Unless you have completely isolated your kids from the outside world, they absorb a lot of your culture from it, even if your family is not quite mainstream for that culture. So your experiment doesn't really tell us much.

I mean, seriously, do you think that boys have some innate gene that makes them make engine noises?..

Europe was never cool when it came to freedom of speech. First it was Holocaust denial laws, then it was generic hate speech laws, these days they have laws against "infringing upon human dignity of another" in some countries. And their constitutions, for those countries which have them, while usually containing an explicit clause protecting free speech, also contain numerous blanket exceptions to it that basically boil down to "speech is free so long as it's not inconvenient, and what's inconvenient can change as we go".

In which case, computers which are not backdoored will start being manufactured in other countries... If there's a market demand, then someone will fulfil it.
Also each country is likely to want their own backdoor, so the terrorists will source their computers from countries which are not friendly to their enemies.
And they could always use old computers which never had hardware backdoors.

Also governments are guilty of both corruption and incompetence, if they have a backdoor then sooner or later it will leak and then law abiding citizens will suffer greatly. The terrorists won't suffer, as they will already know to avoid any government backdoored equipment. On the other hand, they may make use of the new found leaks to aid them in whatever attacks they wish to perpetrate.

As for leaks themselves, for everyone like snowden who wants to get the word out to the general public even to his own significant detriment, there will be many more unscrupulous actors who would rather make personal gains and will sell their information privately to the highest bidder. There are many well funded groups who could afford to buy such information, and it's highly likely that they already do so.

And therein lies the fundamental flaw with such a system...
Most people aren't upset because they aren't aware of, or don't fully understand the problem.
The primary source of information for the majority of the population is mass media, media which is controlled by the incumbents who have no motive to rock the boat because their absolute worst case is sharing power with the other incumbent party.

If you don't control the media, you can't get the word out to enough people, so it doesn't matter how good your policies are nor how bad everyone else's are, even if the truth is so bad that 99% of people would vote for you if they were in full possession of the facts, you have no way to get those facts out to enough people that it would make any difference.

Yes, but this one required constant suspension of disbelief. It was like, every other thing they did was utterly idiotic.

You do realize that it was actually a real thing that existed? You can find some examples in the "Decline and fall of the Roman Empire".

I haven't looked at the report, but from my personal experience, there are some interesting observations that seem to support the notion that gender imbalance in IT is entirely, or at least mostly cultural, and all that talk about "natural differences" is just BS.

Here's why. While there are few enough female coders around, I do notice a definitive trend that the majority of them tend to be immigrants. Generally speaking, China is best represented, there's a good share of Indians and Eastern Europeans, and even some Middle Easterners. But Americans are conspicuously absent. For a while I thought that one girl that I know was born in US, but even she turned out to be from a family of recent immigrants.

OTOH, you can find them quite easily if you stop looking at the engineers - and then you discover them in admin and HR. There, it's the other way around - very few immigrant women, mostly Americans.

Now I'm not claiming that China or India (ha ha!) are less sexist, far from it. But skilled immigrants are a self-selecting category, they're usually people who have already achieved something in their own country and have enough experience to get attention to be hired overseas, and enough money to move. So once you get past that filter, turns out that women actually do very well in IT, engineering, math, and all those other supposedly "not for girls" fields. OTOH, when the workers come from a local pool, that doesn't have such a filter in place, then you see the force of cultural stereotypes firmly implanted in their hands - and they don't even try to go for "male" jobs.

"Cruising speed" is otherwise known as "terminal velocity" and is hundreds of meters per second. And I'll reiterate: the *point* is to go slow. Drag is a *good thing* on the way back down.

Other corrections: It's false that there's no part of the rocket that reliably faces a given angle - it doesn't tumble, it maintains an orientation generally between 0 and 15 degrees relative to the direction of travel. And the concept that bloody air is going to kill a pneumatic piston in a matter of minutes is the height of absurdity. .

Apart from actually launching a rocket to space and then having it descend and attempt to land, what's your proposed method to determine how much the fins have to move during a real-world descent and thus how much hydraulic fluid they'll consume? (beyond the simulations, which SpaceX uses extensively; they're invaluable but don't correspond 100% to real-world flight scenarios)

Yeah, it's kind of funny, but with this "failure" SpaceX will still end up recovering more of their first stage than is recovered for 99% of first stages launched in the history of man. Not like any of it will likely be of any use except for analysis and then scrap, but still...

I believe what they're saying is instead of any hydraulic system at all, which would be a simplification, no? And I have no idea what you mean by "efficiency leeching ramscoop", the whole point is to slow down.

I'm sure that SpaceX had reasons for not going with such a design. One that comes to mind for example would be during hover/low speeds - no ram air. But you don't need to be mean to the GP for suggesting that.

Yep. From 1300 meters per second to maybe 3 meters per second, with a CEP that would make military ballistics engineers salivate. So, so close.

It's funny, but there's really three analogies I use to explain the "whats" and "whys" of the hyperloop concept, and one of them is a roller coaster (the other two being the "super-high altitude airplane" analogy and the "building a pipeline" analogy).

Compare a roller coaster ride with going on a train. Are roller coasters built suchly that you have to wait half an hour or more between rides because they haul many hundreds of people at once? Do you have to spend 5 minutes boarding and later 5 minutes disembarking because of the scale? Does a pilot have to take the controls to maintain spacing and occasionally handle the risks of merging traffic and the like? And the tracks massively heavy and expensive to support these giant roller coaster cars?

No, of course not. Roller coasters are well optimized. Roller coaster cars are small, maybe two dozen or so riders at once. Because of this, they load and unload quickly. They're predominantly computer controlled with only a bit of human "central control" to send craft on their way and the like. They're all "expressways", no intersections, so all the computer has to do is make sure that it's not too close to the cars ahead of or behind it. Because the cars are small, the track can be made light, which makes it a lot cheaper.

Hyperloop implements the roller coaster paradigm to a tee.

That said, the current stage they're at, I wouldn't put people on it. They need to make sure that things are going to go as expected. Most of what they're doing is mature tech, but a few of the things, like the air-bearing skis, are going to need a lot of testing to prove their reliability. Right now they need a proof of concept and to iron out the basics. The next step up, where they have to prove the predicted reliability, repeatability, throughput, economics, maintenance etc, that would be more of the stage where an amusement part ride would be a possibility. Though I'd personally prefer that their next testing stage be built as something that, if it goes well, one could just expand into an actual hyperloop route. Maybe several dozen kilometers here - that should be enough room to accelerate up to top speed, coast a bit and deal with some curves and the like, then decelerate back down. And if it works out well, I have trouble picturing that some Vegas casino magnates wouldn't pay to link it up between them and LA. 6-ish billion dollars to enable millions of people in the LA area to pop over to Vegas in half an hour for $20 and unload a couple hundred dollars in the casinos? The amount of additional traffic they'd get would pay that off in a heartbeat.

Although... hmm, you know, they designed Hyperloop to limit passenger vertical acceleration to 1G and lateral acceleration to 0,5Gs, for reasons of passenger comfort - but not reasons of structural integrity or acceleration capability. So you know, even on actual routes, they actually could potentially let people purchase tickets to a... ahem... less G-force limited experience. ;) It'd require more car spacing, so the tickets would cost more, but when your base price is only $20... Plus, you'd get there a little faster. ;)

But as is typical for MS, there are multiple different versions of "docx", none of which are entirely compatible with each other...

The PC platform also lacked any form of DRM, and is flooded with all manner of software much of which is either low quality or in many cases downright malicious, and yet the platform is very successful.

A lack of DRM or other stupid platform restrictions is overall a good thing, albeit with some side effects.

but why would it be lighter than a conventional train?

The main reason is that hyperloop isn't designed to achieve throughput by bundling everyone together into (proportionally) rarely launched trains, but by frequently launching smaller trains fully under computer control - spacing on the order of a few minutes instead of a half hour or so. There's only 28 passengers per pod. That launch rate is easier than many other computer controlled transportation systems, mind you, because there's no intersections - the only thing you could possibly hit is the car in front of you or the car behind you, and only by doing something really ridiculous (it's also more than enough time to stop if something goes wrong, as per the calculations, and the numbers look quite realistic).

but at the least it's going to have to support the tube plus the train cars itself

The tube isn't actually as heavy as you might think. Unfortunately I dont have my numbers on me right now, but it works out to not materially change the picture.

Is it simply that new materials and not having to share tracks with existing trains allow for different, lighter construction?

The real enabling technology for this is high launch rate, and the enabling technology for that is computer control with a simplified control problem (one way, don't hit the car ahead of or behind you). Yes, they'll use modern materials to try to keep things light, but that's not the key factor; the key factor is spreading out the load. It also adds a great deal of convenience for passengers - near constant departures and quick to get in and out of. The proposal really has more in common with a roller coaster ride than with a train: frequent small cars, quick loading and unloading, computer control maintaining spacing, etc.

But I'm concerned that it might be too optimistic

In the beginning I did too. But I've read the proposal and cross-referenced the numbers, and I'm sold. The cost figure is totally different from rail because it's really nothing like rail. For example, the track construction is far more like pipeline construction (really, it *is* a pipeline construction), so you need to compare to pipeline construction costs, not track construction costs. And it actually favors comparably with most types of pipeline, like oil pipeline, which are bogged down in environmental regulations and almost always lots of lawsuits, plus face high construction costs from having to generally go through wilderness areas, and a ton of other things. In most aspects oil pipelines have a far tougher time of it; the only thing that Hyperloop has harder is establishing and maintaining tolerances (but they have some very good proposed solutions for achieving the them quickly and affordably).