They almost certainly did within the allowed budget. There are two problems with nuclear power spacecraft. The first is that if something goes wrong on takeoff you risk what is effectively a 'dirty bomb' going off somewhere in the Earth's atmosphere which is not good. The second, which does not apply in this case, is that if you make it into space safely you had better make sure that the craft does not return for Earth for a few billion years otherwise, again, it is like a dirty bomb going off in the atmosphere.

Clearly deep space missions like this mean that there is no chance of return but you still have the risk of a disaster on launch which is not entirely uncommon as the recent Antares Rocket launch showed.

I know that but I guess the joke was lost on you.

That's not entirely the right question. You need to account for which is more predictable for another human. If you are in the middle of a war zone with soldiers getting blown up by booby traps then you might expect a human soldier to be rather nervous and so you would approach them with extreme caution or get out of the way. However if you have a robot wandering down a street in a peaceful area and the right set of circumstances just happen to cause it to misidentify a random, innocent person as a target that person has no possible way to predict that they need to be extremely cautious.

The result is a complex combination of both a human's ability to know when they are in danger and the predictability of the gun owner. While a human may be more likely to make wrong decisions under pressure fellow humans are also going to be aware of this and take extra precautions. With a robot the decision will be entirely based on how good the robot makes a decision since the human has no way to know whether the robot is likely to be hostile or not.

Actually the one thing that the Standard Model is absolutely NOT based on is gravity. Gravity being so weak and have an long range actually is responsible for the structures at the largest scales of the Universe which is precisely where we see Dark Matter. The reason for this is that EM is so much stronger that it will force charge cancellation to a large high degree on smaller distance scales: if there is a charge imbalance opposite charges will be rapidly dragged in to create a balance. This cancels EM out at larger distance scales since the charges balance leaving only gravity (the strong and weak nuclear forces being short range [~nucleus] due to their physics).

No, the reason the Higgs is called the god particle is because you can't have Mass without it.

No, it is very different from the ether. The ether was the proposed medium which light propagated through. As such it was a continuous field not clumps of particles. Also the ether was massless and had no gravitational field. Dark Matter has a mass and causes a gravitational field which is how we know that it exists.

In which case it would hardly qualify as ordinary baryonic matter...

Well I suppose this explains why, after Uber has been operating for 2 years Toronto is suddenly in a rush to get the case heard by the courts.

If it is truly single player why would you need a network connection? The only reason for this is so that other player's actions can affect your game (either that or a as a form of DRM but they have denied the latter). While this might provide some protection it still allows hoards of idiots to impact your game and I don't want that. If the changes are made centrally then there is no need for an always-on connection: just provide optional updates from time to time.

No a Brit who made a typo probably assisted by auto-typo since 'n' is nowhere near 't' on the keyboard.

Even donations come with obligations though. If I donate to a charity to support science education in country A and they use the money instead to purchase needles for drug addicts in country B then you could sue them to get you money back since they are using it for a significantly different purpose even though both might be considered good causes.

Whether the a single player game is sufficiently different from the delivered MMO game is something for the courts to decide if it ever gets that far. However what is very shabby about this whole thing is that the announcement has come only 1 month before the release. Given their description of how essential the online servers are to the game it seems highly likely than they have known about this for a very long time and have only just come clean.

It's also a real shame. Part of the beauty of the previous games was that they made such a detailed, massive open sandbox which you could explore and admire the intelligence that went into crafting the procedural generation. Now you are going to be sharing the galaxy with immature, adolescent school kids and any unusual features you will ascribe to a human moderator putting them there. It's going to have more similarity to Eve Online than Elite.

We evolved in Africa which was not known for its large Woolly Mammoth population. While we did eat them, perhaps even to extinction, I don't think you can say that we specifically evolved to eat mammoths. It was more an opportunistic relationship: they were large chunks of fresh meat wandering through a frozen landscape and we were hungry.

Actually I understood that early humans had an large role in causing mammoths to go extinct. So, if anything, wouldn't it be unethical not to reverse the damage we caused? This is our first chance to revive a species which we probably caused to go extinct in the first place.

I absolutely agree with you: the submitter has no clue about statistics. This type of problem has been solved use simple Bayesian statistics where you calculate the probability distribution function for the fraction of people agreeing with X. This gives you all the information you need to calculate the probability that two datasets are consistent. We use this in particle physics for efficiency calculations all the time. There is even a detailed write up here.

I doubt they run over old rails at 200 km/h but rather new, welded rails with concrete sleepers. However with modern rails you can certainly reach beyond 500km/h: the French have the record back in 2007 with a 574km/h TGV train. So 500km/h is not really that fast for a special run. What will be interesting is whether they can achieve this for a regular service but it sounds like they cannot due to noise pollution concerns.

To beat airline speeds you need maglev in a vacuum tunnel. Aeroplanes can only achieve the speeds they do at high altitude where the air pressure is low enough to greatly reduce air resistance. A maglev in an evacuated tunnel could easily reach several thousand km/h in silence. Such systems have been proposed but the cost is prohibitive....still reducing transatlantic travel times to an hour or two would be incredible.