(I'm a Google employee)

Internal backlash was massive, and as far as I can tell hugely stronger than the fairly mild complaints outside the company. The strength of the internal opposition took me by surprise. I understood that while Google doesn't wish to censor the web it also doesn't wish to be the entity serving up sexual content. That seems like a reasonable position to me. I thought the 30-day notice was a bit short, even though the terms of service only offer 14 days, but other than that it seemed reasonable to me, basically bringing blogger into line with the policies in place for YouTube, etc., for years.

Many of my colleagues, however, vehemently disagreed, calling it censorship, application of one region's values upon the world and generally declaiming it as the beginning of the end for Google as a force for openness and access to information. Many called the decision deeply inconsistent with Google's stated mission, "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The internal memegen system was awash in anti-censorship memes, and one of the memegen team went further and more or less shut the system down in protest, replacing it with a complaint about the blogger shutdown. Eng-misc, a high-volume internal mailing list for random discussions of, well, anything, was overrun with threads complaining about it. The founders got hammered with questions and complaints in the weekly company-wide TGIF meeting (which is actually held on Thursday these days, so more Googlers around the world can see it live).

It's been quite the storm.

As soon as the internal reaction started I expected the reversal, though it went further than I expected. I thought the result would just be more notice, maybe 90 days. But I suppose that's because I thought the basic decision was reasonable, and only the short notice unreasonable. Many others felt differently, obviously.

It's going to be interesting to see if this provokes re-examination of the YouTube and G+ policies. I doubt it, but I was wrong about the nature of the reversal, too.

Did Musk ever propose transcontinental hyperloops? I don't believe he did. As I recall this was always intended as a regional transportation technology, something for distances short enough that air travel is inconvenient because of the airport delays at both ends, but long enough that traditional train travel is too slow.

Technically, yes, with the caveat that you'd need regular floating reboost platforms with significant power generation scattered all throughout the Pacific, and of course maintaining the track perfectly straight while floating (one presumes at a fixed depth under the water) provides its own engineering challenges. But room-temperature rarified hydrogen instead of rarified air would allow one to make the journey at about Mach 4. Faster if it's hot hydrogen.

Are you under the misconception that hyperloop is a pneumatic tube system?

Hyperloop is a magnetically-accelerated a ground-effect aircraft operating in the sort of extremely rarified air normally only found at high altitudes. The tube's purpose is to provide such a rarified atmosphere near the ground. It's not a pneumatic train. It's not a vactrain. It's not maglev. It's a ground-effect aircraft.

Branching would be really tricky, but there's no physical barriers. Note that even Musk's proposal isn't as far as you can take the concept. If you fill the tube with very low pressure water vapor instead of very low pressure air (via more pumping to overwhelm leaks, plus water vapor injection), your top speed jumps 40%. Fill it with hydrogen and it jumps 300% (normally hydrogen is a real pain to work with due to flammability, embrittlement, etc, but the densities in question are so low that such issues are mostly avoided). So we're talking the potential for hyperloop "speedways" for long distance runs that could blow airplanes out of the water.

The low numbers of passengers per capsule is really key to making the concept economical. Compare, say, monorail track with a full sized rail bridge. The former is vastly cheaper per unit distance because the peak loadings are so much lower, because the mass of the monorail trains are so much lower. A computer-controlled high launch rate of small, high speed capsules means you're spreading the loading out greatly, which means greatly reduced loading and thus materials costs.

Still, while Musk has been thinking of Hyperloop stations in the "airport" concept, he really needs to get out of that mindset. His proposed plan had them on the outskirts of cities. Airports are only on the outskirts of cities because they *must* be. You greatly reduce your utility by doing that, by making people catch connecting trains. Hyperloop can extend just fine into towns; with his two proposed endpoints in particular there are excellent rail routes into town that are quite straight that it could be built over.

I read about it yesterday at bbc.co.uk. But thanks for playing.

Your semi-literacy must be an embarrassment to you.

Thanks for helping me laugh on a sad day.

Yes, he took a few missteps, as have we all.

Yes, he was still awesome, and yes, he gave those of us who grew up in the 60s/70s a different and better sort of role model.

I use OpenSUSE. The few things I've not been able to find in their stock repos (most notably a non-braindead version of VLC) have always been available in the alternative repos which can be located simply by searching http://software.opensuse.org/ (Packman rocks, BTW). The only stuff I ever *have* to compile on anything like a regular basis is for work.

I will preface this by saying "this is really true" because you probably would otherwise read it as a nonsense, sarcastic, or glib comment.

I heard a conversation the other day about some of the terrible new buildings at the nearby university. A very senior administrator said (paraphrased), "you need to hire a hot architect and pay him 20% of the project price to come up with some really shocking architecture, to prove to prospective students that the school is still relevant."

I think he was talking mostly about the atrocity that they added to the Medical School, which looks suspiciously like the post-accident Chernobyl reactor. The "architecture" part of the project probably added $20M over making it look like a classical higher-ed building. I believe this administrator had final sign-off on such an expense.

It is not like an educated population is some kind of public good.

It's not, if you're speaking about the economic term. A 'public good', to an economist, is something that cannot be provided by the private market (a "market failure") and therefore must fall to a government to provide. Education is one where the private market excels in comparison to the public provision, which would be a counter-example.

And how should the government do that? With the tax income that these companies managed to avoid paying? Cool story bro.

The government should take money from the poor and funnel it into the coffers of these corporations. Did you miss the part where government is for the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses?

The alternative is asking for bankruptcy.

I can just about guarantee you that several buyers of bandwidth in Phoenix had contracts with the people who owned this fiber and those contracts specified multiple redundant paths out of the city.

Odds are we're looking at backup system failure or contract fraud. Probably the former.