That’s a Merlin 1D vacuum. The nozzle is bigger than it looks in that picture, because of foreshortening. It’s made in effect as two pieces, with the bulk of the nozzle being an extension. The larger part that we see glowing orange in the picture is radiatively cooled. The combustion chamber and the early shorter part…

Better. Fewer quick-time events.

Only the early Merlin engines were ablatively cooled. The 1C and 1D use regenerative cooling of the nozzle and combustion chamber. The vacuum version uses radiative cooling for the nozzle. If you search for pictures, eg here, you should see a tube running around the base of the nozzle that contains propane for cooling.

Especially if it supports VR. Teleportation is a way to navigate in VR without triggering nausea. For example, Bethesda have demoed a version of Fallout 4 with VR that uses teleportation. (Then again, “GTA VI supports VR” would be a better headline.)

That still doesn’t matter. Each state knows its own rules and should be capable of getting it done. That they don’t is because they don’t care enough (or else they actively want to disenfranchise certain groups of people).

No; voting scales. The more people you have voting, the more people you have to run it. You have as many polling stations as you need.

Why drop the case now, though? Why not wait until after the election? Just keeping mum for a few more days would have retained more credibility, and do more damage to Trump, then arranging a press conference and not going through with it, or dropping the case entirely. Do you think it is some kind of double-bluff,…

It is especially disturbing that the top (in the photo) matches her tail. Is it made from the tails of other mermaids? Or did she moult?

Rather than stand down, he could promise that if elected President he would immediately declare himself “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”, as per your 25th Amendment. Then the VP becomes acting P. With a such a promise on record, Republicans could vote for Trump knowing that Pearce would…

A lot of these “improvements” are optimisations that can be applied later. And the problem with them is complexity and slowness. The SpaceX design is actually a pretty simple, brute force approach. Here’s their thinking:

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.

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.

There are many, many disappoints I have with Half Life 2. One of them is that I didn’t care about the characters, and that’s partly because they respawn. In Half Life 1, the scientists and Barnies are little more than stick figures like you say, but when they die they die and they don’t come back. You might meet a…

Did you play Far Cry when it first came out? It was about 6 months before Half Life 2, and while its physics may not have been quite as good, they were of the same order in my view. I would do things like shoot cables to see how the thing they were suspending moved without the support. It’s why I wasn’t so impressed…

Um, no? I’m not saying anything about America, nor am I generalising about Italy. I’m just answering the question as to why she came up with a name during the interrogation. You think that because she wasn’t water-boarded, it was fine? No, what happened to her at the police station wasn’t fine. There are right and…

At that point she’d been interrogated for several days, often without a proper translator, and was exhausted to the point of not thinking straight. The police lied to her, and claimed to have evidence that didn’t exist, and then asked her to explain it. She tried to figure out a possible explanation and said, “maybe…

Really? Why?

I think the problem is that they’re competing with real human actors, who are relatively cheap and look great. It’s hard to make virtual porn look good. It’s practical for still images, but for moving images it looks wrong unless you do a lot of work in simulating muscles and bones under the skin, the way the skin…

It’s not the taboo, directly. It’s that too many people have no qualms about pirating it. When so much is available for free, people think you’re stupid to pay for porn.

One of the reasons I loved Quake more than Quake II is that the first has enemies that are varied and full of character, while the second has enemies that are all variations on the theme of robot.