Somewhere between "non-existant" and a few metres per second at most.
Sound transmission requires that movement can be transferred between molecules (Just like a newton's cradle)
At the altitudes concerned, gas molecules are so widely dispersed that collisions are occasional to rare, despite giving enough friction to generate a plasma.
"It's difficult to keep a tube depressurized when it's that large"
Pumps capable of handling that already exist, as does the materials science to make tubes capable of handling the crush pressure (which incidentally also makes them pretty much immune to onboard bombs - the overpressure pulse isn't enough to overcome the pressure differential.)
The most important aspect of the project is financial. Tunnel boring and building viaducts doesn't come cheap and the USA political system is so corrupt that a project can easily treble in costs just paying off officials to keep them onside.
It was costed in the 1960s-70s as running into the trillions, but such designs were full vacuum linear motor systems
Hyperloop makes a number of pragmatic/practical changes (such as allowing enough air in to provide air bearings, which in turn reduces engineering costs of suspending the capsules dramatically). Whether it's fully economic to do so is another matter.
My personal belief is that it will prove uneconomic for passengers unless longhaul freight is also carried and that in turn requires large tube diameter to handle intermodal containers.
In all liklihood it would be easier to build a hyperloop in Europe than in the USA, for the same reasons that HSR is all over the place here and non-existant in the USA. Ditto Japan or China - I think the current japanese maglev design is likely to prove uneconomic long-term due to friction issues and the sheer cost of maintaining an uncovered track. (birdstrike?)
Unlike rail, the hyperloop vehicles are able to bank inside the tubes so that cabin gravity is always apparently floorwards. (In fact if the CoG is low, then the banking comes for free, assuming a cylindrical profile.)
That in turn allows much tighter bend radii than rail where the limitations are mechanical stresses on the tube from passing pods and how much vertical G forces you're prepared to subject your passengers to (3G for 30 seconds is quite tolerable from my own experience deliberately spiral diving aircraft. More than that and passengers will probably complain loudly)
It's worth pointing out that HSR systems in the EU use bend radii in the region of 4-5 MILES for full-speed direction changes, and as with rail, the right-of-way only needs to be 30 feet wide for hyperloop.
What if the replacement viaduct took the i5 over the grapvine grade as well as the hyperloop?
There are a lot of roads where a viaduct over a valley would save considerable time, money and fuel over the current norm of terrain-following. Just because that's the way stagecoaches did it doesn't mean that it's appropriate for newer technologies.
At hypersonic velocities a trailing antenna is going to flail around so much that it'll probably snap.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that NASA tried something like this back in mercury days, as I've spoken with some of the scientists who worked on the unmanned and chimp craft. Many are now long-dead, but they had a lot to tell which isn't in any history file (such as desperately giving CPR to a chimp...)
Whenever you see "xyz is going at N times the speed of sound" - it's the speed of sound at sea level (standard temperature and pressure), not the speed of sound in the local environment.
Media always dumb this down. "Journalists" are not reknowned for their comprehension skills for the most part.
(Whenever you see media massively screwing up reporting of stuff you know lots about, bear in mind that every expert in every field has the same gripe about them)
"How much can a ship take corrections at that stage? "
Quite a bit. The basic reentry designs currently in use have substantial lifting body abilities, etc. and there's the possibility of picking up stuff the crew may have missed due to operational overload
(eg: the soyuz crew who asphixiated during reentry due to a faulty valve. With warning, they could have closed their pressure visors and used suit supplies for a few minutes, but the pressure loss was so gradual that they didn't notice it and simply drifted off)
China has a very long history of technological innovations exported to the rest of the world. It's only since the start of the industrial revolution that it's fallen behind and even then only slightly.
The biggest stumbling block in the last few decades has been communism discouraging "tall poppies" - now that the brakes are off it's only to be expected that innovations would start pouring out.
(The world would benefit greatly from china being treated as an equal in space. Locking the chinese govt out of ISS is counterproductive, as will be locking the indian and brazilian govts out when their manned space programs are underway. We only have one planet and nationalist "competition" is bad for the ecosphere.)
If you rely on a 3rd party to maintain the _only_ copy of your work then you're a fucking retard who probably deserves to lose your shit
(and please tell me your projects so I know to avoid them. They're clearly not going to get long-term support)
Seriously. it's a total facepalm if XYZ site (or website) goes away and the data that was on it isn't mirrored somewhere else (or isn't simply a mirror of your private, backed-up master server)
There is already malware circulating which hijacks android phones in order to spam out text and voice messages - it's believed this is precisely because of increasing whitelisting practices.
Politicians, churches and charities have gone and shat in their own nest on this one. (As they did with loudspeaker trucks)
The FCC has been looking at restricting political robodialling for a while due to the sheer number of complaints and it's highly unliklely that only the one exemption will be pulled.
It's not a restriction on speech, it's a restriction on the manner of speech (as are loudspeaker truck laws) and forcing speech on those who do not wish to listen to it.
> using some lawyerly language like "aiding and abetting" "knowingly providing false information" "negligent"
Or "materially benefitting from a criminal enterprise" - _your_ telco gets about 1/3 of the call revenue for terminating the inbound call, so they're part of the problem.
> he was using Magic Jack for VOIP, and how he could break into my mobile phone (which he demonstrated to me by calling with his caller-ID set to my number),
The only reason he was able to do that is because your phone company passed the call on.
Telcos get paid for terminating calls. The fact that they don't filter obviously scammy callerID, etc should make them liable as accessories to the crime (financial benefits, etc)
> "The" IRS, or as they'd be more likely to identify themselves, the Internal Revenue Service of the United States of America" doesn't call like this
The IRS also has the ability and willpower to go after scammers like this no matter what country they're in. Fucking with Uncle Sam's income (or any other countries tax system) by impersonating their revenue agencies is a guaranteed way of getting their complete and undivided attention.
The tax department in most countries has more powers of investigation, search and prosecution than even the spy agencies. You do not want to cross them unless you have a deathwish.
Invite them in. Give them coffee. Tell them you will be extremely culturally offended if they don't drink it.
For added fun: Leave the door open, make sure they have a clear path from their chair to it and have a shotgun nearby. Tell them that if they are so confident in their faith in god and that he'll save them, you're more than happy to load it and shoot it at them to see if he will.
"There's supposed to be some way to sue them for $1,000 a call, which would be a good living, but I don't know if it's an urban myth."
USA only:
Telephone Consumer Protection Act - it's $500 per call, tripled for wilful violations (if you're on a DNC then it's automatically wilful).
Fileable in small claims court. Caller and the company which hired them are jointly and severally liable (that means you get to go after both of them for $1500 apiece). Make sure you identify what they're advertising, as stinging the people who hire phone spammers is more likely to result in the practice stopping than stinging the phone spammers themselves.
If you get a default judgement then you can apply for interstate enforcement, etc and all the costs are charged against the spammer.
There are a lot of webpages devoted to this. Some people have made a cottage industry out of suing telemarketers.
"If you get a human, they are just trying to get paid to do a job. They know it is a crap job, and there is no need to be abusive or profane."
IN a lot of cases it's an _illegal_ call, and they are criminals.
I enjoy making them as uncomfortable as possible. I _want_ them to feel dirty and disgusting when they finish talking to me, because that way they won't last long in the job.
The thing is (of course) that politicians face the media (who seldom defer in the UK anymore) but the civil servants who are the real power behind the throne are usually well protected from such things.
Surprisingly, if the records were in Westminster palace then this doesn't need bad weather. The building is starting to fall apart and at least one MP has been flooded out by the effluvia from the gents toilets on the floor above.
I don't know about you but I'm not keen on picking through records with _that_ kind of water damage - dried or not.
Puddlejumper pilots graduate to the larger birds as they go on, or so the theory goes.
The reality is that a lot of pilots barely make enough to pay off their training debts and far more end up finding jobs which don't keep them away from home for days on end than ever end up flying the big birds.
I doubt that anyone would take drone time any more seriously than simulator hours.
"Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation."
Civil transport outfits don't want military pilots. The training they receive and the attitudes they subsequently bring with them are diametrically opposed to the need for safe, _conservative_ pilots who don't put passengers at risk by attempting landings when everyone else has given up and turned back, etc.
Civil transport has a lot more in common with bus driving than military flying (I'd say that bus driving is probably less boring and more exciting). Military pilots are not a good fit in the modern cockpit and haven't been for a while - airlines noticed the problem a long time ago and for the past 30 years have generally preferred to recruit people who've come through training schools.
"If it were one or more of those fine ISIS chaps I was targeting, no, I'd not have a problem killing them without a second thought."
That mindset is exactly what created ISIS in the first place.
That 'fine ISIS chap' has a family. You might think he's a bad guy but they probably don't.
He's also mixed amongst civilians - who also have families.
Killing him will irritate his friends and family, possibly recruiting more members for revenge. Killing civilians who don't want to be in the line of fire in the first place will also recruit more members wanting revenge.
And finally splatting people like bugs from 7000 miles away (or even just 20,000 feet up) is a sure-fire way of pissing off the locals enough for some of them to take up arms on the general principle of "don't tread on me" (try it in the USA and you'd see exactly the same response).
This isn't a video game. There are ALWAYS consequences and the raw fact is that every time the USA has gone into a region to try and solve a problem with war it's resulted in things being made significantly worse.
Things in the middle east have been ratcheting up since the end of the Ottoman empire 100 years ago. The division of areas into countries along lines which split up ethnic/tribal groups and put other ethnic/tribal groups in conflict for leadership was pretty much guaranteed to give a harvest of blood in the long term (this is also happening in Africa), but having done that it's now virtually impossible to redraw the lines in the way that T.E Lawrence (of arabia) proposed after the first world war in order to ensure prolonged peace in the region.
If the amount of money the USA has pissed up against the wall was carpetbombed across the middle east as cash instead, the area would be better off, there'd be few enemies and the US would probably have spent about half as much as it has to date.
It's arguable that the middle east mess is a direct result of the USA military system finding itself at a loose end after the end of the cold war and starting to look around for new missions instead of doing the sensible thing and winding itself down to a lower level. This theory has some legs because one of the consequences of stepping off a federal war footing is that Washington DC would be required to delegate most of its power back to the individual states and after a 70-year long power grab most of those now in control would only see that happen over their dead bodies.
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere between "non-existant" and a few metres per second at most.
Sound transmission requires that movement can be transferred between molecules (Just like a newton's cradle)
At the altitudes concerned, gas molecules are so widely dispersed that collisions are occasional to rare, despite giving enough friction to generate a plasma.
"It's difficult to keep a tube depressurized when it's that large"
Pumps capable of handling that already exist, as does the materials science to make tubes capable of handling the crush pressure (which incidentally also makes them pretty much immune to onboard bombs - the overpressure pulse isn't enough to overcome the pressure differential.)
The most important aspect of the project is financial. Tunnel boring and building viaducts doesn't come cheap and the USA political system is so corrupt that a project can easily treble in costs just paying off officials to keep them onside.
It was costed in the 1960s-70s as running into the trillions, but such designs were full vacuum linear motor systems
Hyperloop makes a number of pragmatic/practical changes (such as allowing enough air in to provide air bearings, which in turn reduces engineering costs of suspending the capsules dramatically). Whether it's fully economic to do so is another matter.
My personal belief is that it will prove uneconomic for passengers unless longhaul freight is also carried and that in turn requires large tube diameter to handle intermodal containers.
In all liklihood it would be easier to build a hyperloop in Europe than in the USA, for the same reasons that HSR is all over the place here and non-existant in the USA. Ditto Japan or China - I think the current japanese maglev design is likely to prove uneconomic long-term due to friction issues and the sheer cost of maintaining an uncovered track. (birdstrike?)
Unlike rail, the hyperloop vehicles are able to bank inside the tubes so that cabin gravity is always apparently floorwards. (In fact if the CoG is low, then the banking comes for free, assuming a cylindrical profile.)
That in turn allows much tighter bend radii than rail where the limitations are mechanical stresses on the tube from passing pods and how much vertical G forces you're prepared to subject your passengers to (3G for 30 seconds is quite tolerable from my own experience deliberately spiral diving aircraft. More than that and passengers will probably complain loudly)
It's worth pointing out that HSR systems in the EU use bend radii in the region of 4-5 MILES for full-speed direction changes, and as with rail, the right-of-way only needs to be 30 feet wide for hyperloop.
What if the replacement viaduct took the i5 over the grapvine grade as well as the hyperloop?
There are a lot of roads where a viaduct over a valley would save considerable time, money and fuel over the current norm of terrain-following. Just because that's the way stagecoaches did it doesn't mean that it's appropriate for newer technologies.
At hypersonic velocities a trailing antenna is going to flail around so much that it'll probably snap.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that NASA tried something like this back in mercury days, as I've spoken with some of the scientists who worked on the unmanned and chimp craft. Many are now long-dead, but they had a lot to tell which isn't in any history file (such as desperately giving CPR to a chimp...)
Whenever you see "xyz is going at N times the speed of sound" - it's the speed of sound at sea level (standard temperature and pressure), not the speed of sound in the local environment.
Media always dumb this down. "Journalists" are not reknowned for their comprehension skills for the most part.
(Whenever you see media massively screwing up reporting of stuff you know lots about, bear in mind that every expert in every field has the same gripe about them)
"How much can a ship take corrections at that stage? "
Quite a bit. The basic reentry designs currently in use have substantial lifting body abilities, etc. and there's the possibility of picking up stuff the crew may have missed due to operational overload
(eg: the soyuz crew who asphixiated during reentry due to a faulty valve. With warning, they could have closed their pressure visors and used suit supplies for a few minutes, but the pressure loss was so gradual that they didn't notice it and simply drifted off)
China has a very long history of technological innovations exported to the rest of the world. It's only since the start of the industrial revolution that it's fallen behind and even then only slightly.
The biggest stumbling block in the last few decades has been communism discouraging "tall poppies" - now that the brakes are off it's only to be expected that innovations would start pouring out.
(The world would benefit greatly from china being treated as an equal in space. Locking the chinese govt out of ISS is counterproductive, as will be locking the indian and brazilian govts out when their manned space programs are underway. We only have one planet and nationalist "competition" is bad for the ecosphere.)
"The DOOM archive was saved"
If you rely on a 3rd party to maintain the _only_ copy of your work then you're a fucking retard who probably deserves to lose your shit
(and please tell me your projects so I know to avoid them. They're clearly not going to get long-term support)
Seriously. it's a total facepalm if XYZ site (or website) goes away and the data that was on it isn't mirrored somewhere else (or isn't simply a mirror of your private, backed-up master server)
There is already malware circulating which hijacks android phones in order to spam out text and voice messages - it's believed this is precisely because of increasing whitelisting practices.
Politicians, churches and charities have gone and shat in their own nest on this one. (As they did with loudspeaker trucks)
The FCC has been looking at restricting political robodialling for a while due to the sheer number of complaints and it's highly unliklely that only the one exemption will be pulled.
It's not a restriction on speech, it's a restriction on the manner of speech (as are loudspeaker truck laws) and forcing speech on those who do not wish to listen to it.
> the old movie trope of "keep them on the line while we trace this call" is bogus
Back in the days of strowger switches it had to be done this way but that was a very long time ago.
> using some lawyerly language like "aiding and abetting" "knowingly providing false information" "negligent"
Or "materially benefitting from a criminal enterprise" - _your_ telco gets about 1/3 of the call revenue for terminating the inbound call, so they're part of the problem.
> he was using Magic Jack for VOIP, and how he could break into my mobile phone (which he demonstrated to me by calling with his caller-ID set to my number),
The only reason he was able to do that is because your phone company passed the call on.
Telcos get paid for terminating calls. The fact that they don't filter obviously scammy callerID, etc should make them liable as accessories to the crime (financial benefits, etc)
> "The" IRS, or as they'd be more likely to identify themselves, the Internal Revenue Service of the United States of America" doesn't call like this
The IRS also has the ability and willpower to go after scammers like this no matter what country they're in. Fucking with Uncle Sam's income (or any other countries tax system) by impersonating their revenue agencies is a guaranteed way of getting their complete and undivided attention.
http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/...
http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/...
The tax department in most countries has more powers of investigation, search and prosecution than even the spy agencies. You do not want to cross them unless you have a deathwish.
You don't need the cops.
Invite them in. Give them coffee. Tell them you will be extremely culturally offended if they don't drink it.
For added fun: Leave the door open, make sure they have a clear path from their chair to it and have a shotgun nearby. Tell them that if they are so confident in their faith in god and that he'll save them, you're more than happy to load it and shoot it at them to see if he will.
JW-baiting is fun.
"There's supposed to be some way to sue them for $1,000 a call, which would be a good living, but I don't know if it's an urban myth."
USA only:
Telephone Consumer Protection Act - it's $500 per call, tripled for wilful violations (if you're on a DNC then it's automatically wilful).
Fileable in small claims court. Caller and the company which hired them are jointly and severally liable (that means you get to go after both of them for $1500 apiece). Make sure you identify what they're advertising, as stinging the people who hire phone spammers is more likely to result in the practice stopping than stinging the phone spammers themselves.
If you get a default judgement then you can apply for interstate enforcement, etc and all the costs are charged against the spammer.
There are a lot of webpages devoted to this. Some people have made a cottage industry out of suing telemarketers.
"If you get a human, they are just trying to get paid to do a job. They know it is a crap job, and there is no need to be abusive or profane."
IN a lot of cases it's an _illegal_ call, and they are criminals.
I enjoy making them as uncomfortable as possible. I _want_ them to feel dirty and disgusting when they finish talking to me, because that way they won't last long in the job.
There are scamblocker apps for androids at least.
It was this kind of answer which fell apart in the face of people like Jeremy Paxman.
"That's a very nice answer, but it's not an answer to the question I asked you. Please answer the question"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
The thing is (of course) that politicians face the media (who seldom defer in the UK anymore) but the civil servants who are the real power behind the throne are usually well protected from such things.
Surprisingly, if the records were in Westminster palace then this doesn't need bad weather.
The building is starting to fall apart and at least one MP has been flooded out by the effluvia from the gents toilets on the floor above.
I don't know about you but I'm not keen on picking through records with _that_ kind of water damage - dried or not.
Puddlejumper pilots graduate to the larger birds as they go on, or so the theory goes.
The reality is that a lot of pilots barely make enough to pay off their training debts and far more end up finding jobs which don't keep them away from home for days on end than ever end up flying the big birds.
I doubt that anyone would take drone time any more seriously than simulator hours.
"Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation."
Civil transport outfits don't want military pilots. The training they receive and the attitudes they subsequently bring with them are diametrically opposed to the need for safe, _conservative_ pilots who don't put passengers at risk by attempting landings when everyone else has given up and turned back, etc.
Civil transport has a lot more in common with bus driving than military flying (I'd say that bus driving is probably less boring and more exciting). Military pilots are not a good fit in the modern cockpit and haven't been for a while - airlines noticed the problem a long time ago and for the past 30 years have generally preferred to recruit people who've come through training schools.
"If it were one or more of those fine ISIS chaps I was targeting, no, I'd not have a problem killing them without a second thought."
That mindset is exactly what created ISIS in the first place.
That 'fine ISIS chap' has a family. You might think he's a bad guy but they probably don't.
He's also mixed amongst civilians - who also have families.
Killing him will irritate his friends and family, possibly recruiting more members for revenge.
Killing civilians who don't want to be in the line of fire in the first place will also recruit more members wanting revenge.
And finally splatting people like bugs from 7000 miles away (or even just 20,000 feet up) is a sure-fire way of pissing off the locals enough for some of them to take up arms on the general principle of "don't tread on me" (try it in the USA and you'd see exactly the same response).
This isn't a video game. There are ALWAYS consequences and the raw fact is that every time the USA has gone into a region to try and solve a problem with war it's resulted in things being made significantly worse.
Things in the middle east have been ratcheting up since the end of the Ottoman empire 100 years ago. The division of areas into countries along lines which split up ethnic/tribal groups and put other ethnic/tribal groups in conflict for leadership was pretty much guaranteed to give a harvest of blood in the long term (this is also happening in Africa), but having done that it's now virtually impossible to redraw the lines in the way that T.E Lawrence (of arabia) proposed after the first world war in order to ensure prolonged peace in the region.
If the amount of money the USA has pissed up against the wall was carpetbombed across the middle east as cash instead, the area would be better off, there'd be few enemies and the US would probably have spent about half as much as it has to date.
It's arguable that the middle east mess is a direct result of the USA military system finding itself at a loose end after the end of the cold war and starting to look around for new missions instead of doing the sensible thing and winding itself down to a lower level. This theory has some legs because one of the consequences of stepping off a federal war footing is that Washington DC would be required to delegate most of its power back to the individual states and after a 70-year long power grab most of those now in control would only see that happen over their dead bodies.