Both you and your parent poster are correct, but you will tend to be completely at odds with one another. Are you both willing to identify and compromise?
If SS keeps going the way it is, the parent poster will probably live about as long as his mandated working life, given how the retirement age is rising. Hence, the share of the populace who will receive their retirement will shrink.
If we turn SS off now, people like your g'ma will be deluged by personal bankruptcy.
While parent poster's generation is being forced to die out of SS, your g'ma is facing that wonderful "free market" health care that is a root problem in its expense.
Other than those costs, perhaps we can explore weaning people off SS at the early age. Firstly, we can turn off all SS's "welfare" provisions (i.e. stuff like paying benefits to non-retirees). Then we can start removing 18yr-olds from the system... they don't pay in, and can't participate.
SS is a mess. We got ourselves into it humanely and slowly, and we can get ourselves out of it the same way.
Re:"The revolution will not be televised."
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 1
In one sense, no. A simplified UI can be a very functional UI.
In another sense, hell yes. I've run myself in circles following Windows procedures that are essentially workarounds for highly restrictive GUIs. They should have made the stuff with less bells+whistles and thought more about how people need to use the software. Just today I struggled to point out to a user how to make their own mailing list in Outlook. It took too many steps... because each step had too many options to consider, leading to a terribly cluttered series of dialog boxes which confused the holy bejesus out of the user. It's not their fault; it's Microsoft's.
Like I say nowadays: Windows XP is exactly what we needed... 6 years ago.
Linux is the poster child of how you know something's important by its absence in textbooks.
On a similar topic, my so-called company has railroaded us all into online "eLearning", which is just management-speak for Microsoft-drenched how-to propaganda. I started some of these courses, then quit in disgust. Any fool can follow a list of instructions on how to do something in Windows 2000 Server. Where's the beef?
I'll leave the eLearning and other "authorized" IT knowledge paths to the unwashed masses. In the meantime, I must prepare for the glorious day when some company is looking for a Linux guy and finds one in me. Then it'll be time to talk salary.
I heap blame on user and tool, both being necessary elements for the bad events which follow. Which is why we lock up guns in a home where children reside.
If the middle class wants a future, it should stop acting like it is the upper class. It should revert to the sensibilities of "reduce, reuse, recycle" and "make it last, use it up, wear it out", instead of buying stupid shit on credit and then throwing it all out when maintenance or repair is required.
Elbert Hubbard's definition of "capitalist" was the best I'd ever seen: a man with savings and a home. From that basis, I speculate that sustainable Capitalism is just a by-product. The savings/home are also by-products of all the qualities I outlined above.
Of course, with massive and irresponsible consumerism, America doesn't want that kind of thing. It wants wage slavery as long as it delivers the goods. People have come to accept that both parents have to work in order to afford their false affluence. They are coming to accept they will never "own" a home, or will live in apartments all their lives. They are coming to accept that there is no such thing as a career anymore, and that benefits are the province of the executive set only. I'm quite sure that they will tolerate further degradation... like child labor, no retirement, and gasoline rationing. We have quite some distance to fall yet.
Granted. I only glossed that over due to a critical implication. One implied thing that changed for these types of folks is a remarkable loss of social consciousness. Spreadsheets and other such financial tools have only given them more power with less responsibility.
I tell ya, it's getting bad where I live. Our BBB is bringing up things like "fairness" and "balance" to local businessmen, and they are being met with actual cursing and threats. This is not a recipe for social stability. We can't all make a mil, stuff it into a Bahamanian account, and live like a king for the rest of our lives.
Careful with your metaphors, Roscoe:
I've noticed that with hammers, people do NOT tend to wander around bashing things with them.
I can't say the same about spreadsheets; those tools are definitely in the hands of people who have destroyed a good deal of America already, and they are just working up steam for the next round of social destruction.
Or perhaps your job hasn't been outsourced yet just so some ss line shows 3.4% more this year than before.
Ss are a wonderful invention under the reasoning I put forth in my posting.
That is undeniable.
But like nukes, they can cause a great deal of destruction -- they should be used and understood with much more care than being currently exhibited.
That's all I said... and you should perhaps stop treating tech like some sort of fucking Holy Grail.
>>"Lots of rudeness and Hate (A house for sale near Boston was set on fire by White neighbors when they discovered the people buying it were Black)"
>
>Nice anecdote -- I'm sure nothing like that has ever happened anywhere else. Never any race riots in CA, always in MA, right?
Roger that. I thought that people were a bit standoffish in MA... but when I returned to OH (yeah, yeah -- a stupid move, I know) I learned exactly what spite and malice was all about. If you are really looking for fine examples of dumb viciousness, go to OHIO. If you're in Mass., then consider yourself lucky. (Disclaimer: This excludes Southie, "Deathchester", "Stab-and-Kill", "Ruckusbury" and of course "Murderpan".)
As an ardent gun owner, I understand that that's a likely statistic. But I can't deny that gun violence makes the meek equally ardent about banning guns. Hence, "social problems". I often propose regulation as a means of compromise.
I catch flack each and every time I say that, but I still think it's true.
The ss has some serious advantages. In an environment of increasing number density and decreasing personal involvement, the need to have a comprehesive tool for data analysis could only have given birth to the spreadsheet. We could talk all day about how handy the ss is for many of the tasks in this environment.
But the space between the substance is what concerns me. Ss have allowed us to max/min too many things without much regard for the things that are undefined and necessarily intangible, but are still entangled in the matter itself. No corporate ss takes into account the costs of pollution, unemployment and general social degradation due to uncontrolled greed.
Like handguns, ss have brought us significant personal power at the cost of a good many social problems. Hence, they seem to require more careful handling and regulation. One aspect to this is training, and in general ethics training is a good place to start. (The BBB in my area is attempting to emphasize this, but they are meeting stiff resistance from the business community.)
Ss should be used with care, and their results are suspect anyway. That's the least message I've tried to convey for years.
Oh, yeh, riiight. Raise THAT little issue. You and your damned deductive reasoning!
On the serious side, I'm finding too many people (who additionally should know better) that don't see much point to space transportation systems since they feel there's "nowhere to go". They think there's nowhere to go since there's nothing Earthlike waiting for us within lightyears.
Hence, terraforming.
Start lobbing those comets at Mars, and they will come.
Hearing the press releases from MS, I can only assume that they are taking a trade position on this... meaning, their words are part of an appeal to the State Department to get involved and smooth things over. In short, they intend to have the US gov convince the EU gov to back off. Companies of that size have the influence to make it happen.
Thank you for the information. There are advantages, but I don't claim to know all the details of those.
As for iron... it's not as sexy as titanium, and is likely not to form the structure of a spacecraft, but if you can mfg it by the long ton, it's perfectly fine for Lunar and orbital structures. You can launch it off the Lunar surface by linear accelerators (again, powered by all that solar energy that the Moon offers) and put ton after ton into LEO for construction. In fact, with the Lunar launchers, you could put whatever you what from the Moon anywhere into Cislunar space. (And with long enough ones, you can perform "ballistic" launches to anywhere in the Solar System. Luna could be the primary Human launch platform.)
Luna's ore fraction of silicon offers exciting possibilities for producing a bootstrapping of power structures. Which is why I'm not worried about power on the Moon. I figure that the worst that could happen is that without many volatiles, a low-efficiency version solar cell could be produced, and square mile after square mile of them dumped onto the Lunar surface, connected up to many, many miles of aluminum wire. Who cares how much space it takes up? The Moon's surface is a desert anyway.
More on the point of what you said, the fine will tell investors that fining the company is possible -- even likely -- and has relatively harsh consequences upon equity. Hence, in the right circumstances, a fine as small as US$10 million could crash Microsoft's stock 5%... erasing billions in stock value.
Not that I care about the economy-destroying stock speculators, mind you.
Titanium and aluminum are found in vast quantities in some areas in the form of ores that, while not the preferred source on earth, are still quite usable.
Look up the composition of the Lunar regolith sometime. Aluminum, oxygen, silicon, iron, calcium, titanium, then onto trace elements.
Regolith is finely-pulverized material. As far as ores go, this is good stuff since all the crushing you'd ever want has already been done by billions of years of bombardment.
But I don't expect any of that to come back to Earth. I expect it to make it as low as LEO for construction efforts. You'd have to arrive at a serious shortage of ore on Earth to start needing processed metals from 250K miles away.
Because people don't eat "over the long term" -- they eat 3 times a day. If we are to be truly civilized, then perhaps we should come up with a social machine that doesn't run on Human blood, misery, forfeiture, evictions, bankruptcy and divorce.
I abide by the sustainable definition of Capitalism: an economy in which skilled men have savings and homes. (A definition lifted essentially straight out of the writings of Elbert Hubbard.) All other productive activity can be fallout from that state. Men with skills, savings and homes are marked entrepreneurs.
In your example, bringing in $1 billion yearly may not please the analysts, but when you take that billion dollars to buy equipment, hire people and to sell some product, you find that your money's as green as anyone else's. A billion stagnant dollars buys as much as a billion growth dollars.
The "Capitalism" of unsustainability needs to die off, before we start making people die off in great numbers instead.
For many OSS proponents, it's not religious zeal. It's JOY... joy over finally having a critical alternative to closed-source AND proprietary systems.
The world is attempting to wake up from the Microsoft Age -- the Nightmare, the Dark Ages of Information -- which have been filled with secrecy, hidden potholes and vast mistrust. DRM is coming like a chariot being whipped by Microsoft and media corporations, and it frankly hates you, the common man. It's coming to turn your computer into a television set (and if I have to explain to you what's so horrible about TV, then you're intellectually lost).
Some OSS repository in one state government is not hurting you at all. I'm sure Mass. has plenty of Microsoft, Oracle, etc. licences floating around. Now they have more choices. More alternatives. And this kind of thing is quite beneficial; after all, your government should be able to make data without having it held for ransom by a proprietary and closed provider.
I'm warning you now. If you reside in willful ignorance long enough, you become STUPID. Is that what you really wanted in your life?
Re:Yes, yes, yes, Apple's dying, blah blah blah
on
Why iPod Can't Save Apple
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Roger that. Only in America can we judge that a company selling a profitable product is a non-viable entity. This only means that we are used to Wall Street declaring a company dead if they made 6% this year instead of the 9% that their analysts predicted.
I'm sure that Steve Jobs wallpapers his office with all of the predictions of Apple's demise. If we keep going like that, we'll give him enough to wallpaper all of Apple's offices.
380Kt? Wow, I was off by an order of magnitude. Shit.
EMP is an electromagnetic event. I'm not exactly sure, but it is a natural byproduct of a thermonuclear explosion where a lot of radiation is produced (and EM is radiation).
I'd expect something similar from an asteroidal explosion, since the plasma of the re-entry (why do I call it "re" entry since it never was in the atmosphere the first time?... "entry") produces electromagnetic energy. Recall that the re-entry plasma envelope has always been a signal blocker to ships returning from space (and only recently that satellites have been used to get signals to the Shuttle from the rear where the envelope is essentially open).
But at best, entry plasma produces weak EMism. Like lightning, meteors produce EM pulses... they are just far weaker. People have even come up with a transmission methodology that capitalizes on the intermittent small meteors that happen in the sky all the time... they make use of the plasma trails, envelopes and explosion plumes. The signals bounce from these in over-the-horizon shots.
I can see that the EMP of even a 1000ft (Tunguska sized?) asteroid entry is nothing to worry about.
I'd say EMP detection is one way to determine if a large atmospheric explosion was due to cosmic material. That, and residual radioactivity readings around the area.
Look at the facts and deduce your answer. I didn't have time to googleconfirm any of this, so I assume the risks of some numerical errors.
Man-made objects that come down are very light, hollow and fairly slow. Asteroids and comets are guaranteed to be the opposite.
Asteroids are 2 different types: metallic, stony and finally "carbonaceous chondrite". The metallic are essentially chunks of nickel-iron. The stony are just rock. And the CC types are rocky but composed significantly of some ices and other nearly-organic material.
(Comets are mostly icy material with some rocky inclusions... there may even be a small core, or it may end up being a rubble pile after most of the ices burn away. The 1908 Tunguska event was probably a small comet, which exploded in the strato- or tropo-sphere. Still, it caused enormous damage in a vast ellipse over Siberia.)
Knowing these things, we can perhaps make some deductions.
A 100ft object of asteroidal material (often compacted rubble) probably weighs at most 120LB per cubic foot. I say this since 150LB/ft3 is a good rule of thumb for any rock you pick up on Earth. Hence, assuming a roughly spherical shape, the object will weigh ~31000 tons.
The largest man-made object to destructively re-enter couldn't have exceeded 100 tons. Hence, the object is over 300 times more massive.
It is also coming in at interplanetary speeds; since these tend to be about 30km/s, and orbit is about 7km/s, then it will encounter (30/7)^2 more resistance upon re-entry... about 16 times the forces ever encountered by Mir or Skylab.
Opposing that: 300 times the mass. I can only imagine that the mass will win.
Now, "win" means that it will overpower destructive re-entry... that it probably won't "burn up". But we must allow for the chances of mid-entry detonation.
This depends on what type of asteriodal material that the 30m object is, and how that material is arranged. The less metallic, and the more rubblized, then the greater the chances that it will explode, and the higher up it will do so. Even at 31kt mass, re-entry is harsh enough to force streams of plasma into even small cracks, and the pressure can crack it open along many fault lines. With volatile ices stuffed through the object, this becomes even more explosive.
Overall, even not knowing the object's composition except to bet that it's asteroidal and not cometary, I'd say that if it did aim for the Earth, we'd be in for at least a huge explosion in the upper atmosphere. I don't have the equations sitting before me, but such an explosion can be in the ten-megaton range. But this explosion can happen anytime before it strikes the ground.
I can't imagine who at Slashdot would have a problem with what happened. It's effectively Open Source Legislating (OSL). The "code" was stamped with the author's name, and was reused with attribution.
Who convicts companies anymore? The standard line we see in news stories is "company XXXXXX settled class-action lawsuit from YYYYYY organization while admitting no wrongdoing". I just read about Cooper Tire about an hour ago doing exactly that.
Fraud is for the little guy. Businesses just "settle"... they settle with individuals, organizations and even governments.
I said it in jest over a year ago: to stay in IT, the American should become an Indian citizen in order to be qualified to work in IT in America again.
This is kind of a new paradigm for labor, using an old paradigm for other assets. If you run a corporation in America, you register it in Delaware. If you run a cargo ship, you register it in Liberia. Now, it seems that to work in IT, you have to register your body in India.
Slashdot Mirror
Both you and your parent poster are correct, but you will tend to be completely at odds with one another. Are you both willing to identify and compromise?
... they don't pay in, and can't participate.
If SS keeps going the way it is, the parent poster will probably live about as long as his mandated working life, given how the retirement age is rising. Hence, the share of the populace who will receive their retirement will shrink.
If we turn SS off now, people like your g'ma will be deluged by personal bankruptcy.
While parent poster's generation is being forced to die out of SS, your g'ma is facing that wonderful "free market" health care that is a root problem in its expense.
Other than those costs, perhaps we can explore weaning people off SS at the early age. Firstly, we can turn off all SS's "welfare" provisions (i.e. stuff like paying benefits to non-retirees). Then we can start removing 18yr-olds from the system
SS is a mess. We got ourselves into it humanely and slowly, and we can get ourselves out of it the same way.
In one sense, no. A simplified UI can be a very functional UI.
... because each step had too many options to consider, leading to a terribly cluttered series of dialog boxes which confused the holy bejesus out of the user. It's not their fault; it's Microsoft's.
... 6 years ago.
In another sense, hell yes. I've run myself in circles following Windows procedures that are essentially workarounds for highly restrictive GUIs. They should have made the stuff with less bells+whistles and thought more about how people need to use the software. Just today I struggled to point out to a user how to make their own mailing list in Outlook. It took too many steps
Like I say nowadays: Windows XP is exactly what we needed
Linux is the poster child of how you know something's important by its absence in textbooks.
On a similar topic, my so-called company has railroaded us all into online "eLearning", which is just management-speak for Microsoft-drenched how-to propaganda. I started some of these courses, then quit in disgust. Any fool can follow a list of instructions on how to do something in Windows 2000 Server. Where's the beef?
I'll leave the eLearning and other "authorized" IT knowledge paths to the unwashed masses. In the meantime, I must prepare for the glorious day when some company is looking for a Linux guy and finds one in me. Then it'll be time to talk salary.
Viciousness+Tool=Catastrophe
I heap blame on user and tool, both being necessary elements for the bad events which follow. Which is why we lock up guns in a home where children reside.
If the middle class wants a future, it should stop acting like it is the upper class. It should revert to the sensibilities of "reduce, reuse, recycle" and "make it last, use it up, wear it out", instead of buying stupid shit on credit and then throwing it all out when maintenance or repair is required.
... like child labor, no retirement, and gasoline rationing. We have quite some distance to fall yet.
Elbert Hubbard's definition of "capitalist" was the best I'd ever seen: a man with savings and a home. From that basis, I speculate that sustainable Capitalism is just a by-product. The savings/home are also by-products of all the qualities I outlined above.
Of course, with massive and irresponsible consumerism, America doesn't want that kind of thing. It wants wage slavery as long as it delivers the goods. People have come to accept that both parents have to work in order to afford their false affluence. They are coming to accept they will never "own" a home, or will live in apartments all their lives. They are coming to accept that there is no such thing as a career anymore, and that benefits are the province of the executive set only. I'm quite sure that they will tolerate further degradation
Granted. I only glossed that over due to a critical implication. One implied thing that changed for these types of folks is a remarkable loss of social consciousness. Spreadsheets and other such financial tools have only given them more power with less responsibility.
I tell ya, it's getting bad where I live. Our BBB is bringing up things like "fairness" and "balance" to local businessmen, and they are being met with actual cursing and threats. This is not a recipe for social stability. We can't all make a mil, stuff it into a Bahamanian account, and live like a king for the rest of our lives.
Oh, look, what a fucking surprise: flack.
... and you should perhaps stop treating tech like some sort of fucking Holy Grail.
Careful with your metaphors, Roscoe: I've noticed that with hammers, people do NOT tend to wander around bashing things with them. I can't say the same about spreadsheets; those tools are definitely in the hands of people who have destroyed a good deal of America already, and they are just working up steam for the next round of social destruction. Or perhaps your job hasn't been outsourced yet just so some ss line shows 3.4% more this year than before.
Ss are a wonderful invention under the reasoning I put forth in my posting. That is undeniable. But like nukes, they can cause a great deal of destruction -- they should be used and understood with much more care than being currently exhibited. That's all I said
>>"Lots of rudeness and Hate (A house for sale near Boston was set on fire by White neighbors when they discovered the people buying it were Black)"
... but when I returned to OH (yeah, yeah -- a stupid move, I know) I learned exactly what spite and malice was all about. If you are really looking for fine examples of dumb viciousness, go to OHIO. If you're in Mass., then consider yourself lucky. (Disclaimer: This excludes Southie, "Deathchester", "Stab-and-Kill", "Ruckusbury" and of course "Murderpan".)
>
>Nice anecdote -- I'm sure nothing like that has ever happened anywhere else. Never any race riots in CA, always in MA, right?
Roger that. I thought that people were a bit standoffish in MA
As an ardent gun owner, I understand that that's a likely statistic. But I can't deny that gun violence makes the meek equally ardent about banning guns. Hence, "social problems". I often propose regulation as a means of compromise.
I catch flack each and every time I say that, but I still think it's true.
The ss has some serious advantages. In an environment of increasing number density and decreasing personal involvement, the need to have a comprehesive tool for data analysis could only have given birth to the spreadsheet. We could talk all day about how handy the ss is for many of the tasks in this environment.
But the space between the substance is what concerns me. Ss have allowed us to max/min too many things without much regard for the things that are undefined and necessarily intangible, but are still entangled in the matter itself. No corporate ss takes into account the costs of pollution, unemployment and general social degradation due to uncontrolled greed.
Like handguns, ss have brought us significant personal power at the cost of a good many social problems. Hence, they seem to require more careful handling and regulation. One aspect to this is training, and in general ethics training is a good place to start. (The BBB in my area is attempting to emphasize this, but they are meeting stiff resistance from the business community.)
Ss should be used with care, and their results are suspect anyway. That's the least message I've tried to convey for years.
Oh, yeh, riiight. Raise THAT little issue. You and your damned deductive reasoning!
On the serious side, I'm finding too many people (who additionally should know better) that don't see much point to space transportation systems since they feel there's "nowhere to go". They think there's nowhere to go since there's nothing Earthlike waiting for us within lightyears.
Hence, terraforming.
Start lobbing those comets at Mars, and they will come.
Yes, this will make the Libraries safer places to surf. "Browser, google for bomb homemade recipe, please." {looks around at all the staring}
Hearing the press releases from MS, I can only assume that they are taking a trade position on this ... meaning, their words are part of an appeal to the State Department to get involved and smooth things over. In short, they intend to have the US gov convince the EU gov to back off. Companies of that size have the influence to make it happen.
Thank you for the information. There are advantages, but I don't claim to know all the details of those.
... it's not as sexy as titanium, and is likely not to form the structure of a spacecraft, but if you can mfg it by the long ton, it's perfectly fine for Lunar and orbital structures. You can launch it off the Lunar surface by linear accelerators (again, powered by all that solar energy that the Moon offers) and put ton after ton into LEO for construction. In fact, with the Lunar launchers, you could put whatever you what from the Moon anywhere into Cislunar space. (And with long enough ones, you can perform "ballistic" launches to anywhere in the Solar System. Luna could be the primary Human launch platform.)
As for iron
Luna's ore fraction of silicon offers exciting possibilities for producing a bootstrapping of power structures. Which is why I'm not worried about power on the Moon. I figure that the worst that could happen is that without many volatiles, a low-efficiency version solar cell could be produced, and square mile after square mile of them dumped onto the Lunar surface, connected up to many, many miles of aluminum wire. Who cares how much space it takes up? The Moon's surface is a desert anyway.
More on the point of what you said, the fine will tell investors that fining the company is possible -- even likely -- and has relatively harsh consequences upon equity. Hence, in the right circumstances, a fine as small as US$10 million could crash Microsoft's stock 5% ... erasing billions in stock value.
Not that I care about the economy-destroying stock speculators, mind you.
Titanium and aluminum are found in vast quantities in some areas in the form of ores that, while not the preferred source on earth, are still quite usable.
Look up the composition of the Lunar regolith sometime. Aluminum, oxygen, silicon, iron, calcium, titanium, then onto trace elements.
Regolith is finely-pulverized material. As far as ores go, this is good stuff since all the crushing you'd ever want has already been done by billions of years of bombardment.
But I don't expect any of that to come back to Earth. I expect it to make it as low as LEO for construction efforts. You'd have to arrive at a serious shortage of ore on Earth to start needing processed metals from 250K miles away.
Because people don't eat "over the long term" -- they eat 3 times a day. If we are to be truly civilized, then perhaps we should come up with a social machine that doesn't run on Human blood, misery, forfeiture, evictions, bankruptcy and divorce.
You're absolutely right: it does sound retarded.
And the reason for that is: it is retarded.
I abide by the sustainable definition of Capitalism: an economy in which skilled men have savings and homes. (A definition lifted essentially straight out of the writings of Elbert Hubbard.) All other productive activity can be fallout from that state. Men with skills, savings and homes are marked entrepreneurs.
In your example, bringing in $1 billion yearly may not please the analysts, but when you take that billion dollars to buy equipment, hire people and to sell some product, you find that your money's as green as anyone else's. A billion stagnant dollars buys as much as a billion growth dollars.
The "Capitalism" of unsustainability needs to die off, before we start making people die off in great numbers instead.
For many OSS proponents, it's not religious zeal. It's JOY ... joy over finally having a critical alternative to closed-source AND proprietary systems.
The world is attempting to wake up from the Microsoft Age -- the Nightmare, the Dark Ages of Information -- which have been filled with secrecy, hidden potholes and vast mistrust. DRM is coming like a chariot being whipped by Microsoft and media corporations, and it frankly hates you, the common man. It's coming to turn your computer into a television set (and if I have to explain to you what's so horrible about TV, then you're intellectually lost).
Some OSS repository in one state government is not hurting you at all. I'm sure Mass. has plenty of Microsoft, Oracle, etc. licences floating around. Now they have more choices. More alternatives. And this kind of thing is quite beneficial; after all, your government should be able to make data without having it held for ransom by a proprietary and closed provider.
I'm warning you now. If you reside in willful ignorance long enough, you become STUPID. Is that what you really wanted in your life?
Roger that. Only in America can we judge that a company selling a profitable product is a non-viable entity. This only means that we are used to Wall Street declaring a company dead if they made 6% this year instead of the 9% that their analysts predicted.
I'm sure that Steve Jobs wallpapers his office with all of the predictions of Apple's demise. If we keep going like that, we'll give him enough to wallpaper all of Apple's offices.
380Kt? Wow, I was off by an order of magnitude. Shit.
... "entry") produces electromagnetic energy. Recall that the re-entry plasma envelope has always been a signal blocker to ships returning from space (and only recently that satellites have been used to get signals to the Shuttle from the rear where the envelope is essentially open).
... they are just far weaker. People have even come up with a transmission methodology that capitalizes on the intermittent small meteors that happen in the sky all the time ... they make use of the plasma trails, envelopes and explosion plumes. The signals bounce from these in over-the-horizon shots.
EMP is an electromagnetic event. I'm not exactly sure, but it is a natural byproduct of a thermonuclear explosion where a lot of radiation is produced (and EM is radiation).
I'd expect something similar from an asteroidal explosion, since the plasma of the re-entry (why do I call it "re" entry since it never was in the atmosphere the first time?
But at best, entry plasma produces weak EMism. Like lightning, meteors produce EM pulses
I can see that the EMP of even a 1000ft (Tunguska sized?) asteroid entry is nothing to worry about.
I'd say EMP detection is one way to determine if a large atmospheric explosion was due to cosmic material. That, and residual radioactivity readings around the area.
Look at the facts and deduce your answer. I didn't have time to googleconfirm any of this, so I assume the risks of some numerical errors.
... there may even be a small core, or it may end up being a rubble pile after most of the ices burn away. The 1908 Tunguska event was probably a small comet, which exploded in the strato- or tropo-sphere. Still, it caused enormous damage in a vast ellipse over Siberia.)
... about 16 times the forces ever encountered by Mir or Skylab.
... that it probably won't "burn up". But we must allow for the chances of mid-entry detonation.
Man-made objects that come down are very light, hollow and fairly slow. Asteroids and comets are guaranteed to be the opposite.
Asteroids are 2 different types: metallic, stony and finally "carbonaceous chondrite". The metallic are essentially chunks of nickel-iron. The stony are just rock. And the CC types are rocky but composed significantly of some ices and other nearly-organic material.
(Comets are mostly icy material with some rocky inclusions
Knowing these things, we can perhaps make some deductions.
A 100ft object of asteroidal material (often compacted rubble) probably weighs at most 120LB per cubic foot. I say this since 150LB/ft3 is a good rule of thumb for any rock you pick up on Earth. Hence, assuming a roughly spherical shape, the object will weigh ~31000 tons.
The largest man-made object to destructively re-enter couldn't have exceeded 100 tons. Hence, the object is over 300 times more massive.
It is also coming in at interplanetary speeds; since these tend to be about 30km/s, and orbit is about 7km/s, then it will encounter (30/7)^2 more resistance upon re-entry
Opposing that: 300 times the mass. I can only imagine that the mass will win.
Now, "win" means that it will overpower destructive re-entry
This depends on what type of asteriodal material that the 30m object is, and how that material is arranged. The less metallic, and the more rubblized, then the greater the chances that it will explode, and the higher up it will do so. Even at 31kt mass, re-entry is harsh enough to force streams of plasma into even small cracks, and the pressure can crack it open along many fault lines. With volatile ices stuffed through the object, this becomes even more explosive.
Overall, even not knowing the object's composition except to bet that it's asteroidal and not cometary, I'd say that if it did aim for the Earth, we'd be in for at least a huge explosion in the upper atmosphere. I don't have the equations sitting before me, but such an explosion can be in the ten-megaton range. But this explosion can happen anytime before it strikes the ground.
I can't imagine who at Slashdot would have a problem with what happened. It's effectively Open Source Legislating (OSL). The "code" was stamped with the author's name, and was reused with attribution.
Who convicts companies anymore? The standard line we see in news stories is "company XXXXXX settled class-action lawsuit from YYYYYY organization while admitting no wrongdoing". I just read about Cooper Tire about an hour ago doing exactly that.
... they settle with individuals, organizations and even governments.
Fraud is for the little guy. Businesses just "settle"
There's your free clue.
I said it in jest over a year ago: to stay in IT, the American should become an Indian citizen in order to be qualified to work in IT in America again.
This is kind of a new paradigm for labor, using an old paradigm for other assets. If you run a corporation in America, you register it in Delaware. If you run a cargo ship, you register it in Liberia. Now, it seems that to work in IT, you have to register your body in India.