I disagree. It's not about whether there is an effect but whether the effect is big enough. And I don't believe solar radiation has a significant effect, especially when an asteroid is coming straight at you.
But the asteroid will always be rotating a bit so painting won't help, while a massdriver installed on the surface can be made to pulsate on the rythm of the rotation so stopping the rotation is not necessary(and probably very hard)
You can imagine the standard assumption to be that an asteroid is very hard, and that an atomic bomb would mainly give it a good shove that does not break the integrity of the asteroid, and that the heat can be neglected.
Compare instead an asteroid to be a loose snowball and the bomb to be mainly good at breaking it up and heating it.
Just imagine breaking up an asteroid of 1km diameter in asteroids that all have diameters of less than 50m, with a single bomb. I don't think it'll work. But it does lead to the idea that mass drivers could come in two variants. The efficient one that keeps the asteroid whole, and the wasteful one that just throws aways rocks at escape speed.
splitting up to pieces is a bad idea too. Many pieces will (generally speaking) be large enough to cause devastation, their direction will be unpredictable and the chances of getting hit will increase. You want to nudge it, and using atomic bombs for that is a bad idea. Again.
It's called neutrality sometimes. I fully agree this hands-off reporting means the news organization isn't doing its job, or let's say isn't doing what we thought long ago should be its job. An official can tell outright lies and the paper won't call them out on it.
But to say it's the greatest problem? It's an aspect of the problem. Reporting is increasingly safe, cheap and interesting. This can be contrasted with what we would think to be an actual task of the press: to be difficult on people and organizations with power and to spend a lot of resources on investigative reporting. In other words, to get into trouble , make powerful enemies, and go broke.
Xest, at least you did the work of looking up actual sources. But I don't think you're there yet.
You could look up the piece the consistence that got so much publicity, the detonation chamber in Parchin. It's not mentioned directly in the actual document you linked to but the document has a reference to an earlier document from nov2011 you can find over here http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/IAEA_Iran_8Nov2011.pdf Read items 44 and 45 under C.6. Initiation of high explosives and associated experiments They actually mention those containers could be used for creation of nanodiamonds, but the emphasis is that this may well be a cover.
Now other sources make mincemeat of the accusation that the Iranians would use the container for developing nuclear triggers and claim the very likely reason for that explosives container is just that, creating nanodiamonds, and this is exactly Danilenko's specialty. See ex IAEA inspector Robert Kelley here http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/11/ex-inspector-rejects-iaea-iran-bomb-test-chamber-claim/
Now, you have the IAEA demanding access to a military site, to which they normally have no right of access because it's not nuclear, and they can't make a decent case for it. And Iran is not happy to provide access since the IAEA is not being reasonable.
Does that sound anything like what you've heard about the case? To me this looks like building a case from nothing, in multiple steps - first by the IAEA , by casting suspicion while not actually making hard claims, and then by the US and the media, converting the suspicions to plausible guesses..
If you say "dual program" people will understand something different than if you say "retaining the option". There is pretty much a consensus in US and Israeli intelligence that Iran has not been doing any work on nuclear bombs in the last 10 years. but it's no secret they want that option. Having the option is a deterrent. It does not mean you want to make a bomb. They did bomb related research prior to 2003, but whether there was an actual intent to create a bomb then is very much speculation. Just to get an idea of how realistic your claim of nuclear capability is, you need to do research. If you want to know how much time you'd need, you need to do research. If you give your research to the military, some of them will want to do more research than was asked of them.
The most radical "nuclear threshold" policy I know is that of Japan. They want to be able to assemble bombs within 2 months time. This policy falls within NPT rules.
Iran had the capability of responding tit for tat with chemical weapons in the eighties, and they refused. I've talked about this stuff before on here.
CNN made a remarkable documentary on the Iran nuclear program a few months back http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/14/special-presentation-nuclear-iran-the-expert-intel/ Remarkable in that it's so different from general reporting. there was a CNN poll two years earlier showing that 70% of americans already believed iran had nuclear bombs. CNN can blame themselves for that.
If you check this wapo article . I guess it depends on your interpretation of "hit hard by stuxnet" . In Natanz about 1000 centrifuges were replaced during that time, or 10%, for whatever reason, and the Uranium production during 2010 was not lower.
That is a choice. Because indeed, a lot of people would care. You could also try and spell out what the olympic games would look like if they were implemented according to your ideas. Would judo only have the open category and no weight categories? Would a lot of disciplines be categorized as inferior and be cancelled? Need I also restate that the men's categories already function as 'open' categories, so we're not talking about changing the race, only about adding parallel races.
No it's not a semantic trick, it's about assigning all the responsibility to the individual and none to the environment, or in other words, it's taking two 'pure' instances and making them representative prototypes for the whole discussion:
- a person very much motivated to commit murder will do so even if access to guns is made difficult
- a person who does not want to kill will not do so even if there are plenty of weapons around.
Ok. so in the Olympics you'll have almost only men qualifying. Next step is to say ok, like in judo, that's what we call the open category. Now we create a women only category because otherwise they aren't represented. So you have open/women instead of men/women. The difference with the current situation, that women now are not allowed to participate in men's tournaments while in the new situation they could but very rarely would.Actually I'm not even sure if women aren't allowed.
The main conceptual problem is that we think there should somehow be a perfect solution. Instead we should accept there isn't a perfect solution. We'll always need imperfect ad hoc decisions and there will always be bordercases where you can attribute a win to someone being miscategorized.
actually, I want to say the opposite of the title, but the reasoning is similar to the gun control debate.
With gun control there is the defending perception that guns don't kill but people do. There's a valid point there, but there's another one to counter it: if all you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail, namely the availability and prevalence of a pattern, will mean it will be used much more often.
One can defend the system of profiling people and compiling databases with scores, where not having a facebook account increases your score with one unit, posting anonymously with another unit and so on. The database is just an assistance, there should be a person making the final decision. Of course that person should understand that not having a facebook account is by itself not enough reason to consider them a terrorist. Of course facebook is a weak indicator, there is only a weak correlation with terrorism. That is not a problem in profiling.
But what happens in the real world? You get this database with scores, and it all doesn't mean very much but if you have a score of 10+ (you also listen to RATM, +1, read alternet.org , +1, have been critical of foreign policy, +5) and hey they're not accusing you of anything, but somehow at the airport you have to meet the softspoken man with the rubber glove , and if you don't like that, that's 5 points extra and you end up on the noflylist. The officers at the airport could allow you through, but the people who made the database must have known what they were doing, and it's all the information that they have on you, and it would be discriminating if they let some people pass and others not when they have the same score.
So profiling can be counterproductive. And as always, it can be played to make the ratio of false positives worse than with random approaches. Now you know that if you have a certain plan, make sure you have a facebook account so as to keep your score down.
Whatever the losses were, the plane just kept on flying. So definitely, costs didn't kill it. Costs did made the difference between mere existence and a real presence on the market. The accident made the difference between existence and nonexistence. The PR value of the plane was gone and the prestige of it for the clients was gone.
The fact that Germany wanted to pick a direct fight with the US
that's a contentious statement. I recall reading that the Germany hoped that the Tripartite Pact would deter the US from trying anything. There was no desire to pick a fight with the US. Once the US and Japan started fighting, Germany were in a dilemma whether to blow up the pact or have a state of war with the US.
Consider that without nukes, we would have immediately gone to war with Stalin, and that that war would have been just as bloody as WWII
That's a very questionable statement. It's also not related to my argument. The risks of nuclear armament have constantly been underestimated by those who defend it. In fact, it's presented as a pretty solution. A solution that can blow up in your face when things get shaken up a bit is not a pretty solution. Instable situations where you're no longer in full control of the situation, like disintegration of USSR , Cuba crisis, internal problems in Pakistan, should be part of the calculation, not something to dismiss. And I'm not saying that as a radical opponent of MAD.
and none of the nuclear powers threaten anyone else using their nukes save as a measure of self defense.
More or less right. The US has repeatedly considered using tactical nukes. Also self defense can be stretched to fit anything, and it is. Normally Israel's nuclear strategy is considered more than self defense. Eg in the Yom Kippur war they used them to blackmail the US into helping them. They've also made clear that Europe is a target, so Europe better align itself fully with Israel. "If we go down we take everyone with us".
Nuclear brinksmanship is a thing of the past, in my opinion.
You won't believe this, but that's what a lot of leading Iranians think. They appreciate the political strength of nuclear capability, but they don't see enough value in it to go all the way. Certainly not with Israel, which is too far away to do major damage with conventional means.
Of course, not every Iranian general will think the same about nukes, which is one reason for that Khamenei fatwa against nukes. It's a commitment. You can't turn your back on it without looking really bad. This way you make sure nobody gets any ideas.
I can provide links, that at least show this is indeed what they say, It won't stop anyone from thinking it's all elaborate deception of course. There's an interview of Charlie Rose with Mohammad Javad Larijani two years back that's worthwile. This article is just new http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NG04Ak04.html and discusses things I say here.
Which is an appropriate analogy(or fill in the right word) since even if you just look at the east-west MAD standoff, luck was a considerable factor in our survival. Robert Mcnamara described the Cuba crisis as follows:
For many years, I considered the Cuban missile crisis to be the best-managed foreign policy crisis of the last half-century. I still believe that President Kennedyâ(TM)s actions during decisive moments of the crisis helped to prevent a nuclear war. But I now conclude that, however astutely the crisis may have been managed, by the end of those extraordinary 13 daysâ"October 16-October 28, 1962â"luck also played a significant role in the avoidance of nuclear war by a hairâ(TM)s breadth.
It would have a knob on the side to tweak the power, in percentages of what's needed to vaporize the flake or drop, from 10% to 50000%.. The knob would be awkward,too small, very sensitive and it wouldn't keep its setting so you'd have to correct it all the time as you drive. but you'd still be so happy with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. It's not about whether there is an effect but whether the effect is big enough. And I don't believe solar radiation has a significant effect, especially when an asteroid is coming straight at you.
Indeed I was mixing up comets and asteroids. I was also thinking of 'not too large', not larger than a km.
But the asteroid will always be rotating a bit so painting won't help, while a massdriver installed on the surface can be made to pulsate on the rythm of the rotation so stopping the rotation is not necessary(and probably very hard)
You can imagine the standard assumption to be that an asteroid is very hard, and that an atomic bomb would mainly give it a good shove that does not break the integrity of the asteroid, and that the heat can be neglected.
Compare instead an asteroid to be a loose snowball and the bomb to be mainly good at breaking it up and heating it.
Just imagine breaking up an asteroid of 1km diameter in asteroids that all have diameters of less than 50m, with a single bomb. I don't think it'll work. But it does lead to the idea that mass drivers could come in two variants. The efficient one that keeps the asteroid whole, and the wasteful one that just throws aways rocks at escape speed.
splitting up to pieces is a bad idea too. Many pieces will (generally speaking) be large enough to cause devastation, their direction will be unpredictable and the chances of getting hit will increase. You want to nudge it, and using atomic bombs for that is a bad idea. Again.
It's called neutrality sometimes. I fully agree this hands-off reporting means the news organization isn't doing its job, or let's say isn't doing what we thought long ago should be its job. An official can tell outright lies and the paper won't call them out on it.
But to say it's the greatest problem? It's an aspect of the problem. Reporting is increasingly safe, cheap and interesting. This can be contrasted with what we would think to be an actual task of the press: to be difficult on people and organizations with power and to spend a lot of resources on investigative reporting. In other words, to get into trouble , make powerful enemies, and go broke.
Xest, at least you did the work of looking up actual sources. But I don't think you're there yet.
You could look up the piece the consistence that got so much publicity, the detonation chamber in Parchin.
It's not mentioned directly in the actual document you linked to but the document has a reference to an earlier document from nov2011 you can find over here
http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/IAEA_Iran_8Nov2011.pdf
Read items 44 and 45 under C.6. Initiation of high explosives and associated experiments
They actually mention those containers could be used for creation of nanodiamonds, but the emphasis is that this may well be a cover.
Now other sources make mincemeat of the accusation that the Iranians would use the container for developing nuclear triggers and claim the very likely reason for that explosives container is just that, creating nanodiamonds, and this is exactly Danilenko's specialty.
See ex IAEA inspector Robert Kelley here http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/11/ex-inspector-rejects-iaea-iran-bomb-test-chamber-claim/
Now, you have the IAEA demanding access to a military site, to which they normally have no right of access because it's not nuclear, and they can't make a decent case for it. And Iran is not happy to provide access since the IAEA is not being reasonable.
Does that sound anything like what you've heard about the case? To me this looks like building a case from nothing, in multiple steps - first by the IAEA , by casting suspicion while not actually making hard claims, and then by the US and the media, converting the suspicions to plausible guesses..
If you say "dual program" people will understand something different than if you say "retaining the option". There is pretty much a consensus in US and Israeli intelligence that Iran has not been doing any work on nuclear bombs in the last 10 years. but it's no secret they want that option. Having the option is a deterrent. It does not mean you want to make a bomb. They did bomb related research prior to 2003, but whether there was an actual intent to create a bomb then is very much speculation. Just to get an idea of how realistic your claim of nuclear capability is, you need to do research. If you want to know how much time you'd need, you need to do research. If you give your research to the military, some of them will want to do more research than was asked of them.
The most radical "nuclear threshold" policy I know is that of Japan. They want to be able to assemble bombs within 2 months time. This policy falls within NPT rules.
Iran had the capability of responding tit for tat with chemical weapons in the eighties, and they refused. I've talked about this stuff before on here.
CNN made a remarkable documentary on the Iran nuclear program a few months back http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/14/special-presentation-nuclear-iran-the-expert-intel/
Remarkable in that it's so different from general reporting. there was a CNN poll two years earlier showing that 70% of americans already believed iran had nuclear bombs. CNN can blame themselves for that.
It's like saying Tokelau is the first village to go solar but then it wouldn't be news.
If you check this wapo article . I guess it depends on your interpretation of "hit hard by stuxnet" . In Natanz about 1000 centrifuges were replaced during that time, or 10%, for whatever reason, and the Uranium production during 2010 was not lower.
That is a choice. Because indeed, a lot of people would care. You could also try and spell out what the olympic games would look like if they were implemented according to your ideas. Would judo only have the open category and no weight categories? Would a lot of disciplines be categorized as inferior and be cancelled?
Need I also restate that the men's categories already function as 'open' categories, so we're not talking about changing the race, only about adding parallel races.
No it's not a semantic trick, it's about assigning all the responsibility to the individual and none to the environment, or in other words, it's taking two 'pure' instances and making them representative prototypes for the whole discussion:
- a person very much motivated to commit murder will do so even if access to guns is made difficult
- a person who does not want to kill will not do so even if there are plenty of weapons around.
Ok. so in the Olympics you'll have almost only men qualifying. Next step is to say ok, like in judo, that's what we call the open category. Now we create a women only category because otherwise they aren't represented. So you have open/women instead of men/women.
The difference with the current situation, that women now are not allowed to participate in men's tournaments while in the new situation they could but very rarely would.Actually I'm not even sure if women aren't allowed.
The main conceptual problem is that we think there should somehow be a perfect solution. Instead we should accept there isn't a perfect solution. We'll always need imperfect ad hoc decisions and there will always be bordercases where you can attribute a win to someone being miscategorized.
actually, I want to say the opposite of the title, but the reasoning is similar to the gun control debate.
With gun control there is the defending perception that guns don't kill but people do. There's a valid point there, but there's another one to counter it: if all you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail, namely the availability and prevalence of a pattern, will mean it will be used much more often.
One can defend the system of profiling people and compiling databases with scores, where not having a facebook account increases your score with one unit, posting anonymously with another unit and so on. The database is just an assistance, there should be a person making the final decision. Of course that person should understand that not having a facebook account is by itself not enough reason to consider them a terrorist. Of course facebook is a weak indicator, there is only a weak correlation with terrorism. That is not a problem in profiling.
But what happens in the real world? You get this database with scores, and it all doesn't mean very much but if you have a score of 10+ (you also listen to RATM, +1, read alternet.org , +1, have been critical of foreign policy, +5) and hey they're not accusing you of anything, but somehow at the airport you have to meet the softspoken man with the rubber glove , and if you don't like that, that's 5 points extra and you end up on the noflylist. The officers at the airport could allow you through, but the people who made the database must have known what they were doing, and it's all the information that they have on you, and it would be discriminating if they let some people pass and others not when they have the same score.
So profiling can be counterproductive. And as always, it can be played to make the ratio of false positives worse than with random approaches. Now you know that if you have a certain plan, make sure you have a facebook account so as to keep your score down.
Whatever the losses were, the plane just kept on flying. So definitely, costs didn't kill it. Costs did made the difference between mere existence and a real presence on the market. The accident made the difference between existence and nonexistence. The PR value of the plane was gone and the prestige of it for the clients was gone.
that's a contentious statement. I recall reading that the Germany hoped that the Tripartite Pact would deter the US from trying anything. There was no desire to pick a fight with the US. Once the US and Japan started fighting, Germany were in a dilemma whether to blow up the pact or have a state of war with the US.
That's a very questionable statement. It's also not related to my argument. The risks of nuclear armament have constantly been underestimated by those who defend it. In fact, it's presented as a pretty solution. A solution that can blow up in your face when things get shaken up a bit is not a pretty solution. Instable situations where you're no longer in full control of the situation, like disintegration of USSR , Cuba crisis, internal problems in Pakistan, should be part of the calculation, not something to dismiss. And I'm not saying that as a radical opponent of MAD.
More or less right.
The US has repeatedly considered using tactical nukes. Also self defense can be stretched to fit anything, and it is. Normally Israel's nuclear strategy is considered more than self defense. Eg in the Yom Kippur war they used them to blackmail the US into helping them. They've also made clear that Europe is a target, so Europe better align itself fully with Israel. "If we go down we take everyone with us".
You won't believe this, but that's what a lot of leading Iranians think. They appreciate the political strength of nuclear capability, but they don't see enough value in it to go all the way. Certainly not with Israel, which is too far away to do major damage with conventional means.
Of course, not every Iranian general will think the same about nukes, which is one reason for that Khamenei fatwa against nukes. It's a commitment. You can't turn your back on it without looking really bad. This way you make sure nobody gets any ideas.
I can provide links, that at least show this is indeed what they say, It won't stop anyone from thinking it's all elaborate deception of course. There's an interview of Charlie Rose with Mohammad Javad Larijani two years back that's worthwile. This article is just new http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NG04Ak04.html and discusses things I say here.
It also assumes noone loses. The nuclear risks of the USSR disintegrating are varied and considerable. And the same applies to Pakistan.
Which is an appropriate analogy(or fill in the right word) since even if you just look at the east-west MAD standoff, luck was a considerable factor in our survival. Robert Mcnamara described the Cuba crisis as follows:
And it's not the only story.
Darn that bastard that modded me up! Now the whole esthetic of just the right post inserted exactly on the right spot on the internet, is ruined!
My comment mentions Ron Paul and it's unmodded. So there you have it.
This I've used when it's very hot and it worked very well: take a t-shirt, soak in water and wring so it's moist. Wear for 2 hours. Repeat.
It would have a knob on the side to tweak the power, in percentages of what's needed to vaporize the flake or drop, from 10% to 50000%.. The knob would be awkward ,too small, very sensitive and it wouldn't keep its setting so you'd have to correct it all the time as you drive. but you'd still be so happy with it.
Obviously. But it's still one wicked appliance