The main reason is Europe commonly has 3 phase AC service even to residential areas, with lower current per phase than North America delivers over a single split phase. To fully utilize what's available for AC charging in Europe, you need 3 AC pins on the charge port, where North America only needs 2 for the high and low side of the one phase.

Europe never used J1772 because they needed 3 pins, in NA when J1772 came out DC charging wasn't yet a thing and when it did start gaining ground, the high voltage pins were undersized for the currents DC fast charging provides without room to make them larger and stay compatible, so both CCS and CHAdeMO utilize a completely separate set of DC pins. NACS was designed with DC fast charging in mind, the high voltage pins are physically bigger and the car can use one set for both AC and DC charging, with a set of contactors inside the car to route it to the right onboard charger module. NACS is less useful in other markets because it doesn't provide the third AC pin, there's no point in every car sold in the US taking on the added expense of supporting 3 phase AC charging when 99.999% of them would never use it, and cars in markets where 3 phase are common need it to support efficient AC charging.

Rivian's headlamps look like a giant pair of USB-C sockets to me.

It doesn't? A C2D won't run Sierra or later anyway.

If it continues to meet his needs with the software he already has installed, great, but nobody was going to target new applications to it anyway, regardless of Apple removing 32 bit support.

Yeah, the article (and quite a bit of the press coverage this morning) is wrong. SS1 was the first flight since the 1960s, this is the first flight since 2004.

Tesla has a nationwide 135 kWh quick charge network built out and expanding every day that's closer to 6:1, or ~20 minutes every few hours. I've driven several thousand miles on it over the last couple of years.

The Falcon Heavy is a 2.5 stage design. The two side boosters will stage before the center core separates; it'll land as three independent cores.

The F9 is intended to land with what they call a "Hover Slam" maneuver - the engines decelerate it to zero right above the surface in as little time as possible. The Merlin engines have a limited throttle range, and with the stage empty, just one engine firing at the lowest throttle setting has a thrust-to-weight ratio somewhere around 1.8, so it can't hover. It would decelerate to zero and then start to lift off again if the engine isn't shut off, you'd need a TWR of 1.0 to just counter gravity and make it hover.

Mine are 100 degrees axis, about the only defect I have is an occasional dim spot in my peripheral vision, and that became less noticeable after a few weeks. I haven't noticed anything I'd call motion blur, but that's just me.

I don't use them specifically and couldn't tell the OP if they would help their specific situation, but there are bifocal contacts on the market now. I do use toric astigmatism lenses in one eye which are similar, they're designed in a way that causes them to settle into a certain "up" and "down" orientation when installed.

Or GRAIL.

Or the Orbcomm OG2 constellation that went up in July...

Launching multiple payloads on a single launch isn't exactly new. It sounds like the innovation here is using the satellites themselves as load structures for each other during launch rather than something like an ESPA ring to save weight and payload volume, but launching more than one satellite per mission is pretty common.

The reason people say Yuri Gagarin when you ask who the first human in space was is because Yuri beat Shepard by almost a month (April 12th 1961 vs May 5th 1961).

I've never, ever, heard anyone suggest Shepard didn't deserve Astronaut wings or the title "first American in space" because it was suborbital.

That's a reason why you should protect dealer networks if a company decides to start with that business model.

That's not a reason to protect those dealer networks from an upstart company that never had that business model. Just because GM and Ford made a deal with the devil 50 years ago shouldn't bind a new company to that same business model. Tesla has never had a dealer franchise agreement with anyone, them selling directly does not break any contractual agreement they've entered in to. They have no obligation to respect an agreement Ford or GM made with their dealer network to not compete.

Also as a counter point, Apple sells plenty of things through the half dozen Best Buys in my town. There's also two Apple stores within a 20 minutes drive. Just because a company sells through channel partners doesn't immediately preclude them from selling direct, it depends on the agreement they made with the channel in the first place. Even car dealer arrangements started out with the dealers protected by the franchise agreements themselves, elevating them from simple contract law to specific legislative protections came later.

In many cases they're specifically prohibited from opening one. Cars must be sold through dealers, and dealers must have an arms-length relationship with the manufacturer and can not simply be the manufacturer or a subsidiary of the manufacturer.

Those laws were basically written because while franchise agreements between dealers and manufacturers protected the dealers from direct manufacturer competition, the dealers believed they weren't strong enough and eventually manufacturers and their brands would become strong enough that manufacturers would find a way around them, or simply wait for the agreement to lapse and refuse to renew with that term, that dealers got them codified into law.

Which puts us back to the original point. The law was intended to protect existing franchises from existing dealers. They never anticipated a new manufacturer showing up who didn't want to sell through dealers. The law should not bind Tesla or any other new manufacturer to a business model GM and Ford designed many decades ago that puts the new entrant at a competitive disadvantage.

Columbia was doomed by the time it finished ascent, it just took until descent for the scope of the damage to become apparent. Arguably both losses in the shuttle program can be considered "on ascent".

I think it's more the fact that the whole program feels like it is being stitched together based on which existing technologies and contractors contribute to which congressional seats, rather than which technologies are really a good fit in the long term. As well as the fact that beyond a fairly nebulous manned astroid-capture mission, there doesn't seem to be any great plan or will to have a concrete goal for the booster in general. If Congress earmarked $50B over the next decade to put a research station on the Moon or Mars and insulated it from the year-to-year whims that always infect NASA's budget process it'd be one thing, but they aren't. They're trying to build a rocket and then hope two administrations from now it gets a mission funded.

On the technical side, any believe there's no place for solid motors on crewed flight anymore except to ensure campaign donations from Thiokol and United Space Boosters.

Second, while waiting for the new SSME derivative to get finalized and into production, they intend to fly the existing engine inventory. As one of the larger flown relics from the shuttle program, and with several dozen laying around, many of us would rather see them distributed to smaller museums that didn't get orbiters instead of splashed in the ocean. And as a result of the decision to use up the existing stock, the entire expendable stack is built around an engine that's was originally designed for reusability, with all the cost and engineering penalties that implies, and is ultimately too small for the job anyway. If you don't try to fly the existing SSME stock, something like a larger, more modern F1 derivative may start to make more sense, enabling a more powerful liquid first stage without having to bolt solids on the sides to get it off the pad.