If an asteroid wipes out the Mars colony, then that’s a million or so people dead. Sad, but the people left on Earth can try again. If both Earth and Mars get wiped out at the same time, then it’s game over for humans; but the chances of losing both planets at once are vastly less than losing one planet.
As long as one…

It means, “Of no practical importance; irrelevant”. See definition 1.b here. Or here it means: “Deprived of practical significance : made abstract or purely academic. Other dictionaries have the same. 1ofMany is using it entirely correctly.

Supposedly even after decapitation a la Guillotine, consciousness remains for several seconds. I don’t see how hanging can be any quicker.

I’d prefer Nitrogen asphixiation. Painless, not invasive at all, hard to get wrong, cheap, with materials readily available rather than imported from Europe, and reversible until after the subject has lost consciousness.

The issue is not time delay, but volume. The mic picks up quiet sounds close by, like the bird song, and loud noises far away, like the explosion. Those clangs are more likely to be the former than the latter. In other words, it’s probably coincidence that they happen a few seconds before the explosion. Recall also…

I think it was mostly the characters that endeared people. Some of the plots were dumb. Especially The Messenger, where the organ-smuggling makes no sense, and where the conflict between Mal and his old chum only arises because Mal won’t tell him his plan. (And his plan is dumb,too.)

In The Shockwave Rider John Brunner calls it a worm. That was about 2 years later, so “virus” still wasn’t common then.

The mic is a couple of kilometres from the rocket, so those initial clangs are probably local. 

The He tank is wrapped with carbon fibre. Carbon fibre will burn with liquid oxygen.

I’m guessing the Russian method doesn’t help when you are restarting the first stage engine, for fly back burns, re-entry burns, and landing burns. SpaceX would prefer to use the same method on the second stage as on the first stage.

He couldn’t leave Russia because his passport got cancelled, and it became impossible for him to get safe passage elsewhere.

Ecuador.

I wouldn’t put it that way, but I agree that this is surely a “no earlier than” date. It’s the earliest a pad will be available. It doesn’t mean they will have something to launch on it. Most SpaceX dates are NET dates.

Another problem they’ve not really addressed is making reentry at the kind of speed you need for an orbital launch. When you hit the atmosphere going that fast, it compresses, heats up and becomes a plasma. A plasma is a 4th state of matter that does not behave exactly like a gas. It has weird electrical properties,…

I’m hoping for suicide. That is, I hope to die at a time of my chosing. To die involuntarily must be terrible. And I suspect forced immortality isn’t great either.

He’s currently in the embassy, but before he fled there he was under house arrest in Britain for many months. He had some degree of freedom of movement. He was allowed to go to the embassy for an interview, for example; nobody expected him to jump bail by staying there.

The way European arrest warrants work, he can’t be extradited from Sweden unless Britain gives consent, which means it would be easier to extradite him from Britain than from Sweden. That way they need the consent of one country rather than both countries. And yet that didn’t happen, despite him being under house…

Exiled? You know he’s not American, right? He has a criminal conviction in Australia but he’s not exiled from there, either. Nor he is he confined to the Ecuadoran Embassy. He stays there by choice, as a means to jump bail. There is a European arrest warrant with his name on it, for crimes unrelated to WikiLeaks.

Please tell me you’d already seen this:

You’re not listening. The issue is not that she was interrogated, but the manner of it. And I’m still not saying anything about US police. I am not American.