will be competitive with other ultra high end luxury trucks if there are any.

There are. For one example, Cadillac makes a pickup. (Well, some may argue that that's only "high end", not "ultra high end".)

Suicide doors are doors with the hinges at the rear, so that it's "suicide" to open them if the vehicle is moving at any speed. In a regular car, the slipstream will tend to push the doors closed. With suicide doors, the slipstream tends to rip the doors fully open. If you're not belted in (the term dates to before mandatory seatbelts), and holding onto the door handle, you're likely to get yanked out too.

But the production run is seven. $23.8 M for all seven, buy one for each day of the week...

What happens if a Pinto gets rear-ended by a Tesla?

Hang on, let me just check the slide rule...

(Actually I used have a Pinto -- well, it was my wife's -- and I'd buy a Tesla if it were in my budget.)

As for "conventional" supercars: http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/emergencies/driver-killed-as-speeding-ferrari-hits-tree-in-dubai-1.1208954

Wait, Dubai has trees?

(Yes, that was a joke. I'm sure Dubai has many trees. All carefully planted and plumbed with irrigation hoses, but... )

probably it is a politician trying to look cool. Even a high school chemistry student would know this.

You do realize that the intersection set between politicians and people who took (let alone passed) high school chemistry is vanishingly small, right?

If you're taking antibiotics, you're pretty much dumping antibiotics down the sewers every time you take a, er, dump. Or a piss.

But if you're doing it right that's the only way they're going down the sewers.

SMS was expensive in the beginning because it used a part of the messaging protocol that was not really intended for high volume, and the telcos hadn't configured things to support it. But it beat hell out of the old text paging services.

Once the telcos figured out the demand and started configuring the hardware and software to facilitate it, the price dropped. Almost everyone just bundles unlimited messaging into their phone plan these days, don't they?

Given the players, my guess is that the hardware is likely HP or Dell x86 server boxes, possibly Sun, maybe with an HP Superdome for the database, running RedHat linux, with an Oracle database. Middleware/webserver is quite possibly WebLogic (given Oracle's involvement) with the code in Java. Ie, a LWOJ stack ;-)

Very workable if given sufficient hardware (not VMs) and tuned properly -- but that latter often takes a fair bit of load testing and tweaking.

Whats wrong with statism**?
[...]
**I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt abs assume you actually know what statism is and you aren't actually talking about authoritarianism.

What's wrong with it is that there's no proven or practical way to prevent it from becoming authoritarianism.

Alas, there aren't really any other systems which don't tend in that direction either. People who seek power are generally the ones who can't be trusted with it.

I forget the physics term,

Mach stem.

You're welcome. ;)

The simplest way to do this is to detonate the explosive lenses at different times, rather than simultaneously. Rather than the implosion you need to go critical, you just blow the core into little pieces.

There's a bit of a radioactive materials clean up job, but no earth-shattering kaboom. (Just a small kaboom.)

Who said the switch failed? Likely it operated as supposed to, keeping the device not-fully-armed ("fail safe") because it hadn't been deliberately flipped.

That's a reasonable point on the atmospheric effects of reentry, but that's only in the last couple of hundred miles, so any angular deflection will have a lower effect on the CEP than would even a smaller deflection closer to the launch. Over a few thousand miles, a slight angle change makes a big difference.

And, you're assuming the reentry is unguided. That isn't necessarily the case. Even a simple cone can have some crossrange depending on the relation of center of mass vs center of aerodynamic pressure, with small thrusters, aerosurfaces, or weight-shifting to modify that. (Not that I know for sure one way or the other; if I did I probably couldn't say.)

The more accurate you can make the nuke, the smaller it can be. Saves you nuclear materials and launch weight.

And against hardened targets like missile silos or command bunkers, pretty accurate (eg, Cheyenne Mountain couldn't withstand a direct hit, but it could a nearby miss. Colorado Springs would be toast either way.)

ICBMs are pretty much autonomous once launched (I would assume/hope they have an abort mode), but their targeting data is updated regularly (especially true for sub-launched missiles, of course, but also for the independently targeted warheads on a MIRV.)