The nice thing about the knee-pin move is that, while it lacks the drama and blood of a good mag-lite to the face and thus plays comparatively well for the cameras, there is a relatively thin line between 'pinning' and 'compressive asphyxia'. Just a matter of how much weight you put on that knee...
There are plenty of good cops out there, but by not punishing the bad cops it makes them all look bad.
Does it merely make them look bad? A bad cop is a more dangerous criminal than most of the people the cops are there to deal with. If the 'good cops' aren't enthusiastically hunting them down, I'd say that they are ineffectual at best and complicit at worst, not merely sullied by unfortunate proximity.
The tricky bit is that 'stability and job security' are apparently bad for shareholder value or something, so people hunting it are racing against (generally successful) attempts to crush it like a bug and bring in the temps and subcontractors and offshore peons and whatever else seems handy.
This doesn't make their dumb plan any less dumb; but the number of good plans that they passed up to chose that dumb plan is something we are actively whittling away at.
I certainly wouldn't doubt the use of non-upgradable internal storage as an effective price discrimination and margin padding tactic; but there is the issue of flash and controller quality.
If you are running something nearly the weight of a full OS (and a RAM constrained one that spends a lot of time killing processes and trying to reload them before anybody notices), you want good performance from your flash and controller (consider the user happiness that the first gen Nexus 7 created before it gained TRIM support and the flash was fragmenting and I/O going to hell). That costs more per gigabyte, more in line with what a decent SSD would (which still isn't all that much, these days; but it's a bit steeper than a basic SD/SDHC card).
If you just want bulk mostly-read storage, lousy flash doesn't matter nearly as much.
Unfortunately, there really isn't a terribly elegant way, and mobile OSes tend to adopt the 'the filesystem doesn't exist if we don't show it to you' theory of UI design, in any case (unless you have onboard/SD to serve as an obvious boundary) to present multiple flash subsystems of nonuniform performance to the user, even if some of them really would be better off with 16GB of bat-out-of-hell flash and 128 or 256 of cheap as chips stuff for their media storage and playback.
Maybe we'll see some of the stuff designed for server and SAN use, with the assorted designs for using faster devices to increase the overall performance of a larger pool of cheaper storage, make it down to phones at some point; but until that happens, non-uniformity is unlikely to be a crowd pleaser.
285 million addresses reserved for no compelling reason. sure, let's push onwards to ipv6, but saying "our hands are tied" when over 1/16th of the entire space is still available is a bit irritating.
Would you want to be the guy who pokes every existing and legacy system that makes stupid and/or dangerous assumptions about reserved blocks being reserved permanently? You'd hope that that wouldn't be an issue; but finding out could be exciting indeed.
Hey, now that Intel is trying to sell quarks NICs, we could be looking at a real crunch in the IPv6 space... (and, at a tray price of over $9/unit, large atoms and even most molecules becoming enormously expensive.)
Yes, and I don't see why faces, especially if you have a method for quickly and easily algorithmically fingerprinting them, would be of any less interest than any other aspect of an intercepted signal that could be used to draw inferences about who and where it came from, where it's going and who it's intended for, draw correlations between otherwise apparently separate transmissions, and so on.
Given the relative obscurity of video compared to voice and text, I wouldn't see it replacing CDR grovelling or anything; but that's merely a question of scale rather than of scope.
Relatively early in their life, they were pretty much at parity or better with anything else you could get for roughly the same money and anything like the same convenience, in terms of specs, and much better supported. The fact that subsequent revisions were stagnant or worse and the state of routers-that-actually-work-with-3rd-party-builds didn't stay still took the shine off them. Then re-releasing (now with new higher price and extra letter!) the WRT54GL was something of an insult.
Strictly speaking, under their definition, wouldn't anything that doesn't cause the bootloader to run away crying and fits in the available flash space count as 'a firmware'?
Unless you are one serious badass, you won't be in the mood for much 'sneaking' after a few hours of hypothermia and hypoxia. If your luck holds, you didn't die or get violently ejected at a lethal altitude; but you've still been in a state closer to 'amateur hibernation', not one of our strong points, than anything else. You'll probably just lie on the tarmac defrosting and then maybe try some experimental crawling.
They had (maybe still have) an ARGUS-IS unit puttering around in the vicinity of Quantico, VA for a while, for, um, demonstration purposes only, I'm sure. Now, I suspect that an ARGUS-IS deployment has a price tag that would make the folks at Persistent Surveillance Systems look like a hobby aircraft; but the performance is... impressive.
I suspect that, aside from basic technological advance, it really doesn't help that the Iraq and Afghanistan markets are winding down a bit, so assorted stuff for hunting foreigners we don't care about is now being rebadged and flogged as public safety gear.
I know that there has been some (largely speculative/small scale test) work on a pneumatic equivalent to pumped hydro, using oil and gas wells that have already been emptied of hydrocarbons but are suspected of being geologically sound enough to store compressed air; but I haven't heard of any commercial-scale deployments. Not sure if that one hit the rocks in some fairly fundamental way, or if it's just winding its way through R&D. That one would be handy if it did work, especially since a lot of the US petro production includes areas that don't have much in the way of hydro potential (even if you were given a free hand against environmental objections, hydro means some serious construction if you don't already have a reasonably appropriate site).
I know less about batteries; but I'd love to see something less obnoxious than lead acid become viable even at the smallish datacenter scale.
Given that unpretentious vodka is pretty much food-grade ethanol and water, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, and powdered alcohol would be food grade ethanol, some sort of dextrin, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, they'd have to be saving a lot of money on the reduced bulk and weight of the omitted water to do any better.
Given that, and given the obvious utility in alcohol concealment and infiltration scenarios, I suspect that they aren't even going for price parity with either the Not Too Much Methanol(tm) brand vodkas or the Tastes Like Piss And Turns to Piss!(tm) economy beer sector.
My religion? I was preemptively dismissing all but the most absurdly optimistic assumptions, verging on cheap-magic-teleporters, as irrelevant to the finitude of economic activity. My personal suspicion is much closer to anything extrasolar being forever a spectator sport, and much of what's within it being something you do purely for reasons of scientific curiosity.
I'm not surprised that there is a backdoor ('Hey guys! Should we add a remote management feature that will automagically Just Work with ISPs 'setup disks' and/or remote troubleshooting systems even if the clueless user has forgotten their password, or would that be too scary?' is not a difficult question, especially given how many of these things are sold to ISPs in bulk and not to end users, especially the lousy combined router/modem devices), I am a trifle surprised that it's so slapped-together looking.
It's not exactly a secret that ISPs and providers of combination internet/TV/voice services tend to view customer-controlled equipment as something between a painful support headache and the blasphemous spawn of an unnatural coupling between internet piracy and absolute evil. Hence their enthusiasm for pushing their pet 'home gateway'/'set top box'/etc. with greater or lesser force, and the existence of standards like TR-069 ('CPE WAN Management Protocol') and organizations like the 'Home Gateway Initiative' that seek to standardize a nice, tame, appliance that can be used to sell services to consumers without confusing their little brains or letting them meddle.
That's what surprises me about seeing a comparatively dodgy-looking; but vendor/OEM provided, back door not only present but deliberately preserved even after being discovered, and sufficiently badly as to be rediscovered. There are remote management systems that, by design, are not under the control of the user, present for the convenience of the operator; but those are in the 'bydesign, wontfix' bucket. There are also malicious backdoors; but if this is one the party inserting it was far too arrogant for their own good. There are probably also legacy backdoors, used by some specific ISPs or the like; but those would presumably show up in their hardware, since Sercomm doesn't control enough of the market to assure that all customer-supplied devices will have the backdoor; but they do control enough that a single ISP's backdoor would be splashed all over the place.
Who is the expected user here, and what did they gain by trying to hold on to an existing backdoor so shoddily as to have it detected again?
"“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,”[The supervisor of the project at the sheriff's department Sgt. Douglas] Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”
That is...not exactly... the sort of attitude you want somebody with access to legalized violence to operate under. 'Yeah, we knew people wouldn't like the idea, so we just did it secretly instead. Listening to complaints is a total pain in the ass.' That alone strikes me as reason enough to clean house of everyone who gave it their approval, regardless of whether I thought the project was a good idea or not.
You can use bigger numbers until you run out of memory; you'll still be representing the same pitiful little pile of stuff at the bottom of our gravity well.
If your space-travel-fu is good, maybe some of the nearby ones as well(though shipping costs are likely to be high, and only superluminal travel could overcome the truly massive time discounting effects that would otherwise leave even the most impressive human expansion scenarios as a scattering of mostly disconnected 'islands' between which essentially no economically meaningful interaction is likely).
Hopefully, everyone involved with the Sheriff's department will be punished as hard as legally possible and possibly harder; but that seems unlikely to change the fact that 'power we could use' turns into 'power we just did use' with unpleasant regularity, and it's only reasonable to suspect that the cost of this sort of sensors-and-analysis package is only going to continue plummeting.
I'm sure that the insufferable 'if, hypothetically speaking, this level of surveillance would be legal if carried out by a magical force of zero-cost police officers with perfect memories and no need for sleep, it must be legal if carried out by any means whatsoever!' brigade will be by shortly; but their argument is ahistorical nonsense that ignores the real issue: most of your protection has always been logistical rather than legal. Now we are substantially reducing the logistical barriers and can reasonably expect to further reduce them in the near future. Any protections that you think would be a good idea will soon need to be explicitly legal; because the logistics will be increasingly trivial(possibly even self-financing, if you can sell ads somehow...)
Given the numbers in TFA, though, which had solar-generating customers as barely a rounding error, this particular incident seemed to be a straightforward rate fight caused by grid costs being rolled into assumptions about typical energy use by customers.
I agree that the behavior of an electrical system where wind and solar make up a substantial portion of generation assets would be a great deal hairier, though. Like base load units, both have capital and maintenance costs, sometimes substantial; but cost comparatively little to run at full capacity rather than to idle. Given the fixed costs, and the extremely low variable costs, the floor price for electricity from such is likely to be near zero(since you aren't paying for fuel, nor can you store those photons or that wind for the future, like the hydro units can with water, nearly anything more than nothing will at least cause you to lose money on your fixed costs more slowly); but the operator can do nothing about situations where they are constrained by supplies of sun or wind, no price is high enough to increase output under those conditions.
It...remains to be seen... if our less than promising history of managing risks in financial markets is up to the task(be sure your backup generator is in good repair, kids!)
At present, more or less all the options for electricity storage pretty much suck. Some of the more advanced purpose-built ones (fancy batteries, supercapacitors, that sort of thing) might actually be reasonably efficient; but the cost enough that it hardly matters. The ones you get 'for free', like pumped hydro, are not particularly efficient and only work if you have certain conditions in place.
This seems like the sort of problem that could be much more logically and less painfully solved by breaking out the (more or less constant, at least within a given size class and geographic area) grid hookup cost and the per-KW/h price for electricity as separate items on the bill.
Infrastructure doesn't build and maintain itself, so if you want to maintain your connection, it's only logical that you'll pay something for that. If you try to bundle the distribution costs into the energy cost, though, you just get a bit of a mess since the amount a given person is paying for infrastructure can vary wildly and you end up having to field requests like this. Even here, they make a somewhat arbitrary distinction between users who do feed to the grid and those who don't (who presumably also use less power but just aren't easy to identify). Just break out the two items and call it a day.
Aside from the technical difficulties (which are certainly real; but probably surmountable with time and funding), I would be concerned about the political side of the project(politics being...somewhat less of a solved problem... than space and blowing things up).
The technology sufficient to divert an asteroid, especially with limited warning(which precludes some of the subtler 'attach an ion drive or give it a slow shove with a laser' type schemes), is probably pretty punchy, possibly 'basically an ICBM but better at escaping earth's gravity well' punchy. It would be an unfortunate irony if, in the attempt to mitigate the city-destroying-asteroid threat, we ended up with some sort of proliferation problem or another round of delightful nuclear brinksmanship.
In an ideal world, you'd hope that people could put "Stopping asteroid apocalypse" in the category of 'things more important than your petty nation-states and dumb ethnic and religious squabbles'; but I wouldn't exactly be shocked if people largely can't and every stage of an anti-asteroid project ends up being a bunch of delicate diplomacy and jingoistic dickwaving between the assorted nuclear powers, along with a lot of hand-wringing about anti-satellite capabilities, and generally a gigantic mess.
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The nice thing about the knee-pin move is that, while it lacks the drama and blood of a good mag-lite to the face and thus plays comparatively well for the cameras, there is a relatively thin line between 'pinning' and 'compressive asphyxia'. Just a matter of how much weight you put on that knee...
There are plenty of good cops out there, but by not punishing the bad cops it makes them all look bad.
Does it merely make them look bad? A bad cop is a more dangerous criminal than most of the people the cops are there to deal with. If the 'good cops' aren't enthusiastically hunting them down, I'd say that they are ineffectual at best and complicit at worst, not merely sullied by unfortunate proximity.
The tricky bit is that 'stability and job security' are apparently bad for shareholder value or something, so people hunting it are racing against (generally successful) attempts to crush it like a bug and bring in the temps and subcontractors and offshore peons and whatever else seems handy.
This doesn't make their dumb plan any less dumb; but the number of good plans that they passed up to chose that dumb plan is something we are actively whittling away at.
I certainly wouldn't doubt the use of non-upgradable internal storage as an effective price discrimination and margin padding tactic; but there is the issue of flash and controller quality.
If you are running something nearly the weight of a full OS (and a RAM constrained one that spends a lot of time killing processes and trying to reload them before anybody notices), you want good performance from your flash and controller (consider the user happiness that the first gen Nexus 7 created before it gained TRIM support and the flash was fragmenting and I/O going to hell). That costs more per gigabyte, more in line with what a decent SSD would (which still isn't all that much, these days; but it's a bit steeper than a basic SD/SDHC card).
If you just want bulk mostly-read storage, lousy flash doesn't matter nearly as much.
Unfortunately, there really isn't a terribly elegant way, and mobile OSes tend to adopt the 'the filesystem doesn't exist if we don't show it to you' theory of UI design, in any case (unless you have onboard/SD to serve as an obvious boundary) to present multiple flash subsystems of nonuniform performance to the user, even if some of them really would be better off with 16GB of bat-out-of-hell flash and 128 or 256 of cheap as chips stuff for their media storage and playback.
Maybe we'll see some of the stuff designed for server and SAN use, with the assorted designs for using faster devices to increase the overall performance of a larger pool of cheaper storage, make it down to phones at some point; but until that happens, non-uniformity is unlikely to be a crowd pleaser.
285 million addresses reserved for no compelling reason. sure, let's push onwards to ipv6, but saying "our hands are tied" when over 1/16th of the entire space is still available is a bit irritating.
Would you want to be the guy who pokes every existing and legacy system that makes stupid and/or dangerous assumptions about reserved blocks being reserved permanently? You'd hope that that wouldn't be an issue; but finding out could be exciting indeed.
Hey, now that Intel is trying to sell quarks NICs, we could be looking at a real crunch in the IPv6 space... (and, at a tray price of over $9/unit, large atoms and even most molecules becoming enormously expensive.)
Listening is 'hauling in data'(unless you are purely passive about it, which they aren't.) I didn't mention humans at all.
Yes, and I don't see why faces, especially if you have a method for quickly and easily algorithmically fingerprinting them, would be of any less interest than any other aspect of an intercepted signal that could be used to draw inferences about who and where it came from, where it's going and who it's intended for, draw correlations between otherwise apparently separate transmissions, and so on.
Given the relative obscurity of video compared to voice and text, I wouldn't see it replacing CDR grovelling or anything; but that's merely a question of scale rather than of scope.
And there are no digitized images or videos that include faces anywhere among the data they haul in?
Relatively early in their life, they were pretty much at parity or better with anything else you could get for roughly the same money and anything like the same convenience, in terms of specs, and much better supported. The fact that subsequent revisions were stagnant or worse and the state of routers-that-actually-work-with-3rd-party-builds didn't stay still took the shine off them. Then re-releasing (now with new higher price and extra letter!) the WRT54GL was something of an insult.
Strictly speaking, under their definition, wouldn't anything that doesn't cause the bootloader to run away crying and fits in the available flash space count as 'a firmware'?
Unless you are one serious badass, you won't be in the mood for much 'sneaking' after a few hours of hypothermia and hypoxia. If your luck holds, you didn't die or get violently ejected at a lethal altitude; but you've still been in a state closer to 'amateur hibernation', not one of our strong points, than anything else. You'll probably just lie on the tarmac defrosting and then maybe try some experimental crawling.
They had (maybe still have) an ARGUS-IS unit puttering around in the vicinity of Quantico, VA for a while, for, um, demonstration purposes only, I'm sure. Now, I suspect that an ARGUS-IS deployment has a price tag that would make the folks at Persistent Surveillance Systems look like a hobby aircraft; but the performance is... impressive.
I suspect that, aside from basic technological advance, it really doesn't help that the Iraq and Afghanistan markets are winding down a bit, so assorted stuff for hunting foreigners we don't care about is now being rebadged and flogged as public safety gear.
I know that there has been some (largely speculative/small scale test) work on a pneumatic equivalent to pumped hydro, using oil and gas wells that have already been emptied of hydrocarbons but are suspected of being geologically sound enough to store compressed air; but I haven't heard of any commercial-scale deployments. Not sure if that one hit the rocks in some fairly fundamental way, or if it's just winding its way through R&D. That one would be handy if it did work, especially since a lot of the US petro production includes areas that don't have much in the way of hydro potential (even if you were given a free hand against environmental objections, hydro means some serious construction if you don't already have a reasonably appropriate site).
I know less about batteries; but I'd love to see something less obnoxious than lead acid become viable even at the smallish datacenter scale.
Given that unpretentious vodka is pretty much food-grade ethanol and water, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, and powdered alcohol would be food grade ethanol, some sort of dextrin, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, they'd have to be saving a lot of money on the reduced bulk and weight of the omitted water to do any better.
Given that, and given the obvious utility in alcohol concealment and infiltration scenarios, I suspect that they aren't even going for price parity with either the Not Too Much Methanol(tm) brand vodkas or the Tastes Like Piss And Turns to Piss!(tm) economy beer sector.
My religion? I was preemptively dismissing all but the most absurdly optimistic assumptions, verging on cheap-magic-teleporters, as irrelevant to the finitude of economic activity. My personal suspicion is much closer to anything extrasolar being forever a spectator sport, and much of what's within it being something you do purely for reasons of scientific curiosity.
I'm not surprised that there is a backdoor ('Hey guys! Should we add a remote management feature that will automagically Just Work with ISPs 'setup disks' and/or remote troubleshooting systems even if the clueless user has forgotten their password, or would that be too scary?' is not a difficult question, especially given how many of these things are sold to ISPs in bulk and not to end users, especially the lousy combined router/modem devices), I am a trifle surprised that it's so slapped-together looking.
It's not exactly a secret that ISPs and providers of combination internet/TV/voice services tend to view customer-controlled equipment as something between a painful support headache and the blasphemous spawn of an unnatural coupling between internet piracy and absolute evil. Hence their enthusiasm for pushing their pet 'home gateway'/'set top box'/etc. with greater or lesser force, and the existence of standards like TR-069 ('CPE WAN Management Protocol') and organizations like the 'Home Gateway Initiative' that seek to standardize a nice, tame, appliance that can be used to sell services to consumers without confusing their little brains or letting them meddle.
That's what surprises me about seeing a comparatively dodgy-looking; but vendor/OEM provided, back door not only present but deliberately preserved even after being discovered, and sufficiently badly as to be rediscovered. There are remote management systems that, by design, are not under the control of the user, present for the convenience of the operator; but those are in the 'bydesign, wontfix' bucket. There are also malicious backdoors; but if this is one the party inserting it was far too arrogant for their own good. There are probably also legacy backdoors, used by some specific ISPs or the like; but those would presumably show up in their hardware, since Sercomm doesn't control enough of the market to assure that all customer-supplied devices will have the backdoor; but they do control enough that a single ISP's backdoor would be splashed all over the place.
Who is the expected user here, and what did they gain by trying to hold on to an existing backdoor so shoddily as to have it detected again?
Did you miss this bit?
"“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,”[The supervisor of the project at the sheriff's department Sgt. Douglas] Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”
That is...not exactly... the sort of attitude you want somebody with access to legalized violence to operate under. 'Yeah, we knew people wouldn't like the idea, so we just did it secretly instead. Listening to complaints is a total pain in the ass.' That alone strikes me as reason enough to clean house of everyone who gave it their approval, regardless of whether I thought the project was a good idea or not.
You can use bigger numbers until you run out of memory; you'll still be representing the same pitiful little pile of stuff at the bottom of our gravity well.
If your space-travel-fu is good, maybe some of the nearby ones as well(though shipping costs are likely to be high, and only superluminal travel could overcome the truly massive time discounting effects that would otherwise leave even the most impressive human expansion scenarios as a scattering of mostly disconnected 'islands' between which essentially no economically meaningful interaction is likely).
Hopefully, everyone involved with the Sheriff's department will be punished as hard as legally possible and possibly harder; but that seems unlikely to change the fact that 'power we could use' turns into 'power we just did use' with unpleasant regularity, and it's only reasonable to suspect that the cost of this sort of sensors-and-analysis package is only going to continue plummeting.
I'm sure that the insufferable 'if, hypothetically speaking, this level of surveillance would be legal if carried out by a magical force of zero-cost police officers with perfect memories and no need for sleep, it must be legal if carried out by any means whatsoever!' brigade will be by shortly; but their argument is ahistorical nonsense that ignores the real issue: most of your protection has always been logistical rather than legal. Now we are substantially reducing the logistical barriers and can reasonably expect to further reduce them in the near future. Any protections that you think would be a good idea will soon need to be explicitly legal; because the logistics will be increasingly trivial(possibly even self-financing, if you can sell ads somehow...)
Given the numbers in TFA, though, which had solar-generating customers as barely a rounding error, this particular incident seemed to be a straightforward rate fight caused by grid costs being rolled into assumptions about typical energy use by customers.
I agree that the behavior of an electrical system where wind and solar make up a substantial portion of generation assets would be a great deal hairier, though. Like base load units, both have capital and maintenance costs, sometimes substantial; but cost comparatively little to run at full capacity rather than to idle. Given the fixed costs, and the extremely low variable costs, the floor price for electricity from such is likely to be near zero(since you aren't paying for fuel, nor can you store those photons or that wind for the future, like the hydro units can with water, nearly anything more than nothing will at least cause you to lose money on your fixed costs more slowly); but the operator can do nothing about situations where they are constrained by supplies of sun or wind, no price is high enough to increase output under those conditions.
It...remains to be seen... if our less than promising history of managing risks in financial markets is up to the task(be sure your backup generator is in good repair, kids!)
At present, more or less all the options for electricity storage pretty much suck. Some of the more advanced purpose-built ones (fancy batteries, supercapacitors, that sort of thing) might actually be reasonably efficient; but the cost enough that it hardly matters. The ones you get 'for free', like pumped hydro, are not particularly efficient and only work if you have certain conditions in place.
Size? Potential size?
This seems like the sort of problem that could be much more logically and less painfully solved by breaking out the (more or less constant, at least within a given size class and geographic area) grid hookup cost and the per-KW/h price for electricity as separate items on the bill.
Infrastructure doesn't build and maintain itself, so if you want to maintain your connection, it's only logical that you'll pay something for that. If you try to bundle the distribution costs into the energy cost, though, you just get a bit of a mess since the amount a given person is paying for infrastructure can vary wildly and you end up having to field requests like this. Even here, they make a somewhat arbitrary distinction between users who do feed to the grid and those who don't (who presumably also use less power but just aren't easy to identify). Just break out the two items and call it a day.
Aside from the technical difficulties (which are certainly real; but probably surmountable with time and funding), I would be concerned about the political side of the project(politics being...somewhat less of a solved problem... than space and blowing things up).
The technology sufficient to divert an asteroid, especially with limited warning(which precludes some of the subtler 'attach an ion drive or give it a slow shove with a laser' type schemes), is probably pretty punchy, possibly 'basically an ICBM but better at escaping earth's gravity well' punchy. It would be an unfortunate irony if, in the attempt to mitigate the city-destroying-asteroid threat, we ended up with some sort of proliferation problem or another round of delightful nuclear brinksmanship.
In an ideal world, you'd hope that people could put "Stopping asteroid apocalypse" in the category of 'things more important than your petty nation-states and dumb ethnic and religious squabbles'; but I wouldn't exactly be shocked if people largely can't and every stage of an anti-asteroid project ends up being a bunch of delicate diplomacy and jingoistic dickwaving between the assorted nuclear powers, along with a lot of hand-wringing about anti-satellite capabilities, and generally a gigantic mess.