Flying high speed aircraft with meatbags behind the controls will someday disappear.
Anyone want to know how SpaceX controls their very high speed rockets? Answer, entirely with computers.
All rockets are entirely computer controlled. That would have been a very unfortunate parallel to draw if you had chosen any rocket company other than SpaceX. Rockets have a distressing tendency to crash into the sea on every flight (by design). Except for SpaceX, unique in the world at being able to land the first stage of an orbital class rocket intact.
When will non-believers like you give the prophet credit for deeming to communicate with the faithful? It doesn't what he says, or when he says it - instead you should being feeling all joyous inside just hear his missives./s
Oi. I can't tell if the mess you made of the English was intentional or not. Let's try that again...
When will nonbelievers like you give the prophet credit for deigning to communication with the faithful? It isn't what he says, or when he says it—instead you should be feeling all joyous inside just to hear his missives. </sarcasm>
Uhm, I'm not knowledgeable in metalurgy or guns, but I have a pretty good hunch that actual military vehicle armor is very different from just any old steel, and most likely a lot more expensive.
It certainly is different. To be clear, I wasn't talking about reactive tank armor that can stop a sabot round fired by a T-72. I was talking about steel vs rifle rounds.
Just as an example, I was out with some friends many years ago and we shot through about a half-inch steel target from what I recall, with regular 30-06 rifle ammo. It left a perfectly clean hole, as if someone had taken a drill to it. I would not be so certain that whatever steel they use to build thousands of miles of large tubes would be very bulletproof at all.
I suspect your memory was faulty, or it wasn't steel. I invite you to watch the linked video. While you are correct that there are many grades of steel, we're talking about a tube suspended on pylons dozens of feet apart, capable of withstanding the transient loads of a many ton capsule passing through it at hundreds of miles per hour, in earthquake country. Nobody is suggesting they use the cheap stuff.
In the case of the northeast corridor, all of that is out the window anyway. It's fairly clear that a Hyperloop in the American northeast would have to be underground, where idiots with rifles and too much time on their hands aren't a factor. Also thermal expansion would be far less of a factor, if not obviated completely. Getting people out in the case of capsule failure would be harder, though I bet capsules can be designed well enough and inspected well enough at each end that the chances of capsule failure drop to even less than the chances of a plane crash per passenger mile. Even when a capsule does fail, only air skid failure would really be a problem for passengers. The capsule would grid to a halt and the passengers would be stuck waiting for the little electric tractor to come fetch them and tow them to an access point or an end point. Inconvenient but eminently survivable. I predict if a Hyperloop ever got built, it would be safer than any other form of vehicular transportation, ever.
The idea that there's a severe gender imbalance may be a myth according to recent reports...
The exact size of the gender imbalance may be a little imprecise, but there's no doubt about the existence of the gap. Singles Day (11/11) was started as a bit of gallows humor by a single Chinese man. Now it dwarfs US Black Friday in one day retail sales. Obviously there are plenty of people bargain hunting, piggybacking on the original core of single men, but there's still enough single men to noticeably skew the exact nature of the items sold. Lots of consumer electronics, lots of toys for big boys, not so much with the Pampers and bassinets. That's one of numerous examples. Statistics coming out of China are always a little screwy, but evidence of the gender gap is visible in a bunch of places like that.
To Westerners, China is an elephant with a sheet over it. It takes some study, but you can get a fair idea of the general shape. Just the details are obscure. Me, I just ask my cousin, who speaks fluent Mandarin, lives in Beijing, and has a Chinese wife, with whom he's had two children. Legally.
To your first point, does the government save more than they pay out in subsidies or tax credits?
The US federal government gives neither tax credits nor subsidies for rockets. They buy launch services. There's a bunch of laws requiring it. A ULA launch costs $480 million. A SpaceX launch costs $62 million. Subtract the latter from the former and that's the straight up savings. SpaceX has already launched one national security payload, saving the US government in the form of the NRO hundreds of millions of dollars.
If you're asking about saving money with SpaceX vs spending tax credits with Tesla, ultimately yes, the government will save money. As the post you replied to pointed out, Teslas will be ineligible for the federal tax credit very soon. Projections were Tesla would hit the ceiling late this year, with Model 3 production. If not, they'll definitely hit it next year. After that, no more tax credits for Tesla vehicle purchases in the US. Meanwhile, SpaceX will continue saving hundreds of millions of dollars with every single launch the government buys.
NASA has booked no less than 26 resupply launches to the International Space Station with SpaceX. Every single one of those launches saves a fortune in tax money. Next year, NASA's contract with Russia for Soyuz launches of American astronauts to the ISS runs out. SpaceX is pushing hard to finish the Commercial Crew NASA contract, which would get them certified to take over from Russia late next year. That won't save quite as much money: Soyuz launches cost NASA $81.6 million per seat for six launches in three years. SpaceX will probably come in under that, but not by much. More importantly, that money will go to an American company with American employees, instead of a Russian "company".
More abstractly, the existence of Tesla is making electric cars a reality. The usual suspects can no longer lie to Congress and say it's impossible for them to build a product acceptable to consumers because there's now a company doing it. Electric cars reduce emissions, move emissions, and change the nature of emissions. Rather than hundreds of millions of vehicles spewing toxic fumes from gasoline combustion at ground level everywhere people live, we'll have merely thousands of power plants spewing toxic fumes from coal combustion hundreds of feet into the air far outside of cities. It's not a great win (yet), but it's still a win. The net result will be fewer lung disorders Medicaid has to pay for, saving the government money.
The Medicaid savings are a lot harder to quantify. Easier to just point to the rocket launch savings, which will add up to many many billions over time. Still, there will be more than just rocket launch savings from Elon Musk companies.
* The tube would be the largest vacuum chamber in the world.
And? So it would set a record. So what? On its own, that fact is meaningless.
* Any maintenance whatsoever in the tube requires depressurization and shutting down the line.
Overstated. Some types of maintenance would require depressurization and shutting down the line. Others would not. In particular, none of the required maintenance on the vehicles that traverse the tube requires depressurizing anything but the airlock already in hourly usage anyway. You take them out of the tube, perform maintenance, and put them back. For tube maintenance, you shut down. Consider it a snow day at an airport in the northeast, or a heat wave at an airport in Phoenix, except predictable and scheduled. No big deal. (And incidentally, completely impervious to snow.)
* Vacuum seals must work repeatedly and reliably for passenger loading and unloading.
Yes. And? Is this impossible? I doubt it. Does it require some engineering work? Yes. That work can be done.
* If a vehicle dies out in the field, it's unclear how they plan to evacuate passengers from either the vehicle or the sealed, elevated steel tube.
Unclear, but any idiot can imagine adding access ports to the tube at intervals, including removable sections large enough to allow removal of a failed vehicle. It's amazing what you can do with hydraulics.
* The tube has to deal with steel expansion in the daytime. The total expected variance (for the 370-mile California route) is three football fields, so you need lots of expansion joints (unless your loading platforms and pylons are going to be incredibly mobile), all of which must also be vacuum sealed. Also keep in mind the sun hits only the top of the tube so the expansion won't be uniform.
So it will have expansion joints. A two and a half foot expansion joint every mile would do it. Since it's not a very hard vacuum, designing an adequate expansion joint is entirely possible. I would build them much less than every mile and make them quite large, and double up the design as being both an expansion joint and the aforementioned rescue access. As for uniformity of expansion, steel is a very very good thermal conductor. The difference in expansion is negligible.
* A breach in the system is likely to be catastrophic, with a torrent of air rushing in and propelling the first vehicle it hits at great speed into the next one, since there's no air cushion between the vehicles.
Ridiculous. Railroads have had rail integrity sensing for decades now. The system requires both integrity sensors and pressure sensors along its entire length anyway. It's not like there's one giant vacuum pump at the end, with only one sensor. These are both safety and operational features. A breach in the system is a nonevent. It can be detected in a matter of seconds, and the information broadcast to all capsules in danger (a steel tube is basically a wave guide, making communication dirt simple), which can automatically engage emergency braking systems, which mainly means retracting the air skid pylons and letting the capsule drop onto its wheels. The wheel bearings will be ruined and have to be replaced, but the capsule will stop safely.
* Anyone with a rifle along the impossible-to-guard 370-mile tube can cause one of those failures by penetrating the inch-thick steel.
Uhm, no. Just no. Inch-thick steel is effectively armor. Very very good armor. You can legally buy armor-penetrating large caliber rifle ammunition in the United States (because 'Murica! Fuck yeah!) and while it does put a divot into inch thick steel, it does not penetrate. At all. Plenty of video on Youtube demonstrating. That lunatic in Texas tried it with all manne
The reason kids like spending all this time with their smartphone is the cost is negligible. Think about all the ways kids used to spend money:
1. Eating out at the mall + cafes + Denny's 2. Driving Around
Negligible? Smartphones cost $700, and for a while there, that money was being spent every two years. It was concealed in an outrageously huge phone bill, but it was being paid. The phone bill with data plan runs $700/year. The yearly average for most of the past decade is $1050/year on phone + plan. Admittedly with inflation that doesn't buy you as much Denny's/gasoline/amusement park tickets/movie tickets as it used to, but it still buys a helluva lot of those things.
Add to that the lack of jobs. This argument comes up every time Slashdot addresses UBI. There's a contingent who are still living in the '70s who think "entry-level job" actually means something. It doesn't anymore. A startling number of so-called entry-level jobs are being filled with GenXers and Boomers, because there's literally nothing else. Used to be there was some place to "advance" all those useless unskilled people. It was called middle management. There were tiers and tiers of it available at every large corporation that could suck up millions of bumbling morons, give them pointy haircuts, and put them in charge of something totally unimportant. Those jobs have been either automated away or simply dispensed with as corporations push harder and harder for efficiency. So now they're working retail or fast food, crowding teens out.
Between lack of personal income and the vast expense of a smart phone + data plan, teens simply don't have the money to go to a movie, drive around all night, then get breakfast at Denny's at 5:00 in the morning.
Some of that is driven by consumerism. In every media every minute of the day, teens are confronted with gleaming perfection, and the message has been hammered home since birth that anything less than gleaming perfection is so ghetto you don't dare show your face in public without it being airbrushed. That's where the $700 phones come from, and that's why they can't afford to cruise around all night—the car they have to have before they're remotely socially acceptable (she don't want no scrub, hangin' out the passenger side of his best friend's ride) costs tens of thousands of dollars they don't have. Gone are the days of the $200 disposa-car. Cash For Clunkers killed them off, and that prolonged absence on the streets forced incredibly high expectations that simply can't be met.
Kids have been priced right out of traditional social interaction, both socially and financially.
Chinese HS rail is much more maintainable than Hyperloop tubes, especially in a country full of angry rednecks with rifles.
It's an inch-thick steel tube. Do you know what happens when a rifle bullet hits inch-thick steel? It bounces. If you hit it at just the right angle, it bounces back directly at the idiot who fired it. There's video on YouTube of some moron who can't do math firing a 50 caliber round at a steel plate. If the plate had been just a hair closer to perpendicular to his rifle barrel, he'd be dead and the video would have been taken off of YouTube. As it was, he got incredibly lucky and lived.
We're not talking about a stop sign here. For all intents and purposes, we're talking about armor plate. Angry rednecks with rifles are irrelevant.
How are they planning to handle the occasional earthquake that might cause a permanent shift along a fault line?
Easily. The system has to have expansion joints built in to the tube to deal with temperature fluctuations.
A naive proposal was expansion sections only at the ends of the tube, at the stations. Unless the tube rests on totally frictionless bearings on every pylon, that obviously won't work. As temperatures rise, the whole tube tries to expand at once. Since there's no such thing as a frictionless bearing, especially one bearing the weight of several tons of steel, expansion pressures won't be evenly distributed. The inevitable result is that some random sections of a solid steel tube would wrinkle to relieve the stress, making it impossible for capsules to navigate that stretch without bottoming out their levitation skids.
So there will have to be expansion joints built in to the tube at intervals. Those joints can be slightly over-engineered and become earthquake expansion/contraction joints as well as thermal expansion joints. Problem solved.
You are wrong in at least one case: mine. I pretty much have one issue I vote on and it's H1B visas....as far as I'm concerned Trump can abort every LGBTQ with an AR-15 assault rifle, nuke the whales, pave the planet with CO2 belching tractors, put on clown makup to gargle Putin's balls, and build a 100 foot wall of undulating penises waving at Mexico.
And $1000 won't do it. People won't buy it. A few people on/. might, but your average person? No way in hell. Not with 4TB HDDs under $100. $200 drives with $20 tapes might work, but they would need to be in the TB range, native. I don't see that happening, though I'd love to be wrong.
Agreed as to price range. And you're not wrong; it's not going to happen. It's friggin' IBM and Sony. That's practically synonymous with overpriced crap. IBM will only want to sell them with $10,000/year service contracts, and Sony will only want to sell them for $10/gig. They want to pay back the R&D after one sale. No way these drives will ever be reasonable for even medium sized enterprises, nevermind consumers.
I too simply built a NAS. FreeNAS makes it so easy these days, and ZFS snapshots give you quite proper backup behavior. Vdevs with just three devices gives it the best chance to rebuild before a second failure ruins the volume, especially if you take care to build vdevs out of disparate devices. FreeNAS is even itself very nicely recoverable. I lost my boot volume soon after I built it, and had to reinstall. Reconstructing the volume from the imported devices worked perfectly. (I had sense enough to make a copy of the encryption key on another device.)
The days of consumer tape are over. The days of corporate tape are fading fast, even with this new device. Unless the two companies in question do something totally out of character, it'll get bought by banks and Fortune 100 and that's about it.
I presume only one fork will really survive. After a period of double-spend shenanigans, I expect the larger block size fork will be the sole survivor. Since it's effectively evicting all of the Chinese miners, some 40% of the mining power of the network, the block difficulty for the new, larger block chain should plummet, making mining far more attractive to individuals again. In addition, the new chain should have radically cheaper transaction fees, which will tend to push transactions to use it. Where the people go, so goeth the cryptocurrency. I doubt even the Chinese population that uses Bitcoin will stick with the original fork; they hate transaction fees as much as anyone else, if not more.
Bitcoin might actually be useful for microtransactions again. Sorry, bitcoin Cash...
China and India both would have world power economies
Look at wikipedia - they already do!
"World power economies" as in "11 supercarriers with accompanying battlegroups". "World power economies" as in "18 ballistic missile submarines". "World power economies" as in "oil is traded worldwide in their native currency."
The Western world seems weirdly unusual in history for its sheer honesty
He never had a plan. He never needed one, because he didn't want to be president to fix America's problems. He wanted to be president to make himself richer, that's all.
Indeed, he never had a plan. Not because he wanted to be president to make himself richer, though. That only occurred to him after he got elected. He never had a plan because he never wanted to actually be president. He wanted to be a candidate for president.
He absolutely loves being the candidate. People hold rallies just for him, people cheer any bullshit he says, Important People from Important Places get up and give flattering introductory speeches about him, and the news talks about nothing else but Trump, Trump, Trump. He adores that so much that he's already created his reelection committee and started holding campaign rallies! Just five months in to his first term! He's campaigning again because that's the only part he wanted. Actually getting elected was a total disaster for him. He did everything he could to avoid it. He said every outrageous thing he could think of, and it still didn't work.
Trump didn't have a plan to govern because everybody knew he wasn't going to get elected, including himself. He even started laying the groundwork for his post-campaign talking points (election was rigged). Then he got elected and he discovered how much it truly sucks to be President of the United States. People expect him to govern now. He never wanted that. People expect him to lead the Republican Party, which he is completely incapable of doing, because unlike every career politician before him who pretended to be an outsider, Trump really is an outsider. New York is his stomping grounds, not D.C. He didn't know the first thing about D.C. and how it works, and the more he learns, the less he likes it. Now people expect him to read long, complicated policy documents, understand them, make administrative choices, and accept that at least 30% of the population is going to hate his choice no matter what it is. Trump doesn't even want to do Step One, which is why his daughter and son-in-law now have offices in the White House. Somebody has to do all that reading.
The United States may end up with a shadow presidency by sheer accident, just because the President doesn't want to do the job, and never did.
I would think many use same the password. I do for ease of use. It's knowing when to use a unique one is the trick - to add: almost all of mine are unique.
Why would you ever use the same password twice when there is KeePass? You memorize one complex, annoying, long password which unlocks your database, then generate really really long, complex, annoying passwords (that tend to break the authentication software of many naively written websites) for each and every individual account. Everything goes into the database, with lots of nice metadata like the date of account creation and the recovery questions and answers. That way you can lie on the recovery answers intentionally, and not have to worry about remembering which site you told which lie. (You didn't think my dog's name actually was AdmiralNelson did you?) About the only thing which doesn't go into the database is the passphrase for the encrypted volume in which I keep all my nuclear secrets. I memorize that one too.
And do investors really understand ROI? SpaceX would have to become incredibly/'impossibly profitable to justify these valuations to get a decent return even at these current interest rates.
I'm quite sure SpaceX investors don't give a damn about ROI. The handful of billionaires and multi-millionaires who have invested in SpaceX are doing it to see something done, regardless of whether or not they get their money back afterwards. They were fantastically rich before they invested. They're still fantastically rich after they invested. This is play money to such people.
This is an echo of the New Space movement, except with money. Lots of it. For SpaceX specifically, this is about ideology, not profit. SpaceX investors believe the space industry should be far bigger than it currently is. Not could, but should, and they've found someone with the proven ability to turn money into rockets that work. Naturally they're getting behind him and pushing. SpaceX is being funded by the people who have read Buzz Aldrin's sci-fi novels and said to themselves, "We should do this."
Elon Musk does not have a cult of personality. Elon Musk is an engineering manager with a proven track record of doing what the usual suspects repeatedly said was impossible. Just because you think like a scammer or cultist, that doesn't mean everyone is a scammer or cultist. A company that last successfully launched an orbital rocket and put a 6,761 kg payload into the correct orbit 3 weeks and 2 days ago is not a personality cult. It's a launch services company.
They're not the only one with this goal. Samsung announced a similar proposal, and Blue Origin is also striving for it. Everybody sees the dollar signs; the question is who will actually achieve it first?
Even a former Googler was interested in the idea, and thought of doing it independently. I think that person ultimately decided to invest in SpaceX instead, since the independent proposal seems to have vanished.
I'd bet on SpaceX, myself. They have people who have flown orbital hardware, repeatedly. Blue Origin and Samsung may, but neither have done so in their current organizations. The skill of individuals is important, but the role of a successful organization is far more important. No skilled individual is going to make Windows 10 not suck, nor BlackBerry's OS the dominant phone OS. SpaceX's demonstrated collective skill is currently unparalleled in the space industry anywhere in the world. Most importantly, they have a boss who considers what he wants done first, then figures out how to pinch pennies to make it happen, rather than pinching pennies first and foremost and damn the product. I expect SpaceX's approach to satellite design and manufacture to be nearly as radical as their approach to rocket design and manufacture. The difference could be spectacular.
As usual though, what could scuttle the whole idea is politics. Getting spectrum in 200 countries is fantastically difficult. It's only been done once before, and Iridium did it by being connected at the highest levels. Elon Musk is young, naive, and doesn't know where any of the bodies are buried. SpaceX is going to find spectrum acquisition an uphill battle all the way. Being as good at building satellites as they are at building rockets may not be enough.
Corruption in management, recruiting faculty, running the college, collecting the fees, in admission procedure, everywhere is rampant.
China and India both would have world power economies if not for this factor. The cognitive load required to function in a society where you're permanently on guard against being ripped off at every turn is truly enormous. It's downright debilitating, and made all the worse by being so pervasive it becomes unavoidable in certain sectors. The Western world seems weirdly unusual in history for its sheer honesty. Those days are fading as the kleptarchs return to power. It was good while it lasted.
One reason for these degree mills is the Indian marriage market. Dowries are common, where the bride's family will give money and assets to the groom's family. A son can bring in a bigger dowry if he has a degree, but it is less important that he actually learn anything useful. Degree mills provide credentials that cost less than the expected bump in the dowry value.
I have to wonder how long that practice will last now. I've worked with both male and female Indian software engineers, in the same office, and I have to say the female engineers tend to be better than the males. Pathologically nonassertive, but still better. Seems to me the dowries should be going the other way, especially if India actually has a shortage of women. (First I'd heard that assertion, and you gave no citations.)
I am really wondering how China's gender imbalance is going to play out. You'd think that women would become highly valued, because that would be the sensible reaction to serious scarcity, but human cultures aren't noted for sane reactions in the face of bizarre imbalances. They might just double down on their devaluing of women. That would be more than a little concerning, especially if you're Russian. 30 million single men with zero prospects of marriage (the projected number by 2020), is pretty much the definition of social instability. The notion of polyandry was floated a couple of years ago by a Chinese professor of economics at Zhejing University, and apparently caused quite a stir in China on the Internet. The exact nature of the response is obscured behind the language barrier. Slate, naturally, only reports about the reaction of Chinese feminists, who are presumably a vanishingly small percentage of the population. I'm curious what the mainstream reaction was.
Incidentally, that article also mentions the Indian imbalance, so there's at least some source for the assertion.
As the apocryphal ancient Chinese curse says, "May you live in interesting times." China and India both are in for some very interesting times. Putin's paranoia about Russia being invaded (again) makes a little bit of sense.
Slashdot Mirror
"Virtue signaling at its peak in SV ivory tower."
At its peak? What makes you think it can't get worse?
Flying high speed aircraft with meatbags behind the controls will someday disappear.
Anyone want to know how SpaceX controls their very high speed rockets? Answer, entirely with computers.
All rockets are entirely computer controlled. That would have been a very unfortunate parallel to draw if you had chosen any rocket company other than SpaceX. Rockets have a distressing tendency to crash into the sea on every flight (by design). Except for SpaceX, unique in the world at being able to land the first stage of an orbital class rocket intact.
When will non-believers like you give the prophet credit for deeming to communicate with the faithful? It doesn't what he says, or when he says it - instead you should being feeling all joyous inside just hear his missives. /s
Oi. I can't tell if the mess you made of the English was intentional or not. Let's try that again...
When will nonbelievers like you give the prophet credit for deigning to communication with the faithful? It isn't what he says, or when he says it—instead you should be feeling all joyous inside just to hear his missives. </sarcasm>
Stop posting drunk, Peter.
Uhm, I'm not knowledgeable in metalurgy or guns, but I have a pretty good hunch that actual military vehicle armor is very different from just any old steel, and most likely a lot more expensive.
It certainly is different. To be clear, I wasn't talking about reactive tank armor that can stop a sabot round fired by a T-72. I was talking about steel vs rifle rounds.
Just as an example, I was out with some friends many years ago and we shot through about a half-inch steel target from what I recall, with regular 30-06 rifle ammo. It left a perfectly clean hole, as if someone had taken a drill to it. I would not be so certain that whatever steel they use to build thousands of miles of large tubes would be very bulletproof at all.
I suspect your memory was faulty, or it wasn't steel. I invite you to watch the linked video. While you are correct that there are many grades of steel, we're talking about a tube suspended on pylons dozens of feet apart, capable of withstanding the transient loads of a many ton capsule passing through it at hundreds of miles per hour, in earthquake country. Nobody is suggesting they use the cheap stuff.
In the case of the northeast corridor, all of that is out the window anyway. It's fairly clear that a Hyperloop in the American northeast would have to be underground, where idiots with rifles and too much time on their hands aren't a factor. Also thermal expansion would be far less of a factor, if not obviated completely. Getting people out in the case of capsule failure would be harder, though I bet capsules can be designed well enough and inspected well enough at each end that the chances of capsule failure drop to even less than the chances of a plane crash per passenger mile. Even when a capsule does fail, only air skid failure would really be a problem for passengers. The capsule would grid to a halt and the passengers would be stuck waiting for the little electric tractor to come fetch them and tow them to an access point or an end point. Inconvenient but eminently survivable. I predict if a Hyperloop ever got built, it would be safer than any other form of vehicular transportation, ever.
The idea that there's a severe gender imbalance may be a myth according to recent reports...
The exact size of the gender imbalance may be a little imprecise, but there's no doubt about the existence of the gap. Singles Day (11/11) was started as a bit of gallows humor by a single Chinese man. Now it dwarfs US Black Friday in one day retail sales. Obviously there are plenty of people bargain hunting, piggybacking on the original core of single men, but there's still enough single men to noticeably skew the exact nature of the items sold. Lots of consumer electronics, lots of toys for big boys, not so much with the Pampers and bassinets. That's one of numerous examples. Statistics coming out of China are always a little screwy, but evidence of the gender gap is visible in a bunch of places like that.
To Westerners, China is an elephant with a sheet over it. It takes some study, but you can get a fair idea of the general shape. Just the details are obscure. Me, I just ask my cousin, who speaks fluent Mandarin, lives in Beijing, and has a Chinese wife, with whom he's had two children. Legally.
To your first point, does the government save more than they pay out in subsidies or tax credits?
The US federal government gives neither tax credits nor subsidies for rockets. They buy launch services. There's a bunch of laws requiring it. A ULA launch costs $480 million. A SpaceX launch costs $62 million. Subtract the latter from the former and that's the straight up savings. SpaceX has already launched one national security payload, saving the US government in the form of the NRO hundreds of millions of dollars.
If you're asking about saving money with SpaceX vs spending tax credits with Tesla, ultimately yes, the government will save money. As the post you replied to pointed out, Teslas will be ineligible for the federal tax credit very soon. Projections were Tesla would hit the ceiling late this year, with Model 3 production. If not, they'll definitely hit it next year. After that, no more tax credits for Tesla vehicle purchases in the US. Meanwhile, SpaceX will continue saving hundreds of millions of dollars with every single launch the government buys.
NASA has booked no less than 26 resupply launches to the International Space Station with SpaceX. Every single one of those launches saves a fortune in tax money. Next year, NASA's contract with Russia for Soyuz launches of American astronauts to the ISS runs out. SpaceX is pushing hard to finish the Commercial Crew NASA contract, which would get them certified to take over from Russia late next year. That won't save quite as much money: Soyuz launches cost NASA $81.6 million per seat for six launches in three years. SpaceX will probably come in under that, but not by much. More importantly, that money will go to an American company with American employees, instead of a Russian "company".
More abstractly, the existence of Tesla is making electric cars a reality. The usual suspects can no longer lie to Congress and say it's impossible for them to build a product acceptable to consumers because there's now a company doing it. Electric cars reduce emissions, move emissions, and change the nature of emissions. Rather than hundreds of millions of vehicles spewing toxic fumes from gasoline combustion at ground level everywhere people live, we'll have merely thousands of power plants spewing toxic fumes from coal combustion hundreds of feet into the air far outside of cities. It's not a great win (yet), but it's still a win. The net result will be fewer lung disorders Medicaid has to pay for, saving the government money.
The Medicaid savings are a lot harder to quantify. Easier to just point to the rocket launch savings, which will add up to many many billions over time. Still, there will be more than just rocket launch savings from Elon Musk companies.
* The tube would be the largest vacuum chamber in the world.
And? So it would set a record. So what? On its own, that fact is meaningless.
* Any maintenance whatsoever in the tube requires depressurization and shutting down the line.
Overstated. Some types of maintenance would require depressurization and shutting down the line. Others would not. In particular, none of the required maintenance on the vehicles that traverse the tube requires depressurizing anything but the airlock already in hourly usage anyway. You take them out of the tube, perform maintenance, and put them back. For tube maintenance, you shut down. Consider it a snow day at an airport in the northeast, or a heat wave at an airport in Phoenix, except predictable and scheduled. No big deal. (And incidentally, completely impervious to snow.)
* Vacuum seals must work repeatedly and reliably for passenger loading and unloading.
Yes. And? Is this impossible? I doubt it. Does it require some engineering work? Yes. That work can be done.
* If a vehicle dies out in the field, it's unclear how they plan to evacuate passengers from either the vehicle or the sealed, elevated steel tube.
Unclear, but any idiot can imagine adding access ports to the tube at intervals, including removable sections large enough to allow removal of a failed vehicle. It's amazing what you can do with hydraulics.
* The tube has to deal with steel expansion in the daytime. The total expected variance (for the 370-mile California route) is three football fields, so you need lots of expansion joints (unless your loading platforms and pylons are going to be incredibly mobile), all of which must also be vacuum sealed. Also keep in mind the sun hits only the top of the tube so the expansion won't be uniform.
So it will have expansion joints. A two and a half foot expansion joint every mile would do it. Since it's not a very hard vacuum, designing an adequate expansion joint is entirely possible. I would build them much less than every mile and make them quite large, and double up the design as being both an expansion joint and the aforementioned rescue access. As for uniformity of expansion, steel is a very very good thermal conductor. The difference in expansion is negligible.
* A breach in the system is likely to be catastrophic, with a torrent of air rushing in and propelling the first vehicle it hits at great speed into the next one, since there's no air cushion between the vehicles.
Ridiculous. Railroads have had rail integrity sensing for decades now. The system requires both integrity sensors and pressure sensors along its entire length anyway. It's not like there's one giant vacuum pump at the end, with only one sensor. These are both safety and operational features. A breach in the system is a nonevent. It can be detected in a matter of seconds, and the information broadcast to all capsules in danger (a steel tube is basically a wave guide, making communication dirt simple), which can automatically engage emergency braking systems, which mainly means retracting the air skid pylons and letting the capsule drop onto its wheels. The wheel bearings will be ruined and have to be replaced, but the capsule will stop safely.
* Anyone with a rifle along the impossible-to-guard 370-mile tube can cause one of those failures by penetrating the inch-thick steel.
Uhm, no. Just no. Inch-thick steel is effectively armor. Very very good armor. You can legally buy armor-penetrating large caliber rifle ammunition in the United States (because 'Murica! Fuck yeah!) and while it does put a divot into inch thick steel, it does not penetrate. At all. Plenty of video on Youtube demonstrating. That lunatic in Texas tried it with all manne
The reason kids like spending all this time with their smartphone is the cost is negligible. Think about all the ways kids used to spend money:
1. Eating out at the mall + cafes + Denny's
2. Driving Around
Negligible? Smartphones cost $700, and for a while there, that money was being spent every two years. It was concealed in an outrageously huge phone bill, but it was being paid. The phone bill with data plan runs $700/year. The yearly average for most of the past decade is $1050/year on phone + plan. Admittedly with inflation that doesn't buy you as much Denny's/gasoline/amusement park tickets/movie tickets as it used to, but it still buys a helluva lot of those things.
Add to that the lack of jobs. This argument comes up every time Slashdot addresses UBI. There's a contingent who are still living in the '70s who think "entry-level job" actually means something. It doesn't anymore. A startling number of so-called entry-level jobs are being filled with GenXers and Boomers, because there's literally nothing else. Used to be there was some place to "advance" all those useless unskilled people. It was called middle management. There were tiers and tiers of it available at every large corporation that could suck up millions of bumbling morons, give them pointy haircuts, and put them in charge of something totally unimportant. Those jobs have been either automated away or simply dispensed with as corporations push harder and harder for efficiency. So now they're working retail or fast food, crowding teens out.
Between lack of personal income and the vast expense of a smart phone + data plan, teens simply don't have the money to go to a movie, drive around all night, then get breakfast at Denny's at 5:00 in the morning.
Some of that is driven by consumerism. In every media every minute of the day, teens are confronted with gleaming perfection, and the message has been hammered home since birth that anything less than gleaming perfection is so ghetto you don't dare show your face in public without it being airbrushed. That's where the $700 phones come from, and that's why they can't afford to cruise around all night—the car they have to have before they're remotely socially acceptable (she don't want no scrub, hangin' out the passenger side of his best friend's ride) costs tens of thousands of dollars they don't have. Gone are the days of the $200 disposa-car. Cash For Clunkers killed them off, and that prolonged absence on the streets forced incredibly high expectations that simply can't be met.
Kids have been priced right out of traditional social interaction, both socially and financially.
Remember, being shy or introverted is something that is wrong and evil now.
Now? Where have you been for the past 100 years? Or probably 10000 years.
Chinese HS rail is much more maintainable than Hyperloop tubes, especially in a country full of angry rednecks with rifles.
It's an inch-thick steel tube. Do you know what happens when a rifle bullet hits inch-thick steel? It bounces. If you hit it at just the right angle, it bounces back directly at the idiot who fired it. There's video on YouTube of some moron who can't do math firing a 50 caliber round at a steel plate. If the plate had been just a hair closer to perpendicular to his rifle barrel, he'd be dead and the video would have been taken off of YouTube. As it was, he got incredibly lucky and lived.
We're not talking about a stop sign here. For all intents and purposes, we're talking about armor plate. Angry rednecks with rifles are irrelevant.
How are they planning to handle the occasional earthquake that might cause a permanent shift along a fault line?
Easily. The system has to have expansion joints built in to the tube to deal with temperature fluctuations.
A naive proposal was expansion sections only at the ends of the tube, at the stations. Unless the tube rests on totally frictionless bearings on every pylon, that obviously won't work. As temperatures rise, the whole tube tries to expand at once. Since there's no such thing as a frictionless bearing, especially one bearing the weight of several tons of steel, expansion pressures won't be evenly distributed. The inevitable result is that some random sections of a solid steel tube would wrinkle to relieve the stress, making it impossible for capsules to navigate that stretch without bottoming out their levitation skids.
So there will have to be expansion joints built in to the tube at intervals. Those joints can be slightly over-engineered and become earthquake expansion/contraction joints as well as thermal expansion joints. Problem solved.
You are wrong in at least one case: mine. I pretty much have one issue I vote on and it's H1B visas. ...as far as I'm concerned Trump can abort every LGBTQ with an AR-15 assault rifle, nuke the whales, pave the planet with CO2 belching tractors, put on clown makup to gargle Putin's balls, and build a 100 foot wall of undulating penises waving at Mexico.
Clown makeup? Now you've gone too far!
And $1000 won't do it. People won't buy it. A few people on /. might, but your average person? No way in hell. Not with 4TB HDDs under $100. $200 drives with $20 tapes might work, but they would need to be in the TB range, native. I don't see that happening, though I'd love to be wrong.
Agreed as to price range. And you're not wrong; it's not going to happen. It's friggin' IBM and Sony. That's practically synonymous with overpriced crap. IBM will only want to sell them with $10,000/year service contracts, and Sony will only want to sell them for $10/gig. They want to pay back the R&D after one sale. No way these drives will ever be reasonable for even medium sized enterprises, nevermind consumers.
I too simply built a NAS. FreeNAS makes it so easy these days, and ZFS snapshots give you quite proper backup behavior. Vdevs with just three devices gives it the best chance to rebuild before a second failure ruins the volume, especially if you take care to build vdevs out of disparate devices. FreeNAS is even itself very nicely recoverable. I lost my boot volume soon after I built it, and had to reinstall. Reconstructing the volume from the imported devices worked perfectly. (I had sense enough to make a copy of the encryption key on another device.)
The days of consumer tape are over. The days of corporate tape are fading fast, even with this new device. Unless the two companies in question do something totally out of character, it'll get bought by banks and Fortune 100 and that's about it.
I presume only one fork will really survive. After a period of double-spend shenanigans, I expect the larger block size fork will be the sole survivor. Since it's effectively evicting all of the Chinese miners, some 40% of the mining power of the network, the block difficulty for the new, larger block chain should plummet, making mining far more attractive to individuals again. In addition, the new chain should have radically cheaper transaction fees, which will tend to push transactions to use it. Where the people go, so goeth the cryptocurrency. I doubt even the Chinese population that uses Bitcoin will stick with the original fork; they hate transaction fees as much as anyone else, if not more.
Bitcoin might actually be useful for microtransactions again. Sorry, bitcoin Cash...
Well, that was weird. I was reading the article about taxes, hit the post button, and it landed here. WTF, Slashdot?
It's been a problem for years now. Yay for buggy, unmaintained web "code".
China and India both would have world power economies
Look at wikipedia - they already do!
"World power economies" as in "11 supercarriers with accompanying battlegroups". "World power economies" as in "18 ballistic missile submarines". "World power economies" as in "oil is traded worldwide in their native currency."
The Western world seems weirdly unusual in history for its sheer honesty
Have you heard of a guy called Trump?
Yes. Which is why I wrote the next two sentences.
OH NOES! I hate that Canada has invaded and we're suffering under foreign rule.
At least they apologize when their jackbooted thugs kick down your door and rape your wife.
Where are my mod points... gone into the wind....
This is a tax on the wealthy that are not quite wealthy enough to buy politicians.
That would be one of several major distinctions between being merely a little rich and being actually wealthy.
Rich people own expensive shoes. Wealthy people own the company that sells expensive shoes (as a frickin' hobby).
Rich people own expensive cars. Wealthy people own a controlling interest in the company that sells expensive cars.
Rich people own expensive houses. Wealthy people own the expensive office space being leased by megacorporations.
Rich people own iPhones encrusted in gold and diamonds. Wealthy people own substantial chunks of national economies.
Rich people own expensive wives. Wealthy people own expensive politicians.
He never had a plan. He never needed one, because he didn't want to be president to fix America's problems. He wanted to be president to make himself richer, that's all.
Indeed, he never had a plan. Not because he wanted to be president to make himself richer, though. That only occurred to him after he got elected. He never had a plan because he never wanted to actually be president. He wanted to be a candidate for president.
He absolutely loves being the candidate. People hold rallies just for him, people cheer any bullshit he says, Important People from Important Places get up and give flattering introductory speeches about him, and the news talks about nothing else but Trump, Trump, Trump. He adores that so much that he's already created his reelection committee and started holding campaign rallies! Just five months in to his first term! He's campaigning again because that's the only part he wanted. Actually getting elected was a total disaster for him. He did everything he could to avoid it. He said every outrageous thing he could think of, and it still didn't work.
Trump didn't have a plan to govern because everybody knew he wasn't going to get elected, including himself. He even started laying the groundwork for his post-campaign talking points (election was rigged). Then he got elected and he discovered how much it truly sucks to be President of the United States. People expect him to govern now. He never wanted that. People expect him to lead the Republican Party, which he is completely incapable of doing, because unlike every career politician before him who pretended to be an outsider, Trump really is an outsider. New York is his stomping grounds, not D.C. He didn't know the first thing about D.C. and how it works, and the more he learns, the less he likes it. Now people expect him to read long, complicated policy documents, understand them, make administrative choices, and accept that at least 30% of the population is going to hate his choice no matter what it is. Trump doesn't even want to do Step One, which is why his daughter and son-in-law now have offices in the White House. Somebody has to do all that reading.
The United States may end up with a shadow presidency by sheer accident, just because the President doesn't want to do the job, and never did.
I would think many use same the password. I do for ease of use. It's knowing when to use a unique one is the trick - to add: almost all of mine are unique.
Why would you ever use the same password twice when there is KeePass? You memorize one complex, annoying, long password which unlocks your database, then generate really really long, complex, annoying passwords (that tend to break the authentication software of many naively written websites) for each and every individual account. Everything goes into the database, with lots of nice metadata like the date of account creation and the recovery questions and answers. That way you can lie on the recovery answers intentionally, and not have to worry about remembering which site you told which lie. (You didn't think my dog's name actually was AdmiralNelson did you?) About the only thing which doesn't go into the database is the passphrase for the encrypted volume in which I keep all my nuclear secrets. I memorize that one too.
Blue people are less scary than black people?
Of course. How many people are afraid of Blue Man Group? None.
And do investors really understand ROI? SpaceX would have to become incredibly/'impossibly profitable to justify these valuations to get a decent return even at these current interest rates.
I'm quite sure SpaceX investors don't give a damn about ROI. The handful of billionaires and multi-millionaires who have invested in SpaceX are doing it to see something done, regardless of whether or not they get their money back afterwards. They were fantastically rich before they invested. They're still fantastically rich after they invested. This is play money to such people.
This is an echo of the New Space movement, except with money. Lots of it. For SpaceX specifically, this is about ideology, not profit. SpaceX investors believe the space industry should be far bigger than it currently is. Not could, but should, and they've found someone with the proven ability to turn money into rockets that work. Naturally they're getting behind him and pushing. SpaceX is being funded by the people who have read Buzz Aldrin's sci-fi novels and said to themselves, "We should do this."
Elon Musk does not have a cult of personality. Elon Musk is an engineering manager with a proven track record of doing what the usual suspects repeatedly said was impossible. Just because you think like a scammer or cultist, that doesn't mean everyone is a scammer or cultist. A company that last successfully launched an orbital rocket and put a 6,761 kg payload into the correct orbit 3 weeks and 2 days ago is not a personality cult. It's a launch services company.
They're not the only one with this goal. Samsung announced a similar proposal, and Blue Origin is also striving for it. Everybody sees the dollar signs; the question is who will actually achieve it first?
Even a former Googler was interested in the idea, and thought of doing it independently. I think that person ultimately decided to invest in SpaceX instead, since the independent proposal seems to have vanished.
I'd bet on SpaceX, myself. They have people who have flown orbital hardware, repeatedly. Blue Origin and Samsung may, but neither have done so in their current organizations. The skill of individuals is important, but the role of a successful organization is far more important. No skilled individual is going to make Windows 10 not suck, nor BlackBerry's OS the dominant phone OS. SpaceX's demonstrated collective skill is currently unparalleled in the space industry anywhere in the world. Most importantly, they have a boss who considers what he wants done first, then figures out how to pinch pennies to make it happen, rather than pinching pennies first and foremost and damn the product. I expect SpaceX's approach to satellite design and manufacture to be nearly as radical as their approach to rocket design and manufacture. The difference could be spectacular.
As usual though, what could scuttle the whole idea is politics. Getting spectrum in 200 countries is fantastically difficult. It's only been done once before, and Iridium did it by being connected at the highest levels. Elon Musk is young, naive, and doesn't know where any of the bodies are buried. SpaceX is going to find spectrum acquisition an uphill battle all the way. Being as good at building satellites as they are at building rockets may not be enough.
Corruption in management, recruiting faculty, running the college, collecting the fees, in admission procedure, everywhere is rampant.
China and India both would have world power economies if not for this factor. The cognitive load required to function in a society where you're permanently on guard against being ripped off at every turn is truly enormous. It's downright debilitating, and made all the worse by being so pervasive it becomes unavoidable in certain sectors. The Western world seems weirdly unusual in history for its sheer honesty. Those days are fading as the kleptarchs return to power. It was good while it lasted.
One reason for these degree mills is the Indian marriage market. Dowries are common, where the bride's family will give money and assets to the groom's family. A son can bring in a bigger dowry if he has a degree, but it is less important that he actually learn anything useful. Degree mills provide credentials that cost less than the expected bump in the dowry value.
I have to wonder how long that practice will last now. I've worked with both male and female Indian software engineers, in the same office, and I have to say the female engineers tend to be better than the males. Pathologically nonassertive, but still better. Seems to me the dowries should be going the other way, especially if India actually has a shortage of women. (First I'd heard that assertion, and you gave no citations.)
I am really wondering how China's gender imbalance is going to play out. You'd think that women would become highly valued, because that would be the sensible reaction to serious scarcity, but human cultures aren't noted for sane reactions in the face of bizarre imbalances. They might just double down on their devaluing of women. That would be more than a little concerning, especially if you're Russian. 30 million single men with zero prospects of marriage (the projected number by 2020), is pretty much the definition of social instability. The notion of polyandry was floated a couple of years ago by a Chinese professor of economics at Zhejing University, and apparently caused quite a stir in China on the Internet. The exact nature of the response is obscured behind the language barrier. Slate, naturally, only reports about the reaction of Chinese feminists, who are presumably a vanishingly small percentage of the population. I'm curious what the mainstream reaction was.
Incidentally, that article also mentions the Indian imbalance, so there's at least some source for the assertion.
As the apocryphal ancient Chinese curse says, "May you live in interesting times." China and India both are in for some very interesting times. Putin's paranoia about Russia being invaded (again) makes a little bit of sense.