Google Maps says that if he leaves right now, the trip from his HQ to LA airport takes 12 to 16 minutes, by road. Going by his tunnel, maybe half that, if the car elevators at each end are really quick or if he leaves his cars pre-positioned at the tunnel level. If we assume he uses the tunnel twice a week, say 100 times a year, for the next 10 years, that's 2,000 trips, or about 14,000 minutes, or about 200 hours. If he can built it at 1/20th the cost per mile of the chunnel, that would be right around $1 billion. So it's going to cost him $5 million dollars for every saved hour. Is Elon's time worth $5 million an hour? Oh, he's going to open the tunnel to general use? How many cars an hour can the elevators position? Even if you figure one car per minute, that's still a very underutilized and uneconomical tunnel!

We are doomed to repeat the same mistakes of previous generations, it seems. The Hindenburg, the best of German engineering, needed special mooring masts, could not survive and had to evade rough weather, and overall had a horrible safety record, around a thousand times worse than modern planes.

With Trump's limited vocabulary, how many bits do we need to represent every word to make a nice compact dictionary? 8? 9? Fewer?

What?

One smoking phone battery and:

* The plane is evacuated.
* The flight is cancelled.

What?

How would it not be enough to fling the phone out the door and carry on?

I'm a little dubious, on general principles. Plus my optometrist just suggested this new "blue-blocker" option for my glasses, it stops blue-laser light dead, a very impressive demonstration, but it paradoxically doesn't remove any blue from what you're looking at. Must be a very fine-tuned filter that just blocks one wavelength of blue. He talked on and on about the effects of blue light on sleep. Quite a hard-sell. And they want $140 for that option. Sounds like blue snake-oil to me.

Have they figured out how:

(1) To make a tube that sags just a few millimeters between pylons? Hint: A 1-inch thick steel tube sags several inches between those pylons.

(2) How to get people into space suits? Even the Air Force doesn't let pilots, even in wartime, sit in a plane at 70,000 feet without a space suit.

(3) How to get a common-carrier license, for a vehicle and tube without emergency exits?

Those are all pretty hard show-stoppers, and they seem to be working on everything but.

Did anybody actually *think* before writing this article?

A cable box drawing "500 watts" would be cherry-red hot.

The rating of "500 watts" on the back is for cable boxes that have an accessory AC outlet, and the rating means that you can plug in a TV or whatnot rated at up to 500 watts. The cable box itself draws a whole lot less, like 15 watts, even less for the newer ones.

So what happens if you come to a stop and then want to turn right? You have a flywheel spinning real good and you're trying to change its axis. Either it's going to twist and bust its bearings and do considerable mayhem, or your car is going to go around the turn on two wheels. Fun times!

Economics. Burying is going to cost a lot. The ISPs would have to borrow money now to pay the diggers, and hope that they can recoup the cost in the long run. The up-front cost is like $2000 per city lot. The ISPs are unlikely to foot the bill, even though interest rates are at record lows.

Some folks do get belligerent, my father for one.

If it's like the other continuous monitoring devices, it will be priced in the stratosphere, with sensors "needing" to be replaced every few days, at $75 a pop.

A semi-ridiculous idea.

It takes 200 million BTU equivalent of eletcricity to refine a ton of aluminum.

That's about the equivalent of 1,800 gallons of gasoline.

If using aluminum for the truck body ups the efficiency by 5 MPG, that would save 200 gallons for every 100,000 miles driven.

So you're still about 1,300 gallons in the hole.

A bad idea.

The physics of antennas is pretty darn basic electrodynamics. You need a quarter to half a wavelength to make an efficient antenna. Scientists and engineers have tried for well over a century to overcome that limitation, with not much success. It's pretty basic-- if you want to set up an EM field, you need to be able to have charges separated by a goodly amount relative to the wavelength. The emitting material is irrelevant, in fact you need a really good conductor as you make the antenna shorter, as it's radiation resistance goes way down with length. Gaphene not only does not seem to have any advantage, it's high resistance is a big disadvantage. Sounds super highly fishy.

A ridiculous press release.

Did they mention HOW RELIABLY it can tell a paper bag from a kid on a bigwheeler on the road?

If it is less than 99.99% correct, the first kid that gets run over will spawn a billion-dollar lawsuit.

Cmon, converting electric power to radio frequency AC is at best 80% efficient, and coupling it maybe 50% at best, and converting it back to DC 80% again. I get 32% best efficiency and those are for the most optimum situation. No way this will ever fly, economically. And since people are scared of their water meters e-field of a fraction of a watt, how are they going to feel about megawatts? Not gonna fly, or even crawl.