Still, Slashdot doesn't have to play along with their weasel wording. For example, "ergonomic collars that deliver an electric pulse" - just say "shock collar". Don't help them whitewash what they're talking about.

Now if they were to engineer in some harmaline/telepathine and put it into a tomato you could make some very special marinara sauce.

Why stop there? Most modern cuisines use tomatoes, giving you lots of possibilities. How about a adult-grade version of catsup or salsa? Or, if you prefer, tex-mex chili with a new type of kick to it?

Sure. Just a reminder, back in the old days, before the NLRB forced owners and unions to negotiate in good faith... Factories and warehouses burned to the ground during labor disputes, people were beaten and killed.

And for all of you out there who think that that's exaggerated, take a look at the Ludlow Massacre with its body count of approximately 21, mostly women and children.

No, we were involved in blowing away members of the NVA who were invading the Republic of South Vietnam at the time. Much of the time we were using reverse slope trajectories to hit targets on the backside of a mountain, and once to the backside of the second mountain back. Our ship had a very good reputation with the spotting planes giving us the locations of targets.

If we have a draft today the level of resistance will cripple the country. Nobody will tolerate the Government pulling that. That move could break the country.

Yes, and I give him full credit for that. And please note that the reason we don't need a draft now isn't because there's no more conflict but because there are enough men and women willing to serve their country without it.

I was on what was then called a Destroyer Escort (Later changed to a Fast Frigate to fit in with NATO.) doing shore bombardment on the Gun Line for the most part. Our ship was targetted by counter-battery twice; once at night when I was sleeping, and once in the daytime when I was the one who reported that there were 6" shells landing about 30 yards off our fantail.

Trust me, most of us came back without any long-term mental issues. The stereotype of the unhinged 'Nam vet was created by leftist journalists and writers to give them something to point at when they wanted an excuse to make anybody who didn't march in lock-step with their leftist beliefs look evil. Do yourself a favor and take a good look at their propaganda and you'll see for yourself how phony it is.

And I don't care if that billionaire is D.D. Harriman as long as it gets built.

Speaking as a member of the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club, I would like to point out that the proper title for people like you is "bubblehead."

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

Lol, I was thinking of this instead ;)

People forget that the primary concerns about Kessler Syndrome were about geosynchronous orbit, which used to be where all the most important satellites went (many of course still go there, but not the megaconstellations). It takes a long, long time for debris to leave GEO. But LEO is a very different beast.

They said it's internal rather than a collision, so probably a failed COPV would be my guess.

Yeah. In particular:

with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks

LEO FTW. Kessler Syndrome is primarily a risk if you put too much stuff with too poor of an end-of-life disposal rate in GEO. End-of-life without proper disposal rates have declined exponentially since Kessler Syndrome was first proposed (manufacturers both understand the importance more, and do a better job, of decreasing the rate of failures before deorbit - in the past, sometimes there wasn't even attempts to dispose of a craft at end-of-life). And now we're increasingly putting stuff in LEO, where debris falls out of orbit relatively quickly. It's not impossible in LEO, esp. with higher LEO orbits - but it's much more difficult.

Or to put it another way: fragments can't build up to hit other things if they're gone after just a couple weeks.

And this trend is likely to continue - a lower percentage of premature failures, and decreasing altitudes / reentry times. Concerning ever-decreasing altitudes, we've already been doing this via use of ion engines to provide more reboost (with mission lifespans designed for only several years before running out of propellant, instead of decades like the giant GEO ones), but there's an increasing interest in "sky skimming" satellites that function in a way somewhat reminiscent of a ramjet - instead of krypton or xenon as the propellant for an ion engine, the sparse atmospheric air itself is the propellant, so the craft can in effect fly indefinitely until it fails, wherein it quite rapidly enters the denser atmosphere and burns up.

ED: "But it doesn't work for gravity with linear curvature"