Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan seems to have been a huge influence on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: in Sirens, one of the jokes is that the entirety of human history results from the meddling of an alien species.
Well, obviously the consumers don't agree with you, because high-capacity iPods continue to fly off the shelves.
I think the main reason is that the iPod is a digital media device, not just a digital music player. You can put photos, videos, etc. on there. I use it as a portable backup drive for my laptop and to transfer files.
You know, in Star Trek this lead to everything becoming "free," ushering in a utopia where the only "work" people did was stuff they enjoyed doing. Too bad that, instead, we'll just enact a bunch of draconian laws to artificially induce scarcity again...
The problem I see is in human psychology. It would theoretically be possible to create a society in which virtually everyone achieves a certain level of material comfort; on average people are better off today in terms of food, shelter, life expectancy etc. than they were 100 or 1000 years ago, and if that keeps up, fewer and fewer people will be truly impoverished.
The problem is "keeping up with the Joneses": human beings don't measure their success by whether they have enough, but whether they have more than their neighbors. Compared to a farmer scratching out a starvation-ration existence in the hills of Africa, the poor of the first world are wealthy. Or consider that poor of America have access to material comforts that no Roman emperor could ever have dreamed of, like flush toilets and DVDs. But despite these comforts, few people ever stop and say, "hey... I have enough." I have a friend who works as a Wall Street finance type, who tells me that in his business "Nobody is really rich. There are only degrees of poverty". The fact that you are bringing home hundreds of thousands of dollars working on Wall Street does not make you feel rich, because you look at the executives taking home millions and wonder why you don't get as much... and those executives look at some bigger, more powerful executive and wonder why they don't make as much... and so on.
Charles Darwin is a good example of why you need a broad education. He didn't come up with the idea of natural selection by reading a lot of biology papers, he came up with the idea by reading Malthus' book on human population growth.
If you focus exclusively on your field, then the best you can do is learn everything that is already known in that field. That may be fine if you just want to be a craftsman, using time-honored techniques. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if you want to really push boundaries, you need to go outside your field and bring in pieces of knowledge which are foreign, even revolutionary.
Your small, lightweight 100mpg car will have high explosive charges placed in its bumpers; when it crashes into something they detonate, negating the threat. This will (1) eliminate the need for expensive, heavy crash-proofing, and (2) cause the Hummmers to think twice before bumping into a Mini Cooper.
Couple other observations: the dude on the cover of "Iron Sword" has got to be Fabio. Shudder... the idea of pretending to be Fabio for any length of time makes my skin crawl. And am I crazy, or is that Bono- with green hair- driving the "Crazy Taxi"? The article says the artist also did the Elvis stamp, so maybe he's got a thing for portraying musicians...
These kinds of molecular techniques do have an incredible amount of potential, but I am also worried that they could cause us to start neglecting other, vital questions. OK, I've got the genome of these various microbes, fine... but which ones are common in the environment, and which are rare? What do they consume? What consumes them? What proteins do the genes code for? Trying to reduce the complexity of biology down to a genome may cause us to ignore other, important questions.
It's like trying to understand a phenomenally complex, dynamic entity such as New York City by creating a vast archive which contains the blueprints of every building, the registration of every car and truck, and the phone listing of every citizen. Yes, this could be of incredible use in helping to figure out the dynamics of the city, but it would be a phenomenal mistake to believe that because you had all this data, you somehow understood New York. This, however, is precisely the kind of mistake that some ivory-tower academics make.
What are you? The Lord King Emperor of Denial and Enabling?
Well, I for one am absolutely, positively, most certainly NOT the Lord King Emperor of Denial and Enabling. So why don't you have a couple beers and forget all about this discussion?
Her ramblings showed the entire point of the ad. The ad was implying that Hillary speaks in meaningless and empty rhetoric that the masses eat up like mindless brainwashed drones.
Which is why I don't think Hillary is electable.
Don't get me wrong here- I'm not one of those right-wingers for whom hating Hillary is an unconscious reflex, like breathing. I'm a slightly left-of-center Democrat (or a "radical leftist liberal" in right-wing terms), and I think a President Hillary Clinton would be a vast improvement over the current bunch of incompetent right-wing hacks. But when she talks, she sounds calculated; it sounds like her words are the result of intensive polling, long hours of drafting in a committee, and several rounds of focus groups. There's no passion, no idealism, no belief. It's very difficult to get others to believe in your cause if you don't sound like you believe in it yourself. She's so much a product of marketing that she's unmarketable.
Americans are fundamentally idealists and we want idealistic presidents. It almost doesn't matter what you believe in as long as you are sincere, I don't agree with all of McCain's views but the fact that he seems honest and sincere in holding them counts for a lot. Of course you can have too much of a good thing; Bush II is a perfect example of how good intentions can lead to disaster if you don't have a grasp on reality. It'll be interesting to see how this election plays out; between the right-wing Democrats, and the left-wing Republicans, the next election is almost guaranteed to put the country back on a more centrist track, which is exactly where we need to be right now.
I think it's kind of a contrived explanation, personally. The simplest explanation which fits the facts (that is, Occam's Razor) is that Google saw an internet phenomenon, got dollar signs in their eyes, became worried what might happen if Microsoft bought them instead, and overpaid for something with a lot of potential liabilities.
Companies buy other companies all the time. They frequently do this to make more money, they frequently overpay for them, and they frequently purchase companies which end up hurting their business more than helping it. This rarely has anything to do with looking out for the overall health of the industry, and often it ends up hurtng the industry because buying up other companies is a way of keeping technology out of your competitor's hands, and preventing new competitors from arising. "Don't be evil" notwithstanding, I don't see why Google would be that different.
The irony of war, waste and lost lives, is that the technologies which have been developed in Iraq & Afganistan by the U.S. & its allies from surveillance, guidance, sensors, weapons, language analysis, tactics and human psychology of urban conflict have resulted in abilities and knowledge which will help the industrialized world immensely in being able to find, monitor, stop and minimize potential conflicts through this century.
Here's a problem with your cute little theory: the U.S. military already outclasses the insurgency in terms of guidance systems, weapons, training, logistics, and all that shit. And they are still not winning. So I find it difficult to believe that new technologies will make war any less messy; if anything it may just get messier. For instance, improvements in materials, manufacturing, and firearms made it possible to manufacture cheap, lightweight assault rifles like the AK-47. Its light weight means that you don't have to be big to carry one, and its rapid fire means you don't have to be a terribly good shot. So even a small child can use an AK-47, and now we've got child soldiers in Africa.
Learning and applying the lessons and equipment early will save countless dollars and lives ultimately, against a medieval set of ideas based on forced conversion not of just people to their religion, but indeed also the conversion of the entire worlds law and governmental systems to Sharia law.
I'm all for fighting the radical Islamists and their medieval ideas. The problem is, invading Iraq without a legitimate reason, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and destroying the country has convinced the Muslims that WE are the bad guys, that we are trying to take over the Islamic world, and that maybe Al-Qaeda has a point. The Iraq war has not helped the U.S. achieve its aims; it has isolated us from our traditional allies, turned the entire Islamic world against us, and increased popular support for radical Islamist terrorist organizations. I saw a bumper sticker that summed it up pretty well: "We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them".
Think about it: would you rather travel in an Islamic country today, or the day after 9/11?
Even the worst diseases don't have a 100% fatality rate. Bubonic plague, smallpox, AIDS, the 1918 flu- none of them have even come close to wiping out the species. At best they are able to locally reduce the population growth rate; but sooner or later the population evolves resistance, just like rabbits and myxomatosis in Australia. Also, the disease evolves to become benign (diseases that kill their host quickly have a hard time being passed on).
Massive asteroid will make Earth FAR more uninhabitable than mars.
Even assuming the re-entering ejecta heats up the surface to uninhabitable levels, you have caves, which are vastly superior in terms of gravity, temperature, pressure, and atmosphere to anything you could find on Mars. Once the surface has cooled down a bit, you have a large area which is going to be warmer than Mars, have a breathable atmosphere, one gravity, etc.
We are the direct descendants of mammals which survived an asteroid impact- in fact, everything you see around you is the direct descendant of survivors of the Chicxulub impact. If some stupid little shrew-like critter can survive a 10-kilometer asteroid smacking into the earth, then Homo sapiens- with our ability to plan, store food, generate power, etc.- could certainly do the same.
Besides, what do you have against being on another planet? It can only help us, not hurt us.
I disagree that spaceflight can "only help us". Everything comes at a cost. Every dollar we spend on spaceflight is one dollar we could be spending on something else. I'm not one of those people who say we shouldn't spend one dollar on spaceflight so long as one homeless person exists, and I certainly think NASA is a better way to spend money than the War on Terror, but I don't agree that we should settle Mars at any price. Creating a self-sustaining colony- one which could manufacture and grow everything it needs, with enough people to have a viable population- would probably cost trillions of dollars. If we are really in great danger of immediate extinction on earth- from diseases, asteroids, climate change, war, or whatnot- we would probably be much better off taking that money and investing it into recognizing those threats and dealing with them.
Saying we need to go to Mars is like saying that because I'm bleeding, instead of patching the cut, I should clone myself. It's ridiculously expensive, it's so far away from being practical it won't save me anyway, and there are simpler ways of solving the problem.
theres millions of starvinfg kids yet the governments of the world choose to spend their money shooting billion dollar toy rockets into space. disgussting.
Whether something is a "waste of money" or not depends on two things: what you get out, and what you put in. This is called "ROI", "Return on Investment". Almost anything is worth funding, if it's cheap enough. Likewise, almost anything can be a waste of money if it costs enough. A cure for cancer or AIDS would easily be worth 100 billion dollars, but for 100 trillion dollars you could probably save more lives by feeding people, curing malaria, etc. so spending 100 trillion to cure AIDS would be a waste.
In my opinion, manned spaceflight is in the "waste of money" category because putting a human in a spacecraft gives you few advantages (given how advanced robotics have become) but increases your costs by orders of magnitude. However, probes, telescopes, and robots can collect some very vital data for (relatively) little money. Some of this data includes things like global climate change, which is important for understanding (for instance) droughts in Africa, which cause kids to starve. Keep in mind that a lot of what NASA does is monitor planet earth.
Its all about the mean between two vices. In my opinion, space exploration is important and will ultimately be a worthwhile investment- maybe not today or tomorrow, but in 25 or 50 years, the advances in scientific knowledge will help us make the world a better place. At the same time, I wouldn't want to cut food aid to Africa for a couple more Mars probes, either.
They should be collaborating to make a Mars colony instead so we can get our eggs out of one basket.
The "all our eggs in one basket" argument is just silly. If the earth experiences massive global warming, a runaway superflu, all-out nuclear war, and then gets hit by a massive asteroid, it would *still* be much more habitable than Mars, and our chances of surviving here would still be exponentially better than our chances on Mars.
On earth, a nuclear weapon causes damage via its atmospheric shock wave - it's the motion of the air that causes buildings to fall down [or implode, or whatever].
Much of the damage caused by nuclear weapons, particularly hydrogen bombs, is actually from the intense heat released; the thermal energy is capable of causing severe burns miles from the point of explosion even after the air has absorbed most of the radiation (which is why, believe it or not, "duck and cover" isn't such bad advice). My suspicion is that you would want to detonate the bomb some distance above the asteroid; the heat would cause the surface of the asteroid to vaporize, and the gas jetted from the surface would shove the asteroid off course.
I'm on the other side of the spectrum, in that I prefer to travel for work. I feel that my interactions with the culture and the people are a little more genuine when I have a real reason to be there, other than to take pictures of the cute little brown children and pose in front of old buildings. Trying to live a normal, day-to-day existence in a foreign country, versus doing the tour thing, gives you a better appreciation of what the country is really like, I think.
The only mindless zombies I see on a regular basis are the ones that assume everything Bush does is somehow inherently evil, destroying the constitution, causing global warming, etc. Those are the people I find who lack logic and reason and possess an inability to think beyond some handed down meme they read somewhere or heard somewhere and get patted on the backend by their circle of yes men.
The reason so many people criticize Bush is simple: most people think he's a bad president. By "most people" I mean the 57-61% who disapprove of him according to the most recent polls. Personally, I don't believe Bush is evil; I suspect he actually wants to make the world better. But he's a damn fool and incompetent. Bush is a spoiled rich kid who never had to learn how to do honest work, to pay for his own mistakes, to grow up. Now he's finally out from under Daddy's wing and Daddy Bush can't fix his mistakes. It's one thing to bail you out when you screw up a small oil company. But unfortunately, there's nobody that can bail you out when you invade a large Middle Eastern country on false pretenses and let it descend into civil war. He might be well-intentioned, but good intentions do not equal good domestic and international policy. Let's look at a few of the cock-ups which have occurred on Bush's watch:
*Not doing jack shit to stop Osama bin Laden before 9/11.
*Letting Osama get away in Afghanistan.
*Invading Iraq on false pretenses and blowing our credibility.
*Letting looting go unchecked in Baghdad, blowing our credibility with the Iraqis.
*Letting an insurgency develop in Iraq, turning it into a giant terrorist training ground.
*Firing the entire Iraqi Army and locking the Baathists out of power, which fueled the insurgency.
*Letting U.S. soldiers engage in torture in Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan, blowing our credibility on human rights
*Neglecting the rebuilding of Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to come back.
*Letting North Korea go from a company which may or may not have had a nuclear program, to one that has the bomb.
*Failing to mobilize Federal resources to respond to Hurricane Katrina
*Implementing domestic surveillance on a previously unheard of scale
*Decreasing funds for basic scientific research at the NSF, NIH, and NASA even while engaging in massive deficit spending.
Did Bush do anything right? The invasion of Afghanistan was the right move, and was well done. And arguably we're doing something right with Al Qaeda since we haven't been attacked. Appointing David Petraeus as head of the army in Iraq was the right move, but it came far too late, and his counterinsurgent tactics may be too little, too late. Firing Rumsfeld and replacing him with Gates was a good move, but again it should have been done a long time ago. Currently, Bush is in the running for the honor of Worst President of All Time. They had a whole series of op-eds on this very topic in the Washington Post. Face it, the radical conservatives have had their opportunity to put their theories into practice, and they've blown it.
Super catastrophes are pretty much by definition, super-rare. If they happened every other day, they would be normal, not super.
Sure, if it goes off it will ruin a lot of people's days. But if it goes off every million years or so, well, what are the chances of being alive to witness it? Not terribly good. Our species may not even be around the next time this thing blows. Same goes with other super-catastrophes like large asteroid impacts. I'm all for long-term thinking, but there's a danger in thinking too long-term as well, that is, let's worry about next year's hurricane season, or that hundred-year flood, rather than what happens when the sun goes into red giant phase a billion years from now.
Historically, it's the "normal" catastrophes that happen on the order of every few decades or centuries -like earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, plagues, famines, and non-super volcanoes- which have tended to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Not to mention our incredible genius when it comes to killing each other. In terms of minimizing human casualties, odds are the most cost-effective solutions will be things like better building codes to withstand earthquakes, not letting people build in flood-prone areas, and perhaps most importantly, developing the ability to rapidly respond to disasters when they do happen.
Poor, unwanted, neglected PS3s... anyone else thinking of the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Maybe the PS3 can make friends with that choo-choo with square wheels!
Slashdot Mirror
Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan seems to have been a huge influence on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: in Sirens, one of the jokes is that the entirety of human history results from the meddling of an alien species.
I think the main reason is that the iPod is a digital media device, not just a digital music player. You can put photos, videos, etc. on there. I use it as a portable backup drive for my laptop and to transfer files.
The problem I see is in human psychology. It would theoretically be possible to create a society in which virtually everyone achieves a certain level of material comfort; on average people are better off today in terms of food, shelter, life expectancy etc. than they were 100 or 1000 years ago, and if that keeps up, fewer and fewer people will be truly impoverished.
The problem is "keeping up with the Joneses": human beings don't measure their success by whether they have enough, but whether they have more than their neighbors. Compared to a farmer scratching out a starvation-ration existence in the hills of Africa, the poor of the first world are wealthy. Or consider that poor of America have access to material comforts that no Roman emperor could ever have dreamed of, like flush toilets and DVDs. But despite these comforts, few people ever stop and say, "hey... I have enough." I have a friend who works as a Wall Street finance type, who tells me that in his business "Nobody is really rich. There are only degrees of poverty". The fact that you are bringing home hundreds of thousands of dollars working on Wall Street does not make you feel rich, because you look at the executives taking home millions and wonder why you don't get as much... and those executives look at some bigger, more powerful executive and wonder why they don't make as much... and so on.
We should get the cameras to yell at Slashdot editors if they try to post a dupe...
If you focus exclusively on your field, then the best you can do is learn everything that is already known in that field. That may be fine if you just want to be a craftsman, using time-honored techniques. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if you want to really push boundaries, you need to go outside your field and bring in pieces of knowledge which are foreign, even revolutionary.
Your small, lightweight 100mpg car will have high explosive charges placed in its bumpers; when it crashes into something they detonate, negating the threat. This will (1) eliminate the need for expensive, heavy crash-proofing, and (2) cause the Hummmers to think twice before bumping into a Mini Cooper.
Couple other observations: the dude on the cover of "Iron Sword" has got to be Fabio. Shudder... the idea of pretending to be Fabio for any length of time makes my skin crawl. And am I crazy, or is that Bono- with green hair- driving the "Crazy Taxi"? The article says the artist also did the Elvis stamp, so maybe he's got a thing for portraying musicians...
It's like trying to understand a phenomenally complex, dynamic entity such as New York City by creating a vast archive which contains the blueprints of every building, the registration of every car and truck, and the phone listing of every citizen. Yes, this could be of incredible use in helping to figure out the dynamics of the city, but it would be a phenomenal mistake to believe that because you had all this data, you somehow understood New York. This, however, is precisely the kind of mistake that some ivory-tower academics make.
Well, I for one am absolutely, positively, most certainly NOT the Lord King Emperor of Denial and Enabling. So why don't you have a couple beers and forget all about this discussion?
I was making posts like that before it was cool.
Which is why I don't think Hillary is electable.
Don't get me wrong here- I'm not one of those right-wingers for whom hating Hillary is an unconscious reflex, like breathing. I'm a slightly left-of-center Democrat (or a "radical leftist liberal" in right-wing terms), and I think a President Hillary Clinton would be a vast improvement over the current bunch of incompetent right-wing hacks. But when she talks, she sounds calculated; it sounds like her words are the result of intensive polling, long hours of drafting in a committee, and several rounds of focus groups. There's no passion, no idealism, no belief. It's very difficult to get others to believe in your cause if you don't sound like you believe in it yourself. She's so much a product of marketing that she's unmarketable.
Americans are fundamentally idealists and we want idealistic presidents. It almost doesn't matter what you believe in as long as you are sincere, I don't agree with all of McCain's views but the fact that he seems honest and sincere in holding them counts for a lot. Of course you can have too much of a good thing; Bush II is a perfect example of how good intentions can lead to disaster if you don't have a grasp on reality. It'll be interesting to see how this election plays out; between the right-wing Democrats, and the left-wing Republicans, the next election is almost guaranteed to put the country back on a more centrist track, which is exactly where we need to be right now.
Companies buy other companies all the time. They frequently do this to make more money, they frequently overpay for them, and they frequently purchase companies which end up hurting their business more than helping it. This rarely has anything to do with looking out for the overall health of the industry, and often it ends up hurtng the industry because buying up other companies is a way of keeping technology out of your competitor's hands, and preventing new competitors from arising. "Don't be evil" notwithstanding, I don't see why Google would be that different.
Here's a problem with your cute little theory: the U.S. military already outclasses the insurgency in terms of guidance systems, weapons, training, logistics, and all that shit. And they are still not winning. So I find it difficult to believe that new technologies will make war any less messy; if anything it may just get messier. For instance, improvements in materials, manufacturing, and firearms made it possible to manufacture cheap, lightweight assault rifles like the AK-47. Its light weight means that you don't have to be big to carry one, and its rapid fire means you don't have to be a terribly good shot. So even a small child can use an AK-47, and now we've got child soldiers in Africa.
Learning and applying the lessons and equipment early will save countless dollars and lives ultimately, against a medieval set of ideas based on forced conversion not of just people to their religion, but indeed also the conversion of the entire worlds law and governmental systems to Sharia law.
I'm all for fighting the radical Islamists and their medieval ideas. The problem is, invading Iraq without a legitimate reason, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and destroying the country has convinced the Muslims that WE are the bad guys, that we are trying to take over the Islamic world, and that maybe Al-Qaeda has a point. The Iraq war has not helped the U.S. achieve its aims; it has isolated us from our traditional allies, turned the entire Islamic world against us, and increased popular support for radical Islamist terrorist organizations. I saw a bumper sticker that summed it up pretty well: "We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them".
Think about it: would you rather travel in an Islamic country today, or the day after 9/11?
You're right- and the multicolored circles must be the meatballs!
Even the worst diseases don't have a 100% fatality rate. Bubonic plague, smallpox, AIDS, the 1918 flu- none of them have even come close to wiping out the species. At best they are able to locally reduce the population growth rate; but sooner or later the population evolves resistance, just like rabbits and myxomatosis in Australia. Also, the disease evolves to become benign (diseases that kill their host quickly have a hard time being passed on).
Massive asteroid will make Earth FAR more uninhabitable than mars.
Even assuming the re-entering ejecta heats up the surface to uninhabitable levels, you have caves, which are vastly superior in terms of gravity, temperature, pressure, and atmosphere to anything you could find on Mars. Once the surface has cooled down a bit, you have a large area which is going to be warmer than Mars, have a breathable atmosphere, one gravity, etc.
We are the direct descendants of mammals which survived an asteroid impact- in fact, everything you see around you is the direct descendant of survivors of the Chicxulub impact. If some stupid little shrew-like critter can survive a 10-kilometer asteroid smacking into the earth, then Homo sapiens- with our ability to plan, store food, generate power, etc.- could certainly do the same.
Besides, what do you have against being on another planet? It can only help us, not hurt us.
I disagree that spaceflight can "only help us". Everything comes at a cost. Every dollar we spend on spaceflight is one dollar we could be spending on something else. I'm not one of those people who say we shouldn't spend one dollar on spaceflight so long as one homeless person exists, and I certainly think NASA is a better way to spend money than the War on Terror, but I don't agree that we should settle Mars at any price. Creating a self-sustaining colony- one which could manufacture and grow everything it needs, with enough people to have a viable population- would probably cost trillions of dollars. If we are really in great danger of immediate extinction on earth- from diseases, asteroids, climate change, war, or whatnot- we would probably be much better off taking that money and investing it into recognizing those threats and dealing with them.
Saying we need to go to Mars is like saying that because I'm bleeding, instead of patching the cut, I should clone myself. It's ridiculously expensive, it's so far away from being practical it won't save me anyway, and there are simpler ways of solving the problem.
Whether something is a "waste of money" or not depends on two things: what you get out, and what you put in. This is called "ROI", "Return on Investment". Almost anything is worth funding, if it's cheap enough. Likewise, almost anything can be a waste of money if it costs enough. A cure for cancer or AIDS would easily be worth 100 billion dollars, but for 100 trillion dollars you could probably save more lives by feeding people, curing malaria, etc. so spending 100 trillion to cure AIDS would be a waste.
In my opinion, manned spaceflight is in the "waste of money" category because putting a human in a spacecraft gives you few advantages (given how advanced robotics have become) but increases your costs by orders of magnitude. However, probes, telescopes, and robots can collect some very vital data for (relatively) little money. Some of this data includes things like global climate change, which is important for understanding (for instance) droughts in Africa, which cause kids to starve. Keep in mind that a lot of what NASA does is monitor planet earth.
Its all about the mean between two vices. In my opinion, space exploration is important and will ultimately be a worthwhile investment- maybe not today or tomorrow, but in 25 or 50 years, the advances in scientific knowledge will help us make the world a better place. At the same time, I wouldn't want to cut food aid to Africa for a couple more Mars probes, either.
The "all our eggs in one basket" argument is just silly. If the earth experiences massive global warming, a runaway superflu, all-out nuclear war, and then gets hit by a massive asteroid, it would *still* be much more habitable than Mars, and our chances of surviving here would still be exponentially better than our chances on Mars.
Much of the damage caused by nuclear weapons, particularly hydrogen bombs, is actually from the intense heat released; the thermal energy is capable of causing severe burns miles from the point of explosion even after the air has absorbed most of the radiation (which is why, believe it or not, "duck and cover" isn't such bad advice). My suspicion is that you would want to detonate the bomb some distance above the asteroid; the heat would cause the surface of the asteroid to vaporize, and the gas jetted from the surface would shove the asteroid off course.
I'm on the other side of the spectrum, in that I prefer to travel for work. I feel that my interactions with the culture and the people are a little more genuine when I have a real reason to be there, other than to take pictures of the cute little brown children and pose in front of old buildings. Trying to live a normal, day-to-day existence in a foreign country, versus doing the tour thing, gives you a better appreciation of what the country is really like, I think.
I don't get it. Why doesn't Take Two just run him over with a stolen car?
The reason so many people criticize Bush is simple: most people think he's a bad president. By "most people" I mean the 57-61% who disapprove of him according to the most recent polls. Personally, I don't believe Bush is evil; I suspect he actually wants to make the world better. But he's a damn fool and incompetent. Bush is a spoiled rich kid who never had to learn how to do honest work, to pay for his own mistakes, to grow up. Now he's finally out from under Daddy's wing and Daddy Bush can't fix his mistakes. It's one thing to bail you out when you screw up a small oil company. But unfortunately, there's nobody that can bail you out when you invade a large Middle Eastern country on false pretenses and let it descend into civil war. He might be well-intentioned, but good intentions do not equal good domestic and international policy. Let's look at a few of the cock-ups which have occurred on Bush's watch:
*Not doing jack shit to stop Osama bin Laden before 9/11.
*Letting Osama get away in Afghanistan.
*Invading Iraq on false pretenses and blowing our credibility.
*Letting looting go unchecked in Baghdad, blowing our credibility with the Iraqis.
*Letting an insurgency develop in Iraq, turning it into a giant terrorist training ground.
*Firing the entire Iraqi Army and locking the Baathists out of power, which fueled the insurgency.
*Letting U.S. soldiers engage in torture in Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan, blowing our credibility on human rights
*Neglecting the rebuilding of Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to come back.
*Letting North Korea go from a company which may or may not have had a nuclear program, to one that has the bomb.
*Failing to mobilize Federal resources to respond to Hurricane Katrina
*Implementing domestic surveillance on a previously unheard of scale
*Decreasing funds for basic scientific research at the NSF, NIH, and NASA even while engaging in massive deficit spending.
Did Bush do anything right? The invasion of Afghanistan was the right move, and was well done. And arguably we're doing something right with Al Qaeda since we haven't been attacked. Appointing David Petraeus as head of the army in Iraq was the right move, but it came far too late, and his counterinsurgent tactics may be too little, too late. Firing Rumsfeld and replacing him with Gates was a good move, but again it should have been done a long time ago. Currently, Bush is in the running for the honor of Worst President of All Time. They had a whole series of op-eds on this very topic in the Washington Post. Face it, the radical conservatives have had their opportunity to put their theories into practice, and they've blown it.
But EA told me that it's standard in the industry for employee contracts to be signed in goat's blood!
Sure, if it goes off it will ruin a lot of people's days. But if it goes off every million years or so, well, what are the chances of being alive to witness it? Not terribly good. Our species may not even be around the next time this thing blows. Same goes with other super-catastrophes like large asteroid impacts. I'm all for long-term thinking, but there's a danger in thinking too long-term as well, that is, let's worry about next year's hurricane season, or that hundred-year flood, rather than what happens when the sun goes into red giant phase a billion years from now.
Historically, it's the "normal" catastrophes that happen on the order of every few decades or centuries -like earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, plagues, famines, and non-super volcanoes- which have tended to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Not to mention our incredible genius when it comes to killing each other. In terms of minimizing human casualties, odds are the most cost-effective solutions will be things like better building codes to withstand earthquakes, not letting people build in flood-prone areas, and perhaps most importantly, developing the ability to rapidly respond to disasters when they do happen.
Poor, unwanted, neglected PS3s... anyone else thinking of the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Maybe the PS3 can make friends with that choo-choo with square wheels!
Hebrew National- is that the brand where the hot dogs are circumcised?