Posts by HelpfulJohn

UK expands police facial recognition rollout with 10 new vans heading to a town near you

Re: "10 new vans heading to a town near you"

" "V" was about an lizard alien invasion."

Yeah, and I never understood that. There is absolutely nothing on nor in this planet that would justify an invasion. I mean the women are very nice and cats are cool but you could hire a couple, milk them for eggs and breed billions back on Planet Vee. Everything else is available an great, huge, literally astronomical amounts closer to Home.

Invading France from England in the 12th Century made a tiny bit of sense in an era of scarce resources such as land but a star-travelling species has entire Galaxies of land to play with.

And, as every SF story tells us, humans are rather annoying.

Even if the V-ans replaced our leaders with their own people in masks (as many people think may have happened in USAlia recently, though I can't see Aliens as being both able to travel between the stars and being that dumb) the effort would far exceed any possible reward.

Aliens just ain't going to war on us. Not because they are nice or peaceful or even enlightened but simply because it's not worth the bother.

Stealing empty planets by the millions is easier and cheaper and doesn't get your people killed by "The Resistance".

Oh, was that off-topic?

Wasp nest at US nuclear site tests ten times over safe radiation limit

It's been done. Many times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Furies_(Roberts_novel)

For some strange reason, loots of people think wasps would make good horror story evil dudes.

I've never really understood that. I like wasps. They're good guys.

Norwegian lotto mistakenly told thousands they were filthy rich after math error

Re: Winners jumping the gun?

"Surely any sensible person would have waited until the money was paid into their accounts before spending excessively??"

Well, I, for one, surely would. Then, as soon as I saw my Current Account credited, I'd move the funds into a Savings Account, just to hinder them clawing it back.

It wouldn't prevent a clawback, if one were supported by some good reason, but it would annoy them. And, if the winnings were large enough, I might even make a few quid out of it in interest. :)

Re: Manual error

"Multiplied by 100. But the article says the amounts were inflated by 10,000x."

Yes, that is correct.

Instead of *dividing* by 100, they did not divide at all, that makes the winnings 100 times larger than they should have been.

Then they compounded this error by *multiplying* by 100, which makes the winnings 100 X 100 times as large as they should have been.

100 X 100 = ten thousand. 10,000 times bigger than it should have been.

The maths works fine.

World's largest camera shows galaxy in 3,200 megapixel glory as Rubin telescope goes online

Pulsars being a fine example of this.

Quick question ...

"Women are capable, but they cannot lead and must remain silent."

Has anyone pointed this out to the loud Congress-critters who are, apparently, female?

Or to the majority who are, apparently, not? Just so those ones can then mention it to the female ones?

I'm not against ladies speaking, I actually like a few of them but if it's their *religion* ...

That's a lot.

"The camera in the instrument weighs 2,800 kilograms (6,200 pounds) ..."

That's just less than the Earth's StarGate. It's a tiny bit more than my digital camera weighs and I thought carrying that around was tiring.

US lawmakers fire back a response to Trump's NASA cuts

"... and believe that climate change isn't real, including Trump himself."

I do wonder whether that is entirely true?

Or if it is that the President just does not have the mental carrying capacity to understand what "climate", "weather" and "climate change" are?

My cat did understand "sunny" and "rainy" but he thought that I - as the resident omnipotence - could arrange the latter to becoming the former. Perhaps the President is limited to such an intellectual level by his lack of mental powers and utter lack of any sort of formal education?

It would not be that he does not *believe* the Science, he just has no idea what all of those words mean.

I'm not insulting the President, many, many people don't understand any of what Science is, does or tells us. Many people just *can't*; they, too lack the mental tools, just as some of us lack the mental tools to do advanced calculus or to learn a new language in a matter of hours. It's no failing. It's nothing to be embarassed about. It's nothing to have a temper tantrum over when other people *do* understand these things.

Some of those of us who do not take our comprehension so far as it will go and then rely on the experts, the Scientists, those who *do* undertand those things. Those who have spent, in many cases, decades of their own lives trying to improve ours.

Politicians used to do this, too. Some of them, sometimes.

It is sad to see that few of them now accept advice from wiser, more-educated minds. It is sadder to see them denigrate and demean those very minds who are working for the betterment of Mankind and Life in general.

The politicians really should just stop, pause, consider what they are leaving their great-granchildren as a legacy and *listen*.

It *enhances* not diminishes your manhood to listen. Especially when you are wrong. Or ignorant of a subject.

I wonder whether we could help them to see this truth?

To see that a Real Man can say both "I was wrong" and "I do not know"?

A president or any other bureaucrat, is not supposed to know everything. He is supposed to have advisors. He is also supposed to listen to them and to pick good ones.

Dissension is neither treason nor mutiny. It is simply a difference in understanding of a situation.

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

Re: Musk falls out with Trump, Optimus in peril

Taking his cues from Science Fiction?

There's an awful lot of background from the TV serial "Continuum" in your post. Not that "Continuum" did it first but it was a fun exploration of a dystopian, Corporate future.

The sort of future Mush might have liked and which I was slightly surprised that the TV comanies allowed to be demonised.

Re: Tragedy

Just as an anecdotal semi-data point: I see a lot of E.V.'s in southrn UKland. Amazon Prime and other delivery companies use them.

They probably don't amount to 1% of the total traffic and few of them ae pasenger 'buses but they do seem to be getting more common with every year.

I've yet to see a Tesla. I doubt that that is significant.

Re: It's no suprise.

"And... Jesus, they're ugly."

Zoot suits are ugly. Bustles are grotesquely ugly, uncomforatble and downright evil. Cabbage Patch dolls were ugly (do they still exist?) Men wearing their underwear and trousers low enough to expose their bums are ugly, to many of us. Lots of things are ugly yet are strangely popular. There are incredibly ugly males who have managed to attract and to marry incredibly bright, talented and beautifiul women - I know this from experience :) .

Ford's Model "T" is ugly, yet it was popular.

Ugly isn't always a dawback. Sometimes it is only a parochial, insular and temporary matter of taste which - in some future date - becomes beauty.

Twenty years from now, if there is still a civilisation, the lines of the Cybertruck may be thought of by critics and consumers alike as classical, clean, perfectly produced and tightly made.

Or perhaps not. Maybe "ugly" is timeless and universal?

Kawasaki and Foxconn build robot nursing assistant to tackle hospital scutwork

Re: It's Quicker by Tube

Or rodents, chasing after the sandwiches and becoming stuck, expiring and - them not having the proper barcodes - being shunted to a dead space for "investigation" , which will naturally take months. :)

Re: I don't see that working

"Not all hospital work is equal, ..."

And if we can prevent nurses from a lifetime of back pain caused by lifting and moving patients weighing in at five times their mass that can only be a good thing.

Even if the robots do nothing more than lift stuff, it is still a worthy innovation.

If they can also deploy A.E.D.'s and other tools either on command or semi-autonomusly, so much the better. Trying to keep a flat-liner alive while screaming for human help can only ever be a good thing.

It was once commonplace for human patients to request that some types of human be excluded from caring for them. That sort of prejudice has mostly vanished, which is a good, lovely and beautiful thing. Any prejudice against robotic assistance will eventually disappear after the patients gain greater understanding of the powers and the limitations of their robotic helpers. No robot could ever, *ever* totaly replace human medics of any rank or speciality but they could be useful tools. Just as stethoscopes, thermometers and those little watches are. Even relatively dim patients could, over time and interactions, learn to see this.

Even without "The Three Laws", robots are never going to go rampaging through the halls annihilating anything that breathes. They simply won't have the programming nor the carrying capacity to manage such a task. Unless, of course, they are running on Windows.

But, of course, no one would *ever* run mission-critical stuff on Windows.

Hmm, it's taken a while.

"The Door Into Summer", R. A. Heinlein, 1957.

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

Would it be possible ...

Would it be possible, and cheap, to have school bus lights flash a kill-code that Teslas, and every other FSD machine would recognise? Preferably a code that humans could not see so migraines and epilestic crashes would be avoided.

Would it be possible to have a Q-code or bar-code on the sleeves of clothing that the sensors of electric vehicles would recognise as a kill-code from a safe stopping distance? These could be printed in "colours" that humans can't see so no fashions would be disrupted.

Would it be possible to have, on the rear of other vehicles a "back-off, no tail-gating" code that would tell E.V.'s to slow down and to back off a little so they had sufficient braking distance?

And if we could do these for E.V.'s, could we have them for petrol-fueled cars, too?

Those sorts of things were possible in the 1930's though we never used them. We preferred to allow for tens of thousands of deaths by impact with cars because that was cheaper.

X's new 'encrypted' XChat feature seems no more secure than the failure that came before it

Re: I wonder

"... would the smartest man in the world feel he need to prove that "achievement" to all the less smarter people?"

Truthfully, no, I do not. :)

Re: Would Elon do that?

"There are fringe groups who claim the Roman Catholic church as a hierarchy strayed into heresy in the 1960s, and only they spotted it."

Using the local common language instead of Latin for services and other stuff was considered a ReallyBadMove and possibly blasphemy by many.

The numbers who care are reducing as crumbly and crinkly curmudgeons die off but they stil linger on a little.

From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council

"Other changes that followed the council included the widespread use of vernacular languages in the Mass instead of Latin, the allowance of communion under both kinds for the laity, ..."

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

Re: "poses no danger to Earth"

Only if you have the great misfortune of living in London.

Or, perhaps, Luton.

Re: "poses no danger to Earth"

A "steady state" of this Culture, one using oil and coal, can not be continued for a millennium. There isn't sufficient oil and coal for that. It's simple arithmetic. Earth is so big, she can only contain so much oil, if we burn it at any rate it will, must, eventually run out. There can *never* be any more made.

So, either Man does something terribly clever and nice and becomes the sort of calm, lovely, united species that can create and sustain a better society with bettter energy supplies or, very shortly, there will be non-interfertile remnant species trying to survive in a zombie-infested, biologically contaminated nuclear wasteland.

I've seen a politician, I know which I'd bet on.

"The Wizards lived in castles miles tall. They faught wars with Wizard weapons. We watched the skies burn."

Cruithne?

"One is that it's the first identified quasi-satellite of a major planet."

I thought that Earth (which, according to IAU rules is not really a planet as she hasn't cleared her orbit: the Moon is in it and Earth isn't "in hydrostatic equilibrium": she has lumpy bits in the South Atlantic) had some of those? Cruithne for one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3753_Cruithne

Don't these guys read their own Press releases?

Oh, and don't the four gassy planets have loads of things like this? Of course, maybe the IAU don't think Saturn is a "major" planet?

Saturn runs rings around Jupiter

Re: Should we Pluto some of them.

Any object, however large or small, orbiting a bigger object is a "moon" of said larger object. Thus all planets are also moons. Also many stars, Globular Clusters and galaxies are moons.

This would, of course, necessitate us finding obscure deities after whom we would name dustgrains, hydrogen atoms and water molecules but I'm fairly sure that Humanity has sufficient numbers of gods, demons, godlings, demi-gods and Marvel Superheroes to go around.

Note: this defininition does not differentiate between "real" natural moons and artificial ones so dead space stations, lost spanners, drifting screws from assembly missions, dropped, dried bacon baps and elderly weather satellites would be included. That makes life easier, yes?

What of edge cases where two objects of absolutely equal size orbit each other? We simply decide that *both* are smaller than the other and *both* are moons. That way, we save on bothering to measure them to any degree of precision.

Yes, moons can have moons, too, so the moon, Saturn, can have littler moons.

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: making an essential appliance too damn complicated

"There is literally no way to improve this thing by making it more complicated."

Have it tell you, through an application on your mobile 'phone, when the last bag of curry made from the left-over turkey is being used? Or when you're running out of space for the bodies? Or when the mains is off and the ice cream is under threat of melting?

Have it cool to -18 in one part for the meats, -25 in another for the ice cream and -80 in the centre for the solid CO2? With, of course, an application on your mobile 'phone to show you a thermal map?

Have it have the ability to convert from C to degrees C to Farenheit to Kelvin using ....'phone?

There's *loads* of ways a "smart£ freezer could amply improve your life and reward you for the investment.

Firefox ditches Do Not Track because nobody was listening anyway

Re: Tracking

Not once you have used them to carry tea.

Most seriously not once you have used them to contain strong, tasty tea.

Which brings up a thinky, *can* chocolate be made strong enough to withstand hot tea? Without melting?

In short, are chocolate tea-pots even possible?

Not tea-pot shaped chocolate bars but actual, useful functional tea-pots made from chocolate instead of glass?

Materials technology is wonderful but is that beyond even our 21st Century powers?

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Re: That reminds me of "The Plan"

The "security issue" is a bad certificate.

The site's certificate has been issued to a multitude of other sites but it seems to be valid for those so I went to CATB. It looks fine. No scripts and other nasties hijacked me.

There is a weird issue with spaces being shown as diamonds with ?'s inside them but Firefox can correct this. "Toolbar > View > Repair Text Encoding".

The CATB site itself looks interesting and potentially useful but perhaps saner people than me will want to avoid it.

Merry Christmas and have as wonderful a New Year as possible.

Congress ponders underwater alien civilizations, human hybrids, and other unexplained stuff

They should watch more TV.

There's ten years of "Stargate: SG1", a prequel movie, five years of "Stargate: Atlantis", two years of "Stargate: Universe" and at least two "SG-1" movies that the USAlien Congresscritters could be using as "evidence" in this hunt for THE TRUTH.

Should they need more documentary evidence, there are many years worth of "Doctor Who" files that they could catch up with. Those even relate some of the activities of the very important United Nations Intelligence Task-force, U.N.I.T. which has protected the world and the human species since the 1970's.

And they could ask for copies of the super-secret filmed documentaries collected under the project name "U.F.O.", which discusses some of the background of the S.H.A.D.O. planetary policing agency.

There are others, including the "Secret Wars" paper-copy documents, excerpts of which, amended and rheavily redacted, were once published by the Marvel Corporation but those first three should be enough to give the Congresscritters sufficient expert testimonies to begin their highly vital work.

Getting the Goa'uld or the Aesir (the badly named "Asgard") to sit in on a Senate Hearing, even a closed-door, top-secret one could be difficult and sending a subpoena ad testificandum and a subpoena duces tecum to the lifeform called The Beyonder, which, as an aspect of the Cosmic Cube may not even have an email address, would be problematic but some of the human agents are still among us.

And I'm sure Hydra and A.I.M. would be delighted to testify.

.

.

.

I need to get out more.

We regret to inform you Earth will not be destroyed by an asteroid within 1,000 years

Re: What

Errr.. isn't the proper form of having been made extinct, "extinguished"?

Falcon Heavy sends NASA probe to metal-rich asteroid Psyche

Re: Next big crater on the Moon?

"Err, what do you think would happen if a sizable asteroid collided with the moon without being slowed down?"

"What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth?

Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledgehammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad." - Dave Barry

"I would worry about a big crater, debris being flung widely over the Moon's surface,"

Oh, and those have *NEVER* happened on the Moon. Not in all of her history. Why, it's almost impossible to find any impact craters anywhere on the Moon's surface and debris splashed from impacts such as the one that happened in the centre of Tycho just *never* happens.

"possible moonquakes,"

Yes, but they would be yards and yards and *yards* away from fragile buildings in Los Angeles so there wouldn't need to be any movies about them.

" some of the debris being flung into the space between the Earth and Moon."

Well, okay, that's a maybe. But stuff gets dropped onto this planet all of the time. Millions of tons per year, every year and quite a few human beings have survived this massive bombardment for a ew days. Anyway, if we're dropping rocks onto Farside, Earth isn't going to be hit by much. And we could always film the bits that do get through and save Hollywood a packet on special effects.

" Any installations on the Moon could be negatively affected by this."

Protective, transparent, washable domes around the artifacts. Hairspray on the foot- and rover prints. Is there anything else up there needing to be protected?

"This probably wouldn't be as bad as an asteroid hitting the Earth, but still it doesn't seem like a good idea to me."

Well, it depends where on the Earth one hits. There's a lot of places no one would miss.

Farside.

There's an entire fifty per cent of the Moon that dioes not have valued and precious Apollo artifacts on it. It currently does not have anybody's artifacts on it though our pals in China do have odd ideas about landing there for little holidays. We'd only need to pick a day when the Chinese robots had all gone back home so we didn't damage their stuff.

It may be that were we to slightly gently-ish drop a mile or two of metal-rich stuff onto Farside the vibrations could erase the footprints and rover tracks and the dust could could perhaps coat the laser ranging mirror thingys but if we're going to go there in crowds to pick up the splashed bits of the incoming rocks, which we'd need to do to complete the "mining" bit of the process, we could always hairspray the prints and cover the artifacts with protective, washable domes - both of which would be fun ideas anyway.

Re: My prediction ....

A dirty snowball is both volatiles for air, water and farms and fuels for the City-Farm and any drive it may someday decide to install. Sucking up comets to make cabbages, onions, meat and pharmaceuticals that can be delivered to any point on Earth cheaper than Amazon could ever do might take some sense, long-term planning and investment but the pay-off would be large enough to make Amazon look like a corner shop.

The metals in even a metal-poor rock from the Belt are a bonus. The valuable thing is the rock itself. Having a new nation to build would be like finding the Americas, only better because it would begin with high-tech and advanced Sciences.

The stuff dug out to make the central cavity and the housing and stuff inside the rock could be sold to Earth cheaper than any surface-based mining company could supply refined metal yet would still be pure profit for the asteroid miners.

It's all in how you see the thing.

To the asteroid guys, the metals are mostly waste that they can use some of to build extra bits onto their home-world. To Earth they are valuable resources. Put the two together and you have the basis of Commerce.

And you have some people becoming unimaginably wealthy but that's okay.

Re: My prediction ....

"Moving the entire asteroid into Earth orbit is a massive waste of energy."

Not if you want to build a City-Farm in high Earth orbit. Hollowing out the thing would mean using the "useless" debris to fuel the economy of metal-hungry Earth and Moon while the resultant caverns would become habitats. Some of he tailings would also be used to build external structures, labs, entertainment centres, zero-gee sports arenas, "high-gravity" hotels on the skin, research tools, loads of stuff, but that would be a bonus.

Once a couple of hundred, mile-wide "rocks" are floating over Earth, some would find HEO too crowded and would migrate slowly to circle the other useful bits of debris in the System, Mars, Mercury, Venus, the Trojan Zones, Miranda, eventually the Oort Cloud.

From the dark but rich zone of comets around Sol to that around Proxima (if there is one) or Wolf 359, is a mere matter of drifting, conservation and good engineering. Oh, and patience, lots and lots of patience but if your entire Culture is contained in your falling world that isn't really an issue. Circling Sol at a couple of light-yers or drifting towrds a lesser light are pretty much the same thing, with the major difference being that Barnard's Oort cloud wiould be quieter, for a while.

Once a couple of other stars are "colonised", it is inevitable that the galaxy would be. It is inevitabe that some of the more idiotic City-Farms would try to make the huge jump to the Magellanics and to the big, bright light of Andromeda. M31 is *such* a temptation.

Dropping *one* falling rock into high Earth orbit would start the eternal ubiquity of the children of Man.

It's a shame that we'll never do it.

Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

Re: Western Wyoming geological (in)stability.

Emm, I htought the recent thinking was that the hotspot was moving under the thick, mountainous bit outside of the park and that Yellowstone would never erupt again?

Also that it never really was a "super"-vocano?

While the BBC drama "Supervolcano" had it as its main point that the caldera was 40,000 years overdue and could boil the planet at any moment. It's a fun story but not entirely up to date.

The origin of 3D Pipes, Windows' best screensaver

Re: Personally

One of the nice tricks you could do with the toasters was to change them into other objects by editing two hex characters in the script.

One could then save many of those scripts and write a DOS batchfile to swap them around.

It wasn't "real" programming but it was nice.

Adobe users just now getting upset over content scanning allowance in Terms of Use

Re: Windows OS hoovering

Hmm.

To me, "The GIMP" is plural and has nothing to do with images. "The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search", The GIMPS, Prime95 software from https:///www.mersenne.org .

I've never even seen the other one and I've certainly never used it.

Oh, and the name may be "stupid" but it is an acronym for "GNU Image Manipulation Program" which is quite a sensible name as it's what the software does. Maybe, though they could have called it "GNU Licence Image Manipulation Program" or GLIMP?

Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China

Re: China Singing

"Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye"

"Na-na is the saddest word"?

Well, in this context, perhaps it should be "Fr-fr"? Or could francium and fluorine make a cell? Temporarily.

Re: Na Ion Battery surely

So, "Naib" for Natrium-ion batteries?

Is "Naib" a rude word in a recognised human language?

Oh, Wikoi-poo says it's Arabic and not at all rude. That's nice.

Re: Written while listening to to "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads

If you lose 50% of your atoms in 22 minutes you can solve that by simply having lots and lots and *lots* of atoms.

If you start off with a battery weighing in at a couple of hundred tons, it should be able to power a 'phone for weeks.

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

I tried this. It worked.

For a couple of weeks.

Then I got distracted by "life" and the backlog started.

Then my scanner got broke by Win XP so I needed a newer one, which I never did buy. So the backlog grew.

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

It may come as a surprise to the guys born after 2000 A.D. but this also happens with digital file systems.

Even email programs.

With great storage comes greater ability to store tremendous amounts of trash you'll never need.

But I *know* that that one necessary file is in here ................... somewhere.

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

Make a note of where the screw is, remove the screw, tape it to something solid and not loseable then move on to the next.

Ideally, use a marker to number the screw as you tape it in case some are of different shapes, sizes or genders.

In the age of digital cameras, including 'phones, you may possibly use pictures instead of notes.

Taking the time to do it right can save *days* of scrabbling about when you don't.

And how often do I take my own advice?

Guess. :)

Apple unveils M4 chip with neural engine capable of 38 TOPS, and some other kit

Can't the iPads be hacked to stuff MacOS onto them?

Or does that void the warranty?

Can it do distributed computing such as BOINC [ https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ ] and GIMPS [ https://www.mersenne.org/ ]?

I like those and have been contributing a little dribble of CPU for decades.

How do you get four elephants into a Mini?

First, take out the whales.

Cannibalise to upgrade my Mini?

Is it theoretically possible to cannibalise the new iPad to put its M4 chip into my M2 Mini?

I like my Mini a lot but I suspect that I'd like it even more if it had two CPU's and more memory.

I'm not thinling of doing this myself, of course, but I know a guy who'se Authorised. :)

So you've built the best tablet, Apple. Show us why it matters

Re: Just think

"Buy a GaN charger. If you’re a serious traveller this is a no brainer."

I would agree that it's a no-brainer. Anyone with a brain would have given at lest one web-linkie to at least one supplier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=gan+charger

https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?q=gan+charger&cat=web&language=english

That took very little brain and about thirty seconds.

Oh, and for those not interested enough to look but stil wondering "GaN" is Gallium Nitride. Gallium is silicon's cousin.

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

Re: Let me guess...

Hmm ...

I sometimes take a taxi from the Town Centre to my home. Ten minutes or so at a cost of about £10 or one pound per minute. Assuming you could average 50% usage on a taxi over the year, with it charging and doing distributed computing projects the rest of the time, that's about 60x24X365/2 = £262,800 per year. That is well worth having and more than the cost of the car, charging and inevitable random fixes.

It could be that Tesla-taxis may charge less due to them not having a human driver to feed or licence or they could possibly need that slack to cover lawsuits so let's run with 200,000 per car, per year.

With, say, a million cars, that's an income of about 262,800,000,000 per year, not all of it profits. That is slightly more than Musty owns at present. A million taxis isn't a lot if you scatter them over the entire planet and serve the entire population. If they become cheaper to build, cheaper to run, cheaper to hire and far more numerous, the profits on such a fleet could be astonishing.

If Muesli has ever been in a taxi and paid for a journey (is that likely?) he might have run those simplistic numbers. They are very attractive numbers. He might even think that he could stop *selling* cars and instead use them as taxis.

Then he could pay for his rockets to Mars.

Re: Farts

Could we tell Old Musty that the idea would work on the Moon?

It could even be a monorail, above-ground, so the passengers could see some scenery. With, perhaps, underground parts avoiding critical structures.

Musty is possibly malleable enough to see this as a good idea and building it would mean we'd need cities to serve as stops and transit points.

Lunar civilisation built because a bunch of billionaires want to one-up one another with a truly stupid notion?

Re: Farts

Doesn't that depend on how it got stuck?

If it slowly ground to a halt on spilled beers and wines and an assortment of cheeses, or on the rodents eating said spills, perhaps the deceleration would be survivable.

Until the air ran out. Or the vending machines and everyone reverted to cannibalism.

Have we considered the air? And, perhaps, some jolly pranksters with helium, sulpher dioxide or nerve agents? Or those who eat loads of beans before traveling? Or those delightful folk who live in torrid climes and have yet to hear about showers? Or laundry.

Hyperloops are potentially *lots* of fun. :)