Technically, yes, with the caveat that you'd need regular floating reboost platforms with significant power generation scattered all throughout the Pacific, and of course maintaining the track perfectly straight while floating (one presumes at a fixed depth under the water) provides its own engineering challenges. But room-temperature rarified hydrogen instead of rarified air would allow one to make the journey at about Mach 4. Faster if it's hot hydrogen.

Are you under the misconception that hyperloop is a pneumatic tube system?

Hyperloop is a magnetically-accelerated a ground-effect aircraft operating in the sort of extremely rarified air normally only found at high altitudes. The tube's purpose is to provide such a rarified atmosphere near the ground. It's not a pneumatic train. It's not a vactrain. It's not maglev. It's a ground-effect aircraft.

Branching would be really tricky, but there's no physical barriers. Note that even Musk's proposal isn't as far as you can take the concept. If you fill the tube with very low pressure water vapor instead of very low pressure air (via more pumping to overwhelm leaks, plus water vapor injection), your top speed jumps 40%. Fill it with hydrogen and it jumps 300% (normally hydrogen is a real pain to work with due to flammability, embrittlement, etc, but the densities in question are so low that such issues are mostly avoided). So we're talking the potential for hyperloop "speedways" for long distance runs that could blow airplanes out of the water.

The low numbers of passengers per capsule is really key to making the concept economical. Compare, say, monorail track with a full sized rail bridge. The former is vastly cheaper per unit distance because the peak loadings are so much lower, because the mass of the monorail trains are so much lower. A computer-controlled high launch rate of small, high speed capsules means you're spreading the loading out greatly, which means greatly reduced loading and thus materials costs.

Still, while Musk has been thinking of Hyperloop stations in the "airport" concept, he really needs to get out of that mindset. His proposed plan had them on the outskirts of cities. Airports are only on the outskirts of cities because they *must* be. You greatly reduce your utility by doing that, by making people catch connecting trains. Hyperloop can extend just fine into towns; with his two proposed endpoints in particular there are excellent rail routes into town that are quite straight that it could be built over.

It's a bit of a shame since Comodo Dragon was my favorite Chrome-but-not-actually-Chrome browser. However this and them dragging their feet on updates means I'll be switching to something else.

One that gets to point fingers and scream Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

sweet! does this mean they're going to upgrade my internet connection to morse code soon?

can't wait.

Here are the steps to have infinite grace period with Windows 7 -- no 3rd party tools required!

Reboot
press F8 at startup
Repair Computer
System Recovery Options: Keyboard: US
Username/Password
(you will see: Windows found on Drive ?:)
Command Prompt
win7_reset.bat
exit
Reboot

The contents of: win7_reset.bat

reg load HKLM\MY_SYSTEM "\Windows\System32\config\system"
reg delete HKLM\MY_SYSTEM\WPA /f
reg unload HKLM\MY_SYSTEM

And on reboot,

Command Prompt
Right-click, Run as administrator
win7_reg.bat

Contents of: win7_reg.bat

slmgr /upk
slmgr /cpky
REM Default keys for Window s7
REM Home Premium
REM slmgr /ipk RHPQ2-RMFJH-74XYM-BH4JX-XM76F
REM Professional
slmgr /ipk HYF8J-CVRMY-CM74G-RPHKF-PW487
REM Ultimate
REM slmgr /ipk D4F6K-QK3RD-TMVMJ-BBMRX-3MBMV

Absolutely agree! How Rock Band jumped the shark ...

1. In Rock Band 1 you could slow the practice speed down to 50% speed. In Rock Band 3 some idiot designer raised this to 70%!? WTF? I'm trying to _learn_ the song. Allow me to slow this down to _25%_ for some of those songs.

2. Give me an option to show me the notes in _actual_ music notation so I can **learn to read music**. I _want_ to see the notes in Treble Cleff and/or Bass Clef.

Color-coding the music was brilliant. Teachers even used it to _actually_ teach students!

3. For the love of god use a _standard_ USB connection.

Stop locking me into your shitty proprietary vendor lock-in peripherals. If I buy a guitar, drums, or keyboard it should work across ALL games and ALL platforms: Xbox360, Xbone, PS3, PS4.

4. Stop the bullshit "No Export" option. WTF can't I export it from Rock Band 2 and import it into Rock Band 3 if I own *both* ??

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

5. Provide the band's famous song(s) not their shitty unknown songs of bands we love.

Why can't we buy Journey's "Any Way You Want It"?? We're stuck with the crappy: "Don't Stop Believing"

And now we can't even buy that??

* http://www.rockbandaide.com/20...

Greed ruined the music games.

Super-genius executive: Maybe we should promise not to do stuff like that any more, but exempt "security software and Lenovo applications". That way we can continue getting paid by McAfee and others to continue loading their stuff, as long as they don't mind us slapping our logo on it.

If that happens you should complain. Customer complaints aren't addressed quite as strongly as accidents, but getting many complaints is pretty bad for a driver.

I will never forget him, in his iconic white and gold uniform.

Seriously, though, terrible day. I feel like I knew him.

So... you still have nothing to cite.

I said no such thing. You were the one who brought up the 30s, I just used your era.

And I really have no dog in this fight, and would be interested to hear about examples of the Teamsters behaving badly in recent years. So I asked if you had any evidence that they still behave this way. You apparently don't.

At UPS they incent performance for drivers in ways that don't interfere with the seniority system.

Accident handling is pretty simple: If you have one, barring really, really clear evidence that it's not only not your fault but there is no possible way you could have avoided it, you're fired. The Teamsters lawyer will fight to get you a decent severance package, but that's it. Even with said evidence, you'd better not ever have another.

As for packages/per hour, UPS has a system that calculates the time required for a given route, including driving and deliveries. Drivers get paid max(route_time, actual_time), so if they can get the route done in less than the estimated time they get to go home early without losing pay. Experienced drivers can always beat the estimated time, usually by large margins, and even in the event of breakdowns, etc.

Further, habitually beating your route time gives you the opportunity to take on longer routes. So, many good UPS drivers habitually do 12-hour routes in 7 hours, which means they get paid for 14 hours (the last four of the 12 are time and a half) for working 7. Meanwhile, drivers who habitually take longer than their estimated times get assigned shorter and shorter routes, and, of course, there is a point at which drivers are taking so much longer than the estimate, that they can be fired for cause.

BTW, if you have the perception that UPS drivers are well-paid, you're both wrong and right. Their nominal hourly wages are decent, maxing out at around $20 per hour or a bit above, but those who work hard can easily earn lots of "fake" overtime, as in my example of 14 hours' pay for 7 hours' work. That plus massive amounts of real overtime around the holidays means that UPS drivers' incomes can approach six figures -- but only if they work hard.

The precision is actually pretty impressive, I've had a model I designed printed out in brass before, and some of the detail, I can't imagine milling achieving it. But yeah, no question that milling or sintering will get your stronger parts.