Hyperloop is not real. Much as I am rooting for Elon Musk's enterprises, he's never built a working train, and his vision for one was a safety nightmare. It would have been perfectly comfortable for someone who flys one of those old Rutan aircraft and nobody else at all (get in the cockpit of one of an "EZ" class plane and you'll understand). Making that idea practical requires scaling up from the little tube and correspondingly little train he was thinking of. And there is still the matter of making the evacuated tunnel safe. Rockets are easy next to this.

Wherever I went in Britain, the trains were at least as good as cars would have been. And I've been on some of the shortlines, etc.

In the U.S. freight lines go everywhere. It's quite common that there's one adjoining a farm in the middle of nowhere, with a working siding. There is no reason passenger lines can't go everywhere, too.

No transportation infrastructure should be subsidized with taxes; it should all be financed by user fees or private investments.

This is sort of old-fashioned Friedmanesque economics. It's the same sort of thinking that imports inexpensive workers from India and puts them to work in Silicon Valley because local ones are more expensive. Eventually, people start to realize that it makes someone's bottom line better, but not theirs.

We need to subsidize an improved form of transport so that it can compete with the heavily-subsidized ones today (you're not going to tell me roads are privatized) and so that people won't have to sustain the totally insane cost of automobile ownership. In this way we put economics on the right track for everyone. We've really had a century-long economic distortion as far as automobiles are concerned, we are now starting to pay the price as energy costs increase and we see the ecological impact, etc. Let's help people get away from that.

The largest taxes you pay today are what you pay for the inflated price of land (indirectly if you are a renter, but you still pay) and the cost of an automobile, which can exceed $50K for 10 years of usage plus the rest of the cost of ownership.

Once place where I was near Zurich, admittedly an expensive area, wanted $2000/year for a commuter rail pass. I calculated that it was actually a very large savings over automobile ownership or even automobile use.

Seismic activity is a matter for bridges, and for very short spans that might directly cross a fault. Regarding the rest of the land, we build buildings on it and put our sweet little kids to sleep in them every evening. We worry about earthquakes, but modern buildings stand up to them without being prohibitively expensive to construct.

LA to SF has one high pass over the entire route, and it's all agricultural. The rest is quite flat, California's central valley is historically marshland.

Funny how there is no shortage of land available for building automobile roads. They go through all of those expensive neighborhoods, without exception. There's room to piggyback urban rail on them. Regarding LA to SF, there is nothing but farmland for most of the way. That's the first thing you learn about I-5, and even 101 is the same for much of its length. Getting the train down the SF Penninsula and into urban LA is a small part of the overall route.

Monterey has an Amtrak bus link to the Salinas station, and they sell it pretty well, including in a package with aquarium tickets. But it's a shame they have that bus, because Monterey had fine train service of its own. One remaining car is in the Sacramento railroad museum while the right of way has become a walking trail. Our country was collectively asleep at the switch while that stuff was shut down and removed.

Boise got its electric street railway in 1890 and it coupled with great intercity lines. All gone.

I don't stay in luxury locations (just because I'm not fancy) and in general I am with the common people. I didn't see that they weren't riding the trains in Europe. Rather, they didn't own automobiles.

Southwest finally got 110 outlets between the seats. Of course Amtrak has had this forever...

My impression was that Stansted was at least an hour's ride from anywhere that I wanted to be. Now, if you happen to live there (and lots of folks do) it might work out.

I'm a little scared about flying on Ryanair anyway. But then again, even Lufthansa screwed up with their discount airline.

I remember being in a train station in Italy and seeing a train for Egypt. NY to SFO is 2915 miles, about 60 hours driving (I did it in that long, a long time ago) and theoretically 10 hours on a Japan-class high speed rail and 6 hours for a flight plus 3 for logistics. So given that the rail is city-to-city and has an hour for departure logistics and 15 minutes for arrival logistics, it's not that far apart. Now, put a shower on the train and a full-recline bed and I'm sold.

The cost of my labor per hour is a lot higher than $70. Any trip where I can do even an hour of writing instead of driving is more than paid for.

I just drove the I-5 all of the way from LA to San Francisco yesterday as I'd brought a carful of test equipment to an engineer there. I didn't fly because of the freight I had, but in general train transport is better for carrying a lot of baggage. Less handling, less fees for freight.

Also, planes can't compete when there's a good high-speed rail, because of their logistical complications. Airports are usually far from town and require their own train to get to. Nobody takes a plane instead of Eurostar. While Southwest will survive on its many other routes, their SFO to LAX route is doomed.

Having traveled extensively in Europe, and having enjoyed never having to use a car and rarely needing a plane because their trains are so fast, cheap, and efficient, I marvel at the idiocy of our citizens, it's not the government's fault, in not having insisted on keeping and improving rail since the 40's. Americans are total retards about this, they can't ever have any excuse.

What I am getting from the videos is that this test was a success but that there was indeed an engine failure and the system recovered from it successfully by throttling off the opposing engine. There was less Delta-V than expected, max altitude was lower than expected, downrange was lower than expected, and that tumble after trunk jettison and during drogue deploy looked like it would have been uncomfortable for crew.

This is the second time that SpaceX has had an engine failure and recovered from it. They get points for not killing the theoretical crew either time. There will be work to do. It's to be expected, this is rocket science.

It sounds to me like the launch engineers were rattled by the short downrange and the launch director had to rein them in.

Uh, no. Fiorina ran for US Senate. You're thinking of Meg Whitman, who tried to click "Buy It Now" on the California Governorship ($150 million campaign). But your confusion is understandable, since they're both from the tech sector, and they both spout buzzword-bingo gibberish.

Whitman lost to Jerry Brown, BTW, thus earning Brown the singular distinction of having to clean up the mess left by a B-grade movie actor twice.

Huh. I always parsed Lemongrab as male...

It's a radio transmitter in a can. It would take an even larger departure from known physics to make it go boom. We have a good deal of experience with radio transmitters in space.

OK, I will try to restate in my baby talk since I don't remember this correctly.

Given that you are accelerating, the appearance to you is that you are doing so linearly, and time dilation is happening to you. It could appear to you that you reach your destination in a very short time, much shorter than light would allow. To the outside observer, however, time passes at a different rate and you never achieve light speed.