> As usual, mostly western commentators sitting on their high horses pointing and pontificating with no idea of local context or understanding.
Pray tell, what context justifies arbitrary lynchings, summary executions, extrajudicial capital punishment, and an overall disrespect for human life?
Perhaps it's the view from the high horse I'm sitting on, but when I look throughout europe I don't see nations with major drug problems, and they haven't fixed any problems they had with assassinations.
Could you please provide any insight on what makes this sort of rampant uncivilized behaviour necessary or even remotely justified?
> So I just wanted to say it's an engineering issue at this point.
It's far more than a mere engineering issue. It's primarily an economic issue. The engineering issues are mitigated by throwing cash at them, but in the end for an infrastructure project to make sense the payoff must be greater than the investment.
Meanwhile, air travel is already cheaper than conventional high-speed rail, is far more flexible to manage, and operates on a cruise speed that is at least equivalent to the best case scenario sold by hyperloop's salespeople.
Any airline is able to transport hundreds of people at a cruise speed between 800 and 900km/h with an investment of around 200 million dollars. Hyperloop's salespeople are selling a concept whose cost is some orders of magnitude higher, takes longer to build, and competes with ticket prices that are somewhere between 100 and 200 dollars a ticket. While an airline needs to rely on those 100 dollar tickets to pay off their 200 million dollar investment, how do hyperloop's salesteam expect an operator to amortize a trillion-dollar investment by competing in a market based on those ticket prices?
Furthermore, essentially airlines only need to maintain their planes and pay airport costs. An hyperloop operator needs to maintain, in addition to the vehicle, hundeds of kilometer of experimental track sections. Where's the business case?
There's a good reason why hyperloop's salesteam only invest in marketing and propaganda, and in spite of being backed by a savvy scifi-inclined billionaire with a long history of investing in amazing projects we don't see him opening his wallet to fund a real-world project. Instead, the project is focused on convincing others to foot the bill.
> But hyperloop? Nothing new really needs to be discovered.
This isn't true.
The concept of a moving load travelling over the rayleigh wave speed on heterogeneous soils is something that's very new, very problematic, and very expensive to deal with.
Let's put it this way: the french currently hold the conventional high-speed railway speed record for just bellow 600km/h, and yet they are only able to operate their TGV trains on the record-breaking track at 320km/h. They can't push it any faster due to all the maintenance problems caused by very high speed travel, although SNCF is one of the leading rail companies and the track is brand new.
If there were no technical issues to be resolved, they wouldn't be capping their circulation speeds at around half their speed record.
This is one of the many technical issues. But then there are the multitude of economic problems which hyperloop is entirely unable to offer any solution, yet alone make a case.
Strapping a rocket on a short stretch of track is not a technical solution. It's just a marketing trick.
Capacity is a problem, but not a significant one. The problem is the cost to build, maintain and operate the infrastructure required to comply with the speed requirements, the fact that most of the technology doesn't exist, that the physics issues of a vehicle interacting with a foundation medium at very high speeds are far from being tackled (commonly referred to as trans-rayleigh trains), and that even the most basic issues of the propaganda talking points are yet to be tackled by the project.
Hyperloop reminds me of the Simpson's monorail episode in many ways.
> It seems like you are much smarter than the rest of us.
I'm not smarter than the rest of us. I just happen to be a researcher in the field of railway engineering, specifically in the design of high and very high speed tracks for conventional high-speed rail.
> Would you please tell us plebs what the fatal flaw is?
The main issue with very high speed rail is the cost required to build and maintain infrastructure that must meet such precise tolerances to keep the transportation system safe and reliable and the track usable for human transportation. Technology is still far away from providing a solution for speeds below 400km/h, and the solutions that are currently available are simply cost-prohibitive.
The problems associated with this project are further compounded by the uncertainty of the whole vehicle solution.
Then there are the physics problem. Just for a brief glimpse on the true nature of the problem, in moderately stiff soils a vehicle traveling above 700km/h triggers a response from the soil that is much like the sonic boom triggered by supersonic planes, but with Raileigh waves. This phenomena is already a major problem in some railway lines operating at lower speeds (in Sweden, for example, where a high-speed track crosses an unusually soft soil), and manifests itself in vibrations that are measured in centimeters. Currently, the only available solution to this problem is essentially reducing the traveling speed on regions where the soil stiffness is low. Yet, in hyperloop's case these issues aren't rare: they are the norm.
Adding to the problem, speeds above 700km/h mean that the vehicle clears a span of around 200m in 1 second, which means that even with the vehicle's load the entire section must have an elevation delta in the milimeter range just to limit the vertical acceleration alone. This level of precision is unheard of in civil and railway engineering, and is something that is very expensive to pull off. Now, consider this issue while adding to the mix issues such as natural changes in the region's relief. These levels of precision require a straighter line with lower inclinations, accompanied with larger turn radii. This means bridges and tunnels for hundreds (if not thousands) of kilometers.
Meanwhile, even high-speed railway has serious feasibility problems, to the point where only a hand-full of high-speed railway lines manage to turn a profit ( Paris-Lion for example).
Meanwhile, in the real world the hyperloop hype competes with air travel, which doesn't require trillion-dollar infrastructure construction and maintenance costs, is very flexible, and is far cheaper to operate.
The investment in high-speed railway lines for travel speeds between 300 and 350km/h only rarely makes sense. That's the main reason why today only a few operators have spent money on that sort of infrastructure, and the vast majority of those operators did only so for political and propaganda reasons. Increasing the infrastructure bill a few orders of magnitude to get the exact same thing that are offered today by conventional rail and air travel is simply unheard of.
> A successful tube transport system could be technologically ground breaking. Theoretically they'd be faster than airplanes and use a fraction of the fuel/energy (once they're constructed of course; not counting development costs).
The track would also be far more expensive to operate and build than high-speed rail in pretty much any aspect of the project, the tolerances that need to be complied with for safety reasons are orders of magnitude smaller than the ones in high-speed rail, and it's impossible to ensure a human-tolerable ride.
It appears that everyone is caught in the romantic vision of the future that the Hyperloop salespeople are dedicated to sell to the public, but rarely are the fundamental problems even mentioned.
There are plenty of good reasons why maglev hasn't caught, and the concept being sold by Hyperloop's sales team is far more limiting and expensive to pull than the maglev concept.
> The thing about hyperloop is that none of the technology is new...or even recent!
...or even works.
It's quite clear that all this hyperloop hype is a publicity scam targeted at states with deep pockets and whose governments are gagging for some propaganda talking point. The people behind hyperloop dedicate themselves to one thing only: generate hype around the project and jump from publicity stunt to publicity stunt.
The end goal is to get a government to shelve a wheelbarrow full of hard cash for them to waste the money building a prototype for propaganda purposes.
> (...) but the heart of the matter in the Dallas case is whether the suspect posed an imminent threat which could not be addressed any other way besides lethal force.
At that time, the assailant already stated his purpose of killing as many police officers he could, and during his rampage he already had killed 5 police officers and gunned down dozen or so victims.
The assailant planned for this sort of attack for some time, he purposely took military training in private weekend warrior schools specifically to conduct the attack he was planning, and he even planned and mobilized himself to use explosives.
The assailant's plans were all suicide missions, and their goal was to inflict the most damage possible.
I'm not an american, and I live in a country where there isn't a single police-involved death for years, and even I am well aware that going with such a radical option was quite obviously the only way the police could ensure that the assailant would cease to be a threat to the public.
My guess is that Venezuela was a theme during the elections because Maduro's regime has been caught bankrolling Podemos, the anti-establishment socialist party that managed to become the second most-voted party in the last two elections.
> Oh, come on. Such activities happen the world and history over regardless of the ostensible public political veneer.
Socialist/communist regimes are founded on a system devised to take away any and all wealth away from the people to handle it to the state, supposedly with the objective of spreading the wealth and taking care of everyone's needs.
In practice, the system takes away any and all wealth from the people, and handles it to the regime's cronies for them to use to pamper themselves as they wish.
The history of socialism repeats itself over and over again. We see it right now in Venezuela, we saw it in Brazil with the successive Worker Party's, we see it right now in Angola as well.
> Virtual inheritance means you have a diamond pattern and haven't separated your components properly.
I've seen this argument pop out time and again as if it was a mantra of sorts, and more often than not it comes from someone with a background almost exclusively founded on Java.
Their line of reasoning essentially boils down to "Java doesn't support it, the people behind Java said something about it, therefore it's bad".
But C++ isn't Java, nor does Java dictate what is correct or what makes sense.
Particularly when the only assertion you could come up with to criticize multiple inheritance was a comment that had nothing to do with C++ or even OO programming, but only to do with your personal taste regarding your superficial impressions regarding software design.
> Then they got on Patreon for the wrong reason. You're supposed to back someone because you like what they're creating, and want them to continue doing so
Sounds like you're admitting that patrons do expect something specific in return.
> Sure. You could say precisely the same about a politician who accepts money from a mafia or large corporation.
...except that is illegal and an absurd example, and the "artist" explicitly sought patrons to provide him money in exchange for his product.
If an "artist" opens a business and attracts clients then he needs to serve his clients with the business he advertised, even if you use strawman arguments to compare them to organized crime.
From the wikipedia article, it appears that typical flow batteries only reach 10% to 20% of lithium polymer's power density.
That means that it would take a flow battery that weights 5 to 10 times as the standard lithium polymer batteries that equip a Tesla/Nissan Leaf/whatever electric car you imagine to deliver the same power.
> Does this means that you are ok with breaking the law if some ones offers you something convenient?
The goal of business regulation is to protect the clients. If a regulation does nothing to protect the clients and only hinders their rights, that regulation is absurd and should be rethought.
> Don't you care about workers rights?
Imposing artificial restrictions on a market is not workers rights. It's corporativism, typical of totalitarian states, which abuses the rights of all citizens of a nation only to guarantee absurd priviledges to a minority.
> Is Uber useful ? no doubt they are, but so are any other illegal taxi service.
It is my understanding that Uber only has a problem with a single service of the many they provide: the rideshare one, where unlicensed and unregistered people get to provide the service for a fee.
This is not the only service provided by uber. Uber also offers transportation services provided by fully licensed and perfectly legal transport operators.
More specifically, some people do a poor job following basic best practices to reduce and manage complexity, such as encapsulation and the tried and true separation of concerns, and then proceed to pin the result of their own failures on abstract concepts, such as programming paradigms.
There's that saying that goes something like "a bad workman blames his tools"... Well, a programmer bitching about basic programming paradigms is just that.
Pray tell, what context justifies arbitrary lynchings, summary executions, extrajudicial capital punishment, and an overall disrespect for human life?
Perhaps it's the view from the high horse I'm sitting on, but when I look throughout europe I don't see nations with major drug problems, and they haven't fixed any problems they had with assassinations.
Could you please provide any insight on what makes this sort of rampant uncivilized behaviour necessary or even remotely justified?