The main advantage of a plane is that they are air-breathing, not so much the wings. Oxygen is really heavy, and sucking it in from the atmosphere massively increases your system’s mass efficiency, since it doesn’t have to carry the oxygen for the atmospheric portion of flight.

My life seems so much more normal now that I’ve read that [at least] two other people also had to search through trash after tossing out a retainer.

Did it at a fast-food restaurant once. Put the (brand-new, multi-hundred-dollar) retainer on the tray->tray contents get tossed in trash->OH SHIT.

Depends on the level of motorsport. If you’re a good mechanic, many LeMons or ChumpCar teams would probably trade a shift or two in return for an engine or transmission rebuild.

The issue for RB I think is that the engine rules make it _much_ more difficult to catch back up. You get no out-of-competition testing, you get limited chances to develop the internal components, and if you have reliability issues, you get even less running since if it blows up at a race, that’s 2+ hours of running…

Math-wise it all works out. Since your engine generates negative energy, you’d have to crank it yourself. As you went backwards, it’d generate diesel fuel out of the energy of your cranking!

It’s particularly stupid for a libertarian to oppose such testing and enforcement, since pollution (aka externalities) is supposed to be one of the rare things they believe a government-like body is supposed to police.

Depends on whether the delete was simply removing them from the inbox, or actually doing an on-disk delete. Quite possibly you could implement an email database where the DB row representing a given email simply gets marked as “do not show to user”, with all the data retained.

The real chemtrails.

From reading up on the An-2, it looks like a very common usage of the plane is as a small (12 passenger) passenger plane. So likely for that reason.

As a total aviation outsider, my guess was that it might prevent a mistake/missed checklist item or let them focus a bit more during high-workload periods as they navigate through weather/terrain as magnox suggested, or just repeated normal checklists over the lifetime of the unit. Over the course of thousands of…

What do you think the cost is of an average go-around? Airlines have to put up passengers in hotels, hand out vouchers, burn more fuel, put more hours on the airframe, etc.

Sure. And it’s unfortunate that this was Pirelli’s first-ever car race where those things were a factor, and so it was their engineer’s first stab at getting a tire-life estimate right.

If Pirelli was advising on lap count, then the fact Pirelli was saying absolute 40 laps maximum pre-race should mean that a 28-lap stint is possible. All the handwaving about “oh no, race conditions change things” shouldn’t mean a thing, since this wasn’t the first F1 race they’ve supplied for. If they’re saying 40…

Pirelli indicated the wear life was 40 laps. Vettel was on the medium, which was the harder of the tires available. Source: http://www.crash.net/f1/news/222272…

This is a good point. I suppose in their contract FOM/FIA might have a clause saying something like “tires must produce 80% of maximal lap speed after 50 miles”, but it’s not like FOM or the FIA is going to go to court to enforce their “shitty tire clause”, as that’d be even worse PR than the somewhat boring-er races…

How were they pushing to the limit? Vettel’s laptimes were completely flat until the blowout. There was no indication the tire was going off, so it seems to have blown while still having grip (and thus rubber) remaining.

If they get their factor-of-ten reduction in mass efficiency and aim for 500kW, That’ll be 1500kg of laser apparatus, requiring about 700hp of electrical power to run it. Then you need:

It’s very hard to believe that the condos wouldn’t have found tenants or been built elsewhere if the arena didn’t exist.

It is difficult to think of how one could ever think this was a good idea.