I read that in the sense of, "Let's say that I'm in the position of being a general manager", as a hypothetical rather than something to be taken literally.

No, we don't. If you don't have the water, or at least the hydrogen and oxygen, you don't have a large body of water to moderate the temperature and host cyanobacteria to create oxygen, which takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years, assuming you have enough bound oxygen to begin with. We don't have the technology. We can't even filter out a little carbon dioxide in our own atmosphere.

That assumes the winds are perfectly linear and even fairly constant, which of course, is impossible on a sphere.

The problem is they are advertising a "free" upgrade to everyone with Win 7+ right now. Who doesn't want a FREE upgrade? Obvioously /. readers but most consumers think they are saving money with a free upgrade to an OS that is in fact pwning them.

No, she doesn't. He specifically said:

"but she is just not very passionate about coding or IT in general."

So yes, it does look like he's trying to push her. Most women I know take a few months of maternity leave, not a few years, so maybe that is why he is pushing, but he's pushing her in the wrong direction.

I find this an interesting statement. Running the numbers, I find that you'd have to be using a rocket burning something rather better than H2/O2 (we're talking Isp >500 just to reach escape speed, much less to reach the target rock) to allow two launches of a delta-IV heavy.

Huh?

The fact that a Delta-IV Heavy has a LEO payload of over 27 tonnes is a fact. You don't need to "run the numbers". As for the kick stage, I didn't specify a propulsion system - for all we care (since we haven't established a timeframe), it could be an ion drive and not even take a rocket so large as a Delta IV-Heavy.

Meanwhile, the Falcon Heavy is to make its first launch this year, with double the payload of a Delta IV-Heavy. And as was mentioned, the Tsar Bomba was not optimized to be as lightweight as possible.

And this entirely ignores that noone actually has a Tsar Bomba sized nuke available to be detonated.

Oh, and you didn't allow for a backup

It's almost as if I didn't add "with enough advance warning" for that scenario and leave what "enough advance warning" is unspecified. But if there's another rock the size of the Chicxulub impactor out there and we don't see it until the last second, we deserve to get hit - we're no longer talking about a 50 meter spec (Tunguska-sized), rather a rock with a cross section 30% bigger than the island of Manhattan. We're talking about an impact of a scale that happens once every hundred million years or so.

That's a pretty recent (and destructive) interpretation of the responsibilities of a public company, and one that has no statue in law.

A more appopriate version of the BBC's article:

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OMG - matti makkonen .fi sms pioneer dead!!!
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WTF - mm just died @63! #txtpioneerdeath was father of sms & dvlped idea of txt msg with phones. @2012 msged BBC that txt would be here "4EVR".
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shoutout 2 Nokia for spreading sms w/Nokia 2010. thought txt good 4 language. was btw mng. director of Finnet ltd and "grand old man" & rly obsessed with tech.
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OMFG people!

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.

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.

Of course they're screwed. And for every Euro the Greeks owe, there's a banker in the rest of the EU that lend it to them, knowing full well that they could never pay it off, and that their government would bail them out when it would turn sour. And that's exactly what happened in 2010-2012. German Landesbanken were up in their necks in Greek debt and would topple en-masse if Greece would default. They were assuming that the German government would stand by Greece. Landesbanken are interesting banks. They are 'cooperative', meaning that they are largely controlled by German politicians. These would get into serious trouble if those banks would topple, so the German state decided that Greece could not default until the bad debt was removed from the Landesbanken and was completely socialized over the population. And then they added the rhetoric that every eurocent would be paid back to appease the populace.

Many people actually argued at the time that both Italy and Greece were not in any shape to join the Euro, but were overruled by the Germans that needed as large a Euro-zone as France desired, in order to 'pay' for their right of unification. And that's where the trouble started. Not with the Greek lies, but with the German desire to placate France.

Yes, the Greeks lied and cheated. The Germans did something worse. Rather than letting their banks take the hit, they let their population pay for it, and blame it on foreigners.

No, I think the reaction would be much more subdued. All Euro notes with Greece's 'X' on it will be considered counterfeit money, and people holding those notes will be reimbursed. If Greece starts to really cheat and create notes with other countries initials on it, then the story changes. They could just as well print dollars at that time. The reaction would be much the same.

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?

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.

That's all true and not even disputed in the paper (which is linked in the article). The paper doesn't argue that all universal search results are bad for consumers, and some definitely are better. What's at issue is "local" search, like looking for a doctor in your city. In this case, there isn't one correct "answer," there are a bunch of them. And what you probably want are doctors with lots of good reviews. Instead, you get doctors with fewer reviews who happen to also have google+ pages.