There was some statistic a few years ago about how the cost of air-conditioning for the troops in Afghanistan and the Middle East exceed NASA's budget.

4) You were traveling at normal speed with no visible traffic in front of you, crested a hill and then ran into the traffic that was stopped just over the crest of the hill.

This happened to me once, I had stopped behind the car in front of me (in a line of stopped traffic extending down the hill for about 1km), two cars had stopped behind me. A third car came over the hill, impacted into the last car which shunted into the car behind me, who shunted into my car with enough force that my car was put off the road with a broken rear axle. Fortunately I had stopped with enough room that I wasn't shunted into the car in front of me. This also occurred just after dusk, and a light rain was falling, so it was the worst of all possible conditions.

D'oh moment. The text of the quote is in TFA, but there is no attribution that it was Stallman who said it.

While I am not 100% in agreement with Stallman all the time (EG I am vehemently against toe cheese), where the hell did the quote from him in the TFS originate? It is not in TFA.

20 or 30 years ago I asked a cop in Australia about what should I do when the lights don't respond to a motorcycle. His reply was that if you are sitting there for so long then you can consider the light to be defective and you can proceed with caution. However this was before the widespread introduction of red light cameras and I never put it to the test.

Whats worse is that after you buy those electrons from the power companies and use them in your process, you give them back for free. Imagine the overall cost savings you could have if someone developed a market for used electrons and you could sell what you didn't need. I bet that its those power companies that are suppressing that idea so that they can hold on to all those $$$.

But to answer your question. If the Green power company pours X amount of electrons into the grid, and the FB pays that company $$ to pull X electrons from the grid and uses them to power their data center, then what is the problem if they also mix with electrons from other sources? What you are proposing (dedicated onsite, pure green power stations for each enterprise) would be cost prohibitive and stupid for a number of reasons - such as not utilizing scales of economy in the power generation, having to colocate the data centers at the site of the renewable generation, and finally having zero redundancy in their power supplies.

This wind power failure meme needs to die .. there are many well proven approaches to energy storage that have been used since before grid sized renewables were even a twinkle in their designers eyes.

A prime example is Pumped storage which is being used All over the world

Is that a European or an American Latte?

It's kinda important .. sort of like swallows and coconuts.

So you didn't get paid?

Read TFA .. the ESRB has signed up to the same service as Australia and both Goole Play and Firefox Marketplace support the IARC.

From TFA

So the Oz government has signed up with a global, unified ratings system from the IARC. And all that is required from the game publishes is to submit answers to a bunch of questions to set a ratings level for their game. For free.

Sure, the OZ government has probably tailored how the answers to the question map into the desired Australian ratings system, but this sounds like a great step forward with consistency and transparency. Also from TFA

In a message recently released to investors, Amazon has announced that its plans to improve targeted advertising will now utilize metrics gleaned from analyzing what eBook pages it's locked in market monkeys (IE The people who think that they are the customers) read, as well as how long they linger over each particular page. This will allow Amazon sell more highly targeted advertisements to its actual customers and thus tap a previously unavailable segment of analytics.

For example, the monkey reads a book that contains both an explicit sex scene and a restaurant scene. By timing how long the monkey takes to read each scene (and hopefully in the future each paragraph - along with eye movement measurements) Amazon will be able determine what sort of sex the monkey prefers as well as the types of food they like. Correlating this data with data obtained from other books the monkey has read, Amazon will be able to craft an individual marketing scheme that highlights the monkey's desire for blindfolds as well as chocolate lava cake.

Note that Amazon has been rumored to be in talks with Facebook about posting such campaigns to not only the monkey's FB feed, but also to the feed of their friends as well. This will have a synergistic sales effect of either the monkey's friends sharing the same taste (and thus opening up new markets), or the monkey paying to opt out of the campaign (in order to hide their behavior) - and thus bringing in more revenue . Amazon has already applied for a patent on paying to opt out of a marketing campaign and they have also started trialing the technology in some market segments in order to estimate how much value monkey's place on their privacy.

You just need to stretch out your browsers windows so that it is wide enough to accommodate the headline layout as envisaged by the might /. design team.

Or in other words the idiots at /. designed a layout that looks good on their monitors and never tested it beyond that. Why should they, as it works on their systems!

So do you want to fill the whole pipe up at once? Or are you going to break it into airtight sections with pressure proof doors at each end? Because each set of doors you insert into the system will cost money in maintenance and testing and will have to be available 100% of the time.

Now lets do some basic math. Suppose that you let the air in at 1/3 the speed of sound in order to protect equipment and people. Assume no friction and that the air travels down the pipe as a plug. So the maximum distance between doors is constrained by the time it takes the air to traverse that distance. 15 minutes is 900 seconds. At 100m/s the air will travel a maximum of 90000 metres.

So in a perfect world you have to have emergency self sealing doors located every 90km along the pipe. So lets round that down to 50 miles. GIven 400 miles between LA and SFO, that means you need 8 sets of emergency doors. But there is the chance that a capsule could stop on a door, or a door could fail. So you need at least to double the number of doors in order to stay within your safety limit. So that's 16 sets. Plus we ignored friction, so lets add another 4 to round it up to 20 sets of doors.

So that's 20 sets of mechanical devices that need regular maintenance and weekly (if not more) testing - and that testing has to be done when the hyper loop is not in use - because if a door does not fully retract after testing then the capsule is screwed. They also need high availability power supplies to operate the doors, and pumps to pump each individual section back down to its working pressure, and a staff of people to service them (probably another 5 to 10 people on payroll based up and down the hyper loop just to do that on a sustainable basis).

So we have just added a shitload more money to the operating costs of the hyper loop.

Right now, the hyper loop concept seems to me like a bad kickstarter project that is all full of dreams, but is missing a practical design. But safety can't be tacked on at the end, it has to be considered up front and will impact the design. Yet nothing in the designs shows any thoughts to safety or survivability. I was puzzle by this (as I know that Musk is a smart guy), but just now Bruce Perens made a comment below that made my head spin bit. Basically his comment is that Musk is somehow conspiring to kill high speed rail, with the implication that the hyper loop is just a tool for this purpose.

I have no knowledge of the politics of high speed rail, but the inadequacies of the hyper loop as passenger transport is puzzling. It is much better suited to transporting freight.