It would still be possible to fly a predominantly ballistic trajectory, yet use rocket propulsion to decelerate whilst still outside the atmosphere. It would require a huge amount of extra fuel compared to a purely ballistic trajectory, but perhaps still less than achieving a full orbit and de-orbiting again for some destinations.
At global distances a fraction orbital trajectory would use less total rocket delta-V.
More practical would be a trajectory that was a series of small suborbital arcs with skipping off the atmosphere (perhaps with some airbreathing propulsion during the skips.) The thermal protection can cool by radiation between the skips.
Several Kia models produced around 2005 incorporated the questionable design of having the engine control electronics located below the oil sump - as I've seen first-hand what that does to the vehicle's maintenance costs, I'm inclined to agree with you!
I know a number of people with this view on Kia and Hyundai. "They were garbage back in 199X or 200X so they're still garbage now." Except that was twenty or thirty years ago and from what I've heard they made advances in design and quality since then.
Most of what I've heard is about the electric vehicles they produce, not the ICE cars. My understanding is their EVs are different beasts and much better.
Kia has some competitive vehicles in niches that not many seem to want to service, and I suspect many of their buyers do not live in areas where immobilizers are going to be a major issue.
Our dealer was fine, and it's been fine. It's a car car, not really doing anything amazing.
Brands, but especially Asian ones, seem to go through cycles - this thing is absolute shit, nobody buy it, company fixes the problems and gets reliable, but still thought of as crap, company keeps improving, people start to notice, becomes known as a real good and reliable deal, company starts charging more and more. Kia's on the ascendant right now, where Toyota was 20+ years ago.
The immobilizer thing isn't due to stupidity, but corner cutting taken to ridiculous extremes. I don't think a company can recover from being run down by bean counters.
Your example is exactly the same problem as "admissible evidence" in a court of law. In the USA, it's very common for evidence to be rejected because the collection of that evidence was itself illegal - this is intended to protect the integrity of the system in general, no matter how heinous the alleged crime in a specific case.
So I'm sceptical: was the union really defending that specific employee, or were they trying to prevent a precedent from being set that could be used against other, more upright employees?
Termination for criminal activity is covered in the CBA's "just cause" clause. The union could have let the termination slide without setting any kind of precedent. Instead the union defended the employee as a flex.
The union knew that they had sympathetic arbitration and it was the early years of retail store surveillance being used against employees rather than common criminals (this was decades ago). I doubt a similar case would go the same way today.
> 10 years went by and the search for Mister 880 turned into the largest and most expensive counterfeit investigation in Secret Service history.
The article doesn't explain why the Secret Service made this their biggest case, and it doesn't make much sense to me. If the dollars were accepted by the general population, it would cause an infinitesimal increase in inflation of no consequence to others. And if shopkeepers wised up to the false dollars and rejected them, at worst he was defrauding the public by a few hundred dollars a year. In either eventuality, surely the Secret Service had more notorious counterfeiters to track down?
The state reserves some of the harshest punishments for counterfeiters, since large scale counterfeit operations is one of the few crimes that is an attack on the state itself.
The US secret service was originally created specifically to combat counterfeit money, it's no surprise that they would keep tracking this man for a decade.
This man is unusual because he did the tiniest amount of one the most severely punished crime.
I have two "counterfeiting" stories - both of which are humorous even though one involve the Secret Service.
The first was in college. A buddy of mine scribbled a facsimile of a $20 onto a piece of paper with a green marker. He then handed it to the checkout clerk at the cafeteria who took it and started to hand them back change. He stopped her and said "no, no it's a joke - look at what I just handed you". She was embarrassed but they both laughed together.
The second story which does involve the Secret Service is when my friend had a bunch of presents that he had wrapped and put in his front porch until was going to depart for a party. One of the presents was wrapped in a sheet of uncut dollar bills - which you could buy for that purpose.
A neppy neighbor saw it through the window and called the police who called the FBI who called the Secret Service who came knocking on his door to investigate. They were also embarrassed but I don't think they laughed. My friend told him he understands that they're just doing their job and that it's an important one.
I remember my friend coming home from his first year in college and telling me about how he passed a counterfeit $30 he'd found to a clueless clerk and they actually made the correct change. My wise-ass response was that that wasn't actually counterfeit, it was just fraud.
If it's being passed off as money, then someone thought it was. I don't think the Secret Service cares if it's an invalid denomination or has Bozo the Clown on the front. Probably not a high priority for them given the overall lack of believability, but the attempt is what counts.
I don't think that the parent comment is making the case it's not a crime, but rather that it's not specifically counterfeiting. There comment reads as playfully snarky to me, since, when discussing counterfeit currency, we almost always take counterfeit to mean "to make a fraudulent replica of".
> The state reserves some of the harshest punishments for counterfeiters, since large scale counterfeit operations is one of the few crimes that is an attack on the state itself.
Which is pretty ironic, given that the state need not be involved in providing physical cash at all.
The number of countries where life imprisonment is available possible sentence for counterfeiting seems to confirm it having some of the harshest punishments.
> number of countries where life imprisonment is available
All of those, I believe, have the death penalty for e.g. corporate fraud.
This is a bit of a nut job hypothesis. States don’t collapse because of private counterfeiting. It simply becomes an economic nuisance. The budget given to anti-counterfeiting in any country is generally a rounding error compared with other policing.
A small leak can sink a ship. The fake dollars weren't knowingly accepted.
If public confidence in the value of money is lost, we're all in big trouble.
The Secret Service was right to pursue the case zealously.
I think the public take a pretty pragmatic view on this and don't care as long as they are not losing money on it. A few years ago it was estimated that 3% or so of the 1 pound coins in the UK were fake (there is now a more secure coin type); AFAIK the quality was pretty good, so they weren't glaringly obvious, and it seems no-one really cared - if the supermarket or pub would accept it, then it's effectively money, right?
> if the supermarket or pub would accept it, then it's effectively money, right?
Only long as you both accept the same shared understanding of what it is. If one of you believes it's counterfeit and the other doesn't (whether it actually is or isn't!)... then it's not effectively money, no. For example, I don't know about you, but I sure as hell wouldn't knowingly pass off a counterfeit on the basis that the supermarket would accept it.
I think it depends... if everyone else was treating the counterfeits same as genuine coins, so you're continually getting a mix in change, and no-one is rejecting them when you pass them on, then I think most people would just do the same. If you are not going to get in trouble by spending one (assuming you even noticed in the first place - probably not), and can be pretty much 100% assured it'll be accepted, then it'd be a bit perverse to squint at every coin you handle.
Fiat currency has no inherent value - it's just a system of communal acceptance. If everyone accepts the fake coins then they ARE money. As you note, the system only breaks down if some people stop accepting it.
It'd be interesting if someone from the UK could chime in: Were you aware of all the fake pounds circulating (1 in 30!) ? Did you notice if you got one? Did you care?
> I think it depends... if everyone else was treating the counterfeits same as genuine coins, so you're continually getting a mix in change, and no-one is rejecting them when you pass them on, then I think most people would just do the same.
I think you're directly affirming this: it's fine as long as you both accept the same shared understanding of what it is.
£1 coins are a small proportion of the value of cash in circulation and cash is a small proportion of the money supply. Coins are easier to counterfeit than notes so even if other coins have similar rates of counterfeits its a small problem in context.
We have the benefit of hindsight. The Secret Service couldn’t know the true scale of the operation, how many fake bills were in circulation, and that they were only singles.
To set an example, as a deterrent to larger operations. If they go after even the smallest impact counterfeiters, it leaves no room for a plausible level at which an operation can safely run under, no matter how small.
Yes, the MNT Reform and Pocket Reform both have trackballs[1]. They're very different products from the StarFighter laptop though, in that they sacrifice a lot of potential processing power in exchange for a platform which is much more amenable to customization.
I don't see the AI talent visa as a serious suggestion. There's already the Blue Card, which is pretty easy for software engineers to obtain; for an AI talent visa to be anything special, it would have to loosen the already fairly lax requirements. To manage to persuade the whole EU to create a special visa for an emerging field that doesn't even have commonly-agreed-upon qualifications would be a unrealistic feat when many EU member states are looking to close down immigration opportunities, not create them.
Another useful tip: don't immediately register with the division local to you in the 'real world', but instead take a look at a variety to see how different divisions conduct themselves. Some divisions have very long waiting lists, and standards of service do differ between ARTCCs/FIRs. It's also worth just checking to see whether the software a given division uses is actually compatible with your computer, because they don't all use the same programs.
I've spent many hours in VATSIM and loved it, so don't be discouraged from diving in, but as a warning: I encountered a pervasive issue with pretentiousness across the VATSIM community, with some divisions setting largely arbitrary rules and procedures which don't exist in real world ATC.
