In that case, it would require deflection rather than deceleration. Consider it like a game of pool. Put the queue ball in the normal starting position (centered between the second pair of dots on one end of the table. Put the second pool ball on the other end of the table centered between the second pair of dots, just off center. Put a third ball at the far end of the table, on the center line. When you shoot the queue ball straight down the table, it won't hit the third ball.
The red ball is the incoming asteroid.
The blue ball is the shield object.
The green ball is the earth.
The lines illustrate the trajectories of both. The shield object, would ideally would be captured in orbit again. The asteroid would go elsewhere (top right pocket, if you make the shot right)
I know it's not a perfect example, but it should simplify it for human consumption.
Well, it's almost twice the mass, and that isn't a limit. Addition of materials, strategically placed can work wonders.
A pile of scrap metal is a pile of scrap metal. A formed shield to redirect an object is something different. Not to say you can just shove a bunch of scrap together to make a shield, but if it were reorganized it could be something very interesting. A nuclear reactor meltdown in the middle of 12 million pounds of titanium and steel floating in space would either make a big radioactive mess, or a nice dense marble to knock another marble slightly off course.
Well, it would solve two problems. One is all the crap that's floating around now.
I guess it's all in how good you think you really are. What's the farthest we've ever gotten a payload like that out? I'd have to say the biggest thing we've ever put up in one shot was a Saturn V. Hoping you can get not only get something up there, but something that can deliver not only itself but another rocket to land. That's a lot of payload. Like, more than we've ever put up there. Sure we can adjust the ISS with smaller boosters, but we're talking about things much bigger, going much faster.
Well, lets look at it another way. When the astronauts were returning from the moon, did their launch disturb the moon's orbit in the least?
Or are you of the belief that if all the people in China jumped at the same time, it would cause an earthquake in New York? (or a billion other insane misconceptions).
Lets take a little look at something that could actually be tested on.
I don't think 7.6 million pounds is going to do much to a 59 billion pound rock. And we don't have anything that could carry an unfired Saturn V even into LEO, much less to where ever it may need to get to. (somewhere well above LEO, I'd presume)
Ummm. Ya, it's very practical to send up rockets with enough thrust to move a rock a mile wide, flying at 64,000mph.
When I said shield, I thought it had been explained well enough.
The shield could be made up of orbital debris, and other stuff. There's only about 12,000,000 pounds of man made debris in space, and I don't think that takes into account objects that were misplaced like Asteroid 2010 KQ, J002E3, and 6Q0B44E. Reduce their velocity, and capture them into an artificial reef (or, moon).
Just like playing pool, a straight shot passes the energy straight through. That may help, or not. If it's something that would crumble, it could cause a shower of small pieces that would burn up in the atmosphere. If it were a glancing blow, it would change the trajectory of the incoming object and your shield.
In time, this may add a nice effect of cleaning up more debris as it orbits. Since it would have been intentionally placed, getting rockets and fuel to it would be a hell of a lot easier than a rock somewhere out there, that's a speck in a telescope, of unknown composition, mass, and is moving really really fast.
But hey, NASA doesn't pay me for my opinion. I'm glad you're the rocket scientist. Oh wait. You aren't.
Well, we've only had a 50% success rate hitting Mars, so ya, I think a shield in closer proximity to earth would be a lot more manageable.
But, if you read the article, it's actually clear.
"In a way, the kinetic impact was demonstrated by the Deep Impact mission back in 2005," said Schweickart. "But that was a very big target and a small impactor that had relatively no effect on the comet. So, we haven't really demonstrated the capability to have the guidance necessary to deflect a moderately sized asteroid."
In simpler words, we couldn't change the trajectory of a moderately sized asteroid with a 815 pound cannon ball. The change has to be pretty significant and pretty far out. If other factors are guiding the object (which they would be), gravity from the sun and other planets can and will effect it's flightpath. If you knock it 1 degree, it may be pulled straight back onto it's original course. And lets not forget the Earth seems to have a bit of gravity (something like 1g on the ellipsoid, on a standard day, with standard pressure), so bumping the object off from a direct path to earth may just result in it still coming straight in.
Here's a test for you... Have a friend drop a 16 pound bowling ball from a 10 story building straight down at your head. When it reaches 9 stories up, shoot it with a BB gun, and hope that deflects it.
I don't know why the solution is always to blow it up or crash something into it. We have a wonderful history of knowledge about how objects have avoided hitting the earth. A few giant planets in orbit farther from our sun than we are, and a moon. You don't crash things into the moving object. You let the moving object crash into your defenses.
For example, if someone is shooting at you, do you shoot at their bullet? No, you hide behind cover, or carry it with you.
Most of the objects we've detected are pretty small (relative to the earth). A large high orbit object (like the moon) is a pretty damned good defense. Now, if we could control this like a shield, if another object were to come towards the earth, it could be deflected (bounced away from impact) or disrupted (i.e., break it into a bunch of smaller pieces).
Launching an artificial object isn't exactly practical, but we've already done a good bit of it. I wonder what the total mass of the current LEO objects is.
An accumulation of matter isn't ideal. But think of driving off the road. If you run into a brick wall or a snowbank, you're probably going to stop, be deflected, or disrupted.
So the solution isn't the bigger space weapon. It is the better space shield.
You know, I got one of those calls. Well, I'm not a trucker, but I had set myself up with a tracking system in my car. It fed two cameras, and kept my site updated with coordinates, speed, heading, altitude, and automatically moved my marker on Google Maps. Around 3am, I was tired, so I pulled over in a rest area in California, Arizona, or New Mexico (I'm not sure which, it all looks the same). I laid my seat back to take a nap. I was only out for about 1/2 hour, when I got a panicked call asking if I was ok.
When I stopped, I just saw that it was a rest area. I parked in a fairly quiet corner, with my car facing away from the road. I didn't bother to look at the map to see what it was showing. As it turns out, if you looked at the cameras, all you could see was empty desert. If you looked at the map, I was several hundred feet off the road, heading South, and not moving.
Back to the topic, I wonder how the eye tracking would perform when checking blind spots or backing up. You may not even be facing forward, so it can't check you all the time. And as I was taught, you can't only trust the mirrors, turn your head to check blind spots. So negative reinforcement (the wakeup alarm) would be a very bad thing, reinforcing bad habits in drivers.
I propose that we all can tag vehicles for being stupid. If enough people flag them as being stupid drivers, they are removed from the road. There's no in-car interlock that seems to work well enough to keep stupid people from driving.
Bigger crashes make bigger news. If the driver of a tractor-trailer falls asleep at the wheel, that runaway truck can do significant damage. If the driver of a ford escort falls asleep at the wheel, he may cause some damage, but nothing comparable to the previous example.
The media tends to pick up stories that involves the most blood, or the most dramatic scene. Here's an example. Several years ago, my sister was driving home, and the driver of an oncoming car fell asleep at the wheel and drifted into her lane. Both cars were absolutely totaled, and both drivers were hospitalized. By the car being totaled, I went to gather her belongings from the car. The left front wheel was under the drivers seat. I couldn't get my legs into the car between the dash and the seat. They both survived, but they were both banged up pretty well. There was no mention of it at all.
Right around the same time, a tractor-trailer hauling fuel misjudged a turn, and rolled the truck over. It caught fire. He was fine and walked away from it. There were no other people involved. That was front page news for about a week. Oh the fire, oh the disaster. What can we do to make the roads safer? Are truckers allowed to drive too much? Should truckers have mandatory lower speed limits? blah, blah, blah. They hit it for all it was worth.
Truckers actually have strict rules they work under, as far as the max allowable hours driven in a day. Not to say I haven't seen my share of sleep truckers (or at least non-attentive ones), but I've seen a lot more sleepy and non-attentive automobile drivers. I'd strongly suspect there are more uncaught DUI cases than sleepy drivers.
Now, if you have a trucker that's been drinking and falls asleep behind the wheel, while hauling a trailer full of fuel, flips it, and it explodes, *THAT* would make the news. If he lands it on a bus full of nuns, or in a school yard, that'll make front page everywhere.
There's a decision that always has to be made when faced with something like this. Which will be more expensive? To tie up a team of lawyers with a BS claim for years in court, or just pay it.
For the likes of Apple and Google, I'm sure they considered the options, and took the easy way out. They would have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to follow it through court. As long as they keep the cost of licensing the patent below the cost of the defendant going to court, they'll keep making money.
A company I worked for a company who was involved in one of these. Acacia Research (aka Acacia Technologies, LLC) acquired patents that basically covered any sort of method of sending audio or video over the Internet. They were going after the "low hanging fruit", as one of their executives said. They'd come in and demand 25% of the company revenue. Not the profit, the gross. If you cooperated with them, you could get that number down to something more reasonable, once they had a chance to go over your books and see what you had to take.
They used their "wins" to go after bigger companies. Basically their letter said "These people have licensed from us. You should too, or we'll bankrupt you in court". When they hit the $10 million to $500 million company range, they ran into trouble. They sent out a stack of warning stating pretty much the same as this one. Now they're playing against guys with deeper pockets, who don't like their profit margin fucked with. Normally competition don't play nicely with each other, but this time they did. They formed the "Adult Defense Group". This who mess started in 2003, and was finally thrown out in 2009, with the EFF, the Adult Defense Group, DirecTV, EchoStar, Time Warner, and others fighting it.
It's not the only case, or else we wouldn't have the coined term "patent trolls". {sigh}
If the day comes where I ever have to pull a weapon on someone, there will be an abundance of evidence of their intentions. I've only ever needed my weapon a handful of times, for a possibility of a problem. I have never needed it for an actual altercation. I've been using firearms for over 30 years. It'd take that as statistically the need will never arise, but just in case it does, I still own them.
Good race teams have proper scales, that are ungodly expensive. You can put your car on boards (levers) on bathroom scales to get the same effect. You'd be able to tell a pound of anything were added, and get a good idea of where due to the change in. It would probably take some planning, if you intended to check your weight distribution every time you parked and left. Don't forget, that short drive to the store will change the balance slightly due to burning off some fuel.
Sprint. Left them after 3 months of extra $300 fees, while disputing it the whole way.
Nextel. I switched to them from Sprint. They were great until the Sprint/Nextel merger, and a few months later the same scenario happened.
Verizon Wireless was the one who can't figure out to pass the real billing information over to collections.
And finally, Boost Mobile. I know, it's a Sprint/Nextel company but they've provided the best rates and cheapest phones. I'm very happy with my Blackberry Curve 8330, and have been using it since just after they launched it.
I bought a couple other Boost phones for other people, changed the information online to the real owner, and haven't heard a word about them since. I know one stopped paying, and they never came back to me to ask me to rejoin for them.
No contract prepaid is the *ONLY* way I'll ever own a cell phone ever again. I'm getting over $100 worth of service for $60/mo, including the data plan. (regular Boost unlimited is $50, with only the iDEN data connection, which just plain sucks).
We attempted T-Mobile, which was a clusterfuck on poor overpriced equipment. We used AT&T a long time ago, but haven't been back. I don't know what they have for good prepaid plans.
I did some reading up on the OnStar units. They're frequently a rather large electronics package in the rear or trunk area, attached to an antenna. The cell phone is built in, and is part of the GPS system. I don't know if they can be defeated with just pulling a fuse, or if removing the unit would render the vehicle nonoperational.
I like the idea of OnStar. If I'm in trouble, help can be dispatched immediately. I don't like the big brother features of it.
My next vehicle will be an older one, that I can completely remove the existing electronics, and clean up the engine bay by using a 1-wire alternator, and a few other required wires, along with a points type ignition system (read: EMP proof)
I can't imagine it will be too long before they extend the taser concept to deploy against vehicles. One hit (or near miss), and all the electronics go out, and you have a chunk of metal sitting in the highway.
Any of them can cause collateral damage, which must be considered in any such situation. i.e., if it happens, they're going to take out innocent people in the process. It may not happen, but it's a possibility.
It's a lot easier to kill someone by tampering with them. There are two essential systems that if you disable either one, they will cease to function.
It's a lot harder to kill them with their car, and it runs the risk of collateral damage. Sure, disable the brakes (15 seconds). Now you've sent the victim driving into a bus full of nuns and school kids (oh god, think of the kids!).
Explosives? Well, you gotta buy them, plant them, trigger them.
Gas tank? Have fun there. Things don't blow up as nicely as they do on TV.
Shoot out a tire? Really, it doesn't work as well as on TV. And yes, I've had to help someone with a tire shot out before. We didn't actually know until the next day, which was really weird.
Of course, you could be referencing just assisting them into their car in a drowsy state, and leaving the car running in the garage with the door shut. Still, time consuming, and you're bound to leave evidence.
Aw heck, 4 more days til the next Dexter episode:)
That was a consideration, but they showed 0 minutes of airtime used. It'd be silly to clone a phone and leave it turned on for months waiting for... well, who knows what.
I could always blame the feds.
[Firmly affixing my tinfoil hat]
They must have cloned my phone and were waiting for all those suspicious calls to come in, that weren't coming in over my landline. Or the aliens. I doubt it's within the ability of bigfoot though.:)
[Removing tinfoil hat]
Nope, I attribute it to the billing procedures at the company. It's easy to slip in a few extra bucks on the phone. When I was traveling frequently, I couldn't dispute if I used 2000 or 4000 minutes, or how many hours or days I was roaming in a strange place. It becomes very obvious though when the service isn't being used at all, and they got a little too greedy. Really, a $300 bill wasn't totally unheard of, considering international roaming and international calls. But I was making plenty of money, so that really didn't matter. Well, til I didn't want to pay for $300/mo on a non-functional phone.
On the gift phone, we called it in and had the account transferred over after about 2 weeks (like, after I gave it as the present). If I call in, they won't talk to me about the account, since I'm not on it. My only account with them was terminated about 3 years ago. It's some screwup between normal billing and collections. But, normal billing becomes collections after 48 hours of not paying. It already showed up on my credit report once, and I disputed it to get it off. I'm no longer the account holder. It hasn't shown back up yet.
And seriously with your 2 examples of "roaming charges" how old are these examples? I don't think any US carrier has had roaming charges other than international in the last 10 years!!
Some of the providers have local or regional plans still at a discount rate. I'm better off with prepaid $60/mo unlimited on a Blackberry that I can tether with a decent throughput. I frequently run up 2000 to 3000 minutes a month, depending on what I'm doing. There's nothing like standing around in or around a datacenter listening to the provider saying "Hmm, it should work... I don't know why it won't work... Lets try this...". I've burnt up 1000 minutes in 4 days doing that. Some of them prefer to keep me on the line, rather than just calling me when it's fixed.
Also in your 2nd example, moving to a new location that has no coverage is a reason to terminate your contract with no ETF with most carriers, why didnt you take advantage instead paying the bill for a phone you didn't even use?
I had kept the phone service for when I was traveling. The normal cost was reasonable. I'd just need to charge up the phone the day before, and be on my way. It just happened that during that period I hadn't traveled at all (working from home and all), so since no one could call it, I figured it was silly to even charge it.
Over the years, I've had several phones which didn't have a provision for showing minutes used in the billing month, nor any way to check other than calling customer support and lingering on hold for a half hour and transferred twice, just to be told that they think it's a number.
I posted another message explaining more, but I've been hit with $300 overages for things that didn't exist, like roaming with a phone that never moved an inch and had a dead battery (and 0 minutes of airtime used).
I found one of the better solutions to "Bill Shock". Prepaid phone with unlimited minutes. My bill is my bill, and I can plan for that amount with no confusion.
I was screwed twice by cell phone companies who were out to screw their customers. The first time, I was overcharged $300/mo for "roaming" in a city 100 miles away, even though I never left my city limits during the entire period in question.
The second time, several years later, my phone didn't even work at a house I moved to. I left it sitting on my desk until the battery died, but I still paid the bill normally. Then I started getting overcharged $300 for "roaming". They couldn't demonstrate any calls, or even show any minutes used. I asked them to clarify how I could be roaming if the phone was dead. They couldn't give me any answer but "you need to pay..." But when the phone was working, they were kind enough to nail me with all kinds of fees for International use. Hop over the border, or even be close to it, and they can hit you for it.
Nope, I'm done with that nonsense. No more calls if I'm a day late (and every day after that for months). If my phone gets shut off, it's because I didn't pay the normal fixed amount, and they leave me alone. I *still* get calls 5 years later about a phone I bought as a gift for someone, and my name isn't suppose to even be on the account. No, I'm not paying their phone bill, because it's not my account dammit.
You have to sleep sometime, and if you don't suspect a fed will be installing a device, you won't be keeping an eye on your car 24/7. It's really not very hard to gain access to someone's car. It will be stopped and unattended for hours at home, work, school, shopping, etc. Most people ignore things that aren't their problem. I got a call from a friend who locked their keys in the car. It was cold out, so they stayed in their friends house while I popped the door open. Of course, it was about midnight, in a less than desirable neighborhood. With a slim-jim, flashlight, and a pair of screwdrivers, I worked on it for about 5 minutes, got the door open, set the alarm off, and then shut the alarm down with their keys. I pocketed the keys, put my tools back in my car, and then called them out so they could leave. In a neighborhood where I'd expect to have a car stolen, no one said a word to me, even though several cars drove by, and I didn't make any attempt to hide what I was doing.
You also need to read up on "Castle Doctrine". In any case, if you shoot someone on your property, it will be heard by the courts. If you kill an officer of the law (who would presumably be installing the device), you're going to spend a long time in prison, possibly followed by your execution. Since you wrote it here, and I'd be willing to believe you've told friends and neighbors the same thing, it would become premeditated.
My state used to have the "duty to retreat" clause. Basically, if you had an option to avoid shooting someone, you must take that. For example, if someone is in your driveway, you can stay in the house, or retreat out the back door. If you opted to shoot him/her, then you are in violation and will be prosecuted. Thankfully, that part was repealed, after several cases showed justification even with the option to retreat. It does not justify shooting any trespasser in your yard though. You *must* be in direct threat of your life. You can't shoot a Jehovah's Witness at your front door, no matter how much you'd like to at 8am on a Saturday.:) I find the "Warning! Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again." sign, along with the accidental spill of costume blood one Halloween has been more than sufficient encouragement for people not to want to ring the doorbell.
Ideally, if they install one, they'll put it somewhere that you'll never see it. There are plenty of wonderful places to hide objects on cars. Ask any mechanic if they've ever lost a tool in a car. If they say "no", they haven't been doing the job very long, or they're lying. Those are just the places that things can fall to.
Most cars have plastic/rubber bumpers. Behind the bumper is some sort of material that will crush on impact. Some used hard plastic honeycomb pieces. Some use styrofoam. Those don't always fill all the space, which leaves nice gaps to hide things in.
I had to change my turn signal housings about a year ago. They were cracked. To remove them, the electric raise headlights had to be removed, and some other plastic removed. Only then could I see that there was a space on each side of the front of the car large enough to put a shoebox.
On a car with a grill, how many of you have looked behind the grill to see what may be lurking? I know most people don't. It gets warm there, but it also leaves a nice spot to leave something in plain sight.
For the power wires, that's not really very hard either. Slip the wire into an existing loom, or put an oem-ish one in.
I was helping a friend do some significant changes to the interior of his SUV. As we were pulling stuff out, we came across several boxes of unknown origin. I'm sure they were there since the truck was manufactured, but no one had seen them since. Who pulls the headliner, and all the interior trim parts out? Not too many people. We searched the part numbers, and found that they were indeed factory pieces, but they were for options that weren't included on this particular truck. Behind the radio and throughout the dash has many gaps that you'd never notice. I was installing GPS tracking devices for a fleet (perfectly legitimate, the owners and vehicle operators knew they were there). Most of them had spots that I could mount the oversized box in very nicely, and hide all the wiring away so you'd have a really tough time finding them. I could set up a private or commercial vehicle in about 15 minutes, but I was taking my time and doing everything right.
But, there are plenty of mystery boxes that you simply don't know exist, or you don't know what they do. In 2005, 65% of new passenger vehicles had EDR (Event Data Recorders), which store the last few seconds before an event (i.e., crash). 2006 on, it was suppose to be 100%. I haven't heard too many people asking "What's this box do?". They just accept that it's a piece of the car. In reading up on it, some vehicles may become disabled if it's removed. If people aren't finding or questioning this standard equipment, would they ever notice an extra piece? Probably not unless you duct taped it to the windshield with a note that said "This is a government tracking device, do not remove under penalty of law"
How well it's hidden directly relates to how long the person installing it believes they have, and how adept they are at getting around a security system. If you can disable the alarm and unlock the doors, in most driveways you'd have from 1am to 4am (climb inside, and work with the doors shut). Mounting it outside just adds visibility. Sure, you can put it on, but will a neighbor or passer by stop to find out why you're crawling around under the car in the middle of the night? Surely if a fed was doing it covertly, and the local police spotted him, it would ruin the covert part of the operation.
They've been working on that one. If you run a blurb of NYT stuff, they'll get pissy. Then they'll go after you, your money, search engines, and even the search engine caches. I've known people who have cited a single sentence fragment, and received nasty-grams.
These are nasty-gram someone I know received, via Google Adsense. There have been several over quite a few years. In these cases, compliance on their part happened within about 2 hours. Adsense left them without any ad revenue for weeks. Neither NYT nor Attributor commented that the result was to their satisfaction, nor were they able to even begin negotiations for the requested "license". Oh, and these complaints on behalf of the NYT were frequently regarding other unrelated (to the best of anyone's knowledge) publications.
They aren't about openness and inducing conversation about current topics. But please, come in, pay us, and be open. What if the readers don't trust the NYT to know who they are, so they can't leave open comments, because they are afraid of the repercussions?
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In that case, it would require deflection rather than deceleration. Consider it like a game of pool. Put the queue ball in the normal starting position (centered between the second pair of dots on one end of the table. Put the second pool ball on the other end of the table centered between the second pair of dots, just off center. Put a third ball at the far end of the table, on the center line. When you shoot the queue ball straight down the table, it won't hit the third ball.
Here is a diagram illustrating it.
The red ball is the incoming asteroid.
The blue ball is the shield object.
The green ball is the earth.
The lines illustrate the trajectories of both. The shield object, would ideally would be captured in orbit again. The asteroid would go elsewhere (top right pocket, if you make the shot right)
I know it's not a perfect example, but it should simplify it for human consumption.
Well, it's almost twice the mass, and that isn't a limit. Addition of materials, strategically placed can work wonders.
A pile of scrap metal is a pile of scrap metal. A formed shield to redirect an object is something different. Not to say you can just shove a bunch of scrap together to make a shield, but if it were reorganized it could be something very interesting. A nuclear reactor meltdown in the middle of 12 million pounds of titanium and steel floating in space would either make a big radioactive mess, or a nice dense marble to knock another marble slightly off course.
Well, it would solve two problems. One is all the crap that's floating around now.
I guess it's all in how good you think you really are. What's the farthest we've ever gotten a payload like that out? I'd have to say the biggest thing we've ever put up in one shot was a Saturn V. Hoping you can get not only get something up there, but something that can deliver not only itself but another rocket to land. That's a lot of payload. Like, more than we've ever put up there. Sure we can adjust the ISS with smaller boosters, but we're talking about things much bigger, going much faster.
Well, lets look at it another way. When the astronauts were returning from the moon, did their launch disturb the moon's orbit in the least?
Or are you of the belief that if all the people in China jumped at the same time, it would cause an earthquake in New York? (or a billion other insane misconceptions).
Lets take a little look at something that could actually be tested on.
99942 Apophis (2004 MN4), 59,524,810,800 pounds. Saturn V, 7,648,000 pounds force.
I don't think 7.6 million pounds is going to do much to a 59 billion pound rock. And we don't have anything that could carry an unfired Saturn V even into LEO, much less to where ever it may need to get to. (somewhere well above LEO, I'd presume)
Ummm. Ya, it's very practical to send up rockets with enough thrust to move a rock a mile wide, flying at 64,000mph.
When I said shield, I thought it had been explained well enough.
The shield could be made up of orbital debris, and other stuff. There's only about 12,000,000 pounds of man made debris in space, and I don't think that takes into account objects that were misplaced like Asteroid 2010 KQ, J002E3, and 6Q0B44E. Reduce their velocity, and capture them into an artificial reef (or, moon).
Just like playing pool, a straight shot passes the energy straight through. That may help, or not. If it's something that would crumble, it could cause a shower of small pieces that would burn up in the atmosphere. If it were a glancing blow, it would change the trajectory of the incoming object and your shield.
In time, this may add a nice effect of cleaning up more debris as it orbits. Since it would have been intentionally placed, getting rockets and fuel to it would be a hell of a lot easier than a rock somewhere out there, that's a speck in a telescope, of unknown composition, mass, and is moving really really fast.
But hey, NASA doesn't pay me for my opinion. I'm glad you're the rocket scientist. Oh wait. You aren't.
Well, we've only had a 50% success rate hitting Mars, so ya, I think a shield in closer proximity to earth would be a lot more manageable.
But, if you read the article, it's actually clear.
In simpler words, we couldn't change the trajectory of a moderately sized asteroid with a 815 pound cannon ball. The change has to be pretty significant and pretty far out. If other factors are guiding the object (which they would be), gravity from the sun and other planets can and will effect it's flightpath. If you knock it 1 degree, it may be pulled straight back onto it's original course. And lets not forget the Earth seems to have a bit of gravity (something like 1g on the ellipsoid, on a standard day, with standard pressure), so bumping the object off from a direct path to earth may just result in it still coming straight in.
Here's a test for you... Have a friend drop a 16 pound bowling ball from a 10 story building straight down at your head. When it reaches 9 stories up, shoot it with a BB gun, and hope that deflects it.
Nope, I'd rather have a roof for it to hit.
I'm pretty sure your 18 month old is right. That thing is fucking scary. :)
I don't know why the solution is always to blow it up or crash something into it. We have a wonderful history of knowledge about how objects have avoided hitting the earth. A few giant planets in orbit farther from our sun than we are, and a moon. You don't crash things into the moving object. You let the moving object crash into your defenses.
For example, if someone is shooting at you, do you shoot at their bullet? No, you hide behind cover, or carry it with you.
Most of the objects we've detected are pretty small (relative to the earth). A large high orbit object (like the moon) is a pretty damned good defense. Now, if we could control this like a shield, if another object were to come towards the earth, it could be deflected (bounced away from impact) or disrupted (i.e., break it into a bunch of smaller pieces).
Launching an artificial object isn't exactly practical, but we've already done a good bit of it. I wonder what the total mass of the current LEO objects is.
An accumulation of matter isn't ideal. But think of driving off the road. If you run into a brick wall or a snowbank, you're probably going to stop, be deflected, or disrupted.
So the solution isn't the bigger space weapon. It is the better space shield.
You know, I got one of those calls. Well, I'm not a trucker, but I had set myself up with a tracking system in my car. It fed two cameras, and kept my site updated with coordinates, speed, heading, altitude, and automatically moved my marker on Google Maps. Around 3am, I was tired, so I pulled over in a rest area in California, Arizona, or New Mexico (I'm not sure which, it all looks the same). I laid my seat back to take a nap. I was only out for about 1/2 hour, when I got a panicked call asking if I was ok.
When I stopped, I just saw that it was a rest area. I parked in a fairly quiet corner, with my car facing away from the road. I didn't bother to look at the map to see what it was showing. As it turns out, if you looked at the cameras, all you could see was empty desert. If you looked at the map, I was several hundred feet off the road, heading South, and not moving.
Back to the topic, I wonder how the eye tracking would perform when checking blind spots or backing up. You may not even be facing forward, so it can't check you all the time. And as I was taught, you can't only trust the mirrors, turn your head to check blind spots. So negative reinforcement (the wakeup alarm) would be a very bad thing, reinforcing bad habits in drivers.
[standing on his sarcasm box]
I propose that we all can tag vehicles for being stupid. If enough people flag them as being stupid drivers, they are removed from the road. There's no in-car interlock that seems to work well enough to keep stupid people from driving.
[stepping away from his sarcasm box]
Bigger crashes make bigger news. If the driver of a tractor-trailer falls asleep at the wheel, that runaway truck can do significant damage. If the driver of a ford escort falls asleep at the wheel, he may cause some damage, but nothing comparable to the previous example.
The media tends to pick up stories that involves the most blood, or the most dramatic scene. Here's an example. Several years ago, my sister was driving home, and the driver of an oncoming car fell asleep at the wheel and drifted into her lane. Both cars were absolutely totaled, and both drivers were hospitalized. By the car being totaled, I went to gather her belongings from the car. The left front wheel was under the drivers seat. I couldn't get my legs into the car between the dash and the seat. They both survived, but they were both banged up pretty well. There was no mention of it at all.
Right around the same time, a tractor-trailer hauling fuel misjudged a turn, and rolled the truck over. It caught fire. He was fine and walked away from it. There were no other people involved. That was front page news for about a week. Oh the fire, oh the disaster. What can we do to make the roads safer? Are truckers allowed to drive too much? Should truckers have mandatory lower speed limits? blah, blah, blah. They hit it for all it was worth.
Truckers actually have strict rules they work under, as far as the max allowable hours driven in a day. Not to say I haven't seen my share of sleep truckers (or at least non-attentive ones), but I've seen a lot more sleepy and non-attentive automobile drivers. I'd strongly suspect there are more uncaught DUI cases than sleepy drivers.
Now, if you have a trucker that's been drinking and falls asleep behind the wheel, while hauling a trailer full of fuel, flips it, and it explodes, *THAT* would make the news. If he lands it on a bus full of nuns, or in a school yard, that'll make front page everywhere.
There's a decision that always has to be made when faced with something like this. Which will be more expensive? To tie up a team of lawyers with a BS claim for years in court, or just pay it.
For the likes of Apple and Google, I'm sure they considered the options, and took the easy way out. They would have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to follow it through court. As long as they keep the cost of licensing the patent below the cost of the defendant going to court, they'll keep making money.
A company I worked for a company who was involved in one of these. Acacia Research (aka Acacia Technologies, LLC) acquired patents that basically covered any sort of method of sending audio or video over the Internet. They were going after the "low hanging fruit", as one of their executives said. They'd come in and demand 25% of the company revenue. Not the profit, the gross. If you cooperated with them, you could get that number down to something more reasonable, once they had a chance to go over your books and see what you had to take.
They used their "wins" to go after bigger companies. Basically their letter said "These people have licensed from us. You should too, or we'll bankrupt you in court". When they hit the $10 million to $500 million company range, they ran into trouble. They sent out a stack of warning stating pretty much the same as this one. Now they're playing against guys with deeper pockets, who don't like their profit margin fucked with. Normally competition don't play nicely with each other, but this time they did. They formed the "Adult Defense Group". This who mess started in 2003, and was finally thrown out in 2009, with the EFF, the Adult Defense Group, DirecTV, EchoStar, Time Warner, and others fighting it.
It's not the only case, or else we wouldn't have the coined term "patent trolls". {sigh}
If the day comes where I ever have to pull a weapon on someone, there will be an abundance of evidence of their intentions. I've only ever needed my weapon a handful of times, for a possibility of a problem. I have never needed it for an actual altercation. I've been using firearms for over 30 years. It'd take that as statistically the need will never arise, but just in case it does, I still own them.
That's really not hard to do.
Good race teams have proper scales, that are ungodly expensive. You can put your car on boards (levers) on bathroom scales to get the same effect. You'd be able to tell a pound of anything were added, and get a good idea of where due to the change in. It would probably take some planning, if you intended to check your weight distribution every time you parked and left. Don't forget, that short drive to the store will change the balance slightly due to burning off some fuel.
In order...
Sprint. Left them after 3 months of extra $300 fees, while disputing it the whole way.
Nextel. I switched to them from Sprint. They were great until the Sprint/Nextel merger, and a few months later the same scenario happened.
Verizon Wireless was the one who can't figure out to pass the real billing information over to collections.
And finally, Boost Mobile. I know, it's a Sprint/Nextel company but they've provided the best rates and cheapest phones. I'm very happy with my Blackberry Curve 8330, and have been using it since just after they launched it.
I bought a couple other Boost phones for other people, changed the information online to the real owner, and haven't heard a word about them since. I know one stopped paying, and they never came back to me to ask me to rejoin for them.
No contract prepaid is the *ONLY* way I'll ever own a cell phone ever again. I'm getting over $100 worth of service for $60/mo, including the data plan. (regular Boost unlimited is $50, with only the iDEN data connection, which just plain sucks).
We attempted T-Mobile, which was a clusterfuck on poor overpriced equipment. We used AT&T a long time ago, but haven't been back. I don't know what they have for good prepaid plans.
I did some reading up on the OnStar units. They're frequently a rather large electronics package in the rear or trunk area, attached to an antenna. The cell phone is built in, and is part of the GPS system. I don't know if they can be defeated with just pulling a fuse, or if removing the unit would render the vehicle nonoperational.
I like the idea of OnStar. If I'm in trouble, help can be dispatched immediately. I don't like the big brother features of it.
My next vehicle will be an older one, that I can completely remove the existing electronics, and clean up the engine bay by using a 1-wire alternator, and a few other required wires, along with a points type ignition system (read: EMP proof)
I can't imagine it will be too long before they extend the taser concept to deploy against vehicles. One hit (or near miss), and all the electronics go out, and you have a chunk of metal sitting in the highway.
Any of them can cause collateral damage, which must be considered in any such situation. i.e., if it happens, they're going to take out innocent people in the process. It may not happen, but it's a possibility.
It's a lot easier to kill someone by tampering with them. There are two essential systems that if you disable either one, they will cease to function.
It's a lot harder to kill them with their car, and it runs the risk of collateral damage. Sure, disable the brakes (15 seconds). Now you've sent the victim driving into a bus full of nuns and school kids (oh god, think of the kids!).
Explosives? Well, you gotta buy them, plant them, trigger them.
Gas tank? Have fun there. Things don't blow up as nicely as they do on TV.
Shoot out a tire? Really, it doesn't work as well as on TV. And yes, I've had to help someone with a tire shot out before. We didn't actually know until the next day, which was really weird.
Of course, you could be referencing just assisting them into their car in a drowsy state, and leaving the car running in the garage with the door shut. Still, time consuming, and you're bound to leave evidence.
Aw heck, 4 more days til the next Dexter episode :)
That was a consideration, but they showed 0 minutes of airtime used. It'd be silly to clone a phone and leave it turned on for months waiting for ... well, who knows what.
I could always blame the feds.
[Firmly affixing my tinfoil hat]
They must have cloned my phone and were waiting for all those suspicious calls to come in, that weren't coming in over my landline. Or the aliens. I doubt it's within the ability of bigfoot though. :)
[Removing tinfoil hat]
Nope, I attribute it to the billing procedures at the company. It's easy to slip in a few extra bucks on the phone. When I was traveling frequently, I couldn't dispute if I used 2000 or 4000 minutes, or how many hours or days I was roaming in a strange place. It becomes very obvious though when the service isn't being used at all, and they got a little too greedy. Really, a $300 bill wasn't totally unheard of, considering international roaming and international calls. But I was making plenty of money, so that really didn't matter. Well, til I didn't want to pay for $300/mo on a non-functional phone.
On the gift phone, we called it in and had the account transferred over after about 2 weeks (like, after I gave it as the present). If I call in, they won't talk to me about the account, since I'm not on it. My only account with them was terminated about 3 years ago. It's some screwup between normal billing and collections. But, normal billing becomes collections after 48 hours of not paying. It already showed up on my credit report once, and I disputed it to get it off. I'm no longer the account holder. It hasn't shown back up yet.
Sprint roaming information
Verizon roaming information
Some of the providers have local or regional plans still at a discount rate. I'm better off with prepaid $60/mo unlimited on a Blackberry that I can tether with a decent throughput. I frequently run up 2000 to 3000 minutes a month, depending on what I'm doing. There's nothing like standing around in or around a datacenter listening to the provider saying "Hmm, it should work ... I don't know why it won't work ... Lets try this ...". I've burnt up 1000 minutes in 4 days doing that. Some of them prefer to keep me on the line, rather than just calling me when it's fixed.
I had kept the phone service for when I was traveling. The normal cost was reasonable. I'd just need to charge up the phone the day before, and be on my way. It just happened that during that period I hadn't traveled at all (working from home and all), so since no one could call it, I figured it was silly to even charge it.
Over the years, I've had several phones which didn't have a provision for showing minutes used in the billing month, nor any way to check other than calling customer support and lingering on hold for a half hour and transferred twice, just to be told that they think it's a number.
I posted another message explaining more, but I've been hit with $300 overages for things that didn't exist, like roaming with a phone that never moved an inch and had a dead battery (and 0 minutes of airtime used).
I found one of the better solutions to "Bill Shock". Prepaid phone with unlimited minutes. My bill is my bill, and I can plan for that amount with no confusion.
I was screwed twice by cell phone companies who were out to screw their customers. The first time, I was overcharged $300/mo for "roaming" in a city 100 miles away, even though I never left my city limits during the entire period in question.
The second time, several years later, my phone didn't even work at a house I moved to. I left it sitting on my desk until the battery died, but I still paid the bill normally. Then I started getting overcharged $300 for "roaming". They couldn't demonstrate any calls, or even show any minutes used. I asked them to clarify how I could be roaming if the phone was dead. They couldn't give me any answer but "you need to pay..." But when the phone was working, they were kind enough to nail me with all kinds of fees for International use. Hop over the border, or even be close to it, and they can hit you for it.
Nope, I'm done with that nonsense. No more calls if I'm a day late (and every day after that for months). If my phone gets shut off, it's because I didn't pay the normal fixed amount, and they leave me alone. I *still* get calls 5 years later about a phone I bought as a gift for someone, and my name isn't suppose to even be on the account. No, I'm not paying their phone bill, because it's not my account dammit.
You have to sleep sometime, and if you don't suspect a fed will be installing a device, you won't be keeping an eye on your car 24/7. It's really not very hard to gain access to someone's car. It will be stopped and unattended for hours at home, work, school, shopping, etc. Most people ignore things that aren't their problem. I got a call from a friend who locked their keys in the car. It was cold out, so they stayed in their friends house while I popped the door open. Of course, it was about midnight, in a less than desirable neighborhood. With a slim-jim, flashlight, and a pair of screwdrivers, I worked on it for about 5 minutes, got the door open, set the alarm off, and then shut the alarm down with their keys. I pocketed the keys, put my tools back in my car, and then called them out so they could leave. In a neighborhood where I'd expect to have a car stolen, no one said a word to me, even though several cars drove by, and I didn't make any attempt to hide what I was doing.
You also need to read up on "Castle Doctrine". In any case, if you shoot someone on your property, it will be heard by the courts. If you kill an officer of the law (who would presumably be installing the device), you're going to spend a long time in prison, possibly followed by your execution. Since you wrote it here, and I'd be willing to believe you've told friends and neighbors the same thing, it would become premeditated.
My state used to have the "duty to retreat" clause. Basically, if you had an option to avoid shooting someone, you must take that. For example, if someone is in your driveway, you can stay in the house, or retreat out the back door. If you opted to shoot him/her, then you are in violation and will be prosecuted. Thankfully, that part was repealed, after several cases showed justification even with the option to retreat. It does not justify shooting any trespasser in your yard though. You *must* be in direct threat of your life. You can't shoot a Jehovah's Witness at your front door, no matter how much you'd like to at 8am on a Saturday. :) I find the "Warning! Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again." sign, along with the accidental spill of costume blood one Halloween has been more than sufficient encouragement for people not to want to ring the doorbell.
Ideally, if they install one, they'll put it somewhere that you'll never see it. There are plenty of wonderful places to hide objects on cars. Ask any mechanic if they've ever lost a tool in a car. If they say "no", they haven't been doing the job very long, or they're lying. Those are just the places that things can fall to.
Most cars have plastic/rubber bumpers. Behind the bumper is some sort of material that will crush on impact. Some used hard plastic honeycomb pieces. Some use styrofoam. Those don't always fill all the space, which leaves nice gaps to hide things in.
I had to change my turn signal housings about a year ago. They were cracked. To remove them, the electric raise headlights had to be removed, and some other plastic removed. Only then could I see that there was a space on each side of the front of the car large enough to put a shoebox.
On a car with a grill, how many of you have looked behind the grill to see what may be lurking? I know most people don't. It gets warm there, but it also leaves a nice spot to leave something in plain sight.
For the power wires, that's not really very hard either. Slip the wire into an existing loom, or put an oem-ish one in.
I was helping a friend do some significant changes to the interior of his SUV. As we were pulling stuff out, we came across several boxes of unknown origin. I'm sure they were there since the truck was manufactured, but no one had seen them since. Who pulls the headliner, and all the interior trim parts out? Not too many people. We searched the part numbers, and found that they were indeed factory pieces, but they were for options that weren't included on this particular truck. Behind the radio and throughout the dash has many gaps that you'd never notice. I was installing GPS tracking devices for a fleet (perfectly legitimate, the owners and vehicle operators knew they were there). Most of them had spots that I could mount the oversized box in very nicely, and hide all the wiring away so you'd have a really tough time finding them. I could set up a private or commercial vehicle in about 15 minutes, but I was taking my time and doing everything right.
But, there are plenty of mystery boxes that you simply don't know exist, or you don't know what they do. In 2005, 65% of new passenger vehicles had EDR (Event Data Recorders), which store the last few seconds before an event (i.e., crash). 2006 on, it was suppose to be 100%. I haven't heard too many people asking "What's this box do?". They just accept that it's a piece of the car. In reading up on it, some vehicles may become disabled if it's removed. If people aren't finding or questioning this standard equipment, would they ever notice an extra piece? Probably not unless you duct taped it to the windshield with a note that said "This is a government tracking device, do not remove under penalty of law"
How well it's hidden directly relates to how long the person installing it believes they have, and how adept they are at getting around a security system. If you can disable the alarm and unlock the doors, in most driveways you'd have from 1am to 4am (climb inside, and work with the doors shut). Mounting it outside just adds visibility. Sure, you can put it on, but will a neighbor or passer by stop to find out why you're crawling around under the car in the middle of the night? Surely if a fed was doing it covertly, and the local police spotted him, it would ruin the covert part of the operation.
They've been working on that one. If you run a blurb of NYT stuff, they'll get pissy. Then they'll go after you, your money, search engines, and even the search engine caches. I've known people who have cited a single sentence fragment, and received nasty-grams.
These are nasty-gram someone I know received, via Google Adsense. There have been several over quite a few years. In these cases, compliance on their part happened within about 2 hours. Adsense left them without any ad revenue for weeks. Neither NYT nor Attributor commented that the result was to their satisfaction, nor were they able to even begin negotiations for the requested "license". Oh, and these complaints on behalf of the NYT were frequently regarding other unrelated (to the best of anyone's knowledge) publications.
They aren't about openness and inducing conversation about current topics. But please, come in, pay us, and be open. What if the readers don't trust the NYT to know who they are, so they can't leave open comments, because they are afraid of the repercussions?
That's no fun. We like applying imaginary technologies from stories we've made up.
It could be something else simple, like the planet has orbited to the far side of its star.
Hyperdense gravity well. Ya, that's a better one. Maybe a result from a hyperwarp drive malfunction while being chased by the Klingons. :)