I'm not sure where you are going with that. Both rovers are still active even if one is stuck. The solar panels seem to work for them even if there have been issues wrt dust on them. Curiosity is Nuclear powered as it is much much larger and has vastly larger power requirements to even move let alone perform experiments.

"The perverse effect of permitting police to go ahead with a mistaken reading of the law, she wrote, is to prevent or delay clarification of the law "
And it is a good point. If the police can just say "I did not understand the law in question" where are the rest of us left?

Facts are facts. If you decide that they are bad then you will not have much fun in life, perhaps you should look at the upside and what you learned from those facts. Even if the rocket breaks up and plummets into the ocean there is information there that may be useful for your perfect landing criteria.

Only one of the goals is to land perfectly. Gosh who would have thought that there may be more than one goal.

Many liquid fuelled rockets never run until they run out of fuel. They are shut off at the appropriate time/place/velocity. So there tends to be fuel "left over" anyway. Now the total mass of one of these 1st stage rockets is primarily fuel/oxidiser. They do not mass much without anything in them. So trying to land it is not quite as expensive as you may think if you take into account the left overs. I presume they are going with the "If there is not enough fuel left let it burn" approach. Sort of trimming the margins to make sure it gets up but possibly it will not get down but should if it all goes well.

A very negative point of view.

The stage is a loss anyway if they did not try to get it back down and land it. If not it would eventually renter and burn. I thought that was the whole point. Trying to get it back in one piece where you want it to land. If you get it back in one or a few bits then it is a win over just just chucking it up there and knowing you have lost it (as most rockets do)
There is cost in trying to do so. And yes they do need a perfect pinpoint landing to achieve it. Missing by a bit would show yet again that they can do it but have problems wrt navigation/mobility/finding the target pad or just going boom. But showing possibly that it can be done.

I am not exactly a fan boy but it is interesting and lots could be learned even if it fails.

Did you look at the low speed handling set up. Its brill. Lots of big model boats travelling very slowly with trainees inside them.
http://www.warsashacademy.co.u...

Low tech but it apparently still works well.
Oh they have other bits to but that made me smile.

Oh I see what you mean by Gross tonnage. Now that is something I learned today.

You are talking about water level volume and how that affects displacement wrt gross weight. I think the parent was talking about overall volume. As in the stuff above water. Cruse ships have a very shallow draft, they are wide and long. They are not liners. Ocean Liners where longer and much narrower with a deeper draft (and made with thicker skins) to enable high speed through very bad weather (but not ice burgs as it happens). They are built for different things. Cruise liners are a bit like a slightly streamlined barge with a 10 storey building on top. I think the only ocean liner still running is the Queen Mary 2

Your quality of life may be improved if you did not have to commute into the city thus saving you valuable time, reducing your taxes by not having to build ever larger free ways, by not having to pay more and more for gas and parking each year. A more worthy goal?

Some people have to work were the retail centres are. Most other city business does not need to be done in a city centre any more. chucking more free ways at is does not solve the problem.

And those few hours are the rush hours. What you are asking for is to scale the roads to handle the maximum possible capacity when in reality outside those few hours a day they have a 5%(or whatever) usage. And you want your taxes to do that? Have you ever done that in any other situation and do you know how much it costs to have that much capacity which mostly stands unused. (roads cost a lot to maintain.

Thanks for answering. I have only been to LA a few times and it was always a pain wrt traffic.

A question. Is not some of the underground in LA being extended? Last I saw was lots of people complaining about the potential noise of construction.

And where do you put all the cars when they get to the city? More parking spaces needed. This helps people move further out and require more transport to get to the city and requires even bigger free ways and even more parking. So all you end up doing is causing people to spend more time and money travelling. More on taxes for the ever larger free ways and ever more for parking when they get there. Yet it still will not remove the traffic problems. All traffic passing through the city (as in not stopping there) will still be screwed. And all to try to resolve a few hours a day when peak traffic occurs.

Look up Smeed's Law (average speed part)

Also know as Smeed's Law (well part of it)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

That is about 0.5% of California's water usage over the last two years and often at times when the water would not have been stored.

There is not enough bandwidth for analogue tv AND lots of shopping channels.