Don't be so sure.

I had a similar problem with a bank back in 2000-2001. I called their customer service dept. and they put me in contact with the IT dept. I explained that their web banking portal was spewing private information all over the place. (I was quite alarmed, since I had noticed this when doing my own online banking.) They said they'd see to it right away.

A couple of weeks go by, it's still the same. Now, mind you, this was a MAJOR leak to anybody who knew about it. Arguably worse than OP's problem. So I called them again. I was assured that they were right on top of it.

After about another month went by, I went into the main branch of the bank, and SHOWED this to one of the managers. He seemed quite concerned. Another couple of months go by... nothing.

I finally called them up and said if they didn't fix the problem, I was going to the newspapers with it. It didn't faze them. I actually did take it to the local paper, and they weren't interested in the story. (Turned out later, they were best buds with this particular bank.)

Anyway, long story short: they did nothing. It took them a full year and a half to fix the problem. If I had been an unethical person, I could have emptied out the accounts of MANY people over that time.

And how do we know that the real benefit doesn't come from hitting yourself with birch branches?

It would be pretty darned simple for the HD manufacturers to provide a utility for checking the firmware against stock versions. In most cases a simple MD5 hash would probably do.

While MD5 is not the absolute most secure thing around, it is very difficult to make custom software fit an existing hash.

It's about avoiding unnecessary risk.

It's about having your cake and eating it too. Banks and credit card companies have succesfully integrated themselves into the society so it can't function without them. They're too big to fail, and can thus take insane risks and the profits associated with them, secure in the knowledge they'll get saved on public dime should those risks turn sour. So why should society not force them to pay the price: make them serve the public good even when that's not in their personal best interests?

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.

Does this guy want to consider a bunch of other Trans-Neptunian objects as planets too? Because if he doesn't, he's probably either letting nostalgia or some other emotional attachment cloud his judgment.

Or he realizes that the whole concept of a "planet" is just a historical curiosity from ages long past, was invented by people who had no idea what they were describing, and is thus bound to lead to problems in scientific context. Best delegate it to the realm of public relations, where it can serve a useful role to give people a rough idea of what's being talked about without getting mired in details.

So: "A planet is an astronomical object the speaker thinks is best described as a planet."

And so forth. Why does the concept of another category, dwarfs, enrage people?

I suspect there's some kind of pissing match going on behind the scenes, and Pluto is simply being used as a proxy. That's usually the case when something utterly insignificant gets treated like it was Serious Business.

In the end, even astronomers are just humans, and can't avoid projecting their personal issues into their work.

There could be hundreds of legitimate accesses of that file. If the hacker was indeed using a hidden IP address to access the database, but his real IP to download the gist, how are Uber going to determine that from all the other legitimate accesses?

Why would they? They'll simply rise a lawsuit demanding damages against them all. Since that's a civil suit, the accused need to prove their innocence, which will take years and absurd amounts of money - or they can settle out of court with Uber for a couple thousand dollars.

Nothing personal, just business.

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%.

You think keeping hundreds of miles of tubing is really going to be cheap? Go look at a highway budget sometime.

Because Hyperloop is a highway? The closest analogy is a pipeline. Except that the environmental hurdles for building an oil pipeline raise the cost dramatically. Yet Musk's budget in Hyperloop Alpha is well higher than that of an equivalent diameter per mile.

Then consider ... Then consider ... Then consider ... Then consider...

And when you're done with that, then consider that every last thing you mention here was analyzed in detail in the Hyperloop Alpha proposal, which you apparently never read.