It would still be far more efficient to use the thrust to push the big object with the small object.
As others in other threads have mentioned, it makes no sense to send up a massive object to attract the asteroid when you can send up an equally massive amount of fuel to push on the asteroid.
How about the right to make money off of something that millions find valuable that you labored to create, without fear that someone else will make a copy of it and start selling it themselves?
The ablation thing is inefficient. Use a nuclear reactor on the asteroid surface to melt itself down, melting a portion of the asteroid and directing it through the melt hole into space. You can send up a big reactor, use the asteroid itself as reaction mass, and get much more efficiency than a blast and an ablation.
As for "rubble pile" asteroids, those would tend to break up and explode in the atmosphere. The more you can disperse them before they hit the atmosphere, the better. So embed a nuclear bomb and explode it when it's a few days out, so it doesn't have time to reform.
You couldn't do it by station-keeping next to the asteroid. You'd have to maintain thrust directed at the asteroid. First, the thrust couldn't last very long, and second, it would just push the asteroid back away from the ship. You could fire it in a conical pattern, but then you decrease the effective thrust you get from your fuel.
All you really do by putting a lightweight object near an asteroid is create a heavier asteroid. If you have enough reaction mass to manage the sort of station-keeping you imagine, then you might as well put the vehicle on the asteroid and point the thrust outward, and push the asteroid into another trajectory.
It will be comparatively easy to detect a planet-killer sized asteroid and determine its trajectory in plenty of time to launch a deterrent mission.
A surprise impact by anything with major destructive capability is vanishingly unlikely at this point. Improvements in detection shouldn't be prioritized, but should be allowed to continue at a normal pace.
Deciding how to minimize the destruction should be the focus, and we don't really know how to do it with a high degree of confidence, yet. So deflection technology should be prioritized.
No. When you record content to your VCR it comes from broadcasters who have a license to the content and have granted you a license to copy it onto your VCR (they tried once not to grant you that license, but the courts gave them little choice). Reread what I wrote.
So you go back a while later and ask if the information you asked to be declassified was, and if not, why not. Since you had a valid cause in the first place, you have a valid cause the second time, and if the information is still classified you then have cause to start proceedings against the people covering it up.
But really, this isn't going to happen. The apparatus knows about this sort of thing and has watchers watching the watchers. The only time it really gets out of hand is situations like the Bush administration, where the bullshit was flying so fast there was no way to get any of it dealt with. Which is why you had a guy like Colin Powell, of all people, helping a dry-drunk (W) and a cro-magnon (Cheney) and a vampire (Rumsfeld) lie to start an unnecessary war.
Unless the diplomacy is conducted before the operation is approved, in secret, by both sides.
Then there's a mild kerfuffle for the benefit of the press and shortly thereafter everyone gets distracted by a missing-child story, of which there are enough you don't even have to create them.
1. They aren't doing it because they don't like him. They're doing it because he deserves it.
2. Sure it makes it legal. Australia wants Assange's head, and says to the U.S. if you find him, lop it off. That's what military allies are for. Please don't be a dope.
They're still building it, so nobody knows what it's like.
Though from the delays, I don't doubt it will have at least one major technical fuck-up that they'll gloss over but will piss me off every time I turn the machine on.
Anywhere the FCC has jurisdiction copying copyrighted content from anyone other than a licensee is breaking the law (and playing it to your screen from a stream is, indeed, copying it).
I have a Roku box. Cost me $60. Uses the Internet (built-in 802.11n wireless, at that). And now is available with 1080p support (though I wish they'd announced that before I'd bought my second Roku for the other TV...)
I get Netflix, as well as a lot of other content, on it.
Two reasons it's not as good as cable/satellite:
1. There still isn't a lot of content, and almost none of it is live (there's an MLB out-of-market channel, but I haven't tied into it yet to see if it's live or delayed).
2. Roku works because it's sparsely distributed to the marketplace. The Internet does not have the bandwidth to give everyone unlimited, on-demand, random-access content in full HDTV quality all the time. The cable and satellite communication models eliminate the on-demand portion (mostly; each has some channels for on-demand-like programming, but they're pay-per-view controlled and that keeps their use down to a sparse segment of the viewership at any moment), but ensure that literally every installed endpoint can get any of the channelized content at the same time.
Of course, the real problem with the cable/satellite models is that they've become so fractionated that no channel has a really significant audience share, so they all have suck commercial revenues, so they can't afford the decent television shows, so 90% of them run the sucky junk that costs nothing. Which makes Bruce Springsteen not just observant, but prescient by a factor of 20: 1100 channels and nothing on...
Assange didn't save anyone, and endangered many. In the very least-deleterious case, he made it more expensive to get the same job done. More likely, he extended the war by a year, had no effect on how combat operations would be evaluated on the ground, got a dumb kid jailed for life, got several informants tortured or killed, and put a target on his own back.
Let a = 0.999... then we can multiply both sides by ten yielding 10a = 9.999... then subtracting a (which is 0.999...) from both sides we get 10a — a = 9.999... — 0.999... which reduces to 9a = 9 and thus a = 1. Mathematicians as far back as Euler have used various means to prove 0.999... = 1.
That is not a correct proof.
In order to perform the subtraction step in the given proof you had to let the thing after the decimal point be equal to a, but that is presuming your conclusion, which is a fallacy.
I.e., the thing after the decimal point in "10a = 9.999..." does not equal a. It equals 10a-9.
There are many simple, correct proofs, but that one is neither simple nor correct.
Here's a simple, correct one:
Define (0.999...) = {the limit as i goes to infinity of [1-(1/10^i)]}. The right hand side is the same as {1 - [1/(the limit as i goes to infinity of 10^i)]}. Now, the limit as i goes to infinity of 10^i is infinity, and 1/infinity is 0, therefore 1/(the limit as i goes to infinity of 10^i) is 0. Therefore the right hand side is equal to 1. Thus, 0.999... = 1. QED.
Of course, this is only simple if you already understand the bog-simple concept of limits; but if you're smart, you'll use this as a simple example when teaching limits and thus prove that bob's your uncle.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I don't write mine there. I write yours.
Regards,
Mark Z.
We'll get on that, just as soon as our Y2K-bug vulnerability scan is done running.
Dopefish is not a lie!
Obligatory Mythbusters reference.
It would still be far more efficient to use the thrust to push the big object with the small object.
As others in other threads have mentioned, it makes no sense to send up a massive object to attract the asteroid when you can send up an equally massive amount of fuel to push on the asteroid.
The costs of almost all astronomical equipment is already distributed, since it's paid for through taxation.
You might want to learn the difference between public domain and created works.
How about the right to make money off of something that millions find valuable that you labored to create, without fear that someone else will make a copy of it and start selling it themselves?
Those don't actually solve the problem. As usual.
The ablation thing is inefficient. Use a nuclear reactor on the asteroid surface to melt itself down, melting a portion of the asteroid and directing it through the melt hole into space. You can send up a big reactor, use the asteroid itself as reaction mass, and get much more efficiency than a blast and an ablation.
As for "rubble pile" asteroids, those would tend to break up and explode in the atmosphere. The more you can disperse them before they hit the atmosphere, the better. So embed a nuclear bomb and explode it when it's a few days out, so it doesn't have time to reform.
You couldn't do it by station-keeping next to the asteroid. You'd have to maintain thrust directed at the asteroid. First, the thrust couldn't last very long, and second, it would just push the asteroid back away from the ship. You could fire it in a conical pattern, but then you decrease the effective thrust you get from your fuel.
All you really do by putting a lightweight object near an asteroid is create a heavier asteroid. If you have enough reaction mass to manage the sort of station-keeping you imagine, then you might as well put the vehicle on the asteroid and point the thrust outward, and push the asteroid into another trajectory.
You're going to deflect an asteroid with distributed computing exactly how?
We don't only find the monster ones.
We commonly track asteroids under 500 feet wide; much smaller than a planet-killer.
It will be comparatively easy to detect a planet-killer sized asteroid and determine its trajectory in plenty of time to launch a deterrent mission.
A surprise impact by anything with major destructive capability is vanishingly unlikely at this point. Improvements in detection shouldn't be prioritized, but should be allowed to continue at a normal pace.
Deciding how to minimize the destruction should be the focus, and we don't really know how to do it with a high degree of confidence, yet. So deflection technology should be prioritized.
I give it a D.
Adults think their pets are human, and humans of different colors are animals. People are generally not a good source of judgment.
No. When you record content to your VCR it comes from broadcasters who have a license to the content and have granted you a license to copy it onto your VCR (they tried once not to grant you that license, but the courts gave them little choice). Reread what I wrote.
So you go back a while later and ask if the information you asked to be declassified was, and if not, why not. Since you had a valid cause in the first place, you have a valid cause the second time, and if the information is still classified you then have cause to start proceedings against the people covering it up.
But really, this isn't going to happen. The apparatus knows about this sort of thing and has watchers watching the watchers. The only time it really gets out of hand is situations like the Bush administration, where the bullshit was flying so fast there was no way to get any of it dealt with. Which is why you had a guy like Colin Powell, of all people, helping a dry-drunk (W) and a cro-magnon (Cheney) and a vampire (Rumsfeld) lie to start an unnecessary war.
Unless the diplomacy is conducted before the operation is approved, in secret, by both sides.
Then there's a mild kerfuffle for the benefit of the press and shortly thereafter everyone gets distracted by a missing-child story, of which there are enough you don't even have to create them.
1. They aren't doing it because they don't like him. They're doing it because he deserves it.
2. Sure it makes it legal. Australia wants Assange's head, and says to the U.S. if you find him, lop it off. That's what military allies are for. Please don't be a dope.
They're still building it, so nobody knows what it's like.
Though from the delays, I don't doubt it will have at least one major technical fuck-up that they'll gloss over but will piss me off every time I turn the machine on.
Do I have to explain the difference in tense between "doesn't" and "didn't".
DirecTV and TiVo kissed and made up over a year ago.
Anywhere the FCC has jurisdiction copying copyrighted content from anyone other than a licensee is breaking the law (and playing it to your screen from a stream is, indeed, copying it).
I have a Roku box. Cost me $60. Uses the Internet (built-in 802.11n wireless, at that). And now is available with 1080p support (though I wish they'd announced that before I'd bought my second Roku for the other TV...)
I get Netflix, as well as a lot of other content, on it.
Two reasons it's not as good as cable/satellite:
1. There still isn't a lot of content, and almost none of it is live (there's an MLB out-of-market channel, but I haven't tied into it yet to see if it's live or delayed).
2. Roku works because it's sparsely distributed to the marketplace. The Internet does not have the bandwidth to give everyone unlimited, on-demand, random-access content in full HDTV quality all the time. The cable and satellite communication models eliminate the on-demand portion (mostly; each has some channels for on-demand-like programming, but they're pay-per-view controlled and that keeps their use down to a sparse segment of the viewership at any moment), but ensure that literally every installed endpoint can get any of the channelized content at the same time.
Of course, the real problem with the cable/satellite models is that they've become so fractionated that no channel has a really significant audience share, so they all have suck commercial revenues, so they can't afford the decent television shows, so 90% of them run the sucky junk that costs nothing. Which makes Bruce Springsteen not just observant, but prescient by a factor of 20: 1100 channels and nothing on...
Assange didn't save anyone, and endangered many. In the very least-deleterious case, he made it more expensive to get the same job done. More likely, he extended the war by a year, had no effect on how combat operations would be evaluated on the ground, got a dumb kid jailed for life, got several informants tortured or killed, and put a target on his own back.
From the summary:
Let a = 0.999... then we can multiply both sides by ten yielding 10a = 9.999... then subtracting a (which is 0.999...) from both sides we get 10a — a = 9.999... — 0.999... which reduces to 9a = 9 and thus a = 1. Mathematicians as far back as Euler have used various means to prove 0.999... = 1.
That is not a correct proof.
In order to perform the subtraction step in the given proof you had to let the thing after the decimal point be equal to a, but that is presuming your conclusion, which is a fallacy.
I.e., the thing after the decimal point in "10a = 9.999..." does not equal a. It equals 10a-9.
There are many simple, correct proofs, but that one is neither simple nor correct.
Here's a simple, correct one:
Define (0.999...) = {the limit as i goes to infinity of [1-(1/10^i)]}.
The right hand side is the same as {1 - [1/(the limit as i goes to infinity of 10^i)]}.
Now, the limit as i goes to infinity of 10^i is infinity, and 1/infinity is 0, therefore 1/(the limit as i goes to infinity of 10^i) is 0.
Therefore the right hand side is equal to 1. Thus,
0.999... = 1. QED.
Of course, this is only simple if you already understand the bog-simple concept of limits; but if you're smart, you'll use this as a simple example when teaching limits and thus prove that bob's your uncle.