Well, actually, higher taxes is probably the only viable solution right now, but not the way most enviro its think, at the consumer end.
Here's the rub. Burning coal is bad. Stopping that alone would mostly get us where we want to go. Probelm is, once it is dug up it'll burn and we're toast. Right? Now, we can build out renewables to decrease demand for coal, right? Yeah, but that'll have no effect. Prices on coal go down and it becomes more attractive somewhere else. So it's burned and we're toast. In theory we could put enough downward pressure on coal prices to make mining not a viable business, but given the demand for energy that isn't likely to ever happen.
So, what to do? Make coal more expensive. LOTS more expensive. Tax the bejeezuz out of it's production. Import and export taxes up the wazoo. Slam the production hard. The US, Europe etc.
That'll work. Nothing else will.
No, he says it isn't science because it doesn't employ the methodology of science. Economy, psychology and astrology are similar in that they can use words that make them sound scientific, but that doesn't make them science. I also doesn't make them invalid subject of an institution of education. A great many things taught at schools are not science.
As they say - rocket science isn't exactly rocket science...it's easy bordering on trivial, but might be a tad expensive.
As far as nukes go, why would they be dumb?
Generally because blowing the blasted thing up isn't really going to help much. However, your question shows you have not read up on this stuff. You should. A tug is far easier, and has far less unknown side-effects.
Technically it is trivial. It will have a significant cost, but compared to losing a major city, the cost is going to be trivial. We can deflect very large masses at a cost significantly below the cost of the Iraq war. In some cases, as someone pointed out, "painting it white" could be sufficient. The only important factor is detection. Given enough time we can move just about anything that is likely to impact us. The easiest wold be to increase (or perhaps decrease) the objects orbital velocity a tiny amount. Putting a somewhat dense object in front of the asteroid moving at a slightly higher velocity is probably the easiest way to do it.
We really don't know the best way to do it.
We have one or two alternatives, but increasing orbital velocity is probably the easiest. Solar sail. A "rocket" with some weight "pulling" it by just staying in front of it. There are a few good alternatives. Anything involving nukes is probably dumb.
There is nothing to come up with. Seriously. The tech is, given enough resources, trivial. The B612 foundation solved that problem in the early 1970's - amazingly even before the foundation existed.
Nonsense. Deflecting an asteroid is trivial. This is why the guys at the B612 foundation changed focus from that task to the task of actually finding the city killers out there. We can't deflect if we can't detect.
make their defensive/offensive tech as far ahead of us as a modern naval battle group would be ahead of some revolutionary war army with muskets and cannons
I am going to disagree in a manner. An alien race with such technology would, compared to us, be like the US Army vs 12 sheep and a dog. We probably wouldn't even know they were attacking. In fact, the moronic stuff we see here, they probably already are. They have discovered a dino-killing asteroid heading our way, and now they are making sure we'll never see it coming.
I would say the odds of us getting hit by a city-killer space-rock tomorrow is infinitely higher than of you ever putting together a reasoned justification for your own continued existence. Considering all the resources you are wasting, you should fix that.
I am amazed that people simply do not understand the difference between, as other have pointed out, risk and chance.
The cost of fixing the problem the B612 foundation are trying to fix is close to zero. A few hundred million is close enough to zero to be discarded entirely. The potential upside - saving a major city from an impact is enormous. Are there anyone at NASA who are not morons?
This is actually urban legend. Never happened. Pure myth. Remember, Microsoft was, in the DOS days, utterly dependent on Lotus to sell PCs. Every Lotus employee involved at the time also deny there ever was such a problem.
Lotus 1-2-3 dies because Excel was a (in areas vastly) superior product. It certainly had its flaws, but from a usability standpoint it blew Lotus out of the water. You only have to look at the Apple side of things. Lotus Symphony and Excel existed at the same time on the Mac, and I would guesstimate that Excel outsold Lotus on Apple by about a million to one.
and WordPerfect
This isn't even an urban legend. This never happened, and there isn't even a myth that it did.
Word Perfect committed suicide. Word Perfect on Windows was a deeply flawed product. It was, for any windows user, a usability nightmare. The morons insisted on staying with WP shortcuts and their own (horrible) menu system despite the fact that nobody wanted it. Refusing to change, and at the release of Microsoft Word 2.0, which was a far inferior product from a technical standpoint, but good enough for 97.5% of all use-cases, WordPerfect was dead. By moronic suicide. WP refused to go the proper Windows route, their product (on Windows) was buggy as to be unusable until version 6.0a and by then the fight was over.
This is pure fantasy with no basis in reality. We simply have no idea how many deaths Chernobyl may or may not have caused. The number is unknowable but probably somewhere between 0 and 4000. We also do not know how many people suffered health consequences.
The prudent, conservative, thing to do was to recommend people with pre-puberty children and pregnant women move out of the area. The rest should have stayed put.
I love articles like this. They are sooo funny. Take a look at the illustration picture. You saw the same type of imagery with another "investigative report". Here the TV crew got dressed up like that and took a TEPCO representative with them who declined the "protective gear". They claimed he did so only to safe the face of TEPCO 'cause, you know, everybody knows we can't enter Fukushima with this type of protective gear.
Except, this is for protection against dust, not radiation. Same as is used in a slaughter house or in a factory producing micro chips.
Journalists are clueless morons who'll do anything for a click.
Which effects? Seriously. I learned in school (back during the nuclear-holocaust nonsense) that nuclear bombs would make the world uninhabitable for millennia and more. Still, a mere weeks after the bombs fell on these two cities living there posed no risk to anyone (except from the fact that significant parts of the infrastructure was gone). Radiation risks after a nuclear bomb are negligible. Unless you were exposed when the bomb exploded.
all coal and nuclear power in the country would have been replaced with solar panels. In the Carter Administration
Yes, and the US would have been a third world country with 50 million people in it, and the discussion about a fence between Mexico and the US would have been a topic in Mexican elections, not US elections.
realize that nuclear power is the most expensive technology ever invented by man
...and also the cleanest and safest way to create the required amount of electricity.
no plant rolls the full cost of it's construction
Who does? Does prices of coal-produced electricity include the price of fixing climate gas problems? If it did, could anyone afford it?
much less storing the waste for hundreds of years
This is only a problem because religious fruitcakes claim that the scientifically sound plans for waste managment are dangerous.
Yeah, 'cause your religious delusions are so much more accurate than their science. No, the IAEA is not a pro-nuclear agency.
Here's your tin foil hat. Get well soon.
If that was his main issue... The entire story is based on a storm on Mars creating havoc. That's insane. The atmosphere on Mars is so thin a storm would barely topple a Barbie Doll standing on one leg. It wouldn't topple any kind of space faring vehicle!
You are right, the mother company can order its employees abroad to hand over the data. The employees in said country can not comply however, since they would break the law in the country they reside.
To make a silly, but perfectly apt, analogy - a wholly owned subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian company could order a qualified employee in the US to stone a female employee to death for adultery. The employee of the US subsidiary could not comply within the law of the location where he is though. Laws are limited to the region where they are applicable. US law is irrelevant toilet paper in Ireland, as it should be.
Nonsense. It is fully legal. Please quote which law, and in which way this is illegal. If it is illegal, why are companies like Microsoft and Google not prosecuted. The tax authorities are actually quite fond of prosecuting illegal tax evasion. Please don't make up your own fact just to make reality fit your emotions.
considered a plague upon the earth
Sigh. Why don't you just move to North Korea immediately. Then you will not be plagued with companies or even the concept of having a job.
Sorry no it is illegal they are bleeding economies out of sheer greed
Nonsense. Greed is perfectly legal. The fact that you don't like it doesn't make it illegal. In fact, you say so your self:
they have paid their lobbyists to create via corrupt politicians
If a company is following the law, no matter how that law came about, then the company is not doing anything illegal. Again, the fact that you don't like it doesn't make it illegal.
To my own comment: A company is required, by regulation, to maximize profit for share holders. If a company has the ability to legally move their money around to minimize taxation then they are required to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, actually, higher taxes is probably the only viable solution right now, but not the way most enviro its think, at the consumer end. Here's the rub. Burning coal is bad. Stopping that alone would mostly get us where we want to go. Probelm is, once it is dug up it'll burn and we're toast. Right? Now, we can build out renewables to decrease demand for coal, right? Yeah, but that'll have no effect. Prices on coal go down and it becomes more attractive somewhere else. So it's burned and we're toast. In theory we could put enough downward pressure on coal prices to make mining not a viable business, but given the demand for energy that isn't likely to ever happen. So, what to do? Make coal more expensive. LOTS more expensive. Tax the bejeezuz out of it's production. Import and export taxes up the wazoo. Slam the production hard. The US, Europe etc. That'll work. Nothing else will.
Saying that the Surface Pro and the iPad Pro are similar is like saying an Audi S8 and a 1969 Beetle are similar.
No, he says it isn't science because it doesn't employ the methodology of science. Economy, psychology and astrology are similar in that they can use words that make them sound scientific, but that doesn't make them science. I also doesn't make them invalid subject of an institution of education. A great many things taught at schools are not science.
technically it's non-trivial
As they say - rocket science isn't exactly rocket science...it's easy bordering on trivial, but might be a tad expensive.
As far as nukes go, why would they be dumb?
Generally because blowing the blasted thing up isn't really going to help much. However, your question shows you have not read up on this stuff. You should. A tug is far easier, and has far less unknown side-effects.
Deflecting an asteroid is anything but trivial.
Technically it is trivial. It will have a significant cost, but compared to losing a major city, the cost is going to be trivial. We can deflect very large masses at a cost significantly below the cost of the Iraq war. In some cases, as someone pointed out, "painting it white" could be sufficient. The only important factor is detection. Given enough time we can move just about anything that is likely to impact us. The easiest wold be to increase (or perhaps decrease) the objects orbital velocity a tiny amount. Putting a somewhat dense object in front of the asteroid moving at a slightly higher velocity is probably the easiest way to do it.
We really don't know the best way to do it.
We have one or two alternatives, but increasing orbital velocity is probably the easiest. Solar sail. A "rocket" with some weight "pulling" it by just staying in front of it. There are a few good alternatives. Anything involving nukes is probably dumb.
There is nothing to come up with. Seriously. The tech is, given enough resources, trivial. The B612 foundation solved that problem in the early 1970's - amazingly even before the foundation existed.
Nonsense. Deflecting an asteroid is trivial. This is why the guys at the B612 foundation changed focus from that task to the task of actually finding the city killers out there. We can't deflect if we can't detect.
make their defensive/offensive tech as far ahead of us as a modern naval battle group would be ahead of some revolutionary war army with muskets and cannons
I am going to disagree in a manner. An alien race with such technology would, compared to us, be like the US Army vs 12 sheep and a dog. We probably wouldn't even know they were attacking. In fact, the moronic stuff we see here, they probably already are. They have discovered a dino-killing asteroid heading our way, and now they are making sure we'll never see it coming.
Which of these threats are real for human kind? Moron.
I would say the odds of us getting hit by a city-killer space-rock tomorrow is infinitely higher than of you ever putting together a reasoned justification for your own continued existence. Considering all the resources you are wasting, you should fix that.
I am amazed that people simply do not understand the difference between, as other have pointed out, risk and chance.
The cost of fixing the problem the B612 foundation are trying to fix is close to zero. A few hundred million is close enough to zero to be discarded entirely. The potential upside - saving a major city from an impact is enormous. Are there anyone at NASA who are not morons?
Myth
what Microsoft did to stop Lotus
This is actually urban legend. Never happened. Pure myth. Remember, Microsoft was, in the DOS days, utterly dependent on Lotus to sell PCs. Every Lotus employee involved at the time also deny there ever was such a problem.
Lotus 1-2-3 dies because Excel was a (in areas vastly) superior product. It certainly had its flaws, but from a usability standpoint it blew Lotus out of the water. You only have to look at the Apple side of things. Lotus Symphony and Excel existed at the same time on the Mac, and I would guesstimate that Excel outsold Lotus on Apple by about a million to one.
and WordPerfect
This isn't even an urban legend. This never happened, and there isn't even a myth that it did.
Word Perfect committed suicide. Word Perfect on Windows was a deeply flawed product. It was, for any windows user, a usability nightmare. The morons insisted on staying with WP shortcuts and their own (horrible) menu system despite the fact that nobody wanted it. Refusing to change, and at the release of Microsoft Word 2.0, which was a far inferior product from a technical standpoint, but good enough for 97.5% of all use-cases, WordPerfect was dead. By moronic suicide. WP refused to go the proper Windows route, their product (on Windows) was buggy as to be unusable until version 6.0a and by then the fight was over.
Thousands have died from Chernobyl
This is pure fantasy with no basis in reality. We simply have no idea how many deaths Chernobyl may or may not have caused. The number is unknowable but probably somewhere between 0 and 4000. We also do not know how many people suffered health consequences.
For the record, the ban on DDT has killed orders of magnitude more people than DDT ever could. The ban on DDT was FAR worse than DDT.
The prudent, conservative, thing to do was to recommend people with pre-puberty children and pregnant women move out of the area. The rest should have stayed put.
I love articles like this. They are sooo funny. Take a look at the illustration picture. You saw the same type of imagery with another "investigative report". Here the TV crew got dressed up like that and took a TEPCO representative with them who declined the "protective gear". They claimed he did so only to safe the face of TEPCO 'cause, you know, everybody knows we can't enter Fukushima with this type of protective gear.
Except, this is for protection against dust, not radiation. Same as is used in a slaughter house or in a factory producing micro chips.
Journalists are clueless morons who'll do anything for a click.
Which effects? Seriously. I learned in school (back during the nuclear-holocaust nonsense) that nuclear bombs would make the world uninhabitable for millennia and more. Still, a mere weeks after the bombs fell on these two cities living there posed no risk to anyone (except from the fact that significant parts of the infrastructure was gone). Radiation risks after a nuclear bomb are negligible. Unless you were exposed when the bomb exploded.
all coal and nuclear power in the country would have been replaced with solar panels. In the Carter Administration
Yes, and the US would have been a third world country with 50 million people in it, and the discussion about a fence between Mexico and the US would have been a topic in Mexican elections, not US elections.
realize that nuclear power is the most expensive technology ever invented by man
...and also the cleanest and safest way to create the required amount of electricity.
no plant rolls the full cost of it's construction
Who does? Does prices of coal-produced electricity include the price of fixing climate gas problems? If it did, could anyone afford it?
much less storing the waste for hundreds of years
This is only a problem because religious fruitcakes claim that the scientifically sound plans for waste managment are dangerous.
Yeah, 'cause your religious delusions are so much more accurate than their science. No, the IAEA is not a pro-nuclear agency. Here's your tin foil hat. Get well soon.
If that was his main issue... The entire story is based on a storm on Mars creating havoc. That's insane. The atmosphere on Mars is so thin a storm would barely topple a Barbie Doll standing on one leg. It wouldn't topple any kind of space faring vehicle!
Java was supposed to protect you from shitty coding
No, it wasn't. Remember, it's much better to sit quietly in the corner and let everyone think you are a moron, than to post on /. and remove all doubt.
You are right, the mother company can order its employees abroad to hand over the data. The employees in said country can not comply however, since they would break the law in the country they reside.
To make a silly, but perfectly apt, analogy - a wholly owned subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian company could order a qualified employee in the US to stone a female employee to death for adultery. The employee of the US subsidiary could not comply within the law of the location where he is though. Laws are limited to the region where they are applicable. US law is irrelevant toilet paper in Ireland, as it should be.
Nope the tax evasion is illegal
Nonsense. It is fully legal. Please quote which law, and in which way this is illegal. If it is illegal, why are companies like Microsoft and Google not prosecuted. The tax authorities are actually quite fond of prosecuting illegal tax evasion. Please don't make up your own fact just to make reality fit your emotions.
considered a plague upon the earth
Sigh. Why don't you just move to North Korea immediately. Then you will not be plagued with companies or even the concept of having a job.
Sorry no it is illegal they are bleeding economies out of sheer greed
Nonsense. Greed is perfectly legal. The fact that you don't like it doesn't make it illegal. In fact, you say so your self:
they have paid their lobbyists to create via corrupt politicians
If a company is following the law, no matter how that law came about, then the company is not doing anything illegal. Again, the fact that you don't like it doesn't make it illegal.
To my own comment: A company is required, by regulation, to maximize profit for share holders. If a company has the ability to legally move their money around to minimize taxation then they are required to do so.