You know, we complain when a company exerts market influence via patents...then we complain when a patent isn't enforced...I sense a logical inconsistency, here.
Something like the 5m rock they're looking for, should they accidentally manage to break it up completely, would scatter. Every piece of it would keep its original vector, plus the new one added by the blast. Relative to the Earth, the pattern would appear to form a cone in the short term. It is possible that some piece of the rock would find itself an orbit which intersects that of Earth. Even in that event, the odds of it and the Earth being in the same place at the same time are vanishingly small. Given the scale involved, if you got on a plane and dropped a baseball, the odds of it hitting me in the head are higher than the odds of that rock hitting the planet.
They would certainly calculate the new orbit of any rock which didn't break up (this is what they're trying to do, actually), and in the incredibly unlikely event their calculation or execution error happened to result in an orbit which would cause the rock to hit Earth, they would just nudge it again.
Also, the tolerances involved in any mission of this complexity are so fine that everything would be checked and rechecked, just for financial reasons, if nothing else. If an error in calculation is made, it's almost certain that the mission would simply never come together. For it to come together in a fashion which approximates success enough to shift an orbit exactly enough to be disastrous is almost inconceivable. We're talking monkeys writing Chaucer.
Finally, even if the inconceivable did happen, and the rock was nudged into an Earth-impact orbit, and no one noticed, a 5m rock doesn't exactly pose a huge threat to the planet. Odds are pretty good the moon would capture it, like it has so many other rocks. Failing that, odds are good that it hits the ocean, if it even makes it to the surface. Failing that, odds are good that it hits somewhere pretty sparsely inhabited.
Ultimately, the risk is so remote that it's not worth hindering a real effort to do this for its scientific (and potentially economic) value.
If we assume for the moment that they aren't actually going to intentionally aim an asteroid at the planet, bumping the orbit of one increases the odds of it striking Earth so infinitesimally that it doesn't even matter.
We have a hard time hitting Mars with a rocket whose every vector change we control when we're trying. Not to mention that, if they did somehow put it in an orbit that would strike Earth, they also of necessity have the ability to alter its orbit again so it wouldn't.
As far as blowing up the asteroid causing a "scattershot" effect which would threaten the planet...well, I'll just say it's not a reasonable concern. The rock's got its vector already, breaking it up into pieces won't change the vector of any individual piece any more than the total energy of the device used to break it up can contribute. And even if you did have a Death Star-style weapon to blow it apart, for every order of mangitude you increase the odds of a randomly ejected bit hitting the planet by increasing the number of independent vectors, you decrease the mass of the bit which will hit the planet by an order of magnitude.
Not to mention that farther != safer...the moon is pretty damn close and pretty damn massive, but we don't worry about whether it's going to hit the planet or not. On the other hand, there are pieces of ice and rock in the Kuiper pelt that are pretty damn far away, and which may well intersect our orbit catastrophically at some point.
Your argument pretty much boils down to "leave well enough alone," but that attitude prevents all progress.
Er...check your math. We're talking geometric growth, not linear growth. At 10%/year inflation, something which cost $1.00 in 1974 would cost $17.45: (Y sub t)=(Y sub 0)(1+r)^t where r is rate and t is number of periods being considered. A 300% increase would be an annual inflation of about 3.7%, if my math skills don't fail me.
And I think you'll agree that 3.7% is a pretty reasonable number for inflation - and as an average over a set including the runaway inflation of the late 70s, actually pretty optimistic.
If all we do is break it up, but don't generate a miss, there will still be an impact. The kinetic energy of the collision is based on mass and velocity, which the asteroid would still have virtually all of. If it can be converted into enough pieces, the surface area might be increased to a point where each piece burns up in the atmosphere (I doubt the real possibility of this, but I'll go with it as a thought experiment) - but that would still deposit all that kinetic energy into our system, it would just be as therms in the atmosphere rather than shockwaves through the ground. I have no idea what suddenly dumping something on the order of thousands of megatons of energy into the atmosphere would actually do, but I can't imagine it would be all that good from our point of view.
Did you read what I wrote? It was dust movement on Mars that NASA was studying. I am aware of this, as were they, which is why I also said that wind was still the most likely cause. No one is claiming that anything other than wind causes the Martian dust storms/dust devils.
I was merely pointing out that it's not unreasonable to be surprised at it happening, since tests replicating as closely as possible the conditions believed to obtain on the Martian surface indicate that it's less likely than it seems.
The reason wind isn't the obvious answer it seems like is that the Martian atmosphere is so thin. I remember seeing (on Discovery HD, IIRC) a wind tunnel simulation NASA was doing to study dust devils on Mars. They set up the chamber at Martian atmospheric pressure, then cranked up a fan to blow some insanely high wind speed. The fine dust on the floor didn't even budge; there just wasn't enough air to make anything happen.
The only way they were able to replicate the observed dust devil effects was to toss larger pebbles into the chamber, kicking the dust up into the wind.
Anyway, the point is that wind is still the most probable cause, but it's not quite the obvious slam-dunk that it superficially seems.
I take your point, but...if your defense is incapable of stopping a 25-yard 4th down play, then what, exactly, is wrong with going for it on fourth-and-twenty-five?
It's not like they're taking advantage of a game bug, or using a modern Bo Jackson to be unstoppable. You just have to prevent that gain. I'm quite certain that every NFL coach would go for it on every fourth down if the other team wasn't able to stop them and immediately score. The only way you're going to get the game to model real life is if your play also models real life.
The correct response to this play you don't care for is to spank them. They keep handing you the ball inside their own 40, you keep scoring. Simple.
Don't confuse "players using a style you disagree with" with "players being lame."
If you demand that your opposition only call the plays you think they should call, you're not going to find any sort of online gaming enjoyable, 'cause that's never going to happen.
I don't think it's particularly surprising or noteworthy that the "rugged individualists" and the "rebels without a cause" don't show up on a list of the most common things to search for.
If they did, then they wouldn't be so much "individualists," would they?
Or NFL fans are more computer literate, and type the URL into the address bar instead of searching for it.
Or they're more fanatical than TdF fans, and therefore have nfl.com as their homepage.
Or nfl.com is easier to guess than whatever the TdF's home page is.
Or NFL fans were split between searching for "nfl" and "national football league".
Or NFL fans just searched for "football" assuming most of the links would be for American-rules football.
Or possibly there's nothing like enough data for a broad generalization of NFL fans vs. TdF fans to be made, much less a case for the changing demographics of the internet as a whole.
On the plus side, I got you a xmas gift: it's a mat, and it's got conclusions painted on it...
I read most of the list, and was obscurely pleased that I have never searched for any of those strings (in many cases, this is only because I knew the web site to go to - I would have searched for "Best Buy" if I hadn't known bestbuy.com, for example).
I was all set to come all over superior to the average luser, with my more refined taste, disdain for pop culture, etc., etc.
But, much to my dismay, I searched for "roomba" a few months ago.
Farriers, actually. Blacksmiths make things out of iron. Farriers shoe horses. Given the amount of iron used in cars, blacksmiths wouldn't necessarily be put out of business by them (they might be put out of business by the manufacturing techniques, but that's not the same thing). Farriers, however, would be put out of business as the car supplanted the horse, which was their business. </pedant>
You know, there are plenty of things I didn't hear about in school and don't see on the Discovery channel.
There are also plenty of things said by random people on slashdot with no supporting evidence or documentation of any kind.
The former case does not make said things untrue. The latter case does not make said things true.
You, Fantastic though you may be, fall into the latter category. While I hesitate to dismiss concepts out of hand simply because I haven't encountered them, if you're going to make bold assertions about the "unignited half" (whatever that means; I wasn't aware that solar masses needed to be doused in starter fluid and lit with a match...I was under the impression that it was a sort of natural result of that much mass, but that's just me) of our binary star system, you're going to have to provide more evidence than just making an offhand reference to it.
But that would fall under the heading of powered armor, rather than a true 'mech.
It may be hairsplitting on my part, but if we're going to talk about actually building devices that have their roots in SF, we should use the appropriate terms.
Aside from that, though, you're right. Powered armor is far more likely to be practically useful than a honest-to-$deity 'mech.
"Yankees vs. Whoever signed Randy Johnson This Year" gets a little old after a while.
Oh, I don't know. I think Yankees vs. Yankees would be an interesting game to watch. One of them has to lose.
(Of course, while looking for a URL to link to for those who didn't get the joke, I discovered that Johnson is apparently not going to the Yanks. I choose to not change my post, however, because I still think it should have been funny)
Re:5 year deal could well be money wasted
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Actually, I would be surprised if it was prohibited. For once, "we" have corporations on our side. EA's got the license, but I'm quite sure ESPN/Sega wants to make money by continuing their 2k* football franchise. It's very much in their interest, then, to make player created rosters available through Live!.
Then it's just a question of whether EA has the desire and the cash to make MS prevent other video game makers from doing such a thing. It's one thing for EA to convince MS to set up a service such that EA can charge to be online, it's another for EA to get MS to limit Live! functionality for other developers. Not that it would be impossible, but it's a whole different game. Most importantly, it's probably not one EA would need to play; they can count on the player pic/NFL logo on the cover of the box to sell copies regardless of whether another game can be made "sort of like the real thing."
The PS2 has the advantage of not having central servers under Sony's control; it should be trivial for a game to leverage the web for this purpose. Which is yet another reason MS would likely allow the functionality: they don't want to encourage PS2-only sporting titles (after all, that's why they buckled to EA in the first place).
The wild card, of course, is the court system, which could conceivably decide that hosting rosters making use of the real information violates the licensing deal. IANAL and don't know if that's a real possibility or not. But even if it is, there's enough money floating around ABC/MS to make me think that, at worst, EA/the NFL would end up only able to go after individual uploaders of the information...and we all know how well that works.
You've clearly never worked at supporting computers for the public. I do. And I work with educated people - I provide support for our website to dentists.
Every day, I have to explain the difference between a slash and a backslah. Twice last year I had to tell someone what a colon was. A few times every week I have to explain right clicking to someone. Almost every day, I have to explain to at least one person the difference between their operating system and their browser, or the difference between the internet and their browser, and especially the difference between AOL and their browser.
I'm sorry you're offended that slashdotters are eager to point out the general ignorance of the public at large in re: computers, but your offense doesn't make it not so.
This doesn't, of course, mean that slashdotters are better, smarter, or superior to the average person. We're just better with computers. I have no illusions about being able to perform pulpotomies, gingival debridements, or apicoectomies. I am not superior to the dentists I support. But I do no a metric fuckton more about computers than they do, and I'm faced with the appalling - to me - breadth of their ignorance on a daily basis.
I'm sure at ADA conventions, dentists complain about the general ignorance of the public about proper oral hygiene and dental care. In fact, I know they do, because our dental directors (all of whom, obviously, have their own DDSs) complain about this ignorance all the time. Your surprise that a group of people who are knowledgeable about a field complains about the ignorance of people who aren't knowledgeable about it is somewhat surprising to me.
"same clock time everywhere in the world simultaneously" concept that even Gene Ray has debunked...
Please, please point me to a good argument as to why this can't/shouldn't be done. The more references, the better. A friend of mine is convinced this is a good idea, and I've so far failed to sway him from his beliefs.
The argument isn't we shouldn't use stem cells from ebryos currently going to waste, the argument is that allowing the use of embryonic stem cells will create a market for them, which will increase the number of abortions performed.
Hell, I'm in favor of pursuing stem cell research as vigorously as possible, and your argument pisses me off.
Their argument isn't irrational as you claim, it's a matter of different values. They see the risk of encouraging pregnancy for the purpose of aborting as greater than the risk of patients not benefitin from stem cell research. You think the opposite.
This stems from them being of the belief that the fetus is a human being who has rights. You don't believe that. Good for both of you. Calling them irrational doesn't help your cause.
No, he's assuming nothing of the kind. He's simply saying that the search for purpose is not properly the province of science.
This is true. The existence of a purpose is irrelevant to the statement. Whether or not we have one, the goal of science is not discerning its existence or what it is.
Luckily, we know there aren't any level 3s out there.
Unless, of course, they're harnessing that energy simply to hang stars that emit light exactly as it would have been emitted if they weren't harnessing that energy...
Actually, I figured this out once (for a short story I wrote which the interested can read here). In 2000, the total world capacity for nuclear destruction (counting only known weapons, of course) was ~13,000 megatons. Making certain assumptions about density (taking the median density of known asteroids, which is significantly higher than any mostly-ice comet would be), it only takes a ~600m rock hitting the planet at ~27kps to expend ~26,000 megatons of energy. The velocity I used was about 10kps higher than average impact (because these were launched with malice aforethought), but I was also doubling the target energy.
Unfortunately, I've lost the data and calculations, but I remember them being pretty well born out by the asteroid impact calculator that showed up on slashdot a while back.
(I'm at work; I don't have the time to do all the research and digging I did for the numbers then, but if you're willing to, it's not hard to figure out for yourself)
Wow, you're right. I can't believe how ignorant we've all been using statistical modeling to make predictions...good thing those casions are lucky enough to have stayed profitable all this time based on statistical modeling. Better let them know it's crap before they all go bankrupt!
I also can't believe it never occurred to me that one guy making a bogus claim is such a comprehensive, ringing indictment of higher education. And here I've been trusting those morons who wasted their time getting MDs and DDSs to patch me up. Think of the money I could have saved learning how to perform surgery on myself!
It's a good thing you've explained to me that it's no use pursuing education beyond basic literacy.
Or no, wait, we don't even need basic literacy, because we can discount articles out of hand as ignorant without reading them!
I've been so wrong headed, it's terrifying. Thank you, sir, for turning my life around. Your shining example of refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants to instead figure everything out yourself has changed my life already.
Let us strike down the universities, I say! Sinkholes for valuable money that would be better placed lining the pockets of the proletariat! Education for none!
Slashdot Mirror
Let me put on my "surprised" face.
They would certainly calculate the new orbit of any rock which didn't break up (this is what they're trying to do, actually), and in the incredibly unlikely event their calculation or execution error happened to result in an orbit which would cause the rock to hit Earth, they would just nudge it again.
Also, the tolerances involved in any mission of this complexity are so fine that everything would be checked and rechecked, just for financial reasons, if nothing else. If an error in calculation is made, it's almost certain that the mission would simply never come together. For it to come together in a fashion which approximates success enough to shift an orbit exactly enough to be disastrous is almost inconceivable. We're talking monkeys writing Chaucer.
Finally, even if the inconceivable did happen, and the rock was nudged into an Earth-impact orbit, and no one noticed, a 5m rock doesn't exactly pose a huge threat to the planet. Odds are pretty good the moon would capture it, like it has so many other rocks. Failing that, odds are good that it hits the ocean, if it even makes it to the surface. Failing that, odds are good that it hits somewhere pretty sparsely inhabited.
Ultimately, the risk is so remote that it's not worth hindering a real effort to do this for its scientific (and potentially economic) value.
We have a hard time hitting Mars with a rocket whose every vector change we control when we're trying. Not to mention that, if they did somehow put it in an orbit that would strike Earth, they also of necessity have the ability to alter its orbit again so it wouldn't.
As far as blowing up the asteroid causing a "scattershot" effect which would threaten the planet...well, I'll just say it's not a reasonable concern. The rock's got its vector already, breaking it up into pieces won't change the vector of any individual piece any more than the total energy of the device used to break it up can contribute. And even if you did have a Death Star-style weapon to blow it apart, for every order of mangitude you increase the odds of a randomly ejected bit hitting the planet by increasing the number of independent vectors, you decrease the mass of the bit which will hit the planet by an order of magnitude.
Not to mention that farther != safer...the moon is pretty damn close and pretty damn massive, but we don't worry about whether it's going to hit the planet or not. On the other hand, there are pieces of ice and rock in the Kuiper pelt that are pretty damn far away, and which may well intersect our orbit catastrophically at some point.
Your argument pretty much boils down to "leave well enough alone," but that attitude prevents all progress.
And I think you'll agree that 3.7% is a pretty reasonable number for inflation - and as an average over a set including the runaway inflation of the late 70s, actually pretty optimistic.
If all we do is break it up, but don't generate a miss, there will still be an impact. The kinetic energy of the collision is based on mass and velocity, which the asteroid would still have virtually all of. If it can be converted into enough pieces, the surface area might be increased to a point where each piece burns up in the atmosphere (I doubt the real possibility of this, but I'll go with it as a thought experiment) - but that would still deposit all that kinetic energy into our system, it would just be as therms in the atmosphere rather than shockwaves through the ground. I have no idea what suddenly dumping something on the order of thousands of megatons of energy into the atmosphere would actually do, but I can't imagine it would be all that good from our point of view.
I was merely pointing out that it's not unreasonable to be surprised at it happening, since tests replicating as closely as possible the conditions believed to obtain on the Martian surface indicate that it's less likely than it seems.
The only way they were able to replicate the observed dust devil effects was to toss larger pebbles into the chamber, kicking the dust up into the wind.
Anyway, the point is that wind is still the most probable cause, but it's not quite the obvious slam-dunk that it superficially seems.
It's not like they're taking advantage of a game bug, or using a modern Bo Jackson to be unstoppable. You just have to prevent that gain. I'm quite certain that every NFL coach would go for it on every fourth down if the other team wasn't able to stop them and immediately score. The only way you're going to get the game to model real life is if your play also models real life.
The correct response to this play you don't care for is to spank them. They keep handing you the ball inside their own 40, you keep scoring. Simple.
Don't confuse "players using a style you disagree with" with "players being lame."
If you demand that your opposition only call the plays you think they should call, you're not going to find any sort of online gaming enjoyable, 'cause that's never going to happen.
I don't think it's particularly surprising or noteworthy that the "rugged individualists" and the "rebels without a cause" don't show up on a list of the most common things to search for.
If they did, then they wouldn't be so much "individualists," would they?
Or they're more fanatical than TdF fans, and therefore have nfl.com as their homepage.
Or nfl.com is easier to guess than whatever the TdF's home page is.
Or NFL fans were split between searching for "nfl" and "national football league".
Or NFL fans just searched for "football" assuming most of the links would be for American-rules football.
Or possibly there's nothing like enough data for a broad generalization of NFL fans vs. TdF fans to be made, much less a case for the changing demographics of the internet as a whole.
On the plus side, I got you a xmas gift: it's a mat, and it's got conclusions painted on it...
I was all set to come all over superior to the average luser, with my more refined taste, disdain for pop culture, etc., etc.
But, much to my dismay, I searched for "roomba" a few months ago.
Guess I'm just one of the sheeple.
Farriers, actually. Blacksmiths make things out of iron. Farriers shoe horses. Given the amount of iron used in cars, blacksmiths wouldn't necessarily be put out of business by them (they might be put out of business by the manufacturing techniques, but that's not the same thing). Farriers, however, would be put out of business as the car supplanted the horse, which was their business.
</pedant>
(Sense of humor? Who needs one?)
There are also plenty of things said by random people on slashdot with no supporting evidence or documentation of any kind.
The former case does not make said things untrue. The latter case does not make said things true.
You, Fantastic though you may be, fall into the latter category. While I hesitate to dismiss concepts out of hand simply because I haven't encountered them, if you're going to make bold assertions about the "unignited half" (whatever that means; I wasn't aware that solar masses needed to be doused in starter fluid and lit with a match...I was under the impression that it was a sort of natural result of that much mass, but that's just me) of our binary star system, you're going to have to provide more evidence than just making an offhand reference to it.
At least, you are if you want me to believe it.
It may be hairsplitting on my part, but if we're going to talk about actually building devices that have their roots in SF, we should use the appropriate terms.
Aside from that, though, you're right. Powered armor is far more likely to be practically useful than a honest-to-$deity 'mech.
Oh, I don't know. I think Yankees vs. Yankees would be an interesting game to watch. One of them has to lose.
(Of course, while looking for a URL to link to for those who didn't get the joke, I discovered that Johnson is apparently not going to the Yanks. I choose to not change my post, however, because I still think it should have been funny)
Then it's just a question of whether EA has the desire and the cash to make MS prevent other video game makers from doing such a thing. It's one thing for EA to convince MS to set up a service such that EA can charge to be online, it's another for EA to get MS to limit Live! functionality for other developers. Not that it would be impossible, but it's a whole different game. Most importantly, it's probably not one EA would need to play; they can count on the player pic/NFL logo on the cover of the box to sell copies regardless of whether another game can be made "sort of like the real thing."
The PS2 has the advantage of not having central servers under Sony's control; it should be trivial for a game to leverage the web for this purpose. Which is yet another reason MS would likely allow the functionality: they don't want to encourage PS2-only sporting titles (after all, that's why they buckled to EA in the first place).
The wild card, of course, is the court system, which could conceivably decide that hosting rosters making use of the real information violates the licensing deal. IANAL and don't know if that's a real possibility or not. But even if it is, there's enough money floating around ABC/MS to make me think that, at worst, EA/the NFL would end up only able to go after individual uploaders of the information...and we all know how well that works.
But I guess you can't have everything.
Every day, I have to explain the difference between a slash and a backslah. Twice last year I had to tell someone what a colon was. A few times every week I have to explain right clicking to someone. Almost every day, I have to explain to at least one person the difference between their operating system and their browser, or the difference between the internet and their browser, and especially the difference between AOL and their browser.
I'm sorry you're offended that slashdotters are eager to point out the general ignorance of the public at large in re: computers, but your offense doesn't make it not so.
This doesn't, of course, mean that slashdotters are better, smarter, or superior to the average person. We're just better with computers. I have no illusions about being able to perform pulpotomies, gingival debridements, or apicoectomies. I am not superior to the dentists I support. But I do no a metric fuckton more about computers than they do, and I'm faced with the appalling - to me - breadth of their ignorance on a daily basis.
I'm sure at ADA conventions, dentists complain about the general ignorance of the public about proper oral hygiene and dental care. In fact, I know they do, because our dental directors (all of whom, obviously, have their own DDSs) complain about this ignorance all the time. Your surprise that a group of people who are knowledgeable about a field complains about the ignorance of people who aren't knowledgeable about it is somewhat surprising to me.
1-10 is due to user error.
Please, please point me to a good argument as to why this can't/shouldn't be done. The more references, the better. A friend of mine is convinced this is a good idea, and I've so far failed to sway him from his beliefs.
(Oh, and sorry to stray OT)
The argument isn't we shouldn't use stem cells from ebryos currently going to waste, the argument is that allowing the use of embryonic stem cells will create a market for them, which will increase the number of abortions performed.
Hell, I'm in favor of pursuing stem cell research as vigorously as possible, and your argument pisses me off.
Their argument isn't irrational as you claim, it's a matter of different values. They see the risk of encouraging pregnancy for the purpose of aborting as greater than the risk of patients not benefitin from stem cell research. You think the opposite.
This stems from them being of the belief that the fetus is a human being who has rights. You don't believe that. Good for both of you. Calling them irrational doesn't help your cause.
This is true. The existence of a purpose is irrelevant to the statement. Whether or not we have one, the goal of science is not discerning its existence or what it is.
Unless, of course, they're harnessing that energy simply to hang stars that emit light exactly as it would have been emitted if they weren't harnessing that energy...
...crap. Better dig my bunker deeper next time.
Unfortunately, I've lost the data and calculations, but I remember them being pretty well born out by the asteroid impact calculator that showed up on slashdot a while back.
(I'm at work; I don't have the time to do all the research and digging I did for the numbers then, but if you're willing to, it's not hard to figure out for yourself)
I also can't believe it never occurred to me that one guy making a bogus claim is such a comprehensive, ringing indictment of higher education. And here I've been trusting those morons who wasted their time getting MDs and DDSs to patch me up. Think of the money I could have saved learning how to perform surgery on myself!
It's a good thing you've explained to me that it's no use pursuing education beyond basic literacy.
Or no, wait, we don't even need basic literacy, because we can discount articles out of hand as ignorant without reading them!
I've been so wrong headed, it's terrifying. Thank you, sir, for turning my life around. Your shining example of refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants to instead figure everything out yourself has changed my life already.
Let us strike down the universities, I say! Sinkholes for valuable money that would be better placed lining the pockets of the proletariat! Education for none!
*eyeroll*