I'm bemused by the large number of "they shouldn't be allowed to publish that" comments. If this was youdontneedtoknowthat.com, I'd understand it better.
I ran for school board a few years back and I needed a list of registered voters in my district. I had to pay the county $100. Not a lot, but it represented 10% of what we had to spend on the campaign. I clearly had a need to know and it rankled me that some bureaucrat had decided that candidates should have to pay $100 for a floppy that took 2 minutes to produce. It boiled down to a tax on challenging the incumbents.
As a public service, I publish California high school SAT scores. Every year, it's like pulling teeth to get the state to relinquish the data. We go round the bush with the same arguments each year and then they finally let me have the data. It's obvious they don't like what I do with the data, but then, is it their right to deny access?
We operate a tutoring business that uses computers to grade some 500 tests per week. We think what we're doing has a real effect on children's ability to compute and that it's positively correlated with their math test scores. We've needed access to data for years to test that hypothesis but privacy concerns thwarted that access. This year, we finally gained access and sure enough, our hypothesis was confirmed. Those data not only showed us we're on the right track, they also suggested changes in what we're doing. Was the public interest better served by denying access?
In the end, it comes down to "who decides what you should be allowed to know?" Given their druthers, most agencies would rather they decide, even if their decision is not in the public interest.
What *is* a slight mystery is why Apple failed to donate to the school... now that's a mystery... are they slipping or can they no longer afford to do that?
Perhaps you mean all those Apple ]['s back in the 80's? Those weren't donated, they were bought and paid for by a tax strategy crafted by Apple and Sacramento. In short, Apple got more than a typical tax write off - they got to write off 3 times their manufacturing cost on every Apple ][ that they placed in the public schools. Why 3 times? At the time, it was customary to compute street cost at three times cost of goods.
At least Sacramento had the sense to limit the "gift" to one computer per classroom.
They have reached the point where they are getting significantly more energy
out than they are putting in.
Not sure where that comes from. The GA announcement merely said they had managed to smooth the plasma by spinning it. Thought there was a lot of speculation about "improved prospects...", there weren't any claims of significant energy gains.
The ten years has morphed to 50, it's just the Canadians haven't heard about it yet.
Seriously, at a fusion conference a few years back one of the speakers raised the "in ten years..." issue and said that by underestimating the difficulties of building a fusion power plant, the industry had lost its credibility. He started talking in terms of 50 year horizons. It was at that point I gave up hope for fusion.
Consider: for fusion to work, you've got to jam at least two protons together and corral at least two neutrons. Since free neutrons are unstable, you've got to generate them in situ. You can't corral them, they don't interact with magnets so you have to hope that two of them happen to be around just at the moment you've managed to squeeze some protons together. Only problem is, the neutrons, once generated, are fleeing the plasma as fast as their little quarks will carry em.
In an H-Bomb, you don't care - you wrap the reaction chamber with uranium and let the neutrons fission the u-238 and u-235. Yep, even u-238 fissions if you've got scads of neutrons. Our H-Bombs generate 70%+ of their power from the neutron - uranium reaction. Less than 30% comes from fusion itself. So unless you wrap fusion chambers with uranium - hmmmm , there goes the neighborhood - you're going to have a heck of a time getting any useful work out of the neutrons.
Bottom line - fusion is a never ending funding hole. Fund the research, but recognize it's a long shot that the research will pay off in our lifetime.
You want proof NMD won't work? Try this:
1) The Maignot Line - Technical marvel of the 30's and 40's. Impregnable. Hitler circumvented it by going where the Maignot line wasn't. France fell in two weeks.
2) The Atlantic Wall. Hitler tells Rommel to build an defensive wall the Allies can't breach. Rommel knowing full well it was a waste of resources, followed orders. Nonetheless, Rommel had targeted every square foot of vulnerable beach front. It took Eisenhower one day to breach the defense on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.
3) The DMZ. It was going the keep the North Vietnamese out of South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh sent his troops around the high tech fence.
My point is: Every static defense ever built has been breached or circumvented. The attacker has the time to figure out where the weak points are and then exploits them.
Nukes can be packaged small enough that they can be hand carried to their destination. A few of those stashed around will not be stopped by a $100 billion pork-barrel missile field in Alaska.
Moreover, there's the cost of building this travesty. To pay for it, Rumsfield wants to pare troop strength down so we no longer can fight a two-front war. During WWII, which coast do you think got the resources? "We'll fight Japan *after* we finish here in Europe." was what Nimitz was told.
Or how about this? The Russians have stipulated that if we withdraw from the ABM treaty, they'll stop decommissioning their MIRV'ed missiles as they have been doing per the START treaty. So we unravel a web of treatys just so Bush can enrich his buddies? We'll end up facing more missiles, not fewer if NMD goes ahead.
Where in God's green earth does this make any sense?
The benchmark source is at http://www.aceshardware.com/files/benchmarks/flops _dist.zip - download it to your powerpc, compile it and find out. Or, take a look at the Seti@home benchmark which shows the powerpc getting a score 1/8th the Athlon's (3 vs 25).
Course they both get trounced by the HP PA-Risc which for some odd reason Fiona has decided to drop in favor of IA-64.
...too big of a local cash cow.... it's just a lot more fun to imagine...
And those two reasons are why religion will never die. There will always be people who prefer to believe in gods over more prosaic explanations. As long as someone stands to benefit finanically, there'll be preachers of the faith-du-jour catering to that preference.
Step right up and git your levitating gurus, silver lizards and Nessies here! Don't push! There's enough for everybody...
I had exactly the same problem and solved it using a two pronged approach. First I replaced the power supply with an Enermax power supply. It controls its fans (it has two) using a thermo couple and only runs them as fast as it needs.
The second change I made was to get rid of the fan on the cpu and replaced it with a water cooler. I attached the radiator to the power supply's intake so I wouldn't have to add yet another fan. Fortunately, the temperature delta from the warm air intake isn't too high for the ps.
Net result is the computer went from being the pariah that was only turned on when absolutely needed to being the first choice machine. (I have 3 machines in a small room.)
If I were to do it over I'd probably just go with a Koolance case. They appear to have put the pieces together properly with the exception of putting the radiator at the bottom of the case.
When I read the Athlon scores vs the Pentium III scores, they aligned with other benchmarks I've seen which compared the two chips. What's more interesting is that the fastest Athlon was 2 times faster than the fastest Mac. One might be tempted to say mhz do matter until you look at the clock on the PA-Risc. At less than half the clock speed, it blows the fastest Athlon out of the water. Looks like HP knows how to build a cpu.
...we would look at very close to finished games. Ideas simply weren't worth our time because there were lots of people who had ideas but very few who could take it from idea to a fun playable game. So your first hurdle is to make the game.
If you have something that's fun and good looking, you've got a potential product. To find out if your game is fun, you should let as many people as possible beat on it. Watch them play the game and see how long they play before they decide to do something else. If they play just a minute or two, you're toast - doesn't matter how much fun you think it is - what matters is how much fun they think it is. After all, they're the ones who are going to pay for it. To find out if folks will pay for your game, make it shareware. DOOM started out as shareware and it worked well for them. Epic started out sharewaring their games and did well.
Be forewarned - you're shooting long odds when you sit down to write a game. Most of the games we looked at to publish we passed on and of the ones we passed on, only one got picked up by another publisher. Long, but not impossible, odds.
According to the original source, the bolide was 10 feet across, not 80 feet.
I've seen estimates of the 1908 Tunguska bolide being somewhere around 150 feet across. That bolide's explosion destroyed some 2000 square miles. The difference in damage is a function of the bolide's radius cubed so a doubling of the radius octuples the bolide's kinetic energy, assuming similar materials and velocities. There's a lot of uncertainty in these kinds of calculations because nobody knows much about the bolides in question. All that was left of the Tunguska event was a lot of destroyed landscape and in the case of the April 23 event, some recorded booms and flashes.
We went into Potsdam knowing exactly what the would accept and what they
wouldn't, and we deliberately gave them what they wouldn't.
The term "unconditional surrender" which gave the Japanese so much trouble, came from FDR at Casablanca. Truman didn't come up with terms at Potsdam; he stuck to FDR's Casablanca position articulated much earlier in the war. The July intercepts you refer to do not support your contention that the Japanese were suing for peace. They underscore the point that the Japanese were trying to figure out how to end the war on more favorable terms to them. Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to it. Hirohito says as much in his Aug 15 broadcast.
To answer your rhetorical why you suggest that it was Stimson's fault. According to your lights, Stimson doesn't want to go to Leavenworth so he convinces the U.S. to continue the war so we can use his bomb? That's a hell of a stretch. The simple fact is that FDR laid out a course of action and the War Department was implementing it. They weren't second guessing or flip-flopping on prosecuting the war. Make no mistake; the decision to enter the war was Hirohito's as was the decision to end it. Not Truman's, not Stimson's, not Grove's, but Hirohito's.
As to "needlessly killed 200,000 civilians..." Truman's staff was telling him to expect somewhere between 500,000 to 1,000,000 casualties if we invaded Japan. Given that choice, most rational people would make the same choice Truman did - drop the bomb and hope Hirohito stops the fighting. Hirohito didn't sue for peace until Aug 15th, 1945.
Rhode's book has a picture that shows an imperial palace surrounded by bombed out Tokyo and there's a photo of a top-hatted Hirohito touring the damage. Even LeMay dropping death on Hirohito's doorstep wasn't enough to get Hirohito to quit - like it or not, it took the Bomb.
Yep, you're being paranoid. Any efficient power source is useful both as a sword and as a plow. Batteries in cell-phones can be used to detonate bombs - should we ban them?
As to anti-matter being feasible, no, not now. However, there's a sci-fi book written by Charles Pellegrino and James Powell called Flying to Valhalla in which they outline how to build an anti-matter starship.
Dr. Powell is the co-inventor of maglev trains and has the background to cover the issues you raise, and several others. At the back of the book, he lays out a design for the ship and associated technologies. He suggests using robots to build solar arrays on Mercury to provide the necessary power to manufacture and store the anti-matter. The starship is assembled in space so the anti-matter doesn't get anywhere near earth.
Without ruining the story, it turns out that the starship can be used as either a transport or as a weapon. Powell calculates that a space-shuttle sized craft hitting a planet at starship speeds would incinerate half the planet. Not from the anti-matter but just the stored kinetic energy. Moreover, at the speed it's moving, there's nothing you can do. By the time you think you know where it is, it's somewhere else. No missile defense is feasible (not that one can exist today...) If our children or grandchildren choose to misuse anti-matter, then we're all out of the gene-pool game. OTOH, if they choose wisely, anti-matter may actually be a technology that saves their butts.
If it all sounds fantastic, well it is. But then Buck Roger's trips to the moon were fantastic in the 30's. Startrek communicators were far-fetched in the 60's. A lot of the technology you take for granted was pie in the sky in the past.
Re:Japanese (and American) revisionist history
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 1
The Japanese knew it was over and were suing for peace. These overtures were rejected because of one word: We insisted on "unconditional" surrender
Not true: They were not suing for peace. The fact is that the Japanese were split - the military wanted to continue the war, the civilians wanted it to end. The civilians, not the military, were probing for clarification as to what "unconditional surrender" meant but no way had anyone sued for peace. It wasn't til we dropped the bomb that Emperor Hirohito felt compelled to side with the civilians. Even after Hirohito sided with the civilians, there was an attempted coup that was bent on preventing Hirohito's surrender from being broadcast.
While it's true that FDR's call for unconditional surrender made it harder for the Japanese to surrender, it's not true that the Japanese were suing for peace prior to Hiroshima. If the bomb achieved anything, it made it very clear to Hirohito that Japan had lost the war and that his generals had lied and were continuing to lie to him. Hiroshima made it 100% clear to Hirohito that if the war were to drag on, the Japanese, not the Americans, were going to lose even more. In his surrender speech broadcast on August 15, 1945, he says: Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
Hirohito probably knew the war was over when Curtis LeMay destroyed Tokyo that spring but it took Hiroshima to get him to act on that knowledge. I'll take Hirohito's word as to why he surrendered over any revisionist historians.
The level-flying planes were dropping torpedoes, not bombs. The torpedoes were modified in a Mitsubitshi plant that was working overtime to get the fins modified in time for the fleet to sail. Prior to the fin mod, plane-dropped torpedoes would sink too deep and swim under their target.
From the NEAR mission fact sheet (the one with the NASA logo on it...), As the first mission launched in NASA's discovery program... If NASA is funding the paychecks, don't you think they might be considered part of the project?
From the report you cite.... The make up burn placed NEAR on a trajectory to rendezvous with Eros on Feb 14 2000, 13 months later than originally planned.
Granted, they recovered from the initial miss, but the fact is they did miss on the first try. It doesn't matter if it's "an engine burn anomaly," the result is a miss on the first try.
I'm not castigating NEAR or NASA for missing on the first try. My point was that if you're trying to deflect an asteroid, you had better be where you need to be on the first try - you may not have time enough for a correction. The way to increase the odds that a "hose up" won't happen is to give NASA/JHU APL/JPL/... lots of practice.
Yeah, they missed the first time. They shot by Eros on the first attempt to orbit and spent a year turning around and chasing down Eros.
Nasa can only be deemed capable of "planetary defense" if they get plenty of practice doing this kind of thing. Consider the Mars probes that failed for a variety of reasons and the jammed antenna on the Jupiter probe for examples of what can go wrong. The more practice NASA gets, the better off we'll all be.
Perhaps. But without this kind of research that NASA is engaged in now, DoD wouldn't have a clue what to do. Do you hit the thing or do you nudge it with a mass driver? Or do you stand off and explode a bomb to push a loosely consolidated rubble pile to the side? My point is that this kind of research has to be done now and it has to be done frequently enough so that we can be confident we can deal with whatever we find coming our way.
You have to give NASA credit. The fact is that NASA, not DoD, sponsored the research that's made sci-fi sci-fact. Nasa managed the trip to the moon that demonstrated that the moon's craters were impact craters, not volcanic, and they underwrote Shoemaker and Levy's research that spotted the bolide which made earth-size plumes on Jupiter.
Yes they can hit them . But when the time comes to deal with an incoming bolide, they're going to have to know how that particular object is constructed - solid rock - solid ice - rubble - mix? How it is made determines how to deal with it. That means getting near the thing, probing and then deciding how to best deal with it.
There are a myriad # of things to go wrong but the more practice NASA has at doing this kind of thing, the more confident we can be that when the time comes that they have to do it right, they will.
You're right - it's research. The research is basic research in that we don't know much about comets and asteroids. It's applied research in that we need to be able to do this kind or manuever reliably because a time will come when we have to. So no, this experiment isn't about blowing up comets, but it's excellent practice for the day when we need to.
It may also be that we find asteroids that are worth mining. The only way we'll find them is to send these kinds of probes out and look.
Hmmm,... that was my point. There haven't been too many successes at intercepting their target. Then again, there haven't been that many attempts either. It is neat that NEAR recovered from the first miss but the point is that if we're going to deflect an incoming asteroid, we had better get it right on the first shot. That means NASA needs practice rendezvousing.
Ah, but if I'm not mistaken, NEAR was operated by JPL, not NASA; perhaps that's what you meant?
Actually NEAR was operated at Johns Hopkins and funded by NASA. NEAT is operated by JPL and also funded by NASA.
Table - a horizontal surface that you put things on and sit around. Horizontal - in space? Sit - in space? Put things on - in space?
There's no gravity, no down, no chairs... Maybe if you had a velcro surface and everything had velcro stuck to it then the table would serve as a repository but no, it has a duct tape "top."
What does the phrase "finally had a table on which to eat, cook and work..." mean in outer space?
The idea of object abstraction is nice but you really should know whether the object is in memory or on disk for the simple reason that going to disk costs a lot of time. Your initial design should take that simple fact into account so when you release, you're not shipping pig-slow software. Kinda makes you look bad in the marketplace.
Way back when, I worked on a new-fangled air-defense system that was going to be 100% high level language - no assembly language for us, no-siree! The machine was state of the art - 16 mhz with 24 terminals hung off it - power to burn! Fortunately, my boss had the sense to write a small snippet of code that pretended to be a radar feeding a control program - classic client-server code. No real radar processing was involved and the control program didn't have to do anything with the fake return except count it. Our design spec called for handling 2000 returns per minute. The simple client-server code he wrote could only manage 500 returns/minute. Fortunately, the test happened early in the coding phase so we were able to re-design portions of the system to adjust to the physical realities of the hardware.
Abstraction is nice but be sure it's not so abstract that the hardware can't handle it.
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I ran for school board a few years back and I needed a list of registered voters in my district. I had to pay the county $100. Not a lot, but it represented 10% of what we had to spend on the campaign. I clearly had a need to know and it rankled me that some bureaucrat had decided that candidates should have to pay $100 for a floppy that took 2 minutes to produce. It boiled down to a tax on challenging the incumbents.
As a public service, I publish California high school SAT scores. Every year, it's like pulling teeth to get the state to relinquish the data. We go round the bush with the same arguments each year and then they finally let me have the data. It's obvious they don't like what I do with the data, but then, is it their right to deny access?
We operate a tutoring business that uses computers to grade some 500 tests per week. We think what we're doing has a real effect on children's ability to compute and that it's positively correlated with their math test scores. We've needed access to data for years to test that hypothesis but privacy concerns thwarted that access. This year, we finally gained access and sure enough, our hypothesis was confirmed. Those data not only showed us we're on the right track, they also suggested changes in what we're doing. Was the public interest better served by denying access?
In the end, it comes down to "who decides what you should be allowed to know?" Given their druthers, most agencies would rather they decide, even if their decision is not in the public interest.
Perhaps you mean all those Apple ]['s back in the 80's? Those weren't donated, they were bought and paid for by a tax strategy crafted by Apple and Sacramento. In short, Apple got more than a typical tax write off - they got to write off 3 times their manufacturing cost on every Apple ][ that they placed in the public schools. Why 3 times? At the time, it was customary to compute street cost at three times cost of goods.
At least Sacramento had the sense to limit the "gift" to one computer per classroom.
Not sure where that comes from. The GA announcement merely said they had managed to smooth the plasma by spinning it. Thought there was a lot of speculation about "improved prospects...", there weren't any claims of significant energy gains.
You can read the original release at their web site.
Seriously, at a fusion conference a few years back one of the speakers raised the "in ten years..." issue and said that by underestimating the difficulties of building a fusion power plant, the industry had lost its credibility. He started talking in terms of 50 year horizons. It was at that point I gave up hope for fusion.
Consider: for fusion to work, you've got to jam at least two protons together and corral at least two neutrons. Since free neutrons are unstable, you've got to generate them in situ. You can't corral them, they don't interact with magnets so you have to hope that two of them happen to be around just at the moment you've managed to squeeze some protons together. Only problem is, the neutrons, once generated, are fleeing the plasma as fast as their little quarks will carry em.
In an H-Bomb, you don't care - you wrap the reaction chamber with uranium and let the neutrons fission the u-238 and u-235. Yep, even u-238 fissions if you've got scads of neutrons. Our H-Bombs generate 70%+ of their power from the neutron - uranium reaction. Less than 30% comes from fusion itself. So unless you wrap fusion chambers with uranium - hmmmm , there goes the neighborhood - you're going to have a heck of a time getting any useful work out of the neutrons.
Bottom line - fusion is a never ending funding hole. Fund the research, but recognize it's a long shot that the research will pay off in our lifetime.
You want proof NMD won't work? Try this: 1) The Maignot Line - Technical marvel of the 30's and 40's. Impregnable. Hitler circumvented it by going where the Maignot line wasn't. France fell in two weeks. 2) The Atlantic Wall. Hitler tells Rommel to build an defensive wall the Allies can't breach. Rommel knowing full well it was a waste of resources, followed orders. Nonetheless, Rommel had targeted every square foot of vulnerable beach front. It took Eisenhower one day to breach the defense on D-Day, June 6th, 1944. 3) The DMZ. It was going the keep the North Vietnamese out of South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh sent his troops around the high tech fence. My point is: Every static defense ever built has been breached or circumvented. The attacker has the time to figure out where the weak points are and then exploits them. Nukes can be packaged small enough that they can be hand carried to their destination. A few of those stashed around will not be stopped by a $100 billion pork-barrel missile field in Alaska. Moreover, there's the cost of building this travesty. To pay for it, Rumsfield wants to pare troop strength down so we no longer can fight a two-front war. During WWII, which coast do you think got the resources? "We'll fight Japan *after* we finish here in Europe." was what Nimitz was told. Or how about this? The Russians have stipulated that if we withdraw from the ABM treaty, they'll stop decommissioning their MIRV'ed missiles as they have been doing per the START treaty. So we unravel a web of treatys just so Bush can enrich his buddies? We'll end up facing more missiles, not fewer if NMD goes ahead. Where in God's green earth does this make any sense?
The benchmark source is at http://www.aceshardware.com/files/benchmarks/flops _dist.zip - download it to your powerpc, compile it and find out. Or, take a look at the Seti@home benchmark which shows the powerpc getting a score 1/8th the Athlon's (3 vs 25).
Course they both get trounced by the HP PA-Risc which for some odd reason Fiona has decided to drop in favor of IA-64.
And those two reasons are why religion will never die. There will always be people who prefer to believe in gods over more prosaic explanations. As long as someone stands to benefit finanically, there'll be preachers of the faith-du-jour catering to that preference.
Step right up and git your levitating gurus, silver lizards and Nessies here! Don't push! There's enough for everybody...
The second change I made was to get rid of the fan on the cpu and replaced it with a water cooler. I attached the radiator to the power supply's intake so I wouldn't have to add yet another fan. Fortunately, the temperature delta from the warm air intake isn't too high for the ps.
Net result is the computer went from being the pariah that was only turned on when absolutely needed to being the first choice machine. (I have 3 machines in a small room.)
If I were to do it over I'd probably just go with a Koolance case. They appear to have put the pieces together properly with the exception of putting the radiator at the bottom of the case.
The P3 that the Seti numbers refer to is running Win 2000. It's also an average, so perhaps your P3 is hobbled by something running in the background.
The comparable data are:
When I read the Athlon scores vs the Pentium III scores, they aligned with other benchmarks I've seen which compared the two chips. What's more interesting is that the fastest Athlon was 2 times faster than the fastest Mac. One might be tempted to say mhz do matter until you look at the clock on the PA-Risc. At less than half the clock speed, it blows the fastest Athlon out of the water. Looks like HP knows how to build a cpu.
If you have something that's fun and good looking, you've got a potential product. To find out if your game is fun, you should let as many people as possible beat on it. Watch them play the game and see how long they play before they decide to do something else. If they play just a minute or two, you're toast - doesn't matter how much fun you think it is - what matters is how much fun they think it is. After all, they're the ones who are going to pay for it. To find out if folks will pay for your game, make it shareware. DOOM started out as shareware and it worked well for them. Epic started out sharewaring their games and did well.
Be forewarned - you're shooting long odds when you sit down to write a game. Most of the games we looked at to publish we passed on and of the ones we passed on, only one got picked up by another publisher. Long, but not impossible, odds.
According to the original source, the bolide was 10 feet across, not 80 feet.
I've seen estimates of the 1908 Tunguska bolide being somewhere around 150 feet across. That bolide's explosion destroyed some 2000 square miles. The difference in damage is a function of the bolide's radius cubed so a doubling of the radius octuples the bolide's kinetic energy, assuming similar materials and velocities. There's a lot of uncertainty in these kinds of calculations because nobody knows much about the bolides in question. All that was left of the Tunguska event was a lot of destroyed landscape and in the case of the April 23 event, some recorded booms and flashes.
The term "unconditional surrender" which gave the Japanese so much trouble, came from FDR at Casablanca. Truman didn't come up with terms at Potsdam; he stuck to FDR's Casablanca position articulated much earlier in the war. The July intercepts you refer to do not support your contention that the Japanese were suing for peace. They underscore the point that the Japanese were trying to figure out how to end the war on more favorable terms to them. Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to it. Hirohito says as much in his Aug 15 broadcast.
To answer your rhetorical why you suggest that it was Stimson's fault. According to your lights, Stimson doesn't want to go to Leavenworth so he convinces the U.S. to continue the war so we can use his bomb? That's a hell of a stretch. The simple fact is that FDR laid out a course of action and the War Department was implementing it. They weren't second guessing or flip-flopping on prosecuting the war. Make no mistake; the decision to enter the war was Hirohito's as was the decision to end it. Not Truman's, not Stimson's, not Grove's, but Hirohito's.
As to "needlessly killed 200,000 civilians..." Truman's staff was telling him to expect somewhere between 500,000 to 1,000,000 casualties if we invaded Japan. Given that choice, most rational people would make the same choice Truman did - drop the bomb and hope Hirohito stops the fighting. Hirohito didn't sue for peace until Aug 15th, 1945.
Rhode's book has a picture that shows an imperial palace surrounded by bombed out Tokyo and there's a photo of a top-hatted Hirohito touring the damage. Even LeMay dropping death on Hirohito's doorstep wasn't enough to get Hirohito to quit - like it or not, it took the Bomb.
As to anti-matter being feasible, no, not now. However, there's a sci-fi book written by Charles Pellegrino and James Powell called Flying to Valhalla in which they outline how to build an anti-matter starship.
Dr. Powell is the co-inventor of maglev trains and has the background to cover the issues you raise, and several others. At the back of the book, he lays out a design for the ship and associated technologies. He suggests using robots to build solar arrays on Mercury to provide the necessary power to manufacture and store the anti-matter. The starship is assembled in space so the anti-matter doesn't get anywhere near earth.
Without ruining the story, it turns out that the starship can be used as either a transport or as a weapon. Powell calculates that a space-shuttle sized craft hitting a planet at starship speeds would incinerate half the planet. Not from the anti-matter but just the stored kinetic energy. Moreover, at the speed it's moving, there's nothing you can do. By the time you think you know where it is, it's somewhere else. No missile defense is feasible (not that one can exist today...) If our children or grandchildren choose to misuse anti-matter, then we're all out of the gene-pool game. OTOH, if they choose wisely, anti-matter may actually be a technology that saves their butts.
If it all sounds fantastic, well it is. But then Buck Roger's trips to the moon were fantastic in the 30's. Startrek communicators were far-fetched in the 60's. A lot of the technology you take for granted was pie in the sky in the past.
Not true: They were not suing for peace. The fact is that the Japanese were split - the military wanted to continue the war, the civilians wanted it to end. The civilians, not the military, were probing for clarification as to what "unconditional surrender" meant but no way had anyone sued for peace. It wasn't til we dropped the bomb that Emperor Hirohito felt compelled to side with the civilians. Even after Hirohito sided with the civilians, there was an attempted coup that was bent on preventing Hirohito's surrender from being broadcast.
While it's true that FDR's call for unconditional surrender made it harder for the Japanese to surrender, it's not true that the Japanese were suing for peace prior to Hiroshima. If the bomb achieved anything, it made it very clear to Hirohito that Japan had lost the war and that his generals had lied and were continuing to lie to him. Hiroshima made it 100% clear to Hirohito that if the war were to drag on, the Japanese, not the Americans, were going to lose even more. In his surrender speech broadcast on August 15, 1945, he says:
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
Hirohito probably knew the war was over when Curtis LeMay destroyed Tokyo that spring but it took Hiroshima to get him to act on that knowledge. I'll take Hirohito's word as to why he surrendered over any revisionist historians.
The level-flying planes were dropping torpedoes, not bombs. The torpedoes were modified in a Mitsubitshi plant that was working overtime to get the fins modified in time for the fleet to sail. Prior to the fin mod, plane-dropped torpedoes would sink too deep and swim under their target.
The plant was destroyed when we bombed Nagasaki.
From the report you cite....
The make up burn placed NEAR on a trajectory to rendezvous with Eros on Feb 14 2000, 13 months later than originally planned.
Granted, they recovered from the initial miss, but the fact is they did miss on the first try. It doesn't matter if it's "an engine burn anomaly," the result is a miss on the first try.
I'm not castigating NEAR or NASA for missing on the first try. My point was that if you're trying to deflect an asteroid, you had better be where you need to be on the first try - you may not have time enough for a correction. The way to increase the odds that a "hose up" won't happen is to give NASA/JHU APL/JPL/... lots of practice.
Nasa can only be deemed capable of "planetary defense" if they get plenty of practice doing this kind of thing. Consider the Mars probes that failed for a variety of reasons and the jammed antenna on the Jupiter probe for examples of what can go wrong. The more practice NASA gets, the better off we'll all be.
You have to give NASA credit. The fact is that NASA, not DoD, sponsored the research that's made sci-fi sci-fact. Nasa managed the trip to the moon that demonstrated that the moon's craters were impact craters, not volcanic, and they underwrote Shoemaker and Levy's research that spotted the bolide which made earth-size plumes on Jupiter.
There are a myriad # of things to go wrong but the more practice NASA has at doing this kind of thing, the more confident we can be that when the time comes that they have to do it right, they will.
It may also be that we find asteroids that are worth mining. The only way we'll find them is to send these kinds of probes out and look.
Ah, but if I'm not mistaken, NEAR was operated by JPL, not NASA; perhaps that's what you meant?
Actually NEAR was operated at Johns Hopkins and funded by NASA. NEAT is operated by JPL and also funded by NASA.
There's no gravity, no down, no chairs... Maybe if you had a velcro surface and everything had velcro stuck to it then the table would serve as a repository but no, it has a duct tape "top."
What does the phrase "finally had a table on which to eat, cook and work..." mean in outer space?
Way back when, I worked on a new-fangled air-defense system that was going to be 100% high level language - no assembly language for us, no-siree! The machine was state of the art - 16 mhz with 24 terminals hung off it - power to burn! Fortunately, my boss had the sense to write a small snippet of code that pretended to be a radar feeding a control program - classic client-server code. No real radar processing was involved and the control program didn't have to do anything with the fake return except count it. Our design spec called for handling 2000 returns per minute. The simple client-server code he wrote could only manage 500 returns/minute. Fortunately, the test happened early in the coding phase so we were able to re-design portions of the system to adjust to the physical realities of the hardware.
Abstraction is nice but be sure it's not so abstract that the hardware can't handle it.