in case you weren't terrified yet today . . .

[dep]

quoth Kurt Wall:
| In a 0.4K blaze of typing glory, dep wrote:
| > http://www.techcentralstation.com/031004C.html
|
| Gah! It's always comforting to be proven wrong. :-)

there are some public policy questions here that the scifi movies never 
get into, such as when/whether evacuations should be ordered -- if all 
you know is that it's northern hemisphere, for instance, it makes good 
sense to evacuate coastal areas, but woe be to the official that sends 
the residents of new york city inland to the place where the asteroid 
ends up hitting -- and how to deal with the inevitable false alarms. i 
mean, in this case there was a body of evidence suggesting that an 
asteroid would hit the earth within *days.* if anything was to be done, 
it would have needed to be done almost instantly; fortunately, it 
turned out the asteroid wasn't headed for us after all. despite our 
nifty back-of-the-mind suppositions, we do not have megaton hydrogen 
bombs sitting on saturn v rockets waiting to go change the course of an 
approaching asteroid. (i actually discussed all this with no less a 
person than edward teller about 15 years ago. he thought that any 
defense system ought to include some way of pushing approaching rocks 
out of the way. he was right. practically no one listened.)
-- 
dep

Hippocratic oath: An ethical construct whose initial tenet, "first, do 
no harm," prohibits doctors from treating lawyers.