Last year I worked on a Stacker/Reclaimer (EG the big wheely bucket loaders that either scoop up huge piles of coal, or stack coal into piles), and has an operator out in a cabin doing the driving. The same system was being sold to two different customers. The first customer wanted an automatic mode that would guide the machine around the piles of coal and scoop/deliver in order to get an optimal materiel field while the operator sat back and basically watched.

The second customer basically said "I don't want no damn stinkin' automatic mode, because if I'm payin' for an operator to sit out there, he better be working"

It's not the people you have to worry about, it's the sheep.

On the other hand, having watched both Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles I wouldn't want to mess with a country that produced Peter Jackson.

No I would not. But then again those Thai women in the bars who keep wanting to have a drink with me all seem on the up and up.

It could be, but from what I heard Sarah Palin recommended that guy to Hillary.

Not knowing NVidia I now see that entry into gaming console market has created a rather unfortunate combination of styles. But you'd think that their marketing team would know what anXBox was and looked like.

No, its not. But if you want to make your product stand out, don't make it visually reminiscent of a major player in the same market space.

As soon as I saw the console with its angular X-styled ridges and lime green LED "V-slash" I immediately thought XBox. So possibly not a good choice in styling if you want to stand out from the crowd.

Yep, it was discussed in Linux Kernel Switching To Linux v4.0, Coming With Many New Addons

There is also an opposite of the loser edit, but I don't know if it has its own name. It is the edit where by using selective editing the focus is placed on (the mistakes or the perfection) one person in a competition, and minimizes the focus on the person who will eventually win or lose. So that when the final decision is revealed it "surprises" the audience - and hence boosts drama, and hopefully higher ratings.

My feeling is that I see this behavior more than I see a "loser edit"

Well if you were refactoring a brain dead method into something that had more smarts it is possible for the refactored code to run faster.

I take a lot of that back. Apparently I know fuck all about what a hyper loop actually is. It is not a hard vacuum at all.

A 4 lane highway in rural areas costs about $5 million per mile (*). And while a road is not an enclosed vacuum tube, the vacuum tube would be many more times complex to build (and maintain) than the road - for example, there its the infrastructure needed to keep the hyperloop pumped down to its working pressure, as you can be sure that leaks will occur.

But that infrastructure will have to be dispersed across the length of the hyper loop, as a pumping station in LA or NYC will not be able to deal with a leak in the midwest until the air introduced in that leak makes its way to either end of the loop - meaning both a huge volume of air, and a huge lag time until it gets there. And huge vacuum pumps will not be cheap, and will have to be powered by something. So there you are building not only the hyper loop, but at a minimum HV transmission lines for the pumping stations and possibly power stations as well (be they solar, wind, nuke or coal), as well as the roads needed to reach that infrastructure . Plus as you say .. you are doing it in the middle of nowhere,which is going to jack up prices in its own way.

So it does't take much for the cost per mile to start adding up.

* $5 million per mile cost for a 4 lane highway is taken from the American Road & Transportation Builders Association website. And it rises to $9 million in urban areas.

No, but the OP did, in an argument comparing planes to hyper loops.