1. This isn't the first test. Labtests have been done extensively.
2. It's 500 meters. Not miles. Not even 1 mile.

That once a year that snow covers the road and the cleanup crews haven't been fast enough so it actually stays there (instead of turning into salt water) we drive a lot slower. Slower means you don't have to see as far ahead because you have more time to respond. It means the regular headlights are more effective.

HID lamps should be illegal and the legislators who pushed for their legality should be arrested. Those damn things are dangerously blinding.

A tiny bit of electricity times 135.470 km of public roads is a lot of electricity.
(disclaimer: that doesn't mean it's a bad idea)

Instead they prefer to so be blinded by streetlights that they can't see the rapist hiding a few meters beside the light spot.
People are counterproductive at times. Streetlight makes most of us feel safe, besides the simple fact that they decrease safety in most cases.

Correct me if I am wrong, but my limited knowledge of what happens tells me this:
Probably, assuming the observer is infinitely strong and can survive the gravity shear and immense pressure of the black hole:
From the observers POV the universe speeds up, until the surroundings (except for the black hole itself) become a bright light, because time dilation causes the cosmic background radiation to appear like visible light.
Then the black hole evaporates due to Hawking radiation and the observer is free again. When checking an outside ("absolute") clock billions of years have passed but the observer only felt a relative short while. The observer never encountered anything that could be considered a black hole. Time dilation reached near infinite before it could get there. The observer did encounter a lot of mass, mass that was falling into the black hole, never reaching it because time dilation didn't allow it to reach anything.
This mass has unknown properties. It is far denser than neutronium. It is still falling towards the core, only slowed down by time dilation.
The star itself was torn apart way before the "visible cosmic background" part. It kept falling towards the black hole as part of that mass with unknown properties.

From the outside an object doesn't exactly fall into the event horizon. It falls towards it but slows down before it. The light reflected or emitted by the object gets redshifted to nothingness. The event horizon does grow to meet the object.
Assuming the event horizon doesn't grow extremely fast the object will be invisible due to extreme redshift. Whether it is torn apart by gravity shear before that depends on the mass of the black hole and the strength of the object.

Often I find it fun to do that too. Poking holes in extreme statements I mean.

In that case I wouldn't want to be a construction worker there!

Air filtration, chemicals for narcose/desinfectant/pre and post op medicine, a couple of people busy, hospital heating.
A sex change operation is quite expensive, even just energy wise. It may cost more to change from female to male than there can be saved.
Especially since adding those parts may not change a woman from semi coldblooded to warmblooded.

Although, if every woman did that the energy consumption would dropping quite far in a hundred years.

Oh and GPP probably meant whenever reasonably possible.

If the xbox would have been standby anyway then it doesn't matter. It's even unwise to add an appleTV's standby to it since however little that may be it's fully wasted.

If stuff like forcefields are allowed then you should just give your ship a General Products hull.

Well, you could end each conflict by lobbing a few ICBM's at the enemy. That'd stop them for sure.

These weapons are an alternative to lobbing nukes. A nicer alternative, something akin to the difference between removing a tumor with a scalpel or with a sledgehammer. Neither is fun for the tumor, but the surrounding tissue prefers the scalpel.

Decelerating it with a magnetic field isn't feasible. The current in the railgun does 2 things:
1. It makes a hell of a magnetic field
2. It runs through the projectile. That current undergoes a Lorentz force due to the magnetic field. The Lorentz force moves the projectile.

How are you going to induce that current in a projectile that is heading towards you? Without it the magnetic field will not influence the projectile.

And that is besides the technical challenges in making a magnetic field with enough strength to stop this while enveloping the entire ship.

I'd upgrade the goalkeeper, but I am Dutch so that was to be expected.

That squared in "speed squared" is much of the fun.

Nah, the terrorist would attack during a new moon.