My guess is that folding wings & landing gear would be heavier and more difficult to produce. Also, it would mean you'd need a landing strip to land at, which would mean it would have to fly over land; probably a harder thing to get clearance for.
Firstly, I think SpaceX were trying to get away from parachute recoveries. The Shuttle solid booster rockets used to parachute down into the ocean, but the problem with that is that they need completely cleaning out and refurbishing between each flight.
Secondly, they would need more than parachutes to recover the first stage because it is travelling so fast when it separates (not sure of the exact number, but somewhere between 2 and 4 Kilometers per second). They have to do a retrograde burn to slow down enough to safely re-enter the atmosphere.
The thing is, I'm not sure the vast majority of people do still use those imperial units. UK schools have taught in metric units for the last 40 years, and all food and drink (with the exception of draught beer and cider) has had to sold with metric labelling for the last 20 years. I'm 41, and although I have a good idea of what an inch and a foot is, I have no particularly intuitive feeling for a pound or an ounce, so I always have to the mental conversion to grams or kilograms first, and I grew up at a time when imperial measured labelling was more common.
The thing I find interesting is that David Cameron is probably among the last set of people in the UK to have been taught any imperial measures in school - in fact he would have been eight years old in 1974 when using metric units in schools became compulsory, so it's possible he could have been taught both imperial and metric (Unless private schools were exempt from such rules, I guess).
Certainly anyone aged 44 or under in the UK will have grown up with the metric system in school.
Yeah, that bit was pretty alarming. Imagine being encased in that suit, unable to move your arms and suddenly a spark gets in and sets your clothes or hair on fire. I'd be interested to know if he had any kind of alarm he could press to get people to run in with extinguishers and the like.
There are several comments suggesting that they had simply planned badly at the start of the project, which had resulted in a bad engine choice.
He actually mentions it in the article; Unreal Engine 4 only became available at a feasible price when they had started the project.
It's a nice idea, but it requires the calling party to have a Mac or iOS device to call in from. I would have thought they need a solution that would support PC users as well.
Just buy some Eurofighters...
To be fair, in the US they'd have just charged you with a bunch of more serious crimes as well, which they'd offer to drop if you plead guilty for the one they wanted you for.
Personally, I'm neutral. On one hand, the Prius and Nissan keyfobs that just sit in a pocket are cool with one less thing to flip open. On the other hand, having to stick the physical key in the vehicle with a very low power transmitter handling the passive anti-theft access gives a bump in security.
There's no transmitter in my key. You're thinking of the RFID keys, which are pretty good security: coupled with a decent quality alarm with multiple immobilizers it makes a car pretty much unstealable unless you have a flatbed.
But there's no reason you can't simply put the RFID into the alarm keyfob instead of the key. In fact, most of the pushbutton starters I've seen in recent years work exactly like that -- there's an RFID in your keyfob, and if you don't have the keyfob in your pocket (or within a few feet of the car), the car simply won't start. If the car gets out of range of the keyfob, it'll trip the fuel line immobilizer.
Looking at the map in the UK, the vast majority of England is coded yellow or worse (5.6 - 6.0 - suburban sky). In some places you can can get green coded (6.1 - 6.5 - suburban / rural transition), and there's only four areas coded blue (6.6 - 7.0, rural), which are along the border with Scotland, a chunk of Cornwall, a very small bit of the North Norfolk coast at Wells-next-the-sea, and a bit at the border with Wales. Wales in general fares better with some proper dark places through the central and western of the country, as does Scotland in the highlands and along the border with England. Northern Ireland has a few spots of 'blue' in the north and southwest of the country.
Anyway, for me a it's a little disappointing - It'd be many hours drive to get to anywhere rated 'blue' or darker, and over an hour to get to the only place in the whole of the southeast rated 'green'.
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
