The drugs are often exotic molecules we've cooked up for the purpose; but hormonal birth control exploits the same hormones that would naturally show up, since those are the ones that there are receptors for and that cause the desired changes. The quantity that a dense human population will put out is something quite different; but the chemistry won't be markedly different between humans and other placental mammals.

There might be an RO system somewhere that uses gravity and an input reservoir at higher altitude than the output to supply some or all of the pressure; but I don't think that that is anything like the typical configuration. Cleaning up after a leak in zero gravity isn't going to be lots of fun; but everything else should work largely as planned.

In the case of SDI the PR might actually be worse than useless (playing mutually-assured-destruction isn't much fun to begin with; but if one or both sides come to believe the hype about a missile defense system things could really go downhill). In the case of 'iron dome', though, it might actually be helpful. Barring fairly substantial increases in rocket construction expertise, or acquisition of something particularly nasty to fill them with, the attacks it is supposed to defeat are only modestly dangerous; but extremely inflammatory.

Given how lousy the alternatives for appearing to be taking action against the rocket menace are (grovelling through every last hidy-hole in Gaza is militarily doable but a PR debacle and unlikely to turn up more than a few bits and pieces of impoverished machine tools, because low-end rockets just aren't that hard to build. Paying Hezbollah a visit might turn up somewhat more interesting stuff; but that hasn't turned out well in the past) a system that postpones or prevents somebody taking the bait and trying them might be quite helpful.

They don't need to be high voltage or high current, they just need to have electrolytic caps, like most analog circuitry does. Electrolytic caps don't need to run hot, they just need to be electrolytic and made in China, and they're virtually guaranteed to fail early. Go read about the Capacitor Plague.

Yeast with THC sounds like a perfect combination, get high while eating something baked and it could be any bread, a dope bagel, a funny muffin, a nostalgic croissant, the branding possibilities are endless!

The American dream (before it was hijacked by the realtors in the USA) has died a horrific death as the government completely overtook over every function of the market and declared itself to be the legal dictator state completely dominating over the individual human being. The American dream was the idea that equal under the law individuals could pursue their own happiness on their own terms, where apart from regulating criminal conduct, government wouldn't have any authority to stop the individuals from attempting to build their own lives and businesses the way they saw fit. That dream suffered its first heart attack during Teddy Roosevelt, second heart attack during the Hoover and FDR, it was kicked in the balls in the fifties and then had a minor stroke when Nixon took the world off the gold standard. Now the dream is a dying, rotting, gangrenous corpse, that is being systematically shat on by every self proclaimed 'saviour' of the society and its values, by all the Marxists, socialists, fascists and basically brainless, dickless, heartless pigs that are happy simply to take another shit on the Constitution and smear their faeces all around them - a form of societal self degradation that periodically descends one or another population of humans into the dark ages throughout history.

So you believe that what Afghans want is your version of a welfare state, that rather than being left alone they want to be corralled into your personal version of 'free paradise'? Why not just LEAVE THE PEOPLE ALONE and not try to play either occupants or saviours?

Nobody ever wants to go on strike, any more than employers want a lockout. It's the nuclear option, used as a last resort.

As best I can tell, they are whining because they preferred the imaginary world where the lawsuit against Aereo was actually over whether the filthy, disruptive, upstarts shoudl be burned to the ground and have the earth beneath them salted, rather than whether they were more like an antenna rental service or more like a cable company.

Aereo obviously didn't want to be a cable company, hence its ongoing defense; but the tone of the rhetoric against them was never "Yeah, because of a raft of tedious reasons, Aereo ought to be classified as a cable company for regulatory purposes"; but rather a bunch of fire and brimstone nonsense about the signal-stealing piratepocalypse.

You sound like a typical Democrat voter: anyone who disagrees with the Democrat party line is automatically a "nutcake gun-owning, violent conservative", Obama somehow isn't at fault for anything his administration does but Bush can be blamed for all current Democrat policies, and calling Obama on his pro-Bush policies is somehow "hatred of technology and science" and makes one a Holocaust denier.

Honestly, I used to think the Republicans were the nutty ones, but these days I'm starting to believe it's really the Democrats who are insane.

Yes, but also this is a meaningless move by Germany in the real sense of the world, because it is still not demanding that all of its gold is returned by the USA immediately.

Of-course the German central bank authorities decided a couple of weeks back that it is better to pretend that the USA still has German gold and not raise any noise than to make it clear that its gold is gone. Germany requested the USA Fed to return its gold about 2 years ago, USA came out saying that it will return half of the gold within 7 year period but in 2 years only returned 1/100th of what it was supposed to, actually the numbers can be found here. In any case if Germany truly wanted to make a statement it would insist on the return of its gold, with the correct serial numbers on the bars and everything.

If Germany simply wanted to get the gold back it also has a choice of selling the gold in the market and getting dollars back, which the Fed could easily provide by creating them out of thin air as it always does, so that then Germany could buy the gold back in the market (of-course fewer tons could be bought since the prices would go up, but at least it wouldn't be a total loss as it is now). Any of this would be better than a useless symbolic gesture.

You are misinformed and ignorant.

Sounds like a typical American.

I wonder if it fell victim to the Capacitor Plague. It might have just needed some new electrolytic caps.