I'm not an armchair engineer, but I am a real scientist. And while I have never seen anything at this scale, I have read a lot of proposals. This one did not set off my general bullshit alarm.

I really, really like that Musk has everyone talking about the Hyperloop and the ancillary discussions of public transportation in general, but there are a couple of details that are glossed over in the big, long document. One is the acceleration/braking by linear induction motors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he seems to jump from idea that they already work in rotary engines and that MVA inverters are already commercialized (in mining equipment and trains) to the conclusion that they therefore will work in the linear configuration shown in the document. The wording there was sneaky.

The second is holding a vacuum, ~0.001 Atm., through the whole tube. Has that ever been demonstrated on such a large scale? He shows some metrics from commercial pumps, but then seems to assume that they will scale constantly with volume... how many pumps? Spaced how? What sort of maintenance requirements? How long to pump down the shunts at stations where modules are loaded/unloaded? Vacuum is non-trivial at commercial scales. Perhaps this sort of thing is commonplace and I have just never seen it (and I have seen vacuum chambers that would accommodate a pickup truck). But it felt to me like he was making a lot of assumptions about how easy it is to work with vacuum at those scales.

Those are both issues that can be demonstrated/prototyped, but it is as naive to say that the proposal was anything more than a whitepaper as it is to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

I don't think that is entirely true. The magnetic strip in my PIN card failed and it stopped working on other bank's ATMs. It continues to work fine with my bank's ATMs and in chip readers at retailers... But thanks for reminding me that I have to replace it before I go to the US : )

I pay for cable, but just don't watch it--I pirate everything instead and the since the fastest tier comes bundled with phone and TV, I pay for them too.

I just hate commercials so very much. Those jingles and catch phrases, the branding... it pollutes my brain and I resent it. (I will pollute my brain how I want to, thank you very much.) I am bothered by the fact that I remember commercials from my childhood so vividly. I still remember when a Hostess commercial ran twice in a row when I was six... with that dancing humanoid cupcake in the park telling me how delicious it was.

Once I got a VCR, I would record TV shows on VHS and watch them immediately after so that I could fast-forward through the commercials, but someone who likes uploading things to usenet now takes care of that for me.

I'm sure I belong to a tiny fraction of crazy people, but there are plenty of reasons to pirate besides saving money.

Are you a parent? Because once you have kids, decisions can come back to bite you in the ass years later in ways that were not at all obvious at the time. I realize we are talking about the workplace, and understand your point, but being a good person and not an asshole is the first step towards raising kids who are good people and not assholes... sometimes I think children are the origin of parables and generalities about "doing the right thing" and "being a good person" even when you have nothing to gain. All that nonsense about setting a good example can easily follow you home from work.

Several of my organic chemistry courses were taught this way. Since there was no practical way of taking notes digitally at the time (which may still be the case?), we were forced to perfectly transcribe the structures into our notes. I still have most of those notes and can still draw near-perfect benzene rings... and am still picky about pens.

Probably, but I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat: "The demise of broadcast TV and push-media in general." Now tell me what I've won!

I had no idea it was airing where I live, but why would I care when the "pirated" version is waiting for me to queue it up at my earliest convenience on myriad devices. (So is the Netflix version, but I use a region-unblocker for Netflix--is that still "piracy?")

To be clear, I meant flying between any two European cities works basically how it would if American cities connected mass transit to their airports in a meaningful way. Passenger rail in Europe is usually more expensive and slower than flying except, obviously, over distances too short to fly.

Having lived in both the Bay Area and LA and commuted between them frequently, it was almost always less hassle to drive than to fly. Sure the flight itself was short, but the traffic getting to/from the airports, parking, car rental, standing in long lines, being fondled by a stranger in a uniform, etc. was no match for the tedium of sitting behind the wheel for five hours or so. Making air travel anything less than the dehumanizing punishment that it is now may be impossible, given the inertia of the entrenched interests, but I-5 isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Traveling between pretty much any two European cities (of reasonable size), where you have efficient mass-transit on both ends and no TSA, is basically what you propose for California, and it would be truly amazing... but as you point out, it would require building a mass transit system and linking it to the airport. And if BART and the LA Subway are any indication, that is a pipe dream for a fantasy world where politicians aren't corrupt assholes.

Much like Africa sort of skipped over landlines and went right to mobile, maybe California can pioneer a new form of medium-distance travel that is--and I think this is the most compelling argument Musk makes--sustainable. If this thing can really be powered entirely by solar panels on the tubes, then it could be a nice alternative to (medium-distance) air travel, which is currently the most carbon-intensive mode of transportation.

Due to the nature of my job, I spend most of my time abroad and frequently communicate with "suspect" countries. I also engage in international communications involving the US on a regular basis. Given that Obama blows unidentified people up for a "pattern of behaviors" in so-called signature strikes, I say go ahead and laugh at my tinfoil hat. I will never know how my years of paranoia--using proxies, encryption, etc., on a regular basis--have influenced what data the NSA have been able to pin to whatever unique hash represents me in their secret databases, but I hesitate to call it paranoia now... more like prescience.

Well, you say that, but do have any evidence to back up that claim? (And editorials from Fox News or Cato do not count as evidence.) Also, why does it matter how someone dies from a gun? They're still dead. And it's a hell of a lot harder to kill someone accidentally with a knife than a gun.

Defensive homicides? You mean like when family members accidentally shoot each other because the think someone is breaking into the house? Those are still homicides, right? Defensive homicides are also a crime, by they way, except in extraordinary circumstances or in places with incredibly well thought out "stand your ground" laws. Or is there a rash of people staving off murders by shooting the would-be murder that I just didn't encounter living in the US for 30 years?

Sure, here you go. (Hint: its still a factor of four or five higher, depending on if you include Eastern Europe.) And yes, in fact, it's impossible to have gun violence without guns, which is why they should be licensed and registered and people should have to have background checks and pass competency tests to own them.

I completely agree. And the homicide rate is still higher in the US by a factor of four than Northern, Southern, and Western Europe. All those "Europe is super-violent" statistics include Eastern Europe. If we lump Central America in with the US, the homicide rates jumps to five times that of all of Europe combined.

The US also has a much larger homicide rate by guns than almost the enture rest of the world. Are you arguing that if guns were regulated rationally in the US that all of the gun homicides would be replaced by non-gun homicides? Or that they would somehow increase? (No one is arguing for total prohibition here--just sensible regulations.)

Misguided is putting it mildly.

Recidivism is a problem the world over. However, the high statistic in the US is largely an artifact of the ridiculous drug laws; i.e., someone gets busted for possession, serves jail time, and then later robs a 7/11, poof--recidivism. (Thus wonderful policies like the California Three Strikes Law that lead to the Supreme Court ruling their prisons cruel and unusual punishment.)

I see, your basic argument is that it matters how people are killed with guns (that link actually breaks it out into intentional, suicide, accidental, and unknown BTW). The biggest difference between gun deaths and other forms of death is that the former is incredibly simple to prevent. Sure, you can tell people not to drive cars--that way they will never die in a traffic accident--but cars are much more useful to many more people than guns.

And I hope you realize that "gun control people" aren't a monolithic group of gun prohibitionists. I'm a hunter who owns many guns, has been shooting all my life (even competitively when I was younger). I just don't agree that any idiot that wants any kind of gun should be able to go out and buy as many as they want. Like cars--which are also lethal weapons when used improperly--I think guns should be licensed and registered and that gun owners should have to prove competency. Stupid people, the mentally ill, violent criminals, and children are good examples of people who should not be allowed to own firearms of any sort.

Nope. Although I am trolling in the sense that I'm curious to see how people rationalize their fervent belief that the world will come to end if any gun regulations are passed, I was shot at on several occasions. As I said, usually by idiots shooting downhill or without a clear field of view, sometimes by the crazy guy that shot at everything that crossed his property line, and on occasion by drunk rednecks. I should qualify by saying that lived in the middle of nowhere. No local police or city utilities (other than power) or paved roads or anything like that. Our neighbor used to train his dogs by shooting skeet off his back porch and we could barely hear it. I used to practice by shooting small tree branches and G.I Joe action figures with my scoped Ruger .22 semi-auto and walking cans with a .44 mag revolver (but that was an occasional treat because the cartridges were so expensive) which is insanely fun. My uncle was actually shot by his own uncle while out deer hunting, but they were bow hunting, so it "only" left a silver-dollar-sized hole in his calf.

Interestingly, I live in Europe and have yet to be killed by the roaming death-squads that are apparently rampant here. However, when I lived in the US I was shot at multiple times. Usually because some idiot was shooting downhill or mistook me getting off the school bus for a dear and only occasionally by our local lunatic that sat on his back porch shooting at anything that moved. Oh, and once or twice because I was "a damn hippie," but fortunately they were too drunk to hit the broad side of a barn.

But my point was about the lose definition of the word "fact." As in, according to Slashdot it is a well-known fact that Europe is a violent anarchist paradise and that the lack of guns here just breeds more tire iron and cricket bat assaults... usually against the elderly, who cower in fear, wishing they had the liberty to own a gun with which they could keep the kids off of their lawn.