How about this - we can block posts by particular editors. Next time one posts a Benshit post, we add them to the list. If enough of them are posting his crap, and enough of us are blocking it, they'll pretty quickly see pageviews go down.

Mass.

An RTG is heavy. Solar panels are much lighter, and the comet is currently on a sun approach.

Let's look at the strengths and weaknesses of each type of power:

Coal/Oil/Gas:
+ Fast to spin up
+ Can produce exactly the amount of power needed
- Makes Captain Planet cry

Nuclear (fission):
+ Produces a lot of energy
- Doesn't throttle well
- Pollution problems solvable, but not currently solved

Hydro/Tidal:
+ Relatively reliable output of power
+ Hydro dams can be used as storage (pump water back up when it's cheap, let it drop again when needed)
- Reliant on geography
- Hydro dams are expensive
- Hurts fish

Geothermal:
+ Reliable power output
+ Usually no pollution
- Only works in some areas

Solar/Wind:
+ The greenest
- Not reliable
- Tends to produce most when price is cheapest

Nuclear (fusion):
+ Clean, reliable and powerful
- Doesn't exist yet

From this, you can easily see that you can only get a homogenous power grid that works by using fossil fuels or massive storage. Everything else has problems either with reliability (solar/wind/tidal), throttling (nuclear), or geography (hydro/tidal/geothermal). Since storing electricity is hard, it is obvious that some sort of hybrid system is necessary.

The base load should be handled by geothermal, tidal, hydro, and nuclear, in that order (which is both how green they are, and how strict they are in where they have to be located). These produce reliable amounts of power. Tidal is a bit weird in that it's cyclical and not continuous, but that's not as much buffering needed, and it doesn't synch up with solar/wind.

Peak load should be handled by solar and wind, buffered by a reasonable amount of storage. Long-distance superconducting lines might also mitigate the problems - if it's cloudy in Paris, see if it's sunny in Tripoli.

And yes, there's still a place for fossil fuels. They're your last-line-of-defense system. Keep a few plants idling, to handle any peak load that spills over from solar/wind. Keep another few mothballed, able to be brought up within, say, a week. That way if your wind production gets wrecked by a hurricane, you can get back on your feet quickly.

They did do things backward, but switching engines would be much easier if they hadn't settled on such a tiny craft. If they could deal with larger fuel tanks, they could use an RD-0124 - higher thrust (290kN vs. 270kN), and I can't see how it can have lower specific impulse. The only hurdle I can see is that liquid fuel takes up a lot more space than solid fuels, and they've got a pretty small craft.

However, you missed an important part of the feather problem. The pilot erroneously unlocked it, but DID NOT deploy it. That is clearly an engineering problem.

Honestly, I think they're fucked right now no matter what the problem is. It could have literally been Space Jesus shooting it with lightning - they're in the tourism business, and rich tourists are pretty risk-averse. Any failure is probably going to be enough to kill the business.

If it had been the engine, it would have been forgettable. Rocket engines explode all the time, because they're funneling huge amounts of extremely volatile fuels and oxidizers into a high-pressure, high-temperature chamber. SS2 was also testing a new design - new engines are particularly failure-prone, because there's still stuff rocket scientists don't know. While it would have been worse than "not exploding at all", if the problem had been the engine, they could fix it and move on.

The news that it was the wing, and not the engine, that caused the failure is, in my mind, worse. It means they fucked up on a relatively simple, well-understood problem. Part of the blame can be assigned on the pilot disabling the safety early, but it still activated spontaneously and catastrophically. That makes me suspicious of what other simple things they've screwed up.

I voted for one Libertarian, one Independent, and two Democrats. The first Democrat was running unopposed, and the other was opposed only by a Republican, and both were for minor local offices only. I didn't use write-ins only because I didn't actually know of anyone worth writing in.

No, yesterday's election message was "fuck Democrats", just as 2008's was "fuck Republicans". The system just doesn't really allow a message of "fuck BOTH of them", probably because the system was made by both of them.

In Soviet America, government ALSO sodomizes you!

It's not available on OpenBSD.

If they're showing possible symptoms AND recently traveled to a region with an ebola outbreak, yes, a quarantine seems reasonable. For "region" I would include both small countries like Liberia in their entirety, and subdivisions of larger countries (for example, Texas).

If they're not showing symptoms but came into close contact with ebola patients, a quarantine is also reasonable. As motivation for accurate self-reporting, let's give them free healthcare if they do develop a case. That way, the people fleeing to seek treatment elsewhere will actually go into quarantine.

Otherwise? Let them go. The early symptoms for ebola are basically indistinguishable from the flu, and even in the countries with full-blown pandemics, it's not a particularly common disease. We don't need to ban all travel from Liberia, let alone from all of Africa.

Ham won't be convinced of anything. But the people who follow him might. Ham has convinced them that science and religion are at odds, and many people, unfortunately, would choose religion over science. If you can convince them there is no such war, they'll stop fighting it.

We don't need them to join our side - we just need them to stop fighting.

According to Wikipedia, the refurb consists mainly of electronics and steering mechanisms.

Nye did not win, because he was fighting the wrong war.

Nye argued like a scientist. He presented the evidence, gave logical explanations, and generally relied on demonstrable facts. He did a flawless job, but changed absolutely no-one's mind, because anyone who cares about science, reason and evidence already accepts evolution.

Ham didn't even really argue. He just riled people up for a crusade - it was the evil liberal commie atheists trying to teach satan's lies, and him and his book of JESUS that showed the big bad man up. He also did not convince anybody, but he can count it as a win because he got people who believed in the general idea of creationism to believe specifically in his branch of creationism.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: when you argue about creationism, you are not arguing science. You're arguing theology. If it were me on the stage with Ken Ham, I wouldn't bring slides of radiocarbon dating and fossil evidence, I'd bring quotes from Augustine and Aquinas. I'd point out that some of the earliest work leading to evolution was done by Gregor Mendel, a friar in the Augustinian order. I'd use some choice words from Pope Francis, who, even if you aren't catholic, you have to admit he's probably read the bible at least a few times. I'd present a history of creation that matches both scientific evidence (literally) and scripture (figuratively). And then I'd attack his own character, not with the insults of the scientist, but with the insults of a religious man. I'd ask rhetorically how he thinks he can interpret scripture for the rest of us. I'd make him out to be a fraud and a cheat, hijacking religion for his own gain (which, to be fair, he kind of is).

That's how you argue with a crazy person - with more crazy. He, and his followers, don't give a single fuck about the truth. So take them down within their own framework, not from your own.

SpaceX has flown missions for the Canadian, Taiwanese and Turkmen space agencies, and is contracted for the new versions of both the Iridium and Orbcomm satellite networks, among numerous other commercial payloads. NASA is currently their biggest single customer, but they're rapidly losing that status (Iridium has seven launches contracted, NASA only four).

Soylent News runs on Slashcode (although a fork of an earlier version, I think). HTTPS works just fine, as does Unicode and probably a few other things broken on Slashdot. No IPv6 yet but I'm sure it's coming. It's all on Github so it would be fairly trivial to merge it in to Slashdot.