That statement is too strong. There were certainly cases and countries where the opportunity to rape and plunder with impunity were used as an incentive to sign up for the military, and lots of rape and plunder was done.

Is the Programmer aware that his simulated beings are sentient? Games simulate suffering beings all the time, but that is fine because computer programs are not sentient.

This is changing though. If you run a distribution with SELinux enabled, many applications and daemons are likely to be blocked from making outbound connections. Changing the rules is somewhat difficult though; distributions generally assume that the user does not have a clue when asked whether frobnitzd should be allowed to connect to Slashdot, so there is no GUI for asking the user.

AppArmor can do it too, and the configuration is perhaps a bit easier. I have no idea how much Ubuntu restricts by default.

Bikes must not go through roundabouts. They are the Achilles heel of roundabouts. They need their own lane entirely separated from the traffic in the roundabout, with their own separate crossings where they have to yield to cars. Even that solution is bad for bikes, because that means they have to yield a lot, and if there are a lot of bikes they end up in a traffic jam.

In England bikes rarely get squashed in roundabouts because there are so few of them and they generally go quite fast and seize the lane like motorcycles in roundabouts. That solution does not scale, in places like Denmark where bikes are plentiful and often go quite slow that would jam the roundabouts.

I think it is amply clear to anyone who happens upon this thread who should do the apologizing and who is missing the point. I do not think that I can add more clarity to the matter.

Please register on spritmonitor.de. Your numbers will be very welcome there.

The Lupo has been out of production for a decade and only manages 3.5l/100km in practice.

Yes, if you go at a steady 50km/h any decent car can do 3l/100km or better. That is not a realistic test.

"Redirecting without using fuel" is known as "gravity assist". I mention gravity assist in every single post.

5l is doable in a petrol hybrid, and you can get quite close with certain non-hybrid petrol econoboxes.

I know spritmonitor.de very well. They are one of very few sources of real fuel consumption data. Not silly test data that no one can achieve in practice.

Feel free to provide examples of in-production econoboxes with a 3l/100km fuel consumption under real-life driving conditions.

Compressing gas has a fairly lousy energy return. The air heats up when being compressed, and that heat is wasted unless you insulate the tank.

3l/100km is a myth. See The most fuel efficient vehicles.

The only ones that come close are 2 tiny diesel cars. Both have been out of production for almost a decade.

Accelerating at a modest rate is not particularly an advantage in a petrol car. Petrol cars are only decently efficient under full load, so you want to accelerate quite swiftly, using as high a gear as possible. If you are driving an automatic, it will spoil that idea by "helpfully" shifting down when it detects that you are pushing the accelerator, so that only works in a manual.

Because are wrong. I am not talking about landing on the Sun. You need to get rid of the "horizontal" delta-V of the Earth. "Vertical" delta-V is a non-issue; the Sun's gravity can provide plenty of that, but that only helps you once you get rid of your horizontal delta-V. Otherwise you keep missing.

And yes you only need to get rid of enough horizontal delta-V to strike the outer parts of the Sun. The difference is negligible.

I already address that part of your wordgasm. You can gravity assist to escape velocity, and it is easier since the delta-V is smaller.

Orbits do not spontaneously decay. They stay pretty much forever. Otherwise the planets would have long ago fallen into the Sun.