It is not only possible, but the easiest option, to "blow them up Armageddon style" (minus the drilling and the like). There's a lot of simulation work going on right now and the results have been consistently encouraging that even a small nuclear weapon could obliterate quite a large asteroid into little fragments that won't re-coalesce, while simultaneously kicking them out of their current orbit. A few years ago they were just doing 2d calcs, now they've gotten full 3d runs.

Think for a second about what nuclear weapons can do on Earth. Here's the crater of a 100kt nuclear weapon test. It's 100 meters deep and 320 meters wide. You could nearly fit a sizeable asteroid like Itokawa inside the hole. And that thing had Earth's intense gravity field working against it and was only 1/10th the size of weapons being considered here. In space you don't need to "blast out" debris with great force like on Earth, you merely need to give it a fractional meter-per-second kick and it's no longer gravitationally bound. And the ability of a nuclear shockwave to shatter rock is almost unthinkably powerful - just ignoring that many if not most asteroids are rubble piles and thus come already pre-shattered. Look at the "rubble chimneys" kicked up by even small nuclear blasts several kilometers underground (in rock compressed by Earth's gravity). Or the size of the underground cavity created by the wimpy 3kT Gnome blast - 28000 cubic meters. Just ignoring that it had to do that, again, working against Earth's compression deep underground, if you scale that up to a 1MT warhead the cavity would be the size of Itokawa itself.

You of course don't have to destroy an asteroid if you don't want to - nuclear weapons can also gently kick them off their path. Again, you're depositing energy in the form of X-rays into the surface of the asteroid on one side. If it's a tremendous amount of energy, you create a powerful shattering shockwave moving throughout the body of the asteroid. If it's lesser, however, you're simply creating a broad planar gas/plasma/dust jet across the asteroid, turning that whole side into one gigantic thruster that will keep pushing and kicking off matter until it cools down.

The last detail is that nuclear weapons are just so simple of a solution. There's no elaborate spacecraft design and testing program needed - you have an already extant, already-built device which is designed to endure launch G-forces / vibrations and tolerate the vacuum of space, and you simply need to get it "near" your target - the sort of navigation that pretty much every space mission we've launched in the past several decades has managed. In terms of mission design simplicity, pretty much nothing except kinetic impactors (which are far less powerful) comes close, and even then it's a tossup. Assuming roughly linear scaling with the simulations done thusfar, with enough advance warning, even a Chicxulub-scale impactor could be deflected / destroyed with a Tsar Bomba-sized device with a uranium tamper. Even though it was not designed to be light for space operations, its 27-tonne weight could be launched to LEO by a single Delta-IV Heavy and hauled off to intercept by a second launch vehicle.

This is why private data about EU citizens must be stored in the EU, or the company storing it outside needs to sign a special contract with the EU (which has some extra US law to back it, so it isn't just a normal contract).

Project Gutenburg would be a counter-proof.

Well, no. The issue is whether code - or any other copyrighted work - will ever enter public domain. Mickey Mouse Protection Act says it won't, and Project Gutenbert doesn't contradict that.

Not that it matters: copyright law has almost no legitimacy whatsoever, so it simply gets ignored despite draconian punishments. The whole concept of property law seems to simply be incompatible with the digital realm, consequently various message boards and other sites depending on user-generated content basically operate as communist utopias: everyone contributes whatever they can, the results are free for everyone to use at their leisure, and even personal glory isn't an issue, at least in anonymous messageboards. That's right: aside from its current immaturity, Anonymous is pretty much a model Marxist collective.

Funny, isn't it? Capitalism won the Cold War, but its natural development is now leading to Communism because that maximizes production in the Information Age. It wasn't a good model for industrial production, but as that keeps getting automated and focus shifts on coordination and cultural production, it turns out hierarchies simply get in the way. So nominally communist countries were arranged like giant corporations, while the new organizational model everyone's learning growing up now is "contribute according to your abilities, enjoy other people's contributions freely".

I wonder if this is why neoliberalism has been so fashionable lately: it's the struggle of a fading system to maintain it's dominance rather than be relegated to handling just a small subsection of total economy?

Uber drivers are subsidized by everybody else. Taxi drivers have to pay high insurance rates because the act of driving a long distance every day for a ton of strangers is a job that inherently leads to a much higher statistical rate of payouts. If they're driving as a taxi on regular car insurance, it's you that's paying the bill for their swindle of the insurance system.

Yeah, wouldn't that be great if I had linked it in my first post, and then if you had actually read my post well enough to see it?

Yeah, there a laws specifically forbidding this in the EU for a reason.

How do you come to that assumption?

By linking to a peer-reviewed paper on the subject?

A nuclear warhead has lots of trouble to even "hit" an asteroid.

Essentially every space mission we have launched for the past several decades has had to navigate with a far more precision than that needed to get close to an asteroid and activate a single trigger event when close by.

Actually it was even more unstable in the 19th century. The myth about gold being solid is VERY mythical and only came about long after anyone remembers who it was like with a gold standard.

It all depends on what you want to do with your matrices. Various operations have various costs in different sparse matrix formats. The standard ones are COO or coordinate format: a list of triples (i, j, val); DOK or dictionary of keys format: the hashmap you are thinking of; LIL or list of lists format: a list for each row and a list if pairs (j, val) in each list entry; CSR/CSC or compact sparse row/column: an array of indices where each row starts, an array of column indices and an array of values.

COO and DOK are great for changing sparsity structure; LIL is very useful if you have a lot of row-wise (or column-wise) operations, or need to manipulate rows regularly. CSR is great for matrix operations such as multiplication, addition etc. You use what suits your usecase, or change between formats (relatively cheap) as needed.

We send spacecraft on comparable missions all the time. And it doesn't really take a spectacularly large payload to destroy (yes, destroy) an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter. 1/2-kilometer-wide Itokawa could be blown into tiny bits which would not recoalesce, via a 0,5-1,0 megatonne nuclear warhead, a typical size in modern nuclear arsenals (in addition, the little pieces would be pushed out of their current orbit).

I know it's a common misconception that "nuking" an asteroid would simply create a few large fragments that would hit Earth with even more devastation, but that's not backed by simulation data. And anyway, even if it didn't blow the asteroid to tiny bits (which simulations say it would) and even if it didn't push the remaining pieces off trajectory (which they say it does), anything that spreads an Earth impact out over a larger period of time is a good thing - it means the higher percentage of the energy that's absorbed high in the atmosphere rather than reaching the surface (less ejecta, lower ocean waves, a broader (weaker) distribution of the heat pulse, etc), the weaker the shockwaves, the weaker the total heat at any given point in time, and the more time for Earth to radiate away any imparted energy or precipitate out any ejecta cloud. If the choice is between 15 Chelyabink-sized impactor (most of which will strike places where they won't even be witnessed) or one Meteor Crater-sized impactor (same total mass), pick the Chelyabinsk ones. 50 10-megatonne meteor crater impactors or one 500-megatonne Upheaval Dome impactor? Pick the former. The asteroid impacts calculator shows the former generating a negligible fireball and 270mph wind burst at 2km distance, while the latter creates the same winds 25km away (156 times the area) and a fireball that even 25km away is 50 times brighter than the sun, hot enough to instantly set most materials on fire.

But that's all irrelevant because, quite simply, simulations show that nuclear weapons do work against asteroids.

What we need is enough detection lead time to be able to launch a nuclear strike a few months before the impact date (to give time for the debris to disperse). There is no need to "land" or "drill" for the warhead. There is no pressure wave; instead, an immense burst of X-rays is absorbed through the outer skin of the asteroid on the side of the explosion, causing it to vaporize (unevenly) from within, especially near the ground zero point, and creating powerful shockwaves throughout its body. In addition to ripping it apart, the vaporized material and higher energy ejecta flies off, predominantly on the side where the explosion was detonated, acting a broad planar thruster.

Here's another recent example, carefully documented. Pay special attention to the attitude of some people after all the claims were retracted as false.

And here's another notable point in that scandal. I will just quote:

"It has a chilling effect on other reports of sexual harassment. Even if Team Harpy were making things up out of whole cloth, women who experience sexual harassment but haven’t recorded the whole thing on tape are going to be terrified of being sued into the streets because few harrassers are going to admit to their behavior. We need to make it easier to report harassment, not harder — given incidents at tech conferences, the US Congress, and ALA itself."

This is in response of a man, accused of sexual harassment, suing his accusers for defamation. Apparently, even if you're innocent, you shouldn't fight back because it hurts the cause! And furthermore:

"While I think Mr. Murphy should stand down for the good of the profession and in the name of providing a safer environment for people to report harassment, I think that it would be in Mr. Murphy’s own best interest to stand down. ... He should go for dropping the suit for the win. For himself and his profession. And to start building a comfort zone so we won’t have to judge anonymous allegations because people will feel free to come into the light and tell their stories."

i.e. even if you're innocent, stand down. "For the team".

I have to preface all this by saying that I personally identify with the much-maligned "progressive thought". I do believe in social justice in general, and I do believe that specific issues, such as discrimination against females, non-whites, non-heterosexuals and other minorities is very real and a problem that we have to deal with. At the same time - and precisely because of that! - I have to speak out; because it is my side and my cause, and I am responsible for the evil that people who share (or claim to share) it with me perpetrate in its name. I'm well aware that there are even more numerous equivalents on the other side of the fence, but they are well-documented and well-accepted among those whose opinion matters to me, and so I am not going to touch on that.

Now to the matter at hand. When I started digging into the recent slew of high-profile social justice activism cases, one thing stood out. It's not so much the quickness to act that is the problem in and of itself, as it is the readiness to do so based on conformance to stereotypes that the person has. Remember the Virginia university rape case? Pretty much every feminist and progressive outlet has published a scathing attack on the purported rapist - spending very little time on the fact that the only evidence to date is the testimony of the self-identified victim, but instead focusing on how this horrible event, which is obviously true (because, well, frat boys gonna rape, duh - "everybody knows", "common sense" ...), is a testament to how horrible things are in general.

And then, when it turned out that not only there isn't anything else, but even said testimony has gaping consistency holes and outright falsehoods - did anyone apologize? Well, the website that broke the original story had the decency to, but I was surprised at the number of other places that doubled down on their take instead by basically claiming that it's all just lies (Jezebel is basically still doing that), or that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the victim should be believed by default - even if there are inconsistencies in her story.

What really raised my hairs, though, was when they acknowledged that the story is false, but nevertheless demanded that the accused should be treated as guilty based on nothing but accusation alone as a generic rule, and that the self-identified victim should give extreme benefit of the doubt, and cannot even be questioned (because that is traumatic etc). Because, you see, actual rapes happen, and therefore if you don't support harsh measures, you support actual rapists - even if you are complaining about an actual false rape accusation. In other words, it's better for one innocent to suffer than for ten guilty persons escape.

I wish this was something that could be ambiguously interpreted or misunderstood by me, but no: the title of the piece that summed up that argument is literally No matter what Jackie said, we should generally believe rape claims". And it contains gems such as, "We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist. Even if Jackie fabricated her account, U-Va. should have taken her word for it during the period while they endeavored to prove or disprove the accusation". Go ahead, read it in its entirety, it's well worth it.

That particular article just left me speechless, for obvious reasons - I am a liberal, among other things, and this was anything but. But then I started digging into it, and have found out that this sort of stuff is not actually new, it's just that it's the first time it was broadcast so prominently to the general audience, and subscribed by so many. Yet if you start digging into the subculture - go visit the blogs where adherents cluster and discuss things in an environment where they do not see the need to moderate or veil their opinion - you quickly find that such attitude is so prominent there as to be practically mainstream, and not just towards rape. There is a general notion that things such as due process, presumption of innocence, reliability of testimony, and even freedom of speech, are not universally good, but should only be used insofar as they help the struggle of the oppressed class (in the cultural reinterpretation of it - women, people of color, LGBTQ and other minorities) against their oppressors (white male patriarchy etc) - and, they claim, in practice more often than not used for the benefit of oppressors. This actually goes all the way back to second-wave feminism (Dworkin, MacKinnon etc) and its anti-pornography crusade - MacKinnon notably criticized the First Amendment (which was used to shoot down the anti-porn laws that she helped write) as detrimental to equality, because under it "some people get a lot more speech than others". Just have a look at the annotation for the book from which I have taken this citation!

Some further derive from it that all these things are the creations of oppressors for the sole purpose of oppression, and therefore nothing good comes out of them - and the appropriate way of dealing with matters is adopting a strict identity-based outlook. A rape accusation, for example, has to be treated as all the necessary evidence to pronounce guilt and render judgment, because it comes from the oppressed (a woman) towards the oppressor (a man). Even if that particular case may eventually be proven wrong, this approach still shifts the balance of power in the way that is overall desirable, and a falsely accused rapist is just a privileged male who is brought down the notch, something that he could use in any case. So there's no reason to even ponder that possibility as something relevant.

At this point I realized that this strongly reminds me of something, something that I have read before. And then I realized: it's a recurring The Gulag Archipelago! Just a few quotes to refresh your memory:

"The reason that fine points of jurisprudence are unnecessary that there is no need to clarify whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty: the concept of guilt is an old bourgeois concept which has now been uprooted. And so we heard from Comrade Krylenko that a tribunal was not that kind of court! On another occasion we would hear from him that a tribunal was not a court at all: "A tribunal is an organ of the class struggle of the workers directed against their enemies" and must act "from the point of view of the interests of the revolution ... having in mind the most desirable results for the masses of workers and peasants. " People are not people, but "carriers of specific ideas." ''No matter what the individual qualities [of the defendant], only one method of evaluating him is to be applied: evaluation from the point of view of class expediency." In other words, you can exist only if it's expedient for the working class. And if "this expediency should require that the avenging sword should fall on the head of the defendants, then no ... verbal arguments can help." (Such as arguments by lawyers, etc.) "In our revolutionary court we are guided not by articles of the law and not by the degree of extenuating circumstances; in the tribunal we must proceed on the basis of considerations of expediency." ... And it must also be kept in mind that it was not what he had done that constituted the defendant's burden, but what he might do if he were not shot now. "We protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future."

"(Lazar Kogan, one of the bosses of the White Sea Canal construction, would, in fact, soon say: "I believe that you personally were not guilty of anything. But, as an educated person, you have to understand that social prophylaxis was being widely applied!"

"Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the innocent? But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and, at the beginning of the thirties, was defined as rightist opportunism. So we can't even discuss these out-of-date concepts, guilt and innocence."

"The theoretical view of the suspect's guilt was, incidentally, elastic from the very beginning. In his instructions on the
use of Red Terror, the Chekist M. I. Latsis wrote: "In the interrogation not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions should be: What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? ... These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused."

"He then proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had not been willing to take: that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative. Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain, but only approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain sense, that we are punishing a guilty person. Thence arose the most practical conclusion: that it was useless to seek absolute evidence--for evidence is always relative-or unchallengeable witnesses-for they can say different things at different times. The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find them, even when there was no evidence and no witness, without leaving his office, "basing his conclusions not only on his own intellect but also on his Party sensitivity, his moral forces" ... "and on his character"

"And in 1950, one of the leading colonels of the MGB, Foma Zheleznov, said to his prisoners: "We are not going to sweat to prove the prisoner's guilt to him. Let him prove to that he did not have hostile intent."

"(Please forgive us, reader. We have once more gone astray with this rightist opportunism-this concept of '"guilt," and of the guilty or innocent. It has, after all, been explained to us that the heart of the matter is not personal guilt. but social danger. One can imprison an innocent person if he is socially hostile. And one can release a guilty man if he is socially friendly. But lacking legal training, we can be forgiven, for the 1926 Code, according to which, my good fellow, we lived for twenty-five years and more, was itself criticized for an "impermissible bourgeois approach," for an "insufficiently class-conscious approach," and for some kind of "bourgeois weighing of punishments in relation to the
gravity of what had been committed."

"Krylenko formulated even more frankly and precisely the tasks of the Soviet courts in his speeches before those
tribunals, when the court was "at one and the same time both the creator of the law and a political weapon. ... Don't tell me our criminal courts ought to act exclusively on the basis of existing written norms. We live in the process of Revolution. .. A tribunal is not the kind of court in fine points of jurisprudence and clever stratagems are to be
restored .... We are creating a new law and new ethical norms. .. No matter how much is said here about the
eternal law of truth, justice, etc., we know . . . how dearly these cost us"

I can only hope that people who have revived this ideology under the banner of social justice and progressivism do not end up hijacking it altogether. I don't think we're there yet, and I do think that there are far more of us who are very uncomfortable with this thing. But the problem is, we're not the loud ones. And if we keep it that way, we will lose.

On the other hand, if they're doubling capacity, then you only need half the number of cycles (it actually even works *better* than that, as li-ion cells prefer shallow charges and discharges rather than deep ones - but yes, fractional charge cycles do add up as fractional charge cycles, not whole cycles). If you have a 200km-range EV and you drive 20 kilometers a day, you're using 10% of a cycle per day. If you have a 400km-range EV and you drive 20 kilometers a day, you're using 5% of a cycle per day.

Top commercial li-ion capacities are about 30% more than they were 5 years ago. And today's batteries include some of the "advances" you were reading about 5 years ago.

I'm sorry if technology doesn't move forward at the pace you want. But it does move forward when you're not looking. Remember the size of cell phone batteries back in the day?