In combat it's called "walking your fire". Sure, the first 30 rounds aren't close enough to matter in themselves, but they give you enough information so that the 31st round hits home.

Who cares about the fuel efficiency of landing? A Falcon 9 launch costs about 50-56 million dollars - the fuel itself only costs about 200,000, or 0.4% of the launch costs. The cost of increasing the fuel load by a few percent to allow for landing barely even qualifies as a rounding error.

Meanwhile, all the extra mechanisms needed to turn a simple high-strength fuel tank into a transformer is almost certainly going to increase the mass so much that you'd need far more fuel to get the thing to the second-stage separation point in the first place - so net loss on fuel anyway.

>Perhaps there's room for deeper throttling.

Indeed. It might even make sense to use a different design for the central engine if deeper throttling interferes with efficiency or maximum thrust. Of course if they can get the control systems working properly with the standard engines that would be the optimal solution.

As for contrary bias - of course it's useful. Not in a "one person has all the power" scenario of course, but that is very rarely the case. If all of congress are Muslim-hating Jews, then Muslims in general have a problem. Replacing half of congress with Jew-hating Muslims will castrate their abuses - now the institution can only take actions approved of by both Jews and Muslims - they may be at each other's throats, but their hatred can't enact new institutional abuses against each other and their mutual love of power will ensure they figure out how to cooperate on at least some things.

Nonsense - there's always rebels that disagree with the status quo. What do *you* think makes people sexist, racist, religious, etc? Something in the water?

So, frozen wasteland or already fully occupied territory that doesn't want them. Nice choice.

Culture systematically shapes our perception of damned near everything - hell, you probably find the though of shitting in the street or eating human flesh disgusting - you think there's anything *natural* about either of those taboos? Hardly. The onus of evidence lies on you to show that it does not.

You are assuming a lack of cultural inertia. Yes, preferentially hiring women for a while would result in a brief surge of female majority in the middle rungs of the institution a few decades down the line - whether that would translate into a surge at the top remains to be seen - it certainly hasn't so far, the glass ceiling remains largely intact.

I'm not saying preference towards women is right, I'm saying that, in the face of the inertia behind centuries of institutionalized sexism, it's arguably less wrong than allowing another several generation of women to grow up in a world that's severely stacked against them.

Great. And if they can they *prove* it, they can have tax-exempt status.

Wait - you bought the CDs at full price? I thought the standard practice was to buy the introductory 10/15/20 CDs for the price of one and then cancel so they'd send you another promo deal.

Well, they're not dead yet, just out of power.

So, because discrimination exists, I should voluntarily subject myself to its erroneous fallout, and shut up about trying to fix the underlying problem? I assume you've adopted a female-sounding name for your resume to avoid gaming the system yourself (assuming you're male)? It's not that there are specific people doing "the wrong thing", it's that damned near *everyone* is doing the wrong thing in subtle ways that are rarely noticed individually but, in aggregate, add up to a major problem.

Well, that and the fact that even those blatantly doing the wrong thing rarely get punished, or even chastised - but I have no power to rewrite the world to change the way the Good Old Boys treat their own - I'm too outspoken and they never let me join the club.

Your ridiculous chastisement is like asking a single CEO to alter corporate policy to give workers a fair shake - even if they do so it won't actually accomplish anything except putting their company at a competitive disadvantage - we need to change the game, not the players.

If they're fondling my crotch, wouldn't that be *under*-reach? Ba-dum-tshhh.

Hell man, I hear you - the life of the scholar-priest in modern society pretty much sucks, especially if you still have the usual biological imperatives. But the fact that the game is rigged against some of us men in no way changes the fact that it's also rigged against the female majority of the human race. If anything there should be some solidarity among the screwed-over masses - let me know if you ever find it.

Fair enough - As GlaDOS sang - I used to want you dead, now I only want you gone. I'm sure (most) of the early American settlers would have been perfectly happy had the natives simply gone some magical "elsewhere" that had nothing worth taking, while perhaps the Nazis might have felt the Jews were "escaping" had they pulled a similar impossible feat, and acted to prevent it. Or not.

Personally though I think "impossible" is the operative word - when the distinction has no practical difference, just how much of a distinction is it, really?