Bolts are never reused in flight qualified spacecraft whether manned or unmanned because once they are used the threads become slightly deformed and do not hold as securely as the first time they're used. You can be sure this situation was tested many times with flight prototypes using identical bolts and I'm quite sure the particular bolt causing the problem was inspected quite thoroughly, but you are correct in that it would never have actually been used previously even for testing.

What is mind boggling to me is that otherwise intelligent people actually seem to think that car companies could make higher mileage vehicles and sell them at a profit in the United States and thus sell far more cars and make much more money than their competition, but they simply choose not to do so or are too "stupid" to think of such a fundamental idea.

If there are higher mileage cars in Europe, there is a damn good reason they aren't being sold in the United States, and that is probably because they do not meet all the draconian safety and air quality regulations that have forced all of our American car manufacturers out of business and caused GM to become a ward of the state.

Does this phenomenal Fiesta have all the airbags and other crap that our idiotic politicians require? In any case, the exact mileage figure is irrelevant, because the fact remains that neither vehicle mileage or any other scientific advances can happen simply by legislation.

Will they ever learn that congress cannot legislate scientific discovery or innovation by merely passing more laws? The physical laws of the universe will trump congressional law every time.

and a maybe a little bit of the submillimetre stuff

Isn't that similar to the wavelengths of the "nude scanners" the Department of Fatherland Security (DHS) uses in airports, and now rail and bus terminals, interstate freeways, etc?

I've been spending more time on /. because of the immature, inane, stinking cesspool that reddit has become.

It depends on what type of computer programming you do. I'm retired now, but most of the programs I wrote didn't require the use of much math; however, one application required integral calculus to determine the orbital angular position as a function of time for the Cassini spacecraft as it passed over an optical telescope at Table Mountain Observatory in Wrightwood, California on Earth as it did its "slingshot" around Earth in an Earth gravity assist maneuver to gain velocity on its eventual journey to Jupiter.

"Are we right to blame the rapid release process?"

Yes.

Most people seem to forget that the justification for creating corporations and "person-hood" in the first place here in the US was that the corporations were supposed to perform a public service of some sort. That has apparently either been forgotten or expanded to include "for-profit" corporations that are accountable only to their shareholders and not to the public at all.

Spamex.com solves that problem nicely. I don't understand why it hasn't caught on yet, but it is severely languishing because of lack of users and is consequently much slower than it used to be.

Don't laugh, as part of my high school science class (Circa 1960) we made solar cells from silicon wafers in a electric kiln the instructor built with firebricks. They probably weren't terribly efficient, but they did work.

Maybe it wasn't the gods who were listening. What makes you think he went to "Heaven"?