Since you can't do the math apparently I'll have to. $20 per bus per month comes out to under $150k per year to have GSM data everywhere. For comparison, the Breeze Card program had a $100 million budget and Marta has a yearly budget of $400 million.

So no it's not a lot of links or a lot of data or a lot of cost although it is sad how people can't do simple math and research anymore.

What part of "There's a lot of reasons to not go with a GSM based approach but data cost is not one of them" is hard for you to read?

Please read the whole thread in the future, I replied to someone who mentioned Poland. If you can't keep up with a simple thread of discussion then maybe slashdot is too complicated for you. And btw, the price of 1gb of data per month is $20 in the US through Verizon or ATT.

You don't need to send a lot of data. Maybe, 1kb for each authentication event? Assuming 2 million authentications per day (a lot) that comes out to 2 gigabytes of data per day. Last I was in Poland I think that cost around 20 zloty ( $10) to get on a prepaid plan. Hell, you can have it send 100 times as much data and you'll still end up paying less than the cost of maintaining the hardware itself.

There's a lot of reasons to not go with a GSM based approach but data cost is not one of them.

Yes they would. You move to SF because you want to live in the hip fun place.

No but when you're buying ads on the side of the bus that is exactly who you think about.

Yes, Apple is *gasp* a company and is driven by profits. When something makes up over 80% of your revenue (and increasing) you focus on that and not the remaining (and shrinking) slice.

Because that's actually making them money.

Macs and OS X are Apple's side business, they haven't been core for a long long time.

Which they'll in turn burn in lost productivity from all the time they spent looking through people's github pages.

Governments have already done the trail blazing for where it matters. There is nothing of worth on Mars, it's inside a gravity well with barely an atmosphere and no radiation protection. The money isn't in shipping a handful of people to a red rock for millions and burying them under twisty feet of rock.

The money is in all the easier to access and easier to reach natural resources in asteroids and outside the giant gravity wells. There may also be some money in cheaper local tourism. As the cost per person goes up, the total amount of money you can make goes down as your potential market shrinks much faster than the price grows.

These are all things which aren't even being commercially exploited. Blazing a trail into the jungle doesn't benefit anyone that much if you're starting from a dinky little 2 man outpost that the commercial routes won't reach for twenty years. Looks at colonization. The governments brazed a trail to the coasts but it was the commercial fur traders who really explored the inside of the US.

There is a difference between buying a TV to smash it up and buying a TV to watch it. Just like there is a difference between buying a TV and buying a plow to send to some third world nation. In all these cases the economy is stimulated as an object needs to be created however the long term impact of all these differs greatly.

Your bad assumption is that the vast majority of accidents require paying out the full liability and vehicle coverage. They don't.

Traffic statistics, btw, are 3.1 billion vehicle miles driven per year and around 10 million accidents. Or in other words one accident every 300k miles.

Why should I praise someone who creates something that is of no value to me or of less value than what someone else made? If you make a device that costs me more time than it saves due to a useless UI how is that of any use to me? You can write the most brilliant code ever but unless that translates to a visible impact or feature for customers what's the advantage?

That's not HSR, that's called local public transportation and it already exists. That has nothing to do with HSR except that some of the HSR money would be diverted to improving local public transportation (ie: basically non-HSR trains). You don't need HSR to improve them and frankly without HSR you'd have a lot more money to devote to it.

Please stop switching arguments at random when it's pointed out that you said something idiotic.

You're makign the same logical fallacies as the blog author, you're assuming the Hyperloop is just a HSR train by a different name. It's not.

If I build a HSR from nowhere to nowhere then I won't get 100% capacity. If I build one across the US with no intermediate stops and it takes 30 straight hours to get somewhere I also won't get 100% capacity. Details matter and California's HSR is pretty much borderline useless in most of those details..

You're also not counting the fact that how long it takes to get somewhere dictates what peak hours means. Or in other words if you need to get somewhere by noon and it takes three hours to get there the peak hours will be 6 to 9. If it takes 30 minutes to get there then the peak hours can be from 6 to 11:30. So basically the Hyperloop can have half the capacity and still get as many people there by noon as HSR with no one having to wake up any earlier.

More to the point, the proposed HSR will be slower and about as expensive as flying so we can use airplane numbers. There's only 6 million flying between SF and LA per year. Let's assume half fly during a 4 hour per day block for commuting (2 morning, 2 evening) during 250 days per year. That gives you around 3000 people/hour at peak both ways and that's rather ludicrous since HSR won't get all of them anyway.

So claiming California's HSR will run at 100% during peak is downright hilarious imho. On the other hand the Hyperloop probably would be at 100% capacity because it's better than flying (rather than just slightly worse or about comparable) so people who normally wouldn't commute suddenly will.

Most people in the Bay Area do not live or work in SF. In fact San Jose which is the south end of the Bay Area alone has almost 1 million people (and growing) compared to 800k in San Francisco (and not growing).

That's because HSR needs to go to downtown to be even remotely competitive with airlines and thus viable. It's so much slower than an airplane it just can't be remotely as fast unless you add in all the commuting to station/airport time. The Hyperloop does not. It is as fast as an airplane if not faster. That's from station/airport to station/airport. So it can be just as fast an an airplane destination to destination despite not going to downtown since airports also don't go directly to downtown. If people care later on it can be expanded but initially it can compete on price for example.

That blog fucked up the numbers. They apparently don't understand the difference between "normal breaking" and "emergency breaking."

The capacity of the hyperloop is 25% of high speed rail and one can question how realistic the high speed rail numbers are. Maximum capacity of X is utterly useless if you'll never reach close to it.

Assuming that the way we do something is the only way to do it and we can never figure out a different way is silly. I'd wager that a lot of the resource we mine today would have been considered "impossible" to mine fifty years ago. Then we invented new technologies and new approaches and adjust old ones to fit the new situation.

On Earth we have water, oxygen and gravity so we use them. In space we have abundant solar energy, no gravity and no friction/heat conductivity so we'd use those. Plus no real environmental contamination issues and no weather. Spin asteroids while heating them with giant mirrors to create massive centrifuges for example. Use relatively weak electromagnets to pick out conductive materials from pulverized asteroids. Or crisscross asteroids with tunnels with no worry of collapse. Maybe have robots grind asteroids into pieces automatically since the asteroid should be mostly homogeneous with less need to account for the location of "deposits." Strip mining with no need to worry about collapsing walls or angry environmentalists, just strip mine the whole asteroid from outside in until nothing is left.