Eventually, and soon with luck, going to space will not be grand projects requiring investing in new tech, it will just be services that NASA will hire. Things like the bidding war between Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada for a space ship will be a thing of the past, and NASA will just look for the cheapest bidder to get their stuff up much like paying for shipping on a package. Sierra Nevada should keep working on their Dream Chaser because the days where somebody else will step in to pay them to develop and build it as a new project are hopefully growing near their end.

Pretty much, but it is a bit more complicated that that. Right hand rule refers to the cross product dealing with current, magnetic force, and the way it is taught. Essentially, physics follows a pattern that is mimicked by using the right hand and assigning certain related forces and fields to the thumb and fingers. This is known as the Right Hand Rule.

Probably did, but this is happening to probably to one hundredth of a percent of people. Their testing probably only included a few hundred people carrying the phone if that many. Still, with large sales, enough for it to be noticed. Much like the antenna issue with earlier phone. Affects practically nobody, but that's still enough to be an issue with the numbers they are selling the attention it is getting. Add in that they seem to assume that people will use cases (and most do IME, I seem to be the only phone user that goes 'bareback' that I know) or just not put a phone under the stresses that it is getting.

Pretty much, but I doubt they'll actually go. Sixteen years out is a pretty long time to take. I bet they don't even up their space spending this year. ...or the next. Sixteen years from now will be somebody else's probably rather than Putin's most likely. My cynical take is that it will go exactly where all of Bush's talk in each Presidential address about going to Mars went, nowhere past the news reporters.

My understanding is that the US backed the Free Syrian Army (along with Turkey, France, etc) which did fight alongside ISIL for a while against the Assad government but ISIL finally turned on the FSA and has been fighting them also for the last year or two.

Hitler's, the NAZI party's, and even Germany's hatred of the Jews goes back farther and is much greater than just the need of a scapegoat. There are times on the Eastern front where more men and material would have made a big difference, but in the end, Hitler ordered that more Jews be sent to the camps rather than supplies and troops to fight the Soviets. It wasn't just Hitler's usual bad tactical judgement, but a determined decision that exterminating the Jews was a greater goal than winning the war.

The ones already in space that don't have to be drug out of a gravity well to be used in space.

I'd say this is more like the rise of Imperial Russia again than the USSR. Russia has always had a chip on its shoulder concerning the rest of Europe. Not that the USSR was that much different from Imperial Russia.

In other discussions on bananas, usually on the demise of the Gros Michael banana, I've heard it stated that such incidents were the major driving force behind public trash cans in cities.

I wouldn't really expect the mass transfer to be that great. The neutron star is quite small and the red giant, quite large. Also, the neutron star, while inside the red giant, is most likely in a very low density region, it just happens that what is in that low density region is very hot plasma. There might even be other conditions such as a hot boundry layer around the neutron star that prevents too much from falling in like a stellar Leidenfrost effect. Sure, it's not stable, but the lifetime of such a thing is probably lasts far greater than our ability to watch it.

Not sure how UnknownSoldier knows that. It certainly doesn't jive with what I've been hearing for the last 20 years since I was in school for physics. Current theory is that the proto Earth was hit by a proto Moon about the size of Mars. Part of the proto-Moon ejected from the collision, unfortunately, the heavy metal cores of both the proto-Earth and proto-Moon stayed with the Earth so the moon does not have a similar metal core and is mostly mantel material. Also, the proto-Moon ejection formed two bodies which re-collided fairly non-violently as things go with the other bit now smooshed onto the back side of the moon.

Have everybody turn it over voluntarily and refrain from such because they think it is an outmoded and barbaric practice, essentially Star Trek. Sure, there will be detractors, but society won't really be set up any more for them to take advantage and exploit such. They'll be pretty much eccentric hobbiests at best and at worst probably be visited by a counselor to see if they are mentally stable but still allowed to go about their business so long as they are not hurting people past a certain point determined by law. Sort of like people who enjoy acting out Gor novels in the privacy of their own homes currently.

If the Chinese expats of CA were screaming for an embargo against China and large enough to sway the vote of the state, we might see an embargo against China. As it is, until the population of the swing state of Florida wants the embargo lifted, I doubt it will be.

Yes, they could have just payed less to have the announcers call whatever the teams were using "Microsoft Surface Pro tablets" and avoided all this mess.

3d6