Somehow I doubt people would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on THz detectors and related technologies if it were no different from conventional visible/IR imaging.
Sure, EM is a continuous spectrum from ELF to gamma rays. That doesn't mean that a two mile long antenna suitable for the former is going to detect gamma rays.
EM in the 1-10THz range has a lot of interesting applications, and currently our ability to manipulate it is very limited, compared to what we can do with radio or with IR/visible on its flanks.
Hey, Linux has had 15 years to get it's own shit together.
What exactly is wrong with it? Works fine for me. Frankly, that's all I really care about.
It's sort of like the Apple MP3 player thing. When the iPod launched it was far from the first MP3 player. But it was the first MP3 player that wasn't 100% crap to use. Completely took over the market and dominated everyone. But you know what? Five years later all the other MP3 players were still crap to use.
Can't say I agree. My current mp3 player (my phone) works the same as my last one - you plug it into a USB port, it mounts as a usb storage drive, and you copy onto it whatever you want. I have a choice of at least 100 different applications on several operating systems capable of doing this. That means that I can use whatever works for me.
I could care less if 90% of the US population thinks I'm doing it wrong. And that is what I like about open standards and FOSS - I get to choose what works for me, and if 90% of the population hates it chances are it will suit me just fine. People get all concerned that unpopular linux distros and such will die out from lack of contributions. However, I've found that there is only a tenuous association between popularity and contribution, unless you're talking about a commercially-backed distro. If only 10 people really like a piece of FOSS software and all 10 of them are solid contributors and the scope is reasonable, the project can be very successful even if it never grows. A piece of software can be successful even if I write it for myself and never distribute it to anyone.
Can't you simply place BID/ASKs? You could bid 40@$25 and leave it up all day - if the price drops enough you'll get shares, and if somebody is trying to unload they might lower their offer price when they see your order in the book.
My understanding is that this is how the market actually works anyway, so I never got why consumers just end up doing market/limit orders.
You can disable secure boot until it is working. Also, I"m not sure if secure boot will apply to CDs or not, but if not then you can do all the install work from the CD (you need to boot off of SOMETHING to install Linux, right?).
I agree - people seem to be missing out on the fact that 2G is the least-common denominator. Virtually all GSM phones support it. Very few phones support 3G+ universally, because there are a bunch of different standards, and various carriers use various ones, and each uses phones that support their standards only.
This move will likely have little impact on AT&T customers, but what about people who travel and need to roam?
The MS specs require any MS-certified firmware to allow the user to load their own keys. So, if you want to install linux, just generate your own keypair, use it to sign any OSes you want to boot, and install it as a trusted key in your firmware.
Viola, you can still use secure boot, and you can boot whatever you want, and as a bonus not even MS can install something on your hard drive and have it be bootable.
Or you can just disable secure boot.
Distros should just make it easy for users to sign their bootloaders. This should be easy for distros that have the user manually install grub/etc. Or the distro could just supply a pre-signed bootloader and a key for the user to load into their firmware.
Yeah, I doubt even MS is going to revoke the Nvidia driver's certificate, unless they have a way to revoke it only for use with PMP but not with stuff like booting up and having better than 640x480 resolution. You're talking about a major disruption to half of the consumer PCs on the planet.
That's because they're all run by MBAs who love NPV calculations. Anything of importance can be quantitated, and if it can't be, well, then it must not be important.
If you've ever used an NPV calculator with typical corporate assumptions you'll find that almost any kind of investment is impossible to justify. If you didn't sink that money into R&D you could be investing it in something else that has a 10% annual return! Of course, in reality those 10% returns don't actually turn out, especially since you end up not investing in anything but cost-cutting.
Are you implying potential is more desirable than actual attainment?
Yes.:)
You can view things two ways, and which one is better is purely subjective:
1. A normal person can kill themselves for 80 hours a week and live in a hovel and eat enough pizza to not starve. An intelligent person can kill themselves for 80 hours a week and win a Noble Prize after which they can go back to their mansion to sleep before going back to work for another 16 hour shift.
2. A normal person can kill themselves for 80 hours a week and live in a hovel and eat enough pizza to not starve. An intelligent person can work for an hour a week and look busy for 39 hours to hold down a job that lets them live in a modest home.
The only person in both scenarios that doesn't fully reach his potential is the lazy intelligent person, but if that guy is the happiest and has a family that appreciates having him around, who is to say that isn't a virtue?
A new ultra-critical patch to the Nvidia drivers has been installed (no, we didn't ask you about it first).
We fixed a serious security problem, and now the system will ensure that access to memory in multimedia and copy-protected applications cannot be circumvented. Such access is limited to less critical data such as credit card and banking data, the password database, and kernel memory in general (for areas that do not handle media pathways).
What I'd like to know is if you can use kmail without having neopmuk even installed. Kmail is a great piece of software. Nepomuk is something that I don't need, so I don't have it. KDE works great without it, minus any of the PIM elements. So, I don't use the PIM elements.
You need to determine if your new position is going to be one of true decision making authority, with high level direction and little or no socialization with your team (more of a high level director role), or if the position is more of a classic on-hands leadership role where you can walk amongst your team as sort of a "team captain" (more of a manager role).
If you're the former, and don't have at least two layers of management under you, please do the world a favor and shoot yourself now, and preferably shoot your boss first.
Too often in big companies I'm seeing this trend towards anybody who is a manager being holed up in meetings 10x5 and maybe talking to their subordinates about once a month for an hour. I'm not sure that level of disengagement is appropriate even for a CEO. I would think that a manager has to be spending about as much time managing down as coordinating upwards or with peers. Otherwise there is a lot of "decision making" but the people doing the actual work are just going about their days with no real influence by those making the decisions.
If an idea is MUCH easier to get out to market than it is to come up with, then it is a good candidate for a patent. The same applies if coming up with an idea requires some huge investment in capital.
If not, patents get in the way.
Getting a phone out to market seems to cost about the same as designing it - we're not talking about orders of magnitude in cost. So, patents tend to get in the way.
If you take something like a drug the situation is the opposite. You have to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars testing out products that don't work before you find one that does. Once you do it only takes maybe a few million dollars to get it to market. That means that patents are a good model here (though I think this area still needs some reform).
I think the real issue is that we treat all patents the same. I think they should be set per-industry, or almost on a bounty-like system.
Yup, and in some sense this is just another example of what is being discussed here. If you're the sort of person who doesn't join everybody's network, then you aren't a team player...:)
So, nobody wants to be the first to use LinkedIn, but once a fair number jump on board everybody signs up to make sure their behavior is perceived as normal. People who lose their jobs usually take time to build things out more, which makes sense as a networking site.
At work nobody goes to the meetings for the company PAC, but if word got out that our department head attended and 20% of the department was now attending, within a month just about everybody would be there. When your employer uses stack ranking and cuts 10% of the workforce every year you don't want to stand out...
Valuing privacy and refusing to participate in information sharing with a company that will only use it in ways you don't approve of hardly makes you suspicious.
Does not conform to normal behavior due to strong ideological views. Check.
If some people really do find that suspicious and can't understand the reasons... screw em.
Ordinary people recognize him as having unusual behavior. Check Lashes out at ordinary people who watch American Idol. Check.
You will have as much success changing their minds as changing ultra-religious fanatics minds about their intolerance and bigotry.
Rejects religion. Check.
The real concern is if businesses or governments start using the lack of social networking presence as grounds for investigations or refusal to be employed.
Anti-business and laissez faire. Check.
Seems like we have a potential terrorist here. At the very least it seems likely that you don't vote for the right sort of people, and who would want you as a neighbor? Let's pretend we're all back in high school and punish this fellow for his lack of conformity!
Anyone remember the 90s when the advice was not to put your personal information on the internet?
Norms change - that which was radical in the past is conservative in the present. Basically they're looking to profile conformity, and doing things that are unusual like not spamming your friends with pictures of cats is non-conformist.
Basically, if you do the sort of stuff that the average person does, then you're fine. Otherwise, you are to be viewed with suspicion. So get out and start a riot after the next football game like a proper idiot...
No, but not joining Facebook is certainly an indicator of non-mainstream social behavior. I can't really argue with that - I avoid it, but I'm certainly not an example of mainstream social behavior either.
Uh, I work with hundreds of scientists in my job. A fair percentage have PhDs. I'd be surprised if 10% truly could apply math at the level you describe. Oh, I'm sure many could differentiate a polynomial, or look up an integral in a table or follow an example from their old calculus texts. They calculate standard deviations every day. However, this really has little bearing on their UNDERSTANDING of the fundamental concepts of statistics and such.
I see people misuse math as a result all the time. I see them misuse it and basic principles of science when doing quantitative work in their own fields. Usually the errors are small enough to not matter, but their calculations are often flawed and some day if they use that math in a situation where some unrealized assumption doesn't apply they could get grossly incorrect results, and no doubt report them because that's their "well-tested and understood" process.
I wouldn't be surprised if half the math professors they had made similar errors, or taught the concepts from a book but never really impressed their true meaning. No doubt they took the book exercises and changed the numbers on the test to ensure they could be worked out again, but that doesn't convey true understanding.
Science and math tend to be full of assumptions. Those assumptions are all-important. Usually the people who come up with the theories or theorems do a very good job of documenting those assumptions, but those who follow after decades later just learn how to use the formulas and don't really bother to understand WHY they work. Try to use half of the theorems in calculus on a discontinuous function and watch as everything turns out wrong (oh sure, you can apply calculus to discontinuous functions, but you have to realize that the function is discontinuous and handle it appropriately). In science assumptions are even more important. Most of the laws of physics on practical scales are gross approximations that hold up under certain circumstances, because near-perfect models of how the universe works start to fail once you get much bigger than a few atoms, and even then require computer simulation.
I have no hope that the common voter will ever have a grasp on this stuff...
I would think that ADS-B might replace most civilian use of radar, but not military use. I know somebody who works with aerospace and apparently after 9/11 there was quite a bit of effort to try to boost primary radar coverage, since any terrorist who wants to do something bad without getting shot down is going to have their transponders off. If you're concerned with actual military air defense then radar is your only option, as incoming bombers aren't going to have lights on, let alone radar transponders.
However, the accuracy of ADS-B would be better for civilian use, and I suspect the military will just let the FAA handle the broadcasting traffic which lets them deal with the stuff that is quiet.
I think that high speed rail MIGHT be viable, if you cut down the stops and run it between major airports, and you treat aircraft as the spokes, and code-share with the airlines.
And I'm talking ultra-high-speed - like JFK to SFO with maybe one stop in Kansas travelling in an evacuated tube at 2000mph or something. That would greatly cut down on travel time and would be less expensive operationally (though the tube would be expensive), and you could then use more conventional travel to build out the network. The train's schedule should also be very predictable, which helps with hub-and-spoke.
The problem with rail is when they schedule a stop every 5 miles on a 1000 mile route.
Yup, and I think you really need to factor in a sleeper room if you want to compare rail to plane. For the one hour flight being in a tight seat is no worse than being in a cramped movie theater or conference room. For a 16 hour journey that does not apply.
I have no idea why rail is so expensive, but at those rates we might as well not have it. Who actually rides those trains?
He was talking about domestic first class - not international. Having ridden Amtrak, domestic coach and first class, and international coach and business class, I can say that the comparison between Amtrak and domestic first class is a reasonably close one as far as accommodations go. You don't get the free hot meal, but the prices in the dining car are reasonable, and you can actually walk around/etc.
I haven't ridden on a train ride in a sleeper cabin, so I can't say what that is like, other than the fact that when I've priced it out my jaw hit the floor - I probably COULD have flown first class across the country for what those tickets cost, and I wouldn't care about sleeping since a six hour flight isn't nearly the hassle that a multi-day voyage by rail is.
I took the Acella out of Philadelphia once and while the rail fare wasn't bad compared to flying, it only stopped at a station in the middle of the city where parking was something like $30/day. Sure, I could have taken the train into the city, but that would add an extra 30 min each way to my travel time vs car, and that is only if I traveled at peak times. In this case I was going to arrive in the evening, and once you tack on the waiting time it would have been an extra 1.5 hours to get home at night - not fun.
The Amtrak Northeast Corridor is reasonably competitive for single travelers who do not benefit from carpooling. However, for just about anything else I don't know why anybody rides Amtrak. I once checked out a trip that was 12 hours by car and it would have been a 24 hour epic saga by train, for a price that I probably could have gotten a 90 minute plane ticket for (and that is WITHOUT a sleeper car - if you want to sleep lying down the price was WAY higher than a plane that would not require sleeping at all).
Sadly, this time around, NASA is not exactly wasting money trying to go to other planets. It's a matter of survival to get the hell off this one and away from the greed in charge of destroying it.
Uh, if you want to get away from the greed that is destroying our country, you're probably best off becoming a nomand and hiding away in some shack in the middle of nowhere, growing your own food and staying off the grid.
Unless somebody comes up with a way to terraform entire planets the only places anybody is going to be living off-world in the next century or two are in habitats built with huge investments of capital, and they will CERTAINLY be governed by the sorts of people who engineered our current economic mess.
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Somehow I doubt people would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on THz detectors and related technologies if it were no different from conventional visible/IR imaging.
Sure, EM is a continuous spectrum from ELF to gamma rays. That doesn't mean that a two mile long antenna suitable for the former is going to detect gamma rays.
EM in the 1-10THz range has a lot of interesting applications, and currently our ability to manipulate it is very limited, compared to what we can do with radio or with IR/visible on its flanks.
Hey, Linux has had 15 years to get it's own shit together.
What exactly is wrong with it? Works fine for me. Frankly, that's all I really care about.
It's sort of like the Apple MP3 player thing. When the iPod launched it was far from the first MP3 player. But it was the first MP3 player that wasn't 100% crap to use. Completely took over the market and dominated everyone. But you know what? Five years later all the other MP3 players were still crap to use.
Can't say I agree. My current mp3 player (my phone) works the same as my last one - you plug it into a USB port, it mounts as a usb storage drive, and you copy onto it whatever you want. I have a choice of at least 100 different applications on several operating systems capable of doing this. That means that I can use whatever works for me.
I could care less if 90% of the US population thinks I'm doing it wrong. And that is what I like about open standards and FOSS - I get to choose what works for me, and if 90% of the population hates it chances are it will suit me just fine. People get all concerned that unpopular linux distros and such will die out from lack of contributions. However, I've found that there is only a tenuous association between popularity and contribution, unless you're talking about a commercially-backed distro. If only 10 people really like a piece of FOSS software and all 10 of them are solid contributors and the scope is reasonable, the project can be very successful even if it never grows. A piece of software can be successful even if I write it for myself and never distribute it to anyone.
Can't you simply place BID/ASKs? You could bid 40@$25 and leave it up all day - if the price drops enough you'll get shares, and if somebody is trying to unload they might lower their offer price when they see your order in the book.
My understanding is that this is how the market actually works anyway, so I never got why consumers just end up doing market/limit orders.
You can disable secure boot until it is working. Also, I"m not sure if secure boot will apply to CDs or not, but if not then you can do all the install work from the CD (you need to boot off of SOMETHING to install Linux, right?).
I agree - people seem to be missing out on the fact that 2G is the least-common denominator. Virtually all GSM phones support it. Very few phones support 3G+ universally, because there are a bunch of different standards, and various carriers use various ones, and each uses phones that support their standards only.
This move will likely have little impact on AT&T customers, but what about people who travel and need to roam?
The MS specs require any MS-certified firmware to allow the user to load their own keys. So, if you want to install linux, just generate your own keypair, use it to sign any OSes you want to boot, and install it as a trusted key in your firmware.
Viola, you can still use secure boot, and you can boot whatever you want, and as a bonus not even MS can install something on your hard drive and have it be bootable.
Or you can just disable secure boot.
Distros should just make it easy for users to sign their bootloaders. This should be easy for distros that have the user manually install grub/etc. Or the distro could just supply a pre-signed bootloader and a key for the user to load into their firmware.
Yeah, I doubt even MS is going to revoke the Nvidia driver's certificate, unless they have a way to revoke it only for use with PMP but not with stuff like booting up and having better than 640x480 resolution. You're talking about a major disruption to half of the consumer PCs on the planet.
I could just see the I'm a Mac ads after that.
That's because they're all run by MBAs who love NPV calculations. Anything of importance can be quantitated, and if it can't be, well, then it must not be important.
If you've ever used an NPV calculator with typical corporate assumptions you'll find that almost any kind of investment is impossible to justify. If you didn't sink that money into R&D you could be investing it in something else that has a 10% annual return! Of course, in reality those 10% returns don't actually turn out, especially since you end up not investing in anything but cost-cutting.
Are you implying potential is more desirable than actual attainment?
Yes. :)
You can view things two ways, and which one is better is purely subjective:
1. A normal person can kill themselves for 80 hours a week and live in a hovel and eat enough pizza to not starve. An intelligent person can kill themselves for 80 hours a week and win a Noble Prize after which they can go back to their mansion to sleep before going back to work for another 16 hour shift.
2. A normal person can kill themselves for 80 hours a week and live in a hovel and eat enough pizza to not starve. An intelligent person can work for an hour a week and look busy for 39 hours to hold down a job that lets them live in a modest home.
The only person in both scenarios that doesn't fully reach his potential is the lazy intelligent person, but if that guy is the happiest and has a family that appreciates having him around, who is to say that isn't a virtue?
Yes, on an 80 inch screen running 1920/1080 - a whopping 13 DPI.
A new ultra-critical patch to the Nvidia drivers has been installed (no, we didn't ask you about it first).
We fixed a serious security problem, and now the system will ensure that access to memory in multimedia and copy-protected applications cannot be circumvented. Such access is limited to less critical data such as credit card and banking data, the password database, and kernel memory in general (for areas that do not handle media pathways).
What I'd like to know is if you can use kmail without having neopmuk even installed. Kmail is a great piece of software. Nepomuk is something that I don't need, so I don't have it. KDE works great without it, minus any of the PIM elements. So, I don't use the PIM elements.
You need to determine if your new position is going to be one of true decision making authority, with high level direction and little or no socialization with your team (more of a high level director role), or if the position is more of a classic on-hands leadership role where you can walk amongst your team as sort of a "team captain" (more of a manager role).
If you're the former, and don't have at least two layers of management under you, please do the world a favor and shoot yourself now, and preferably shoot your boss first.
Too often in big companies I'm seeing this trend towards anybody who is a manager being holed up in meetings 10x5 and maybe talking to their subordinates about once a month for an hour. I'm not sure that level of disengagement is appropriate even for a CEO. I would think that a manager has to be spending about as much time managing down as coordinating upwards or with peers. Otherwise there is a lot of "decision making" but the people doing the actual work are just going about their days with no real influence by those making the decisions.
I think this depends greatly on the industry.
If an idea is MUCH easier to get out to market than it is to come up with, then it is a good candidate for a patent. The same applies if coming up with an idea requires some huge investment in capital.
If not, patents get in the way.
Getting a phone out to market seems to cost about the same as designing it - we're not talking about orders of magnitude in cost. So, patents tend to get in the way.
If you take something like a drug the situation is the opposite. You have to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars testing out products that don't work before you find one that does. Once you do it only takes maybe a few million dollars to get it to market. That means that patents are a good model here (though I think this area still needs some reform).
I think the real issue is that we treat all patents the same. I think they should be set per-industry, or almost on a bounty-like system.
Yup, and in some sense this is just another example of what is being discussed here. If you're the sort of person who doesn't join everybody's network, then you aren't a team player... :)
So, nobody wants to be the first to use LinkedIn, but once a fair number jump on board everybody signs up to make sure their behavior is perceived as normal. People who lose their jobs usually take time to build things out more, which makes sense as a networking site.
At work nobody goes to the meetings for the company PAC, but if word got out that our department head attended and 20% of the department was now attending, within a month just about everybody would be there. When your employer uses stack ranking and cuts 10% of the workforce every year you don't want to stand out...
Valuing privacy and refusing to participate in information sharing with a company that will only use it in ways you don't approve of hardly makes you suspicious.
Does not conform to normal behavior due to strong ideological views. Check.
If some people really do find that suspicious and can't understand the reasons... screw em.
Ordinary people recognize him as having unusual behavior. Check
Lashes out at ordinary people who watch American Idol. Check.
You will have as much success changing their minds as changing ultra-religious fanatics minds about their intolerance and bigotry.
Rejects religion. Check.
The real concern is if businesses or governments start using the lack of social networking presence as grounds for investigations or refusal to be employed.
Anti-business and laissez faire. Check.
Seems like we have a potential terrorist here. At the very least it seems likely that you don't vote for the right sort of people, and who would want you as a neighbor? Let's pretend we're all back in high school and punish this fellow for his lack of conformity!
Anyone remember the 90s when the advice was not to put your personal information on the internet?
Norms change - that which was radical in the past is conservative in the present. Basically they're looking to profile conformity, and doing things that are unusual like not spamming your friends with pictures of cats is non-conformist.
Basically, if you do the sort of stuff that the average person does, then you're fine. Otherwise, you are to be viewed with suspicion. So get out and start a riot after the next football game like a proper idiot...
No, but not joining Facebook is certainly an indicator of non-mainstream social behavior. I can't really argue with that - I avoid it, but I'm certainly not an example of mainstream social behavior either.
Uh, I work with hundreds of scientists in my job. A fair percentage have PhDs. I'd be surprised if 10% truly could apply math at the level you describe. Oh, I'm sure many could differentiate a polynomial, or look up an integral in a table or follow an example from their old calculus texts. They calculate standard deviations every day. However, this really has little bearing on their UNDERSTANDING of the fundamental concepts of statistics and such.
I see people misuse math as a result all the time. I see them misuse it and basic principles of science when doing quantitative work in their own fields. Usually the errors are small enough to not matter, but their calculations are often flawed and some day if they use that math in a situation where some unrealized assumption doesn't apply they could get grossly incorrect results, and no doubt report them because that's their "well-tested and understood" process.
I wouldn't be surprised if half the math professors they had made similar errors, or taught the concepts from a book but never really impressed their true meaning. No doubt they took the book exercises and changed the numbers on the test to ensure they could be worked out again, but that doesn't convey true understanding.
Science and math tend to be full of assumptions. Those assumptions are all-important. Usually the people who come up with the theories or theorems do a very good job of documenting those assumptions, but those who follow after decades later just learn how to use the formulas and don't really bother to understand WHY they work. Try to use half of the theorems in calculus on a discontinuous function and watch as everything turns out wrong (oh sure, you can apply calculus to discontinuous functions, but you have to realize that the function is discontinuous and handle it appropriately). In science assumptions are even more important. Most of the laws of physics on practical scales are gross approximations that hold up under certain circumstances, because near-perfect models of how the universe works start to fail once you get much bigger than a few atoms, and even then require computer simulation.
I have no hope that the common voter will ever have a grasp on this stuff...
I would think that ADS-B might replace most civilian use of radar, but not military use. I know somebody who works with aerospace and apparently after 9/11 there was quite a bit of effort to try to boost primary radar coverage, since any terrorist who wants to do something bad without getting shot down is going to have their transponders off. If you're concerned with actual military air defense then radar is your only option, as incoming bombers aren't going to have lights on, let alone radar transponders.
However, the accuracy of ADS-B would be better for civilian use, and I suspect the military will just let the FAA handle the broadcasting traffic which lets them deal with the stuff that is quiet.
I think that high speed rail MIGHT be viable, if you cut down the stops and run it between major airports, and you treat aircraft as the spokes, and code-share with the airlines.
And I'm talking ultra-high-speed - like JFK to SFO with maybe one stop in Kansas travelling in an evacuated tube at 2000mph or something. That would greatly cut down on travel time and would be less expensive operationally (though the tube would be expensive), and you could then use more conventional travel to build out the network. The train's schedule should also be very predictable, which helps with hub-and-spoke.
The problem with rail is when they schedule a stop every 5 miles on a 1000 mile route.
Yup, and I think you really need to factor in a sleeper room if you want to compare rail to plane. For the one hour flight being in a tight seat is no worse than being in a cramped movie theater or conference room. For a 16 hour journey that does not apply.
I have no idea why rail is so expensive, but at those rates we might as well not have it. Who actually rides those trains?
He was talking about domestic first class - not international. Having ridden Amtrak, domestic coach and first class, and international coach and business class, I can say that the comparison between Amtrak and domestic first class is a reasonably close one as far as accommodations go. You don't get the free hot meal, but the prices in the dining car are reasonable, and you can actually walk around/etc.
I haven't ridden on a train ride in a sleeper cabin, so I can't say what that is like, other than the fact that when I've priced it out my jaw hit the floor - I probably COULD have flown first class across the country for what those tickets cost, and I wouldn't care about sleeping since a six hour flight isn't nearly the hassle that a multi-day voyage by rail is.
Don't forget parking.
I took the Acella out of Philadelphia once and while the rail fare wasn't bad compared to flying, it only stopped at a station in the middle of the city where parking was something like $30/day. Sure, I could have taken the train into the city, but that would add an extra 30 min each way to my travel time vs car, and that is only if I traveled at peak times. In this case I was going to arrive in the evening, and once you tack on the waiting time it would have been an extra 1.5 hours to get home at night - not fun.
The Amtrak Northeast Corridor is reasonably competitive for single travelers who do not benefit from carpooling. However, for just about anything else I don't know why anybody rides Amtrak. I once checked out a trip that was 12 hours by car and it would have been a 24 hour epic saga by train, for a price that I probably could have gotten a 90 minute plane ticket for (and that is WITHOUT a sleeper car - if you want to sleep lying down the price was WAY higher than a plane that would not require sleeping at all).
Sadly, this time around, NASA is not exactly wasting money trying to go to other planets. It's a matter of survival to get the hell off this one and away from the greed in charge of destroying it.
Uh, if you want to get away from the greed that is destroying our country, you're probably best off becoming a nomand and hiding away in some shack in the middle of nowhere, growing your own food and staying off the grid.
Unless somebody comes up with a way to terraform entire planets the only places anybody is going to be living off-world in the next century or two are in habitats built with huge investments of capital, and they will CERTAINLY be governed by the sorts of people who engineered our current economic mess.