The big thing about tunnels is that they give you much better possibilities of getting into town (rather than the periphery like airports, as Hyperloop Alpha did) and maintain straightness in rough terrain.... an elevated Hyperloop would be passing through far too much built up land to maintain straightness, speed, and low right-of-way costs.
These are obvious problems with an elevated Hyperloop that I and others pointed out here a long time ago (while OTOH many Hyperloop fans were claiming it would be cheap like an oil pipe line). Why has it taken Musk so long to realise it?
What I wonder about is that the original Hyperloop white paper said "tubes mounted on pylons elevated" over things like farm fields. Now, they're digging tunnels, much more expensive.
They realised or discovered that not everyone in the World is a Musk fan, and is not going to give his eyesore a free pass over their land or house, on pylons or not. The early Hyperloop publicity implied that people would.
Also, whether it is cheaper depends on what is on the surface. It used only to be cheaper to tunnel in cities, but for example the UK in the South East is now so built-up that a large proportion of the Channel Tunnel railway link was built underground.
Rei is definitely an astroturfer. In a way his posts are interesting in that they seem to give us some inside knowlege of the project, sanitised of course. OTOH he cannot stand the slightest criticism of Hyperloop, much of which he answers on the lines that something will turn up to cover the problem.
All that stuff in his post above about cutting tunnels faster than ever before with the aid of blade cooling etc is really quite irrelevant to the practicality of the Hyperloop concept. Is he smoke-screening something?
He made me laugh here, and gets this week's award for the bleedin' obvious :
Tunnel costs are almost linearly proportional to cross section. By having cars on sleds you don't need any lane margin around the vehicles and can use a much smaller (and thus cheaper) tunnel.
Railway builders had that brainwave over 150 years ago. Unfortunately in the UK they made the tunnels too small and too cheap, something UK railway engineers have regretted ever since, and other nations learned from.
I'd suggest to you that if your solution is to "Use none," this might not be the discussion for you.... your post offers no insight on the difficulty in switching from one voice assistant to another.
This is not a voice assisant forum, it is a general tech forum. The whole point of this thread is to discuss a potential problem with voice assistants, and the OP is giving the advice to avoid that problem entirely. I found his advice useful, I think I shall take it.
Steve Jobs, the archetypical narcissist, taught him that? Did he teach him that by providing an example of what not to do?
Just what I was thinking when I RTFA.
"Cook says, it was a lesson in humility and pride"
No doubt working for Jobs let you see pride at close quarters, and let you see co-workers and yourself reduced to humility. I'm left guessing who were the butch and who were the femme ones.
The most important part of any change is to raise awareness as to why the change is needed..... at least it brought the discussion out of the tin foil hat crowd and into the general public.
Most people don't give a shit, or will consider their convenience the overriding factor. Their bitching along with Snowden is easy because it does not affect their own convenience. However, refusing to use Windows on principle would affect people's convenience, do they wont do it.
There is no way that this craft could be made safe enough for people to trust it. First accident, and no one wants to use it anymore.
Every form of travel ever had the 'first accident.' There are accidents all the time with airplanes. Somehow we still manage to get on them.
But at the time of the first accidents involving trains, planes, cars etc the media and other authorities tended to cover things up and there were no live TV reports. Back then it was considered bad form not to keep a stiff upper lip, and everyone wanted to put a brave face on things. It was a cultural thing. The worse ever railway accident in the UK (Quintinshill, 217 dead) was not revealed to the wider public for years afterwards. Not so today; now the media revels in presenting gory accident details, and the 'Elf and Safety people go apeshit, on top of the fact that everyone (including people not actually involved) sues everyone else over the accident in the aftermath.
The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful
It's incorrect to compare this to a zero base state - if the travel didn't happen at all. The correct comparison is to what would happen if this rocket travel weren't available. i.e. what happens right now? People fly between these locations.
Nope. Jevons paradox kicks in. If you can get between London and New York in 25 minutes for no more cost than an airline economy ticket, more people would be doing it than now, negating any savings in fuel consumption. Like aircraft are more efficient than ocean liners in terms of fuel per passenger-mile, but far more people travel by aircraft now than by ship in the 1930's and the total fuel consumed is greater.
Costs of space rockets compared with aircraft is not just about fuel. Rockets structures are more minimal than aircraft so are very highly stressed (to save weight). The amount of inspection, looking for fatigue cracks etc, that re-usable people-carrying rockets would have to undergo will be very expensive.
Companies are making billions of dollars trading on "facts" about you and me. They compile and sell this data with no recompense. They make no real attempts to ensure the data is accurate or that our lives aren't negatively impacted by errors.
They are only making billions by selling data for more than they paid for it (if they paid anything at all). One day it will suddenly dawn on them that for actual end use it is not worth anywhere near those prices. As everyone is saying, the ads "targeted" at us are mostly miles off-target, and I don't react to them anyway. When that day comes, the whole data-mining bubble will burst.
It is like the price paid for old masters, or Jane Austen manuscripts. They have little or no practical value (you can look at a perfectly good reproduction for nothing), but people pay huge amounts for them because they think they can sell them later for even more. But the admen, for now at least, believe the data they scrape really does have a significant practical value - having paid a lot for it they want to belive it.
The crapware they load on the pre-loaded Windows OS more than pays for the OS license.
That bundled Windows is actually making your PC cheaper.
I am well aware of that. But, cheaper or not, MS and Gates still receive some money from me. I prefer to pay more to avoid that, and the crap & spy-ware.
Shuttleworth takes Microsoft's newfound enthusiasm for GNU/Linux at face value
Then Shuttleworth is a fool.
[Shuttleworth] says the company has a different ethos to that of the 1990s, a fresh perspective
Indeed : tech has moved on and they have found new ways of screwing the user and new ways of spinning it. This is the company that rammed Win10 spyware down users' throats.
At least you're not forced to pay for Microsoft/Facebook's cable; if you don't like their policies, then build your own damn cable.... you're forced to pay for that Government cable.
"Private" is better. Always.
I've been forced to pay for Microsoft's pre-loaded operating systems several times. That or drop out the the modern world by having no PC. You can avoid paying any government too - by dropping out the the modern world and living on a rock. There are still a number of isolated rocks in the sea that are unclaimed, and if that sounds too barren and windswept you can always build your own damned infrastucture on it.
For all Microsoft's flaws, they got the DOS deal through their own hard work.
Er..... DOS itself was mostly the hard work of Seattle Computer Products - they wrote it. MS bought it from them while concealing the reason for the purchase. SCP later successfully sued Microsoft for misrepresentation, although for no-where near what it was worth to MS. Not much work was involved in actually getting the deal, no more so than is usual in such deals.
... His mother got him in to see IBM, but he sold them an operating system he didn't own and then once he had IBM locked in bought MS-Dos off some poor shlub for, I think $10,000.
The original PC-DOS operating system was written by a guy called Tim Paterson who wrote it while working for Seattle Computer Products [SCP] for their own 8086 CPU board (a micro computer kit component). Microsoft bought DOS from SCP and hired Paterson to adapt it for the IBM PC. They then sold it at a massive profit to IBM and other PC makers. Later, SCP successfully sued Microsoft for misrepresenting the intended use at the time of the sale.
SCP seems to have regarded their operating system as a joke because they had originally called it the "Quick and Dirty Operating System", QDOS. They renamed it more sensibly as 86-DOS, probably when they learned that Microsoft was interested in buying it. For the IBM contract Microsoft kept the DOS part of the acronym and said the "D" stood for "Disk".They should have kept the original name.
Easy to look down on successful people, isn't it? Bill Gates worked extremely hard, had a lot of very good ideas... and took his initial good fortune into a 50 billion dollars fortune.
I had to look back to the parent to see what you were refering to, and don't really see the connection. The issue was whether Gates saw further ahead than others did, or whether it was luck (or a combination).
I come across plenty of people who work extremely hard (including blue collar workers like builders and tree surgeons toiling away all hours in rain and shit), and plenty of people with good ideas. In fact good ideas are two-a-penny. But those factors only go ballistic when combined with a great deal of opportunity and luck. I think I have had a moderate amount of all those and am modestly well-off and satisfied. I recognise some good luck and don't claim it is all due to "cleverness". I also see others who have had very bad luck, and I don't accuse them of not working hard enough. Anyway; I live the life I want and would not want Gates' life.
But Gates' chose his career because it arose from a hobby, not because he could see further than others. I was around in the late 70's and the other young techies in my circle knew perfectly well that computers had a huge future, and we all had home computers (that ran CP/M, not DOS). Gates had luck being born into the family he was, and a great deal of luck in getting the IBM contract.
... the real smart/lucky thing Gates did, signed a very good contract that let MS keep control of DOS and perhaps the above. This was possible for several reasons, coming from a family of lawyers, and IBM, due to the antitrust actions on them, being eager to look like they weren't a monopoly.
That is because IBM did not take the PC seriously. It was the same with other components of the IBM PC, like Intel's processor : Intel could also continue to sell their stuff to third parties (ie clone builders). This was not a show of particular smartness by Gates; I had my roof repaired recently by a roofer who mainly does local authority contracts, but those contracts do not prevent him from outside jobs like mine. If doing business outside your main contract makes Gates a business genius, then my roofer is a genius too.
Slashdot Mirror
With you until you said "Gates".
The big thing about tunnels is that they give you much better possibilities of getting into town (rather than the periphery like airports, as Hyperloop Alpha did) and maintain straightness in rough terrain. ... an elevated Hyperloop would be passing through far too much built up land to maintain straightness, speed, and low right-of-way costs.
These are obvious problems with an elevated Hyperloop that I and others pointed out here a long time ago (while OTOH many Hyperloop fans were claiming it would be cheap like an oil pipe line). Why has it taken Musk so long to realise it?
What I wonder about is that the original Hyperloop white paper said "tubes mounted on pylons elevated" over things like farm fields. Now, they're digging tunnels, much more expensive.
They realised or discovered that not everyone in the World is a Musk fan, and is not going to give his eyesore a free pass over their land or house, on pylons or not. The early Hyperloop publicity implied that people would.
Also, whether it is cheaper depends on what is on the surface. It used only to be cheaper to tunnel in cities, but for example the UK in the South East is now so built-up that a large proportion of the Channel Tunnel railway link was built underground.
Rei is definitely an astroturfer. In a way his posts are interesting in that they seem to give us some inside knowlege of the project, sanitised of course. OTOH he cannot stand the slightest criticism of Hyperloop, much of which he answers on the lines that something will turn up to cover the problem.
All that stuff in his post above about cutting tunnels faster than ever before with the aid of blade cooling etc is really quite irrelevant to the practicality of the Hyperloop concept. Is he smoke-screening something?
He made me laugh here, and gets this week's award for the bleedin' obvious :
Tunnel costs are almost linearly proportional to cross section. By having cars on sleds you don't need any lane margin around the vehicles and can use a much smaller (and thus cheaper) tunnel.
Railway builders had that brainwave over 150 years ago. Unfortunately in the UK they made the tunnels too small and too cheap, something UK railway engineers have regretted ever since, and other nations learned from.
I'd suggest to you that if your solution is to "Use none," this might not be the discussion for you. ... your post offers no insight on the difficulty in switching from one voice assistant to another.
This is not a voice assisant forum, it is a general tech forum. The whole point of this thread is to discuss a potential problem with voice assistants, and the OP is giving the advice to avoid that problem entirely. I found his advice useful, I think I shall take it.
Steve Jobs, the archetypical narcissist, taught him that? Did he teach him that by providing an example of what not to do?
Just what I was thinking when I RTFA.
"Cook says, it was a lesson in humility and pride"
No doubt working for Jobs let you see pride at close quarters, and let you see co-workers and yourself reduced to humility. I'm left guessing who were the butch and who were the femme ones.
Try buying a loaf of bread with a gold Doubloon.
You can buy one from me, anytime.
The most important part of any change is to raise awareness as to why the change is needed. .... at least it brought the discussion out of the tin foil hat crowd and into the general public.
Most people don't give a shit, or will consider their convenience the overriding factor. Their bitching along with Snowden is easy because it does not affect their own convenience. However, refusing to use Windows on principle would affect people's convenience, do they wont do it.
Full disclosure is meaningless if there is no option to completely opt-out of telemetry and data collection.
There is no usable alternative to Windows in most people's minds, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have 90+% market share on the desktop.
FTFY, and the reasons for that market share are far more complex.
But it is true that nothing will come of this. MS will simply add a tick box for people to agree to surrender their data, and people will tick it
Most people use semi-disposable email anyway
No they don't.
and how is your email address much more secret than your street address?
Because it requires money and effort to spam me at my street address, but almost none at my email address.
So now it's rockets. What happened to Hyperloop?
How is it any worse than pushing a airliner sized column of air out the way from takeoff to landing?
That's the third time you've said that.
There is no way that this craft could be made safe enough for people to trust it. First accident, and no one wants to use it anymore.
Every form of travel ever had the 'first accident.' There are accidents all the time with airplanes. Somehow we still manage to get on them.
But at the time of the first accidents involving trains, planes, cars etc the media and other authorities tended to cover things up and there were no live TV reports. Back then it was considered bad form not to keep a stiff upper lip, and everyone wanted to put a brave face on things. It was a cultural thing. The worse ever railway accident in the UK (Quintinshill, 217 dead) was not revealed to the wider public for years afterwards. Not so today; now the media revels in presenting gory accident details, and the 'Elf and Safety people go apeshit, on top of the fact that everyone (including people not actually involved) sues everyone else over the accident in the aftermath.
It's incorrect to compare this to a zero base state - if the travel didn't happen at all. The correct comparison is to what would happen if this rocket travel weren't available. i.e. what happens right now? People fly between these locations.
Nope. Jevons paradox kicks in. If you can get between London and New York in 25 minutes for no more cost than an airline economy ticket, more people would be doing it than now, negating any savings in fuel consumption. Like aircraft are more efficient than ocean liners in terms of fuel per passenger-mile, but far more people travel by aircraft now than by ship in the 1930's and the total fuel consumed is greater.
Costs of space rockets compared with aircraft is not just about fuel. Rockets structures are more minimal than aircraft so are very highly stressed (to save weight). The amount of inspection, looking for fatigue cracks etc, that re-usable people-carrying rockets would have to undergo will be very expensive.
FTFA :-
to lead the Arab world in innovation. ...... The flying taxi developed by German drone firm Volocopter .....
I'm afraid they lost me there.
Companies are making billions of dollars trading on "facts" about you and me. They compile and sell this data with no recompense. They make no real attempts to ensure the data is accurate or that our lives aren't negatively impacted by errors.
They are only making billions by selling data for more than they paid for it (if they paid anything at all). One day it will suddenly dawn on them that for actual end use it is not worth anywhere near those prices. As everyone is saying, the ads "targeted" at us are mostly miles off-target, and I don't react to them anyway. When that day comes, the whole data-mining bubble will burst.
It is like the price paid for old masters, or Jane Austen manuscripts. They have little or no practical value (you can look at a perfectly good reproduction for nothing), but people pay huge amounts for them because they think they can sell them later for even more. But the admen, for now at least, believe the data they scrape really does have a significant practical value - having paid a lot for it they want to belive it.
The crapware they load on the pre-loaded Windows OS more than pays for the OS license.
That bundled Windows is actually making your PC cheaper.
I am well aware of that. But, cheaper or not, MS and Gates still receive some money from me. I prefer to pay more to avoid that, and the crap & spy-ware.
I do build my own PCs these days, but I have bought ones too. In the UK you need to go a long way to find a PC not pre-loaded with Windows.
FTFA :-
Shuttleworth takes Microsoft's newfound enthusiasm for GNU/Linux at face value
Then Shuttleworth is a fool.
[Shuttleworth] says the company has a different ethos to that of the 1990s, a fresh perspective
Indeed : tech has moved on and they have found new ways of screwing the user and new ways of spinning it. This is the company that rammed Win10 spyware down users' throats.
At least you're not forced to pay for Microsoft/Facebook's cable; if you don't like their policies, then build your own damn cable. ... you're forced to pay for that Government cable.
"Private" is better. Always.
I've been forced to pay for Microsoft's pre-loaded operating systems several times. That or drop out the the modern world by having no PC. You can avoid paying any government too - by dropping out the the modern world and living on a rock. There are still a number of isolated rocks in the sea that are unclaimed, and if that sounds too barren and windswept you can always build your own damned infrastucture on it.
Someone needs to read their own summary: this looks like the Atlantic Ocean, not the Pacific Ocean.
They didn't say it was the Pacific Ocean. They said it was the Pacfic Ocean. Must be a new one - caused by rising sea levels?
For all Microsoft's flaws, they got the DOS deal through their own hard work.
Er ..... DOS itself was mostly the hard work of Seattle Computer Products - they wrote it. MS bought it from them while concealing the reason for the purchase. SCP later successfully sued Microsoft for misrepresentation, although for no-where near what it was worth to MS. Not much work was involved in actually getting the deal, no more so than is usual in such deals.
... His mother got him in to see IBM, but he sold them an operating system he didn't own and then once he had IBM locked in bought MS-Dos off some poor shlub for, I think $10,000.
The original PC-DOS operating system was written by a guy called Tim Paterson who wrote it while working for Seattle Computer Products [SCP] for their own 8086 CPU board (a micro computer kit component). Microsoft bought DOS from SCP and hired Paterson to adapt it for the IBM PC. They then sold it at a massive profit to IBM and other PC makers. Later, SCP successfully sued Microsoft for misrepresenting the intended use at the time of the sale.
SCP seems to have regarded their operating system as a joke because they had originally called it the "Quick and Dirty Operating System", QDOS. They renamed it more sensibly as 86-DOS, probably when they learned that Microsoft was interested in buying it. For the IBM contract Microsoft kept the DOS part of the acronym and said the "D" stood for "Disk".They should have kept the original name.
Easy to look down on successful people, isn't it? Bill Gates worked extremely hard, had a lot of very good ideas ... and took his initial good fortune into a 50 billion dollars fortune.
I had to look back to the parent to see what you were refering to, and don't really see the connection. The issue was whether Gates saw further ahead than others did, or whether it was luck (or a combination).
I come across plenty of people who work extremely hard (including blue collar workers like builders and tree surgeons toiling away all hours in rain and shit), and plenty of people with good ideas. In fact good ideas are two-a-penny. But those factors only go ballistic when combined with a great deal of opportunity and luck. I think I have had a moderate amount of all those and am modestly well-off and satisfied. I recognise some good luck and don't claim it is all due to "cleverness". I also see others who have had very bad luck, and I don't accuse them of not working hard enough. Anyway; I live the life I want and would not want Gates' life.
But Gates' chose his career because it arose from a hobby, not because he could see further than others. I was around in the late 70's and the other young techies in my circle knew perfectly well that computers had a huge future, and we all had home computers (that ran CP/M, not DOS). Gates had luck being born into the family he was, and a great deal of luck in getting the IBM contract.
... the real smart/lucky thing Gates did, signed a very good contract that let MS keep control of DOS and perhaps the above.
This was possible for several reasons, coming from a family of lawyers, and IBM, due to the antitrust actions on them, being eager to look like they weren't a monopoly.
That is because IBM did not take the PC seriously. It was the same with other components of the IBM PC, like Intel's processor : Intel could also continue to sell their stuff to third parties (ie clone builders). This was not a show of particular smartness by Gates; I had my roof repaired recently by a roofer who mainly does local authority contracts, but those contracts do not prevent him from outside jobs like mine. If doing business outside your main contract makes Gates a business genius, then my roofer is a genius too.