Regular solid aluminum blocks do not burn in a 20% oxygen atmosphere. There's not enough surface area for oxidation to replenish the heat lost to convection or radiation. So it's safe to use liquid aluminum for molds, for example.

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

No, it's more complicated. X86 historically used 80-bit floating point numbers internally and translated to 64-bit as needed. That causes a lot of very subtle bugs if you're not careful - they do not affect the result too much, but they're there. It's easier now, because most CPUs simply use 64-bit floats.

Excel is reproducible. Microsoft worked very hard to make its floating point calculations work exactly the same way on all machines.

SPSS is nice, but it is expensive as hell.

Nope. Numpy doesn't allow you to visually play with the data. You have to write code for everything.

So what's the alternative? There are no good and easy to use software packages to create simple data-intensive apps. The closest alternative was VB6 and if I had to chose between it and Excel, I'd choose Excel any day of the week.

Beloyarsk power plant has a fast-neutron reactor ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... ). It's been working without major incidents for about 35 years.

88% efficiency means that out of every 1KWt*hr you pull from your outlet, 0.88KWt*Hr will be used to propel the car. And it's the TOTAL efficiency, including the battery charging overhead.

I have a Chevy Volt with 10.5KWt*hr of battery storage, it takes about 11.2KWt*Hr to charge it completely. So we're talking about ~5% loss during the charging. With other losses in the high-voltage system, the 88% figure seems believable.

What do you mean by 'terrestrial eye'? An eye filled with air instead of liquid? It won't make any difference in efficiency. You really can't make eyes to look much different than they are.

Tried that, still not as easy to use. Also, holders suck. I'm also using my RPi to get statistics from CAN bus and do a couple of other tricks, like emulating OnStar and sending address directly to in-car navigation so that I don't have to enter it manually.

Answer: convenience.

I actually installed a RPi-based hotspot in my car with a Verizon stick. It's really nice to be able to access Internet on my laptop and non-3G tablet without bothering to activate a hotspot on my phone.

To be fair, he also introduced a bill to make NSA more transparent.

And Svoboda party got 50% of government positions, even though they got less than 5% of popular vote. Things get crazy after revolutions.

I lived for a couple of years right on Kings Highway and I never managed to get a yellow cab. Though a lot of limousine service cars violate their rules and pick up passengers on streets.