So, it's 1800 light years away, not exactly a close neighbor, but it will be an extraordinarily energetic event, no? So how bright is it expected to be -- just another dot in the sky, or are we talking Biblical night-into-day territory?
Thanks.
Or so you were led to think. As the article points out, when officials visited this recycling center, they put up a Potemkin Village of a recycling setup so it all looked right. And assholes like this are too cowardly to come up with something like this: he got the idea from somewhere, and odds are good its actually standard industry practice, just kept quiet to ensure maximum profits at the public tit.
Ah, but if it runs on a "chartered" model, you don't have to wait in line and go through the security check & etc. Smaller airlines running small airplanes do this; the one time I used it I was surprised at the "Oh, you're here early, go ahead and board and we'll tell the tower we're ready once everyone is here."
My high school didn't have robots, but certain students had to carry around bags of flour that were supposed to be their "babies" to take care of. I remember both sexes being quite proud of having to take care of their sacks of flour, and dressing them up/showing them off.
$70k gets the legislation into the system -- all that takes is one congresscritter, and yes they're that cheap. Then you have to lobby every committee member on every committee that reviews your legislation, to keep them from re-writing your bill into something you don't want, then you have to lobby enough to make it pass the first vote, then enough for the other half of Congress, including keeping any other committee from sabotaging your bill and enough votes to get passed and made into a law. Then you have to lobby the relevant enforcement agency, as well as possible state-level efforts depending on the bill and its arena of impact. The $70k is just the entry fee to the party, if you want to drink, that's extra.
I have to admit, I misread the title as "Habits" instead of "Habitats," which immediately made me wonder what those habits would be. Close the airlock behind you so the next person can get through seems obvious, as does being aware of the location of the nearest radiation shelters in the habitat in case of solar storms, and getting enough exercise to to avoid the dreaded bone and muscle loss.
But habitats are cool too.
Seriously. The other day a limited access highway I use for my commute here in Virginia was shut down entirely in one direction, traffic sent on a detour through the local streets and traffic backed up for miles in both directions, due to someone's bike having fallen off a vehicle and landed in the road. There was a cop taking pictures, with dozens of those little evidence markers, a children's bike in the middle of the road, and several other cops blocking the road and redirecting traffic, for what should have been a "pick it up and let traffic move on" situation. During the evening rush hour, I should add.
Heck, I do blacksmithing and knifemaking for a hobby, and even that was impacted by the space program. My propane forge has insulation based on the space shuttle heat protection; the grinding belts I use were developed for making rocket and jet turbine blades, some of the steel I use came out of those programs, and the titanium I sometimes play with is only affordable because the aerospace industry uses enough that there's an economy of scale for production of Ti now.
Nope. If handed that ruling, the owners will declare bankruptcy, re-incorporate, sell their companies back to each other, and then claim that this new fictitious corporate person they've transferred the profits to has nothing to do with the company that has the liability and responsibility to repair stuff. It's how all the major corporations divested themselves of their pension obligations, and how corporations in general treat any toxic "asset" that costs them more than they want to pay out on. The only just solution is to make them open up the codes and repair processes.
Also, the Asimov stories were, at their heart, about smart people doing clever things to prevent disaster before it happens. Hollywood doesn't like thinking, hates smart people, and is all about the disasters actually happening so they can get butts in seats to sell tickets. The average movie goer likes explosions, mass casualties, and easy explanations. People being clever just pisses them off by reminding them how stupid they are. Now, you could take the Asimov three-laws stories, twist them a bit, and make them all explody and flashy, but they would still fail at the box office because the audience can't relate to the protagonists.
It's why I despair of a decent adaption of many of the great books out there: the great stories just aren't emotional enough to get made into a movie, let alone have a decent budget. Producers will grab a title, maybe some plot elements, and then force it into a mold and squeeze until everything that made the story great is gone, leaving something that to them, who have never read the original and who wouldn't understand it if they did, looks like something that will put butts in seats to sell tickets. And then they wonder why it bombed, and vow to never try again.
"You can't melt iron with wood fires."
Actually, the first fuels used to smelt iron and other metals was wood -- charcoal to be precise. Still used by hobbyists and re-enactors who want to recreate the iron available to the earliest smiths. A lot of forests have been chopped down over the centuries to make iron.
I believe there was an issue with laser-based weapons back when a tank-based laser targeting system was determined to be in violation of certain warfighting conventions in regards to blinding weapons. I supposed on the proposed air-to-air platforms it isn't much of an issue, but there would seem to be an issue with air-to-ground use, as it would be trivial to use a 1-megajoule laser to blind anyone in a large area who was looking in the wrong direction at the wrong time. Probably moot as the platform is air-to-air from the description, and probably less effective in real life than chemical explosion propelled metal, but it wouldn't surprise me if the technology got shelved over such concerns.
They do, Landrover and some other off-road systems do exactly that -- switch from one mode to another until they find one that works. Costly, though, and often invisible to the end user, as it should be.
One of the rules in engineering is that you really shouldn't engineer near the limits of your materials. For instance a modern day hammer is so well below what can easily be made with steel and wood that we don't worry about its reliability; even a 50% reduction in strength because of a flaw would still give you a pretty useful hammer, or if the person wielding the hammer is unusually strong, still not a problem.
As a blacksmith, I will point out that I have had many a hammer break on me: not just Chinese recast engine blocks on whatever scrapwood they could handle it with, but name-brand hammers that should have had better quality control. I'm not even particularly strong, but for heavy forging work or repetitive striking of hardened steel tools will take a toll eventually, and some are flawed right out of the box with hidden cracks in the handle or an improper heat-treatiment of the head, or once a beautiful handmade hammer had an issue with the wedge, also handmade, not being properly applied, allowing the head to go flying off after a few uses. Engineering a hammer isn't hard, but don't assume that because it's just a lump of metal on a stick that it's impossible to mess up.
Exactly. Situations humans find easy will sometimes be hard for software to recognize -- a human directing traffic is a great example, or when a construction crew puts up cones but not a clear indication of which side of the cones are going to be worked on, as well as other similar temporary markings. Traffic lights with a burnt-out bulb, or a stuck sensor that won't turn your lane green, old lane markings never properly cleared off before new ones were in place, or even just parking in the right place when a friend is having a party and all the regular spaces in their driveway are taken up. Driving off-road where there are no roads to follow (Sure, you'd drive yourself for fun if we're talking duen-buggies and desert sands, but not so much when trying to get to a remote herd on a large ranch.) Even things like snow, ice, and really hard rain shouldn't faze a robust driving system, but a poorly-marked detour through a parking lot like I had to take this morning? Those will probably need human intervention or similar for a while, though I doubt it will take long for even the extreme edge cases to be covered.
A big problem with the perception of cars unable to deal with snow/ice is that a lot of people leave all their traction control gizmos on even in slick conditions, and the car just won't move. This is because at least elements of traction control systems need to be turned off in some situations, something an auto-driving car is well aware of and presumably just bypasses when its driving in such conditions. I've seen cars abandoned in the middle of a 4-lane highway on a gentle slope because they didn't know that all they had to do was hit the button to turn off that feature.
Mars is barren, extremely inhospitable, wasteland. Why are they in such a hurry to send meatbags there ?
Because when, inevitably, someone kickstarts a nuclear war, releases a 100% deadly disease, or we're all turned into computronium by our new AI overlords, having an offsite backup, even a primitive one, seems like a really good thing. Sure, it won't be self-sufficient at first, but if we never start, we'll never get there at all, and then it might be too late.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
I know a few techs who decided, upon living the US a few years, that the arranged marriage waiting for them back home was a crap deal, and made arrangements to stay. In one case, a woman I worked with, her father confiscated her passport and refused to let her return for a month until the arranged wedding collapsed when the groom also declined to marry for someone else's benefit.
Great idea, lets start with land mines, ban their production in the US (US-based companies build and sell more land mines than any other country, most without auto-deactivation or other features that let them stop being a problem after the war ends), sales, and shipment through US controlled territory. Oh, wait, that would impact profits, nevermind.
It's a great idea, but then a greedy factory-ship captain decides nobody's looking, and goes in and cores out your sanctuary, gets away with it, brags about it, and the next thing you know you have to have your navy shooting foreign ships out of the water to keep them out. Something like that happened in the Grand Banks, and Canada still, despite a naval presence, says that the banks cannot recover for the foreseeable future due to incursions by illegal foreign factory ships.
Well, I have a working The Tabulating Machine Company card punch from 1901, s/n 58634, still punches cards, though I don't know if card reading systems are still in use anywhere. Would that count?
Trying to verify theories with astronomy on the other hand is impractical since we don't have a method to move stars around to see if they are what caused a phenomenon or if it's just a coincidence.
Yet. We can't do this, or blow up stars, or set up colliding black holes *yet.*
No. The main problem is that they are weapons of mass destruction that can vaporize entire cities in an instant. They are weapons that are specifically designed to kill a large number of people over a large area very quickly. THAT is the main problem with them. Let's not lose sight of why nukes are scary. The fallout merely adds the problem.
The term collateral damage when applied to nukes is kind of meaningless. The entire point of a nuke is to destroy everything in a rather large radius. There really is no such thing as collateral damage when using explosions of that size because you are unavoidably and intentionally targeting non-combatants and infrastructure when you make the decision to use one. Yes this remains true for "tactical nukes" too.
Exactly. We also, though we could, don't create firestorms in cities anymore, nor do we engage in unlimited civilian target bombing. We seem to, as a species, decided that these things are off the table, both due to adverse reactions to civilian deaths, as well as the possibility of nuclear response ("You burned my capital to the ground, we don't have the air superiority to do the same to you, but the NORKs sold us a little bomb we've sent over in a cargo container.")
As most "tactical" nukes are more powerful than the original strategic WWII-era nukes, it is pretty clear that their use, no matter what they are called, would be as city burners, as that's where the modern battlefields are.
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So, it's 1800 light years away, not exactly a close neighbor, but it will be an extraordinarily energetic event, no? So how bright is it expected to be -- just another dot in the sky, or are we talking Biblical night-into-day territory? Thanks.
Or so you were led to think. As the article points out, when officials visited this recycling center, they put up a Potemkin Village of a recycling setup so it all looked right. And assholes like this are too cowardly to come up with something like this: he got the idea from somewhere, and odds are good its actually standard industry practice, just kept quiet to ensure maximum profits at the public tit.
Ah, but if it runs on a "chartered" model, you don't have to wait in line and go through the security check & etc. Smaller airlines running small airplanes do this; the one time I used it I was surprised at the "Oh, you're here early, go ahead and board and we'll tell the tower we're ready once everyone is here."
My high school didn't have robots, but certain students had to carry around bags of flour that were supposed to be their "babies" to take care of. I remember both sexes being quite proud of having to take care of their sacks of flour, and dressing them up/showing them off.
The Soap Box is drowned in a sea of noise, the Ballot Box is broken, the Jury Box is bought and paid for, maybe it's time for the Ammo Box?
Nope, the corporations and state own the ammo box as well. Time to think outside the boxes they've convinced you you're stuck with.
$70k gets the legislation into the system -- all that takes is one congresscritter, and yes they're that cheap. Then you have to lobby every committee member on every committee that reviews your legislation, to keep them from re-writing your bill into something you don't want, then you have to lobby enough to make it pass the first vote, then enough for the other half of Congress, including keeping any other committee from sabotaging your bill and enough votes to get passed and made into a law. Then you have to lobby the relevant enforcement agency, as well as possible state-level efforts depending on the bill and its arena of impact. The $70k is just the entry fee to the party, if you want to drink, that's extra.
I have to admit, I misread the title as "Habits" instead of "Habitats," which immediately made me wonder what those habits would be. Close the airlock behind you so the next person can get through seems obvious, as does being aware of the location of the nearest radiation shelters in the habitat in case of solar storms, and getting enough exercise to to avoid the dreaded bone and muscle loss. But habitats are cool too.
Seriously. The other day a limited access highway I use for my commute here in Virginia was shut down entirely in one direction, traffic sent on a detour through the local streets and traffic backed up for miles in both directions, due to someone's bike having fallen off a vehicle and landed in the road. There was a cop taking pictures, with dozens of those little evidence markers, a children's bike in the middle of the road, and several other cops blocking the road and redirecting traffic, for what should have been a "pick it up and let traffic move on" situation. During the evening rush hour, I should add.
Heck, I do blacksmithing and knifemaking for a hobby, and even that was impacted by the space program. My propane forge has insulation based on the space shuttle heat protection; the grinding belts I use were developed for making rocket and jet turbine blades, some of the steel I use came out of those programs, and the titanium I sometimes play with is only affordable because the aerospace industry uses enough that there's an economy of scale for production of Ti now.
Nope. If handed that ruling, the owners will declare bankruptcy, re-incorporate, sell their companies back to each other, and then claim that this new fictitious corporate person they've transferred the profits to has nothing to do with the company that has the liability and responsibility to repair stuff. It's how all the major corporations divested themselves of their pension obligations, and how corporations in general treat any toxic "asset" that costs them more than they want to pay out on. The only just solution is to make them open up the codes and repair processes.
Also, the Asimov stories were, at their heart, about smart people doing clever things to prevent disaster before it happens. Hollywood doesn't like thinking, hates smart people, and is all about the disasters actually happening so they can get butts in seats to sell tickets. The average movie goer likes explosions, mass casualties, and easy explanations. People being clever just pisses them off by reminding them how stupid they are. Now, you could take the Asimov three-laws stories, twist them a bit, and make them all explody and flashy, but they would still fail at the box office because the audience can't relate to the protagonists. It's why I despair of a decent adaption of many of the great books out there: the great stories just aren't emotional enough to get made into a movie, let alone have a decent budget. Producers will grab a title, maybe some plot elements, and then force it into a mold and squeeze until everything that made the story great is gone, leaving something that to them, who have never read the original and who wouldn't understand it if they did, looks like something that will put butts in seats to sell tickets. And then they wonder why it bombed, and vow to never try again.
"You can't melt iron with wood fires." Actually, the first fuels used to smelt iron and other metals was wood -- charcoal to be precise. Still used by hobbyists and re-enactors who want to recreate the iron available to the earliest smiths. A lot of forests have been chopped down over the centuries to make iron.
I believe there was an issue with laser-based weapons back when a tank-based laser targeting system was determined to be in violation of certain warfighting conventions in regards to blinding weapons. I supposed on the proposed air-to-air platforms it isn't much of an issue, but there would seem to be an issue with air-to-ground use, as it would be trivial to use a 1-megajoule laser to blind anyone in a large area who was looking in the wrong direction at the wrong time. Probably moot as the platform is air-to-air from the description, and probably less effective in real life than chemical explosion propelled metal, but it wouldn't surprise me if the technology got shelved over such concerns.
They do, Landrover and some other off-road systems do exactly that -- switch from one mode to another until they find one that works. Costly, though, and often invisible to the end user, as it should be.
One of the rules in engineering is that you really shouldn't engineer near the limits of your materials. For instance a modern day hammer is so well below what can easily be made with steel and wood that we don't worry about its reliability; even a 50% reduction in strength because of a flaw would still give you a pretty useful hammer, or if the person wielding the hammer is unusually strong, still not a problem.
As a blacksmith, I will point out that I have had many a hammer break on me: not just Chinese recast engine blocks on whatever scrapwood they could handle it with, but name-brand hammers that should have had better quality control. I'm not even particularly strong, but for heavy forging work or repetitive striking of hardened steel tools will take a toll eventually, and some are flawed right out of the box with hidden cracks in the handle or an improper heat-treatiment of the head, or once a beautiful handmade hammer had an issue with the wedge, also handmade, not being properly applied, allowing the head to go flying off after a few uses. Engineering a hammer isn't hard, but don't assume that because it's just a lump of metal on a stick that it's impossible to mess up.
Exactly. Situations humans find easy will sometimes be hard for software to recognize -- a human directing traffic is a great example, or when a construction crew puts up cones but not a clear indication of which side of the cones are going to be worked on, as well as other similar temporary markings. Traffic lights with a burnt-out bulb, or a stuck sensor that won't turn your lane green, old lane markings never properly cleared off before new ones were in place, or even just parking in the right place when a friend is having a party and all the regular spaces in their driveway are taken up. Driving off-road where there are no roads to follow (Sure, you'd drive yourself for fun if we're talking duen-buggies and desert sands, but not so much when trying to get to a remote herd on a large ranch.) Even things like snow, ice, and really hard rain shouldn't faze a robust driving system, but a poorly-marked detour through a parking lot like I had to take this morning? Those will probably need human intervention or similar for a while, though I doubt it will take long for even the extreme edge cases to be covered.
A big problem with the perception of cars unable to deal with snow/ice is that a lot of people leave all their traction control gizmos on even in slick conditions, and the car just won't move. This is because at least elements of traction control systems need to be turned off in some situations, something an auto-driving car is well aware of and presumably just bypasses when its driving in such conditions. I've seen cars abandoned in the middle of a 4-lane highway on a gentle slope because they didn't know that all they had to do was hit the button to turn off that feature.
Mars is barren, extremely inhospitable, wasteland. Why are they in such a hurry to send meatbags there ?
Because when, inevitably, someone kickstarts a nuclear war, releases a 100% deadly disease, or we're all turned into computronium by our new AI overlords, having an offsite backup, even a primitive one, seems like a really good thing. Sure, it won't be self-sufficient at first, but if we never start, we'll never get there at all, and then it might be too late.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
I know a few techs who decided, upon living the US a few years, that the arranged marriage waiting for them back home was a crap deal, and made arrangements to stay. In one case, a woman I worked with, her father confiscated her passport and refused to let her return for a month until the arranged wedding collapsed when the groom also declined to marry for someone else's benefit.
Great idea, lets start with land mines, ban their production in the US (US-based companies build and sell more land mines than any other country, most without auto-deactivation or other features that let them stop being a problem after the war ends), sales, and shipment through US controlled territory. Oh, wait, that would impact profits, nevermind.
Too late to make the primaries for Warren in most states, so unless she wants the VP slot, she's not even in the running.
It's a great idea, but then a greedy factory-ship captain decides nobody's looking, and goes in and cores out your sanctuary, gets away with it, brags about it, and the next thing you know you have to have your navy shooting foreign ships out of the water to keep them out. Something like that happened in the Grand Banks, and Canada still, despite a naval presence, says that the banks cannot recover for the foreseeable future due to incursions by illegal foreign factory ships.
Well, I have a working The Tabulating Machine Company card punch from 1901, s/n 58634, still punches cards, though I don't know if card reading systems are still in use anywhere. Would that count?
Trying to verify theories with astronomy on the other hand is impractical since we don't have a method to move stars around to see if they are what caused a phenomenon or if it's just a coincidence.
Yet. We can't do this, or blow up stars, or set up colliding black holes *yet.*
No. The main problem is that they are weapons of mass destruction that can vaporize entire cities in an instant. They are weapons that are specifically designed to kill a large number of people over a large area very quickly. THAT is the main problem with them. Let's not lose sight of why nukes are scary. The fallout merely adds the problem.
The term collateral damage when applied to nukes is kind of meaningless. The entire point of a nuke is to destroy everything in a rather large radius. There really is no such thing as collateral damage when using explosions of that size because you are unavoidably and intentionally targeting non-combatants and infrastructure when you make the decision to use one. Yes this remains true for "tactical nukes" too.
Exactly. We also, though we could, don't create firestorms in cities anymore, nor do we engage in unlimited civilian target bombing. We seem to, as a species, decided that these things are off the table, both due to adverse reactions to civilian deaths, as well as the possibility of nuclear response ("You burned my capital to the ground, we don't have the air superiority to do the same to you, but the NORKs sold us a little bomb we've sent over in a cargo container.") As most "tactical" nukes are more powerful than the original strategic WWII-era nukes, it is pretty clear that their use, no matter what they are called, would be as city burners, as that's where the modern battlefields are.