They have hypergolic-fueled engines on the Dragon spacecraft. They're already in development on a more powerful hypergolic engine that could be useful for a lander.

Read the guy's blog. He eats "normal" food on social occasions, or when he just feels like experiencing a certain taste. Soylent is just supposed to be about the vast majority of meals you eat where it's just about fueling your body so you can get on with more important things.

The product being shipped to customers is not being produced in that warehouse. The warehouse in the article was for prototyping. The facility the consumer version is being produced in is an FDA regulated and inspected facility.

The actual product being shipped to customers is being prepared in a fully FDA certified and inspected facility. The place where they were making the prototype formula was just that - a place for prototyping.

Orbital and SpaceX could easily take their craft in for docking themselves, but NASA's rules require them to do it this way. NASA's rules are that nobody is allowed to put something on a trajectory that intercepts the ISS, even for an instant, for any reason. This is the reason that a secondary payload on an earlier Falcon launch wasn't allowed to be put into its desired orbit. An engine failure on the Falcon's first stage required it to take a modified trajectory into orbit, at which point boosting the secondary payload would have required that, for an instant during its boost, its trajectory pass through the ISS. For this to be dangerous, it would have required the engine to fail in the middle of its burn at a very precise instant. NASA disallowed it, so the secondary payload wasn't able to perform its mission.

So, bringing a spacecraft in for docking requires you to put your craft on a collision course. Docking is just a low-speed collision, after all. NASA will not allow this, so anyone bringing payload to the station has to rendezvous and place the craft within range for the ISS to grab it and bring it in.

The big win with kerosene over LH2 is that kerosene is much denser, so a) your tanks can be smaller and b) it's much easier to generate high levels of thrust since you don't have to move as much liquid through your engine.

What do you think of SABRE?

> That means the musicians need to get .wav files instead of things like ProTools files.

Protools stores its audio as wav or aif files.

Your "source" is a bunch of TV broadcasts by Syrian TV, which is controlled by the Syrian government. That's not actually a news outlet, it's just the propaganda wing of the Assad regime. They're going to say whatever they need to say to keep Assad in power.

The thing to keep in mind here is the scale of these attacks. You could see the rebels launching an attack on a small scale, maybe. But the attacks were actually launched against three different areas near Damascus, and used rockets and chemical weapons, and killed something like 1400 people and injured more. This kind of large, coordinated attack takes a large, well-trained, well-organized military with heavy weapons in the form of rockets and large chemical weapon stockpiles. The rebels are a bunch of disorganized factions with assault rifles; they just don't have the weapons or organizational ability to do that.

As for why would Assad use chemical weapons? Well, why wouldn't he? He'd previously sent in tanks and soldiers to put down demonstrations. He'd sent paramilitary groups in to murder civilians in their beds. He'd used artillery against civilians. He'd previously used chemical weapons on a small scale. He'd killed 100,000 people. All the while, the U.S. had done nothing, and Putin stood up for him and was going to veto any UN resolution. Assad had already gotten away with so many atrocities, he drew the conclusion that he'd get away with this one as well. And so far, no one's proven him wrong...

As tempting as it would be to attack the finances of the Assad regime, it would be a really, really bad idea. Let's say we hack into his bank accounts and where it says "$37 billion" we change a few decimal places and all of a sudden, it's 37 cents, or maybe we write a $37 billion dollar check to that charity that buys cows for people in Africa. Then the regime collapses because he can't pay for supplies or buy the loyalty of his cronies. This might be effective, but it creates a nasty precedent. During the next conflict, maybe someone decides to attack finances in the U.S. If bank accounts are vulnerable, everyone is going to start panicking and withdrawing their funds trying to put it somewhere safe, and people will be reluctant to loan money, and you'll have a financial panic on your hands like in 1939 or 2008. And of course, everyone's connected to everyone else. U.S. firms borrow money from Germany and China... if those firms suddenly go belly-up that's going to cause a global panic.

It's night and day. You can go on Youtube and see the victims of the chemical weapons yourself- children suffering seizures, row after row of men, women and children laid out on concrete floors without any signs of physical injury. Medecins sans Frontiers came out and said that the doctors treating the wounded described symptoms consistent with nerve gas. Some of the people treating the victims got enough exposure that they fell ill and some of them died. Tissue samples taken by doctors have tested positive for Sarin gas. The British recently came out and said that it's chemical weapons. So we have US intelligence, British intelligence, and a French NGO all saying it's chemical weapons. And the Syrian Army is the only group in the area that has the weapons and capability to launch 3 different attacks and kill 1400 people. The accounts indicate that the attack was launched using rockets; the rebels don't have heavy weapons.

One problem with cyberwarfare is that the US is heavily dependent on the internet, whereas the dictatorships we're facing off against aren't. North Korea is a good example of this. The North Korean regime is supposed to have invested heavily in offensive cyberwarfare as a deterrent weapon. If hostilities were to break out with the U.S., North Korea could try to disrupt our civilian infrastructure and economy, but they'd be almost invulnerable to counterattack, since the country doesn't depend on the internet. They are about the worst opponent you could face- Russia and China would have more formidable offensive capabilities, but they would also have their own vulnerabilities so you could at least hit back.

Syria is a different issue. Assad's regime did invest heavily in technology to monitor the internet but doesn't seem to have any serious offensive cyberwarfare capabilities. The "Syrian Electronic Army" is just a bunch of pro-Assad hackers hacking websites. So far they've managed to hack the Twitter feed of BBC Weather, the Onion, the Marines web page... the most serious thing they managed to do was hack the AP and post a story about the White House had been bombed, which caused the stock market to take a dive (before just as quickly rebounding). This is advanced mischief, not serious cyberwarfare of the type that can cause major economic damage. It's possible that the Syrian regime has some sort of weapon hidden up their sleeve, but I doubt it. As Dr. Strangelove says, the whole point of a deterrent weapon is lost if you keep it a secret. The bigger issue is how effective cyberwarfare will be against the Syrians.

Israel was able to use cyberwarfare against them effectively when they bombed the Syrian nuclear plant- they hacked into the air defense system. The Syrian air defense radars actually detected the inbound Israeli F-15s, but the screens showed clear skies. The first clue the Syrians had they were under attack was when their nuclear bomb program blew sky high. But currently the fight is brutal and low-tech. It's being fought by soldiers with guns, with artillery, and with paramilitary groups. The communications of the regime might be more vulnerable to attack but overall any cyberattack would probably have a psychological and propaganda effect rather than really altering the military equation.

If routine commuting is "fun," then you're doing it wrong. Driving safely and efficiently is, and should be, boring as hell and I can't wait for it to be illegal to operate a vehicle manually on public roadways so I can spend my commuting time doing more interesting things.

You'll always be free to do your driving for fun on private roads and tracks, but keep your "fun" off the roads that I have to share with you.

A "need" is not necessarily something you have to have or you will die. You won't die if you're locked in a room for the rest of your life with no human contact, but there's a reason that solitary confinement is considered a form of psychological torture. Social contact is a human need, emotional bonding is a human need, sex is a human need. Hell, Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs puts sex in the *bottom tier* of the pyramid.

Yeah, I think the effort of space colonization and life extension would be more appropriately put toward making the human race *worthy* of exploring the universe and living forever.