seanflyon

I don't imagine any sort of suspension would be needed. The system is always loaded (with only a slight increase when the vehicle is over a given support because the tube is most of the weight). It needs bearings, but they don't have to move quickly or be particularly low friction. Even if the bearings failed the tube would just slide; you would want to replace them before too much wear, but it would not be urgent.

If that is too complicated, just put in replaceable slide plates. More regular maintenance, but fewer moving parts.

I think that there are a lot of options for reducing friction wear. My first thought would be to put wheels between the tube an its supports (attached to the supports, not the tube).

The design only calls for one station at each end. Many people have said that the best way to deal with thermal expansion is to let the ends (at the 2 stations) move ~500 feet at each end. The alternative is expansion joint every so often along the tube.

Perhaps they can do a better job, but I think tech companies are already pushing for more housing.

The obvious solution is allowing people to build more (and denser) residential, but that is a hard sell around here.

According to http://www.seattle.gov/economicdevelopment/business-owners/e... the median income was $52,048 in 2011. I don't know where the $94,000 number comes from, but I find it suspicious.

> bought as investments and rented

Or bought as investments and not rented out (I hear a lot of anecdotes about this).

I was thinking of something with a slider so you can find that diagram someone drew in the middle of a discussion last week.

A time-lapse would be great as well.

Sulfur compounds are one kind of air pollution. No one is saying that sulfur doesn't count, they are saying that other things count too.

It didn't work this time, but it will land vertically under thrust. Here is a earlier vehicle from the same company:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NANePoo_p30

That makes sense. I would consider a concept to be an idea or a plan, not a working product.

> still in the concept phase

Multiple generations of prototypes and hundreds of thousands of miles driven is well past the concept phase.

What? Of course not. If you think I implied that then you need to reread my post.

We all agree that counterfeiting is a serious problem, so of course there is a governmental agency that covers "Financial Crimes, covering missions such as prevention and investigation of counterfeiting of U.S. currency and U.S. treasury securities, and investigation of major fraud" (according to Wikipedia).

I think you got to the heart of the matter when you wrote "Scale matters". Murdering millions of people is a bigger deal than murdering one person. Theft of millions of dollars is worse than theft of one dollar. The problem I have is the distinction is made not based on scale but by the means of theft. I suppose the idea is that is is worse to steal one dollar each from a million people than a million dollars from one person, but I disagree with that conclusion.

Assuming movement is continuous and not in discrete units.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length

So, extracting value that doesn't belong to you, causing financial harm, but not physical harm. Sounds a lot like theft. If you walk into a bank with phony checks and walk out with money that isn't yours, how is that worse than walking in with a gun or sneaking in at night?

Counterfeiting seems to me to be on par with fraud and theft. Could you explain why you consider it to be on par with treason?

We are not talking about a huge inconvenience, but we are also not talking about a huge effect. If we want to have a significant impact we can either have almost everybody cut their usage in half, or have a few cut their usage by a few percent.

Rainwater is cheaper. IF you look at how much residential users pay, then yeah you see that desalinization would not break the bank, but most water is for farms and they get it by the acre-foot.

Low hanging fruit mean the most impact for least effort. You are talking about inconveniencing almost all the people so that a few can avoid any changes at all. We should just charge more for water for both residential and agricultural use and let people vote with their dollars on how big of an inconvenience it is to them.

The conspicuous absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

I think that you are using a the more general meaning of vertical integration, but in this context it means putting the payload on the rocket while the rocket is standing upright and not on its side.

SpaceX is dramatically more vertically integrated as a company than the ULA (their competitor for government launches).

Residential use is a small enough part of the picture that it is not worth focusing on. Yes it would help to reduce residential use, but if we want to reduce water usage enough to make a difference we have to look at farming.

I don't see any indication that treehau5 thinks farm-related infrastructure is as easily scalable as tech-sector infrastructure nor did treehau5 suggest it would not take years.

Farmers are not the only consumers of water, but they consume approximately 80% of it. We are nowhere near running out of drinking water.

So you mean 25 grams of battery per watt of solar panels?

I have seen a semi-automatic AR-15 clone malfunction an spontaneously become fully automatic. They are not so different from a technical perspective.

These balloons will not be geostationary.

I think you mean 25 grams/Watt-hour and keep in mind that you need ~12 hours of energy storage.