Of all the vaporware that ever vaporwared, this is the vaporwariest.

A good enough picture will show the serial number.

OK, fine. Let's phrase it like this:

"The US Government spent $6.5 billion last year subsidizing bulk advertising and Amazon deliveries."

Better?

The peasant does not silence the King.

Some zip codes cover more than one city.

Hell, some zip codes cover more than one state.

The "fair" prices in 1978 were often times higher - in absolute dollars - than airline fares today. Yes, you got a mediocre meal and a couple of extra inches of legroom, but you paid far more for the privilege. And you had a much higher chance of dying in an accident to boot.

I'm not from Europe or Asia, but I can use Google.

Miami and Orlando are about 210 miles apart as the crow flies.

Here are a few city pairs that are about the same distance apart, how long a train between them takes, and how much it costs for a ticket on October 4, ten days from now:

Marseille - Geneva: 205 miles, 3h55m, $84 or $115 one way
Venice - Turin: 228 miles, 4h21m, Prices from $33 to $159 one way
Frankfurt - Dresden: 229 miles, 4h17m, prices from $64 to $157 one way
Kyoto-Yokohama: 221 miles, 1h55m, $90-$100 one way

So 3h38m for $80/150 seems to be about as fast and expensive as a European ticket, and slower but about the same price as a Japanese ticket. Though note that there is only one stop on that Japanese train, while there are more on the European trains. Stops add time, easily ten minutes per stop.

These aren't cherry-picked. These are the first city pairs I found that were about the right distance apart.

Each of those words is spelled correctly, but together they mean nothing.

My state sends out every alert at the highest level. I turned my alerts off after a 3am notification that an old guy had wandered away from his nursing home ten miles from my home.

In 1998, the Secure Digital Music Initiative was formed. One of their goals was to inaudibly watermark music so that SDMI-compliant players would recognize copyrighted music and refuse to play it if the user didn't have the appropriate permission.

Hackers almost immediately developed methods to remove the watermark, and SDMI folded a couple of years later.

The real advantage of Japanese porn is that with the naughty bits blurred out, you can safely watch it around children, on public transportation, at the airport, or elsewhere that porn consumption might normally be frowned upon.

A slingshot around Venus would certainly be cool and interesting, but I doubt it could beat a three month direct trajectory to Mars.

It might be the best solution if the next Mars launch window is 18 months from now. That's one real value from this idea, opening up a second set of launch windows to Mars beyond the usual every-26-months.

You'd have to do more orbital mechanics number crunching than I feel like doing this morning to figure out how often and how useful these new launch windows are.

I'm fine with raising gas taxes to pay for roads.

Not bike lanes.

Not light rail.

Not streetcars.

Not pensions for people who retired from the highway district 20 years ago.

Roads. For cars. To drive on.

It's a well-known law of politics that people tend to be more conservative about things they know personally.

The current version of TFA says that the surface pressure of Venus is about 90x that of Earth, which is correct. You must have gotten an earlier, incorrect version.