I’ll give up my landline when they pry the receiver from my cold dead hands, but many people are just fine going cell-only, which could cause big problems down the road for the telecom industry.
I think that we have a generation of people who have no experience with quality phone service, and think that when calls get dropped, or you have trouble hearing the other person, that’s just the way it is, so they don’t know what they’re giving up. It’s going to be interesting to see how we continue to improve broadband if there is no cross subsidization from voice.
That was the subject of one of the myriad spam emails I get encouraging me to enhance…something or other. I have to believe that women get them, too.
Anyone who responds to such idiocy had no brain to give up in the first place. It’s as stupid as the ones that tell me that no one can resist buying a new watch. Watch me.
NASA is charged with seeking out nearly all the asteroids that threaten Earth but doesn’t have the money to do the job, a federal report says.
That’s because even though Congress assigned the space agency this mission four years ago, it never gave NASA money to build the necessary telescopes, the new National Academy of Sciences report says.
If we really do have a climate change problem, this seems like a much better solution than a command-control economy. But it doesn’t provide the watermelon socialists with an excuse to run our lives.
Could “cloud ships” solve the problem (assuming that there is a problem) with “global warming”?
I do find this both amusing and frustrating, though:
The Copenhagen Consensus Centre, which advises governments on how to spend aid money, examined the various plans and found the cloud ships to be the most cost-effective.
They would cost $9 billion (£5.3 billion) to test and launch within 25 years, compared to the $250 billion that the world’s leading nations are considering spending each year to cut CO2 emissions, and the $395 trillion it would cost to launch mirrors into space.
That’s an absolutely insane (and economically and technologically ignorant) number for the latter. The only way to get it is to assume that a) the mirrors are very massive, b) they are made entirely out of terrestrial materials and c) that launch costs would not be reduced in any way by launching that much mass. I’m not saying that “space mirrors” are the most cost effective solution, but I’d like to see their basis of estimate, because that number is nuts.
One of the stupidest and most criminal results of Constellation’s crowding out the rest of the NASA budget was the dismantling of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts two years ago. It was only costing a few million dollars a year, and that trivial amount of money, which was providing tremendous bang for the NASA buck, was taken to be poured down the multi-billion-dollar Ares rat hole. Now, apparently, there’s talk of resurrecting it. That would be a small, but vital step in getting the agency back on the right track, if the new administrator follows the advice.
The morning anchor (a twenty-something, by the looks and behavior) on Fox 29 in Palm Beach was reporting on a Star Wars story, and pronounced C3PO “See Three Poh.” She was ribbed by her co-anchor, and defended herself by saying, “I’ve never seen the movie.”
I was too old to be influenced by Star Wars (in my early twenties when it came out) — 2001, a real SF movie, was my cultural touchstone, but this is the first time I’ve run into an adult that is too young.
To properly explain the crater distribution, Ito and Malhotra say some other factor must have been involved. One possibility is that we simply haven’t seen all the craters yet: the ongoing lunar mapping missions may help on that score.
Another idea is that the Earth’s tidal forces tear Earth-crossing asteroids apart, creating a higher number of impacts than might otherwise be expected.
But the most exciting and potentially worrying possibility is that there exists a previously unseen population of near Earth asteroids that orbit the Sun at approximately the same distance as the Earth. These have gone unnoticed because they are smaller or darker than other asteroids, say Ito and Malhotra.
“More complete observational surveys of the near-Earth asteroids can test our prediction,” they say.
And let’s not waste too much time about it. By some reckonings, asteroid impacts represent the greatest threat to humankind that we are able to calculate.
Even more to the point, it’s not only the greatest one we can calculate, it’s probably the greatest one that we can actually mitigate (short of colonizing the galaxy).