The first US transcontinental railroad was built primarily by low-paid Irish and Chinese immigrants and veterans from the Civil War. Since it didn't go through any slave states, at no point did it involve any slaves (at least in any significant number). Though how "free" the immigrants were is probably debatable.

As for your inability to see how a tube could be cheaper than a rail track, you can always just read the proposal. The hyperloop was specifically suggested as an alternative to an existing rail project, in part because it would be cheaper, so the comparison is there. Whether it's correct or not is another question.

You're missing the point of the Hyperloop and of high-speed rail in general: it's not intended to replace passenger airplanes entirely, only for short and medium distances. The Hyperloop proposal was made as a cheaper, faster, and more efficient alternative to the Los Angeles - San Francisco high speed rail that they've been working on for years now and is costing in the tens of billions of dollars. No one ever said anything about Los Angeles to New York, that would be ridiculous.

I was reading Soylent for a while, but there was some absurd drama among the people in charge and ridiculously long posts about all the bullshit. They forced out the guy who started it for some reason, then he wanted them to reimburse him for the money he had spent on hosting, etc... I'll take the slashvertisements over that.

On the other hand Pipedot, which is run by one guy, has been quite nice but doesn't have the volume of content to replace Slashdot.

This is a somewhat on-topic reason to throw out a link to the Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter. They started their campaign with supporting Linux only as a stretch goal, but eventually realized that they were losing money that way. This might not come as a surprise if you think about it, but Kickstarted games seem to be the ones with the most consistent cross-platform support and DRM-free availability. People are a little pickier about what they're willing to donate to than what they're willing to buy.

He made a lot of money how? The pipeline is almost certainly still going to get built, this is an argument over procedure. Congress has been trying to bypass the state department, and the president is standing in the way. That's there is to this.

That's a good point. Even if the robots are banned the US is unlikely to sign on to such treaty, and so China / Russia won't either. With the largest militaries ignoring any proposed ban, the only countries to sign on will be those where humanitarian concerns trump military ones. Most of those are going to be poorer countries which can't afford the robots anyway.

On the other hand, if by some freak chance the US did sign on to something like this China and Russia and pretty much everyone else would too. China/Russia would jump at the chance to maintain military parity without a huge, expensive, killer robot development and manufacturing program.

Indeed. I'm not as smart as Turing was, so he must have been a fuckin' genius. No living human could ever hope to match him. Basically a god.

And what could a thousand mewling peasants hope to accomplish next to that? A thousand ditches dug? A thousand burgers served? Worthless. Every one of those pathetic normals going through their lives like automatons, without a thought in their heads for how *this* burger is just a little bit different from *that* burger and needs a shred of extra care if the customer is going to enjoy their meal. Or the foresight to see that the grass obscures the ditch in this spot and someone might fall in without a safety cone there to mark it. Or the desire to go home and finish writing that song that will never get played on the radio. How could a thousand such insignificant people with their simple trivial little projects compare to just one singer who gets in the top 40, and who you've actually heard of?

Actually, no it isn't illegal. Not in the US at least, though Jamies Italian Kitchen is probably in the UK.

People over forty are a protected class in the US, and can't be legally discriminated against (there are exceptions to this, like the military). But a thirty six year old person can be openly discriminated against without legal repercussion.

Care to elaborate a little more on her ebook and other shenanigans? All I had heard of her is that she approved of Sanderson, who finished the series, and apparently he did a bang-up job.

Regardless of who gets the money, the fact that this group has been squatting on the rights for so long and seems do be interested in doing nothing with them other than suing people means that they need to pass into the hands of someone else. I would support her case for that reason alone.

Yelp, contributing member of the Legitimate Businessman's Social Club., today initiated a lawsuit against itself announcing, "Our terms of service clearly state that developers may not compete with services already in the Yelp ecosystem."

Yelp later dropped the case, without admission of guilt, when it walked into court only to be confronted by attorneys from Yelp.

Both his presumption and assumption are wrong. Is it better to assume that everyone commenting is always foolish and wrong, or that everyone commenting is expert and right? Neither assumption is correct.

I have my own set of assumptions about the character of commenters, assumptions which are usually influenced by the site I'm reading, but even when I go into a thread with the assumption that there will be a bunch of people spouting off with an air of authority on some subject of which they actually know very little, I still find that sometimes their comments will influence me. It's a difficult situation. It's the punditry problem really - a pundit can declare some nonsensical shit to be factual and the honest-to-god truth, and you're basically left with three options: first, you can believe them because they certainly seem to know what they're talking about and they wouldn't lie outright, would they? Second, you can disbelieve them but always have this small lingering doubt floating around in the back of your head. A suspicion that maybe there was a nugget of truth in there. Third, you can spend hours fact checking the claim in order to eventually, finally, reassure yourself that yes, they are lying sacks of shit and no part of what they said was representative of the truth.

How often do you actually take the third option? How often can you, really? That's like asking someone how many EULAs they read.

The only reason they otherwise wouldn't be able to is because it would be in use. In other words, we've deferred 20 years worth of economic benefit.

The only real counter argument that I've seen is that there have been very few good suggestions for an alternative system. Although there have been some, they tend to get pushed aside for the sake of maintaining status quo.

Come on, he obviously meant a speeder bike. Think: if you're looking to ride a bike and you want something that isn't boring, what bike are you riding?

Are you kidding? We had a whole thing called "the civil rights movement" which ultimately went pretty well in terms of accomplishments. And that's not the first or the last, a few other big ones: women's suffrage, emancipation, there's a pretty strong push right now for rights for gay people, etc. Are you trying to claim that the suffragettes were conservative? They were not.

You are obviously confusing civil rights (completely unrelated to guns) and property rights (guns are property). I really doubt that your confusion is accidental, I'd be willing to bet an awful lot that you got that idea either directly or indirectly from the NRA. The NRA regularly concocts this kind of nonsense because, to a lobbyist, honesty is just a speedbump. I can't say that I have much of an opinion about guns one way or the other, but I absolutely hate the NRA and this sort of intentional spreading of ignorance is the reason why.

The article misses the big point here: regardless of whether or not what you do is actually illegal, the NFL may very well sue you anyway. It's illegal in practice even if not in the books.