I do believe us Yanks did. The British Crown and Parliament has been a government in exile (from the 13 colonies) for what, 220-something years now? That's as good as it gets (unless you can do them like the Tsar).;-) --
Then there's the issue of picking out the characteristics of the child, further reducing his/her prenatal humanity.
And if you pick your hand one at a time instead of shuffling and dealing, it's no longer made up of cards?
The idea that a gene-selected child would be less human is absurd. Humanity isn't something you can filter out in solution, it permeates our gatherings and our selves. Making a kid from the best DNA you've got to offer is not going to make them one whit less - or more - human than the luck of the draw. --
It would be easy to eliminate the downside of the sickle-cell gene: couple it to another gene which causes the embryo to abort if it is duplicated. This way there would be no sickle-cell homozygotes born, only heterozygotes. The investment in a blastocyst or embryo which fails within a couple of weeks is minimal, so the overall evolutionary fitness of the carriers would increase even though their fecundity would decrease slightly.
This is the kind of thing we might be able to get with full knowledge of our genes and the ability to manipulate them: grab all the upside potential of the variability that's out there and eliminate the downside. --
There appears to be a lot of Chicken Littleism out there centering around the potential results of the Human Genome Project. A lot of it is based on flawed assumptions or simple lack of thought. Take this example from the above:
Have we really thought through the implications of unleashing medical procedures that would reduce the incidence of addiction, depression, retardation and physical disabilities? Are we comfortable living in a world in which whose categories of humanity - the retarded, the blind, the disabled - will disappear from our part of the earth? Do the healthy lose something when it's possible to eradicate the impaired?
Are we comfortable living in a world in which whole categories of humanity - the leprous, the polio-afflicted, the smallpox-scarred - have nearly disappeared from our part of the earth? I dare say we are, and we're happier for it. My mother spent time caring for children in iron lungs, and it was not pretty; whatever the benefits of the lesson in compassion for humanity at large, those poor polio kids paid a staggering price. Ask them if dying before age 10 was worth it. Ask whole Native American tribes if their susceptibility to alcohol addiction is worth it.
One distinction lost in the above is the fact that only congenital defects or susceptibilities can be eliminated by gene selection. We can eliminate accidents of nature, but we can't eliminate accidents, period. We'll still have the ill, the retarded and the maimed with us, we just won't have so many of the heartbreaking cases who were born that way and never had a chance.
There's also a big difference between knowing what a person's genes are and being able to control what they think, feel and do. This is an ENORMOUS leap of logic, but it often gets glossed over as demonstrated by this quote from Katz:
In effect, children may be given genotypes, genetic profiles. Offspring considered grotesque, revolting, impaired, repugnant or offensive could be eliminated.
How many parents will choose ugly kids when they can be assured attractive ones? Why have an idiosyncratic or rebellious offspring when you can choose a cheerful and pliant one?
There's a little saying from the life science that rebuts this: "Under perfectly controlled conditions of temperature, pressure, humidity, nutrient concentration and lighting, the organism will do whatever the hell it pleases." Being assured of your kid not having Down's Syndrome is a rather simple thing. Being assured that your interaction as parents, as playmates, as teachers, and as book, television, radio and cyber-media influences - hell, even your interaction as a pregnant woman - with their genes and innate and developed abilities is going to yield any predictable outcome is simply impossible. The influences are nonlinear, combinatorial and beyond any ability to compute.
Besides, there will be a lot of people who will select for the idiosyncratic and other traits because they will desire children who aren't the same as everyone else's. It's not very likely that many people will select for low intelligence or crooked teeth or Prince Charles ears, but when they are selecting for something else it's bound to fall out in some by the luck of the draw. I'm afraid that the future is Human-Genome-Project-proof as far as the eye can see. --
The Congress has a great deal of control over the funding of the executive branch. If they want to zero out the funding for the NSA, they could do it tomorrow.
That's if they could handle the backlash. Consider for a moment how J. Edgar Hoover kept himself in the top-dog spot at the FBI. Now think about how much dirt the NSA must have on all kinds of people as a result of their work. I'm not just talking congressmen, but their staffers, judges, the families of the above, and other people who might suddenly find their positions and security threatened by an NSA bent on defending itself. If it came to trying to shut the NSA down, there would be a lot of bodies in the streets after the battle (politically speaking).
For example, if we are sampling at 48khz, then the highest frequency wave that we can represent is 44khz.
24 KHz.
However, this assumes that the peaks of the waves are aligned with the sample points. If they are not then the phase is either going to get shifted up to 90 degrees in either direction to be able to represent the waves, or they will be anti-aliased into the wrong amplitude (if they even come out as a wave at all).
Alignment of the signal peaks and the sample points is only an issue near the Nyquist frequency. Below 1/3 of the sample rate you can get essentially perfect reproduction of the original, including phase. That includes pretty much all of the audible frequencies, and all the fundamentals and the first few harmonics of even the highest notes.
I therefore think that it is quite possible that although the theoretical maximum frequency is well up into the super-sonic range, the effect of doubling the sampling frequency will provide a much more natural coherent sound than you would initially assume.
What the increased sample rate is really going to do is eliminate the need for re-sampling and/or sharp cutoff filters at 18-20 KHz, which will get rid of a lot of phase distortion up near the limits of audibility. To the extent that phase distortion creates audible artifacts, this will improve the experience.
Forget clean power, better homes, human rights, and all those complicated issues that can't be only solved by throwing more and more high tech. RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!
Human rights is one of those things that appears to improve when groups have the space to get out from under the thumb of government. And as for clean power and better homes, the engineering challenges of trying to do things in a radically different environment often lead to inventions which transfer back to the original milieu and change it for the better.
Then there are the ineffable issues. Knowledge from observing the Martian dust storms led to our model of nuclear winter and deterred people from starting a nuclear war here. Observations of Jupiter's atmosphere led to better models of our own and superior weather forecasts. Going to a new planet, especially to live there, is bound to yield knowledge that will improve conditions somewhere, or maybe even everywhere. It's very short-sighted to say "I can't see what we might find, let's not go" when the whole point of going is to see what you'll find. And until we find it, we don't know what it's good for.
Gimme a ticket on a Mars Direct. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Yes, in the long term would should focus on getting a new rock to live on. I don't think Mars is the way to go at the moment. First, we need to get to the point were it is cheap and commonplace for normal people and companies to go to orbit for either travel or manufacturing, then the moon, then mars...
That kind of thinking is one of the reasons it hasn't been done yet. What do you have in LEO space? Lots of vacuum (discounting the space junk); you have to ship everything with you at $10,000 US/pound. No wonder nobody's doing anything commercial there except relaying signals and remote sensing.
The moon isn't much better. Aside from rock (with some additions due to the solar wind and "gardening" by meteroids over the eons), there doesn't appear to be much there either. There are tantalizing hints of water-ice (nothing confirmed yet) but no nitrogen or carbon. You'd have to import pretty much everything you need for carbon-based life, and that $10,000/lb just to get it to LEO is pretty daunting.
Mars is the nearest place we can go that has all the basics. The atmosphere is chock full of carbon and oxygen (CO2 97%), it has nitrogen (3% in the atmosphere) and we know water (and thus hydrogen) is present; the Vikings sent back pictures of morning frosts on the ground under conditions too warm for dry ice to form, so we know that the relative humidity exceeds 100% at times under natural conditions. All the essential elements of life are there in vast quantities compared to any place other than Earth. This makes Mars the nearest place where people can easily "live off the land", and thus our best bet for a viable colony. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
A worker with a lathe can shape metal many times faster. The owner of the lathe, the "capitalist" who invested in it, is responsible for some fraction of the increased production; it is not "stolen", it is rightfully the owner's.
Capital is productive, but "ownership" is not a productive activity. The owner has not produced anything. "Stolen" is obviously a word which only makes sense in the context of a system of laws, but it seems clear to me that some of the value produced by the interaction of labour and capital has been legally expropriated by someone not involved in the production process.
"Expropriated" is a fancy euphemism for "stolen"; you're showing your prejudices. You assume that whatever came out of the process was the property of the machine operator. I could just as easily argue that all the production improvement of worker-cum-lathe over worker-cum-file is due to the foresight and investment of the person who built the lathe or paid for the lathe to be built, and the entire difference is rightfully the lathe owner's.
"Ownership" isn't productive per se; I could take a lathe and put it in a warehouse where it would produce nothing. Investment is another matter. If I own a lathe I benefit from having it produce value, so my interests lie in having it work well - including hiring and compensating the people who can make the most value with it. Ownership qua investment is a very productive activity, because the more productive capital becomes the less capital you need.
Money is the metaphor for capital, but ultimately capital is things like land and materials and machines and expertise. The more productive the capital is, the less work you have to put into the system to get your desires out of it. This is a point that Marx missed AFAIK, because in a communal ownership system the pressures leading to a tragedy of the commons come to the fore. All the communist economies have failed miserably to produce as much well-being as capitalism, proving that Marx was way out of touch. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
If people are "producing more than they consume", then someone is stealing some of the product of their labour.
... Or they're investing their work-product instead of consuming it.
Productivity isn't just an individual attribute, it also applies to machines and enterprises. For instance, a worker with a file can shape metal. Slowly. A worker with a lathe can shape metal many times faster. The owner of the lathe, the "capitalist" who invested in it, is responsible for some fraction of the increased production; it is not "stolen", it is rightfully the owner's.
On the enterprise level, metal precisely shaped to form objects nobody needs is worthless. The collective intelligence of the enterprise which can decide what metal to shape how to make which products determines the value of its output. This value rightfully accrues to the owners of the enterprise; because they made the value.
Just had to spend a few minutes picking Marx apart (Marx isn't worth any more, too easy a target). -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
In the past couple of decades, anti-technology has become something of a trendy national political movement, especially among journalists, politicians, academics and other intellectuals.
That's because it threatens them. "Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it." - Florence Ambrose, Freefall.
To a large extent this can be traced to our schools and universities. While it is almost impossible to get a 4-year degree without taking a number of literature classes, there are scores of college graduates who have not had a math class since high-school algebra. Chemistry? Get real. Physics? Forget it. These people have only the sketchiest understanding of how the gadgets that run their world - and on which they depend - actually work. What they do not understand, they are often helpless to affect. And they fear this.
Technophobic writing and demagoguery is usually full of examples of scientific cluelessness. To the extent that the audience for these things is no better informed, the errors go uncorrected or even multiply. We wind up with a situation of the blind leading the blind.
I am of the opinion that our schools and universities are largely responsible for this. A person should not be considered worthy of a high-school diploma if they have not mastered algebra and chemistry and biology. Science classwork should be a requirement for all degree programs in universities, including literature and arts. When the future of our society depends on being able to understand and manage these things, there is no excuse for our educational system allowing people to slip through without having a firm grasp of the fundamentals, at the very least.
This is especially true of the communications specialists, journalists and politicians. No PolySci grad should be able to get into the field without knowing *why* CFC's are bad (chemistry) and the reason we do not want to use antibiotics and antibacterials when not required (evolution). No journalism major should get out without knowing the difference between radioactivity and radiation, or a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour. No person should graduate high school without knowing something about ROI and the unsustainability of Ponzi schemes (which is why we're having such a hard time reforming Social Security).
In a dumbing-down world, smartening up the populace isn't going to be easy. But we have to, because it's essential to our future. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
What we did IIRC was use laser interferometry to establish the distance to the moon to within a few wavelengths, then we crashed parts of the lunar landers into it and saw what kind of disturbance we got.
Um, I don't think so.
The Apollo missions planted a number of seismographs on the moon (6 total); the laser reflectors are not useful for seismic data. The seismographs were lost to science when the ALSEP packages were shut down due to NASA budget cuts. This was a supreme waste, as they were functioning beautifully; Congress axed the funds for data collection and analysis, a pitiful hundred thousand dollars a year I believe. (Somebody please nuke Wisconsin, the state that re-elected William Proxmire over and over because it felt that milk price supports were more important than science.)
One of the missions included a mortar firing grenades to get some reference seismic waves, IIRC.
The lunar ascent stages were not deliberately crashed, IIRC; the Apollo 11 ascent stage was still in orbit until a few years ago, again IIRC. On the other hand, the SIVb stage which pushed the CSM/LM to the Moon was surplus after the injection burn, and at least some of them were sent to collide with Luna.
You have the conclusions correct AFAIK. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
3 times the speed = 9 times the energy. If you stop in the same distance, the forces will be 9 times as high. This assumes that Martian soil is about the same consistency as Mojave desert soil, of course.
I wonder if these little babies carry high-speed accelerometers to infer the mechanical characteristics of the stuff they're plowing into... could be useful information. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Specific details about the new planets and their host stars are given below: HD 10697 is a G5IV star, slightly cooler and a bit larger than the Sun. It lies 106 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. Its planet has a minimum mass of 6.35 Jupiter masses and a 1,072-day orbit. The radius of this orbit is about 2.13 AU, but the orbit is somewhat eccentric, so the planet's distance from its star ranges from 1.87 AU to 2.39 AU. At its average orbital distance, it lies just at the outside edge of the habitable zone of its star, and is expected to have an equilibrium temperature (due to energy received from its parent star) of about 15 degrees F.
Since the calculated "equilibrium temperature" is not defined, I have to wonder what it means. If it is the temperature a blackbody at the same mean distance would assume, it means that the surface of the planet (beneath a thick atmosphere which could contain lots of methane, CO2, and other gases) could be much much warmer. Earth would be at about 250 K (-10 F) if it didn't have an atmosphere to trap heat.
On the other hand, any planet massing as much as 6 Jupiters is going to have a lot of heat left over from its formation, however many billions of years ago. It'll be warm, plenty warm. What it probably won't have is a solid surface or a liquid sea anywhere within the zone that allows for life as we know it (liquid water between freezing and maybe 250 F). Life appears to be very tenacious, but it probably has its limits nonetheless. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
I could pick a few nits with your analysis (like your use of Kg instead of the standard symbol G for the gravitational constant, which BTW has a value around 6e-11 N/kg^2/m^2) but mostly I think you erred by over-simplifying into uselessness. Gravity is an inverse-square force so the point where the asteroid "starts being affected" is at infinity, and the exercise in the real world is a 3-body problem where the primary (Sol) is the overwhelming influence until a relatively brief time before any possible collision. What you really need to do is go over your orbital mechanics, keeping in mind Kepler's Law, and calculate what a given change in velocity will do to the position of the asteroid after X fraction of an orbit and the timing of its arrival. You'll do some algebra for the aphelion/perihelion calculations, and the rest you may have a better time looking up the answers (I know I did). Treat it as an interesting puzzle and you can't go wrong, succeed or fail. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
But monitoring the asteroids when they are in the asteroid belt will do no good whatsoever. They are all in chaotic orbits, so current observations don't allow us to predict their future paths.
Yes we can. The property of chaotic behavior is that the long-term effect of infinitesimal perturbations grows rapidly over time. Note, long-term effect. Just because an orbit cannot be projected reliably for a million years doesn't support your conclusion. We can do a perfectly adequate job of seeing where these rocks will be over 20 years or so, and that's more than sufficient warning. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
...there are already treaties in place that forbid the exo-atmospheric use of nuclear weapons.
The treaty bans weapons of mass destruction, not nukes as such. A device to propel an asteroid arguably doesn't qualify. Besides, you know in your heart of hearts that the signatory nations would take perhaps 5 minutes to vote to exempt a mission to deflect a dangerous asteroid.
Using this meteor-smashing as an excuse to start orbiting a Death Star is just giving carte blanche to the US military-industrial complex to gear up for full blown SDI again. An international anti-meteor shield treaty would be exploited in seconds by the US.
Would we, now? Nukes are rather indiscriminate things; in orbit, they could be used to wipe out many dozens of satellites in one fell swoop, or take down the electrical grid of a goodly chunk of a continent (friend or foe). There would be a lot of collateral damage from any use near Earth, and there are no military targets far from Earth. I have to ask you just how the US could exploit such a treaty? Your suspicion is more productively directed at your own government (you might want to replace your "Official Secrets Act" with a Freedom of Information Act just for starters). -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Here's a link to the Yahoo News story about asteroid characteristics, specifically referencing Mathilde. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
With our present technology there's little we could do to deflect a projectile of sizable momentum.
You're being much too vague. Do you want to quantify what you mean by "deflect" and "sizable momentum"? Available technology includes explosive devices yielding upwards of 20 megatons (8.4e23 ergs), and the kick you can get out of that is going to be impressive regardless. The Earth is only 6,400,000 meters radius; if you can give something a kick of 1 m/sec 6.4e6 seconds ahead (about 2.5 months), it'll have moved far enough to turn a strike into a miss. If you can apply the kick further ahead, you need less delta-V and can move even bigger objects with the same device.
We ought to spend the money on manned space exploration of the solar system. That way we get access to the asteroid belt's natural resources, which we need in order to construct the massive equipment we'd need to both monitor and protect against incursions from that same asteroid belt.
Your premise, that massive equipment is required to gain protection from asteroid/comet strikes, is incorrect. Being able to loft a few high-yield thermonuclear bombs on spacecraft buses with high-impulse ion drives would probably do the trick. A few small (30 cm) orbital telescopes would multiply our asteroid- and comet-finding capabilities manifold. Manned space is desirable for a number of reasons, but asteroid defense doesn't require it. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Yes, you are correct. But that all depends on us being able to get a nuke up there, finding the correct position, and not blowing it into lots of city-crushing sized chunks when it goes off. Given NASA's recent problems with caluclating orbits, I won't say I'd be a hundred percent convinced of its success.
NASA had no problems with calculating orbits; they had a problem with unit conversions due to a supplier's use of the English system (IOW, it's all you damn Brits' fault!;-).
If you go back a little ways in the BBC Sci/Tech material, you'll find an article about the properties of asteroids. Specifically, they are not solid; they are loose aggregates of fluff, and when something hits them they compress instead of shattering. This indicates that the likely response of an asteroid to a nearby nuclear blast would be to squash inward on the side facing the blast, absorb the kick, and fly away as an intact unit on a slightly different trajectory. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
... spare cycles are more abundant than people who can build an antenna.
You over-estimate the complexity of the antennas you need. Can you drill a hole in a chunk of plexiglas, bend a piece of welding rod around a broomstick and solder a piece of 300 ohm twin-lead to the ends with a propane torch? That's about the expertise required. Most any idiot could get it right in a couple attempts.
The real difficult point is the receivers themselves, and with just about everything getting a DSP in it these days it is rapidly becoming a software issue instead of a hardware issue. We all know what that means... -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Infrared radiation and "radiant heat" are the same thing, if that's what you were wondering. (I could go into hand-waving about the characteristics of infrared radiation, but that's not really germaine to the passive Chinese aircraft detection technology or its countermeasures.) -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
It would take someone very well versed in radar and electromagnetic theory to even understand the algorithms. Creating the algorithms from scratch would be even harder.
Eh? I don't think so. You're looking for an interference pattern caused by a source of reflection/scattering that is moving over time. All you'd have to do is take deltas in strength and phase from one sample to the next (good clocks are necessary to synchronize the timekeeping) and look for the source of the stuff that changed (backtrack a spherical wave and its reflections to the source). This is not black magic; something very similar was done with air-traffic control radars many years ago to eliminate the stationary ground clutter - using ultrasound waves in glass tubes of mercury as the storage elements!
If that's all it takes to do the reception and analysis, then connectivity is the only other hurdle. When everyone has T1 equivalent connectivity at home, I'll bet that distributed.net will have competition from distributed.track. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Slashdot Mirror
I do believe us Yanks did. The British Crown and Parliament has been a government in exile (from the 13 colonies) for what, 220-something years now? That's as good as it gets (unless you can do them like the Tsar). ;-)
--
The idea that a gene-selected child would be less human is absurd. Humanity isn't something you can filter out in solution, it permeates our gatherings and our selves. Making a kid from the best DNA you've got to offer is not going to make them one whit less - or more - human than the luck of the draw.
--
This is the kind of thing we might be able to get with full knowledge of our genes and the ability to manipulate them: grab all the upside potential of the variability that's out there and eliminate the downside.
--
One distinction lost in the above is the fact that only congenital defects or susceptibilities can be eliminated by gene selection. We can eliminate accidents of nature, but we can't eliminate accidents, period. We'll still have the ill, the retarded and the maimed with us, we just won't have so many of the heartbreaking cases who were born that way and never had a chance.
There's also a big difference between knowing what a person's genes are and being able to control what they think, feel and do. This is an ENORMOUS leap of logic, but it often gets glossed over as demonstrated by this quote from Katz:
There's a little saying from the life science that rebuts this: "Under perfectly controlled conditions of temperature, pressure, humidity, nutrient concentration and lighting, the organism will do whatever the hell it pleases." Being assured of your kid not having Down's Syndrome is a rather simple thing. Being assured that your interaction as parents, as playmates, as teachers, and as book, television, radio and cyber-media influences - hell, even your interaction as a pregnant woman - with their genes and innate and developed abilities is going to yield any predictable outcome is simply impossible. The influences are nonlinear, combinatorial and beyond any ability to compute.Besides, there will be a lot of people who will select for the idiosyncratic and other traits because they will desire children who aren't the same as everyone else's. It's not very likely that many people will select for low intelligence or crooked teeth or Prince Charles ears, but when they are selecting for something else it's bound to fall out in some by the luck of the draw. I'm afraid that the future is Human-Genome-Project-proof as far as the eye can see.
--
Then there are the ineffable issues. Knowledge from observing the Martian dust storms led to our model of nuclear winter and deterred people from starting a nuclear war here. Observations of Jupiter's atmosphere led to better models of our own and superior weather forecasts. Going to a new planet, especially to live there, is bound to yield knowledge that will improve conditions somewhere, or maybe even everywhere. It's very short-sighted to say "I can't see what we might find, let's not go" when the whole point of going is to see what you'll find. And until we find it, we don't know what it's good for.
Gimme a ticket on a Mars Direct.
--
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The moon isn't much better. Aside from rock (with some additions due to the solar wind and "gardening" by meteroids over the eons), there doesn't appear to be much there either. There are tantalizing hints of water-ice (nothing confirmed yet) but no nitrogen or carbon. You'd have to import pretty much everything you need for carbon-based life, and that $10,000/lb just to get it to LEO is pretty daunting.
Mars is the nearest place we can go that has all the basics. The atmosphere is chock full of carbon and oxygen (CO2 97%), it has nitrogen (3% in the atmosphere) and we know water (and thus hydrogen) is present; the Vikings sent back pictures of morning frosts on the ground under conditions too warm for dry ice to form, so we know that the relative humidity exceeds 100% at times under natural conditions. All the essential elements of life are there in vast quantities compared to any place other than Earth. This makes Mars the nearest place where people can easily "live off the land", and thus our best bet for a viable colony.
--
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--
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"Ownership" isn't productive per se; I could take a lathe and put it in a warehouse where it would produce nothing. Investment is another matter. If I own a lathe I benefit from having it produce value, so my interests lie in having it work well - including hiring and compensating the people who can make the most value with it. Ownership qua investment is a very productive activity, because the more productive capital becomes the less capital you need.
Money is the metaphor for capital, but ultimately capital is things like land and materials and machines and expertise. The more productive the capital is, the less work you have to put into the system to get your desires out of it. This is a point that Marx missed AFAIK, because in a communal ownership system the pressures leading to a tragedy of the commons come to the fore. All the communist economies have failed miserably to produce as much well-being as capitalism, proving that Marx was way out of touch.
--
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Productivity isn't just an individual attribute, it also applies to machines and enterprises. For instance, a worker with a file can shape metal. Slowly. A worker with a lathe can shape metal many times faster. The owner of the lathe, the "capitalist" who invested in it, is responsible for some fraction of the increased production; it is not "stolen", it is rightfully the owner's.
On the enterprise level, metal precisely shaped to form objects nobody needs is worthless. The collective intelligence of the enterprise which can decide what metal to shape how to make which products determines the value of its output. This value rightfully accrues to the owners of the enterprise; because they made the value.
Just had to spend a few minutes picking Marx apart (Marx isn't worth any more, too easy a target).
--
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To a large extent this can be traced to our schools and universities. While it is almost impossible to get a 4-year degree without taking a number of literature classes, there are scores of college graduates who have not had a math class since high-school algebra. Chemistry? Get real. Physics? Forget it. These people have only the sketchiest understanding of how the gadgets that run their world - and on which they depend - actually work. What they do not understand, they are often helpless to affect. And they fear this.
Technophobic writing and demagoguery is usually full of examples of scientific cluelessness. To the extent that the audience for these things is no better informed, the errors go uncorrected or even multiply. We wind up with a situation of the blind leading the blind.
I am of the opinion that our schools and universities are largely responsible for this. A person should not be considered worthy of a high-school diploma if they have not mastered algebra and chemistry and biology. Science classwork should be a requirement for all degree programs in universities, including literature and arts. When the future of our society depends on being able to understand and manage these things, there is no excuse for our educational system allowing people to slip through without having a firm grasp of the fundamentals, at the very least.
This is especially true of the communications specialists, journalists and politicians. No PolySci grad should be able to get into the field without knowing *why* CFC's are bad (chemistry) and the reason we do not want to use antibiotics and antibacterials when not required (evolution). No journalism major should get out without knowing the difference between radioactivity and radiation, or a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour. No person should graduate high school without knowing something about ROI and the unsustainability of Ponzi schemes (which is why we're having such a hard time reforming Social Security).
In a dumbing-down world, smartening up the populace isn't going to be easy. But we have to, because it's essential to our future.
--
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Government malfeasance is always reported in the past tense.
--
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- The Apollo missions planted a number of seismographs on the moon (6 total); the laser reflectors are not useful for seismic data. The seismographs were lost to science when the ALSEP packages were shut down due to NASA budget cuts. This was a supreme waste, as they were functioning beautifully; Congress axed the funds for data collection and analysis, a pitiful hundred thousand dollars a year I believe. (Somebody please nuke Wisconsin, the state that re-elected William Proxmire over and over because it felt that milk price supports were more important than science.)
- One of the missions included a mortar firing grenades to get some reference seismic waves, IIRC.
- The lunar ascent stages were not deliberately crashed, IIRC; the Apollo 11 ascent stage was still in orbit until a few years ago, again IIRC. On the other hand, the SIVb stage which pushed the CSM/LM to the Moon was surplus after the injection burn, and at least some of them were sent to collide with Luna.
You have the conclusions correct AFAIK.--
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I wonder if these little babies carry high-speed accelerometers to infer the mechanical characteristics of the stuff they're plowing into... could be useful information.
--
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On the other hand, any planet massing as much as 6 Jupiters is going to have a lot of heat left over from its formation, however many billions of years ago. It'll be warm, plenty warm. What it probably won't have is a solid surface or a liquid sea anywhere within the zone that allows for life as we know it (liquid water between freezing and maybe 250 F). Life appears to be very tenacious, but it probably has its limits nonetheless.
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I could pick a few nits with your analysis (like your use of Kg instead of the standard symbol G for the gravitational constant, which BTW has a value around 6e-11 N/kg^2/m^2) but mostly I think you erred by over-simplifying into uselessness. Gravity is an inverse-square force so the point where the asteroid "starts being affected" is at infinity, and the exercise in the real world is a 3-body problem where the primary (Sol) is the overwhelming influence until a relatively brief time before any possible collision. What you really need to do is go over your orbital mechanics, keeping in mind Kepler's Law, and calculate what a given change in velocity will do to the position of the asteroid after X fraction of an orbit and the timing of its arrival. You'll do some algebra for the aphelion/perihelion calculations, and the rest you may have a better time looking up the answers (I know I did). Treat it as an interesting puzzle and you can't go wrong, succeed or fail.
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Here's a link to the Yahoo News story about asteroid characteristics, specifically referencing Mathilde.
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If you go back a little ways in the BBC Sci/Tech material, you'll find an article about the properties of asteroids. Specifically, they are not solid; they are loose aggregates of fluff, and when something hits them they compress instead of shattering. This indicates that the likely response of an asteroid to a nearby nuclear blast would be to squash inward on the side facing the blast, absorb the kick, and fly away as an intact unit on a slightly different trajectory.
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The real difficult point is the receivers themselves, and with just about everything getting a DSP in it these days it is rapidly becoming a software issue instead of a hardware issue. We all know what that means...
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Infrared radiation and "radiant heat" are the same thing, if that's what you were wondering. (I could go into hand-waving about the characteristics of infrared radiation, but that's not really germaine to the passive Chinese aircraft detection technology or its countermeasures.)
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If that's all it takes to do the reception and analysis, then connectivity is the only other hurdle. When everyone has T1 equivalent connectivity at home, I'll bet that distributed.net will have competition from distributed.track.
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