Indeed, in these kinds of class action lawsuits, there is only one big winner, and that is the lawyers who are litigating it.
I'm all for class action lawsuits in principle; companies that do things that are bad for soceity should face some sort of consequences for their actions, and people who were inconvenienced or harmed by the actions of companies should have some sort of recompence. In practice, however, usually what happens is that the people nominally benefitting get just a few dollars (probably not worth the paperwork of making it happen), the charge to the company is perhaps not trivial, but an easily absorbed cost of doing business, and it's a bonanza for the lawyers involved. The rewards system encourages litigous behavior for the sake of litigation, not good behavior on the part of companies nor does it provide any real recompense for people harmed.
The half life is not all that long on the isotopes used in RTGs
You do realize that there is a decay chain right? The next one in the sequence has a half life of 246,000 years and it carries on after that ending at some stable isotope of lead.
No military has ever put dirty bombs in to inventory. The reason is that they are really not effective weapons.
Correct. However there is a difference between deliberately trying to destroy something and accidentally doing so. No military has ever used a nuclear power station as a weapon. Are we therefore to conclude that they are completely safe and pose zero risk of contaminating the environment? The question is not whether these things are a deadly weapon the question is whether they are dangerous. Plutonium is also extremely toxic chemically.
Even if these batteries can be made safe enough to launch, and I don't doubt that they could, you have to prove that which will require a considerable engineering effort potentially making them more expensive than the budget will allow. In addition Pu-238 has a very limited supply.
Testing is done by firing the battery from an artillery gun directly into a solid steel wall several feet thick.
In England this would be covered under Fraud Act 2006 sections 2, 4, 6 and 7 (that's 4 separate INDICTABLE criminal charges with a concurrent maximum sentence of ten years).
You are talking rubbish. Organizations issue fines all the time in the UK e.g. libraries can fine you if you are late returning a book etc. I doubt every library has a sworn judge and a panel of jurors on hand to adjudicate your fine.
Any organization can levy a fine through an agreement. Students typically sign that they agree to be bound by the terms of the university's code of student conduct in before they are allowed to enrol. That code will undoubtedly contain the relevant clauses allowing a discipline procedure to levy a fine on the student. Even without such a signed agreement the fine can still be enforced with the threat of losing you membership of the organization should you fail to pay.
I can't see any way that any of the above constitutes false representation or abuse of position and section 6 and 7 have to do with possession, making and supplying articles for use in fraud (did you even read the act before citing it?).
This is certainly not the behaviour you would expect from a university and I am frankly amazed that they are doing this to their own students. However if it is done within the discipline framework of the university and the students have signed on to follow that code then I would expect that their choices are limited to either paying it or dropping out and finding a better university to attend.
Uh, nuh. Pu238 half-life is 88 years.
Correct but it does not stop there. It decays into an isotope with a 246k year half life and so on down a decay chain which eventually ends at lead.
I was ignorantly assuming that they'd do everything they could to insure the accomplishment of the mission.
They almost certainly did within the allowed budget. There are two problems with nuclear power spacecraft. The first is that if something goes wrong on takeoff you risk what is effectively a 'dirty bomb' going off somewhere in the Earth's atmosphere which is not good. The second, which does not apply in this case, is that if you make it into space safely you had better make sure that the craft does not return for Earth for a few billion years otherwise, again, it is like a dirty bomb going off in the atmosphere.
Clearly deep space missions like this mean that there is no chance of return but you still have the risk of a disaster on launch which is not entirely uncommon as the recent Antares Rocket launch showed.
Which is more likely to shoot a civilian...
That's not entirely the right question. You need to account for which is more predictable for another human. If you are in the middle of a war zone with soldiers getting blown up by booby traps then you might expect a human soldier to be rather nervous and so you would approach them with extreme caution or get out of the way. However if you have a robot wandering down a street in a peaceful area and the right set of circumstances just happen to cause it to misidentify a random, innocent person as a target that person has no possible way to predict that they need to be extremely cautious.
The result is a complex combination of both a human's ability to know when they are in danger and the predictability of the gun owner. While a human may be more likely to make wrong decisions under pressure fellow humans are also going to be aware of this and take extra precautions. With a robot the decision will be entirely based on how good the robot makes a decision since the human has no way to know whether the robot is likely to be hostile or not.
The fundamental problem with the "standard model" is that it's based on gravity.
Actually the one thing that the Standard Model is absolutely NOT based on is gravity. Gravity being so weak and have an long range actually is responsible for the structures at the largest scales of the Universe which is precisely where we see Dark Matter. The reason for this is that EM is so much stronger that it will force charge cancellation to a large high degree on smaller distance scales: if there is a charge imbalance opposite charges will be rapidly dragged in to create a balance. This cancels EM out at larger distance scales since the charges balance leaving only gravity (the strong and weak nuclear forces being short range [~nucleus] due to their physics).
can be baryonic matter, if it is encapsulated in some fashion.
In which case it would hardly qualify as ordinary baryonic matter...
John Tory (the next mayor of Toronto) has made statements actually supporting Uber. Thing is, although he's been elected he hasn't taken office yet, so he's not quite in a position to act.
Well I suppose this explains why, after Uber has been operating for 2 years Toronto is suddenly in a rush to get the case heard by the courts.
"I am, therefore I am." -- Akira