Usually it's a combination of the natural resistance to change (because change causes stress) and cognitive dissonance, although religion can be a cause and a symptom.
There was a paper recently published that established a correlation between the variety of ideas one is exposed to (particularly in childhood/youth) to the the level of stress felt as a result of change. The former provides a causal basis for past observations that people with more education (exposed to more ideas) tend to be more liberal/progressive (more willing to embrace change). Thus somebody exposed to fewer ideas in their formative years will be more resistant to new ideas, particularly when those ideas conflict with established beliefs. Most religions encourage or enforce rejection of new ideas that clash with accepted dogma (also known as heresy) and therefore a) reinforce this natural tendency and b) limit the ideas that people are exposed to. People living in urban settings will also be exposed to more people and ideas, and therefore tend to be more liberal than those in rural settings.
p>There was another paper that indicated Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief. People who go on to pursue advanced education are more likely to be trained in analytical thinking and therefore, unless they have a degree of obsessive-compulsive disorder, are less likely to adhere to religious dogma. (Combined with the other observation, this partly explains increasing Western secularization as a consequence of increased education due to industrialization and urbanization.)
When you take those factors and throw in a civilization that has an accelerating rate of technological change, you're going to have a rural/conservative population which is increasingly resistant to (ever increasing) change, and an urban/educated population which is increasingly exposed to new ideas and more receptive to them. You have two positive feedback loops which are increasingly polarizing the two segments of the population (and a sensationalizing media which is aggravating the problem).
I think the Internet has the possibility of being a game changer by providing access to more ideas to rural youths and breaking the cycle identified in the first paragraph. However it could also exacerbate the situation by creating a huge generational conflict in rural populations, which leads to more stress and more resistance to change in the older rural/religious population. I'm really hoping it works out to be breaking the conservative feedback loop, but accelerating change makes that feedback increasingly strong.
I think that if progressives were smart, we would recognize the different needs of the rural/religious conservatives (i.e. regarding guns, which are useful tools in rural areas) to lessen that positive feedback loop and allow the other to overtake it.
To continue with your metaphor, these fakes--though of reasonable quality--are priced so low that only boobs would be taken in by them.
Is there anything that prevents the FBI from pricing them realistically?
Apparently a lack of humint assets to put them in touch with genuine trained terrorists who would be interested in paying full price and have the funds available. Let's put it another way. If you're a trained agent running a covert terrorist op in enemy territory, wouldn't you think it's damned convenient for someone to be coming up to you in a mosque and offering to sell you SAMs? Unless you've got contacts that have sourced and smuggled in said SAMs into the country, or who can vouch for past arms deals with whoever is offering the weapons, you wouldn't touch such a deal with a 21.5' pole and risk blowing the op.
You see, it's not the FBI's job to have humint assets among radical Islamic terrorists, it's the CIA's job because (with the exception of homegrown "lone" nutcases like Timothy McVeigh or the anti-arbortion loonies) the terrorists (and radical islamists in particular) are not based out of the USA. And when it comes to catching the real homegrown variety before the fact (as opposed to the entrapped twits), the FBI has a pretty poor public record with an apparent propensity to accuse the wrong men to show visible signs of progress.
An API is more than "all about functionality"; it is an artful expression of the collection of function calls, and their parameter signatures, needed to implement such functionality.
Or it could be. Only a judge can decide that.
Indeed it sounds like this case will provide a ruling on that since the judge has reserved the right to rule the the applicability of copyright to the API for himself and told the jury to assume that the APIs are copyrightable so that their verdict will stand even if his finding on the legality of API copyrights is challenged on appeal. However when it comes to the jury's verdict, it would seem that Schwartz' testimony gives really good grounds to Google for estoppel that Sun had limited the copyright-based constraints it asserted on the APIs. More specifically that, since Google had not tried to call Dalvik by the trademarked Java name, that they had complied with Sun's public statements regarding licencing requirements of the Java APIs in that the licencing was only required for access to the JCK/TCK for compatibility testing and use of the Java name.
And when that does happen, I'm sure that the cost of manufacturing and maintaining/operating MRI's will drop significantly. In the meantime however...
Anyways, thanks for the heads up. Once you had alerted me to it, I did find the mention of new YBCO wire allowing high Tc magnets to be built back in 2007, and that the test magnet supported.96T at 77K. That's on the low end of MRI field strengths and it's not clear they'll be able to get much more out of it. Who knows though, maybe they'll be able to use variants of the pre-stressing coil fabrication techniques being developed for Niobium-Tin to increase the ceiiling. That would be trickier to pull off with an MRI-sized magnet though.
Well in the case of MRIs, since you're talking about very large superconducting coils, I expect they're also expensive to run because a) very strong B fields require lots of power to generate, b) superconducting magnets need to be cooled with liquid helium (which itself tends to be kept in an intermediary LN insulating "blanket").
The LHe and LN also require power to condense/cool and when dealing with stuff kept that cold, there almost certainly is more maintenance complexity (and hence costs) than with the machines that go ping.
As for the long run and AGW, I've read the IPCC report and as far as I'm concerned we have about a century before things start potentially getting really bad.
I haven't read the IPCC report, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that the 100 year projections are assuming that warming continues along current trends based on CO2 production from fossil fuels. It doesn't take into account probable release of GGs from melting permafrost or from ocean floor methyl clathrates. The latter two could substantially shorten the time-frame when serious consequences start, and we're already starting to see signs that Arctic GG release is increasing. That's what's driving the sense of urgency behind appeals to do more to control GGs because if/once that transition starts, it will accelerate change beyond our ability to adjust via consumption restriction, transition to other energy sources, and/or terraforming. It's not possible to demonstrate this in the way that you can project the escalating costs of fixing a bug as you move from req. analysis, through design and implementation, to deployment. But there is a significant chance that delaying the fix will escalate costs exponentially despite any savings that may be obtained through improved techniques.
These days I find myself strongly hoping that EMCC can pull the Polywell rabbit out of a hat, because I really fear that's the only thing that's got a chance of causing the necessary socio-technological re-alignment in time.
I agree with you that those are also a factor. Another factor is that it sounds like Steve Jobs felt personally betrayed by Eric Schmidt because Jobs believed that Schmidt heavily used the information on the iPhone and iPad programs he was a party to as a member of Apple's board when creating Google's Android strategy. Given the character aspects you pointed out, his vendetta response is unsurprising. However if it hadn't been for Apple's past successes against Apple][ cloners and Psystar, Steve might not have jumped so quickly to a global 'scorched earth' legal policy and may have looked at other tools at his disposal.
Vendettas don't have any place in good governance and either Tim Cook understands that or he at least isn't caught up in this one and is willing to try to de-escalate the situation if it's causing as much harm as good. He may not be another Steve Jobs, but he also isn't a Steve Ballmer.
Apple are very aggressive, and often attack first.
Well, that was certainly true under Steve Jobs. His legal and emotional responses in this area were formed in the Apple ][ clone battles of the 70's/80's against companies like Orange who created look-alikes that used almost straight copies of the Apple ][ ROMs and motherboards. Apple have since faced numerous issues with copies of their hardware and software, including the infamous battles with Microsoft over Windows Look and Feel and the Psystar Mac clones. It's not surprising that Steve Jobs would have been sensitive over the issue after it kept rearing its ugly head over decades.
Conversely, Tim Cook started with Apple in 1998 after most of these Apple litigation battles, and it doesn't look like his earlier career would have exposed him to that issue as much as Steve Jobs was. So it's not surprising that Mr. Cook would not react to any third-party product similarity in as knee-jerk a manner as Steve jobs would, and that he would be much more measured in his approach. With the changing of the guard, it seems quite possible that "Past performance is not indicative of future results" when it comes to Apple litigation. The war with Samsung is a lot less clear cut than it was with Orange or Psystar, and the risk of throwing money at a Microsoft Look & Feel-type legal dead end a lot higher. Tim Cook appears capable of being more objective than Steve Jobs in assessing the situation.
I suspect that's a straw man because most physicists and climate scientists would agree with the saturation and reflection arguments you raise regarding water vapour production. Most "apocalyptic" thermal catastrophe scenarios tend to involve two other factors: firstly, reduced reflection of incoming radiation on polar oceans from melted ice caps resulting in increased polar heating, reduced intensity of the Pacific and Atlantic Conveyors, and drastically changed weather systems which could significantly affect the food productivity of breadbaskets like the European and American central plains; secondly, release of methane gas (another very potent greenhouse gas) through the melting of methyl clathrates at the bottom of warming polar oceans. Methane gas would not "precipitate out" as easily as water vapour and the resulting increased warming could exceed any negative feedback mechanisms provided by the water cycle. There appears to already be increased methane gas release as a result of melting arctic permafrost.
Can you please explain in detail how a colorless, odorless gas can trap heat from radiating from the planet and act as a blanket?
Rayleigh scattering. Because much incident radiation reaching earth from the sun has a peak in the visible spectrum, it goes through the colourless gas fine. However, given its much lower temperature (thank goodness), earth re-radiates that heat as a blackbody with the peak in the infrared. CO2 scatters IR (in the same way that other atmospheric molecules scatter blue light, making the sky blue) keeping much of that heat from escaping into outer space and keeping it in the atmosphere. Since your eyes cannot see in the infrared, you cannot detect this scattering/reflection and perceive CO2 as clear/colourless, but properly designed instrumentation can.
This description is based on concepts which are often introduced in a 1st year university physics course, and explained in mathematical detail in a 2nd or 3rd year Optics course.
BC Hydro has run Power Smart for decades to encourage people to update appliances and make other changes that reduce power consumption. This, along with upgrading efficiency in existing power facilities, allowed them to delay huge capital outlays for constructing new capacity for decades. This is despite a burgeoning BC population and increased variety in electronic appliances, although those two factors are finally outstripping their efforts from increased generation and customer efficiency and requiring them to increase capacity though new generating plants.
So any established police force and enforcement of laws will inevitably lead to a police state? Or do you think there might be a few shades of grey possible?
We now have the knowhow to produce food at a rate which frees up most of the population for other activities.
We do, but it's currently heavily based on petroleum, both as an energy source and as raw material for fertilizer production and intensive use. Petroleum appears to be a finite resource and is getting increasingly difficult and expensive to extract. Even if you ignore AGW, that's a bunch of serious risks that should be waving all kinds of red flags. Even if fusion pans out or other hydrocarbons take over as a source of energy without AGW consequences, when the oil runs out and we're forced to go back to crop rotation that's going to seriously impact food production and prices.
You need to read more about the capitalist paradise of the late 19th century, robber barons, company towns/stores, child labour in factories, the Triangle Shirtwaist and Binghamton fires, etc. Or more recently the pollution of Love Canal and other Superfund sites. Also check out the Pinkerton Agency's role in suppressing labour strife, which they had often exaggerated and escalated to drum up more business.
And yet somehow, Berkeley managed to convince a judge to let them do exactly that with BSD. So there seems to be established precedent that this is actually possible without conpyright infringement, and it would be surprising if Google weren't to bring that up at some point in this trial. The relative newbies posting here who have only been in the industry 10 years or less may not know about this precedent, but it's doubtful that Google's lawyers won't have come up with it at some point in searching out relevant case law. Heck, even if they hadn't, Eric Schmidt's been in the ball game long enough that he would have brought it up. If that's all that Oracle's got going for them, then they must be hoping that they can snow the jury.
Berkeley vs. AT&T seems to have pretty well established that APIs cannot be copyrighted, although it's possible that a specific API include file layout can be.
The weight of the Chinese government is not to be underestimated, and Google is not exactly in their good books given past head butting over search and censorship. That said, since the US and EU have both given the go ahead, I wonder if Google/Motorola might decide to tell the Chinese gov. to go stuff itself if the answer is no. Losing the Chinese market and manufacturing facilities would hurt, but the main markets Motorola sells to these days are probably still Japan, S. Korea, the EU, and the US. Chinese labour costs have been rising and losing their advantage. Motorola could shift Chinese production to Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, etc. It depends on how much Google want/need Motorola's patent portfolio, but they may yet be willing to forego the Chinese market. They would be stupid to reveal their hand since it would only aggravate Beijing and ensure a rejection, but I would be surprised if they haven't discussed the possibility and looked at contingency plans.
Maybe the explosion wasn't purely due to K.E. conversion? If there were organics involved, there could also have been a chemical combustion factor as well, once the atmospheric friction had sufficiently raised the temperature..
That's because D.A.R.E isn't education, it's propaganda. D.A.R.E. is to drug education as abstinence propaganda is to sexual education. Now, good propaganda always has a core of truth, but it's often slanted or exaggerated. When you take that approach, you make it easy for the illegal actors to weaken or nullify your arguments by attacking the exaggerations, demonstrating they are false, and damaging any trust they have in the truthful core. Propaganda works in the short term, but it fails in the long term when it's easily disproved.
When has education EVER worked to prevent a drug addiction?
Tobacco consumption. Rates are way down in N.A. and Europe, as a result of a combination of education (cigarette packaging) and measured restrictions (limited advertising, no smoking in enclosed shared/public places - justified based on secondary effects).
Slashdot Mirror
Usually it's a combination of the natural resistance to change (because change causes stress) and cognitive dissonance, although religion can be a cause and a symptom.
There was a paper recently published that established a correlation between the variety of ideas one is exposed to (particularly in childhood/youth) to the the level of stress felt as a result of change. The former provides a causal basis for past observations that people with more education (exposed to more ideas) tend to be more liberal/progressive (more willing to embrace change). Thus somebody exposed to fewer ideas in their formative years will be more resistant to new ideas, particularly when those ideas conflict with established beliefs. Most religions encourage or enforce rejection of new ideas that clash with accepted dogma (also known as heresy) and therefore a) reinforce this natural tendency and b) limit the ideas that people are exposed to. People living in urban settings will also be exposed to more people and ideas, and therefore tend to be more liberal than those in rural settings.
p>There was another paper that indicated Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief. People who go on to pursue advanced education are more likely to be trained in analytical thinking and therefore, unless they have a degree of obsessive-compulsive disorder, are less likely to adhere to religious dogma. (Combined with the other observation, this partly explains increasing Western secularization as a consequence of increased education due to industrialization and urbanization.)
When you take those factors and throw in a civilization that has an accelerating rate of technological change, you're going to have a rural/conservative population which is increasingly resistant to (ever increasing) change, and an urban/educated population which is increasingly exposed to new ideas and more receptive to them. You have two positive feedback loops which are increasingly polarizing the two segments of the population (and a sensationalizing media which is aggravating the problem).
I think the Internet has the possibility of being a game changer by providing access to more ideas to rural youths and breaking the cycle identified in the first paragraph. However it could also exacerbate the situation by creating a huge generational conflict in rural populations, which leads to more stress and more resistance to change in the older rural/religious population. I'm really hoping it works out to be breaking the conservative feedback loop, but accelerating change makes that feedback increasingly strong.
I think that if progressives were smart, we would recognize the different needs of the rural/religious conservatives (i.e. regarding guns, which are useful tools in rural areas) to lessen that positive feedback loop and allow the other to overtake it.
Apparently a lack of humint assets to put them in touch with genuine trained terrorists who would be interested in paying full price and have the funds available. Let's put it another way. If you're a trained agent running a covert terrorist op in enemy territory, wouldn't you think it's damned convenient for someone to be coming up to you in a mosque and offering to sell you SAMs? Unless you've got contacts that have sourced and smuggled in said SAMs into the country, or who can vouch for past arms deals with whoever is offering the weapons, you wouldn't touch such a deal with a 21.5' pole and risk blowing the op.
You see, it's not the FBI's job to have humint assets among radical Islamic terrorists, it's the CIA's job because (with the exception of homegrown "lone" nutcases like Timothy McVeigh or the anti-arbortion loonies) the terrorists (and radical islamists in particular) are not based out of the USA. And when it comes to catching the real homegrown variety before the fact (as opposed to the entrapped twits), the FBI has a pretty poor public record with an apparent propensity to accuse the wrong men to show visible signs of progress.
Indeed it sounds like this case will provide a ruling on that since the judge has reserved the right to rule the the applicability of copyright to the API for himself and told the jury to assume that the APIs are copyrightable so that their verdict will stand even if his finding on the legality of API copyrights is challenged on appeal. However when it comes to the jury's verdict, it would seem that Schwartz' testimony gives really good grounds to Google for estoppel that Sun had limited the copyright-based constraints it asserted on the APIs. More specifically that, since Google had not tried to call Dalvik by the trademarked Java name, that they had complied with Sun's public statements regarding licencing requirements of the Java APIs in that the licencing was only required for access to the JCK/TCK for compatibility testing and use of the Java name.
And when that does happen, I'm sure that the cost of manufacturing and maintaining/operating MRI's will drop significantly. In the meantime however...
Anyways, thanks for the heads up. Once you had alerted me to it, I did find the mention of new YBCO wire allowing high Tc magnets to be built back in 2007, and that the test magnet supported .96T at 77K. That's on the low end of MRI field strengths and it's not clear they'll be able to get much more out of it. Who knows though, maybe they'll be able to use variants of the pre-stressing coil fabrication techniques being developed for Niobium-Tin to increase the ceiiling. That would be trickier to pull off with an MRI-sized magnet though.
Well in the case of MRIs, since you're talking about very large superconducting coils, I expect they're also expensive to run because a) very strong B fields require lots of power to generate, b) superconducting magnets need to be cooled with liquid helium (which itself tends to be kept in an intermediary LN insulating "blanket").
The LHe and LN also require power to condense/cool and when dealing with stuff kept that cold, there almost certainly is more maintenance complexity (and hence costs) than with the machines that go ping.
Well, that would be the nice thing about fusion power. No CO2 = no carbon penalty.
I haven't read the IPCC report, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that the 100 year projections are assuming that warming continues along current trends based on CO2 production from fossil fuels. It doesn't take into account probable release of GGs from melting permafrost or from ocean floor methyl clathrates. The latter two could substantially shorten the time-frame when serious consequences start, and we're already starting to see signs that Arctic GG release is increasing. That's what's driving the sense of urgency behind appeals to do more to control GGs because if/once that transition starts, it will accelerate change beyond our ability to adjust via consumption restriction, transition to other energy sources, and/or terraforming. It's not possible to demonstrate this in the way that you can project the escalating costs of fixing a bug as you move from req. analysis, through design and implementation, to deployment. But there is a significant chance that delaying the fix will escalate costs exponentially despite any savings that may be obtained through improved techniques.
These days I find myself strongly hoping that EMCC can pull the Polywell rabbit out of a hat, because I really fear that's the only thing that's got a chance of causing the necessary socio-technological re-alignment in time.
I agree with you that those are also a factor. Another factor is that it sounds like Steve Jobs felt personally betrayed by Eric Schmidt because Jobs believed that Schmidt heavily used the information on the iPhone and iPad programs he was a party to as a member of Apple's board when creating Google's Android strategy. Given the character aspects you pointed out, his vendetta response is unsurprising. However if it hadn't been for Apple's past successes against Apple][ cloners and Psystar, Steve might not have jumped so quickly to a global 'scorched earth' legal policy and may have looked at other tools at his disposal.
Vendettas don't have any place in good governance and either Tim Cook understands that or he at least isn't caught up in this one and is willing to try to de-escalate the situation if it's causing as much harm as good. He may not be another Steve Jobs, but he also isn't a Steve Ballmer.
Well, that was certainly true under Steve Jobs. His legal and emotional responses in this area were formed in the Apple ][ clone battles of the 70's/80's against companies like Orange who created look-alikes that used almost straight copies of the Apple ][ ROMs and motherboards. Apple have since faced numerous issues with copies of their hardware and software, including the infamous battles with Microsoft over Windows Look and Feel and the Psystar Mac clones. It's not surprising that Steve Jobs would have been sensitive over the issue after it kept rearing its ugly head over decades.
Conversely, Tim Cook started with Apple in 1998 after most of these Apple litigation battles, and it doesn't look like his earlier career would have exposed him to that issue as much as Steve Jobs was. So it's not surprising that Mr. Cook would not react to any third-party product similarity in as knee-jerk a manner as Steve jobs would, and that he would be much more measured in his approach. With the changing of the guard, it seems quite possible that "Past performance is not indicative of future results" when it comes to Apple litigation. The war with Samsung is a lot less clear cut than it was with Orange or Psystar, and the risk of throwing money at a Microsoft Look & Feel-type legal dead end a lot higher. Tim Cook appears capable of being more objective than Steve Jobs in assessing the situation.
I suspect that's a straw man because most physicists and climate scientists would agree with the saturation and reflection arguments you raise regarding water vapour production. Most "apocalyptic" thermal catastrophe scenarios tend to involve two other factors: firstly, reduced reflection of incoming radiation on polar oceans from melted ice caps resulting in increased polar heating, reduced intensity of the Pacific and Atlantic Conveyors, and drastically changed weather systems which could significantly affect the food productivity of breadbaskets like the European and American central plains; secondly, release of methane gas (another very potent greenhouse gas) through the melting of methyl clathrates at the bottom of warming polar oceans. Methane gas would not "precipitate out" as easily as water vapour and the resulting increased warming could exceed any negative feedback mechanisms provided by the water cycle. There appears to already be increased methane gas release as a result of melting arctic permafrost.
Rayleigh scattering. Because much incident radiation reaching earth from the sun has a peak in the visible spectrum, it goes through the colourless gas fine. However, given its much lower temperature (thank goodness), earth re-radiates that heat as a blackbody with the peak in the infrared. CO2 scatters IR (in the same way that other atmospheric molecules scatter blue light, making the sky blue) keeping much of that heat from escaping into outer space and keeping it in the atmosphere. Since your eyes cannot see in the infrared, you cannot detect this scattering/reflection and perceive CO2 as clear/colourless, but properly designed instrumentation can.
This description is based on concepts which are often introduced in a 1st year university physics course, and explained in mathematical detail in a 2nd or 3rd year Optics course.
If EMCC manage to make the Polywell design work, p-B11 fusion would also have little to no neutron generation and little Neutron Activation.
So if you can swim 100m in Olympic time, that means we can drop you 100 miles offshore and you'll make it home OK?
BC Hydro has run Power Smart for decades to encourage people to update appliances and make other changes that reduce power consumption. This, along with upgrading efficiency in existing power facilities, allowed them to delay huge capital outlays for constructing new capacity for decades. This is despite a burgeoning BC population and increased variety in electronic appliances, although those two factors are finally outstripping their efforts from increased generation and customer efficiency and requiring them to increase capacity though new generating plants.
So any established police force and enforcement of laws will inevitably lead to a police state? Or do you think there might be a few shades of grey possible?
We do, but it's currently heavily based on petroleum, both as an energy source and as raw material for fertilizer production and intensive use. Petroleum appears to be a finite resource and is getting increasingly difficult and expensive to extract. Even if you ignore AGW, that's a bunch of serious risks that should be waving all kinds of red flags. Even if fusion pans out or other hydrocarbons take over as a source of energy without AGW consequences, when the oil runs out and we're forced to go back to crop rotation that's going to seriously impact food production and prices.
You need to read more about the capitalist paradise of the late 19th century, robber barons, company towns/stores, child labour in factories, the Triangle Shirtwaist and Binghamton fires, etc. Or more recently the pollution of Love Canal and other Superfund sites. Also check out the Pinkerton Agency's role in suppressing labour strife, which they had often exaggerated and escalated to drum up more business.
And yet somehow, Berkeley managed to convince a judge to let them do exactly that with BSD. So there seems to be established precedent that this is actually possible without conpyright infringement, and it would be surprising if Google weren't to bring that up at some point in this trial. The relative newbies posting here who have only been in the industry 10 years or less may not know about this precedent, but it's doubtful that Google's lawyers won't have come up with it at some point in searching out relevant case law. Heck, even if they hadn't, Eric Schmidt's been in the ball game long enough that he would have brought it up. If that's all that Oracle's got going for them, then they must be hoping that they can snow the jury.
Berkeley vs. AT&T seems to have pretty well established that APIs cannot be copyrighted, although it's possible that a specific API include file layout can be.
While the mechanisms and effects are completely different, this article reminds me of Poul Anderson's Brain Wave .
Oops. That should have been "forgo the Chinese market".
The weight of the Chinese government is not to be underestimated, and Google is not exactly in their good books given past head butting over search and censorship. That said, since the US and EU have both given the go ahead, I wonder if Google/Motorola might decide to tell the Chinese gov. to go stuff itself if the answer is no. Losing the Chinese market and manufacturing facilities would hurt, but the main markets Motorola sells to these days are probably still Japan, S. Korea, the EU, and the US. Chinese labour costs have been rising and losing their advantage. Motorola could shift Chinese production to Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, etc. It depends on how much Google want/need Motorola's patent portfolio, but they may yet be willing to forego the Chinese market. They would be stupid to reveal their hand since it would only aggravate Beijing and ensure a rejection, but I would be surprised if they haven't discussed the possibility and looked at contingency plans.
Maybe the explosion wasn't purely due to K.E. conversion? If there were organics involved, there could also have been a chemical combustion factor as well, once the atmospheric friction had sufficiently raised the temperature..
That's because D.A.R.E isn't education, it's propaganda. D.A.R.E. is to drug education as abstinence propaganda is to sexual education. Now, good propaganda always has a core of truth, but it's often slanted or exaggerated. When you take that approach, you make it easy for the illegal actors to weaken or nullify your arguments by attacking the exaggerations, demonstrating they are false, and damaging any trust they have in the truthful core. Propaganda works in the short term, but it fails in the long term when it's easily disproved.
Tobacco consumption. Rates are way down in N.A. and Europe, as a result of a combination of education (cigarette packaging) and measured restrictions (limited advertising, no smoking in enclosed shared/public places - justified based on secondary effects).