That was fascinating, thanks for the link (and the lost 45 minutes reading about the guy's other genius hacks).

The most sensible government broadband propsals seem to only involve the government in the layer 1/2 aspect of the network and any layer 3+ services are simply using the municipal network as a transport layer and are actually provided by third parties. Even management of the layer 2 side could be outsourced to a third party on some kind of basis where they just make it work for some kind of fixed margin for a period of time.

The metaphor that makes the most sense to me are municipal roads. The government is just tasked with building and maintaining the roads -- nobody expects the government to deliver pizzas or get you to the airport. A municpal network would just provide connectivity, it would be up to individuals to contract with an ISP or teleivision vendor to provide services over the network.

I would expect that there would be some attempt to provide a minimal service over a municpal network in the same way that the government is involved in public transportation, like maybe you could get access to city web sites without buying ISP service, but it hardly seems like these would squeeze out private ISPs from selling service on a municipal network anymore than the city bus system has put the auto industry or the hired car services out of business.

I think the only thing that matters here is the timing of the suit after the governor's resignation. Once the governor resigns, even if the allegations surrounding the resignation turn out to be true, the governor has a cloud over his head making it trivial to tie anything and everything to his "corruption" even if the actual allegations have nothing to do with ancillary claims made against him, such as Oracle's suit.

"Let's blame Oracle" also sounds like a lousy political strategy that would motivate few voters as well as leave the door open to questions about selection of Oracle as a vendor to begin with and quesitons about the competency of the vendor oversight. I doubt any politician would base much of their voter appeal on something like that lest it turn around and bite them.

zblockquote>See: Cabin_Pressurization [wikipedia.org]

A person needs at least 20kPa *from the mask to breathe*. Not 20kPa *ambient pressure*. Please learn to read.

The "problematic loading on the capsules" is from the high speed aerodynamics, not the ambient pressure

Aerodynamic loading = pressure. If you have high loadings, you have high pressures. Period.

How much CPU power is in HDD controllers and how big is the flash storage on the controller?

I'm mostly just curious, but I wonder how much "elbow room" there is to do something nefarious like blocking updates or protecting boot sectors without compromising drive performance significantly.

Is there a mechanism for running software on the drive controller -- passing input, getting output, etc?

There seems to be a widely accepted school of thought within music journalism/critcism that gives significant weight/credit to obscure artists having a disproportionate influence to trends in music. Groups like the Velvet Underground, Big Star, the Replacements never had major popularity in terms of record sales and radio airplay but are often cited by music critics and other musicians as having been influential on bands and genres that were popular later on, in some cases 20 years later on.

Tapping the Billboard 100 doesn't seem to take into account these "opinion leaders" influence, whether it was the music itself that was the inspiration or whether it was just the influence of music critics.

It's pretty debatable whether a specific artist, especially one who had little popularity in their years of recording and performing, actually has this kind of influence or whether it just becomes kind of an orthodoxy of opinion that they had that influence.

But often times it does seem that there can be breakthrough artists who manage to have outsize influence on artists who later go on to popularize a genre.

I think you underestimate how far sensor technology has come and will go, here for example is an example of automated salmon processing. Obviously there's a lot of natural variation, do we need to bioengineer a more robot-friendly salmon? No. They're measured out by a laser and intelligently cut. Head/tail/other cuts are dropped out to go on another processing line. Each cut is grabbed by a robot with robot vision and placed in pouches to be sealed. Skip to 3:12 if you just want to see that last part. Fillet-making machines are still in the research phase but there are examples of that too using X-rays to scan and find the pin bones. If they can deal with all that, I'm sure they can apply the right torque to a screw.

Yes, I realize that the sort of Occam's Razor kind of explanation is that it is a result of a bad picture that exposes some kind of color processing ambiguity and not a result of some kind of manipulation.

That being said, I think it's not unrealistic at all in era of clickbaiting and relentless social media trolling that someone would want to experiment with a scheme for manipulating social media memes or figuring out a way to amplify their views. As far as I know, money can still be made on web advertising, drive-by downloads, tracking, etc.

And as the AC poster who also replied said, there ARE organizations with a vested interest in manipulating socal media, whether its "merely" for advertising purposes or for more nefarious reasons.

intolerance itself

intolerance of intolerance

not the same thing

pointing a gun at a man

pointing a gun back

not the same thing

if you really can't tell the difference between who initiates a transgression and who defends against it, you're not worth the time. you lack fundamental social and moral sense

Are you talking about what I was talking about? I was talking about an electric motor, not a fuel-driven one.

What sort of claim is that? Since when do oxygen masks need 20kPa to function? And secondly, if there's "problematic loading on the capsules" from too much pressure on the pressure-compromised capsule, then your pressure is also way too high inside. Which means that you've repressurized the tube way too much. So the solution is: Don't do that!

Branching at full speed is probably not possible with the Hyperloop as designed; the skis are curved to match the diameter of the tube, with a ~1mm clearance with the tube surface, so there is no passive tube design that could accommodate a "switch". In order to continue from Section A to either Section B or Section C, you'd have to make an intermediate length of tube several hundred meters long that could be physically moved at one end from B to C, with sub-millimeter precision

Wait, meaning that while it's technically possible, but it'd be really tricky to accomplish? Gee, I wish I had written something like "Branching would be really tricky, but there's no physical barriers" at the top of my post ;)

The reason is threefold: drag continues to increase at higher speeds regardless of the speed of sound

Drag is reduced in the first place by using hydrogen even at a given pressure. And you can use 1/4th the pressure and still maintain lift because you're moving four times as fast. And given how few reboosts are needed from LA to SF in the base case, a few more per unit distance hardly seems limiting.

If you consider that the steel Hyperloop pipe draped across 30m-spaced pylons will approximate a vertical sine wave, then at 700mph the allowable sag is only about 5cm

Irrelevant because earthquakes impose far more deflection that you have to be able to counter (and that the proposal calls for countering) than a craft moving past.

Mechanical braking from 1500mph in the event of an emergency is also a non-starter

What, you're picturing drum brakes or something? You're moving at high speeds in a giant steel tube. Magnetic braking couldn't possibly be easier.

a 700mph capsule will incur about 2g's of aerobraking deceleration

Where are you getting this from? Even if the tube was instantly full pressure (which it wouldn't be), a streamlined shape will not experience 2Gs at 700mph, any more than a passenger jet losing full engine power does. And anyway, 10g horizontal is not fatal even if that was the case. The average untrained individual, properly restrained, can tolerate 10g for a minute without even loss of cognitive function.

Not only that, but if your craft is travelling four times as fast, you're sweeping through four times as much gas per unit time to compress under the skis.

Hydrogen has all sorts of advantages. And the very low pressures prevent most of the negatives. The only one that I don't know about and would require testing would be what sort of reaction would one see as a craft moves past, with any residual oxygen. If I had to guess, I'd guess that you will get some combustion, but the craft moves past so fast and the mixture will decompress so fast, I would think the rate would be quite limited.

First off, if servicing that requires full de/repressurization is some sort of frequent event, then the whole concept is doomed for reasons entirely unrelated to anything in this discussion. Secondly, 1/5 ton of hydrogen at industrial rates is about $200. Whoop-di-doodle-doo. And the advantage is being able to travel at mach freaking 4, not about the reduction of drag at a given speed (which is, FYI, true also).

As someone else already mentioned, it uses low pressure air because the "trains" are ground-effect aircraft, not maglev. They need air.

Secondly, the pumping budget to overcome leaks is so small, both in terms of capital and ongoing costs, that you could increase them by an order of magnitude and not have any sort of practical effect on the budget. Whatever factor you increase over the baseline increases the factor you can replace air by. You don't need 100%.