I think while Samsung is commended for getting OLED's to 21" size, they're going to have a seroius competitor for truly flat displays with the Canon/Toshiba SED (Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display) that will be available on the market in the fall of 2005.
Sure, SED's do use more power than LCD's, but SED's make up for this with CRT-level brightness without the finicky geometry calibrations needed for high-resolution CRT's. It will be well after SED displays become commonplace that we'll see a proliferation of OLED dislays.
I think I know a number of reasons why Linux has become very popular for server machines:
1. The per-server cost is much less expensive than other solutions.
2. Linux has been written to run on several different types of server configurations (Beowulf clustering of many server machines, running on supercomputers, and so on). This means many supercomputers now run Linux as their primary operating system.
3. IBM has successfully pushed the use of Linux on their own AS/400, S/390 and other IBM-built "big iron" machines, which has really spiked up Linux use.
4. Because server machines don't really need "easy auto configuration for new hardware" like desktop machines do, there is not a pressing need for high overhead of a GUI interface and ACPI Plug and Play support (and the time and expense needed to develop code for such support).
I see Linux continuing to make inroads in the server business until it could take the vast majority of server machines within a few years.
Using ever faster IDE/ATA bus means few improvement when disk access time is not reduced at the same rate..
Why do you think they're putting in larger hard drive memory caches and speeding up spindle speeds to 10,000 RPM on some Serial ATA drives? The 10K spindle speed will probably do much to make hard drive access faster, especially now with the faster interfaces possible.
I remember that a review showed going from an AGP*2 to a PCI express give very little improvement (except for low-end solution with shared memory system).
It really depends on the application. Outside of games, you really don't get much improvements going to faster bus speeds, but with games like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 putting massive demands on 3-D graphics processing ability, using the fastest bus possible is a pretty good idea.
And that is the real story of desktop computer technology in 2004.
It's no longer how fast you can crank up the CPU speed, it's now how fast the rest of the system runs. Look at what we have now on desktop machines:
1. The development of faster motherboard interconnects with improved chipsets and things like HyperTransport and its competitors.
2. The wide availability of PC3200 (DDR-400) DDR-SDRAM system RAM, with even faster RAM coming over the next 18-24 months.
3. The development of AGP 8x and new PCI Express connections for graphics cards with 3-D processing ability that would be the domain of ultra-expensive workstations only a few years ago.
4. The development of ATA-100/133 IDE, Serial ATA and soon Serial ATA-II IDE, and UltraSCSI 160/320 interfaces and 10,000+ RPM drives with 8 to 16 MB on-drive memory caches for very fast hard disk access. Even optical disk drives are benefiting from these faster interfaces.
5. The very wide availability of 100Base-T Ethernet connections on most motherboards, plus some motherboards now sport 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet connections.
6. The near-universal availability of USB 2.0 connections and increasing use of IEEE-1394 connections to external devices, which makes the use of external disk drives to back up data and connect to digital camcorders possible.
All of these developments have resulted in vastly faster computers in terms of overall speed even if you don't have the fastest CPU installed on the motherboard.
...Is the fact that politically-conservative blogs made a huge difference in the 2004 US Presidential campaign.
I cite two reasons for this:
1. Conservative blogs spread the message of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "527" group far beyond what was possible in the past. I mean let's face it: because most media outlets ignored this 527 group, it took the power of conservative blogs to spread the message, along with conservative radio talk shows and the Fox News Channel. Of course, it didn't help the Kerry campaign that Senator Kerry reacted woefully too slowly to the charges of this group.
2. Conservative blogs in a matter of a few hours revealed that the Texas Air National Guard memos supposedly critical of President Bush's Texas ANG service that CBS News used were fraudulent. And it also made people much less trusting of the mainstream press and also why it may have hastened the decision of CBS News anchor Dan Rather to retire one year earlier than he originally planned.
....from DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite truly says it all in regards to ENORMOUS scale of this tragedy without needing to show the pictures of the massive number of dead piled up.
It looks like the tsunami pretty much scoured the town of Banda Acheh completely clean--it leaves you totally speechless.:-(
A _GOOD_ crt still beats LCD's in picture quality, be it television or computer information that's being displayed
However, CRT displays do have a couple of major downsides:
1. They tend to use a LOT of power--a 19" CRT display uses about 3-4 times the power of an LCD of similar diagonal size for viewing area.
2. There is considerable trial and error in fiddling with the monitor geometry controls to get the display to look just right. With LCD's, plasma, and soon SED's, such problems usually don't exist.
True now, but not so much a problem maybe 12-24 months from now.
I mean, look at Sony's new Playstation Portable. It's certainly not perfect, but it points to some enormous potential with portable video devices. With tiny iPod-compatible hard drives reaching 80 GB capacity already and battery technology improving, what's to say that by January 2006 Apple announces the video equivalent of the iPod with a 120 GB hard drive, decent battery life and a nice, small 16:9 aspect ratio LCD screen with USB 2.0/IEEE-1394 connections to download DRM-protected QuickTime files from your computer that you downloaded legally from the "iVideo" online store?
Finally, Apple hit a huge home run with the iTMS. You don't think they coudln't parlay their success with the RIAA into a deal with the MPAA for movie-on-demand and TV-on-demand downloads?
If there is ANYONE out there that could parlay legal downloads for video programming, it's Apple Computer. The success of the iTunes Music Store has shown that you can make money on a legal download service for multimedia, so why no develop an iVideo store to download near-full screen DRM-protected QuickTime files? With the rapid ascension of broadband use here in the USA, there are enough Internet users out there to make this service viable.
Besides, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is very well-liked in the Hollywood community, so he has the "juice" to influence Hollywood types to implement this idea.
This kind of government usually does not consider saving their civilians a high priority.
I have to disagree, for one reason: a tsunami in the Indonesian Archipelago could seriously threaten oil wells and distribution facilities, the #1 source of income for Indonesia. As such, Indonesia should have had such a system in place a long time ago.
Re:How does this compare to retail giants?
on
Amazon Sales Record
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· Score: 1
I've been reading online news stories about how retail sales this Christmas season has been disappointing.
However, two things are skewing retail sales reports lower:
1. Record-breaking sales of gift cards and certificates. Because gift cards and certificates aren't recorded as a retail sale until they are redeemed, this means we need to look at retail sales in January and February 2005 to determine to true level of retail sales this Christmas season.
2. Record-breaking sales of items through online retailers and through eBay auctions. Again, most reports of retail sales don't include online retailers and eBay transactions.
I think people are switching to broadband if they can get it because the price of the national ISP's for dialup are getting pretty expensive for what you get. EarthLink now costs US$22/month, and MSN and AOL are even more expensive for dial-up service.
As such, people realize that Comcast Hi-Speed Internet broadband at US$42.95/month isn't so bad, especially when you can download complex web pages in a few seconds and enjoy more or less stutter-free streaming audio and video. Besides, most new computers come with 100Base-T Ethernet RJ-45 connectors, so setting up for broadband is relatively easy.
Compared to just a couple years ago I would say things are A LOT more secure....
With all those dire warning articles in the mainstream press, people ARE taking heed of the warnings about Internet security and are installing protection programs as fast as possible. For example, you don't need to pay for that added security: install ZoneAlarm and AVG Antivirus for free to provide real-time protection, and run something like Ad-Aware SE and SpyBot (both are free) once a day to clean out tracking cookies and adware/spyware. Also, people ARE installing patches to various operating systems more diligently, especially since the horrors of the Blaster and Sasser infections.
Actually, I'm very surprised that there is no tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean.
People are forgetting that Indonesia is on the Indonesian Subduction Zone, one of the world's MOST active geological areas, no contest (Indonesia is well-known for earthquakes and volcanism just like the Pacific Northwest, which is also on a subduction zone). Because of that danger, the Indonesian and New Guines governments should have put in place a tsunami warning system almost as far back as the system put in place for the Pacific Ocean back in the late 1940's!
With all the hand-wringing going on we have to ask this question: why hasn't the governments of Indonesia and New Guinea instituted a tsunami warning system that covers the entire Indonesia Archipelago and the Indian Ocean?
People forget that the Indonesian Archipelago sits on one of the world's most geologically-active areas, the Indonesian Subduction Zone just south of the archipelago. As such, Indonesia is very prone to earthquakes and is home to some of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history (Tambora in 1815 and Krakatoa in 1883) and prehistory (the Toba supervolcano eruption about 75,000 years ago).
The Indonesian and New Guinea governments should have put a tsunami warning system in place after the 1998 tsunami that killed 2,500 people in New Guinea after an undersea earthquake.
The reason why Diego Garcia survived is the fact that the undersea topography east of the island does not favor the generation of a deadly tsunami. This is because the sea floor drops off percipitously east of the island, which likely prevented the creation of a deadly tsunami that could have swamped the island.
Let's face it. CPU's have gotten so fast that they are essentially outrunning almost every other component on the computer itself.
Fortunately, things are getting better. I can cite the following improvements in the last 4-5 years:
1. Faster memory access. System RAM memory speeds has gone from running at 33/66 MHz for many years to today's DDR400 (PC3200) DDR-SDRAM, with even faster speeds coming over the next 18 months or so.
2. Faster graphics cards. With AGP 8x and now PCI Express, graphics cards can process and display highly-complex 3-D graphics that would have been the realm of extremely expensive dedicated workstations just a few years ago.
3. Faster disk access. Thanks to ATA-100/133 IDE, Serial ATA (and soon Serial ATA-II) IDE, and UltraSCSI 160/320 interfaces, not to mention hard drives with 7200 to 10,000 RPM spin speeds and 8-16 MB of hard drive memory cache, you can access data on a hard drive very quickly nowadays. Even optical drives have become quite fast thanks to these interfaces.
4. Better motherboard designs. Motherboard interconnects have gotten quite a bit faster, thanks to much-improved chipset designs and the use of HyperTransport and similar technologies.
5. Faster external data access. 100 mbps 100Base-T Ethernet connections are common on motherboards now, and some motherboards now even have 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet connections. External devices that used to connect to the computer through slow serial ports now connect through vastly faster USB and IEEE-1394 ports, fast enough that USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 connections can support the downloading of video data from digital camcorders!
And they still haven't reached the hardest hit areas on the other islands of the Maldives and a couple of islands belonging to India just west of Myanmar (Burma).
A nice example of modern Diesel engineering is the VW Phaeton V10 Tdi. It has 313 HP and, while officially electronically limited to 250 kph (155 mph), was tested at over 290 kph (180 mph) when it was released one year ago. It does 0-100 kph (0-62 mph) in 6.9 seconds (not too shabby for a 3 metric ton car). And yet, it still gets 27.7 mpg.
You can actually get that engine in the 45-state legal version of the Volkswage Touraeg SUV sold in the USA.
But let's see how long before someone designs a race car around this V-10 turbodiesel engine and takes the car to 350 km/h (217 mph). =)
According to what I'm seeing on Fox News Channel, the death toll may well exceed 10,000 by a substantial margin because many parts of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Indonesia have yet to report.
I am concerned about the US military base on Diego Garcia, since it's pretty much open ocean in a straight line from the island to the earthquake epicenter. =(
There's a potentially big (pun not intended) downside to using a nuclear warhead: it could break the asteroid into smaller pieces, and the "shotgun impact" from a broken asteroid could actually be more devastating than a single impact.
A better solution is to assemble an large ion rocket in space, then dock it with the asteroid maybe in 2025. Fire off the ion rocket to run for maybe 30-40 days non-stop, and it may change the orbit of the asteroid enough so it misses the Earth at a relative safe range. Maybe by then we'll have even better ion rockets, and the possibility exists we might even slow down the asteroid enough to place it in the L1 zone between the Earth and the Moon. Given the fact that asteroids have very high quality mineral content, someone could make a financial killing (pun not intended:) ) mining this asteroid after it arrives at the L1 zone.
....You have another factor to consider: the massive amount of debris and dust that will be blown into the atmosphere. We're talking vastly more sun-blotting dust blown into the atmosphere than the Mt. Tambora eruption of 1815, which blew 15 cubic miles of dust into the atmosphere and pretty much eliminated summer in the much of the world for nearly two years. In short, we'll have a much less bright days on Earth for around three years, and agricultural output could be cut by huge margins during these three years, leading to a potential for worldwide starvation by the end of the three years.
Also, such an impact could trigger off any nearby earthquake fault lines, too, and that could also cause large amounts of destruction far away from the impact point as earthquake faults are triggered off.:-(
Obviously, the person who wrote the nitpicking guide didn't listen to the commentary tracks on the Extended Edition DVD's or watch the Appendices supplemental discs from the three EE sets. Producer/Director Peter Jackson went to considerable detail on why he chose to do the films this way.
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I think while Samsung is commended for getting OLED's to 21" size, they're going to have a seroius competitor for truly flat displays with the Canon/Toshiba SED (Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display) that will be available on the market in the fall of 2005.
Sure, SED's do use more power than LCD's, but SED's make up for this with CRT-level brightness without the finicky geometry calibrations needed for high-resolution CRT's. It will be well after SED displays become commonplace that we'll see a proliferation of OLED dislays.
I think I know a number of reasons why Linux has become very popular for server machines:
1. The per-server cost is much less expensive than other solutions.
2. Linux has been written to run on several different types of server configurations (Beowulf clustering of many server machines, running on supercomputers, and so on). This means many supercomputers now run Linux as their primary operating system.
3. IBM has successfully pushed the use of Linux on their own AS/400, S/390 and other IBM-built "big iron" machines, which has really spiked up Linux use.
4. Because server machines don't really need "easy auto configuration for new hardware" like desktop machines do, there is not a pressing need for high overhead of a GUI interface and ACPI Plug and Play support (and the time and expense needed to develop code for such support).
I see Linux continuing to make inroads in the server business until it could take the vast majority of server machines within a few years.
Using ever faster IDE/ATA bus means few improvement when disk access time is not reduced at the same rate..
Why do you think they're putting in larger hard drive memory caches and speeding up spindle speeds to 10,000 RPM on some Serial ATA drives? The 10K spindle speed will probably do much to make hard drive access faster, especially now with the faster interfaces possible.
I remember that a review showed going from an AGP*2 to a PCI express give very little improvement (except for low-end solution with shared memory system).
It really depends on the application. Outside of games, you really don't get much improvements going to faster bus speeds, but with games like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 putting massive demands on 3-D graphics processing ability, using the fastest bus possible is a pretty good idea.
And that is the real story of desktop computer technology in 2004.
It's no longer how fast you can crank up the CPU speed, it's now how fast the rest of the system runs. Look at what we have now on desktop machines:
1. The development of faster motherboard interconnects with improved chipsets and things like HyperTransport and its competitors.
2. The wide availability of PC3200 (DDR-400) DDR-SDRAM system RAM, with even faster RAM coming over the next 18-24 months.
3. The development of AGP 8x and new PCI Express connections for graphics cards with 3-D processing ability that would be the domain of ultra-expensive workstations only a few years ago.
4. The development of ATA-100/133 IDE, Serial ATA and soon Serial ATA-II IDE, and UltraSCSI 160/320 interfaces and 10,000+ RPM drives with 8 to 16 MB on-drive memory caches for very fast hard disk access. Even optical disk drives are benefiting from these faster interfaces.
5. The very wide availability of 100Base-T Ethernet connections on most motherboards, plus some motherboards now sport 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet connections.
6. The near-universal availability of USB 2.0 connections and increasing use of IEEE-1394 connections to external devices, which makes the use of external disk drives to back up data and connect to digital camcorders possible.
All of these developments have resulted in vastly faster computers in terms of overall speed even if you don't have the fastest CPU installed on the motherboard.
...Is the fact that politically-conservative blogs made a huge difference in the 2004 US Presidential campaign.
I cite two reasons for this:
1. Conservative blogs spread the message of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "527" group far beyond what was possible in the past. I mean let's face it: because most media outlets ignored this 527 group, it took the power of conservative blogs to spread the message, along with conservative radio talk shows and the Fox News Channel. Of course, it didn't help the Kerry campaign that Senator Kerry reacted woefully too slowly to the charges of this group.
2. Conservative blogs in a matter of a few hours revealed that the Texas Air National Guard memos supposedly critical of President Bush's Texas ANG service that CBS News used were fraudulent. And it also made people much less trusting of the mainstream press and also why it may have hastened the decision of CBS News anchor Dan Rather to retire one year earlier than he originally planned.
....from DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite truly says it all in regards to ENORMOUS scale of this tragedy without needing to show the pictures of the massive number of dead piled up.
:-(
It looks like the tsunami pretty much scoured the town of Banda Acheh completely clean--it leaves you totally speechless.
A _GOOD_ crt still beats LCD's in picture quality, be it television or computer information that's being displayed
However, CRT displays do have a couple of major downsides:
1. They tend to use a LOT of power--a 19" CRT display uses about 3-4 times the power of an LCD of similar diagonal size for viewing area.
2. There is considerable trial and error in fiddling with the monitor geometry controls to get the display to look just right. With LCD's, plasma, and soon SED's, such problems usually don't exist.
it would be too bulky to put in your pocket?
True now, but not so much a problem maybe 12-24 months from now.
I mean, look at Sony's new Playstation Portable. It's certainly not perfect, but it points to some enormous potential with portable video devices. With tiny iPod-compatible hard drives reaching 80 GB capacity already and battery technology improving, what's to say that by January 2006 Apple announces the video equivalent of the iPod with a 120 GB hard drive, decent battery life and a nice, small 16:9 aspect ratio LCD screen with USB 2.0/IEEE-1394 connections to download DRM-protected QuickTime files from your computer that you downloaded legally from the "iVideo" online store?
Finally, Apple hit a huge home run with the iTMS. You don't think they coudln't parlay their success with the RIAA into a deal with the MPAA for movie-on-demand and TV-on-demand downloads?
If there is ANYONE out there that could parlay legal downloads for video programming, it's Apple Computer. The success of the iTunes Music Store has shown that you can make money on a legal download service for multimedia, so why no develop an iVideo store to download near-full screen DRM-protected QuickTime files? With the rapid ascension of broadband use here in the USA, there are enough Internet users out there to make this service viable.
Besides, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is very well-liked in the Hollywood community, so he has the "juice" to influence Hollywood types to implement this idea.
Mostly because it requires pretty expensive hardware to implement WinMCE.
I still see WinMCE has a relatively niche product until the hardware that can fully implment it get really cheap over the next few years.
This kind of government usually does not consider saving their civilians a high priority.
I have to disagree, for one reason: a tsunami in the Indonesian Archipelago could seriously threaten oil wells and distribution facilities, the #1 source of income for Indonesia. As such, Indonesia should have had such a system in place a long time ago.
I've been reading online news stories about how retail sales this Christmas season has been disappointing.
However, two things are skewing retail sales reports lower:
1. Record-breaking sales of gift cards and certificates. Because gift cards and certificates aren't recorded as a retail sale until they are redeemed, this means we need to look at retail sales in January and February 2005 to determine to true level of retail sales this Christmas season.
2. Record-breaking sales of items through online retailers and through eBay auctions. Again, most reports of retail sales don't include online retailers and eBay transactions.
I think people are switching to broadband if they can get it because the price of the national ISP's for dialup are getting pretty expensive for what you get. EarthLink now costs US$22/month, and MSN and AOL are even more expensive for dial-up service.
As such, people realize that Comcast Hi-Speed Internet broadband at US$42.95/month isn't so bad, especially when you can download complex web pages in a few seconds and enjoy more or less stutter-free streaming audio and video. Besides, most new computers come with 100Base-T Ethernet RJ-45 connectors, so setting up for broadband is relatively easy.
Compared to just a couple years ago I would say things are A LOT more secure....
With all those dire warning articles in the mainstream press, people ARE taking heed of the warnings about Internet security and are installing protection programs as fast as possible. For example, you don't need to pay for that added security: install ZoneAlarm and AVG Antivirus for free to provide real-time protection, and run something like Ad-Aware SE and SpyBot (both are free) once a day to clean out tracking cookies and adware/spyware. Also, people ARE installing patches to various operating systems more diligently, especially since the horrors of the Blaster and Sasser infections.
Actually, I'm very surprised that there is no tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean.
People are forgetting that Indonesia is on the Indonesian Subduction Zone, one of the world's MOST active geological areas, no contest (Indonesia is well-known for earthquakes and volcanism just like the Pacific Northwest, which is also on a subduction zone). Because of that danger, the Indonesian and New Guines governments should have put in place a tsunami warning system almost as far back as the system put in place for the Pacific Ocean back in the late 1940's!
With all the hand-wringing going on we have to ask this question: why hasn't the governments of Indonesia and New Guinea instituted a tsunami warning system that covers the entire Indonesia Archipelago and the Indian Ocean?
People forget that the Indonesian Archipelago sits on one of the world's most geologically-active areas, the Indonesian Subduction Zone just south of the archipelago. As such, Indonesia is very prone to earthquakes and is home to some of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history (Tambora in 1815 and Krakatoa in 1883) and prehistory (the Toba supervolcano eruption about 75,000 years ago).
The Indonesian and New Guinea governments should have put a tsunami warning system in place after the 1998 tsunami that killed 2,500 people in New Guinea after an undersea earthquake.
The reason why Diego Garcia survived is the fact that the undersea topography east of the island does not favor the generation of a deadly tsunami. This is because the sea floor drops off percipitously east of the island, which likely prevented the creation of a deadly tsunami that could have swamped the island.
Let's face it. CPU's have gotten so fast that they are essentially outrunning almost every other component on the computer itself.
Fortunately, things are getting better. I can cite the following improvements in the last 4-5 years:
1. Faster memory access. System RAM memory speeds has gone from running at 33/66 MHz for many years to today's DDR400 (PC3200) DDR-SDRAM, with even faster speeds coming over the next 18 months or so.
2. Faster graphics cards. With AGP 8x and now PCI Express, graphics cards can process and display highly-complex 3-D graphics that would have been the realm of extremely expensive dedicated workstations just a few years ago.
3. Faster disk access. Thanks to ATA-100/133 IDE, Serial ATA (and soon Serial ATA-II) IDE, and UltraSCSI 160/320 interfaces, not to mention hard drives with 7200 to 10,000 RPM spin speeds and 8-16 MB of hard drive memory cache, you can access data on a hard drive very quickly nowadays. Even optical drives have become quite fast thanks to these interfaces.
4. Better motherboard designs. Motherboard interconnects have gotten quite a bit faster, thanks to much-improved chipset designs and the use of HyperTransport and similar technologies.
5. Faster external data access. 100 mbps 100Base-T Ethernet connections are common on motherboards now, and some motherboards now even have 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet connections. External devices that used to connect to the computer through slow serial ports now connect through vastly faster USB and IEEE-1394 ports, fast enough that USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 connections can support the downloading of video data from digital camcorders!
And they still haven't reached the hardest hit areas on the other islands of the Maldives and a couple of islands belonging to India just west of Myanmar (Burma).
A nice example of modern Diesel engineering is the VW Phaeton V10 Tdi. It has 313 HP and, while officially electronically limited to 250 kph (155 mph), was tested at over 290 kph (180 mph) when it was released one year ago. It does 0-100 kph (0-62 mph) in 6.9 seconds (not too shabby for a 3 metric ton car). And yet, it still gets 27.7 mpg.
You can actually get that engine in the 45-state legal version of the Volkswage Touraeg SUV sold in the USA.
But let's see how long before someone designs a race car around this V-10 turbodiesel engine and takes the car to 350 km/h (217 mph). =)
I have an aunt who lives in Penang. I need to call her and find out if she's okay. :-(
According to what I'm seeing on Fox News Channel, the death toll may well exceed 10,000 by a substantial margin because many parts of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Indonesia have yet to report.
I am concerned about the US military base on Diego Garcia, since it's pretty much open ocean in a straight line from the island to the earthquake epicenter. =(
There's a potentially big (pun not intended) downside to using a nuclear warhead: it could break the asteroid into smaller pieces, and the "shotgun impact" from a broken asteroid could actually be more devastating than a single impact.
:) ) mining this asteroid after it arrives at the L1 zone.
A better solution is to assemble an large ion rocket in space, then dock it with the asteroid maybe in 2025. Fire off the ion rocket to run for maybe 30-40 days non-stop, and it may change the orbit of the asteroid enough so it misses the Earth at a relative safe range. Maybe by then we'll have even better ion rockets, and the possibility exists we might even slow down the asteroid enough to place it in the L1 zone between the Earth and the Moon. Given the fact that asteroids have very high quality mineral content, someone could make a financial killing (pun not intended
....You have another factor to consider: the massive amount of debris and dust that will be blown into the atmosphere. We're talking vastly more sun-blotting dust blown into the atmosphere than the Mt. Tambora eruption of 1815, which blew 15 cubic miles of dust into the atmosphere and pretty much eliminated summer in the much of the world for nearly two years. In short, we'll have a much less bright days on Earth for around three years, and agricultural output could be cut by huge margins during these three years, leading to a potential for worldwide starvation by the end of the three years.
:-(
Also, such an impact could trigger off any nearby earthquake fault lines, too, and that could also cause large amounts of destruction far away from the impact point as earthquake faults are triggered off.
Obviously, the person who wrote the nitpicking guide didn't listen to the commentary tracks on the Extended Edition DVD's or watch the Appendices supplemental discs from the three EE sets. Producer/Director Peter Jackson went to considerable detail on why he chose to do the films this way.