Apparently, NASA sent a memo to its employees at the Johnson Space Center asking for their urine so they, NASA, could use it to test the Orion space capsule. How much urine? 30 liters per day, including weekends. Disposal of urine for up to six months would be required if Orion is to work as planned. Alert reader nettamere adds a link to story at Discovery.com, excerpting: “Donations will be treated with a chemical that can hold solid particulates in the liquid so they don’t clog up the tubing in microgravity, said Leo Makowski, company spokesman for Hamilton Sundstrand, a contractor designing the new spaceship’s toilet. … “It’s difficult to come up with a faux urine, explained NASA’s Jim Lewis, the systems manager overseeing development of Orion’s potty. ‘That’s why we depend on collections.’”

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Filed under: Products and services, Competitive strategy, Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon.com (AMZN), Sony Corp ADR (SNE)

Nearly every consumer electronics device from the Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Unbox to the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Xbox has a service for downloading and playing movies. Now, late to the market, Sony (NYSE: SNE) wants to offer a similar service of its own.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Sony began offering a video-downloading service Tuesday for its PlayStation 3 videogame console, part of its aim to broaden its audience.”

When one or two companies in an industry offer a new feature, it could be a competitive advantage. But the feature of downloading movies over the web is available on so many devices that the advantage, even for those early to the market, may be taken away.

Movie download services have become a commodity and not a differentiating feature. Critics could argue that Sony should have added the product to the PS3 a year ago. But it does not matter. At this point it is just one feature among others that everyone in the industry offers. What everyone has, no one is apt to be able to use as critical leverage to get more customers.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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thepacketmaster learned of “…the possibility of Steven Hawking moving to Waterloo in Canada: ‘A report out of Britain recommends Stephen Hawking is considering an invitation to come work at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics….But he’s also being encouraged to move to Ontario by his University of Cambridge colleague Neil Turok, the mathematical physicist who will take over as Perimeter’s executive director on Oct. 1. Perimeter confirmed last night that it has made a standing offer to Hawking…Turok is leaving Cambridge after failing to persuade university authorities, research councils and sponsors to spend $40 million…By comparison, Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute has about $600 million in funding…The addition of Hawking to Perimeter’s staff of top physicists would be a major coup for the research institute, founded in 1999 by Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion, which makes the BlackBerry.’”

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Rob writes with an excerpt from an article at spacefellowship.com: “A powered rasp on the back of the robotic arm scoop of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is being tested for the first time on Mars in gathering sample shavings of ice. The lander has used its arm in recent days to clear away loose soil from a subsurface layer of hard-frozen material and create a massive enough area to use the motorized rasp in a trench informally named ‘Snow White.’ The Phoenix team prepared commands early Tuesday for beginning a series of tests with the rasp later in the day. Engineers and scientists designed the tests to lead up to, in coming days, delivering a sample of icy soil into one of the lander’s laboratory ovens. ‘While Phoenix was in development, we added the rasp to the robotic arm design specifically to grind into very hard surface ice,’ said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. ‘This is the exactly the situation we find we are facing on Mars, so we believe we’ve the right tool for the job. Honeybee Robotics in New York City did a heroic job of designing and delivering the rasp on a very short schedule.’” I still can’t get enough of photos of a tiny hunk of metal on Mars.

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thepacketmaster learned of “…the possibility of Steven Hawking moving to Waterloo in Canada: ‘A report out of Britain recommends Stephen Hawking is considering an invitation to come work at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics….But he’s also being encouraged to move to Ontario by his University of Cambridge colleague Neil Turok, the mathematical physicist who will take over as Perimeter’s executive director on Oct. 1. Perimeter confirmed last night that it has made a standing offer to Hawking…Turok is leaving Cambridge after failing to persuade university authorities, research councils and sponsors to spend $40 million…By comparison, Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute has about $600 million in funding…The addition of Hawking to Perimeter’s staff of top physicists would be a major coup for the research institute, founded in 1999 by Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion, which makes the BlackBerry.’”

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An anonymous reader writes “July marks the 50th anniversary of the world’s largest tsunami — a 1,720-foot-tall wave in Lituya Bay, Alaska. It was triggered by a chain reaction of events that began with a magnitude 7.7 earthquake on the Fairweather Fault, which dislodged a rock fall of 40 million cubic yards, that fell 3,000 feet and splashed into the northwest end of Lituya Bay to generate the wave. This article includes survivor accounts, maps, a satellite image, and photos taken right after the event.” To be fair, eyewitness accounts put the height of the wave as it came toward their boats at perhaps 100 feet. The tsunami scoured the land of vegetation and soil to a height of 1,720 feet above sea level, however.

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Rob writes with an excerpt from an article at spacefellowship.com: “A powered rasp on the back of the robotic arm scoop of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is being tested for the first time on Mars in gathering sample shavings of ice. The lander has used its arm in recent days to clear away loose soil from a subsurface layer of hard-frozen material and create a massive enough area to use the motorized rasp in a trench informally named ‘Snow White.’ The Phoenix team prepared commands early Tuesday for beginning a series of tests with the rasp later in the day. Engineers and scientists designed the tests to lead up to, in coming days, delivering a sample of icy soil into one of the lander’s laboratory ovens. ‘While Phoenix was in development, we added the rasp to the robotic arm design specifically to grind into very hard surface ice,’ stated Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. ‘This is the exactly the situation we find we are facing on Mars, so we believe we have the right tool for the job. Honeybee Robotics in New York City did a heroic job of designing and delivering the rasp on a very short schedule.’” I still can’t get enough of photos of a tiny hunk of metal on Mars.

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An anonymous reader writes “July marks the 50th anniversary of the world’s largest tsunami — a 1,720-foot-tall wave in Lituya Bay, Alaska. It was triggered by a chain reaction of events that began with a magnitude 7.7 earthquake on the Fairweather Fault, which dislodged a rock fall of 40 million cubic yards, that fell 3,000 feet and splashed into the northwest end of Lituya Bay to generate the wave. This article includes survivor accounts, maps, a satellite image, and photos taken right after the event.” To be fair, eyewitness accounts put the height of the wave as it came toward their boats at perhaps 100 feet. The tsunami scoured the land of vegetation and soil to a height of 1,720 feet above sea level, however.

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Cowards Anonymous passes along a PCWorld article that begins, “The robotic arm on the Mars Lander found itself in a tough position over the weekend. After receiving instructions for a movement that would have damaged its wrist, the robotic arm recognized the problem, tried to rectify it and then shut down before it could damage itself, according to Ray Arvidson, a co-investigator for the Mars Lander’s robotic arm team and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.”

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Vote McCain in 2008! writes “McCain’s campaign is doing everything it can to erase Obama’s online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn’t the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their on the web campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks.” Assuming the spider adheres to robots.txt, this is clever and well done.

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