These are definitely valid concerns. Have you talked to your political representative about having your government use its influence to assure China and Nicaragua are building effective preventitives into their plans?
How many chimps would I sacrifice to save a human life?
Bullshit question. The real question these days is
How long will you put up with your neighbor committing atrocities in the name of Science when there are better (more ethical, less costly, and more accurate) ways of getting the answers?
We have a good and growing arsenal of non-invasive research tools that can be used directly on humans. They appear not to be used as often as they could be, and the most likely reason for that is that researchers who have devoted their careers to learning to use electric shock treatments and scalpels on lab animals have no skills in using MRI scanners or computer simulations. It is time to start limiting the influence the practitioners of these ancient ways have on the R & D industries. Using the law to guide these industries into the 21st century is fully appropriate.
Parent post argument is at least 25 years out of date.
A lot of the research that was only possible using animals then can now be done by non-invasive means and computer simulations. The day when almost all research can be done this way is not far off. This is not because the new ways are ethically better (even though they are). It is because the new ways allow faster and more comprehensive studies at much lower total costs. It is indeed time to consider using legal ways to force the biological R & D industry to upgrade its skills.
The problem is that a lot of today's researchers have skills in applying electric shocks and scalpels to research animals that do not transfer to reading MRI scans or improving computer simulations. As a group, these persons are going to be as opposed to the inevitable changes as the wagon drivers, farriers, and livery stable owners opposed the New York City laws that began favoring automobiles and trucks. Using legalities to prod the industries they influence to evolve is not a bad thing to do.
I'm having trouble following the mostly hidden logic behind parent post. It seems to address two distinctly different issues.
With regard to politicians, they are most definitely a self-selected group of persons who are willing, and successful, at advancing their personal agendas by portraying themselves as champions of this or that group. The average amount of lying, fraud, deceit, and associated crimes of politicians is naturally going to be much higher than the average for the general population. Culling politicians would therefore improve the species. It is not about how stupid they are; it is about how their moral compass is all twisted up. So, since effective ostracism (an acceptable form of culling introduced by the Greeks) will not be possible until we have established a lunar colony, using politicians as primates in various experiments should be on the table. (There might be better solutions, but this one is worthy of considering).
WRT using chimps in testing, that is now so bogus. The automobile has replaced the horse and buggy and freed horses for their rightful place as pampered pets (there are now more horses in the USA than there were in 1899-- hoowoodathunkit?) The MRI and computer simulations are now replacing the old fashioned use of chimps in the laboratory. There is no question that sooner or later the nasty old ways of doing biological research are going to become history, just like the horse and buggy, replaced by technology that can do the job faster, better, and without exploiting some other species. The only question is when do we pass the laws that will force today's buggy whip manufacturers to find some better source of employment?
This will cause a shake-up in the research and development industry, as the employment opportunities of persons who have spent their careers developing skills in carving up the brains of primates will be out of work and unemployable. Along with a host of other specialists in supporting roles. A lot of these people are quite likely incapable of finding other work. It requires a certain kind of blockage of normal human empathy to slice and dice a chimpanzee, and without that a lot of job opportunities will be closed to these individuals with their self-inflicted damage to their psyches.
The neolithic violins, oboes, xylophones, ocarinas and drum sets leave very little evidence in the archaeological record, and much of what little is left has been easy to dismiss as pieces of kid's toys, or ornaments: minor details that signify nothing. Choral groups and dance troupes and story tellers leave no evidence behind them, none at all. And yet, outside of those who have put on technology blinders, intricate forms of music and performing arts are considered to be advanced forms of culture.
Then there are practices like yoga, Zennist ways, and Taoism that are also advanced forms of culture, but also leave no trace that an archaeologist could discover.
Do you think that everyone who lived in a society that chose to stay in balance with its ecosystem was some kind of lesser human being than human than you are, and had no aspirations of advancing their culture? Do you really believe that in 10,000 years of First Nation's existence there was no advancement of any kind? Other than finding better ways to chip an arrow point? That the Aboriginals did nothing in the 60,000 years of Dream Time but pick at their toenails?
Measuring human history by the evidence of how this group or that went about destroying its ecosystem is looking at the world through a telescope with a very narrow field of view. And looking through the wrong end of that telescope at that.
But we seem to have wandered far from the original thread of this discourse.
Parent post fails badly. In point of fact, the only intrinsic advantage between Photoshop and the current version of The Gimp is that Photoshop offers arguably better support for CMYK than The Gimp does.
What Photoshop has going for it is a micro ecosystem of student discounts, training sessions for college teachers, exclusive license deals with colleges that limit art students' exposure to any other image manipulation software, and workshop junkets to exotic locales that can be tax write-offs for Arts Departments. None of this "professional" support adds any value to the artwork created by Photoshop. It does create a circus of fanbois, many of whom have a vested interest in Photoshop's continued dominance.
Meanwhile, The Gimp is adding new features and improvements constantly, at no cost to its users other than the bother of downloading and installing the upgrades. Photoshop takes a few years between version releases, primarily because as a for-profit business, it needs to milk every dime it can get from the current version before replacing it with something better.
Also, see other comment, below.
Hmm. I first read that as "Deforestation does not equal Caucasian, which seemed strangely racist. Then I thought maybe it was "Defenestration does not equal Caucasian", which kind of made more sense, since being tossed out a window is pretty much an equal opportunity experience. But that seemed to be stating the obvious.
I got it right on the third read.
That course in speed reading may not have helped my reading comprehension, but it has made my world a more interesting place.
Since the lake is more than 100 feet above today's sea level, if it ever floods with salt water, there are not going to be many people left to worry about its ecology.
Now hitchhiker organisms riding on the bottoms of the ships or in their ballast tanks are a reasonable concern. We can assume that inspection and cleaning facilities will be set up on both sides of the Nicaragua canal, since this kind of contamination is a well known problem. I expect that the Panama Canal has been retrofitted by now-- although maybe it is being treated as a lost cause.
Something very similar to this did happen in the USA, from some time in the 1980s until around 1995. It involved a government forestry agency, and the database they had to track logging, replanting, spraying, road building, and other commercial forest management activities.
I became involved about 1993 when I was hired by an eco-activist group who had used FOIA to obtain a digital copy of a detail report of the entire forestry database for the region. My task was to develop one-off perl scripts to extract the data from the report format and build a Paradox database that could be queried to see if the forestry records indicated any violations of the laws to protect spotted owl habitat. This was straightforward work: as I recall the hardest part was staying awake when doing the validation cross-checking. (I also dislike reconciling my checking account with the bank statement.)
But what I discovered was that the forestry database was full of crap. You cannot harvest a 20 year old stand of timber from a parcel that had been clear cut just three years earlier; you cannot harvest anything from a parcel before the access road to it is completed. A big portion of the database lacked self-consistency. Years later, I learned that the consultant that the forestry agency had hired to develop and maintain the database had been convicted of fraud, and that there had been a shake-up in the management of that agency. (Since the database records were crap, the eco-activists chose not use it in their spotted owl fight. Instead a new, and appropriate, attack on the managerial competency of the forestry agency was launched, I believe by persuading one of the State Representatives to demand an investigation.)
I do not think that computer fraud on this scale is likely to happen in the USA now, because I think every manager of any kind of any large government database is well aware that he needs to cover his ass by having his stuff validated by Information Management. However the news indicates this kind of fraud is happening in some small towns, and some of the smaller departments of cities-- places where there is still no easy access to information management professionals, where decisions involving database management have to be made by persons without a background in the subject.
This is the type of coding you should expect of someone without coding experience who is doing it himself because he cannot afford to let anyone else see how he has been screwing with the raw data.
"Breaking and entering" requires physical trespass. There is no trespass involved when using the GET method, which is part of a standard and open protocol, to request a web page, which in this case is unencrypted and easily read by anyone who asks for it.
The "bait car" analogy fails miserably. There is no property theft involved in what was described by TFA since nobody was deprived of use of anything. In the general case, "intellectual property" is not physical property and courts need to recognize the differences.
If anyone needs a physical analog of what this fellow has done, it is like this:
Imagine that for reasons unknown, the New York City Board of Education recorded the student ids and test scores as graffiti on all the park benches in Central Park. Where any passer-by could read them. Each student was directed to the bench where their data was recorded (in indelible magic marker), and the BoE patted itself on the back for having found a way to make use of all those benches. Then this guy comes along and develops an efficient way to go from bench to bench to bench... Data on the Internet, accessible without any protection to anyone who had or could construct the URL, is as freely available as any graffiti written on a park bench.
Questions should begin with why the India agency responsible for handling this data put up these web pages without involving anyone who had a year or more of training in information management techniques. They certainly had persons on staff who would have avoided making the JavaScript so readily accessible, and there should have been some kind of password scheme so that only the student would be able to access his own scores. Why were their in house experts not involved? It is as if those who were delegated to build the web site did not want to involve anyone who knew enough about data management that they would become suspicious about it being manipulated.
I think there is more than enough evidence here that something is very corrupt in the India education system. Even if the data obtained had not been so obviously altered, the grossly amateur handling of highly personal information stinks to high heaven.
They are not "introducing new genes into the ecosystem," they are taking genes that already exist in the wild and adding them to a species' genome [halleyhosting.com]. Believe it or not, this happens all the time all over the place naturally thanks to viruses, bacteria, and allows for artificial transduction [wikipedia.org] in laboratories
while arguably more correct, the above manages to gloss over completely that natural transmission of genes between species occurs within the homeostatic controls of the ecosystem, but the artificial transduction in the laboratory moves genes between species through pathways that may not be under any kind of natural control.
The difference is similar to the competition of software on the Internet. Most software has to be harmless and add something to the general welfare or it simply goes extinct. But malware that hides within apparently good software can do a world of hurt. Such as crashing hundreds of centrifuges. (Which might not have been a bad thing, but what if that had been crashing dozens of electrical grid monitoring systems in some other country?)
The reasoning in parent post is fatally flawed. It says that we should ignore one potential danger that could be easily prevented because, heck, life is full of all kinds of dangers that cannot be prevented.
Go ahead and store that open can of gasoline in your basement, since you've got flammable clothes in the closets, flammable exposed beams, and even a pilot light burning under the water heater. What could possibly grow wrong?
The only benefit of Monsanto's GMO is profit for Monsanto. This is so clearly obvious: if you removed the profit by prohibiting the patenting of genes (and therefore undercutting Monsanto's ability to charge for licenses), they would be producing very little "Round-Up Ready" seed. They are not like an agricultural University that develops new strains to benefit everyone. Monsanto is in it strictly for the easy money.
I cannot speak for all Luddites. But I know that many are not worried about which god or goddess did or did not put an official OK on Monsanto's "exploit anything for profit" behavior.
Some Luddites, as well as many who are not Luddites, are concerned that maybe the junior grade biologists at Monsanto are not pumping new genes into a specific species as they claim to be doing. Maybe, just maybe, the Universe is not actually built according to the abstract classification scheme of species, genus, order, class, family, phylum, kingdom that was set up in the 1750s and has been in a state of near constant revision ever since. Biology researchers (the true scientists, not Monsanto engineers) have found so many different and equally valid ways to define the taxonomy that the structure can at best be described as an arbitrary set of imaginary boxes that we can imagine will hold every living thing in just one box, with never a thing existing across the imaginary box walls.
In truth, all that can be said is that Monsanto is introducing new genes into ecosystems. Not into an imaginary box in an imaginary classification scheme, but into something very real, very complex and as yet mostly not understood that can and does respond in ways that cannot be anticipated, considering the current state of our ignorance.
Back in the day when DDT was the miracle that was going to put an end to malaria and many other god-given pests and diseases, no one anticipated that the ecosystem would respond to attacks on mosquitoes by incorporating DDT into the defense systems of grasshoppers and locusts, and making egg shells so thin that American eagles almost went extinct. The same kind of limited reasoning that led to spraying DDT on every marsh and pond in the country is behind the Monsanto effort to make a profit off of genetically modified crops.
And that is what some Luddites, as well as many others who are not Luddites, are worried about.
The simplest solution is to use astronauts who are immune to lifetime radiation exposure.
I am serious.
An astronaut who is 65 years old is safe from radiation damage that will kill him 40 years later. He or she is relatively immune to radiation damage that would be a threat to their health 20 years down the road. Not only that, but the corps of potential astronauts is expanded to include all the women who are post menopause.
I doubt that there would be much problem recruiting astronauts from the pool of USA retirees. Since computerization has also pretty much eliminated the need for astronauts with fast reflexes, there is no reason at all not to do this.
As a possibly major fringe benefit, the possibility of aging into the USA Astronaut Corps would encourage a lot of the middle aged to fight harder against that midriff bulge. We would have a much healthier populace.
I was envisioning very minimal separation between the kinetic device and the nuclear device, on the order of tenths of a second. The nuclear device would not encounter any solid ejecta, and we have the heat shield technology that would give it ample protection for the very short time needed before detonation.
A point that is being missed is that the nuclear detonation will occur within moments after a kinetic weapon creates a crater in the asteroid. That crater would still be filled with the gases from the kinetic impact. While that "atmosphere" is transient, it does mean that the nuclear detonation will have a gaseous shock wave.
The kinetic weapons used by the USA in the Middle East were darts of depleted uranium. Uranium has the interesting characteristic of ablating into a self-sharpening point, which increases the dart's penetration. The uranium gas emitted during ablation would be an excellent vehicle for a nuclear shock wave: its much higher atomic weight would offset its relatively low density.
Gee, maybe you should learn to write good. Maybe if you said outright that you were no longer talking about an asteroid impact, but were instead off on some tangent about conservation of momentum, then you would not have failed so badly in your attempt to communicate.
The thing is, just about everyone who reads slashdot has a thorough understanding of conservation of momentum, so no one was really expecting you to be driveling on about it. We expecting much more from your post. Our expectation of an insightful or informative post led us to try to interpret your remarks in the wider context of the discussion. And not in the grade school context of billiard ball physics that was really all you had to say.
You're a good person. You have a good vocabulary. You just need to learn to use it. Instead of thinking so much about how to paint a pretty word picture, think more about what you want your audience to understand. And then use whatever words would serve that purpose.
The way I read TFA, the point is very much to decrease the amount of mass that impacts the Earth. In the best case, the nuclear detonation creates a jet of ejecta that deflects the asteroid to a non-collision orbit. In the more likely case, the ejecta sprays outward with enough velocity that much of the original mass misses the Earth completely. In between there are various grazing impacts where the Earth is peppered by some of the ejecta, or the main body enters and leaves the atmosphere without contacting the lithosphere, etc. This assumes the asteroid can be hit while it is still several weeks away-- which is likely, given our increasing ability to spot this kind of threat.
The concept is sound enough that it should be investigated further. Whether it makes sense to deploy an asteroid busting system is a decision best made later, after the concept is better defined and more is known about the structure of asteroids and how they are likely to react to a thermonuclear tap.
Slashdot Mirror
These are definitely valid concerns. Have you talked to your political representative about having your government use its influence to assure China and Nicaragua are building effective preventitives into their plans?
How many chimps would I sacrifice to save a human life?
Bullshit question. The real question these days is
How long will you put up with your neighbor committing atrocities in the name of Science when there are better (more ethical, less costly, and more accurate) ways of getting the answers?
We have a good and growing arsenal of non-invasive research tools that can be used directly on humans. They appear not to be used as often as they could be, and the most likely reason for that is that researchers who have devoted their careers to learning to use electric shock treatments and scalpels on lab animals have no skills in using MRI scanners or computer simulations. It is time to start limiting the influence the practitioners of these ancient ways have on the R & D industries. Using the law to guide these industries into the 21st century is fully appropriate.
Parent post argument is at least 25 years out of date.
A lot of the research that was only possible using animals then can now be done by non-invasive means and computer simulations. The day when almost all research can be done this way is not far off. This is not because the new ways are ethically better (even though they are). It is because the new ways allow faster and more comprehensive studies at much lower total costs. It is indeed time to consider using legal ways to force the biological R & D industry to upgrade its skills.
The problem is that a lot of today's researchers have skills in applying electric shocks and scalpels to research animals that do not transfer to reading MRI scans or improving computer simulations. As a group, these persons are going to be as opposed to the inevitable changes as the wagon drivers, farriers, and livery stable owners opposed the New York City laws that began favoring automobiles and trucks. Using legalities to prod the industries they influence to evolve is not a bad thing to do.
I'm having trouble following the mostly hidden logic behind parent post. It seems to address two distinctly different issues.
With regard to politicians, they are most definitely a self-selected group of persons who are willing, and successful, at advancing their personal agendas by portraying themselves as champions of this or that group. The average amount of lying, fraud, deceit, and associated crimes of politicians is naturally going to be much higher than the average for the general population. Culling politicians would therefore improve the species. It is not about how stupid they are; it is about how their moral compass is all twisted up. So, since effective ostracism (an acceptable form of culling introduced by the Greeks) will not be possible until we have established a lunar colony, using politicians as primates in various experiments should be on the table. (There might be better solutions, but this one is worthy of considering).
WRT using chimps in testing, that is now so bogus. The automobile has replaced the horse and buggy and freed horses for their rightful place as pampered pets (there are now more horses in the USA than there were in 1899-- hoowoodathunkit?) The MRI and computer simulations are now replacing the old fashioned use of chimps in the laboratory. There is no question that sooner or later the nasty old ways of doing biological research are going to become history, just like the horse and buggy, replaced by technology that can do the job faster, better, and without exploiting some other species. The only question is when do we pass the laws that will force today's buggy whip manufacturers to find some better source of employment?
This will cause a shake-up in the research and development industry, as the employment opportunities of persons who have spent their careers developing skills in carving up the brains of primates will be out of work and unemployable. Along with a host of other specialists in supporting roles. A lot of these people are quite likely incapable of finding other work. It requires a certain kind of blockage of normal human empathy to slice and dice a chimpanzee, and without that a lot of job opportunities will be closed to these individuals with their self-inflicted damage to their psyches.
The neolithic violins, oboes, xylophones, ocarinas and drum sets leave very little evidence in the archaeological record, and much of what little is left has been easy to dismiss as pieces of kid's toys, or ornaments: minor details that signify nothing. Choral groups and dance troupes and story tellers leave no evidence behind them, none at all. And yet, outside of those who have put on technology blinders, intricate forms of music and performing arts are considered to be advanced forms of culture.
Then there are practices like yoga, Zennist ways, and Taoism that are also advanced forms of culture, but also leave no trace that an archaeologist could discover.
Do you think that everyone who lived in a society that chose to stay in balance with its ecosystem was some kind of lesser human being than human than you are, and had no aspirations of advancing their culture? Do you really believe that in 10,000 years of First Nation's existence there was no advancement of any kind? Other than finding better ways to chip an arrow point? That the Aboriginals did nothing in the 60,000 years of Dream Time but pick at their toenails?
Measuring human history by the evidence of how this group or that went about destroying its ecosystem is looking at the world through a telescope with a very narrow field of view. And looking through the wrong end of that telescope at that.
But we seem to have wandered far from the original thread of this discourse.
You believe that the only possible form of advanced human culture involves technologies that destroy ecosystems and leave huge piles of trash behind?
That it is a pathetically limited view of human capabilities.
3 - 4 - 5 triangles. Which is really easy to do once you figure out the papyrus cord trick.
That's a plumb line, Bob.
But a plum pie is tastier than plumb pi. Which makes no sense at all.
Since the first lock would be up river from the ocean, this is not a problem.
Parent post fails badly. In point of fact, the only intrinsic advantage between Photoshop and the current version of The Gimp is that Photoshop offers arguably better support for CMYK than The Gimp does.
What Photoshop has going for it is a micro ecosystem of student discounts, training sessions for college teachers, exclusive license deals with colleges that limit art students' exposure to any other image manipulation software, and workshop junkets to exotic locales that can be tax write-offs for Arts Departments. None of this "professional" support adds any value to the artwork created by Photoshop. It does create a circus of fanbois, many of whom have a vested interest in Photoshop's continued dominance.
Meanwhile, The Gimp is adding new features and improvements constantly, at no cost to its users other than the bother of downloading and installing the upgrades. Photoshop takes a few years between version releases, primarily because as a for-profit business, it needs to milk every dime it can get from the current version before replacing it with something better. Also, see other comment, below.
there's people who after having an eye poked out will refuse to draw any conclusions about eyes and vision until they poke the other eye out.
That statement is SO out of date. The new phrasing is "Do not look into laser with remaining eye."
Deforestation != Causation
Hmm. I first read that as "Deforestation does not equal Caucasian, which seemed strangely racist. Then I thought maybe it was "Defenestration does not equal Caucasian", which kind of made more sense, since being tossed out a window is pretty much an equal opportunity experience. But that seemed to be stating the obvious.
I got it right on the third read.
That course in speed reading may not have helped my reading comprehension, but it has made my world a more interesting place.
Since the lake is more than 100 feet above today's sea level, if it ever floods with salt water, there are not going to be many people left to worry about its ecology.
Now hitchhiker organisms riding on the bottoms of the ships or in their ballast tanks are a reasonable concern. We can assume that inspection and cleaning facilities will be set up on both sides of the Nicaragua canal, since this kind of contamination is a well known problem. I expect that the Panama Canal has been retrofitted by now-- although maybe it is being treated as a lost cause.
If this had happened in the usa
Something very similar to this did happen in the USA, from some time in the 1980s until around 1995. It involved a government forestry agency, and the database they had to track logging, replanting, spraying, road building, and other commercial forest management activities.
I became involved about 1993 when I was hired by an eco-activist group who had used FOIA to obtain a digital copy of a detail report of the entire forestry database for the region. My task was to develop one-off perl scripts to extract the data from the report format and build a Paradox database that could be queried to see if the forestry records indicated any violations of the laws to protect spotted owl habitat. This was straightforward work: as I recall the hardest part was staying awake when doing the validation cross-checking. (I also dislike reconciling my checking account with the bank statement.)
But what I discovered was that the forestry database was full of crap. You cannot harvest a 20 year old stand of timber from a parcel that had been clear cut just three years earlier; you cannot harvest anything from a parcel before the access road to it is completed. A big portion of the database lacked self-consistency. Years later, I learned that the consultant that the forestry agency had hired to develop and maintain the database had been convicted of fraud, and that there had been a shake-up in the management of that agency. (Since the database records were crap, the eco-activists chose not use it in their spotted owl fight. Instead a new, and appropriate, attack on the managerial competency of the forestry agency was launched, I believe by persuading one of the State Representatives to demand an investigation.)
I do not think that computer fraud on this scale is likely to happen in the USA now, because I think every manager of any kind of any large government database is well aware that he needs to cover his ass by having his stuff validated by Information Management. However the news indicates this kind of fraud is happening in some small towns, and some of the smaller departments of cities-- places where there is still no easy access to information management professionals, where decisions involving database management have to be made by persons without a background in the subject.
This is the type of coding you should expect of someone without coding experience who is doing it himself because he cannot afford to let anyone else see how he has been screwing with the raw data.
The examples in parent post are wrong.
"Breaking and entering" requires physical trespass. There is no trespass involved when using the GET method, which is part of a standard and open protocol, to request a web page, which in this case is unencrypted and easily read by anyone who asks for it.
The "bait car" analogy fails miserably. There is no property theft involved in what was described by TFA since nobody was deprived of use of anything. In the general case, "intellectual property" is not physical property and courts need to recognize the differences.
If anyone needs a physical analog of what this fellow has done, it is like this:
Imagine that for reasons unknown, the New York City Board of Education recorded the student ids and test scores as graffiti on all the park benches in Central Park. Where any passer-by could read them. Each student was directed to the bench where their data was recorded (in indelible magic marker), and the BoE patted itself on the back for having found a way to make use of all those benches. Then this guy comes along and develops an efficient way to go from bench to bench to bench... Data on the Internet, accessible without any protection to anyone who had or could construct the URL, is as freely available as any graffiti written on a park bench.
Questions should begin with why the India agency responsible for handling this data put up these web pages without involving anyone who had a year or more of training in information management techniques. They certainly had persons on staff who would have avoided making the JavaScript so readily accessible, and there should have been some kind of password scheme so that only the student would be able to access his own scores. Why were their in house experts not involved? It is as if those who were delegated to build the web site did not want to involve anyone who knew enough about data management that they would become suspicious about it being manipulated.
I think there is more than enough evidence here that something is very corrupt in the India education system. Even if the data obtained had not been so obviously altered, the grossly amateur handling of highly personal information stinks to high heaven.
Since we are picking nits,
They are not "introducing new genes into the ecosystem," they are taking genes that already exist in the wild and adding them to a species' genome [halleyhosting.com]. Believe it or not, this happens all the time all over the place naturally thanks to viruses, bacteria, and allows for artificial transduction [wikipedia.org] in laboratories
while arguably more correct, the above manages to gloss over completely that natural transmission of genes between species occurs within the homeostatic controls of the ecosystem, but the artificial transduction in the laboratory moves genes between species through pathways that may not be under any kind of natural control.
The difference is similar to the competition of software on the Internet. Most software has to be harmless and add something to the general welfare or it simply goes extinct. But malware that hides within apparently good software can do a world of hurt. Such as crashing hundreds of centrifuges. (Which might not have been a bad thing, but what if that had been crashing dozens of electrical grid monitoring systems in some other country?)
The reasoning in parent post is fatally flawed. It says that we should ignore one potential danger that could be easily prevented because, heck, life is full of all kinds of dangers that cannot be prevented.
Go ahead and store that open can of gasoline in your basement, since you've got flammable clothes in the closets, flammable exposed beams, and even a pilot light burning under the water heater. What could possibly grow wrong?
The only benefit of Monsanto's GMO is profit for Monsanto. This is so clearly obvious: if you removed the profit by prohibiting the patenting of genes (and therefore undercutting Monsanto's ability to charge for licenses), they would be producing very little "Round-Up Ready" seed. They are not like an agricultural University that develops new strains to benefit everyone. Monsanto is in it strictly for the easy money.
For Monsanto, the meme has mutated: it is now
What could possibly grow wrong?
I cannot speak for all Luddites. But I know that many are not worried about which god or goddess did or did not put an official OK on Monsanto's "exploit anything for profit" behavior.
Some Luddites, as well as many who are not Luddites, are concerned that maybe the junior grade biologists at Monsanto are not pumping new genes into a specific species as they claim to be doing. Maybe, just maybe, the Universe is not actually built according to the abstract classification scheme of species, genus, order, class, family, phylum, kingdom that was set up in the 1750s and has been in a state of near constant revision ever since. Biology researchers (the true scientists, not Monsanto engineers) have found so many different and equally valid ways to define the taxonomy that the structure can at best be described as an arbitrary set of imaginary boxes that we can imagine will hold every living thing in just one box, with never a thing existing across the imaginary box walls.
In truth, all that can be said is that Monsanto is introducing new genes into ecosystems. Not into an imaginary box in an imaginary classification scheme, but into something very real, very complex and as yet mostly not understood that can and does respond in ways that cannot be anticipated, considering the current state of our ignorance.
Back in the day when DDT was the miracle that was going to put an end to malaria and many other god-given pests and diseases, no one anticipated that the ecosystem would respond to attacks on mosquitoes by incorporating DDT into the defense systems of grasshoppers and locusts, and making egg shells so thin that American eagles almost went extinct. The same kind of limited reasoning that led to spraying DDT on every marsh and pond in the country is behind the Monsanto effort to make a profit off of genetically modified crops.
And that is what some Luddites, as well as many others who are not Luddites, are worried about.
The simplest solution is to use astronauts who are immune to lifetime radiation exposure.
I am serious.
An astronaut who is 65 years old is safe from radiation damage that will kill him 40 years later. He or she is relatively immune to radiation damage that would be a threat to their health 20 years down the road. Not only that, but the corps of potential astronauts is expanded to include all the women who are post menopause.
I doubt that there would be much problem recruiting astronauts from the pool of USA retirees. Since computerization has also pretty much eliminated the need for astronauts with fast reflexes, there is no reason at all not to do this.
As a possibly major fringe benefit, the possibility of aging into the USA Astronaut Corps would encourage a lot of the middle aged to fight harder against that midriff bulge. We would have a much healthier populace.
I was envisioning very minimal separation between the kinetic device and the nuclear device, on the order of tenths of a second. The nuclear device would not encounter any solid ejecta, and we have the heat shield technology that would give it ample protection for the very short time needed before detonation.
A point that is being missed is that the nuclear detonation will occur within moments after a kinetic weapon creates a crater in the asteroid. That crater would still be filled with the gases from the kinetic impact. While that "atmosphere" is transient, it does mean that the nuclear detonation will have a gaseous shock wave.
The kinetic weapons used by the USA in the Middle East were darts of depleted uranium. Uranium has the interesting characteristic of ablating into a self-sharpening point, which increases the dart's penetration. The uranium gas emitted during ablation would be an excellent vehicle for a nuclear shock wave: its much higher atomic weight would offset its relatively low density.
Gee, maybe you should learn to write good. Maybe if you said outright that you were no longer talking about an asteroid impact, but were instead off on some tangent about conservation of momentum, then you would not have failed so badly in your attempt to communicate.
The thing is, just about everyone who reads slashdot has a thorough understanding of conservation of momentum, so no one was really expecting you to be driveling on about it. We expecting much more from your post. Our expectation of an insightful or informative post led us to try to interpret your remarks in the wider context of the discussion. And not in the grade school context of billiard ball physics that was really all you had to say.
You're a good person. You have a good vocabulary. You just need to learn to use it. Instead of thinking so much about how to paint a pretty word picture, think more about what you want your audience to understand. And then use whatever words would serve that purpose.
The way I read TFA, the point is very much to decrease the amount of mass that impacts the Earth. In the best case, the nuclear detonation creates a jet of ejecta that deflects the asteroid to a non-collision orbit. In the more likely case, the ejecta sprays outward with enough velocity that much of the original mass misses the Earth completely. In between there are various grazing impacts where the Earth is peppered by some of the ejecta, or the main body enters and leaves the atmosphere without contacting the lithosphere, etc. This assumes the asteroid can be hit while it is still several weeks away-- which is likely, given our increasing ability to spot this kind of threat.
The concept is sound enough that it should be investigated further. Whether it makes sense to deploy an asteroid busting system is a decision best made later, after the concept is better defined and more is known about the structure of asteroids and how they are likely to react to a thermonuclear tap.