Huge honking load of bullshit in my personal experience. I lived most of my childhood in a "wholesome" rural southern community of about 40 households. By the time I was 13, I had had a shotguns pointed in my face twice by different gun-toting NRA Tea Party types. Once for trying to visit a girl I went to school with. Once for trying to bring my run-away dog back home. Scout's honor, I had done absolutely nothing wrong. As a teen I was again threatened, though more subtly, by a different neighbor because my family took the neighbor's friend to court because the friend built a fence across our driveway. This neighbor also shot my cat with a BB gun and laughed at me for crying when she died.

There are legitimate reasons to own a gun, but as far as I can tell, the people most interested in owning guns are seriously fucked up and should not be trusted with firearms.

By having built a simulator that can reproduce all possible conditions and seeing which kill methods work. If solution does not exist, then do not drill. That is what the oil industry would have done if they were the trustworthy people conservative asshats claim they are. However, the evidence seems to suggest these are sociopathic criminals without regard for life, human or other. They are another perfect example of why free market capitalism does not work.

Shouldn't it be: big .u..... and f.cking? I mean, f*cking could be fucking "fucking" or fucking "flocking," for example.

Fuckin'-A!

I lived in the US south for many years and I think you are on the right trail. Tied in to your second point, when met with failure, a common psychological defense mechanism is to blame that failure on some external factor-- other races, the government, atheists, liberals, gays, Catholics, Jews, the French, the damn yankees, and etc-- instead of blaming oneself. Southern churches capitalize on this human weakness by teaching that gays, atheists and liberals are sick. Republican politicians are capitalizing on the weakness too, they stir up the southern hatred of government and dream up all kinds of enemies to hate. And now, religion and Republican politicians have teamed up to take advantage of the rednecks. I'm pretty sure politicians in WWII Germany and religious leaders in the Middle East today did/do pretty much the same thing to manipulate the masses. How did Germany solve this sort of problem?

Assuming anyone is really considering the nuclear option, do we even have enough data to do a reasonably accurate risk-benefit analysis? For instance, can we really know that a nuke will not fracture the rock and allow oil and gas to continue to spew, but now from hundreds of unsealable places? What was the failure mode for the Russian's use of the bomb technique? Unless there is excellent data that says to a very high degree of certainty that the nuclear option is less risky than letting the damn thing leak for another two months, I can't see using it.

Of course, after reading TFA, it looks like this is yet more political FUD from Slashdot. When are kdawson and timothy going to be fired? As best as I can tell, they are both paranoid nitwits with political agendas and a severe lack of nerdhood and it shows in their work.

My post was poorly worded. I'm all for the government spending a lot of money on space exploration. In fact, I'd like to see the military budget cut in half so that we would have way more money to spend on space while also paying off the national debt. My point was that instead of employing people on crappy space projects (much of Constellation), we should instead employ people in worthwhile, non-dead-end space projects that will efficiently lead to regular people living off-world.

Also, I think that you should have asked what I meant before you flew off the handle over your imagined beliefs about my unclear post.

How about creating jobs that also produce a product that is more useful to the entire country?

Put a bag over the asteroid (or part of it, like a greenhouse) and microwave it. Collect the vapor.