Accrete is a physical simulation of solar system planet formation, originally published to Usenet-- probably comp.sources.unix-- in 1991 by Joe Nowakowski. This software is in the public domain.
This simulation works by modelling a dust cloud around a Sun-like star, injecting a series of masses which collect dust, and form planets. The simulation then determines what the planetary environments will be like in terms of temperature, atmospheric composition, and other factors. The system description is saved to a file named "New.System".
The following output will give a good idea of the end results:
SYSTEM CHARACTERISTICS Mass of central star: 1.247 solar masses Luminosity of central star: 2.875 (relative to the sun) Total main sequence lifetime: 4339 million years Current age of stellar system: 3091 million years Radius of habitable ecosphere: 1.696 AU [... ] Planet #4:
Distance from primary star (in A.U.): 1.038
Eccentricity of orbit: 0.004
Mass (in Earth masses): 0.383
Equatorial radius (in Km): 4675.0
Density (in g/cc): 5.344
Escape Velocity (in km/sec): 8.08
Smallest molecular weight retained: 12.16 (CH4)
Surface acceleration (in cm/sec2): 698.22
Surface Gravity (in Earth gees): 0.71
Boiling point of water (celcius): 53.6
Surface Pressure (in atmospheres): 0.146
Surface temperature (Celcius): 8.39
Hydrosphere percentage: 50.46
Cloud cover percentage: 22.87
Ice cover percentage: 3.61
Axial tilt (in degrees): 23
Planetary albedo: 0.177
Length of year (in years): 1.06
Length of day (in hours): 18.14
You're looking for something like the Leviton 57xxx series TVSS, which provides 3-phase WYE protection for all phases to ground, all phases to common/neutral, and common to ground. It's designed to handle extreme events like a close lightning strike or loss of phase. It's got field-replaceable modules so you can replace them if they blow their fuses or MOVs without needing an electrician.
It gets installed between your house power feed and your primary distribution breaker panel. (If you have a primary disconnect switch, it would go there, otherwise you can get a variant of this with an integral disconnection switch.)
I was using my own nameservers before, but I'd recently swapped out my older Linksys BEFSR81 (which was becoming flaky) to an E2100L. Its DHCP server was using Verizon-supplied nameservers by default. Fixed that, thank you ICSI team.
Most paper in books don't last that long. I'd guess 150 years is the limit.
You're right that most mass-market paperback books won't last that long, at least not without significant yellowing and deterioration. However, any trade edition paperback or hardcover book ought to be made from acid-free paper, which is supposed to be good for hundreds of years if kept in reasonable archival storage conditions.
The documents we do have that are much older were made using a (more expensive) process which includes durability as a side effect. There's no way one can produce the volume of books we do using that kind of process - it would be prohibitively expensive.
This is true, although it's more because a lot of cheap paper around nowadays is made by recycling, which means using bleaches and acids to remove the old print. (But recycled paper is more often used for newspapers and napkins than for books....)
Back in time, they tended to use natural fibers like Egyptian papyrus or cotton, rather than wood pulp, which tend to last longer than paper made from wood pulp.
If you force Vsync on the display preferences, you'll prevent the game from trying to render faster than 60Hz.
Depending on the game, it might only recompute physics, check for collisions, etc at the same rate it renders frames-- which means that if your hardware is capable of going faster, you might get slightly more realistic behavior if it goes faster than your monitor refresh rate. On the other hand, if your system is chugging, you might find shots passing through their targets.
Other games keep rendering and gameworld physics stuff separated, and do world physics updates at some rate like 100Hz regardless of the display framerate.
What you say is true, it certainly wasn't enough to just reject 66.103.128.0/18 netblock, but work with me here: ever see Aliens 2?
Spam is like those alien eggs, which'll do the "spider wasp" thing on trapped humans, which then become full-flavored adult aliens. Adult aliens are like the spam/viral messages which make it through your spam filter: they're actively dangerous, especially to an idiot (of which there are plenty around).
McColo was like the big queen alien, in that it was a central control center and reproductive source for new waves of spam, ie, the zombie control master rather than the horde (or is a botnet a "herd"?). Killing McColo (by ejecting it into the Internet void) didn't eliminate all of the spam sources or control mechanisms, any more than killing the queen eliminated the alien threat, but it was well worth doing, regardless.
I don't have a gmail account, but the people I know who do seem to agree with you; also, to their credit, Google is quite proactive about dealing with spamming involving gmail accounts as a destination.
Anyway, if you ever administer mail systems for various companies (lets say you are a sysadmin consultant: filesharing, email, and web access are the big three of network oriented stuff -- order may vary), you'll have to deal with spam to some extent, just to have samples of spam to train stuff with, and any false positives which you ought to feed as "ham" to your Bayesian classifier (ie, gmail, SpamAssassin, bogofilter, others). But first, you should try to do cheaper things like MTA HELO-time checking (greylisting, RBLs, policy checking [ie, stuff like policyd-weight, amavisd]) first, then virus-scanning, and finally Bayesian scoring.
I fly NYC (out JFK usually, sometimes Newark) to SFO 24 times a year. Most of the non-stop flights available are Virgin America, sometimes JetBlue, Continental, or maybe AA once in a while. Virgin America has had WiFi now on all of the recent flights I've been on this year, except 1 back in Jan; JetBlue was about to add it last time I was on (maybe Feb?). This route is mostly flown by AirBus 319/320s, or less commonly by Boing 757 or modern 737-800 models (which have extended fuel tanks in the wing pylons, IIRC, to make the ~2500 trip without refueling; older 737's don't have the range).
There are roughly 150 - 200 people on these planes; I think the going rate for WiFi access is ~ $8.99 (although free in 1st class, if the carrier does that; ie, not JetBlue). Assume 50 people use it per flight, thats $450 per flight, times three possible flights the plane could take this route in a 24-hour period. $1350/day? I get a break-even for cost around 150 days, assuming the $200K install cost per plane comes with a year's worth of network access?
Gah. I remember dealing with PICK also; it's used in a bunch of airline reservation and courier/package delivery systems. You deal with this beast in something resembling BASIC, rather than in SQL, and you'll quickly discover that all it supports is unary and binary operations: no operator precedence, no parenthesises, and not even compound statements. No equivalent of JOIN, no notion of atomic commits, no transaction model, logging, or rollback, etc.
Think of Berkeley DB 1.x, or early versions of MySQL which only had the MyISAM storage type, and then remove the C or SQL-based API and replace it with a crippled BASIC variant instead, and you've got something pretty close to PICK. Basically, all you get is a filesystem with data kept in hash tables, maybe with a B-tree index added for newer versions of PICK. To do anything beyond the trivial with it, you end up doing all of the heavy lifting on the client side.
Anybody remember DeMorgan's laws? Well, if you want to use PICK you'd better, because to do:
RESULT = NOT (A or B)
You end up having to do three separate statements:
The machine names you might pick for your own home LAN are going to be very different than the ones a network admin overseeing something like multiple data centers would.
For the first case, I go for "short and distinctive", something less than 5 chars if at all possible: pi, tau, mini, oz, iota, pong, shot, etc. For the datacenter or multiple-DC situation, you'll end up with a naming convention typically starting with location, then a group or owner name, then possibly something chosen by the machine's owner or perhaps just a number....
+1 Karma for paying for the software once you decided you liked them.
Capships which can heal other capships are a major help to your vital capships' lifespan. The other important point to note is that staying in the sector with the star greatly speeds up the regeneration rate of blue energy, which means all of your capship special powers are more rapidly available.
If you can get to the star after a big fight, the next wave of enemy ships trying to slaughter your weakened ships won't find an easy target, and you can lure enough of the enemy's fleet to you if you can hold on, that you can often take out another enemy planet before they can rebuild and regroup.
If you can keep your servers off for several days-- such as Friday night through early Monday AM, then shutting them off is reasonably likely to be a benefit. The problem is that spinning the hard drives down and back up is about the worst thing you can do to 'em, short of dropping the suckers onto the floor. Hard drive mechanisms only last for a certain number of power-cycles-- on the order of 10K to 50K or so-- before the spindle motor or the head actuator servo will give up the ghost. Power-cycling 'em weekly won't come close to that, but bouncing them several times daily is going to push up the rate of failure you get after a couple of years.
Laptop power-saving modes seem to be a common reason for high start-stop and load-unload counts, although laptop drives are also supposed to be rated for a higher cycle count than a desktop or enterprise/server-grade drive. They also tend to be smaller and have just a single platter, so they don't get as much wear from a power-cycle than a multi-platter drive...
Power supplies also tend to fail more often if you bounce the machines daily, but they are less affected by power cycling than drives are. Since the main reason PSUs become flakey (if they don't fail completely) is because of the electrolytic caps drying out due to heat, shutting the system down when you can reduces that affect.
Exactly what can you do with spotlight *nixes haven't done with find, locate, and grep for many more years before apple even thought of going the *nix route?
Nothing, but that's assuming the dude can actually *use* find, locate, and grep. Folks who don't know where their documents are saved are not likely to be skilled with Unix CLI utilities.
Besides which, Spotlight performs incremental search (see: / in vi or less, or isearch-forward in Emacs), so you only have to type a few letters (2-3, usually) before it starts showing you the right stuff.
Good find. That site tries to persuade you to run this "WebVideoSetup.exe" program, which is a Win32 GUI PE according to file, and a quick check of strings suggests it creates a remote shell and contacts IP 78.129.166.25. Virus scanners identify it as "DR/Delphi.Gen" or "Mal/Heuri-E, Mal/DelpDldr-E".
Sure, it's true enough. Of course, a nastygram from a lawyer which does not specify the specific materials in question and identify the copyright holder doesn't follow the rules of a "DMCA takedown notice", so the site in question would be free to ignore it. (That's pretty much what happened, too.)
On the other hand, the Wikilinks site isn't obligated to provide a DMCA contact, but refusing to provide one means they'd lose the safe harbor provision granted to ISPs and other network service providers.
You can still buy the classic old IBM keyboards from Unicomp, which spun off from Lexmark who made the original AT keyboards when they were a division of IBM. Their store is here:
I've got a Linux 101-keyboard which places Cntl, Caps-Lock, and ESC in positions which are much more convenient, especially for using emacs. You want the type called "buckling spring", which I think actually has two springs in each key, a weak one for the initial travel, and a much stronger one at the bottom of the keypress motion that gives the classic "touch" or tactile feel. Be aware that their keyboards are seriously heavy-- you want 'em on a desk, not on your lap or anything like that. Also note that they only seem to make keyboards with the PS/2 interface-- not USB.
Re:What about the disclaimer in the footer?
on
A $1 Billion Email Gaffe
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not very-- especially if the email disclaimer makes unilateral demands and you have no prior relationship with the sender. On the other hand, if you previously agree to have a confidential discussion, and then break that agreement, the disclaimer might be enforcable. There's a site here:
As others have mentioned, as soon as you have three or more bodies which are heavy enough so that their masses interact, no, that is not deterministic. This asteroid isn't big enough to affect things like planets significantly, but the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn are all big enough to have mutual interactions which affect everything smaller.
(Well, you can do heavy numerical simulation to figure out the future positions for a limited period of time with reasonable accuracy, but you can't determine what things will look like a thousand years from now just by plugging some numbers in and getting a quick answer.)
The good news is that Earth-based telescopes would have a better view of incoming at us then they do of things incoming towards Mars (which is anywhere from 0.5 to 2.5 AU's away, depending on their relative orbital positions [1]) and would be making more accurate estimates.
The bad news is that it's not clear whether having more time would help, if something big actually was on a possible collision trajectory with Earth.
[1]: Y'all can see the orbital paths yourself here (link needs Java enabled):
Zepplin I can understand but AC/DC? My god they made a career of playing the same song for 40 years.
Hey, don't knock it if it works! After all, it did for Frank Zappa:
We was playin' the same old song
In the afternoon 'n' sometimes we would
Play it all night long
It was all we knew, 'n' easy too
So we wouldn't get it wrong....
[... ]
A guy from a company we can't name
Said we oughta take his pen
'N' sign on the line for a real good time
But he didn't tell us when
These "good times" would be happenin'
Actually, I don't see any reason why they really care how big the iPods are they are selling....they MAY make more money off the larger ones, but if they want they can price them so they make the most profit off the smaller ones. Your analysis strikes me as exceptionally simplistic, and ignores the fact that if a larger iPod is required to keep customers happy, and that means it costs more, that means that fewer people will find it affordable. Let's think about a 4GB Nano-- getting 1000 songs for it means ripping ~100 CDs for $15 a pop (~$1500 worth of content) or spending a grand at the iTunes music store versus $200 for the iPod itself.
If you actually pay for all of your content, you'll spend at least five times more than what you paid for the iPod hardware. And notice who it is that wants you to pay more...it's NBC and Universal, not Apple. If NBC had their way, you'd be paying more like $2500 to get 1000 songs or 500 shows. (Hmm-- ten 23-minute shows per DVD would fit on 50 DVDs, which would go for probably a grand, matching today's music pricing.)
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody generalizes from a single example. At least, I do....
One (simple) dust-cloud accretion program is located here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/accrete/
Accrete is a physical simulation of solar system planet formation,
originally published to Usenet-- probably comp.sources.unix-- in 1991
by Joe Nowakowski. This software is in the public domain.
This simulation works by modelling a dust cloud around a Sun-like star,
injecting a series of masses which collect dust, and form planets.
The simulation then determines what the planetary environments will be
like in terms of temperature, atmospheric composition, and other
factors. The system description is saved to a file named "New.System".
The following output will give a good idea of the end results:
SYSTEM CHARACTERISTICS ... ]
Mass of central star: 1.247 solar masses
Luminosity of central star: 2.875 (relative to the sun)
Total main sequence lifetime: 4339 million years
Current age of stellar system: 3091 million years
Radius of habitable ecosphere: 1.696 AU
[
Planet #4:
Distance from primary star (in A.U.): 1.038
Eccentricity of orbit: 0.004
Mass (in Earth masses): 0.383
Equatorial radius (in Km): 4675.0
Density (in g/cc): 5.344
Escape Velocity (in km/sec): 8.08
Smallest molecular weight retained: 12.16 (CH4)
Surface acceleration (in cm/sec2): 698.22
Surface Gravity (in Earth gees): 0.71
Boiling point of water (celcius): 53.6
Surface Pressure (in atmospheres): 0.146
Surface temperature (Celcius): 8.39
Hydrosphere percentage: 50.46
Cloud cover percentage: 22.87
Ice cover percentage: 3.61
Axial tilt (in degrees): 23
Planetary albedo: 0.177
Length of year (in years): 1.06
Length of day (in hours): 18.14
You're looking for something like the Leviton 57xxx series TVSS, which provides 3-phase WYE protection for all phases to ground, all phases to common/neutral, and common to ground. It's designed to handle extreme events like a close lightning strike or loss of phase. It's got field-replaceable modules so you can replace them if they blow their fuses or MOVs without needing an electrician.
It gets installed between your house power feed and your primary distribution breaker panel. (If you have a primary disconnect switch, it would go there, otherwise you can get a variant of this with an integral disconnection switch.)
http://www.leviton.com/OA_HTML/ibcGetAttachment.jsp?cItemId=RznMfhyJTAUscMgiwmzsgA&label=IBE&appName=IBE&minisite=10251
You'd be looking at a cost of about $4000 including installation.
I used one in a small datacenter in front of a 20kVA Powerware 9330 UPS.
Add Verizon DSL in Manhattan, NY:
http://n3.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/summary/id=ae81b058-20468-26aad796-356d-4fce-806b
I was using my own nameservers before, but I'd recently swapped out my older Linksys BEFSR81 (which was becoming flaky) to an E2100L.
Its DHCP server was using Verizon-supplied nameservers by default. Fixed that, thank you ICSI team.
Most paper in books don't last that long. I'd guess 150 years is the limit.
You're right that most mass-market paperback books won't last that long, at least not without significant yellowing and deterioration. However, any trade edition paperback or hardcover book ought to be made from acid-free paper, which is supposed to be good for hundreds of years if kept in reasonable archival storage conditions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paperwikipedia link
The documents we do have that are much older were made using a (more expensive) process which includes durability as a side effect. There's no way one can produce the volume of books we do using that kind of process - it would be prohibitively expensive.
This is true, although it's more because a lot of cheap paper around nowadays is made by recycling, which means using bleaches and acids to remove the old print. (But recycled paper is more often used for newspapers and napkins than for books....)
Back in time, they tended to use natural fibers like Egyptian papyrus or cotton, rather than wood pulp, which tend to last longer than paper made from wood pulp.
There are several extensions to the USB spec, among them is the "Battery Charging Convention":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#Power
http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/batt_charging_1_1.zip [zip'ed PDF]
If you force Vsync on the display preferences, you'll prevent the game from trying to render faster than 60Hz.
Depending on the game, it might only recompute physics, check for collisions, etc at the same rate it renders frames-- which means that if your hardware is capable of going faster, you might get slightly more realistic behavior if it goes faster than your monitor refresh rate. On the other hand, if your system is chugging, you might find shots passing through their targets.
Other games keep rendering and gameworld physics stuff separated, and do world physics updates at some rate like 100Hz regardless of the display framerate.
What you say is true, it certainly wasn't enough to just reject 66.103.128.0/18 netblock, but work with me here: ever see Aliens 2?
Spam is like those alien eggs, which'll do the "spider wasp" thing on trapped humans, which then become full-flavored adult aliens. Adult aliens are like the spam/viral messages which make it through your spam filter: they're actively dangerous, especially to an idiot (of which there are plenty around).
McColo was like the big queen alien, in that it was a central control center and reproductive source for new waves of spam, ie, the zombie control master rather than the horde (or is a botnet a "herd"?). Killing McColo (by ejecting it into the Internet void) didn't eliminate all of the spam sources or control mechanisms, any more than killing the queen eliminated the alien threat, but it was well worth doing, regardless.
I don't have a gmail account, but the people I know who do seem to agree with you; also, to their credit, Google is quite proactive about dealing with spamming involving gmail accounts as a destination.
Anyway, if you ever administer mail systems for various companies (lets say you are a sysadmin consultant: filesharing, email, and web access are the big three of network oriented stuff -- order may vary), you'll have to deal with spam to some extent, just to have samples of spam to train stuff with, and any false positives which you ought to feed as "ham" to your Bayesian classifier (ie, gmail, SpamAssassin, bogofilter, others). But first, you should try to do cheaper things like MTA HELO-time checking (greylisting, RBLs, policy checking [ie, stuff like policyd-weight, amavisd]) first, then virus-scanning, and finally Bayesian scoring.
I fly NYC (out JFK usually, sometimes Newark) to SFO 24 times a year. Most of the non-stop flights available are Virgin America, sometimes JetBlue, Continental, or maybe AA once in a while. Virgin America has had WiFi now on all of the recent flights I've been on this year, except 1 back in Jan; JetBlue was about to add it last time I was on (maybe Feb?). This route is mostly flown by AirBus 319/320s, or less commonly by Boing 757 or modern 737-800 models (which have extended fuel tanks in the wing pylons, IIRC, to make the ~2500 trip without refueling; older 737's don't have the range).
There are roughly 150 - 200 people on these planes; I think the going rate for WiFi access is ~ $8.99 (although free in 1st class, if the carrier does that; ie, not JetBlue). Assume 50 people use it per flight, thats $450 per flight, times three possible flights the plane could take this route in a 24-hour period. $1350/day? I get a break-even for cost around 150 days, assuming the $200K install cost per plane comes with a year's worth of network access?
Gah. I remember dealing with PICK also; it's used in a bunch of airline reservation and courier/package delivery systems. You deal with this beast in something resembling BASIC, rather than in SQL, and you'll quickly discover that all it supports is unary and binary operations: no operator precedence, no parenthesises, and not even compound statements. No equivalent of JOIN, no notion of atomic commits, no transaction model, logging, or rollback, etc.
Think of Berkeley DB 1.x, or early versions of MySQL which only had the MyISAM storage type, and then remove the C or SQL-based API and replace it with a crippled BASIC variant instead, and you've got something pretty close to PICK. Basically, all you get is a filesystem with data kept in hash tables, maybe with a B-tree index added for newer versions of PICK. To do anything beyond the trivial with it, you end up doing all of the heavy lifting on the client side.
Anybody remember DeMorgan's laws? Well, if you want to use PICK you'd better, because to do:
RESULT = NOT (A or B)
You end up having to do three separate statements:
C = NOT A
D = NOT B
RESULT = C AND D
The machine names you might pick for your own home LAN are going to be very different than the ones a network admin overseeing something like multiple data centers would.
For the first case, I go for "short and distinctive", something less than 5 chars if at all possible: pi, tau, mini, oz, iota, pong, shot, etc. For the datacenter or multiple-DC situation, you'll end up with a naming convention typically starting with location, then a group or owner name, then possibly something chosen by the machine's owner or perhaps just a number....
+1 Karma for paying for the software once you decided you liked them.
Capships which can heal other capships are a major help to your vital capships' lifespan. The other important point to note is that staying in the sector with the star greatly speeds up the regeneration rate of blue energy, which means all of your capship special powers are more rapidly available.
If you can get to the star after a big fight, the next wave of enemy ships trying to slaughter your weakened ships won't find an easy target, and you can lure enough of the enemy's fleet to you if you can hold on, that you can often take out another enemy planet before they can rebuild and regroup.
If you can keep your servers off for several days-- such as Friday night through early Monday AM, then shutting them off is reasonably likely to be a benefit. The problem is that spinning the hard drives down and back up is about the worst thing you can do to 'em, short of dropping the suckers onto the floor. Hard drive mechanisms only last for a certain number of power-cycles-- on the order of 10K to 50K or so-- before the spindle motor or the head actuator servo will give up the ghost. Power-cycling 'em weekly won't come close to that, but bouncing them several times daily is going to push up the rate of failure you get after a couple of years.
Laptop power-saving modes seem to be a common reason for high start-stop and load-unload counts, although laptop drives are also supposed to be rated for a higher cycle count than a desktop or enterprise/server-grade drive. They also tend to be smaller and have just a single platter, so they don't get as much wear from a power-cycle than a multi-platter drive...
Power supplies also tend to fail more often if you bounce the machines daily, but they are less affected by power cycling than drives are. Since the main reason PSUs become flakey (if they don't fail completely) is because of the electrolytic caps drying out due to heat, shutting the system down when you can reduces that affect.
Yes to both: it's known as consulting. A major bonus is that you generally don't even end up carrying a pager...
Exactly what can you do with spotlight *nixes haven't done with find, locate, and grep for many more years before apple even thought of going the *nix route?
Nothing, but that's assuming the dude can actually *use* find, locate, and grep. Folks who don't know where their documents are saved are not likely to be skilled with Unix CLI utilities.
Besides which, Spotlight performs incremental search (see: / in vi or less, or isearch-forward in Emacs), so you only have to type a few letters (2-3, usually) before it starts showing you the right stuff.
"I really don't know why the US allows civil proceedings to be heard by a jury of peers at least a judge would have some level of intelligence."
The founders had enough experience with corrupt judges to not blindly trust them....
Good find. That site tries to persuade you to run this "WebVideoSetup.exe" program, which is a Win32 GUI PE according to file, and a quick check of strings suggests it creates a remote shell and contacts IP 78.129.166.25. Virus scanners identify it as "DR/Delphi.Gen" or "Mal/Heuri-E, Mal/DelpDldr-E".
Sure, it's true enough. Of course, a nastygram from a lawyer which does not specify the specific materials in question and identify the copyright holder doesn't follow the rules of a "DMCA takedown notice", so the site in question would be free to ignore it. (That's pretty much what happened, too.)
On the other hand, the Wikilinks site isn't obligated to provide a DMCA contact, but refusing to provide one means they'd lose the safe harbor provision granted to ISPs and other network service providers.
You can still buy the classic old IBM keyboards from Unicomp, which spun off from Lexmark who made the original AT keyboards when they were a division of IBM. Their store is here:
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/
I've got a Linux 101-keyboard which places Cntl, Caps-Lock, and ESC in positions which are much more convenient, especially for using emacs. You want the type called "buckling spring", which I think actually has two springs in each key, a weak one for the initial travel, and a much stronger one at the bottom of the keypress motion that gives the classic "touch" or tactile feel. Be aware that their keyboards are seriously heavy-- you want 'em on a desk, not on your lap or anything like that. Also note that they only seem to make keyboards with the PS/2 interface-- not USB.
Not very-- especially if the email disclaimer makes unilateral demands and you have no prior relationship with the sender. On the other hand, if you previously agree to have a confidential discussion, and then break that agreement, the disclaimer might be enforcable. There's a site here:
...with more detailed analysis of this.
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
As others have mentioned, as soon as you have three or more bodies which are heavy enough so that their masses interact, no, that is not deterministic. This asteroid isn't big enough to affect things like planets significantly, but the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn are all big enough to have mutual interactions which affect everything smaller.
(Well, you can do heavy numerical simulation to figure out the future positions for a limited period of time with reasonable accuracy, but you can't determine what things will look like a thousand years from now just by plugging some numbers in and getting a quick answer.)
The good news is that Earth-based telescopes would have a better view of incoming at us then they do of things incoming towards Mars (which is anywhere from 0.5 to 2.5 AU's away, depending on their relative orbital positions [1]) and would be making more accurate estimates.
The bad news is that it's not clear whether having more time would help, if something big actually was on a possible collision trajectory with Earth.
[1]: Y'all can see the orbital paths yourself here (link needs Java enabled):
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2007+WD5&orb=1
Hey, don't knock it if it works! After all, it did for Frank Zappa:
We was playin' the same old songIn the afternoon 'n' sometimes we would
Play it all night long
It was all we knew, 'n' easy too
So we wouldn't get it wrong....
[ ... ]
A guy from a company we can't name
Said we oughta take his pen
'N' sign on the line for a real good time
But he didn't tell us when
These "good times" would be happenin'
-- Joe's Garage
Just beware of the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER...
Let's think about a 4GB Nano-- getting 1000 songs for it means ripping ~100 CDs for $15 a pop (~$1500 worth of content) or spending a grand at the iTunes music store versus $200 for the iPod itself.
If you actually pay for all of your content, you'll spend at least five times more than what you paid for the iPod hardware. And notice who it is that wants you to pay more...it's NBC and Universal, not Apple. If NBC had their way, you'd be paying more like $2500 to get 1000 songs or 500 shows. (Hmm-- ten 23-minute shows per DVD would fit on 50 DVDs, which would go for probably a grand, matching today's music pricing.)