This looks like a job for demilitarised Jaegers.

That's the most obvious part of the grounding, but the ship is properly wedged at both ends. It's not the whole problem.

It's wedged at the stern because the bow impelled the ground. The stern isn't impelled, once the front of the ship is free, the back be easily ungrounded by tugs.

That’s just a bit of wraparound suction flame, no big deal.

The landing propellant comes from very small header tanks (to reduce slosh), and those tank sizes constrain how long they can run a landing burn. Future iterations may end up with a bigger header: these are still early prototypes.

The other key take-home is that nobody got a serious case so that's 100% effective at preventing the collapse of the healthcare systems of the world.

It's really good news all round.

Yes. The wacky back-seat epidemiology is new with the many vaccine candidates. Most people won't get an actual choice, they'll be offered what their healthcare provider offers and they can take it or leave it.

Well typically there isn't such a large gap in vaccine performance.

62% is about as bad as vaccines get, and in any other circumstance the manufacturer would retrial instead of seek approval. Even the WHO recommends a 70% minimum during pandemic times (with 50%+ being a measure of last resort, which I guess we're at now).

On the other hand, 95% is better than the best of the best.

Kudos and good feelings, and probably operating costs going forward. Palantir's shady reputation could benefit from some good feelings.

Bzzt! It pegs critical care facilities if not contained and then a lot of people die.

You seem to lack empathy.

The UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that machines are more attractive.

Sorry could you expand on that a bit more? You only vote on one thing at a time?

Typically you’ll only be dealing with elections: General Election, Local Election, Mayoral Election, Regional Parliament Election, (until recently) European Parliament election.

Each of these is a different piece of paper, but on any given Election Day it’s rare (but not unheard of) to see three at once.

UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative. Everything else (who wins the Government, what issues get passed, etc.) is derived from this single point.

> UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative

That's true at the level of national government, but there are separate elections for different levels of government.

It's as if in the US you voted just for the House of Representatives, the Senate was unelected (which, get, historically it was) and the House elected the President.

Instead, the US started out with the same thing, except we elect an entire separate body (because we still didn't trust the people to do that, plus we wanted to make sure that citizens of slave states were overrepresented in executive elections as well as in the Senate) just to elect the President, and then later we decided to make the Senate accountable directly to the state electorate, too.

So you do not personally vote on (as an example) how much money goes to schools? Your representative does that voting for you. Is that correct?

You are correct. The typical voter does not vote on how much money goes to schools.

So is the United States.

A year after the Curiosity rover, they were out of stock and being resold at a handy markup on ebay. Hopefully the 2020 rover will get a model too so I can get it in time. I'd advise not to sleep on this.

The last time I was in the Lego store in Bellevue WA the sales clerk was actively encouraging me to buy four or five of a Star Wars item and to sell them on eBay for profit.