I remember building a crane "by the numbers" using a lego building set. In 1980 or so (I know for a fact is was before 1984, since I moved out of the house that I did it in then. For some reason I still have the box, but the instructions/legos have all gone.

Yes, some sets are more specialized. Minecraft gives you a huge range of blocks that isn't possible in the physical world, but dealing with the way that they fit together in "meat space" has its own value.

That is nice in theory, but I have found all to often in practice, when people see what they ask for, they realize that they didn't really want that. When you have a multi-year process, requirements change (heck I've seen it in multi-week!). Even ignoring the issues of human nature which induce this type of event, there are so many external forces that can drive a change that being able to re-evaluate is key.

My take on agile, and the "developer rebellion" is that developers got fed up with 18 different "Number 1" priorities, and wanted to force management to actually do their job and prioritize.

True, but % 4 would be an adequate approximation given the expected lifetime of most consumer products.

I remember being allowed to bring notes with me to class. Would just making this open book/open notes accomplish the same thing?

Nope, just nuclear. Though it may travel 96,000,000 miles or so to get here.

Sure.

These are both good. I'd mod up if I could.

If they created a site where people could donate $3 to them, I wonder how many people would contribute?

That was the direction of my thinking as well.

Echoing that this everything else is irrelevant until this is known.

To take your excellent idea on profiling and expand it. Maybe Amazon found that dealing with government requests about those books was too expensive, and thus chose to stop selling them so they would have fewer government requests to deal with?

Small quibble: The force does not have to be applied to the air. Rockets work fine without air, and the same could, in theory work.

There must be an equal and opposite force on the craft.

Air just makes the most sense given the current technology.

Usually under the various stickers are the screws that you need to take out to get at the magnets. Usually a torx bit is required.

The chisel, etc is often useful for getting at the magnets once you have opened the case.

The shape that I saw in my drives was kidney bean shaped.