no mod points available

I hope they plan a good light show inside the tunnel. And audio, it must have audio:

There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going.
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing.
Is it raining?
Is it snowing?
Is a hurricane a blowing?

Not a speck of light is showing
so the danger must be growing.
Are the fires of hell a glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes! The danger must be growing
For the rowers keep on rowing. And they're certainly not showing
any signs that they are slowing!

Mercury lives close to the bottom of a very deep gravity well.

https://xkcd.com/681/

If you fall down that well, you gain an enormous amount of velocity that you have to dump if you want to orbit/land on the planet. Mercury has no atmosphere to aerobrake so you need fuel to stop.

The rail gun you'll need to send shipments back to earth would be pretty immense to lift any reasonable mass out of that gravity well.

Yeah. I'm sure that's the case. It would be nice if the laws were written as functional requirements such as "Vehicle shall provide a means for driver to see at least, blah blah blah....." Rather than naming a specific required outdated and limiting technology. Once again, the legal system stifling innovation.

If Elon is looking for a low coefficient of drag, why don't we drop the side mirrors in favor of high resolution wide angle cameras? I've always thought we could replace the center mirror with a long full car width LED display monitor showing a 180 degree view behind and sides fed by 2 wide angle cameras on the back or sides.

You have just demonstrated that you have no idea what atheism is.

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Also, the 10,000 new robots begin to complain of poor working conditions, instigate riots, and some even commit suicide.

So.. much... wrong... with.. this.. post... I don't even know where to begin. So I won't, because you're clearly fucking clueless.

How serious of a problem do you think gender inequality is in the scientific academic world? What would you do to correct it?

Follow up:

You caught a lot of heat for the "Dear Muslima" episode last year. Do you feel you were misinterpreted or misrepresented? Is there anything you regret or would have said differently in retrospect?

Davros!!!!

You're an idiot.

First, launch escape systems only work if activated prior to an explosion. It won't save the lives of astronauts after the fact, the abort has to be done prior to the catastrophic event.

Second, of course the the Space Shuttle had Launch abort system. It had "Abort to Landing Site", "Transoceanic Abort Landing", "Abort Once Around", and "Abort to Orbit". Only Abort to Orbit was used in the program (STS-51-F):

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

Additionally, there was equipment and flight software for crew inflight bailout:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/escape/inflight.html

This was not available during powered flight.

... Google relabels Iran as Dumbfuckistan just to play "with the feelings and realities of the Iranian nation".

The point of this FFT improvement is for signals that are sparse in the frequency domain, not spatial domain. Most images _are_ sparse in frequency due to discretization during data collection.