Which is precisely why the GP suggested restricting website character sets by TLD. If you want to have télétoon as your website address, make it télétoon.fr (or télétoon.com.fr), not télétoon.com, as.com is (in practice) a US-centric TLD. This isn't hard and it isn't discriminatory, but the registrars a) want to blackmail website owners into registering more addresses, b) don't give two shits about security, and to top it off c) like virtue-signaling about how open and accepting they are to other cultures (the latter is actually Mozilla's explicit explanation for not displaying punycode for anything ever, because apparently peoples feelings are more important to them than their users security. I don't give a shit if people want their website under.com TLD, what people want is completely and totally irrelevant: I want a billion dollars, doesn't mean Mozilla should be required to give it to me.)
How, exactly, does the NRA and gun companies benefit from causing a bunch of anti-gun sentiment? Because that's the only NRA/gun company related effect these mass shootings have. Unless you're suggesting that the ammo/gun sales to the shooters is actually a significant profit for companies that sell literally millions of guns per year. Also, casting "the NRA donated to an air-rifle club for students" into "the NRA funded rifle training for a mass shooter" is just downright deceptive, at best.
The new season of Westworld. Altered Carbon. New season of The Expanse. Ready Player One. Annihilation. And the new Pacific Rim movie, though that's more action than sci-fi. Honestly I think we're in a golden age of sci-fi television/movies right now, which is awesome.
This whole comment is more or less complete garbage, because most of the background radiation humans et al are exposed to doesn't come from cosmic radiation: most of that is shielded by the air, near sea level the only thing that remains is muons, and that has no trouble penetrating a few dozen feet of, well, just about anything. Most background radiation comes from terrestrial sources, either from thorium/uranium in soil and rock or from radon, which is produced when uranium/thorium decays. In fact, I'd suspect creatures like mole rats that live underground are exposed to more radioactive background from radon (it's a huge, huge problem in mines and basements). The only radiation they're not going to be exposed to at about the same (or higher) level than humans is ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which contributes to skin cancer, but not most sources of human mortality.
Couple of things. First, the idea of the warrior-hero as a model citizen wasn't invented by the Nazi's, it's literally as old as human civilization, both in myth (Hercules, Achilles, King Arthur, Luke Skywalker) and history (Julius Caeser, King Leonidas I, Edward the Black, George Washington). Physical and martial prowess has always been celebrated by humans. Secondly, most* superheroes are portrayed as deeply flawed individuals who constantly wrestle with both their own personal demons and their role within society. Superhumans in these stories who seek to replace or augment the rest of normal humanity are the bad guys, like Magneto or Syndrome (even though in for e.g. Magneto's case, mutants actually are physically and mentally superior to normal humans). "Brainwashed monstrosities" who have lost their humanity are the villians in superhero stories, not the heroes, and the heroes frequently have to fight to retain their connection to humanity in spite of their actual and very real mental/physical superiority. Heroes who lose their humanity? They become the bad guys, who at best need to be saved and at worst destroyed. Superhero stories aren't about how master race humans need to replace humanity, they're about how they need to protect it, in some cases even from themselves.
*There are exceptions, like Superman, who is (usually) incredibly boring for that exact reason, and Captain America, who was just invented to help fight the Nazi's.
IMDB rating is based on user reviews, not critics. Bright got terrible critic reviews, but the user reviews are pretty good. You can see both if you go to Metacritic: 2.9/10 critic reviews, 7.3/10 user reviews. I'd personally give it around 7/10 as well.
Or maybe, you need to take your head out of your ass and acknowledge that climate change is a real thing, threatening the health and stability of the human civilization on this planet, like 99% of the scientists believe.
Sure, and there's going to be major conflict over resources and land availability over the next century, but human civilization will survive it (assuming no one starts a nuclear war). Global thermonuclear war indicates the literal end of the world for human civilization, possibly for humanity period, which is the point of the "Doomsday" clock. The latter is doomsday, the end of the world, the probable extinction of humanity. The former is a period of strife which will reshape the global political and economic scene, but at the end of the day probably be no worse than past such events which humanity has endured (like WWII). In a word, climate change is not doomsday, not by a long shot.
Gawker is a trash rag but none of their writers made that woman write a racist joke through an account tied to her real name. She deserved any consequences she happened to attract.
That's right, anytime anyone makes a single mistake, they definitely deserve to have their lives ruined. Second chances? Benefit of the doubt? Nah, signaling your virtue to the world by calling out a stupid tweet is true justice!/s
I'm not defending racism (or that tweet, which I don't think is racist but is certainly borderline), but the idea that we can (and should) ruin someone's life over a single stupid and harmless thing they said or did is really, really stupid, and really, really shortsighted (unless you're going to claim that you've literally never said or done a single stupid thing, in which case I don't believe you).
From the picture in TFA, it looks like this means roping off roughly half of the maybe 40 foot wide staircase, which itself is probably not so popular in the snow and ice.
Are you kidding, or have you just never lived in a cold area before? You still have to use stairways in snow and cold, if the ice is actually a problem you just use the railings as well. Those are typically installed at the edges of the staircase, but with the roped off area you can't use half the railings on those stairs now (in fact that stairway is poorly design, it's wide enough that there should be a railing in the middle as well, but that's probably a separate issue).
From the picture they've also completely blocked off an entire staircase on the other side, which, granted, is a pretty useless staircase unless you're admiring the building, but still demonstrates that the building is *not* well or practically designed (ironically, the fact they have to close that staircase should tell you the building isn't even well-designed to look good, since you'd need that staircase to admire the building properly, and it's entirely roped off). Roping off the area means the snow probably won't actually *kill* anyone, but it's clearly an unintended band-aid solution that only solves the symptoms, not the underlying problem.
The problem is it's being framed as a partisan issue, because the Democrats desperately want to find something or someone to blame for Trump winning besides themselves. Russian interference in US elections is a problem, and that's something everyone should agree on, red or blue. It should be looked into, and it should be stopped.
Did it have anything to do with Hillary losing the election? Almost certainly not. 80,000 posts sounds like a lot, but over a two year period on a site like Facebook? It's tiny. Facebook probably had well over 80 billion posts over that timeframe (and it may be even closer to a trillion, if Facebook's daily active users are to be believed), many of them political from both sides. The whole thing is being cast as a red herring to distract from the real reason Hillary lost, which was Hillary.
No, it really makes no sense. He called the ruling party in China "progressive", for example. I didn't realize murdering a bunch of college students was "progress", but maybe I'm just a bit backwards.
It has nothing to do with being "progressive" or not (pollution control isn't even a "progressive" concept), it's because large parts of China are rapidly becoming an unlivable wasteland thanks to the pollution. We experienced many of the same issues in the US a long time ago, thats why the EPA was founded in the first place.
There's also the more nefarious reason, which is global domination of clean energy technologies. They can afford to dump money into the technology and sell them at below-market cost in order to potential competitors out of business, leaving Chinese manufacturing in a monopoly position later on. It's already happened with solar panel manufacturing, and China probably wants to expand that to other industries.
As an example, today I looked at the Higgs boson [wikipedia.org] article and the talk about the rest mass in GeV/c^2. This is a bull shit unit.
No, it's not, not even a little bit. It is, in fact, the standard unit in the field (all particle physics and related fields, like particle astrophysics or cosmology). If I read a scientific paper in those areas that didn't use eV or eV/c^2 for particle masses I'd be not only a bit confused, but actually question the competency of the authors. "Not SI" is the bullshit: SI as a universal standard is all fine and good, but it's not natural to a lot of fields, and those fields can (and should) use whatever system of units is natural to them (preferably metric, but even that is not necessary). Also, the units on the info box on the top right do link to an explanation page, so you know, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Because Apple is so far from a monopoly in the desktop field (for that matter they're not close to a monopoly in any area), it'd be utterly absurd to even hint at anti-trust. Linux has almost as big an install base (roughly half to 2/3rds, depends on which site I look at) on the desktop as OS X.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with dark matter or dark energy, and does nothing whatsoever to disprove the existence of either of those things. We knew this stuff existence, our models said it was in the intragalactic expanse, it's just it's hard to directly see because it's extragalactic: it's not inside stars, so it mostly doesn't emit light, and when it does it's not very bright.
In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that this is just more (indirect) evidence for the existence of dark matter: it helps confirm our models/simulations of galaxy formation, and those models don't work without dark matter, and considerable amounts of it (far more of it than the "missing" baryonic matter they found, in fact).
It's purely an issue of cost. To produce rotational artificial gravity, you need a fairly large lever arm (otherwise the gravitational gradient is rather large, which means your head feels less gravity than your feet and... well, I'm not sure what the effects of that would be, but I can't imagine it would feel pleasant), which means you need a ship far large than you can launch into space in one go. You could build/assemble it in space, but that's difficult and expensive. Finally, you can't add something like that to the ISS: if it breaks or goes wrong, you'd basically destroy the ISS, which would be very very bad (the ISS costs a few tens of billion USD, and the potential debris cause by an accident could cost tens of billions more).
Democracy needs an abort mechanism. If it somehow comes down to two unpopular candidates, disqualify both and start over.
It does, it's called "voting third party." Americans, however, believe the constant lie (perpetuated by both parties, who are terrified they will lose their duopoly) that voting 3rd party is "letting the other guy win" and "throwing away your vote", which is only true because people keep believing it to be true.
People killed, or people killed per capita? People often like to cite the former, as if the US isn't the 3rd most populous country in the world and compare it to, say, France, which has 1/5th the number of people. The US isn't at the top for the latter, countries like Finland and Norway actually lead, and that's even if you ignore terrorist attacks. Mind you, the US definitely does have a problem with gun violence and mass shootings, and a fairly bad one, but not as bad as anti-gun activists would have you believe.
Also, gun control doesn't do much to stop deliberate pre-meditated attacks, which this one sounds like to me (either that or he really, really hated Kei$ha).
If hundreds of professional astrophysicists are devoting their careers to studying a problem, you can be sure that nothing you come up with off the top of your head, without knowing anything about the subject, is going to have any merit.
If hundreds of professional astrophysicists are devoting their careers to studying a problem, you can be sure that nothing you come up with off the top of your head, without knowing anything about the subject, is going to dissuade them from following the money.
Yeah, cause if I'm a well educated, intelligent person with a large range of technical skills in both software and hardware looking to make lots of money, I'm definitely going to go into astrophysics.
Only got through about half the video, but it was pretty much entirely sensationalistic bullcrap. Take the idea that the car is going to tear through the vacuum chamber in case of failure. Why would it? The car is traveling forwards. Even if it got hit with the strongest pressure wave imaginable, it's going to be entirely from the front: none of that is going to translate into sideways motion that would result in significant stress on the tubing from the car. It's literally high school physics. Perhaps worst of all is this idea that a 1 atmosphere pressure wave will automatically "kill everyone in the car". Again, why would it? The car has significant forward momentum, and the momentum imparted by the pressure wave will be relatively tiny compared to that. People inside the car would feel a jolt, sure, but not a blast wave. We know the car can withstand 1 atmosphere of pressure, because it's a pressurized vehicle inside a vacuum: 1 atmosphere of stress is it's normal operating condition. And that's worst case scenario: in practice any holes will be much smaller than the diameter of the tube, so the inrush of air will be gentle breeze, not a pressure wave.
As for people suffocating in the tubes after a failure, that's even dumber. Failure almost always means loss of vacuum, and in cases where it doesn't the system can be repressurized while the emergency is dealt with. The only way people would suffocate is a failure in the vehicle itself resulting in that depressurizing, and there are ways around that. I will agree the idea of propelling the system with a turbine is a little silly, I can't see that being a practical final design.
If a hyperloop tube suffers a catastrophic breach, think of the pressure wave of air rushing in and what that will do to any near by vehicle.
A lot less than you'd think. The incoming air (in a worst-case breach) will be traveling at about the speed of sound, so with the train traveling at ~700mph, it'll be like a ~1400mph headwind for a half-second or so. Aerodynamic craft like airplanes can handle that easily, and I see little reason the hyperloop (which will also likely be aerodynamic, for technical reason) would be much different. It'll also be fairly heavy, which means a lot of inertia, so the brief pressure wave won't have much effect on the train's speed, either. After that, it'll just be traveling into a regular atmospheric headwind, which without propulsion will result in fairly rapid, but gradual, slowing to a halt, so no danger there. And that's a massive worst-case breach, where an entire section of vacuum tube completely vanishes. Sort of a large explosion, that'll never happen (and if you have access to a significant quantity of explosives there are much, much easier and more devastating targets to hit).
Yet it doesn't stop us from dropping dozens of probes and landers onto Mars and Venus...
All of which followed pretty strict decontamination procedures. Well, maybe not the Venus probes, but if Earth bacteria manages to survive on Venus, I say more power to them.
Yeah, because searching through 1 page of error messages because you forgot a ; or } is *so* much better, especially when those have no immediate visual significance at all. Besides, *all* (sane) languages already have significant whitespace: voidFunction() and void Function() are two completely different things. Whitespace is significant in human languages, and there's no reason it shouldn't be significant in computer languages.
It's not even that, there are fundamental limitations to cryptocurrency that I'm not sure *can* be eliminated. Blockchain size, for example. The design of cryptocurrency is such that to known the amount of coins in a wallet, you need to know the entire blockchain. Currently, the Bitcoin blockchain is 130 GB, for 250 million transactions (incidentally, that's about as many transactions as Visa handles per day). That's already fairly large for consumer miners (it means you can't realistically store the chain on your phone, which means using Bitcoin on mobile requires lightweight clients that undermine the point of Bitcoin in the first place), you increase the transaction rate and the total size will explode into the terabyte region, at which point you start needing large servers to even hold the blockchain and know how much money anyone has. The future of Bitcoin's blockchain requires resources individuals generally don't have access to, which means it will be controlled by large corporations. The only way around that is to use some technique that trims the blockchain, but I'm not sure if that's even technically possible. In any case, with the design of Bitcoin as it is now, it absolutely cannot be used by the common consumer, even if you fix all the problems with transaction rates and fees. It's a clever technical experiment, but it's intrinsically flawed as a currency.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is precisely why the GP suggested restricting website character sets by TLD. If you want to have télétoon as your website address, make it télétoon.fr (or télétoon.com.fr), not télétoon.com, as .com is (in practice) a US-centric TLD. This isn't hard and it isn't discriminatory, but the registrars a) want to blackmail website owners into registering more addresses, b) don't give two shits about security, and to top it off c) like virtue-signaling about how open and accepting they are to other cultures (the latter is actually Mozilla's explicit explanation for not displaying punycode for anything ever, because apparently peoples feelings are more important to them than their users security. I don't give a shit if people want their website under .com TLD, what people want is completely and totally irrelevant: I want a billion dollars, doesn't mean Mozilla should be required to give it to me.)
How, exactly, does the NRA and gun companies benefit from causing a bunch of anti-gun sentiment? Because that's the only NRA/gun company related effect these mass shootings have. Unless you're suggesting that the ammo/gun sales to the shooters is actually a significant profit for companies that sell literally millions of guns per year. Also, casting "the NRA donated to an air-rifle club for students" into "the NRA funded rifle training for a mass shooter" is just downright deceptive, at best.
The new season of Westworld. Altered Carbon. New season of The Expanse. Ready Player One. Annihilation. And the new Pacific Rim movie, though that's more action than sci-fi. Honestly I think we're in a golden age of sci-fi television/movies right now, which is awesome.
This whole comment is more or less complete garbage, because most of the background radiation humans et al are exposed to doesn't come from cosmic radiation: most of that is shielded by the air, near sea level the only thing that remains is muons, and that has no trouble penetrating a few dozen feet of, well, just about anything. Most background radiation comes from terrestrial sources, either from thorium/uranium in soil and rock or from radon, which is produced when uranium/thorium decays. In fact, I'd suspect creatures like mole rats that live underground are exposed to more radioactive background from radon (it's a huge, huge problem in mines and basements). The only radiation they're not going to be exposed to at about the same (or higher) level than humans is ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which contributes to skin cancer, but not most sources of human mortality.
Couple of things. First, the idea of the warrior-hero as a model citizen wasn't invented by the Nazi's, it's literally as old as human civilization, both in myth (Hercules, Achilles, King Arthur, Luke Skywalker) and history (Julius Caeser, King Leonidas I, Edward the Black, George Washington). Physical and martial prowess has always been celebrated by humans. Secondly, most* superheroes are portrayed as deeply flawed individuals who constantly wrestle with both their own personal demons and their role within society. Superhumans in these stories who seek to replace or augment the rest of normal humanity are the bad guys, like Magneto or Syndrome (even though in for e.g. Magneto's case, mutants actually are physically and mentally superior to normal humans). "Brainwashed monstrosities" who have lost their humanity are the villians in superhero stories, not the heroes, and the heroes frequently have to fight to retain their connection to humanity in spite of their actual and very real mental/physical superiority. Heroes who lose their humanity? They become the bad guys, who at best need to be saved and at worst destroyed. Superhero stories aren't about how master race humans need to replace humanity, they're about how they need to protect it, in some cases even from themselves.
*There are exceptions, like Superman, who is (usually) incredibly boring for that exact reason, and Captain America, who was just invented to help fight the Nazi's.
IMDB rating is based on user reviews, not critics. Bright got terrible critic reviews, but the user reviews are pretty good. You can see both if you go to Metacritic: 2.9/10 critic reviews, 7.3/10 user reviews. I'd personally give it around 7/10 as well.
Or maybe, you need to take your head out of your ass and acknowledge that climate change is a real thing, threatening the health and stability of the human civilization on this planet, like 99% of the scientists believe.
Sure, and there's going to be major conflict over resources and land availability over the next century, but human civilization will survive it (assuming no one starts a nuclear war). Global thermonuclear war indicates the literal end of the world for human civilization, possibly for humanity period, which is the point of the "Doomsday" clock. The latter is doomsday, the end of the world, the probable extinction of humanity. The former is a period of strife which will reshape the global political and economic scene, but at the end of the day probably be no worse than past such events which humanity has endured (like WWII). In a word, climate change is not doomsday, not by a long shot.
I rather strongly suspect you have no clue what you're talking about.
Gawker is a trash rag but none of their writers made that woman write a racist joke through an account tied to her real name. She deserved any consequences she happened to attract.
That's right, anytime anyone makes a single mistake, they definitely deserve to have their lives ruined. Second chances? Benefit of the doubt? Nah, signaling your virtue to the world by calling out a stupid tweet is true justice! /s
I'm not defending racism (or that tweet, which I don't think is racist but is certainly borderline), but the idea that we can (and should) ruin someone's life over a single stupid and harmless thing they said or did is really, really stupid, and really, really shortsighted (unless you're going to claim that you've literally never said or done a single stupid thing, in which case I don't believe you).
What for the same thing to happen: extend copyright, or never receive another penny of donations while we prop up those who campaign against you.
Oh no, Hollywood's going to drop all its support for Republicans! They're going to be quivering in their shoes over that, I'm sure!
From the picture in TFA, it looks like this means roping off roughly half of the maybe 40 foot wide staircase, which itself is probably not so popular in the snow and ice.
Are you kidding, or have you just never lived in a cold area before? You still have to use stairways in snow and cold, if the ice is actually a problem you just use the railings as well. Those are typically installed at the edges of the staircase, but with the roped off area you can't use half the railings on those stairs now (in fact that stairway is poorly design, it's wide enough that there should be a railing in the middle as well, but that's probably a separate issue).
From the picture they've also completely blocked off an entire staircase on the other side, which, granted, is a pretty useless staircase unless you're admiring the building, but still demonstrates that the building is *not* well or practically designed (ironically, the fact they have to close that staircase should tell you the building isn't even well-designed to look good, since you'd need that staircase to admire the building properly, and it's entirely roped off). Roping off the area means the snow probably won't actually *kill* anyone, but it's clearly an unintended band-aid solution that only solves the symptoms, not the underlying problem.
The problem is it's being framed as a partisan issue, because the Democrats desperately want to find something or someone to blame for Trump winning besides themselves. Russian interference in US elections is a problem, and that's something everyone should agree on, red or blue. It should be looked into, and it should be stopped.
Did it have anything to do with Hillary losing the election? Almost certainly not. 80,000 posts sounds like a lot, but over a two year period on a site like Facebook? It's tiny. Facebook probably had well over 80 billion posts over that timeframe (and it may be even closer to a trillion, if Facebook's daily active users are to be believed), many of them political from both sides. The whole thing is being cast as a red herring to distract from the real reason Hillary lost, which was Hillary.
No, it really makes no sense. He called the ruling party in China "progressive", for example. I didn't realize murdering a bunch of college students was "progress", but maybe I'm just a bit backwards.
It has nothing to do with being "progressive" or not (pollution control isn't even a "progressive" concept), it's because large parts of China are rapidly becoming an unlivable wasteland thanks to the pollution. We experienced many of the same issues in the US a long time ago, thats why the EPA was founded in the first place.
There's also the more nefarious reason, which is global domination of clean energy technologies. They can afford to dump money into the technology and sell them at below-market cost in order to potential competitors out of business, leaving Chinese manufacturing in a monopoly position later on. It's already happened with solar panel manufacturing, and China probably wants to expand that to other industries.
As an example, today I looked at the Higgs boson [wikipedia.org] article and the talk about the rest mass in GeV/c^2. This is a bull shit unit.
No, it's not, not even a little bit. It is, in fact, the standard unit in the field (all particle physics and related fields, like particle astrophysics or cosmology). If I read a scientific paper in those areas that didn't use eV or eV/c^2 for particle masses I'd be not only a bit confused, but actually question the competency of the authors. "Not SI" is the bullshit: SI as a universal standard is all fine and good, but it's not natural to a lot of fields, and those fields can (and should) use whatever system of units is natural to them (preferably metric, but even that is not necessary). Also, the units on the info box on the top right do link to an explanation page, so you know, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Because Apple is so far from a monopoly in the desktop field (for that matter they're not close to a monopoly in any area), it'd be utterly absurd to even hint at anti-trust. Linux has almost as big an install base (roughly half to 2/3rds, depends on which site I look at) on the desktop as OS X.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with dark matter or dark energy, and does nothing whatsoever to disprove the existence of either of those things. We knew this stuff existence, our models said it was in the intragalactic expanse, it's just it's hard to directly see because it's extragalactic: it's not inside stars, so it mostly doesn't emit light, and when it does it's not very bright.
In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that this is just more (indirect) evidence for the existence of dark matter: it helps confirm our models/simulations of galaxy formation, and those models don't work without dark matter, and considerable amounts of it (far more of it than the "missing" baryonic matter they found, in fact).
It's purely an issue of cost. To produce rotational artificial gravity, you need a fairly large lever arm (otherwise the gravitational gradient is rather large, which means your head feels less gravity than your feet and... well, I'm not sure what the effects of that would be, but I can't imagine it would feel pleasant), which means you need a ship far large than you can launch into space in one go. You could build/assemble it in space, but that's difficult and expensive. Finally, you can't add something like that to the ISS: if it breaks or goes wrong, you'd basically destroy the ISS, which would be very very bad (the ISS costs a few tens of billion USD, and the potential debris cause by an accident could cost tens of billions more).
Democracy needs an abort mechanism. If it somehow comes down to two unpopular candidates, disqualify both and start over.
It does, it's called "voting third party." Americans, however, believe the constant lie (perpetuated by both parties, who are terrified they will lose their duopoly) that voting 3rd party is "letting the other guy win" and "throwing away your vote", which is only true because people keep believing it to be true.
People killed, or people killed per capita? People often like to cite the former, as if the US isn't the 3rd most populous country in the world and compare it to, say, France, which has 1/5th the number of people. The US isn't at the top for the latter, countries like Finland and Norway actually lead, and that's even if you ignore terrorist attacks. Mind you, the US definitely does have a problem with gun violence and mass shootings, and a fairly bad one, but not as bad as anti-gun activists would have you believe.
Also, gun control doesn't do much to stop deliberate pre-meditated attacks, which this one sounds like to me (either that or he really, really hated Kei$ha).
If hundreds of professional astrophysicists are devoting their careers to studying a problem, you can be sure that nothing you come up with off the top of your head, without knowing anything about the subject, is going to dissuade them from following the money.
Yeah, cause if I'm a well educated, intelligent person with a large range of technical skills in both software and hardware looking to make lots of money, I'm definitely going to go into astrophysics.
Only got through about half the video, but it was pretty much entirely sensationalistic bullcrap. Take the idea that the car is going to tear through the vacuum chamber in case of failure. Why would it? The car is traveling forwards. Even if it got hit with the strongest pressure wave imaginable, it's going to be entirely from the front: none of that is going to translate into sideways motion that would result in significant stress on the tubing from the car. It's literally high school physics. Perhaps worst of all is this idea that a 1 atmosphere pressure wave will automatically "kill everyone in the car". Again, why would it? The car has significant forward momentum, and the momentum imparted by the pressure wave will be relatively tiny compared to that. People inside the car would feel a jolt, sure, but not a blast wave. We know the car can withstand 1 atmosphere of pressure, because it's a pressurized vehicle inside a vacuum: 1 atmosphere of stress is it's normal operating condition. And that's worst case scenario: in practice any holes will be much smaller than the diameter of the tube, so the inrush of air will be gentle breeze, not a pressure wave.
As for people suffocating in the tubes after a failure, that's even dumber. Failure almost always means loss of vacuum, and in cases where it doesn't the system can be repressurized while the emergency is dealt with. The only way people would suffocate is a failure in the vehicle itself resulting in that depressurizing, and there are ways around that. I will agree the idea of propelling the system with a turbine is a little silly, I can't see that being a practical final design.
If a hyperloop tube suffers a catastrophic breach, think of the pressure wave of air rushing in and what that will do to any near by vehicle.
A lot less than you'd think. The incoming air (in a worst-case breach) will be traveling at about the speed of sound, so with the train traveling at ~700mph, it'll be like a ~1400mph headwind for a half-second or so. Aerodynamic craft like airplanes can handle that easily, and I see little reason the hyperloop (which will also likely be aerodynamic, for technical reason) would be much different. It'll also be fairly heavy, which means a lot of inertia, so the brief pressure wave won't have much effect on the train's speed, either. After that, it'll just be traveling into a regular atmospheric headwind, which without propulsion will result in fairly rapid, but gradual, slowing to a halt, so no danger there. And that's a massive worst-case breach, where an entire section of vacuum tube completely vanishes. Sort of a large explosion, that'll never happen (and if you have access to a significant quantity of explosives there are much, much easier and more devastating targets to hit).
Yet it doesn't stop us from dropping dozens of probes and landers onto Mars and Venus...
All of which followed pretty strict decontamination procedures. Well, maybe not the Venus probes, but if Earth bacteria manages to survive on Venus, I say more power to them.
Yeah, because searching through 1 page of error messages because you forgot a ; or } is *so* much better, especially when those have no immediate visual significance at all. Besides, *all* (sane) languages already have significant whitespace: voidFunction() and void Function() are two completely different things. Whitespace is significant in human languages, and there's no reason it shouldn't be significant in computer languages.
It's not even that, there are fundamental limitations to cryptocurrency that I'm not sure *can* be eliminated. Blockchain size, for example. The design of cryptocurrency is such that to known the amount of coins in a wallet, you need to know the entire blockchain. Currently, the Bitcoin blockchain is 130 GB, for 250 million transactions (incidentally, that's about as many transactions as Visa handles per day). That's already fairly large for consumer miners (it means you can't realistically store the chain on your phone, which means using Bitcoin on mobile requires lightweight clients that undermine the point of Bitcoin in the first place), you increase the transaction rate and the total size will explode into the terabyte region, at which point you start needing large servers to even hold the blockchain and know how much money anyone has. The future of Bitcoin's blockchain requires resources individuals generally don't have access to, which means it will be controlled by large corporations. The only way around that is to use some technique that trims the blockchain, but I'm not sure if that's even technically possible. In any case, with the design of Bitcoin as it is now, it absolutely cannot be used by the common consumer, even if you fix all the problems with transaction rates and fees. It's a clever technical experiment, but it's intrinsically flawed as a currency.