Have consumers continue to consume video content on the screen even while scrolling and consuming other material... In other words, borrow a leaf from Facebook.
Ugh, please not that leaf. Especially not on mobile. Well, allowing video to keep playing (and stay visible) is fine (the new Oreo PiP mode might be great), but please, please do not autoplay video.
I dunno. By my reading, A and B are saying precisely the same thing.
If you squint hard enough. The main difference is that B claims that not adding the buttons will hurt traffic, but the correct interpretation of A is that adding the buttons might help or hurt traffic, and that the effect of not adding them when everyone else does is unpredictable.
Look at this from the perspective of a search engine trying to uprank the best content. Without the buttons, the only signal you have is whether or not users click the link to go to the page based on the title and snippet. That's a useful signal, but it's really a signal about how interested people are in the title and snippet. It doesn't say much about the content. You can try to infer more about the content quality based on whether or not people come back to the search page and click other links after looking at it, but that inference is weak for many reasons.
If there's a +1 button on the bottom of the page, then you're getting a real content quality signal. Not everyone who likes the content will click, but no one who hates it will click.
So, sites with buttons wouldn't get any sort of automatic boost -- or demotion. They'd just provide more information for Google to uprank or downrank their content based on user feedback. Sites without the button simply don't provide any signal other than the pre-existing one, so nothing can be inferred about user satisfaction of the content, only of the title & snippet.
This means that sites with buttons that get lots of +1s may rise above those without buttons. But it also means that sites with buttons that get few +1s may fall below those without buttons. Whether this hurts or helps sites without buttons is unclear.
What is clear is that (as always), the very best way to get your site upranked is to provide good content, with a good title & snippet.
Again a non -verifiable, non falsifiable claim, with circular logic. If it "works" for me, by definition it works for me. But the whole question is to determine what works for me. Short term, long term, about different parameters of health, etc.
Your fundamental problem here is that you're looking for something that doesn't yet exist. You'd like to do what's optimal, but we simply do not yet know that, so you have to settle for something sub-optimal, but proven over time to be reasonably good. Sorry, you were born a century or so too early.
This is very much a case of perfect being the enemy of good... and people seeking perfect optimality based on incomplete theories do radical things that aren't only imperfect, but actually bad.
It is. Extraordinarily so... though less than it was a few years ago, sadly. Mostly because of leaks.
Some examples: There are weekly whole-company meetings in which anyone can question the CEOs, and people can and do ask hard questions -- and get answers. There are regular meetings do discuss in depth various legal issues that Google finds itself in, and where employees can again question the attorneys. The various crucial sensitive subteams -- like the privacy teams -- regularly hold office hours in which anyone can talk to them about the privacy-related decisions and constraints on any product. Nearly all design documents, security and privacy analyses, etc. are openly accessible to any Googler, and findable with the internal search engine. The source code for the entire product base lives in a single globally-accessible and searchable code repository. I can go look at exactly how any Google product works (if you're not a software engineer, or haven't worked for a large company, you may not know how rare this is).
Yes, the company is extremely transparent to employees about its decisions on all sorts of product, business, customer and legal issues. And, actually, most decisions are made from the bottom up, anyway. You can't hide decisions from the people making them.
One of the consequences of this internal transparency is that -- unlike other large publicly-traded companies -- all Google employees are considered insiders by the SEC. When I worked for IBM I could trade IBM stock at will, because the assumption was that non-managerial employees didn't have enough inside knowledge to need restriction. At Google, I'm subject to the same SEC restrictions that the C suite is, because of the extreme amount of information available to me.
I stand corrected. Though I'm quite certain I saw a talk years ago in which he said he did not think that P=NP. That would have been long before 2014, so maybe he changed his mind.
From that perspective, what religion is is the distillation of millenia of human experience, retaining what works well for people and discarding what doesn't.
When you ignore the entire history of religion, I suppose this could look true. In the real world, where people are still persecuted and killed for "crimes" like blasphemy and "sins" like unapproved sexual behavior, your argument falls flat.
I never claimed that *all* of what's in religion is correct. In fact I specifically said it wasn't.
Or demonstrates that you deceive yourself about the nature of the thing you believe in, namely your own ability to rationally work out the best way to live.
The problem with 'streaming' anything, is that it COSTS, COSTS, COSTS. You're paying for the connection.
The GP's point is that this will change, or at least that prices will drop to where it's negligible.
You're paying for the streaming service -- or you're taking an inferior streaming product for free.
The free services are superior to broadcast radio. The paid services are dramatically better than broadcast radio. I long swore I would never pay a subscription for music, until I tried it. Having access to basically all music published is so much better I can't see ever going back. If I were so poor I had to skip one or two meals per month to pay for my subscription music service, it would be worth it.
Maybe in a very academic sense, but practically speaking P != NP is overwhelmingly assumed to be the case, even if not proven. A valid proof of that being the case would be some buzz in the academics of math, but the rest of the world would shrug and move on.
A proof of P=NP, however, would be earthshaking well outside of academia. A constructive proof of P=NP, meaning a proof that contains a recipe for converting an NP problem into a P problem, could well be the single most important mathematical proof of all time, in terms of what it would enable people to do.
Actually, it's the very momentous impact of such a proof that makes everyone assume that P != NP. It's an intuition that the universe just isn't that nice, that there just have to be plenty of incredibly hard problems. Of course, there are problems that are harder than anything in NP, the NEXPTIME problems and, of course, the undecidable problems, so even if N = NP we'll still know we can't solve everything.
Human beings and rocks are basically the same thing, from a universal context.
Completely wrong. Humans (or, more generally "people", by which I mean creatures capable of the open-ended creation of knowledge through abstract reasoning and the conjecture and criticism of explanations) are the most significant objects in the universe, and I say that from a rational and literal perspective, not a parochial anthropocentric one.
Think about it: People are capable of changing the universe about them in any and every way not completely denied by the laws of physics, because people are capable of discovering and exploiting the laws of physics to order their universe in the way they like.
Consider the fact that physicists have created machines that cool small regions of space to 0.006 Kelvin. This is far below the cosmic microwave background temperature, which is almost certainly the lowest temperature reachable by any object in the universe -- in the absence of careful and clever manipulation by people who understand physics.
Consider SETI. Whether or not SETI ever hears anything, the fact is that it's perfectly conceivable that we could see and identify intelligent life at a distance of hundreds of light years, because people can produce patterns of electromagnetic radiation that cannot without people. Very few sub-stellar objects can be detected at that range, but people (potentially) can.
Given enough time, humanity may become capable demolishing solar systems to construct Dyson spheres to capture the entire energy output of suns and turn it to whatever purpose we like. Physics gives no reason that we may not ultimately be able to order galaxies according to our will. The only constraints are the laws of physics and the duration of the universe. Well, and perhaps human intellect... but we can augment and probably increase that by application of physics to ourselves and/or our tools as well.
Human beings -- and other sorts of people -- are about the furthest thing possible from rocks, from a universal context.
Let's ignore any question about the existence or non-existence of a god or god and assume a pure atheistic standpoint. From that perspective, what religion is is the distillation of millenia of human experience, retaining what works well for people and discarding what doesn't. Of course, social institutions change, so some of what has been learned over all that time and codified in religious teachings is no longer true. But human nature doesn't change (on less than evolutionary timescales, barring genetic engineering), so some of what has been learned and codified is and will remain true for a very, very long time. And many of these truths are non-obvious and not easily reconstructed from purely rational analysis.
Note that it's perfectly possible, for both people and institutions, to be both wise and dumb. Intelligence is (roughly) the ability to reason through complex issues and arrive at logical conclusions. Wisdom is often just knowing the correct conclusion from experience... even if it's not the logical one. When intelligence and wisdom arrive at different conclusions it's not because the logic is bad, but because it applies the wrong weight to different tradeoffs, or ignores subtle but important issues entirely.
I know I'm going to get some response of the form "But religion is bad because people murder each other in the name of religion, and that can't be wise!". I have several responses to that, but perhaps the strongest one is to point out that non-religious ideologies are the real mass murders, far, far outstripping religion.
In my limited experience, googlers tend to have an imaginatively high opinion of their employer. I suppose that must be mandatory.
Not mandatory, but the company is very open internally and people take questions of user good and user privacy very seriously. Googlers have a high opinion because we see what really goes on.
The rest of us have come to realize Google is creepy, snoopy, intrusive, monopolistic, progressive, financialist, and generally not to be trusted.
And 95% of that opinion arises from erroneous assumptions about what Google does, and why, rather than from reality.
I know lots of people who were hired in their 50s and 60s. I was 42 when Google hired me, and 45 when my current team within Google "hired" me. A good friend of mine who is 55 just got hired, twice. He got fed up with his job, so he got another one. Didn't like it either, so he jumped ship after six months there to another place. He likes the new one, so I imagine he'll stay there for a few years.
While it might be highest in terms of raw numbers, if you take into effect the cost of living in places where tech jobs tend to be located, the actual standard of living afforded by that wage might be lower than for someone working in a career that pay less but is located in a cheaper area.
Valid point, unless you can swing a telecommuting job, and can work well that way. Then you can live cheap while making good money.
The only place I've found fifty and over IT workers are in family run companies or the like.
Most of my career has been at IBM and now Google, and there were/are plenty of over-50s software engineers in both. They're a smaller percentage at Google, but that's mostly because the bulk of new hires are straight out of school, and because the company just hasn't been around that long. But there are older guys -- I work with one engineer who's in his 70s -- and I fully expect to stay at Google until I retire at 60 or so. Unless I decide to quit and start a company which is a distinct possibility now that my kids are moving out and I can afford to take a little more risk.
Nah. I see this complaint all the time, but in all my 30 years in the industry I've never actually seen it, at least for software engineers. If you can solve hard problems and write good code, you can work, and get paid well for it.
In the meantime the best thing most of us can do is to maintain a balanced diet
But "balanced diet" is undefined "in the meantime"
Just follow inherited cultural wisdom rather than doing anything radical. People have been eating for a rather long time; just stick with the tried and true while the science settles down.
My friend, you might want to hop over to this Slashdot summary on Uber's latest efforts to "secure your privacy" (there's never a sarcasm emoji around when you need one).
Meh. You may (probably do) feel differently about it, but I don't care so much about location tracking. I intentionally have Google's location tracking turned on, and even regularly go into Google Maps to check my location timeline and fill in any locations it's unsure about. I find the location timeline to be quite useful on a regular basis.
Listening in my home is different. To me, at least.
The lure of all that lovely, profitable private information is just too strong.
No, it's really not. Why? Because if the devices started listening to everything, not just hotword-prefixed commands, it would be found out. I think the makers of the current devices all have enough integrity (and oversight) that they'd tell us rather than wait for it to be discovered. But it would be discovered. And it would drive users away in droves. It would drive me away... and I already run almost everything I do through Google's servers. But listening in on conversations in my home? That's way, way over the line.
Actually, on second thought, I think that in all-party consent states it would probably be illegal for device makers to listen in on everything without getting permission. Further, they'd have to be sure they got permission from everyone who happened to come into the house. The laws in question are focused on telephone conversations, but courts have pretty consistently extended to all recording contexts.
False. Verizon FIOS was doing the same thing first and better and ultimately suffered the same fate in stalled rollout.
No, they weren't. FiOS was still installing BPONs, which weren't capable of gigabit download speeds, and couldn't get anywhere close to gigabit uploads. Does FiOS offer symmetric gigabit connections anywhere, even today? Not as far as I can tell.
Firstly, not particularly prone is still miles away from being good enough for a transit system that will be paralyzed by vacuum failure.
That was understatement, just in case you didn't recognize it.
Secondly, we don't have vacuum tubes of the size and scope proposed by Hyperloop & al in existence, anywhere, let alone above ground or with actual high speed traffic going through them on an hourly basis, so there is in fact no way of knowing the exact failure rate of such tubes. I remind everyone that the test track built by Hyperloop for their pod-design competition earlier this year was less than a mile long and still managed to be the 2nd largest vacuum chamber in existence after NASA's.
Meh. The reason there aren't larger vacuum chambers isn't because vacuum chambers are tricky or don't scale well, it's just because generally there's no need for large vacuum chambers.
Secondly, even if it is true that the failure rate of such tubes is almost nil, that does not account for the fact that it's still possible for anyone with malicious intent to disable the system at any times with ease. As long as it's above ground it won't take much thinking from someone to find a way to puncture the tube, so security-wise it's a nightmare.
It's even easier to attack automobiles on a highway. Talk about a security nightmare... except it turns out not to be that much of a problem.
As for simple punctures, I don't think they'd do much to a hyperloop track. Much like an airplane (though in the opposite direction) there will always be some amount of leakage, so you'll need regular pumps keeping the pressure down. Overengineer pumping capacity a small amount and a few punctures won't have much impact -- and such punctures won't be easy. Few rifle rounds will penetrate 1" of steel, even with armor-piercing bullets. For really big tears (which would probably require significant quantities of explosives), the tube could have pressure doors every few miles.
Some of the stuff Hyperloop has currently no answers or numbers for:
Who is "Hyperloop"?
In any case, sure, there are lots of details to work out. And it's even possible that some of them will make it infeasible, or at least more expensive than air travel. The only way to really find out is to forge ahead and try to solve the problems and work out the details. I, for one, am very glad that there are people who are wiling to put their time and resources into working on them. If everyone were like you we'd never accomplish anything new.
Slashdot Mirror
Have consumers continue to consume video content on the screen even while scrolling and consuming other material... In other words, borrow a leaf from Facebook.
Ugh, please not that leaf. Especially not on mobile. Well, allowing video to keep playing (and stay visible) is fine (the new Oreo PiP mode might be great), but please, please do not autoplay video.
I dunno. By my reading, A and B are saying precisely the same thing.
If you squint hard enough. The main difference is that B claims that not adding the buttons will hurt traffic, but the correct interpretation of A is that adding the buttons might help or hurt traffic, and that the effect of not adding them when everyone else does is unpredictable.
Look at this from the perspective of a search engine trying to uprank the best content. Without the buttons, the only signal you have is whether or not users click the link to go to the page based on the title and snippet. That's a useful signal, but it's really a signal about how interested people are in the title and snippet. It doesn't say much about the content. You can try to infer more about the content quality based on whether or not people come back to the search page and click other links after looking at it, but that inference is weak for many reasons.
If there's a +1 button on the bottom of the page, then you're getting a real content quality signal. Not everyone who likes the content will click, but no one who hates it will click.
So, sites with buttons wouldn't get any sort of automatic boost -- or demotion. They'd just provide more information for Google to uprank or downrank their content based on user feedback. Sites without the button simply don't provide any signal other than the pre-existing one, so nothing can be inferred about user satisfaction of the content, only of the title & snippet.
This means that sites with buttons that get lots of +1s may rise above those without buttons. But it also means that sites with buttons that get few +1s may fall below those without buttons. Whether this hurts or helps sites without buttons is unclear.
What is clear is that (as always), the very best way to get your site upranked is to provide good content, with a good title & snippet.
Again a non -verifiable, non falsifiable claim, with circular logic. If it "works" for me, by definition it works for me. But the whole question is to determine what works for me. Short term, long term, about different parameters of health, etc.
Your fundamental problem here is that you're looking for something that doesn't yet exist. You'd like to do what's optimal, but we simply do not yet know that, so you have to settle for something sub-optimal, but proven over time to be reasonably good. Sorry, you were born a century or so too early.
This is very much a case of perfect being the enemy of good... and people seeking perfect optimality based on incomplete theories do radical things that aren't only imperfect, but actually bad.
Hahahaha - "very open internally" - riiiiiiight.
It is. Extraordinarily so... though less than it was a few years ago, sadly. Mostly because of leaks.
Some examples: There are weekly whole-company meetings in which anyone can question the CEOs, and people can and do ask hard questions -- and get answers. There are regular meetings do discuss in depth various legal issues that Google finds itself in, and where employees can again question the attorneys. The various crucial sensitive subteams -- like the privacy teams -- regularly hold office hours in which anyone can talk to them about the privacy-related decisions and constraints on any product. Nearly all design documents, security and privacy analyses, etc. are openly accessible to any Googler, and findable with the internal search engine. The source code for the entire product base lives in a single globally-accessible and searchable code repository. I can go look at exactly how any Google product works (if you're not a software engineer, or haven't worked for a large company, you may not know how rare this is).
Yes, the company is extremely transparent to employees about its decisions on all sorts of product, business, customer and legal issues. And, actually, most decisions are made from the bottom up, anyway. You can't hide decisions from the people making them.
One of the consequences of this internal transparency is that -- unlike other large publicly-traded companies -- all Google employees are considered insiders by the SEC. When I worked for IBM I could trade IBM stock at will, because the assumption was that non-managerial employees didn't have enough inside knowledge to need restriction. At Google, I'm subject to the same SEC restrictions that the C suite is, because of the extreme amount of information available to me.
I stand corrected. Though I'm quite certain I saw a talk years ago in which he said he did not think that P=NP. That would have been long before 2014, so maybe he changed his mind.
From that perspective, what religion is is the distillation of millenia of human experience, retaining what works well for people and discarding what doesn't.
When you ignore the entire history of religion, I suppose this could look true. In the real world, where people are still persecuted and killed for "crimes" like blasphemy and "sins" like unapproved sexual behavior, your argument falls flat.
I never claimed that *all* of what's in religion is correct. In fact I specifically said it wasn't.
Just strengthens my point.
Or demonstrates that you deceive yourself about the nature of the thing you believe in, namely your own ability to rationally work out the best way to live.
The problem with 'streaming' anything, is that it COSTS, COSTS, COSTS. You're paying for the connection.
The GP's point is that this will change, or at least that prices will drop to where it's negligible.
You're paying for the streaming service -- or you're taking an inferior streaming product for free.
The free services are superior to broadcast radio. The paid services are dramatically better than broadcast radio. I long swore I would never pay a subscription for music, until I tried it. Having access to basically all music published is so much better I can't see ever going back. If I were so poor I had to skip one or two meals per month to pay for my subscription music service, it would be worth it.
Maybe in a very academic sense, but practically speaking P != NP is overwhelmingly assumed to be the case, even if not proven. A valid proof of that being the case would be some buzz in the academics of math, but the rest of the world would shrug and move on.
A proof of P=NP, however, would be earthshaking well outside of academia. A constructive proof of P=NP, meaning a proof that contains a recipe for converting an NP problem into a P problem, could well be the single most important mathematical proof of all time, in terms of what it would enable people to do.
Actually, it's the very momentous impact of such a proof that makes everyone assume that P != NP. It's an intuition that the universe just isn't that nice, that there just have to be plenty of incredibly hard problems. Of course, there are problems that are harder than anything in NP, the NEXPTIME problems and, of course, the undecidable problems, so even if N = NP we'll still know we can't solve everything.
Human beings and rocks are basically the same thing, from a universal context.
Completely wrong. Humans (or, more generally "people", by which I mean creatures capable of the open-ended creation of knowledge through abstract reasoning and the conjecture and criticism of explanations) are the most significant objects in the universe, and I say that from a rational and literal perspective, not a parochial anthropocentric one.
Think about it: People are capable of changing the universe about them in any and every way not completely denied by the laws of physics, because people are capable of discovering and exploiting the laws of physics to order their universe in the way they like.
Consider the fact that physicists have created machines that cool small regions of space to 0.006 Kelvin. This is far below the cosmic microwave background temperature, which is almost certainly the lowest temperature reachable by any object in the universe -- in the absence of careful and clever manipulation by people who understand physics.
Consider SETI. Whether or not SETI ever hears anything, the fact is that it's perfectly conceivable that we could see and identify intelligent life at a distance of hundreds of light years, because people can produce patterns of electromagnetic radiation that cannot without people. Very few sub-stellar objects can be detected at that range, but people (potentially) can.
Given enough time, humanity may become capable demolishing solar systems to construct Dyson spheres to capture the entire energy output of suns and turn it to whatever purpose we like. Physics gives no reason that we may not ultimately be able to order galaxies according to our will. The only constraints are the laws of physics and the duration of the universe. Well, and perhaps human intellect... but we can augment and probably increase that by application of physics to ourselves and/or our tools as well.
Human beings -- and other sorts of people -- are about the furthest thing possible from rocks, from a universal context.
Religion is dumb.
Religion is wise.
Let's ignore any question about the existence or non-existence of a god or god and assume a pure atheistic standpoint. From that perspective, what religion is is the distillation of millenia of human experience, retaining what works well for people and discarding what doesn't. Of course, social institutions change, so some of what has been learned over all that time and codified in religious teachings is no longer true. But human nature doesn't change (on less than evolutionary timescales, barring genetic engineering), so some of what has been learned and codified is and will remain true for a very, very long time. And many of these truths are non-obvious and not easily reconstructed from purely rational analysis.
Note that it's perfectly possible, for both people and institutions, to be both wise and dumb. Intelligence is (roughly) the ability to reason through complex issues and arrive at logical conclusions. Wisdom is often just knowing the correct conclusion from experience... even if it's not the logical one. When intelligence and wisdom arrive at different conclusions it's not because the logic is bad, but because it applies the wrong weight to different tradeoffs, or ignores subtle but important issues entirely.
I know I'm going to get some response of the form "But religion is bad because people murder each other in the name of religion, and that can't be wise!". I have several responses to that, but perhaps the strongest one is to point out that non-religious ideologies are the real mass murders, far, far outstripping religion.
In my limited experience, googlers tend to have an imaginatively high opinion of their employer. I suppose that must be mandatory.
Not mandatory, but the company is very open internally and people take questions of user good and user privacy very seriously. Googlers have a high opinion because we see what really goes on.
The rest of us have come to realize Google is creepy, snoopy, intrusive, monopolistic, progressive, financialist, and generally not to be trusted.
And 95% of that opinion arises from erroneous assumptions about what Google does, and why, rather than from reality.
Which culture's wisdom?
Pick one you think works for you.
But can you get hired for it?
I know lots of people who were hired in their 50s and 60s. I was 42 when Google hired me, and 45 when my current team within Google "hired" me. A good friend of mine who is 55 just got hired, twice. He got fed up with his job, so he got another one. Didn't like it either, so he jumped ship after six months there to another place. He likes the new one, so I imagine he'll stay there for a few years.
When I travel, I like to spend a few minutes at the end of each day writing a summary of what we did and where we went.
Heh. I'm way too disorganized and inconsistent to do that. Luckily, most of my interesting travel is with my wife, and she's good about it.
I like having the location history just for day-to-day stuff.
While it might be highest in terms of raw numbers, if you take into effect the cost of living in places where tech jobs tend to be located, the actual standard of living afforded by that wage might be lower than for someone working in a career that pay less but is located in a cheaper area.
Valid point, unless you can swing a telecommuting job, and can work well that way. Then you can live cheap while making good money.
The only place I've found fifty and over IT workers are in family run companies or the like.
Most of my career has been at IBM and now Google, and there were/are plenty of over-50s software engineers in both. They're a smaller percentage at Google, but that's mostly because the bulk of new hires are straight out of school, and because the company just hasn't been around that long. But there are older guys -- I work with one engineer who's in his 70s -- and I fully expect to stay at Google until I retire at 60 or so. Unless I decide to quit and start a company which is a distinct possibility now that my kids are moving out and I can afford to take a little more risk.
At least until you turn 50.
I'm 48, so I guess I'd better be worried?
Nah. I see this complaint all the time, but in all my 30 years in the industry I've never actually seen it, at least for software engineers. If you can solve hard problems and write good code, you can work, and get paid well for it.
You think Google has integrity? Wow.
Quite a lot of it, actually. And I have a good vantage point from which to see it, since I work for Google.
In the meantime the best thing most of us can do is to maintain a balanced diet
But "balanced diet" is undefined "in the meantime"
Just follow inherited cultural wisdom rather than doing anything radical. People have been eating for a rather long time; just stick with the tried and true while the science settles down.
Really, it's not that hard.
My friend, you might want to hop over to this Slashdot summary on Uber's latest efforts to "secure your privacy" (there's never a sarcasm emoji around when you need one).
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/08/30/220211/uber-says-itll-stop-tracking-riders-after-theyre-dropped-off
Meh. You may (probably do) feel differently about it, but I don't care so much about location tracking. I intentionally have Google's location tracking turned on, and even regularly go into Google Maps to check my location timeline and fill in any locations it's unsure about. I find the location timeline to be quite useful on a regular basis.
Listening in my home is different. To me, at least.
The lure of all that lovely, profitable private information is just too strong.
No, it's really not. Why? Because if the devices started listening to everything, not just hotword-prefixed commands, it would be found out. I think the makers of the current devices all have enough integrity (and oversight) that they'd tell us rather than wait for it to be discovered. But it would be discovered. And it would drive users away in droves. It would drive me away... and I already run almost everything I do through Google's servers. But listening in on conversations in my home? That's way, way over the line.
Actually, on second thought, I think that in all-party consent states it would probably be illegal for device makers to listen in on everything without getting permission. Further, they'd have to be sure they got permission from everyone who happened to come into the house. The laws in question are focused on telephone conversations, but courts have pretty consistently extended to all recording contexts.
False. Verizon FIOS was doing the same thing first and better and ultimately suffered the same fate in stalled rollout.
No, they weren't. FiOS was still installing BPONs, which weren't capable of gigabit download speeds, and couldn't get anywhere close to gigabit uploads. Does FiOS offer symmetric gigabit connections anywhere, even today? Not as far as I can tell.
Hells to the yeah. I could have watched the eclipse, caught the train east for an hour, and then watched it again!
So... there's a reason to ride it once every decade or two.
Firstly, not particularly prone is still miles away from being good enough for a transit system that will be paralyzed by vacuum failure.
That was understatement, just in case you didn't recognize it.
Secondly, we don't have vacuum tubes of the size and scope proposed by Hyperloop & al in existence, anywhere, let alone above ground or with actual high speed traffic going through them on an hourly basis, so there is in fact no way of knowing the exact failure rate of such tubes. I remind everyone that the test track built by Hyperloop for their pod-design competition earlier this year was less than a mile long and still managed to be the 2nd largest vacuum chamber in existence after NASA's.
Meh. The reason there aren't larger vacuum chambers isn't because vacuum chambers are tricky or don't scale well, it's just because generally there's no need for large vacuum chambers.
Secondly, even if it is true that the failure rate of such tubes is almost nil, that does not account for the fact that it's still possible for anyone with malicious intent to disable the system at any times with ease. As long as it's above ground it won't take much thinking from someone to find a way to puncture the tube, so security-wise it's a nightmare.
It's even easier to attack automobiles on a highway. Talk about a security nightmare... except it turns out not to be that much of a problem.
As for simple punctures, I don't think they'd do much to a hyperloop track. Much like an airplane (though in the opposite direction) there will always be some amount of leakage, so you'll need regular pumps keeping the pressure down. Overengineer pumping capacity a small amount and a few punctures won't have much impact -- and such punctures won't be easy. Few rifle rounds will penetrate 1" of steel, even with armor-piercing bullets. For really big tears (which would probably require significant quantities of explosives), the tube could have pressure doors every few miles.
Some of the stuff Hyperloop has currently no answers or numbers for:
Who is "Hyperloop"?
In any case, sure, there are lots of details to work out. And it's even possible that some of them will make it infeasible, or at least more expensive than air travel. The only way to really find out is to forge ahead and try to solve the problems and work out the details. I, for one, am very glad that there are people who are wiling to put their time and resources into working on them. If everyone were like you we'd never accomplish anything new.