My point was more that the reliability/price/profitability was not substantially impacted by it being done by the government, in response to the "socialism fails" comment. As in, the cheap Hydro prices are happening in spite of it being provided in a socialist manner.
Yes. My comments were specifically addressed to the grandparent's "another example how socialism fails" comment; it's working quite well for us, and that's not specifically because of the low cost of hydro.
Ontario's power comes primarily from nuclear (clean, but not renewable), though, and I suspect Ontario's pricing woes have more to do with poor policy decisions than technological aspects.
Funny, my province's power is entirely supplied by a government-owned corporation, which hits about 98% renewable energy generation, has among the lowest energy prices in the world, and has still produced a consistent profit in the billions for decades. Doesn't seem to be failing to me.
The fragmentation got worse under Spindler, to be sure, but the confusion starts with the introduction of all the different product lines, all of which happened under Sculley:
You can see the huge mess just starting towards the last few years of Sculley's reign, then you can see Spindler going nuts, and then around 1998 you can see Jobs killing all the product lines.
Yes, although things are a bit different today than they were back then. Today, if they do go that way, it's part of the current trend of convergence. Back then, they took a Performa 520 all-in-one mac and slapped a TV tuner in it and called it "Macintosh TV". It had a 14" screen, and no integration between the Mac and TV side of things. That's a bit different between today's trends of streaming and apps on a TV, and it's something that Apple is already essentially doing today with the AppleTV.
Ditto for the watch, which would be more of an extension of the smartphone platform than the calculator watches of yore.
I'm not saying either of those things is a sure thing, only that an attempt to make such a product today would be radically different than twenty years ago.
The mac fracturing happened before 1993. The Performa was introduced in 1992, the Quadra in 1991, the LC in 1990... Pretty much all that fragmentation happened before Scully left. I'll give you that the Pippin was later, though.
It was a disaster as a business up until it got bought out. They sold few computers when they were a computer vendor, and didn't do so well with the software either. It was an epic failure that was an extremely valuable learning experience for Jobs.
Sculley, who bet the farm on the Newton, which bombed? Sculley, who fractured the Mac lineup into a large number of similar and confusing models? Sculley, who had Apple branch out into every random consumer electronic category he could think of, including digital cameras, videogame consoles, CD players, speakers, television STBs, and even television/computer hybrids, every single one of which flopped?
Things didn't necessarily get much better after he was fired, but his lack of vision and direction are part of the reason that Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy when Jobs took over and got the investment from Microsoft.
Say what you will about Jobs, he was very good at simplifying the product lineup and focusing on a vision. Still, I think that Apple ousting Steve jobs was the best thing that ever happened to both Jobs and Apple. For Jobs, particularly, the experience of the NeXT disaster was extremely educational.
Consider first that sufficiently large deflection would result in the immediate emergency breaking of all capsules. There is also the consideration that earthquakes don't travel instantaneously, which means there is some advanced warning between an earthquake being detected and an earthquake reaching the hypertube. There is also the capability of the dampers on the pylons to absorb a certain amount of movement. These things combine to give sufficient time to decelerate the vehicles.
Consider this: earthquakes are a far larger problem in Japan (both in intensity and frequency), and there are similar consequences to deflecting the rail of a high speed train (the danger there is derailment). Even a stationary train can topple in an earthquake, much less of a concern on the hyperloop. Japan has never suffered a fatality on a shinkansen due to earthquakes, over the past half century. The hyperloop's emergency stopping distance would be vaguely similar to that of the shinkansen. The shinkansen emergency braking from top speed takes about 40 seconds by my math, and the *normal* deceleration from top speed of the hyperloop would take 70. If it decelerates faster than normal for emergency braking, it could potentially even stop faster than the shinkansen.
The target speed was never 4000 MPH (I think you're confusing this with ET3's proposal). For deceleration: emergency brakes and the cars have wheels for emergencies. One question that should be asked is, what is it going to crash into? Not other capsules, they're moving away from you and have a huge safety margin of distance between them. Not the station, it's a passive system that handles deceleration (no power required). If the capsule needs to decelerate themselves for some reason, you're going from a maximum of 760 MPH to 0 MPH using the capsule's mechanical emergency breaking system. At the same deceleration as the capsules would accelerate, that's about seventy seconds over roughly seven and a half miles. Which is much faster than a high-speed train can do the same thing.
The document Must posted does cover several emergency scenarios. Passenger health emergency? Best thing is to keep going to next station as scheduled, with a maximum trip length of 35 minutes it's the fastest way to get an active response, and much faster than you can get emergency services to an in-flight aircraft. Major depressurization of a car? Actuate emergency breaks on all cars and rapidly re-pressurize the entire tube. Major earthquake (beyond the ability of the pylon dampers to handle)? Emergency break all the capsules and wait it out. Power outage? The system has many times more stored battery capacity to complete all in-progress journeys. Power failure of system itself? Cars are self-powered, so can coast a decent distance themselves, and then the batteries normally used to power the turbine can be used instead to power motors on the emergency wheels to get the capsules either to the station at the end of the line or the closest emergency exit location. I'm sure there are tons of possibilities that haven't been accounted for, but many are.
He never promised anything remotely near 4,000 MPH. He promised about a half hour between LA and SF. Proposal does it in 35 minutes, which is indeed about a half hour.
Right, but if you're saying that the geography is similar, and yet they've got the biggest high-speed rail network in the world by a huge margin, then surely that would indicate that geography in the US is not an insurmountable obstacle?
Comparable to China, the country with the largest high-speed rail network in the world by more than a factor of four? They have roughly 23,500 kilometres in operation or under construction (the breakdown is roughly 40/60).
No air is evacuated, that defeats the purpose of a pneumatic system like the hyperloop.
The biggest force trying to slow down a high-speed vehicle is drag. There are two ways to eliminate the drag: either travel through a vacuum, or make the air travel at the same velocity as the vehicle. The hyperloop does the latter: it's basically a pneumatic tube, so the air is moving at the same speed as the vehicle. Such a system does not need to be completely airtight. It's also why Musk claims the Hyperloop can't crash, since the air in front of you would compress if you got closer to the car in front.
Well, I figure if you managed to actually hit a ship with a nuclear torpedo (like the Mark 45, which as far as I can tell is the only one the US ever fielded), having it detonate at the same range a conventional torpedo would, you'd pretty much wreck the thing. So I'd imagine it'd be a one hit kill if you actually managed to get it to detonate at point blank range on a carrier, whereas a carrier would easily survive an individual torpedo hit with a conventional warhead. But I would also think that getting close enough to do that would likely be a suicide mission.
The last nuclear torpedo the US used had a yield of 11 kilotons (ICBMs are a hell of a lot larger than a torpedo). The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 16 kilotons. The closest survivor (lived into his 80s after) to the blast was 300 feet away in a basement. Ships in a carrier strike group are not exactly brushing up against each other, nor are they made of largely wood and glass as most buildings in Hiroshima were. They are in fact made of steel, and designed with the assumption that they WILL be subjected to explosions.
I have no idea why you would think that such a weapon would destroy an entire spread out carrier group a dozen times over. Getting hit by something bigger, like a nuclear-equipped ballistic missile, that might do it. Ground-launched ballistic missiles are considered to be an especially large threat to carrier groups. But the warhead in a tiny nuclear torpedo? Not so much.
The other issue is that an intercepted nuclear torpedo or cruise missile won't detonate at all; detonating a nuclear weapon is a rather precise operation, so if you shoot it down or damage it, it's not going to cause any damage at all. Ballistic missiles (especially ICBMs) are virtually impossible to intercept primarily because of their ridiculous velocity, but the same is not true for cruise missiles and torpedoes (although torpedoes aren't necessarily easy to intercept).
Because in the context of naval warfare, a tactical nuke basically is just a bigger bomb. The vast majority of immediate injuries in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were from things that a conventional explosion of the same size would cause. Flying debris, burns, etc. Even the number affected by the radiation was likely largely due to the fallout after the explosion, which wouldn't be as much a factor at sea.
Remember that the US navy is not ignorant to the hazards of dealing with radiation from nuclear reactions. The carriers we're talking about are powered by nuclear reactors, after all, which have the potential to release large amounts of radiation in case of an accident.
Cruise missiles can be shot down, either by interceptors or CIWS, and nuclear weapons that are shot down don't detonate. In what way are they unstoppable?
Nuclear torpedoes have the yield to take out a single ship, not an entire carrier group, and can be defeated the same way any other torpedo can (if unguided, it can miss or be evaded, especially if fired from extreme range, if guided, it can be tricked). This assumes that the militaries involved even have any; the US got rid of their nuclear torpedoes in the 70s, probably because they could never fire them (without starting a nuclear war) but took up limited space that could be used for torpedoes with conventional warheads.
This also assumes that China or the US, if starting a war, was willing to go nuclear. I find that highly unlikely: most probably any war between the two countries would be conventional.
How is that different than, say, Taxi Diamond, where you enter your order in the smartphone app, it reserves a car, and the address pops up on the GPS screen in the cab?
Perhaps there is a human verifying it (because in the smartphone app you have to wait half a minute or so for it to allocate the driver"), but the user experience is the same. So that's not a paradigm shift, that's a slight change in behind-the-scenes process. At the end of the day, it's not an advantage to the user.
Slashdot Mirror
This is Quebec, not Japan.
My point was more that the reliability/price/profitability was not substantially impacted by it being done by the government, in response to the "socialism fails" comment. As in, the cheap Hydro prices are happening in spite of it being provided in a socialist manner.
Yes. My comments were specifically addressed to the grandparent's "another example how socialism fails" comment; it's working quite well for us, and that's not specifically because of the low cost of hydro.
Ontario's power comes primarily from nuclear (clean, but not renewable), though, and I suspect Ontario's pricing woes have more to do with poor policy decisions than technological aspects.
Funny, my province's power is entirely supplied by a government-owned corporation, which hits about 98% renewable energy generation, has among the lowest energy prices in the world, and has still produced a consistent profit in the billions for decades. Doesn't seem to be failing to me.
Geeze, you put a single wrong letter in one of three instances of a word and everybody loses their minds.
The fragmentation got worse under Spindler, to be sure, but the confusion starts with the introduction of all the different product lines, all of which happened under Sculley:
SE series: 1987 - 1991
II series: 1987 - 1993
LC series: 1990 - 1995
Classic series: 1990 - 1995
Quadra series: 1991 - 1995
Performa series: 1992 - 1996
Centris series: 1993 - 1993
Workgroup Server series: 1993 - 1997
I'm not completely sure the last two were introduced before Sculley left, but they would definitely have been initiated before he did.
There's a great visualization here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Macintosh_models
You can see the huge mess just starting towards the last few years of Sculley's reign, then you can see Spindler going nuts, and then around 1998 you can see Jobs killing all the product lines.
Yes, although things are a bit different today than they were back then. Today, if they do go that way, it's part of the current trend of convergence. Back then, they took a Performa 520 all-in-one mac and slapped a TV tuner in it and called it "Macintosh TV". It had a 14" screen, and no integration between the Mac and TV side of things. That's a bit different between today's trends of streaming and apps on a TV, and it's something that Apple is already essentially doing today with the AppleTV.
Ditto for the watch, which would be more of an extension of the smartphone platform than the calculator watches of yore.
I'm not saying either of those things is a sure thing, only that an attempt to make such a product today would be radically different than twenty years ago.
The mac fracturing happened before 1993. The Performa was introduced in 1992, the Quadra in 1991, the LC in 1990... Pretty much all that fragmentation happened before Scully left. I'll give you that the Pippin was later, though.
It was a disaster as a business up until it got bought out. They sold few computers when they were a computer vendor, and didn't do so well with the software either. It was an epic failure that was an extremely valuable learning experience for Jobs.
Like your example below, the Mac II was started when Jobs was still involved in the company, although it was done behind his back :)
Sculley, who bet the farm on the Newton, which bombed? Sculley, who fractured the Mac lineup into a large number of similar and confusing models? Sculley, who had Apple branch out into every random consumer electronic category he could think of, including digital cameras, videogame consoles, CD players, speakers, television STBs, and even television/computer hybrids, every single one of which flopped?
Things didn't necessarily get much better after he was fired, but his lack of vision and direction are part of the reason that Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy when Jobs took over and got the investment from Microsoft.
Say what you will about Jobs, he was very good at simplifying the product lineup and focusing on a vision. Still, I think that Apple ousting Steve jobs was the best thing that ever happened to both Jobs and Apple. For Jobs, particularly, the experience of the NeXT disaster was extremely educational.
They were only strong enough to "dazzle" pilots, not do any actual damage.
Consider first that sufficiently large deflection would result in the immediate emergency breaking of all capsules. There is also the consideration that earthquakes don't travel instantaneously, which means there is some advanced warning between an earthquake being detected and an earthquake reaching the hypertube. There is also the capability of the dampers on the pylons to absorb a certain amount of movement. These things combine to give sufficient time to decelerate the vehicles.
Consider this: earthquakes are a far larger problem in Japan (both in intensity and frequency), and there are similar consequences to deflecting the rail of a high speed train (the danger there is derailment). Even a stationary train can topple in an earthquake, much less of a concern on the hyperloop. Japan has never suffered a fatality on a shinkansen due to earthquakes, over the past half century. The hyperloop's emergency stopping distance would be vaguely similar to that of the shinkansen. The shinkansen emergency braking from top speed takes about 40 seconds by my math, and the *normal* deceleration from top speed of the hyperloop would take 70. If it decelerates faster than normal for emergency braking, it could potentially even stop faster than the shinkansen.
The target speed was never 4000 MPH (I think you're confusing this with ET3's proposal). For deceleration: emergency brakes and the cars have wheels for emergencies. One question that should be asked is, what is it going to crash into? Not other capsules, they're moving away from you and have a huge safety margin of distance between them. Not the station, it's a passive system that handles deceleration (no power required). If the capsule needs to decelerate themselves for some reason, you're going from a maximum of 760 MPH to 0 MPH using the capsule's mechanical emergency breaking system. At the same deceleration as the capsules would accelerate, that's about seventy seconds over roughly seven and a half miles. Which is much faster than a high-speed train can do the same thing.
The document Must posted does cover several emergency scenarios. Passenger health emergency? Best thing is to keep going to next station as scheduled, with a maximum trip length of 35 minutes it's the fastest way to get an active response, and much faster than you can get emergency services to an in-flight aircraft. Major depressurization of a car? Actuate emergency breaks on all cars and rapidly re-pressurize the entire tube. Major earthquake (beyond the ability of the pylon dampers to handle)? Emergency break all the capsules and wait it out. Power outage? The system has many times more stored battery capacity to complete all in-progress journeys. Power failure of system itself? Cars are self-powered, so can coast a decent distance themselves, and then the batteries normally used to power the turbine can be used instead to power motors on the emergency wheels to get the capsules either to the station at the end of the line or the closest emergency exit location. I'm sure there are tons of possibilities that haven't been accounted for, but many are.
He never promised anything remotely near 4,000 MPH. He promised about a half hour between LA and SF. Proposal does it in 35 minutes, which is indeed about a half hour.
Right, but if you're saying that the geography is similar, and yet they've got the biggest high-speed rail network in the world by a huge margin, then surely that would indicate that geography in the US is not an insurmountable obstacle?
He said he'd release more details on August 12th. Is it August 12th yet?
Comparable to China, the country with the largest high-speed rail network in the world by more than a factor of four? They have roughly 23,500 kilometres in operation or under construction (the breakdown is roughly 40/60).
No air is evacuated, that defeats the purpose of a pneumatic system like the hyperloop.
The biggest force trying to slow down a high-speed vehicle is drag. There are two ways to eliminate the drag: either travel through a vacuum, or make the air travel at the same velocity as the vehicle. The hyperloop does the latter: it's basically a pneumatic tube, so the air is moving at the same speed as the vehicle. Such a system does not need to be completely airtight. It's also why Musk claims the Hyperloop can't crash, since the air in front of you would compress if you got closer to the car in front.
Well, I figure if you managed to actually hit a ship with a nuclear torpedo (like the Mark 45, which as far as I can tell is the only one the US ever fielded), having it detonate at the same range a conventional torpedo would, you'd pretty much wreck the thing. So I'd imagine it'd be a one hit kill if you actually managed to get it to detonate at point blank range on a carrier, whereas a carrier would easily survive an individual torpedo hit with a conventional warhead. But I would also think that getting close enough to do that would likely be a suicide mission.
The last nuclear torpedo the US used had a yield of 11 kilotons (ICBMs are a hell of a lot larger than a torpedo). The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 16 kilotons. The closest survivor (lived into his 80s after) to the blast was 300 feet away in a basement. Ships in a carrier strike group are not exactly brushing up against each other, nor are they made of largely wood and glass as most buildings in Hiroshima were. They are in fact made of steel, and designed with the assumption that they WILL be subjected to explosions.
I have no idea why you would think that such a weapon would destroy an entire spread out carrier group a dozen times over. Getting hit by something bigger, like a nuclear-equipped ballistic missile, that might do it. Ground-launched ballistic missiles are considered to be an especially large threat to carrier groups. But the warhead in a tiny nuclear torpedo? Not so much.
The other issue is that an intercepted nuclear torpedo or cruise missile won't detonate at all; detonating a nuclear weapon is a rather precise operation, so if you shoot it down or damage it, it's not going to cause any damage at all. Ballistic missiles (especially ICBMs) are virtually impossible to intercept primarily because of their ridiculous velocity, but the same is not true for cruise missiles and torpedoes (although torpedoes aren't necessarily easy to intercept).
Because in the context of naval warfare, a tactical nuke basically is just a bigger bomb. The vast majority of immediate injuries in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were from things that a conventional explosion of the same size would cause. Flying debris, burns, etc. Even the number affected by the radiation was likely largely due to the fallout after the explosion, which wouldn't be as much a factor at sea.
Remember that the US navy is not ignorant to the hazards of dealing with radiation from nuclear reactions. The carriers we're talking about are powered by nuclear reactors, after all, which have the potential to release large amounts of radiation in case of an accident.
Cruise missiles can be shot down, either by interceptors or CIWS, and nuclear weapons that are shot down don't detonate. In what way are they unstoppable?
Nuclear torpedoes have the yield to take out a single ship, not an entire carrier group, and can be defeated the same way any other torpedo can (if unguided, it can miss or be evaded, especially if fired from extreme range, if guided, it can be tricked). This assumes that the militaries involved even have any; the US got rid of their nuclear torpedoes in the 70s, probably because they could never fire them (without starting a nuclear war) but took up limited space that could be used for torpedoes with conventional warheads.
This also assumes that China or the US, if starting a war, was willing to go nuclear. I find that highly unlikely: most probably any war between the two countries would be conventional.
How is that different than, say, Taxi Diamond, where you enter your order in the smartphone app, it reserves a car, and the address pops up on the GPS screen in the cab?
Perhaps there is a human verifying it (because in the smartphone app you have to wait half a minute or so for it to allocate the driver"), but the user experience is the same. So that's not a paradigm shift, that's a slight change in behind-the-scenes process. At the end of the day, it's not an advantage to the user.