It doesn't matter anyway, since the number for a name/word is counted by adding the letter values (hebrew and greek both have them) together. The number for www is 18, not 666. In ancient times, if you were jewish, and your sweetheart wanted to say in code that he/she loved you, the line would be "I love the person whose number is 140". 140 is your number (K=20, M=40, P=80 in Hebrew). This tradition does in fact carry forward in interesting ways - I distinctly remember that we had a similar system going in the elementary school. Someone came up with value assignments for all letters of the roman alphabet. At some point every literate kid in the building had those assignments memorized. It was a shortlived fad, even though it was good to get the kids doing some addition exercises and decomposition ("decoding") of integers into sums.

Yet SIL 4 is still hardwired :)

"Getting rocket software right is difficult precisely because there is no way to do a live test." There is. You do hardware-in-the-loop tests where the inertial and other inputs come from simulators. I have seen testing of a jet engine controller done without an actual jet engine attached to it. There was a beefy server that was simulating the physics of a jet engine, though, and providing sensor readings.

Ah, I see you've been to Soviet Union, then, comrade. They always did 150% of the norm!

I hoped so.

What kind of cars do they sell in UK, for crying out loud? I'd expect anything from a major manufacturer and not from Detroit to be pretty much worn-in at the 100k mark, and ready to go another 200k at least without needing a new engine nor a new transmission. Heck, I'd expect a manual transmission to easily outlast any automatic (yes, the clutch is a maintenance item).

Huh? My S80 has 1/4 million miles on it, all engine seals are original, no leaks.

This seems to be the most insightful thing I've read the whole day today.

No. The guy was a lunatic. Sure, he came up with a bunch of useful stuff, but the wireless charging we have now has nothing to do whatsoever with what Tesla envisioned. It is very unfortunate that the two are denoted using the similar words, because they are far from the same. The wireless charging we have now works like an air gap in a transformer core. That effect was known well before Tesla. OTOH, his wireless energy transfer ideas would have only worked in some alternative universe with different laws of Nature. It was total lunacy.

I don't want someone, who later in life didn't seem to grasp basic experimental evidence before him, to have anything to do with designing, well, anything.

Look, if you want so desperately to do something to the payload as long as it's done on time, I'll just go and bash the shit out of it for $1M per paylod, mmkay? I can even use a $50k hammer to do it. What a steal. Cost plus of course.

Now, in the real world, is the "reasonable level of performance" you speak of the same performance USA (United Space Alliance, ULA precursor) had with getting the Shuttles into orbit? Because that was, lest we forget, a major farcical opus every time it didn't happen. But so is space flight, and SpaceX is going in exactly the right direction to change it.

Anyway, so far we don't care about lack of insurance. The damn things get whey they are supposed to. Never mind that I'd like a citation for that lack of insurance of public payloads.

I keep hearing this nonsense, and I can't help but imagine that it's coming straight from the ULA puppets. Nobody is given any free passes. They are contracted to deliver stuff to orbit, not to build rockets for the government. The safety and reliability standards are of not much use if you're being paid (or not) for service. The only ones hurting if a Falcon blows up are SpaceX and cargo insurers: the former won't get paid, the latter will have to pay up. That's all there's to it.

So far, Falcon 9 hasn't blown up once. You're just repeating the stupid ULA nonsense. Stop it.

"an epidemic of anomalies" ha ha, good one. Falcon 9 had 11/11 primary mission successes on the first 11 flights. That sort of a track record is very, very rare. Space Shuttle did it. What other launcher had the same record? Never mind the overall cost of achieving it. If one adjusts for successes per dollar of development costs, Falcon 9 will have everyone beat for a long, long time, if they keep at it.

Enter the synthetic aperture radar :)

TL;DR: F-35 would have been picked up by British radars that came into use towards the end of World War II. So much for stealth. The funniest thing? Everybody who knows about radars has known it since day one. All stealth planes suffer from this problem. Once the wavelength approaches the facet size, the fact that the facet is smooth and "points elsewhere" doesn't matter. It produces what amounts to specular highlights.