There's benefits and costs to that idea. Yes, you get up to about a second less of high-drag regime, but you're paying for it with inability to control azimuth, elevation, and launch site. The people who did the numbers probably concluded that sea would be better for a number of reasons, including sonic conditions around the site. (Firing heavy hypersonic projectiles out of a barrel can't possible make your neighbors happy.)

Not for landing, for maximizing the mass after TLI if you have a fixed LEO mass budget.

It might be different if Bennet were a frequent poster and would be actively engaged in discussions, but he's not. He's just some guy who once heard that brevity is the soul of wit and went off to write ten thousand words explaining what it meant.

If she brings three of her friends then there are four girls, so you can have two pairs of girls and you can catch up on sleep.

The queuing theory to work out the solution gets very complicated (far more complicated than I can be bothered with for a Slashdot post). The distance between the cars is probably enough (although you'd want some margin for error) if they're all staying one breaking distance apart, but they'd also need to make sure that they are either regular, or that the streams in each direction have the same gaps. That's going to require some rearrangement on the road, which will lead to the ripple effects that the grandparent mentions. And, if there are going to be human inhabitants in the cars, then you will still need them to decelerate if they're turning, rather than just crossing.

I really enjoyed the miniseries and the first two full seasons. By then you could tell that, although the Cylons had a plan, the writers didn't. Season 3 (according to Wikipedia numbering - it says 'Season 4 on my boxed set') started okay, but the boxing episode reminded me of TKO from Babylon 5, which was the worst episode of the entire 5-year run, and it went downhill from there. The whole 'God did it' ending was almost as bad as 'they woke up and it was all a dream'. I watched most of Season 4 thinking 'the next episode is going to be better, right? The writers are just having a bad day...week...year...'

The scene with Jabba was in the novelisation that George Lucas wrote in 1977. I was under the impression that it was filmed, but didn't make it into the original because they couldn't make it look anything other than terrible with the special effects at the time.

I really enjoyed the series, but I watched it aged about 9-12. I've avoided watching it again, because I think I was probably in the right age demographic the first time. Knight Rider, on the other hand, I re-watched recently and still enjoyed.

At least this wasn't copied from someone else, as Glen A. Larson was the creator of both.

The reason that Apple disabled this is that a lot of SSDs have really buggy TRIM implementations. This observation wasn't unique to Apple: Microsoft and the Linux kernel defaulted to TRIM being off until quite recently. Apple could afford to turn it on for their own SSDs because they did extensive compatibility testing of those before shipping them.

Now, it doesn't really make sense, but enabling it automatically would likely burn some users, and bug reports about data loss lead to a lot more anger than bug reports about lower performance.

TRIM says 'I won't read back from this sector, so you can erase it whenever you want'. That makes it a bit easier for the wear levelling to work. It isn't essential though. An SSD controller can remap sectors at will. Typically, it will keep track of the age (number of erase cycles) of each cell and the time of the last erase. Once a cell reaches a certain age it will write some old (and therefore hopefully infrequently changing) data onto it. Current SSDs, because of the low reliability of individual flash cells, over provision by quite a lot, so it's relatively easy to structure the writes so that everything is a copy. This doesn't even affect performance, as the reads and writes can happen in parallel. The only thing that hurts performance is if you need to block a write waiting for an erase to finish.

With the exception of rule #1? Or is it the right time for my brain to explode now?

How would that be possible? You're still imparting momentum to one end, that doesn't simultaneously magically impart the opposite momentum to the other end so that it would rotate in place. There has to be some translation involved.

Except for Linux users, who get gimped?

Cars with 600W engines?