My last girlfriend had chronic sinus problems for over two years; was told all sorts of things - it was a deviated septum, she had a virus that wouldn't go away, potential brain tumor, etc, etc. After about two years she developed a bad abscess in a tooth, and had to have it removed; the dentist pointed out on the xrays that the infection had been into her sinus cavity on that side for some time. Removing the tooth and a two week course of antibiotics cleared all her problems up in a few weeks, and they still have not returned after more than a year and half.
None of her doctors, apparently, could read the xrays properly. Seven doctors in two years, nearly twenty thousand dollars in medical bills.
The relevant part of all of this is that shortly after her problems became apparent, we did some research online and the best fit with her symptoms was a sinus cavity infection. Not one of those doctors listened to that, not one, and two of them derided doing our own research as stupid.
For that matter, I'd bet (not that anyone could collect on it) that assuming civ doesn't crash, some X number of years from now we will probably have beaten every disease or problem known to us now, and there will still be problems which will stymie even the best medical professionals.
The assumption that humans will eventually learn (and understand) everything about reality is pure hubris.
While I agree that it's unfair to make generalizations, I'll point out that the human body is many orders of magnitude more complicated than a bridge, or an automobile, or aircraft navigation, or even the global economy, and there are many, many things we still don't know about the interactions that occur within it.
While the rest of your points are good ones, many doctors are still making the best guess they can when they are confronted with a range of symptoms and test results that don't fit anything in their knowledge or experience. That's why getting second and even third opinions, especially when one has serious symptoms, is always a good idea.
I'd also like to point out that the engineers who design bridges don't yet know everything about how bridges react to stress (if they did, no bridge would ever fail); that auto mechanics (especially nowadays with the insanely complicated vehicle systems) can't always make a correct diagnosis the first time, and that airline navigation errors, even with modern instruments and the best training, still routinely occur.
In fifty or a hundred years it's likely that some doctors and many medical students will be wondering just how we managed to do what we are with our horridly primitive knowledge and tools. Short of a global crash of civilization our knowledge about how the human body works will continue to increase in a non-linear fashion for a very long time, just as it has been for the last half a millennia or so.
You can buy laser pointers for a buck or two at a lot of 'dollar' stores, now.
It escapes me how they make money on the things, considering that batteries for them are usually 2-3 bucks retail, but wth, the cats love'em;-) I have a couple dozen of the danged things in a box on a shelf in the closet, with shapes ranging from bullets to dicks to lipstick containers. Ah, the wonders of modern overseas manufacturing.
Yeah, having an actual space station, where humans live in space for long periods of time, and do things like construction (building the ISS), research wrt living conditions(learning about micrograv and it's effects on the human body) and much more, no, that doesn't teach us anything about space exploration, it's just a dick contest - against who, exactly? The ISS was planned before the Cold War,built after it was over, and now you are arguing against maintaining it because it's a dick waving contest against... who?
Post something constructive, otherwise shut the fuck up and get out of the way, asshat anon. I just can't BELIEVE the parent was modded insightful. I guess inflammatory rhetoric trumps reality and logic on slashdot, at least with some moderators. I know I certainly don't waste my moderator points on ignorant drivel like the parent posted.
If we don't have an active and funded unmanned space exploration mission, we can't do manned missions. Sending manned missions ahead without investigating the environment that people are going to have to deal with is tantamount to sending them on suicide missions.
It's not "either or" it's "do both at the same time" and if we spend too much on manned we won't have anything to spend on the unmanned that should precede them.
Of course we aren't spending enough on either, but that's because we have a lot of two and four year shortsighted idiots running our country. Reelection and quarterly profits are more important to them (and to many of the sheeples) than actually doing anything about the future is.
Who else is going to stomp on corporations that are abusing their power?
Other corporations? The "free market" *cough*
Is it easier for the masses to revolt against their corporate masters, or against their government masters?
Oh, wait, at this point in time, it'll be both of them...... but it won't happen, because most of the people in this country are either too fucking content with the garbage they get fed every day to care, or too politically polarized to actually remember that there are real problems.
We are pretty well fucked.
(To those who would say "well, run for public office" I say - get real. I don't throw myself into a tree mulcher, either, for the simple fact that I know it'll fuck me over, that's it's basic mode of operation. )
What do we replace it with?
DamnedifIknow, and I don't think anyone else does,either. But it is obvious that what we do have isn't working. I for one want to move offplanet; preferably way the hell offplanet, and there are many who share that view, for different reasons. So let's get off our asses and find a way to expand already...
1. We've never publicly delivered a KV from one device in orbit to another
There's a first time for everything. As I noted, it's certainly well within our capabilities. If we can put satellites into those orbits, and keep them there, we can certainly move them elsewhere. I'm pretty sure this has been done before.
2. Our guidance isn't designed to deal with targets that far out and our guidance doesn't cover the equator or range out to 23,000+ miles
Piffle. Are you trying to say that the military doesn't track all the geostat sats? I don't believe that for one second.
"Guidance" in this instance means that we are tracking what's out there and we correct the onboard systems with our data.
Neither of those two links seemed all that relevant; CD is old, and the other one has nothing to do with what we are talking about, that's coverage over the earth's curvature, remember.
Come on, now. I think I remember reading about military radars being used in the past to track close passes by NEAs; geostat sats would be a lot easier. Even if mil radars don't have that capability, which I don't believe for a nanosecond, Arecibo certainly does, and the area of sky it can scan includes all geostationary orbits. Arecibo has done surface mapping of NEAs, remember.
Asshole = corrupt, arrogant, and greedy
Asshat = incompetent, arrogant, and greedy
Asswad = damned difficult to work with no matter how good does job, but at least consistent
Assclown = fucks off at work too much
Assface = looks like a donkey's hind end
Note that a person can be both an asshole and an asshat, and occasionally an asswad, but it's unusual to find all of the first four attributes in any one person.
The last one, of course, is mostly an unfortunate combination of genetic tendencies, and can occur in combination with any of the above.
I believe what the GP was trying to say is that the ratio of charity money spent on research vs. awareness is badly skewed, and I agree with him. I've worked with enough charities to see just how many self-serving asshats there are in those organizations, especially in the administration levels.
I'm currently doing thirty hours or so a week as a core member of a local Salvation Army, and we are continually fighting against incompetence and corruption in the administration. We are in danger of having our store/family services building closed by the state and OSHA due to non-compliance with building codes and health regulations - not trivial stuff, either, and most of this is due to a regional church official who ignored the problems with the buildings for years - he is certainly incompetent, whether he is corrupt nobody can say at this point, although there is evidence that points to it. So I have some experience in this area. Like just about any other large organization, these problems exist.
Anyone out there looking for work, the Salvation Army really isn't that bad to work for, as a whole. The pay often sucks, and it can be an emotionally difficult job, but if you are desperate for work as I was after I got laid off just over a year ago, there are much worse jobs, and they are always short of competent help in every department. I glommed on to the job because I needed to have some reliable income; now ten months later I'm finding pride in it because there are so many people who thank you for helping - and believe it or not, if one works hard and is willing to put up with a lot of BS (like every other job) the raises do come.
Oh, and for the one or two out there who follow my postings here, yes, I am an outspoken atheist. They have no problem with that, as long as I don't make it a problem by being militant about it.
Not everybody gets cancer, or dies from it. There are a lot of other diseases or problems that humans are subject to that the drug companies develop and sell possible remedies for. While it might be true in your Dad's case, it's not necessarily going to be true for when applied across everyone.
I hope your Dad gets well, too. I just lost another friend (6 in four years now) to cancer a few months ago, and it still hurts. Best wishes for him and your family.
(I used to think that there weren't people out there so callous that they would not want a cure for cancer, or AIDS, etc, but given the recent economic fiascoes, I no longer believe that strongly...)
Humans are already causing what looks to be the second largest global mass extinction event in the planet's history (the Permian being the largest known). This is still just a blip in the data.
Anything that a human can think up, another human can reverse engineer. This will always be true.
There's always someone, or some group, smarter, or with more time or better tools. After all, it's likely they are building on your knowledge, or the knowledge you built your work on.
Dammit, that ought to be one of the basic laws of technology, right alongside Murphy's Laws. Maybe if it was as popular more people would understand it...
You are talking about the entire delivery system, including the launcher. I'm talking about just a KV with basic guidance and maneuverability.
Guidance we can do from the ground - either by signal tracking, if the satellite is still transmitting, or radar guidance from all those huge military radars.
In this particular case, since the ephemeris of the satellite is very well known and we can update tracking information literally within seconds, we could just send up a warhead package on a geostationary launcher* - that package would be much, much smaller than a geostationary commo satellite, maybe a hundred kg at the most - and almost literally dock it with the satellite, then detonate. Lots of time to work with as well, it's not like it's a military immediate need with a timeframe of hours instead of weeks.
No, I'm not a rocket scientist; but we already know how to precisely position satellites in geostat orbit, and have guidance systems that can deliver warheads to satellites that have enormous relative delta V, this is just using those same capabilities.
* we could even send it up as secondary payload with a geostat launch. Hell, from the military app end, we could send up geostat satellites that aren't, park them there until needed...
I fail to see why this is regarded as so difficult, from an engineering standpoint (the geo-political side is a whole different thing, nobody is going to like anyone else having the capability - which is ridiculous, the capability is already there... politicians aren't very bright about such things, in general)
We don't have a specifically-tasked anti-satellite system that can reach that orbit, no.
However, if we can deploy satellites up there, we can deploy anti-satellite systems up there. I don't imagine the rest of the world would be real happy if we did.
The radiation from the accretion disk would disassociate your molecular structure long before you got close enough for tidal effects to kill you, especially in a galactic-mass black hole;-)
The velocity the black hole is likely moving at isn't going to be a whole lot faster than that of it's surrounding medium, the scale is enormously greater. There probably is a bowshock, but we just can't see it from this distance with the instruments we have.
Also the bowshock is most likely radiating in the xray part of the spectrum.
The only real question I have about this is that the separation between the x-ray source and the center of the galaxy looks to be roughly about 3 arcseconds; the maximum angular resolution of Chandra is about half an arcsecond; it's possible that this could be a positioning error, although I'm sure they've already thought of that and independently verified the source's position.
Iridium is much more common in some types of asteroids than it is in the Earth's crust, as it is very dense and most of it has ended up in the mantle. Asteroids aren't generally as differentiated.
If we need iridium badly enough we can get it. At $13k/kg it's probably not expensive enough for that sort of investment (although iridium would be only one of the elements we could mine) but as it becomes rarer, and demand goes up - there are a lot of other applications - mining it from near earth orbit asteroids could become profitable.
There are likely to be NEAs with compositions similar to Earth's, as some percentage of them would have formed in the same part of the solar system as Earth did. The metals inside them will be easier to get at than the ones that have cycled into the Earth's mantle...
The universe is philosophically incoherent. You are just a meatbag on an insignificant planet orbiting an insignificant sun in an insignificant galaxy, perhaps in another insignificant universe.
There are an infinite number of infinitely more intelligent beings out there, living on infinitely more life bearing planets, and an infinite number of those beings are capable of having the same damned idea that you just did. At any point in time, it's likely that at least a few of them have had the same infinitely improbable thought that you just did; and some infinitesimal fraction of those may have had noses, and some infinitesimal fraction of those beings may have had noses that bled, and some fraction of those had bleeding noses because they were trying to contemplate infinity.
It's a good bet, however, that a large fraction of them just don't give a shit.
Which means we have no idea, really, what is happening "now".;-) We can extrapolate...
Also, our inability to look past a certain redshift means we can't observe past a certain distance - JW telescope will likely reveal even deeper galaxies, with star formation, etc. If we find deeper galaxies with "modern" star formation, beyond what we think was possible after the big bang, does that mean that our theories about the big bang are wrong, or that the hubble constant needs to be revised again, or maybe what we are seeing is just a "local" phenomenon? (Great Attractor; it's either invisible, or very far away, and very old) (Dark Matter - maybe the universe is a lot larger than we think it is...)
Fascinating, ain't it? I'm just an amateur astronomer, but I do try and keep up. It bothers me that we're still sticking with the same theories that made sense more than half a century ago (with revisions), although there are aspects of the evidence that point to greater things. Could the Pioneer Anomaly and related phenomenon be explained if the universe has infinite mass, but is infinitely large? (Replace all instances of infinite with indefinite...)
Hey , just having fun... just because we've figured out some obvious local phenomenon, doesn't mean we know everything...
SB (who suspects that the big bang might have been a "local"phenomenon - it would explain much. Just because we can't imagine an infinite universe doesn't mean that it doesn't exist... no, can't do the math, but when it comes to theories of everything, there are an indefinite number of theories utilizing the same or more obtuse math, so... meh, this makes my head hurt. )
Spraying water a few thousand feet into the air is not going to lead to any significant increase in cloud formation, not on any scale that would matter more than in the very specific locality the spraying is being done in, and probably not even there, either, unless it was a arid location. Not even if we were doing it on a really massive scale. A few thousand feet? Come on... it's all going to just fall back to the ground, it's not going to form any clouds. Who were these assholes?
He just got screwed - out of a pretty small sum of money, true, but still screwed.
I hope he takes that "company" to court and wins back his money. Of course the lawyer's fees for the court case will likely cost a lot more than what he invested in the first place.
I'm not sure how Linux would help there at all. You do know that you can download and install rootkits for Linux too, right?
Yeah, you have to call a terminal, and chmod +x them first.
The average user will do that as a matter of course. Lots easier than clicking on a couple windows that ask them whether they want to run the file they have just downloaded, or display it in a terminal./sarcasm
I am not aware of any linux screensavers that anyone can download and just install, without at least some sort of shenanigans alongst the same lines as what I said above. I do know that no screensaver for the X windows system, no matter what variant, no matter how well it's written (save perhaps some undiscovered vulns) can damage the root system of a linux install. Perhaps you'd like to enlighten us in that respect?
Even if linux users did so, it's not likely that any malware they download will do any damage to anything but what's in userland. If they are being smart about backups, that is not a big deal (if they aren't, they'll get bit anyway).
I might be guessing here, but I suspect that you have never really used a linux variant desktop operating system for any length of time.
"End result: they're still pwnded."
Then write your own user and asshat proof operating system. Or shut the fuck up. Some of us are too busy trying to deal with the decades old consequences of Windows, and contribute to the security of both Windows and Linux, to give much of a fuck about your opinions about things that you obviously don't know jack shit about. You yak on about the social attack user side, but seem to know little about the security models of other operating systems.
I have a clue for you. Anything that one human being comes up with, can be reverse engineered by another human being.
Start thinking that way. There is no such thing as 100% security, making it harder will always be the goal.
In the long run, every form of security is fucked. But that doesn't mean we should play favorites.
System access gives you the ability to hide your running processes from userland scans and deletion of your running files and boot hooks.
There are very few - if any (correct me if I'm wrong, please, with details, if those details are informative enough I'll even pay for the knowledge!) antivirus or antimalware programs that can detect and reliably remove rootkits. I certainly haven't found any that can do so, that's why I rely on combofix, the tdss variant removers, gmer, my intuition, and other tools to remove persistent infections from the increasing number of rootkit infected systems I deal with all the time as an independent home computer technician.
Userland malware isn't the real problem, anymore - most antivirus and antimalware programs can deal with that ( and I agree that most end users don't know to run it, even if they would know what to run, sadly, this is another of the bad things about Microsoft, education of end users as to the problems they will face, but Windows Defender, etc, hell, that's a whole nother topic) the real problem nowadays that I'm seeing much more of is rootkits that keep the spambot/malware alive, regenerates it when you kill it thru other methods.
I have a pretty good toolkit, and enough knowledge, at this point to wipe this crap out on every system I encounter; but I know that it's going to get a lot worse. I already spend about thirty hours a week just trying to keep up on the latest removal tools after seeing a system last week with more than four rootkits on it, in addition to much other crap. (Cleaned it, to the best of my knowledge)
What got me, this year, is that for the first time since Klez I had one of my home systems infected. It was a TDSS variant (probably thru a driveby ad, near as I can tell), got it removed, but even tho I've been doing tech support since before Windows existed; couldn't trace the source of the infection back as well as I want to. Since then I've seen a lot of other attacks being tried, some of which failed on my system because they were executing invalid instructions (experimentation, I imagine); I know it's getting bad out there. I'm careful past the point of paranoia with my home systems.
I have customers who rely on me to keep their systems clean. I have to tell them that I can't be one hundred percent certain that I can guarantee they will be free of crap. Some of them I migrate to linux, Ubuntu or Fedora, if it works for them. I know there aren't any solid solutions, but when I see an article like this, I just have to say that I think the real problem is Microsoft's operating system.
I should probably make this a slashdot Question. Busy...;) and speaking of busy, I have three systems on the bench tonite I am paying lip service too...
Slashdot Mirror
My last girlfriend had chronic sinus problems for over two years; was told all sorts of things - it was a deviated septum, she had a virus that wouldn't go away, potential brain tumor, etc, etc. After about two years she developed a bad abscess in a tooth, and had to have it removed; the dentist pointed out on the xrays that the infection had been into her sinus cavity on that side for some time. Removing the tooth and a two week course of antibiotics cleared all her problems up in a few weeks, and they still have not returned after more than a year and half.
None of her doctors, apparently, could read the xrays properly. Seven doctors in two years, nearly twenty thousand dollars in medical bills.
The relevant part of all of this is that shortly after her problems became apparent, we did some research online and the best fit with her symptoms was a sinus cavity infection. Not one of those doctors listened to that, not one, and two of them derided doing our own research as stupid.
SB
For that matter, I'd bet (not that anyone could collect on it) that assuming civ doesn't crash, some X number of years from now we will probably have beaten every disease or problem known to us now, and there will still be problems which will stymie even the best medical professionals.
The assumption that humans will eventually learn (and understand) everything about reality is pure hubris.
SB
While I agree that it's unfair to make generalizations, I'll point out that the human body is many orders of magnitude more complicated than a bridge, or an automobile, or aircraft navigation, or even the global economy, and there are many, many things we still don't know about the interactions that occur within it.
While the rest of your points are good ones, many doctors are still making the best guess they can when they are confronted with a range of symptoms and test results that don't fit anything in their knowledge or experience. That's why getting second and even third opinions, especially when one has serious symptoms, is always a good idea.
I'd also like to point out that the engineers who design bridges don't yet know everything about how bridges react to stress (if they did, no bridge would ever fail); that auto mechanics (especially nowadays with the insanely complicated vehicle systems) can't always make a correct diagnosis the first time, and that airline navigation errors, even with modern instruments and the best training, still routinely occur.
In fifty or a hundred years it's likely that some doctors and many medical students will be wondering just how we managed to do what we are with our horridly primitive knowledge and tools. Short of a global crash of civilization our knowledge about how the human body works will continue to increase in a non-linear fashion for a very long time, just as it has been for the last half a millennia or so.
SB
Not only that, but easy access to medical information at least encourages average people to learn something about medicine.
SB
You can buy laser pointers for a buck or two at a lot of 'dollar' stores, now.
It escapes me how they make money on the things, considering that batteries for them are usually 2-3 bucks retail, but wth, the cats love'em ;-) I have a couple dozen of the danged things in a box on a shelf in the closet, with shapes ranging from bullets to dicks to lipstick containers. Ah, the wonders of modern overseas manufacturing.
SB
Yeah, having an actual space station, where humans live in space for long periods of time, and do things like construction (building the ISS), research wrt living conditions(learning about micrograv and it's effects on the human body) and much more, no, that doesn't teach us anything about space exploration, it's just a dick contest - against who, exactly? The ISS was planned before the Cold War,built after it was over, and now you are arguing against maintaining it because it's a dick waving contest against... who?
Post something constructive, otherwise shut the fuck up and get out of the way, asshat anon. I just can't BELIEVE the parent was modded insightful. I guess inflammatory rhetoric trumps reality and logic on slashdot, at least with some moderators. I know I certainly don't waste my moderator points on ignorant drivel like the parent posted.
SB
If we don't have an active and funded unmanned space exploration mission, we can't do manned missions. Sending manned missions ahead without investigating the environment that people are going to have to deal with is tantamount to sending them on suicide missions.
It's not "either or" it's "do both at the same time" and if we spend too much on manned we won't have anything to spend on the unmanned that should precede them.
Of course we aren't spending enough on either, but that's because we have a lot of two and four year shortsighted idiots running our country. Reelection and quarterly profits are more important to them (and to many of the sheeples) than actually doing anything about the future is.
SB
Who else is going to stomp on corporations that are abusing their power?
Other corporations? The "free market" *cough*
Is it easier for the masses to revolt against their corporate masters, or against their government masters?
Oh, wait, at this point in time, it'll be both of them... ... but it won't happen, because most of the people in this country are either too fucking content with the garbage they get fed every day to care, or too politically polarized to actually remember that there are real problems.
We are pretty well fucked.
(To those who would say "well, run for public office" I say - get real. I don't throw myself into a tree mulcher, either, for the simple fact that I know it'll fuck me over, that's it's basic mode of operation. )
What do we replace it with?
DamnedifIknow, and I don't think anyone else does,either. But it is obvious that what we do have isn't working. I for one want to move offplanet; preferably way the hell offplanet, and there are many who share that view, for different reasons. So let's get off our asses and find a way to expand already...
SB
1. We've never publicly delivered a KV from one device in orbit to another
There's a first time for everything. As I noted, it's certainly well within our capabilities. If we can put satellites into those orbits, and keep them there, we can certainly move them elsewhere. I'm pretty sure this has been done before.
2. Our guidance isn't designed to deal with targets that far out and our guidance doesn't cover the equator or range out to 23,000+ miles
Piffle. Are you trying to say that the military doesn't track all the geostat sats? I don't believe that for one second.
"Guidance" in this instance means that we are tracking what's out there and we correct the onboard systems with our data.
Neither of those two links seemed all that relevant; CD is old, and the other one has nothing to do with what we are talking about, that's coverage over the earth's curvature, remember.
Come on, now. I think I remember reading about military radars being used in the past to track close passes by NEAs; geostat sats would be a lot easier. Even if mil radars don't have that capability, which I don't believe for a nanosecond, Arecibo certainly does, and the area of sky it can scan includes all geostationary orbits. Arecibo has done surface mapping of NEAs, remember.
Cheers,
SB
Heh. I'll take a stab at that:
Asshole = corrupt, arrogant, and greedy
Asshat = incompetent, arrogant, and greedy
Asswad = damned difficult to work with no matter how good does job, but at least consistent
Assclown = fucks off at work too much
Assface = looks like a donkey's hind end
Note that a person can be both an asshole and an asshat, and occasionally an asswad, but it's unusual to find all of the first four attributes in any one person.
The last one, of course, is mostly an unfortunate combination of genetic tendencies, and can occur in combination with any of the above.
SB
I believe what the GP was trying to say is that the ratio of charity money spent on research vs. awareness is badly skewed, and I agree with him. I've worked with enough charities to see just how many self-serving asshats there are in those organizations, especially in the administration levels.
I'm currently doing thirty hours or so a week as a core member of a local Salvation Army, and we are continually fighting against incompetence and corruption in the administration. We are in danger of having our store/family services building closed by the state and OSHA due to non-compliance with building codes and health regulations - not trivial stuff, either, and most of this is due to a regional church official who ignored the problems with the buildings for years - he is certainly incompetent, whether he is corrupt nobody can say at this point, although there is evidence that points to it. So I have some experience in this area. Like just about any other large organization, these problems exist.
Anyone out there looking for work, the Salvation Army really isn't that bad to work for, as a whole. The pay often sucks, and it can be an emotionally difficult job, but if you are desperate for work as I was after I got laid off just over a year ago, there are much worse jobs, and they are always short of competent help in every department. I glommed on to the job because I needed to have some reliable income; now ten months later I'm finding pride in it because there are so many people who thank you for helping - and believe it or not, if one works hard and is willing to put up with a lot of BS (like every other job) the raises do come.
Oh, and for the one or two out there who follow my postings here, yes, I am an outspoken atheist. They have no problem with that, as long as I don't make it a problem by being militant about it.
SB
Not everybody gets cancer, or dies from it. There are a lot of other diseases or problems that humans are subject to that the drug companies develop and sell possible remedies for. While it might be true in your Dad's case, it's not necessarily going to be true for when applied across everyone.
I hope your Dad gets well, too. I just lost another friend (6 in four years now) to cancer a few months ago, and it still hurts. Best wishes for him and your family.
(I used to think that there weren't people out there so callous that they would not want a cure for cancer, or AIDS, etc, but given the recent economic fiascoes, I no longer believe that strongly...)
SB
Humans are already causing what looks to be the second largest global mass extinction event in the planet's history (the Permian being the largest known). This is still just a blip in the data.
SB
That sounds like something that insurance companies lobbied for.
SB
Anything that a human can think up, another human can reverse engineer. This will always be true.
There's always someone, or some group, smarter, or with more time or better tools. After all, it's likely they are building on your knowledge, or the knowledge you built your work on.
Dammit, that ought to be one of the basic laws of technology, right alongside Murphy's Laws. Maybe if it was as popular more people would understand it...
SB
You are talking about the entire delivery system, including the launcher. I'm talking about just a KV with basic guidance and maneuverability.
Guidance we can do from the ground - either by signal tracking, if the satellite is still transmitting, or radar guidance from all those huge military radars.
In this particular case, since the ephemeris of the satellite is very well known and we can update tracking information literally within seconds, we could just send up a warhead package on a geostationary launcher* - that package would be much, much smaller than a geostationary commo satellite, maybe a hundred kg at the most - and almost literally dock it with the satellite, then detonate. Lots of time to work with as well, it's not like it's a military immediate need with a timeframe of hours instead of weeks.
No, I'm not a rocket scientist; but we already know how to precisely position satellites in geostat orbit, and have guidance systems that can deliver warheads to satellites that have enormous relative delta V, this is just using those same capabilities.
* we could even send it up as secondary payload with a geostat launch. Hell, from the military app end, we could send up geostat satellites that aren't, park them there until needed...
I fail to see why this is regarded as so difficult, from an engineering standpoint (the geo-political side is a whole different thing, nobody is going to like anyone else having the capability - which is ridiculous, the capability is already there... politicians aren't very bright about such things, in general)
SB
We don't have a specifically-tasked anti-satellite system that can reach that orbit, no.
However, if we can deploy satellites up there, we can deploy anti-satellite systems up there. I don't imagine the rest of the world would be real happy if we did.
SB
The radiation from the accretion disk would disassociate your molecular structure long before you got close enough for tidal effects to kill you, especially in a galactic-mass black hole ;-)
SB
The velocity the black hole is likely moving at isn't going to be a whole lot faster than that of it's surrounding medium, the scale is enormously greater. There probably is a bowshock, but we just can't see it from this distance with the instruments we have.
Also the bowshock is most likely radiating in the xray part of the spectrum.
The only real question I have about this is that the separation between the x-ray source and the center of the galaxy looks to be roughly about 3 arcseconds; the maximum angular resolution of Chandra is about half an arcsecond; it's possible that this could be a positioning error, although I'm sure they've already thought of that and independently verified the source's position.
SB
Iridium is much more common in some types of asteroids than it is in the Earth's crust, as it is very dense and most of it has ended up in the mantle. Asteroids aren't generally as differentiated.
If we need iridium badly enough we can get it. At $13k/kg it's probably not expensive enough for that sort of investment (although iridium would be only one of the elements we could mine) but as it becomes rarer, and demand goes up - there are a lot of other applications - mining it from near earth orbit asteroids could become profitable.
There are likely to be NEAs with compositions similar to Earth's, as some percentage of them would have formed in the same part of the solar system as Earth did. The metals inside them will be easier to get at than the ones that have cycled into the Earth's mantle...
SB
Look at it this way:
The universe is philosophically incoherent. You are just a meatbag on an insignificant planet orbiting an insignificant sun in an insignificant galaxy, perhaps in another insignificant universe.
There are an infinite number of infinitely more intelligent beings out there, living on infinitely more life bearing planets, and an infinite number of those beings are capable of having the same damned idea that you just did. At any point in time, it's likely that at least a few of them have had the same infinitely improbable thought that you just did; and some infinitesimal fraction of those may have had noses, and some infinitesimal fraction of those beings may have had noses that bled, and some fraction of those had bleeding noses because they were trying to contemplate infinity.
It's a good bet, however, that a large fraction of them just don't give a shit.
SB
Which means we have no idea, really, what is happening "now". ;-) We can extrapolate...
Also, our inability to look past a certain redshift means we can't observe past a certain distance - JW telescope will likely reveal even deeper galaxies, with star formation, etc. If we find deeper galaxies with "modern" star formation, beyond what we think was possible after the big bang, does that mean that our theories about the big bang are wrong, or that the hubble constant needs to be revised again, or maybe what we are seeing is just a "local" phenomenon? (Great Attractor; it's either invisible, or very far away, and very old) (Dark Matter - maybe the universe is a lot larger than we think it is...)
Fascinating, ain't it? I'm just an amateur astronomer, but I do try and keep up. It bothers me that we're still sticking with the same theories that made sense more than half a century ago (with revisions), although there are aspects of the evidence that point to greater things. Could the Pioneer Anomaly and related phenomenon be explained if the universe has infinite mass, but is infinitely large? (Replace all instances of infinite with indefinite...)
Hey , just having fun... just because we've figured out some obvious local phenomenon, doesn't mean we know everything...
SB (who suspects that the big bang might have been a "local"phenomenon - it would explain much. Just because we can't imagine an infinite universe doesn't mean that it doesn't exist... no, can't do the math, but when it comes to theories of everything, there are an indefinite number of theories utilizing the same or more obtuse math, so... meh, this makes my head hurt. )
Gates ought to ask for his $paltrysum back.
Spraying water a few thousand feet into the air is not going to lead to any significant increase in cloud formation, not on any scale that would matter more than in the very specific locality the spraying is being done in, and probably not even there, either, unless it was a arid location. Not even if we were doing it on a really massive scale. A few thousand feet? Come on... it's all going to just fall back to the ground, it's not going to form any clouds. Who were these assholes?
He just got screwed - out of a pretty small sum of money, true, but still screwed.
I hope he takes that "company" to court and wins back his money. Of course the lawyer's fees for the court case will likely cost a lot more than what he invested in the first place.
SB
I'm not sure how Linux would help there at all. You do know that you can download and install rootkits for Linux too, right?
Yeah, you have to call a terminal, and chmod +x them first.
The average user will do that as a matter of course. Lots easier than clicking on a couple windows that ask them whether they want to run the file they have just downloaded, or display it in a terminal. /sarcasm
I am not aware of any linux screensavers that anyone can download and just install, without at least some sort of shenanigans alongst the same lines as what I said above. I do know that no screensaver for the X windows system, no matter what variant, no matter how well it's written (save perhaps some undiscovered vulns) can damage the root system of a linux install. Perhaps you'd like to enlighten us in that respect?
Even if linux users did so, it's not likely that any malware they download will do any damage to anything but what's in userland. If they are being smart about backups, that is not a big deal (if they aren't, they'll get bit anyway).
I might be guessing here, but I suspect that you have never really used a linux variant desktop operating system for any length of time.
"End result: they're still pwnded."
Then write your own user and asshat proof operating system. Or shut the fuck up. Some of us are too busy trying to deal with the decades old consequences of Windows, and contribute to the security of both Windows and Linux, to give much of a fuck about your opinions about things that you obviously don't know jack shit about. You yak on about the social attack user side, but seem to know little about the security models of other operating systems.
I have a clue for you. Anything that one human being comes up with, can be reverse engineered by another human being.
Start thinking that way. There is no such thing as 100% security, making it harder will always be the goal.
In the long run, every form of security is fucked. But that doesn't mean we should play favorites.
SB
System access gives you the ability to hide your running processes from userland scans and deletion of your running files and boot hooks.
There are very few - if any (correct me if I'm wrong, please, with details, if those details are informative enough I'll even pay for the knowledge!) antivirus or antimalware programs that can detect and reliably remove rootkits. I certainly haven't found any that can do so, that's why I rely on combofix, the tdss variant removers, gmer, my intuition, and other tools to remove persistent infections from the increasing number of rootkit infected systems I deal with all the time as an independent home computer technician.
Userland malware isn't the real problem, anymore - most antivirus and antimalware programs can deal with that ( and I agree that most end users don't know to run it, even if they would know what to run, sadly, this is another of the bad things about Microsoft, education of end users as to the problems they will face, but Windows Defender, etc, hell, that's a whole nother topic) the real problem nowadays that I'm seeing much more of is rootkits that keep the spambot/malware alive, regenerates it when you kill it thru other methods.
I have a pretty good toolkit, and enough knowledge, at this point to wipe this crap out on every system I encounter; but I know that it's going to get a lot worse. I already spend about thirty hours a week just trying to keep up on the latest removal tools after seeing a system last week with more than four rootkits on it, in addition to much other crap. (Cleaned it, to the best of my knowledge)
What got me, this year, is that for the first time since Klez I had one of my home systems infected. It was a TDSS variant (probably thru a driveby ad, near as I can tell), got it removed, but even tho I've been doing tech support since before Windows existed; couldn't trace the source of the infection back as well as I want to. Since then I've seen a lot of other attacks being tried, some of which failed on my system because they were executing invalid instructions (experimentation, I imagine); I know it's getting bad out there. I'm careful past the point of paranoia with my home systems.
I have customers who rely on me to keep their systems clean. I have to tell them that I can't be one hundred percent certain that I can guarantee they will be free of crap. Some of them I migrate to linux, Ubuntu or Fedora, if it works for them. I know there aren't any solid solutions, but when I see an article like this, I just have to say that I think the real problem is Microsoft's operating system.
I should probably make this a slashdot Question. Busy... ;) and speaking of busy, I have three systems on the bench tonite I am paying lip service too...
SB