The LaSalle Heights Disaster occurred in the early morning of March 1, 1965 in the city of LaSalle, Quebec when a gas line explosion destroyed a number of low-cost housing units. In all, 28 people lost their lives, 39 were injured and 200 left homeless. Most of the casualties were women and children because many men had left for work. The casualties might have been higher had it not been the first of the month when many men left earlier than usual to pay their monthly rent at the rental office. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

It communicates to both cars and tells them to execute emergency maneouvers to make enough room. Failing that,, all three calculate a vector that imparts minimal g-forces to all occupants.

I can't even think of a movie (other than Gravity) that did this correctly.

'2001' did. When HAL went and cut Frank Poole's airline during his EVA, his death was shown completely silently and I think it had a far greater impact as a result.

You seem a little harsh on them.

Recovery of the booster would have been nice for investigation, but it was never intended to be flown again and was never the stated goal. The goal for that mission was a controlled descent and touch down on the ocean, which they accomplished. A 'soft-recover' wasn't the term that they were using.

This goal needed to be reached so that Range Safety at the launch pad can determine that SpaceX can reliably put a rocket down within a mile or so of a target. The next launch - in the next week or so - will attempt to land in the ocean much closer to the launch facility.

The technical difficulties of a soft landing are considerable given the hardware that they've got. With the weight of the empty booster, they can't throttle the engines back far enough to hover. So they fall towards the surface and at the right moment fire the engines to reach a computed zero velocity at touchdown. Doing this with gusty 30-40 knot winds on the surface is tough. 'Landing' on a continuously-undulating surface where there is no consistent level is tougher.

And yes, parts of this have been done before. Sure, there's open-source avionics stacks that can do this thing no problemo. But a controlled return of the first stage of a liquid fuel rocket has never been done before, and this kind of work has most certainly never been done for the relatively tiny amount of money that SpaceX has been spending. *That* is the thing that's getting tongues wagging.

- Cars don't have the long wiring needed to effectively 'pick up' EMP.
- Cars have a lot of 'passive' components that can help clamp EMP to a survivable level, most notably the battery which can deal with all sorts of spikes and has fairly heavy gauge wiring to the engine computer (for fuel injection)
- Cars are also quite well shielded (they're mostly a metallic faraday cage)
- Cars deal with lots of EMP as an everyday occurrence (10,000 ignition pulses at 80+kV in the engine bay every minute)

I won't say it's not an issue, but it's not a big an issue as you believe.

That's a little odd. CASA here in Australia has authoritah over most aerial devices and imposes a licensing arrangement (for those using them in a commercial manner) and a restriction that they have to maintain at least 30 metres from people.

Someone in a triathlon got whacked in the head just recently with a drone - the person flying it will be in a world of hurt once CASA finishes discussions with them.

Note that if it had been some kid fooling about in the park CASA would not have been interested, but once it becomes 'for profit', they start to take notice. Which is probably a reasonable distinction to take - 'for profit' types will generally be using more of them, more often, and licensing requirements can also mandate that they have adequate insurance and minimum safety requirements.

So the entire worlds output of nuclear power is .000000372 ExaWatt Hours.

No, that's just Exawatts. You need to multiply it by the runtime per year, which you can comfortably call 8500 hours, allowing for downtime. So that makes it 3.16 ExaWatt-hours, which is just about a third of oil's output, but you can still have oil for mobile transport for quite a while and flip all the power plants to nuclear, that would certainly help,.

Oh, and perhaps you should consider smoking less crack. Or posting to Slashdot whilst under the effects of said crack. Or both.

The exchanges dying is good for bitcoin, because the bad ones will be replaced by more solid and upright entities.

You hope.

Ash = ash.
Coal ash is different from volcanic ash.

I used to do ash analysis on coal samples - coal ash is pushing 95% silica and alumina. The rest of the elemental analysis are trace elements, which can be made to sound super-scary when you scale up the quantities to thousands of tons. OMG! There's 100,000 pounds of this KILLER element released! Yes, but it's spread out evenly though 10 million tons of slurry over 100 square miles. You could probably strip-mine the top 5 feet of the same area in a city and find higher concentrations.

The biggest problem is not all the toxic waste, it's all the bloody inert sludge that's everywhere.

It seems that the quantity of fuel required to fly an nearly empty 1st stage is negligable. That is, the amount that they normally leave behind as reserve in case of issues getting to orbit is enough for the 1st stage to land with - you basically just fall/parachute as far as you dare and then fire the engines at the last second to steady/cushion the landing.

I suspect the issue is increased with the size of the touchscreen.
A 3.5" display is easy - all the controls are near an edge.
A 15" display is trickier - there's a lot of space in the middle that is difficult to accurately hit.

If I were SpaceX, the first thing I would have done is tossed an engine in the water, recovered it, and studied it. Landing legs and cushioned landing are sexy and the whole process is very impressive on paper to the less well educated space fanboy (I.E. 99% of them)... but engine refurbishment is the key to the whole process.

Well, the goal is to eventually land them on, er, land so that they don't get dunked. Then you end up with 9 engines and a first stage in fairly good nick with 5 minutes of flight time on it.

I don't know of their timeline, but I'd expect a couple of sucessful water landings, then it'll be time to land somewhere on terra firma. Or a big-ass barge, that might do the job.

Have a read through the "technical notes on EEC IV MCU" document on this page

This was for a ecu used in the 80's to early 90's - it had things like the "limited output strategy" where basically if the CPU didn't get its act together in time to tickle the hardware watchdog, a very basic set of logic IC's take over which give you a fixed squirt of fuel for every engine revolution and static timing. Which would make your car run like a piece of crap, but still run (sorta).

Well it certainly looks better than CP/M.
You could always emulate your way out of trouble on the low end I suppose, but then you'd suffer a pretty hideous performance/memory hit.
But even the 'low end' is pushing 20MHz these days.......

Let's imagine you could buy a car that was $2000 cheaper without airbags - Would people buy them?

No need to imagine. People did. And people still do. I bought plenty of cars that didn't have airbags or abs or stability control or seatbelt pretensioners or emergency brake assist or power steering,even (the horror!).

But nowadays, people do give serious thought to their safety, which is why even the base model crapbox has ABS and airbags. If I had a choice between a car advertised as "5 STAR crash rating" and one without that was 5 grand cheaper, the one with the 5 stars gets my money every time. If one of those features saves me in an accident - or even better, helps me to avoid one - it's worth it.