A long long time ago when Senator John Kerry was running for president, I was at a small event in Los Angeles.

In front of some local media, I confronted him about his "hockey goal" ad in which he (dressed as a goal keeper) said he would protect against Japanese imports. I said his ad (and the tone of his campaign) was contributing to the recent spike in anti-Asian American violence around the country (I'm Asian American).

He said he, of course, didn't mean for it to be construed that way and didn't mean to stigmatize hard working Asian Americans blah, blah. After that I don't think the ad was pulled or altered. However, I DID notice he would, when speaking about Asian imports, would often make a distinction between Asian competitors overseas and Asian citizens at home. Yay!

Even so I wholeheartedly agree that many politicians are lying, scheming scumbags only out for themselves. However censorship in the U.S. compared to some other countries? Give me a break. You're probably one of those people who like arguing for the sake of arguing and make the Internet (and the world) a miserable place to be in. Go away or become a lawyer.

... there used to be a product called "Desktape" made by a company called Optima Software.

Basically it kept a cached (on the system drive) directory listing of all the files on the tape, and then made a (virtual) disk using that directory which was mounted on the desktop (hence the name). The user would perform file transfers with this "disk" in much the same way as he would a real disk, he could copy files to and from it by dragging and dropping, similarly erasing or copying over files. Note that I said file transfers; direct random access to this "disk", while possible, were strongly recommended against because the tape would seek to one block, then seek to the next etc. so, for example, launching an application from the tape was ill-advised. Anyway, when the tape was ejected, the directory would be updated on the tape.

Still it was great because it made backing up very simple (no special utility to run) and this disk would behave just like a real disk so that you could run regular disk utilities on it like "Virtual Disk" (which kept searchable online copies of directory listings of offline volumes).

The software was hardware agnostic which means it could work with a variety of tape drives so maybe it would work with LTO. Alas, the software only ran on pre-OS X Macintoshes and the company is long gone. I would dearly love it if someone could revive this software and make it work with a "modern" OS! Can't someone buy the IP of this company?, surely the development (patents?) is worth something. (I wish there was some sort of law saying that abandoned software like this would, after 5 years, be put in the public domain; of course for this to work the source code would have to be continually archived at, say, the Library of Congress in case of sudden bankruptcy. Not too feasible.)

Fellow Nerds!

If you just spend a minute registering, WE CAN GET THIS DONE! I mean how many slashdotters are going to see this article and say: "I want one!"

I used my slashdot name and password, it was easier that way.

I wonder if groupon(?) would put together some sort of discount for purchasing these.

(Classic SMBC cartoon)

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1917

I know this is a fault of the movie, not the paper, but there aren't any asteroids 1000 km in diameter (Ceres is just a little bit smaller).

The only way that the movie could be even remotely plausible would be if this were an extra-solar body coming from interstellar space. Otherwise it would have been detected centuries ago. (Actually, I think the movie indicated something like this). It would also probably be traveling at a high rate of speed since it would have been dropped almost all the way down the Sun's gravity well.

Still, such a large object would have likely been detected months, if not years (decades)? before impact; even it it were coal black. (I believe the large nightly deep sky surveys would've caught it way in advance). Astronomers have recently been finding much smaller objects way beyond the orbit of Pluto; even if headed directly headed to earth they would take more than a century to get here. But since that would've allowed NASA to train its astronauts how to use the drilling gear used by Bruce Willis et al. the writers made the time very short (I think it was 14 days).

Far more likely would be the scenario in "Deep Impact" a much more scientifically accurate (boring?) movie. Here the asteroid was only about 10 km or so in diameter, or less than a millionth the size (volume, mass) of the one in "Armageddon". Also, I think, they intercepted it deeper in space and were just trying to deflect it, so a realistically sized nuke would have been able to do the job. And they carried more than one! (So no super heroics requiring Bruce to stay behind).

Obviously the size and speed of the asteroid in "Armageddon" was only to impress the audience; "Texas-sized is a lot more awesome than "Manhattan-sized". (Both would've been "ELE"- Extinction Level Events). The only possible way any realistically sized nuke (remember, those 1950s super H-Bombs were BIG, I don't think the very largest could be carried by plane), could do the job described in the film would be if the asteroid was shaped like a bow tie and the bomb placed in the fragile center (yes underground would also be important). Oh, and it should be (rapidly?) spinning to counteract its own self-gravity so that it would fly apart (and also perhaps be structurally weaker).**

I seem to remember there being something in the movie about it being shaped like this (not spinning though). The writers evidently sought to make their story just a little more plausible by adding even more implausibility to it. So what else is new (in Hollywood)?

*I don't know if any of the recently found Kuiper belt objects are larger, Ceres was the largest asteroid listed in Wikipedia.
** Actually, if the asteroid WAS in some sort of bow-tie or dumbbell kind of shape, it MUST have been spinning. Otherwise it would've collapsed under its own weight into a (rough) sphere.

I believe it was written by Isaac Asimov and resulted in the resource consuming project (I'm not sure if it was the preservation of the last animals) being approved not because the project was important but because it was important to keep people thinking differently.

Or something like that.

In the U.S. the conservative political party (the ones opposed to doing anything about this) is called the Republicans.

By and large they live in the center and southern parts of the country, the parts most affected by the heat.

So, in a sense, they are burning in the Hell they themselves have created. Unfortunately the rest of the world is also suffering.

For those blessed with living near JPL in Southern CA, there usually is a big event at Pasadena City College (where I viewed a few previous landings). I think there are very knowledgeable speakers from JPL who are usually there (along with the media). Maybe this was one of the suggestions in the link posted above, I couldn't access the site.

JPL by the way has a great series of monthly(?) free to the public lectures on its various deep space programs, often given by the lead investigator! A great way of nerding out.

" The diversity of life has historically increased with warming".

Sure, but the same can be said of asteroid impacts; new studies have indicated that after as short as 10 million years, the biosphere has recovered and maybe even opened up a few new ecological niches by dislodging the old dominant species (bye bye dinosaurs!).

The problem is the word "short". On any human timescale, ten million years is a long time. In a few centuries which really is the blink of an eye in a geological sense, we'll be altering the climate substantially. For many species (millions?) it will be too fast for them to evolve.

So they'll die.

Global warming will NOT extinguish life on earth (well not unless we manage to cause a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus). It does have the potential of creating a less diverse world filled with crabgrass, cockroaches and rats and other generalist species (like us) that will take over. Our descendants for TENS OF THOUSANDS of generations may curse their selfish, short-sighted ancestors of the 21st century.

And Americans in particular.

(Bjorn Lomborg) as two prominent if not THE most prominent AGW skeptics to change their minds. (I've heard of these guys and if I've heard of them, since I'm not a specialist, I figure they must be prominent).

So what's it going to take? Convincing every last person that this isn't real? That's going to be pretty damned impossible because as Upton Sinclair wrote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.". Substitute the word "salary" with "lifestyle" (or even "SUV") and you'll see how the average American thinks.

I've read that a ten percentage increase in electrical costs would be enough to sequester all the CO2 we're currently emitting. So the fact that a ten percentage increase in something that is not a big item in the average American budget is keeping us from potentially preventing great harm to our ecology, biosphere and a great number of species on this planet (including us!) makes me realize that we will deserve the hell on earth we get.

"A new airplane doesn't make a new engine possible, a new engine makes a new airplane possible".

While this may be the right thing to do, admit your mistake (cough "shuttle" cough), and use a simple cheap design for a big dumb booster, I'm a little sad for possibilities lost.

Too bad the linear aerospike engines never panned out (X-37?) or the hypersonic scramjet hasn't been fully developed. While the F-1 may reduce launch costs by a factor of 10, it'll take some revolutionary new technology to bring it down by a factor of 100. (Unless I'm seriously wrong and Elon Musk can do it by reusability and sheer operational efficiency). So maybe space flight for the ultra-rich but not for the rest of us. Not until the space elevator at least.

I'm also afraid that the rebirth and re-design of the F-1 will suffer "mission creep" like; let's make it out of some super-exotic alloy to protect against corrosion for possible ocean recovery and we need to add the capability for a restart. By the way, just how reliable were the original F-1s? Didn't one fail on the way to orbit on Apollo 13? Any other failures?

TFA says there is a webcam. Anyone know if there will be a way for us not on NASA's payroll to watch?

I mean, technically you COULD direct a car (or almost any vehicle, they're so ubiquitous) without it but they're so useful it seems almost mandatory. (I think, maybe, the first Wright brother's planes didn't use them but last I checked they're actually two of them in every cockpit). I'm not a patent attorney or IP expert so this is just my guess as to what the issues are.

However, that's a pretty high "standard". What should be the standard? Should it be determined by a popularity contest? User interface designer's testimony? Shouldn't Apple be entitled to something (I mean they spent time and money coming up with their ideas, not to mention that "utility" patents which are essential, are not free).

Yet another issue to be debated during possible patent reform.