they got 5-point ratings in all of the subcategories (which isn't necessary for a 5-point overall rating, and in fact is extremely unusual, if not unique
Volvo S60 also maxed all the individual tests, but I think the Model S got there first.
It's not a truly absolute scale, it's just this year's flat scale. The scale is periodically redrawn, preventing multi-year comparisons from being made. This year's 5-star may not be last year's 5-star.
A variable scale would effectively leave carmakers unsure of what regulatory bar they had to meet.
Except the test isn't pass/fail (ie, can or can't sell). It's designed to give the impression of a comparison between vehicles which have all met the minimum standards for sale. (Go to the NHTSA website, they hammer over and over the idea that stars=safety.)
Imagine a carmaker that produced an incredibly safe, unaffordable fortress that wrecked the curve.
On a truly "absolute scale", that would be a 6 or 7 star rating, leaving all the 5-star cars suddenly looking very sad indeed. As it should be! Instead, the 7+ scoring fortress and the barely 4.5 scoring shit-box-de-la-muerta both score the highest possible "NHTSA 5 Star Rating! * * * * *", until the NHTSA decides to change the test (with no way for consumers to make a year-to-year comparison.)
Tesla Model S and the Volvo S60 maxed out every test last year, but 19 other vehicles that year also scored "5 star ratings" in spite of failing to max out every test. The two perfect scoring vehicles gained nothing from their extra performance, and now, apparently, they can't even tell you they scored more than other manufacturers, even though NHTSA, as I said, harps on that stars=safety.
Either the testing should be pass/fail and no more, increasing in difficulty each year at a rate predictable to manufacturers. Or the scoring should be numerical (no "stars") and on an absolute scale for each test, and the individual results for every vehicle ever tested be made available for easy comparison. (You can look up the overall "star" rating for any model, but you can't list all SUVs with the highest roll-over scores, listed so you can compare their front and side collision scores. And if the data exists, there's no reason why it can't be made available in that form.)
The NHTSA doesn't want manufacturers to optimise for the particular suite of sample accident scenarios to gain an extra 0.1 score and beat their rivals, because that would not mean that the real-world safety was improved and might even mean that safety declined slightly in non-tested accident scenarios. By rounding the scores it eliminates the motivation for this pointless effort,
If that were true, they wouldn't give the precise VSS scores to the manufacturers, just a "where you failed" review for individual tests. In the scenario Mysidia described (4.4 versus 4.6), there's every reason for a manufacturer to want to sneak above that.5 mark, in order to get a "NHTSA 5-Star Rating! * * * * *". If you were a manufacturer, wouldn't you give up a few percent of real-world safety for that extra star (by sneaking from 4.4 to 4.6)? Say by enlarging the rear pillars to cheaply improve your inverted-drop roof-crush score (your area of lowest performance) in spite of loss of visibility it causes (and thus increased real-world accidents), rather than actually improving roof-crush performance through proper structural changes. Or sacrificing your top score in roll-over stability by adding or removing elements to improve your very low-scoring rear collision survival test. Whereas if you weren't given a VSS score for each test, you would only know that the review says your rear-collision survivability sucks, and you'd have to work to improve it without reducing safety in other areas (because you wouldn't know where you exceeded the tests and thus have margin to sacrifice.) The current system clearly encourages manufacturers to "build to the test" at the expense of real-world safety.
Good. The system has no credibility. When NHTSA makes tests harder, or adds new tests, they revamp the scoring so that it 5 stars is still the maximum - even though new cars may be, by NHTSA's own testing, safer than previous 5-star cars.
What's the point letting manufacturers advertise an unqualified "NHTSA 5-star rating" when the number of meaningless unless compared solely with the batch of cars that went though the same tests in the same year, and may have no relationship with the identically phrased ratings from a year before or a year after? Unless the buyers dig down into which batch of models went through which specific testing, there's no way to know what "5-Stars (2010)" and "4-Stars (2012)" comparatively means.
At least on planets there is a veritable soup of energy and compounds
Everything that exists in and on the planets of the solar system, baring that which chemically formed later, originated in the nebula from which the solar system formed. And studies of other nebula show the most complex organic molecules we can detect by spectrum. (Ie, each time we work out how to look for something more complex, we find it in nebula. Not very complex - we're only up to "Organic Chemistry 102": naphthalene, glycine, kerogens, multi-shell fullerenes, etc - but we haven't reached a limit yet.)
An entire solar system, not just the thin cruft on the surface of Earth but whole planets worth of dust and ice, mixing and colliding, sticking and breaking apart, in conditions ranging from in close to the forming sun to well beyond the ice-line. If life can form on very early Earth in just a couple of hundred million years amid the late-heavy bombardment, it can surely form in all that over the preceding billion or so years.
Okay, it might not, but it's an easy proposition to test, and if it did form there, it would mean life is everywhere. Which is what makes it so frustrating that no missions ever try to directly detect Earth-like extremophiles anywhere in the solar system. It's like watching someone trying to work out whether they are in the middle of a forest by taking temperature readings. "Just look for some freakin' trees!" "But it might not be that kind of forest." "And it takes one look to work out if it is!" "But that's only giving us one result and there's a lot of competition for funding..." "Argh! It's the result!"
Tidal effects don't require axial rotation, only the orbit. For example, a tether in orbit will always point towards and away-from the centre of gravity of its primary. They quickly become tide locked because of their exaggerated shape. The two ends experience a force towards, and away from, the centre of gravity of the primary. The same thing happens with a spherical object, but takes longer. That's why the moon is tidally locked.
Essentially, the radius of orbit is the only line where gravitational and centripetal forces are in balance. Anything inside that line is travelling slower than orbital speed at that radius and is pulled towards the primary, anything outside is travelling faster than orbital speed at that radius and is pulled away from the primary. You don't see it in normal man-made objects because they are too small, but a larger object (or an elongated one like a tether) will experience it.
The moon doesn't experience "tides" in the sense of a moving wave travelling through the surface. But it does experience tidal forces, and is exactly as deformed (elongated towards and away from Earth) as its own internal gravity allows. However, as I said, the effect is always in both directions, and is weakest at the centre.
[When I said Earth has two tides per day, I didn't mean one high and one low. I meant two highs and two lows. One high tide is pointing towards the moon (lagging slightly behind), the other is on the other side of the Earth, pointing away from the moon. The two lows are in between, at 90 degrees either side. If the Earth became tide-locked to the moon (which it should in 5-7 billion years) it would still have those two high spots in the ocean and crust, one fore and one aft, and two low spots in between. The only change is that they wouldn't be moving around the Earth.]
Basically, from zero to deadly in no seconds flat. I would not want to be within a 200 foot radius of any battery used in an electric car if it were to puncture.
And yet the driver not only kept driving after the impact, but then (after the second warning) had time to pull over, collect his things and calmly get out.
And after the fire, which was easily put out, he recovered his other possessions from the car, which were all unburnt because not only did the fire never breach the passenger compartment, the heat from the fire never reached it. Theoretically, he could have sat in the car the whole time. I've only seen one vehicle fuel fire, and even though the fire dept was there in a few minutes, there was nothing left afterwards but bare metal.
Modern coal plants also release less other pollutants (such as NOx, PAHs, PM2.5, etc) than the vehicle fleet, and other sources (gas, hydro, solar, nukes) are even better.
It also means that all your remaining emissions/pollution is located at the plant. [Except when they're on fire.] Upgrade or replace the plant and you've reduced or eliminated the emissions for every existing electric car, not just new ones. What upgrade could do that with ICE vehicles? Switching to unleaded or low-sulphur diesel were about the only things, everything further improvement (catalytic converters, better efficiency) requires changing vehicles each time. But one you've electrified the fleet, you can "upgrade them" as often as you want by changing their source of electricity.
However, every ICE vehicle comes with one of those installed under the hood. Most conventional car fires happen at the engine, not the tank. Usually due to a ruptured fuel line or broken fuel filter. The fuel pump then happily keeps spraying fuel onto the fire until the engine finally dies.
Not necessarily. While twitchy, immediate reaction needs to happen at a low latency, any broader environmental modelling, lighting and background rendering can absorb greater latency without harming the game-play. So the regional server farm can push off the heavier load of the latency-tolerant processing to more distant servers that aren't being utilised fully. You might see three layers to the game, the press-a-control-something-happens layer on the console, the things-reacting-immediately layer at the regional server, and everything else (including pre-rendering feeding the other two layers) happening wherever there's a spare cycle on the grid.
Tidal effects don't work like that. It's a stretching, not a one directional pull. It would elongate the core, not pull it towards Earth relative to the rest of the moon. The oceans on Earth experience two daily tides for that reason, the oceans bulge both towards and away from the moon. (So does the crust, but less obviously.)
Moreso, the closer you are to the centre of mass, the less tidal effects you experience. So the moon's core would experience less tidal force than the crust.
For $50 billion dollars, you think they could have chipped in a little to build a flame carrier to safely reach ISS alight, and a torch that can be lit in a vacuum during the space walk.
Wrestling with corruption at the Olympics. Gives a more general overview of the long history of Olympic corruption. Put simply, it's baked into the DNA of the entire organisation.
No. For an object to be going at 800m/s at reentry (ground/atmosphere rotation speed), then it must be at the top (apogee) of an eccentric orbit with a perigee much lower. And lower is inside the atmosphere, which means it already burnt up. The only other way is if the object is in a suborbital, ballistic path. Think SpaceShipOne or Virgin Galactic. (Or any sounding rocket.) Straight up, straight down. One time only. No orbit.
If you are picturing a satellite in an eccentric orbit that has its apogee at geosync altitudes (34 thousand km) and a perigee at the top of the atmosphere (say, 100km above the surface), then at perigee the satellite will be moving faster than a satellite in a circular low orbit. So it's reentry speed will be higher. (About 2km/s higher, so 30% faster.)
Is there enough atmosphere in GEO to cause satellites to slow down (and hence speed up, I love orbital mechanics) enough to significantly reduce altitude?
Tidal effects will cause them to drift, so they won't remain geostationary/geosynchronous, but are they any more likely to degrade than move higher?
Regardless of quality, would anyone want to drive a vehicle like that on most roads and risk getting rear-ended by someone texting and didn't notice (or care) about the situation around them?
Hit the least favourite car of the least favourite nephew of the local dictator, spend the rest of your short life in prison (possibly with your family), or be killed outright by the nephew's security detail.
There was an episode of Top Gear where Hammond was test driving a supercar (Lambo baby-G?) in the Emirates and a local oil prince heard about it and apparently wanted to race them in his $2m MacMerc SLR. Without any notice, the police were ordered to close the main road so that the prince could have a drag race. You could see how very slightly freaked out Hammond was by the whole thing.
These people do not play by the rules you imagine. If they are worried about traffic, they will have the roads closed so they can cruise (or race) in comfort, like the sort of images used in car commercials.
You answered your own question. They go to the US to enjoy being feted by US aristocracy. Letting someone lick your nuts doesn't mean you "love and respect" them, often it means only that you know you have absolute power over them. And having power over the powerful, watching them degrade themselves to please you, must be a heady experience.
With its fins and aerodynamic shape, GOCE will maintain a stable position in orbit as it approaches entry.
Why don't they use the reaction wheels make it tumble before reentry? The higher in the atmosphere it breaks up, the more of the internal components will burn up before impacting.
I'd definitely say energy-absorbing over just more+thicker armour. Something like woven kevlar, I wouldn't even include the steel sandwich, and allow the batteries to move a few inches away from the impact. And a fire suppression system in the battery compartment that triggers when the fire-fire-pull-over-now alarm goes off.
[This fire was supposedly caused by a tow hitch on the road. That's not a small piece of metal. Maybe they need a cattle guard (cow catcher) like the old steam trains. Something that sits ahead of the battery pack and deflects debris to the side, rather than up. (Or up, but into an energy absorbing "catcher" box.)]
But it sounds like the "design flaw" isn't the battery pack, but the way the car squats down at highway speeds. A software update that turns off (or dials back) that feature would likely immediately end the fires (and hence the bad publicity). After Tesla improves the armour in the second generation vehicles, they can bring the feature back in.
And really, what's the minimum wage stockperson going to do even if they see you? Do you think they get any of that sweet money the store gets from sucking the advertiser's cock? They're probably just as annoyed at being exposed to this noise NON STOP for their entire shift. And even if they aren't-- the store ain't paying them nearly enough to care.
You'd think so, but people who work for shitty organisations tend to "kick down". The company enforces idiotic policies on their boss, their boss mindlessly enforces the letter-of-the-law of the idiotic policies on staff, and staff mindlessly enforce them on you. You and lowest-level workers should find yourself naturally conspiring to undermine idiotic policies, but in the real world it rarely happens.
[Aside: Local department store has these in every isle. Mostly "produce demonstrations", ie, infomercials. They've upgraded them with hidden power supplies and no off-switch, but I can still turn down the volumes as I walk past. Obviously customers were turned them off, the store took the hint... and made them impossible to turn off. Sigh.]
I said, "outside of the military". The wikipedia definition is based on (mainly US) military use.
Neither the US Federal, nor state assault weapon legislation uses that definition. Including California, where the shooting actually took place. But every single fucking time a new shooting is reported the same whinging idiots like you repeat the same bullshit "assault rifle means machine gun" gun-nut meme because oh horror the media correctly referred to a weapon that is legally defined as a assault rifle as an "assault rifle".
Question 9 was actually "Write a subtraction story for 8 - _ = 2; Draw a picture". In other words, it had nothing to do with Q8. I made the same mistake on the first read.
(I don't know what a subtraction story is. I'm guessing it's a word problem? By that stage, it looks like the poor kid had pretty much just given up.)
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they got 5-point ratings in all of the subcategories (which isn't necessary for a 5-point overall rating, and in fact is extremely unusual, if not unique
Volvo S60 also maxed all the individual tests, but I think the Model S got there first.
It's not on a curve, it's an absolute scale.
It's not a truly absolute scale, it's just this year's flat scale. The scale is periodically redrawn, preventing multi-year comparisons from being made. This year's 5-star may not be last year's 5-star.
A variable scale would effectively leave carmakers unsure of what regulatory bar they had to meet.
Except the test isn't pass/fail (ie, can or can't sell). It's designed to give the impression of a comparison between vehicles which have all met the minimum standards for sale. (Go to the NHTSA website, they hammer over and over the idea that stars=safety.)
Imagine a carmaker that produced an incredibly safe, unaffordable fortress that wrecked the curve.
On a truly "absolute scale", that would be a 6 or 7 star rating, leaving all the 5-star cars suddenly looking very sad indeed. As it should be! Instead, the 7+ scoring fortress and the barely 4.5 scoring shit-box-de-la-muerta both score the highest possible "NHTSA 5 Star Rating! * * * * *", until the NHTSA decides to change the test (with no way for consumers to make a year-to-year comparison.)
Tesla Model S and the Volvo S60 maxed out every test last year, but 19 other vehicles that year also scored "5 star ratings" in spite of failing to max out every test. The two perfect scoring vehicles gained nothing from their extra performance, and now, apparently, they can't even tell you they scored more than other manufacturers, even though NHTSA, as I said, harps on that stars=safety.
Either the testing should be pass/fail and no more, increasing in difficulty each year at a rate predictable to manufacturers. Or the scoring should be numerical (no "stars") and on an absolute scale for each test, and the individual results for every vehicle ever tested be made available for easy comparison. (You can look up the overall "star" rating for any model, but you can't list all SUVs with the highest roll-over scores, listed so you can compare their front and side collision scores. And if the data exists, there's no reason why it can't be made available in that form.)
The NHTSA doesn't want manufacturers to optimise for the particular suite of sample accident scenarios to gain an extra 0.1 score and beat their rivals, because that would not mean that the real-world safety was improved and might even mean that safety declined slightly in non-tested accident scenarios. By rounding the scores it eliminates the motivation for this pointless effort,
If that were true, they wouldn't give the precise VSS scores to the manufacturers, just a "where you failed" review for individual tests. In the scenario Mysidia described (4.4 versus 4.6), there's every reason for a manufacturer to want to sneak above that .5 mark, in order to get a "NHTSA 5-Star Rating! * * * * *". If you were a manufacturer, wouldn't you give up a few percent of real-world safety for that extra star (by sneaking from 4.4 to 4.6)? Say by enlarging the rear pillars to cheaply improve your inverted-drop roof-crush score (your area of lowest performance) in spite of loss of visibility it causes (and thus increased real-world accidents), rather than actually improving roof-crush performance through proper structural changes. Or sacrificing your top score in roll-over stability by adding or removing elements to improve your very low-scoring rear collision survival test. Whereas if you weren't given a VSS score for each test, you would only know that the review says your rear-collision survivability sucks, and you'd have to work to improve it without reducing safety in other areas (because you wouldn't know where you exceeded the tests and thus have margin to sacrifice.) The current system clearly encourages manufacturers to "build to the test" at the expense of real-world safety.
then the rating system would lose credibility.
Good. The system has no credibility. When NHTSA makes tests harder, or adds new tests, they revamp the scoring so that it 5 stars is still the maximum - even though new cars may be, by NHTSA's own testing, safer than previous 5-star cars.
What's the point letting manufacturers advertise an unqualified "NHTSA 5-star rating" when the number of meaningless unless compared solely with the batch of cars that went though the same tests in the same year, and may have no relationship with the identically phrased ratings from a year before or a year after? Unless the buyers dig down into which batch of models went through which specific testing, there's no way to know what "5-Stars (2010)" and "4-Stars (2012)" comparatively means.
At least on planets there is a veritable soup of energy and compounds
Everything that exists in and on the planets of the solar system, baring that which chemically formed later, originated in the nebula from which the solar system formed. And studies of other nebula show the most complex organic molecules we can detect by spectrum. (Ie, each time we work out how to look for something more complex, we find it in nebula. Not very complex - we're only up to "Organic Chemistry 102": naphthalene, glycine, kerogens, multi-shell fullerenes, etc - but we haven't reached a limit yet.)
An entire solar system, not just the thin cruft on the surface of Earth but whole planets worth of dust and ice, mixing and colliding, sticking and breaking apart, in conditions ranging from in close to the forming sun to well beyond the ice-line. If life can form on very early Earth in just a couple of hundred million years amid the late-heavy bombardment, it can surely form in all that over the preceding billion or so years.
Okay, it might not, but it's an easy proposition to test, and if it did form there, it would mean life is everywhere. Which is what makes it so frustrating that no missions ever try to directly detect Earth-like extremophiles anywhere in the solar system. It's like watching someone trying to work out whether they are in the middle of a forest by taking temperature readings. "Just look for some freakin' trees!" "But it might not be that kind of forest." "And it takes one look to work out if it is!" "But that's only giving us one result and there's a lot of competition for funding..." "Argh! It's the result!"
Even while cumbersome I much prefer sitting in an airplane where people had to pass a check than one without.
Because the only two choices are TSA and nothing?
Tidal effects don't require axial rotation, only the orbit. For example, a tether in orbit will always point towards and away-from the centre of gravity of its primary. They quickly become tide locked because of their exaggerated shape. The two ends experience a force towards, and away from, the centre of gravity of the primary. The same thing happens with a spherical object, but takes longer. That's why the moon is tidally locked.
Essentially, the radius of orbit is the only line where gravitational and centripetal forces are in balance. Anything inside that line is travelling slower than orbital speed at that radius and is pulled towards the primary, anything outside is travelling faster than orbital speed at that radius and is pulled away from the primary. You don't see it in normal man-made objects because they are too small, but a larger object (or an elongated one like a tether) will experience it.
The moon doesn't experience "tides" in the sense of a moving wave travelling through the surface. But it does experience tidal forces, and is exactly as deformed (elongated towards and away from Earth) as its own internal gravity allows. However, as I said, the effect is always in both directions, and is weakest at the centre.
[When I said Earth has two tides per day, I didn't mean one high and one low. I meant two highs and two lows. One high tide is pointing towards the moon (lagging slightly behind), the other is on the other side of the Earth, pointing away from the moon. The two lows are in between, at 90 degrees either side. If the Earth became tide-locked to the moon (which it should in 5-7 billion years) it would still have those two high spots in the ocean and crust, one fore and one aft, and two low spots in between. The only change is that they wouldn't be moving around the Earth.]
And yet the driver not only kept driving after the impact, but then (after the second warning) had time to pull over, collect his things and calmly get out.
And after the fire, which was easily put out, he recovered his other possessions from the car, which were all unburnt because not only did the fire never breach the passenger compartment, the heat from the fire never reached it. Theoretically, he could have sat in the car the whole time. I've only seen one vehicle fuel fire, and even though the fire dept was there in a few minutes, there was nothing left afterwards but bare metal.
Modern coal plants also release less other pollutants (such as NOx, PAHs, PM2.5, etc) than the vehicle fleet, and other sources (gas, hydro, solar, nukes) are even better.
It also means that all your remaining emissions/pollution is located at the plant. [Except when they're on fire.] Upgrade or replace the plant and you've reduced or eliminated the emissions for every existing electric car, not just new ones. What upgrade could do that with ICE vehicles? Switching to unleaded or low-sulphur diesel were about the only things, everything further improvement (catalytic converters, better efficiency) requires changing vehicles each time. But one you've electrified the fleet, you can "upgrade them" as often as you want by changing their source of electricity.
However, every ICE vehicle comes with one of those installed under the hood. Most conventional car fires happen at the engine, not the tank. Usually due to a ruptured fuel line or broken fuel filter. The fuel pump then happily keeps spraying fuel onto the fire until the engine finally dies.
Not necessarily. While twitchy, immediate reaction needs to happen at a low latency, any broader environmental modelling, lighting and background rendering can absorb greater latency without harming the game-play. So the regional server farm can push off the heavier load of the latency-tolerant processing to more distant servers that aren't being utilised fully. You might see three layers to the game, the press-a-control-something-happens layer on the console, the things-reacting-immediately layer at the regional server, and everything else (including pre-rendering feeding the other two layers) happening wherever there's a spare cycle on the grid.
Or you can just charge more for peak play.
Tidal effects don't work like that. It's a stretching, not a one directional pull. It would elongate the core, not pull it towards Earth relative to the rest of the moon. The oceans on Earth experience two daily tides for that reason, the oceans bulge both towards and away from the moon. (So does the crust, but less obviously.)
Moreso, the closer you are to the centre of mass, the less tidal effects you experience. So the moon's core would experience less tidal force than the crust.
For $50 billion dollars, you think they could have chipped in a little to build a flame carrier to safely reach ISS alight, and a torch that can be lit in a vacuum during the space walk.
The original poster said "The Olympics".
Cites for Sochi:
Billions stolen in Sochi Olympics preparations. The opposition alleges that Putin's buddies have stolen US$30b from the Sochi preparations (over half the $54b budget.)
"Corruption and censorship cast shadow over Russia's Games". Corruption, censorship and human rights violations.
Russia Cracks Down On Journalists, Activists Exposing Corruption Ahead Of Sochi Olympics. Putin's response to corruption claims, shoot the messengers.
And more generally:
Wrestling with corruption at the Olympics. Gives a more general overview of the long history of Olympic corruption. Put simply, it's baked into the DNA of the entire organisation.
the tidal bulges would appear to be rotating retrograde.
Ah, yes, of course. I should have seen that. Thanks.
No. For an object to be going at 800m/s at reentry (ground/atmosphere rotation speed), then it must be at the top (apogee) of an eccentric orbit with a perigee much lower. And lower is inside the atmosphere, which means it already burnt up. The only other way is if the object is in a suborbital, ballistic path. Think SpaceShipOne or Virgin Galactic. (Or any sounding rocket.) Straight up, straight down. One time only. No orbit.
If you are picturing a satellite in an eccentric orbit that has its apogee at geosync altitudes (34 thousand km) and a perigee at the top of the atmosphere (say, 100km above the surface), then at perigee the satellite will be moving faster than a satellite in a circular low orbit. So it's reentry speed will be higher. (About 2km/s higher, so 30% faster.)
Is there enough atmosphere in GEO to cause satellites to slow down (and hence speed up, I love orbital mechanics) enough to significantly reduce altitude?
Tidal effects will cause them to drift, so they won't remain geostationary/geosynchronous, but are they any more likely to degrade than move higher?
Regardless of quality, would anyone want to drive a vehicle like that on most roads and risk getting rear-ended by someone texting and didn't notice (or care) about the situation around them?
Hit the least favourite car of the least favourite nephew of the local dictator, spend the rest of your short life in prison (possibly with your family), or be killed outright by the nephew's security detail.
There was an episode of Top Gear where Hammond was test driving a supercar (Lambo baby-G?) in the Emirates and a local oil prince heard about it and apparently wanted to race them in his $2m MacMerc SLR. Without any notice, the police were ordered to close the main road so that the prince could have a drag race. You could see how very slightly freaked out Hammond was by the whole thing.
These people do not play by the rules you imagine. If they are worried about traffic, they will have the roads closed so they can cruise (or race) in comfort, like the sort of images used in car commercials.
You answered your own question. They go to the US to enjoy being feted by US aristocracy. Letting someone lick your nuts doesn't mean you "love and respect" them, often it means only that you know you have absolute power over them. And having power over the powerful, watching them degrade themselves to please you, must be a heady experience.
What if it hits an airline?
Damn I wish people would learn about scale. Or, knowing they don't understand scale, not comment on space related issues.
With its fins and aerodynamic shape, GOCE will maintain a stable position in orbit as it approaches entry.
Why don't they use the reaction wheels make it tumble before reentry? The higher in the atmosphere it breaks up, the more of the internal components will burn up before impacting.
I'd definitely say energy-absorbing over just more+thicker armour. Something like woven kevlar, I wouldn't even include the steel sandwich, and allow the batteries to move a few inches away from the impact. And a fire suppression system in the battery compartment that triggers when the fire-fire-pull-over-now alarm goes off.
[This fire was supposedly caused by a tow hitch on the road. That's not a small piece of metal. Maybe they need a cattle guard (cow catcher) like the old steam trains. Something that sits ahead of the battery pack and deflects debris to the side, rather than up. (Or up, but into an energy absorbing "catcher" box.)]
But it sounds like the "design flaw" isn't the battery pack, but the way the car squats down at highway speeds. A software update that turns off (or dials back) that feature would likely immediately end the fires (and hence the bad publicity). After Tesla improves the armour in the second generation vehicles, they can bring the feature back in.
And really, what's the minimum wage stockperson going to do even if they see you? Do you think they get any of that sweet money the store gets from sucking the advertiser's cock? They're probably just as annoyed at being exposed to this noise NON STOP for their entire shift. And even if they aren't-- the store ain't paying them nearly enough to care.
You'd think so, but people who work for shitty organisations tend to "kick down". The company enforces idiotic policies on their boss, their boss mindlessly enforces the letter-of-the-law of the idiotic policies on staff, and staff mindlessly enforce them on you. You and lowest-level workers should find yourself naturally conspiring to undermine idiotic policies, but in the real world it rarely happens.
[Aside: Local department store has these in every isle. Mostly "produce demonstrations", ie, infomercials. They've upgraded them with hidden power supplies and no off-switch, but I can still turn down the volumes as I walk past. Obviously customers were turned them off, the store took the hint... and made them impossible to turn off. Sigh.]
I said, "outside of the military". The wikipedia definition is based on (mainly US) military use.
Neither the US Federal, nor state assault weapon legislation uses that definition. Including California, where the shooting actually took place. But every single fucking time a new shooting is reported the same whinging idiots like you repeat the same bullshit "assault rifle means machine gun" gun-nut meme because oh horror the media correctly referred to a weapon that is legally defined as a assault rifle as an "assault rifle".
Question 9 was actually "Write a subtraction story for 8 - _ = 2; Draw a picture". In other words, it had nothing to do with Q8. I made the same mistake on the first read.
(I don't know what a subtraction story is. I'm guessing it's a word problem? By that stage, it looks like the poor kid had pretty much just given up.)