The bomb is a British Blockbuster - so called because one could flatten an entire city block.The bombs are the origin of the term..

They were giant cylinders filled with explosive,with no streamling and no tailfins. When dropped they tumbled randomly through the air so there was no kind of accuracy with them. Dropping one on anything smaller than a city was pointless. Essentially they're weapons that were purpose-designed to be dropped on cities and to kill civilians.

That a sniper who's certain to be caught.

Given that virtually every single fragment of the rocket is going to be recovered and examined, most especially in the area where the explosion originated. Evidence of a bullet strike is going to be very very obvious.

The sniper gets caught (the aforementioned money troubles would be a good start in pinning him or her down) and would be offered the choice of ten years or sixty years in jail. The sniper would immediately sing the names of "the people with a motive". A good reason why the paid-sniper scenario is unlikely.

Who robs banks anymore? The take is comparatively low, the risk of capture extremely high and prison sentences lengthy.

It's a crime that is rapidly dying out,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

https://www.theguardian.com/ed...

Here's another interesting project they're cooking up... a Ship tunnel which is, if anything, more impressive.

Picture

The downside of blackmail is that you may make a lot of money from one mug. But if word gets out your business is essentially destroyed instantly. But you might not even get any money as your victim might go to the cops (in some states, blackmail is a felony) or might just refuse to pay and go online to tell the world about your extortion attempt.

High-priced prostitution has a big incentive to be discrete - they want existing customers to be repeat customers. They want new customers to feel safe and confident about what they're doing.

Now I'm not saying that's how it actually works in practice. I'm just wary of saying blackmail is the automatic outcome. Because discretion might ultimately be the most profitable policy for the prostitution providers. Most especially the expensive ones.

See; the XC120 Packplane - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.... Though the fact it didn't work in 1950, doesn't mean it can't work now. I keep an open mind.

However, the idea of sticking the pod on a railway waggon is a complete non-starter - I'm sure a pod that meets railway crash-resistance standards would be stupidly heavy for aviation use.

Britain will likely try to join EFTA - European Free Trade Association, currently Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein - TL;DR it's the EU Lite.

This, together with the EU, make up the European Single Market. Free movement of goods, services and people will continue. Though a lot is going to be completely up in the air - reciprocal deals for health care for example.

The old-school Silicon Graphics web - the Zeye 1.3 - had a little blue plastic shutter to cover the lens. Picture http://www.retrotechnology.com...

Flight recorders sit in the aircraft's tail - where they're ost likely to survive - and are built to be incredibly tough, to survive pretty much any accident.

But surely this is a hangover from the earlier era when data recording was done by things that were big, bulky and expensive. Therefore aircraft designers had no choice to put all their eggs in one (very very tough) basket.

Now data storage devices are tiny, why not have a system that disperses hundreds, each with a copy of the flight data, in the event of an accident? Sure they won't be individually as survivable, but who cares? It's the principle of the baby turtles making their way down the beach - a few are bound to make it.

Eight-inch floppies were pictured in use about two years ago... skip to 2m 50s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Although the introduction of locking cockpit doors had the effect of defeating one security threat, but also introducing a brand new one.

One thing he got wrong, the tank crewman at 7:14 isn't the driver, its somebody starting the engine. Engines of the period had crank-starts. I don't know why British WW1 tanks had the crank handles on the inside, but I'd guess it was because the engines constantly broke down and had to be restarted, and you'd get shot if you had to go outside to do that.

In this picture https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... - you can just about see the crank handle, on the left of the window.

This is what the actual driving position of one of the things looks like.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories

The Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic differed in detail, but was essentially a clone. The Olympic served on the North Atlantic run for two decades and was only retired in 1935. She gained the nickname "Old Reliable". - Picture of the two together

This suggests that whatever people now say about the design, construction, or the metallurgy of the iron, by the standards of the time, the fundamental design of Titanic was sound and the construction was perfectly fine. She was sunk by a crap-load of bad luck and four compartments being breached - a set of circumstances the designers hadn't envisaged.

BTW - "A set of circumstances the designers hadn't envisaged" seems to me what often happens when an airliner crashes. So we really shouldn't be feeling too superior about this.

It is something the lasers for the t Starshot projec could be used for. When they're not pushing micro-probes towards Alpha Centuri.