If we managed to get it down to pieces below a certain size, yes, but we're unlikely to atomize something over a certain size. We avoid a huge single or clustered impact, but you will be left with multiple megaton-yield impacts in the wider area of effect. And that's effectively the equivalent of a nuclear war of some scale, the intensity of the bombardment obviously related to how much material there was to hit the planet.
Reagan was badly upset when he realized that the Russians actually thought that Able Archer 82 was actually a lead up to war. He got a lot more serious about arms control talks after that.
And it is not policy that use of Nuclear Weapons is survivable, the policy as of the latest Nuclear Posture Review is that the US will not guarantee no-first-use, which is not the same thing. However, we do provide that assurance for countries who have signed the NPT.
The idea is that giving a no-first-use guarantee allows the assumption that the US will accept being hit with devastating non-nuclear weaponry and not retaliate because we might not be able to retaliate in "kind" because we don't have a non-nuclear weapon that does the same amount of damage. It also is meant to allow us to maintain a credible threat against heavily militarized countries like North Korea or China without having to match them conventionally. Not providing a guarantee is not the same thing as a definite retaliation, even if something like that came to pass.
Moreover, even your fundamentalist Air Force generals are not going to launch without a reason. They may believe that they will get taken up in the Rapture, but that doesn't mean that they will start the war that kills billions of people to do it. They may be believers in an eventual apocalypse, but only truly crazy people believe that they are the ones who are meant to start it.
Don't get the idea that I feel safe with nuclear weapons around, but I don't think it is impossible for us to avoid destroying the planet with them. In any event, they are here to stay and we need to learn to live with them. I think that enough people have done the calculus in their heads about what they would do if called upon to end the world. Some military folks may perhaps be capable of a first attack out of nowhere, but even the military are not automata.
You will be less likely to have a nuclear winter in that scenario, but something that hits with a gigaton of energy in one piece, is still going to release a gigaton, only over a larger area. It may not create a crater, but you'll probably have pretty much all the vegetation (and people) go up in smoke before the fireballs hit the ground. Lighting a continent on fire may be almost as bad as a direct impact. In fact it may be worse.
The US changed from using huge megaton warheads on it's nuclear missiles because you actually get more effect from more, but smaller warheads which impact in a wider area. You're still dropping a few megatons per ICBM, but more surface area is affected.
Strictly speaking, you don't need every politician to be rational, you just need enough that the order for insanity will be refused or serious opposition would go up. Even current nukes are not automated to the point where one man can set them off. You can be pretty sure that unless there was a serious and credible fear that the other side was going to use first, the President might go insane and attempt to launch, but you can expect the order would be refused or opposition would go up instantly if it was batshit crazy.
Other countries? Harder to say, but even a place like Iran or North Korea might not allow their leader to launch for no reason. At some level there is a circle of government where people are in the know about the realities of what is going on and would probably act to stop annihilation.
That doesn't end the risk of a nuclear war started via a build up of tensions, but there would probably be time to reflect.
Believe it or not, people do understand that the targets of their "gameplay" are actual people, and not computer generated opponents.
Its hard to understand that because people who only play video games, we know that we're not killing real people, so we assume the feeling is similar. It's not. You know full well that those are real people, and you know from the news that some of them are quite possibly innocent. It may not be as visceral, but it still has an impact, especially when the technology lets you stay in action for long shifts while you loiter over an operational zone.
People did get computer virus infections before the wide use of the internet. It came from people sharing floppies or other portable media. Also, you'd get the odd LAN viruses. The Internet just made it far easier to both spread and make use of the intrusions.
Oddly enough, people used to write virus programs with nothing more than the malicious desire to crash your computer or the completely amoral idea of wanting to see what would happen, because it was difficult to get your computer to phone home before people had "always on" Internet connection, so you couldn't really use infected machines for DDoS attacks or for reliably sending back information to the virus writer/operator.
I remember having to be worried about infected disks long before I ever owned a modem at home.
Well New Horizons would probably be extremely difficult, if not impossible without an RTG. I think the article is concerned with suggesting that we're hamstringing ourselves by only using RTGs when we have no other option, as opposed to a situation where it would significantly improve the success of the project.
Of course, as a dozen people have already pointed out, an RTG is far too heavy for this lander anyway, so the point is moot.
Really? You think that a rocket with an RTG on it is the same thing as an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a half dozen Multiple Re-entry Vehicles each with a payload of about 768Kt each?
Are people really that unable to comprehend the difference about what is being talked about here?
The worst thing that can happen to an RTG is that the rocket explodes and spreads the Plutonium over a wide area. Not pleasant, but we're talking maybe a few cases of cancer, not Hiroshima. There's not even a chain reaction involved.
It's unlikely to ever get much higher in a verifiable way. Yes, we can certainly assume that some people will die of complications of it, but would anyone have even noticed after such a long term? Many are going to die long before that due to smoking or heart disease or other non-Fukushima caused cancers.
It may not be valid to lock someone up for 10 minutes, and then call them okay if they die after a day or even ten years, but over a lifetime?
Everyone's going to die of something. There is a possibility, albeit a remote one, that no one will ever die of a Fukushima induced issue ever again after a certain point. How will we ever know? You can say that this or that cancer is most likely caused by irradiation or ingestion of some isotope that could only come from the incident, but it's rarely that cut and dried.
I chalk up the deaths of Chernobyl less to nuclear power, and more to being the risks of living in a place like the Soviet Union. Yes, you can set off nuclear plants like that, but let's face it, Chernobyl was a triumph of Communist bureaucratic indifference at work.
This is also one of the real issues with many energy collection methods in space, up to and especially a Dyson sphere. Getting the heat isn't the problem, the problem is radiating away the excess energy which can't be transmitted or used efficiently enough to keep it from building up destructively.
I don't really like the limitation on the number of hours, really. That was always one of the things about unions that bothered me. I am forced to not work to my full potential even on a job I actually like.
If I am going to do a job, I want to do a job that I like. And if I am doing a job I like, then I'd like the opportunity to work at it.
I like working and I like contributing towards a goal. I wouldn't want to be told to go home to give someone else their "turn". I don't mind working 60 hours, as long as it is something I want to do. If I have an income to fall back on, then I have the option of picking something I really want to do, without fearing for my ability to eat, and then being able to do that work.
If those people who don't really want to do my job, but are doing it because they need to eat are forced to take a turn at the wheel to make their money, then it makes everyone unhappy.
I am unhappy because I have to go home and not work on my project (which I like).
Worker #2 has to come in to work a 20 hour shift to support himself, but really doesn't like doing the work.
And of course, the business suffers because you have to find even more people with the skills and the interest to do the job because your first choice person has to go home when the week is only half over.
Ultimately, we shouldn't define people by their worth as labor. It shouldn't be about giving everyone a job, it should be about everyone enjoying the fruits of our civilization and working on what they want to work on.
One person against the government, yes. They will get swatted.
That said, it drives up the cost of every action. When enough people go into armed opposition, it becomes a lot more difficult for the government to act with impunity.
It is true that the Second Amendment was written in a time where the concept of Federalism and states' rights were stronger. The huge monstrosity of a government we have today was not envisioned, so it was probably assumed that the militia could deal with the government, if needed.
Let's understand, however, that the fact that the Second Amendment is less effective now, does not really remove the need for it. An enraged population will eventually destroy a government it can no longer tolerate, guns or not. Guns aren't about destroying the government, they're about keeping the government from going so far that it comes down to cataclysm.
The real reason for the Second Amendment is not to actually overthrow the government, but to ensure that the government does not become too comfortable and forgets that there is an ultimate sanction for their misdeeds. That sanction can still come with knives or stones, but an armed population keeps the threat imminent enough that the government can't forget about it. The danger is a government so out of touch and so secure in it's control that it completely ignores the possibility of revolution until bloody revolution is the only solution.
It isn't a matter of how important the journalist thinks FB's policies are, it is a matter of him posting in a place and in a manner that would give away his identity when he has no reason to believe that they wouldn't.
Facebook makes no claims to protect users from being discovered. Quite the opposite, really. They are very upfront about the fact that they want you to be identifiable.
I can only believe that this journalist either was unaware that it would go this far, or that he was willing to risk his life to make sure it got to a larger audience. He may have believed that he'd piss them off, but just have normal harassment, which may have been an acceptable cost for him to improve his standing as a journalist and the visibility of his story.
I'd stick with the teaching of the journalists to avoid being killed, if I were you. Being a psychopath isn't exactly a course of study in school. Even for boys.
Journalists need to stay alive to expose those people.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, quite a few of people are at least somewhat positive about living in a mega-city, by definition.
Not really. Some criminals are actually nice people sometimes.
All glory to the Hypnotoad!
If we managed to get it down to pieces below a certain size, yes, but we're unlikely to atomize something over a certain size. We avoid a huge single or clustered impact, but you will be left with multiple megaton-yield impacts in the wider area of effect. And that's effectively the equivalent of a nuclear war of some scale, the intensity of the bombardment obviously related to how much material there was to hit the planet.
Reagan was badly upset when he realized that the Russians actually thought that Able Archer 82 was actually a lead up to war. He got a lot more serious about arms control talks after that.
And it is not policy that use of Nuclear Weapons is survivable, the policy as of the latest Nuclear Posture Review is that the US will not guarantee no-first-use, which is not the same thing. However, we do provide that assurance for countries who have signed the NPT.
The idea is that giving a no-first-use guarantee allows the assumption that the US will accept being hit with devastating non-nuclear weaponry and not retaliate because we might not be able to retaliate in "kind" because we don't have a non-nuclear weapon that does the same amount of damage. It also is meant to allow us to maintain a credible threat against heavily militarized countries like North Korea or China without having to match them conventionally. Not providing a guarantee is not the same thing as a definite retaliation, even if something like that came to pass.
Moreover, even your fundamentalist Air Force generals are not going to launch without a reason. They may believe that they will get taken up in the Rapture, but that doesn't mean that they will start the war that kills billions of people to do it. They may be believers in an eventual apocalypse, but only truly crazy people believe that they are the ones who are meant to start it.
Don't get the idea that I feel safe with nuclear weapons around, but I don't think it is impossible for us to avoid destroying the planet with them. In any event, they are here to stay and we need to learn to live with them. I think that enough people have done the calculus in their heads about what they would do if called upon to end the world. Some military folks may perhaps be capable of a first attack out of nowhere, but even the military are not automata.
You will be less likely to have a nuclear winter in that scenario, but something that hits with a gigaton of energy in one piece, is still going to release a gigaton, only over a larger area. It may not create a crater, but you'll probably have pretty much all the vegetation (and people) go up in smoke before the fireballs hit the ground. Lighting a continent on fire may be almost as bad as a direct impact. In fact it may be worse.
The US changed from using huge megaton warheads on it's nuclear missiles because you actually get more effect from more, but smaller warheads which impact in a wider area. You're still dropping a few megatons per ICBM, but more surface area is affected.
Strictly speaking, you don't need every politician to be rational, you just need enough that the order for insanity will be refused or serious opposition would go up. Even current nukes are not automated to the point where one man can set them off. You can be pretty sure that unless there was a serious and credible fear that the other side was going to use first, the President might go insane and attempt to launch, but you can expect the order would be refused or opposition would go up instantly if it was batshit crazy.
Other countries? Harder to say, but even a place like Iran or North Korea might not allow their leader to launch for no reason. At some level there is a circle of government where people are in the know about the realities of what is going on and would probably act to stop annihilation.
That doesn't end the risk of a nuclear war started via a build up of tensions, but there would probably be time to reflect.
Believe it or not, people do understand that the targets of their "gameplay" are actual people, and not computer generated opponents.
Its hard to understand that because people who only play video games, we know that we're not killing real people, so we assume the feeling is similar. It's not. You know full well that those are real people, and you know from the news that some of them are quite possibly innocent. It may not be as visceral, but it still has an impact, especially when the technology lets you stay in action for long shifts while you loiter over an operational zone.
People store passwords in the Cloud all the time.
Just not in the same place. :)
People did get computer virus infections before the wide use of the internet. It came from people sharing floppies or other portable media. Also, you'd get the odd LAN viruses. The Internet just made it far easier to both spread and make use of the intrusions.
Oddly enough, people used to write virus programs with nothing more than the malicious desire to crash your computer or the completely amoral idea of wanting to see what would happen, because it was difficult to get your computer to phone home before people had "always on" Internet connection, so you couldn't really use infected machines for DDoS attacks or for reliably sending back information to the virus writer/operator.
I remember having to be worried about infected disks long before I ever owned a modem at home.
Oddly enough, my television hasn't been working for months, but my Internet hasn't had a problem.
Even more oddly, I haven't even bothered to call them to fix the TV. I really don't miss it at all.
Well New Horizons would probably be extremely difficult, if not impossible without an RTG. I think the article is concerned with suggesting that we're hamstringing ourselves by only using RTGs when we have no other option, as opposed to a situation where it would significantly improve the success of the project.
Of course, as a dozen people have already pointed out, an RTG is far too heavy for this lander anyway, so the point is moot.
Really? You think that a rocket with an RTG on it is the same thing as an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a half dozen Multiple Re-entry Vehicles each with a payload of about 768Kt each?
Are people really that unable to comprehend the difference about what is being talked about here?
The worst thing that can happen to an RTG is that the rocket explodes and spreads the Plutonium over a wide area. Not pleasant, but we're talking maybe a few cases of cancer, not Hiroshima. There's not even a chain reaction involved.
It's unlikely to ever get much higher in a verifiable way. Yes, we can certainly assume that some people will die of complications of it, but would anyone have even noticed after such a long term? Many are going to die long before that due to smoking or heart disease or other non-Fukushima caused cancers.
It may not be valid to lock someone up for 10 minutes, and then call them okay if they die after a day or even ten years, but over a lifetime?
Everyone's going to die of something. There is a possibility, albeit a remote one, that no one will ever die of a Fukushima induced issue ever again after a certain point. How will we ever know? You can say that this or that cancer is most likely caused by irradiation or ingestion of some isotope that could only come from the incident, but it's rarely that cut and dried.
I chalk up the deaths of Chernobyl less to nuclear power, and more to being the risks of living in a place like the Soviet Union. Yes, you can set off nuclear plants like that, but let's face it, Chernobyl was a triumph of Communist bureaucratic indifference at work.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Terrible things happened there with nuclear weapons.
People still live in both places.
Radioactivity is a pain in the ass to deal with, but it's not impossible.
As for space launches, it's just plain stupid. A radioisotope thermoelectric generator isn't going to go up like Chernobyl. Ever.
This is also one of the real issues with many energy collection methods in space, up to and especially a Dyson sphere. Getting the heat isn't the problem, the problem is radiating away the excess energy which can't be transmitted or used efficiently enough to keep it from building up destructively.
How many times do they want to get paid for the stupid music?"
As many times as they possibly can.
Obviously.
I don't really like the limitation on the number of hours, really. That was always one of the things about unions that bothered me. I am forced to not work to my full potential even on a job I actually like.
If I am going to do a job, I want to do a job that I like. And if I am doing a job I like, then I'd like the opportunity to work at it.
I like working and I like contributing towards a goal. I wouldn't want to be told to go home to give someone else their "turn". I don't mind working 60 hours, as long as it is something I want to do. If I have an income to fall back on, then I have the option of picking something I really want to do, without fearing for my ability to eat, and then being able to do that work.
If those people who don't really want to do my job, but are doing it because they need to eat are forced to take a turn at the wheel to make their money, then it makes everyone unhappy.
I am unhappy because I have to go home and not work on my project (which I like).
Worker #2 has to come in to work a 20 hour shift to support himself, but really doesn't like doing the work.
And of course, the business suffers because you have to find even more people with the skills and the interest to do the job because your first choice person has to go home when the week is only half over.
Ultimately, we shouldn't define people by their worth as labor. It shouldn't be about giving everyone a job, it should be about everyone enjoying the fruits of our civilization and working on what they want to work on.
One person against the government, yes. They will get swatted.
That said, it drives up the cost of every action. When enough people go into armed opposition, it becomes a lot more difficult for the government to act with impunity.
It is true that the Second Amendment was written in a time where the concept of Federalism and states' rights were stronger. The huge monstrosity of a government we have today was not envisioned, so it was probably assumed that the militia could deal with the government, if needed.
Let's understand, however, that the fact that the Second Amendment is less effective now, does not really remove the need for it. An enraged population will eventually destroy a government it can no longer tolerate, guns or not. Guns aren't about destroying the government, they're about keeping the government from going so far that it comes down to cataclysm.
The real reason for the Second Amendment is not to actually overthrow the government, but to ensure that the government does not become too comfortable and forgets that there is an ultimate sanction for their misdeeds. That sanction can still come with knives or stones, but an armed population keeps the threat imminent enough that the government can't forget about it. The danger is a government so out of touch and so secure in it's control that it completely ignores the possibility of revolution until bloody revolution is the only solution.
Which is actually a good point. Although, they could just wound you, and then burn you to death.
But at least you'd have the chance to take one or two of those motherfuckers with you. That might make them think twice.
It isn't a matter of how important the journalist thinks FB's policies are, it is a matter of him posting in a place and in a manner that would give away his identity when he has no reason to believe that they wouldn't.
Facebook makes no claims to protect users from being discovered. Quite the opposite, really. They are very upfront about the fact that they want you to be identifiable.
I can only believe that this journalist either was unaware that it would go this far, or that he was willing to risk his life to make sure it got to a larger audience. He may have believed that he'd piss them off, but just have normal harassment, which may have been an acceptable cost for him to improve his standing as a journalist and the visibility of his story.
I'd stick with the teaching of the journalists to avoid being killed, if I were you. Being a psychopath isn't exactly a course of study in school. Even for boys.
Journalists need to stay alive to expose those people.
They will be using Woz from the Future.
Don't laugh, he's nearly done inventing Mr. Fusion.
It would be redundant. She doesn't need to be in wax to give people the creeps.