It seems like every person that breaths the same air as me at a conference, stumbles across my website, applies for a job, etc., tries to add me to their LinkedIn network. I get a zillion emails with "Someone you don't know and don't want to know wants to add you to their LinkedIn something something." And people keep setting up these groups for former members/employees of stuff, which just dilutes the pool of useful contacts further. LinkedIn is useful for keeping track of former colleagues (because we all move around a lot), and I do occasionally get non-spam from people finding me on LinkedIn, but the SNR is ridiculous.

As an American living in Europe, I could not agree more with that statement. In fact, one of the bigger unifying forces seems to be disdain for the European Union and making fun of the French. (BTW Israel is also an associated country of the EU and I doubt anyone is thinking of Israelis when they say "European.") The idea that a Brit has more in common with a Finn than a collection of treaties their respective governments signed is just wrong. However, this was a difficult concept for me, as an American, to wrap my head around simply because countries here are so tiny (and have such long histories)... they're the size of states, they all belong to a big "union," therefore EU = US is an easy shorthand. It is really difficult to see things from the other side of the Atlantic until you spend a few years here because European countries don't export their culture (e.g., TV and movies) the same way as the US.

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.

Don't worry. The remaining system administrators will properly triage all the work among the remaining admins.

They'll just punt all the routine boring stuff like security audits and access control management to concentrate on the more urgent firefighting, like user requests that would otherwise hold things up, and more visible projects like those new TPS cover sheets.

Bah. They can "collate" all they like, but they are swamped by the false positive (and false negative) problem.

Of course, it sucks to be a false positive, but air travel is overrated...

Pardon me for interrupting the usual /. dialogue with something relevant to the original topic, but Ken Shirriff did a couple of teardowns a year ago that point out exactly why the counterfeit chargers are Not Safe. The safety issues revolve around poor isolation practices between the line and USB sides of some USB chargers.

Major items include
1) lack of "double insulated" construction in the internal transformer.
2) parts placement of line and USB side components on a single circuit board such that paths may be readily formed between line and USB sides from moisture, construction errors, or component failure.
3) inadequate margins between line side and USB side in overall layout of the charger internal components.

http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-quality.html

http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.html

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.

"Where have you lived where your neighbors shunned you for not belonging to the "local church"?"

Idaho Falls, Idaho. They don't much hold with all that whacky stuff the liberals down in Pocatello do. Boy, do I wish I were kidding.