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Online Shoppers Naive About Online Prices
smooth wombat writes "Have you ever been shopping online and noticed the difference in prices for the same item at different stores? Do you realize that not only are the prices different from store to store but they could be different for you compared to someone else who shops at the same store? Nearly 2/3 of adult internet shoppers thought that practice was illegal according to a study (pdf format) conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. First-time buyers at a retailer could see higher prices than a firm's repeat customers, and retailers may not offer discounts to consumers who buy the same brands regularly without even looking at alternative products on the same site. From the article: 'The Annenberg study was based on results from a telephone survey from Feb. 8 to March 14 of 1,500 adults who said they had used the Internet within the past 30 days. The margin of sampling error was reported to be plus or minus 2.51 percentage points.'"
Shopping when you're suffering from it is no fun!
Wakka Wakka Wakka!
That explains why I pay so little for my online subscription to Grizzly Man Magazine...
Also witness the recent problems with mozilla re-licensing. Every contributor had to agree to the relicensing or the code they contributed had to be rewritten when they couldn't be found (and there were a few).
That's why, in the FA, the organizer of GPL-Violations is able to enforce the GPL on the kernel. He is one of the thousands of contributors.
These things are an entity of greed, something in which the GPL was not founded. IMHO the GPL is an agreement between the user and the developer to maintain the inegrity of the code, and to further its existence and usefulness. This, by nature, is in effect the opposite of that which defines conventional means of protecting ideas and property.
Developing open source software for public use is not something attributed to those who would benefit from doing so arbitrarily, it is something attributed to those who would better the world around them no matter what they are doing.
The true meaning behind the division we see is far deeper than what can and cannot be enforceable. The problem we are facing has resolution in the re-thinking of laws and governing institutions over our daily lives. The GPL is not something which can be negotiated or changed to make the individual able to wave in the air in a courtroom, it is a doctrine to which can be added for the need of expanding an idealistic medium of communication between the individual and the masses.
This is why contributors to GNU software are expected to assign copyright to the FSF.
This issue has been addressed, and the FSF has shown one way to handle it properly. There's nothing to see here.
He has been enforcing GPL for over a year now with impressive results.
This guy does not know what he is talking about.
You mean, all those messages I sprinkle in my programs that say "Copyright 2005 Eric Smith" don't give them a hint?
[sarcasm]
...regular copyright agreements, patents, and EULAs are easily enforced.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously, though, I'm a little baffled. I haven't met many lawyers who wanted easy enforcement, clear terms, or intuitive filing. I mean, I guess it's good? But a little odd./p
I have exclusive copyright for my work, unless I transfer it in a written "instrument of conveyance."
An infringer might claim that I have no standing, but could not possibly make that case as there is no instrument of conveyance, and I and FSF would both testify that I had not tranferred ownership.
Since when was uncertainty as to the owner a defence? If I rip off your bicycle (to use the stupid IP as physical property analogy), am I less guilty because I thought I was ripping off somebody else's?
This is pretty stupid. The author of a work is the copyright owner in perpetuity unless they assign ownership to someone else. If there are multiple authors then the authors as a group own the copyright. This is the way copyright has always worked.
A work is technically, and legally, copyright upon creation by the author. You don't have to register something with the US Copyright Office for it to be protected. The point of registering with the Copyright Office is to provide an official registration so that if you are legally challenged, it's likely the first person to register is the owner. But it's nothing more than a measure of protection.
If I create a work and you register the copyright in your name, the burden of proof falls to me to prove that I created it first. But if I can do that, then legally I'm protected and you are not.
So putting your name on it does nothing for it. If you want to protect it, go to the Copyright Office web site, download the form, fill it out, and send it in with you $30. That's the best protection you can have.
Seriously, you can't pay someone to come up with schlock this bad.
No kidding. Check this out (from vmscan.c in the Linux kernel):
Any doubts about whose the copyright is?
Yeah, google is a publicly owned company. Where are my shares, dammit?
On the other hand, the GPL is just clear enough, that anyone reading it knows when he is in wrong doing.
That is why there are so few trials involving the GPL in court: violators tend to make agreements before it even gets there.
It happened just last month around here: on a list I subscribe too tehre are some lawyers who suypport Free Software. One of the members of the list noted that one program a large internet provider offered for free (beer) download for its subscribers was actually a renamed and closed GPLed Software. We on the list had the same doubt as the article proposes: in name of whom should we send a letter to the violators? The developers of said program were all from abroad - they might not even get interested in getting involved. Moreover, for the local lawyers to be able to legaly represent the foreigner developers, there would be quite a lot of bureaucratic entanglements.
So, on the list, we decided just to send a lawyer letter pointing that their software was violating the GPL - said lawyer was representing no one in particular. Ok, it took some phone calls besides the letter, but in no much time, they complied and released the source code for downloading, as required by the license.
So, IMHO, IANAL, ETC, even when a case actually gets into trial, a single developer, with no more than a few dozen lines of code, involved in the proccess is more than enough for the wrongdoing to get characterized.
Wouldent this be covered under Derivative Works as the author "derives" the finished product from a copyrighted work? I am way way not a lawyer, IANAL./div
If the author of GPL-licensed product discovers that a company has not adhered to the terms and conditions of the free software licence, the individual may find it difficult to argue his case in court as the defending party could argue that the copyright appears to belong to the Free Software Foundation, according to Guibault.
"The only name that appears on the licence is the Free Software Foundation -- they appear to be the licensor," she said.
Seriously, you can't pay someone to come up with schlock this bad.
Hmmm.... me thinks someone is posting to the completely wrong thread.
Meh.
This has been obvious to me ever since Wolfenstein 3D almost 14 years ago.
Quote:
A quick perusal of any GPL'd software in the world would have shown how full of shit the guy was.
Seriously, you can't pay someone to come up with schlock this bad.
You have clearly never read a John Dvorak article.
Top 10 includes the US at 28.5%. No EU country is in the top ten list. "during the first three weeks of May, approximately 26% of daily new zombies originated in the European Union, including 6%, 5% and 3% of new zombies originated in Germany, France and the United Kingdom, respectively." That's NEW zombies. The EU share of zombies is increasing, but it isn't the major source (yet).
How do you know they weren't patched? Patching doesn't really help you when the user runs the executable attachment they got in their email, or installs something shiny they found on the web.
Whether hacked computers and their clueless users or hideous undead out for brains, nothing beats the tried and true shotgun.
People own copyright on their own code unless they specifically assign it to someone else. A owns his code, B owns his code. C's code is illegal and C is in a world of hurt because he committed infringement and is liable for the damages. A and B could strip out C's code once they found out and no harm can come to them.
IANAL.
Call in Shaun of the Dead!
Ed: Any zombies out there?
Shaun: Don't say that!
Ed: What?
Shaun: The "zed" word. Don't say it!
Ed: Well... are they any?
Shaun: I don't see any. Maybe it's not as bad as all that.
Shaun: Oh, no wait, there they are.
Joe Hacker's code is still copyright Joe Hacker. When did he assign away his copyright? Not by using the GPL. Of course, it might be hard for Joe Hacker to find out where is code has ended up ... but that's life on the
globe of corporate scumbags we call
Earth.
The FSF owns (a) the licence, and (b) all code assigned to it. (This is why they do strongly suggest assigning rights to it, to avoid any lack of understanding or willful stupidity on the part of lawyers or corporate execs.)
Any individual programmer owns all GPLed code that they write, provided they have not assigned the rights to the FSF.
Personally, I don't see the problem. Well, actually, I do. The problem is that a lot of lawyers get paid to find problems and create them when they aren't there to be found.
The French only pay doctors when people are well, which means that doctors there do a great deal to prevent illness, rather than profit off it. Maybe US corporate lawyers should be paid on a similar basis - by how many legal tangles they DON'T get into, which seems a better indicator of when they are doing their job.
/p
So too, if you own a computer and want to be part of a community of connected computers, not bothering to inform yourself of how to do that does not excuse your responsibility for whatever damage your computer causes.
So what we do to spam zombies is:
a) block them totally and stop them from causing any more damage
b) send them an email telling them how much it cost to clean up their mess (usualy around $500), and that we will bill them if they do it again
c) only unblock them when they give us their assurance they understand what the future costs may be an will never allow it to happen again
d) permanently disconnect them and bill them the full amount of sysadmin and helpdesk time and materials of they allow it to happen again.
It's a really tough line, sure, we have lost maybe 3 customers as a result in 18 months (average spend per customer is $34 per month), out of 20,000. But it is far, far cheaper that the cost of just letting it happen unchecked.
I expected something like this might happen some day, but I'm ready, thanks to this. Bring it on!
Is this some new kind new kind of troll
It's a new kind of troll. Apparently, someone wrote a bot that will scrub the highest rated comments from one story, and post them into another randomly chosen story.
To what end, the mind boggles. But there you go.
I suppose you could argue that you have the ownership of the original post, and so it can't be reposted without your permission; but that would be much harder to enforce with posts that are originally made by an AC, and it would be hard to stop even if you could demonstrate that you originally wrote the original content.
What people do with too much time on their hands is pretty amazing, really. It's all I can to read slashdot, let alone write bots to vandalize it./p
Quote:
A quick perusal of any GPL'd software in the world would have shown how full of shit the guy was.
Fascinating. But what is a "worm" or a "virus"? Did the article define those too?
What we need is for Postfix to have a built in ability to report IP addresses to which it responds "take a flying leap", once per day, and for the top 1,000 of those IP addresses to be included in a report.
As a safety measure, the IP address has to be reported by X number or percent of the participating Postfix hosts to be considered valid.
Any IP address is added for a short period of time, say 72 hours, so if it's a machine that is hacked and quickly fixed the IP isn't blacklisted forever.
It seems like a distributed, real-time system like this would be effective.
I was working on the mail server today, and going through logs tracking a clamav/amavis problem.
I started to notice that...one...after...another...the buggers were connecting. We're not even a very big site (just got a bunch of mailing lists). The DNS names were xxx-yyy-zzz-aaa.(something).(insert european country code).
They outnumbered legitimate connections easily 5:1 or more, and the sessions all consisted of:
client: "HELO, I'm in your domain! Here, have some email"
Postfix: "take a flying leap."
client: "HELO, I'm in your domain! Here, have some email"
Postfix: "take a flying leap."
client: "HELO, I'm in your domain! Here, have some email"
Postfix: "take a flying leap."
Every single one would try and send between 3 and 5 messages before finally realizing it wasn't going to work, and disconnecting. It's irritating, because we do actually run a couple of DNS blacklists, but it seems a lot of european systems aren't on them.
When are we going to stop taking the "oh, we'll just filter it" attitude? Feels like all we've accomplished in half a decade is to do spammer's work for them and make users complacent by hiding all this shit from them. It's a classic white elephant problem if I ever saw it.../p
There is no problem. Joe Hacker owns the copyright on the code he wrote, unless he signed it away. He did not give the copyright to Jack N. Box, so Jack N. Box's heirs do no have rights to that code. Those heirs do have rights to the code Jack N. Box wrote, which is only 10%. Company X can contact Jack N. Box's heirs for a different license, but they only have the right to that 10%. (And if they gave rights to everything they might be in trouble themselves for negotiating in bad faith since they sold rights they did not have)
There is no problem here, except that Company X has a really hard time changing the license. In general the point of the GPL is to make it hard to change the license to something else, so this is intentionall. In fact if company X goes to Joe Hacker and gets rights to his code, they may be unable to use it if Jack N. Box's heirs decide to not give those rights up. In short a tiny minority can hold the majority to not changing the license. (Again, this is by design)
Note that some people assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation. The advantage of this is the FSF will sue to make sure code they own is not misused. This saves Joe Hacker the effort of finding a lawyer when needed. The disadvantage is in theory someone can gain control of the FSF and sell rights (or just make a new version of the GPL that gives everything away), and there is nothing Joe Hacker can do. Most projects using the GNU license choose to not require code be turned over to the FSF to protect against a rouge FSF sometime in the future.
Yes, as a zillion high rated comment already point out, there is no legal doubt that the author own the code. And a "copyright year name" statement is not needed, but anyway encouraged and common (the article actually also state that).
However, the article is about damages, not ownership. If it is unclear to the defendant who the opposing legal party was, it may reduce the chance or size of damages awarded. At least in Holland. No question though, the defendant will be forced to stop the illegal distribution.
Stopping the illegal distribution is what is most important to us, but a lawyer is usually paid to extract as many money as possible, so his point of view is obviously different.
As ever there are lies, damn lies and statistics.
China has a population of about 1.3 billion. The USA has a population of about 295 million. South Korea has a population of approximately 48 million, less than a fifth that of the US, and under 1/20th that of China, yet it has about half the number of zombies of the US.
Proportionally South Korea is by far the worst offender on the list.
How difficult is it to keep your OS up to date and run virus scanners?
The "May Top 10" chart on CipherTrust's web site of course features the "European Union", yet on the same list we see Germany, France, UK and Spain, all member states of the EU.
I for one welcome our new Zombie overlords.
This just goes to show that no one knows where spam and zombies reside. Everyone's "research" (obviously riddled with bias) says it's some place else.
Correction - the FSF doesn't urge people to assign copyright to them on anything and everything, as you imply. They require copyright assignments on official FSF projects, of course, but there are many other Free Software projects they neither have nor want copyright on.
The stuff about french doctors doesn't seem to contribute to your post, and sounds a bit suspect, too.
Stanislaw Lem predicts it about 20-30 years ago in some of his novel.
The zombies are a clear reference to the House of Lords, so the evil cleric must be the Blair Witch Project.
Back in the 1990s, Spam was a big problem. The problem was that a number of ISPs would ignore Spam complaints, or would even encourage spammers to be on their networks. Once enough ISPs refused to listen to complaints, Paul Vixie started the Realtime Blackhole List, which would allow people to find out if a given IP was blacklisted, and refused to receive email from a blacklisted IP.
I worked at Netcom when we ended up on the RBL. We did not have strong Spam protection; for example, our credit card verifier did not contact the credit card company before giving someone internet access. Even after being placed on the RBL, management was unwilling to expend the resources needed to stop our Spam problem; they thought the RBL would just go away. Meanwhile, the number of people calling or emailing technical support doubled because they could not send mail increased (I helped make some graphs showing the increase in emails to tech support to convince management that this was a real problem). It took months for management to wake up, smell the coffee, and make it harder for spammers to get throw-away accounts on Netcom's network.
(For NANOG regulars at the time: It was I who wrote the "Keman-bot")
A similiar list needs to be set up; if a given ISP has zombies and does not cut off said zombies from the internet, the ISP needs to be blacklisted RBL style. Maybe then management will do something about the zonbie problem--such as cutting of zombie machines from the internet (redirecting all HTTP queries to a "You're a zombie so we cut you off page" for example).
What kind of moron compares one country against a group of several countries? What kind of comparison is that? Look at the individual numbers:
U.S. - 20%
Germany - 6%
France - 5%
U.K. - 3%
Only by lumping everyone together as "Europe" are they able to claim that the majority of zombies are not located in the U.S. Even though I live in the U.S., I find this article totally stupid.
>> then we will be able to hold off our extinction for a few more years.
We're not in danger of becoming extinct from bacteria resistance. We adapt too.
Not even accessible to a full-time carthief?
from TFA:
"Using a tool that can track zombie machines, CipherTrust found that 26 per cent of them were hosted in European countries, with most of them in Germany (six per cent), France (five per cent) and the UK (three per cent)."
so now the article establied that the *most* infected country is Germany, with is 6%. now the immediate next paragraph:
"The company's ZombieMeter found that hackers were hijacking around 172,009 computers every day. Approximately 20 per cent of those machines were based in the United States, and 15 per cent were found in China. CipherTrust did not provide details of where the attackers resided."
and US account for TWENTY percent compare to Germany's SIX percent. Even China's FIFTEEN percent is higher. I don't mind it do a country by country comparation, or even a continent by continent. I wonder what's the overall percentange if you really compare it continent to continent. I wonder what's the overall percentage of Americas, Europe, and Asia is...
but IMHO grouping Europe all together and compare it against nations like US and China is just wrong.
It's no secret that Heisenberg
I actually did RTFA. This basically seems like a neater way to make a Petri dish.
He uses bacteria as 'ink', and presses the bacterial mold onto a sheet to produce a bacteria pattern.
I'm not exactly sure why this is better or worse than simply pipetting bacteria into a large petri dish, though.
First, if you look at the diagram for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Now I can get my [fake mail order] University Degree /and/ real [bacterial] culture diversity all on the same certificate.... just like if I had gone to Univeristy and dorm-hopped, or eaten cafeteria food.
He takes a tip from the silicon chip makers and uses the same type of technology to etch a pattern in a wafer. Then he creates a mold (like a mask, not like the stuff growing in the crotches of slashbots) which he can use repeatedly as a printing template.
Since a lot of bacteria grow resistant to antibiotics, it makes sense to use this kind of "printing press" to study how they create their protective biofilm. As a species, we are slowly succumbing to our own success at killing off bacteria. However the rise of super-bacteria that are immune to our medicines is a huge worry. If this type of research can shine some light on why these bacteria are so resistant and how we can control them to be less dangerous to us, then we will be able to hold off our extinction for a few more years.
Is it possible it was a design "speculated" from spy reports from the allies? It does capture two crucial design decisions (gun assembly and plutonium core), but manages to mix them up in a single entity. Which would be an easy mistake to make if one was relying on shaky intelligence from someone close to the Manhattan project, but not too close.
The design still looks approximated though, and does not take into account the scale or space requirements of a v2-type rocket.
It seems a lot of interesting science happens at the spatial/topological/geometrical level.
E.g. those bioplaques can be real killers. Models of bacteria that assume they are all evenly distributed in 2-space or 3-space really don't cut it.
Same thing with blood vessels. They aren't solid tubes, like the plumbing in your house. There's all sorts of transverse stuff happening that doctors fail to model and take into consideration.
Or materials science -- all the "edge effects" that people like to ignore, because they are necessarily messy.
If this advance allows them to study different geometries of bacteria cheaply, that will be a big step -- they'll be able to run big batches of simulations of different layouts. Hopefully they'll get their models right and do better work.
I can't possibly be the only one who immediately thought "game of life" ... can I?
Too bad it'd never work - not unless you could find some REALLY weird bacteria, anyway.
Like land mines in Vietnam and Cambodia?/p
This is great! There might be hope after all! Maybe in 60 years the US will find diagrams of WMD in Iraq!
If you drop hundreds of thousands of various types of ordnance onto an industrialised area then as much as 20% will not explode. Even ordnance flung into Baghdad some 60 years later didn't all explode on impact.
I doubt this was intentional.
Just remember not to use anti-bacterial soap on your bacterial printer. Otherwise, you will void the warrantry.
ahh.. seems like the perfect application of P2P.. or at least massive mirroring: make the postfix clients aware of each other (or a bunch of their nearest neighbors) and mirror the list. If one goes down, send the request to another one. Check all neighbors for updates and new neighbors every so often and merge the new data into the local list, deleting expired changes. New addresses could get pushed to the web by simply ammending their own list, when their neighbors d/l it they will propogate the changes. It doesn't matter if everyone has the whole list at any point, as long as the lists propogating through are reasonably complete.
it's a neat process. before i read the article i'd pictured an inkjet-esque approach. probably a good thing they didn't go that way --- can you imagine how much consumables would cost? to say nothing of issues related to poor quality drivers...
He claims to have stopped the scientists from developing the bomb any further - not because he was opposed to the concept if such a weapon (he certainly wasn't). The reason was that it was clear it would need much more time than was available in order to complete the work.
What was considered feasible was the idea of an "energy producing Uranium motor" for use in vehicles, and research was switched in that direction around 1944.
Antony Beevor's excellent book on the fall of Berlin also makes it clear that the Germans' nuclear research facilities were well known to the Russian's and were a major influence on Stalin's tactical decisions regarding Berlin. He was determined to obtain the fruits of this research.
The book also makes clear that Heisenburg did not try to sabotage the programme but was eager to succeed. This view is also backed up by the famous meeting between Heisenburg and Nils Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941 and Hesinburg's views at that time.
Of course even though one new where Heisenburg was in 1941 you could never tell what direction he was taking at that time.
One thing in the article that is a bit deceptive is that the article says that one can print with details as small as one micrometer . . . the size of a single bacterium. This may technically be true, but I doubt that controlling which individual bacterium are transferred (printed) or not is possible. And the neither the technique of pipetting bacteria nor regrowing bacteria on the agarose media is likely to have a resolution of one micrometer. Though the postulated one micrometer resolution may be possible, it is for all practical purposes impossible.
This is sorta off topic, and I wrote this essay for another forum, but I think it's relavent anyhow because people should know why prices are very likely to be 20 to 40 times higher before the year is out.....
The Coming Collapse of the Dollar
and will FOSS Save the Day
Yeah, I know, the title sounds like gloom and doom. But seriously, I want
people to read this, so they can understand the big picture making it
more likely that they can improve and secure their life over the long
term. I am not an investment adviser, and I don't get paid for this -
so take things here with a grain of salt please.
Money is supposed to be a medium of exchange and a store of value. And
while it's true that money is still used as a medium of exchange, US money
at least, has not been good as a store of value since the 1970's when the
US dollar became 100% unlinked from any commodities (like gold). Well
I take that back, for some periods the dollar has been a great store
of value. Which is surprising, because other countries that had tried this
trick ended up having hyper inflation as their currencies became worth not
much more than the cost of ink and paper. But in the USA this has not
happened for several reasons:
1st: A LOT of people are used to using dollars as a store of value and
exchange, so it takes a lot to change that way of life.
2nd: (and most importantly) even if a US citizen does all his transactions
and makes all his earnings in other currencies, he still must eventually
convert any gained value to US dollars to pay taxes (or go to jail), which
creates a demand for dollars propping up it's value and keeping it from
collapsing.
3rd: The good citizens of the USA have had large productivity increases for
long periods of time, which has a tendency to disguise how badly the
dollar has lost it's value. If your bang for the buck is half of what it
used to be, but the cost of making your widgets has also gone down to
half of what it used to be. Then you are less likely to notice that you
were robbed of half of what you would have had otherwise. Did I say that
right?
BTW: they even have a name for this level of inflation, it's called the
"core inflation". In my own technically illiterate terms, it's the
inflation point at where the economy doesn't panic over inflation because
efficiency gains disguise the loss of value. And it's no coincidence that
oil, commodities, and food prices (that is "volatile" prices that are less
responsive to productivity changes) are often excluded from inflation indexes.
4th: The dollar is "technically" not just printed up like other fiat
currencies (as they are often called). It is "loaned" out to banks (by the
fed) who, in turn loan it out to people and businesses, who in turn
circulate the money in the economy. So in the big picture, the need to
pay back dollar debt also creates a demand that keeps the currency from
collapsing.
5th: At this point, so many institutions and investors rely on the dollar
that they can't afford to let it collapse. So they will go through great
measures to promote it's value even if they perceive it to be worth less
than it is.
6th: Other currencies do the same thing, and often aren't all that great
either. Factually, the USA is big, powerful, more business friendly,
less corrupt, and more transparent, than many other governments. When
people seek a place to store their wealth, they will more often than not
choose the dollar over other currencies for those reasons.
So are those compelling reasons to use the dollar, or what? Well, all of
these reasons really translate to: people can't find an easy way
to squeeze out of using and relying on the dollar. However, when it comes
money and wealth, people are very creative and determined, so over time
the dollar sill looses value in spite of all these pressures. And over long
periods of time, it
The trick to fighting fat kids is endurance! They don't have it... so you have to draw the fight out.
So needless to say, when I managed to find myself in an encounter, I had to end the event quickly.
Know thy own limitations!
(I did drop most of the weight though... roughly 30lbs to go)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
are the copy/paste scripts from other articles running again?
Germany invested a lot in rocketry research, and the V2 wasn't the only thing the had designed.
Ballistic missiles are known by everyone because of the cold war hype, but with that era's technology and bearing in mind that they didn't need to go all the way to america with it, a cruise missile is where it's at. I.e., a rocket with wings. You don't have to launch the thing upwards with a rocket to hit Britain from France, you can just as well launch it horizontally or on a flat arc and use wings to provide the needed lift. Like the V-1 did, for example.
And they did research and build just that too: rockets with wings.
The Me-163 Komet for example was an interceptor aircraft with a liquid-fuel rocket (not turbojet) engine. It reached a speed of approximately 600 mph (almost 1000 km/h) and had a maximum range of about 80 km.
Nasty thing and more dangerous for the pilot than for the enemy, but to chuck a small bomb without a pilot across the channel it would have worked outstandingly.
And I have no doubt that, if they absolutely needed to chuck a 4 ton bomb (the weight of the hiroshima bomb), they could have slapped 2, 3 or 4 of those engines on an airframe with bigger wings.
It's a lot easier to design such a one-shot contraption, when you don't have to worry about being able to land safely, or about structural damage during flight. It can, for all you care, come apart at the end, as long as it does it on the other side of the channel.
"In Darwin Australia, Intelligent Designers troll for _you_!"
No more coffee for me...
Is there an inverse Godwin's Law? "Any discussion of the Nazis will inexorably tend towards a discussion of Godwin's Law"
From what I can tell, it looks to be a straightforward version of the "gun design" used in the Hiroshima bomb, which a) is so obvious that I think even I could have figured out the basic concept, and b) won't work with real plutonium as Pu-240 contamination will cause the weapon to blow itself to bits before enough of the plutonium has fissioned. So, even if it was true, they had a very long way to go before they could have made a bomb.
An implosion design, by contrast, would be a much bigger deal, though as I understand it just having the idea is a very long way from making it work.
Two final things: one of the reasons why the Nazis never got very far on their nuclear weapons project is that they could never get a reactor working; one of the key reasons for that was their supply of heavy water was kept from them by Norwegian partisans working with British SOE. Their story is a pretty amazing one.
And finally, while it's not possible to make a plutonium gun bomb now; it should be possible in the very distant future. Pu-240 (the contaminant) has a much shorter half-life (about 6500 years) than Pu-239 (about 24,100 years). So, over (lots of) time, the proportion of the Pu-240 should gradually reduce. So maybe these Germans were just a little ahead of their time.../p
I'm surprised there isn't a RBL for zonbies yet
There is
Since the link in your post goes the website of a fictional organisation that Doctor Who belongs to, perhaps the moderation of your post as 'informative' was a little misplaced?
From what I can tell, it looks to be a straightforward version of the "gun design" used in the Hiroshima bomb, which a) is so obvious that I think even I could have figured out the basic concept, and b) won't work with real plutonium as Pu-240 contamination will cause the weapon to blow itself to bits before enough of the plutonium has fissioned. So, even if it was true, they had a very long way to go before they could have made a bomb.
An implosion design, by contrast, would be a much bigger deal, though as I understand it just having the idea is a very long way from making it work.
Two final things: one of the reasons why the Nazis never got very far on their nuclear weapons project is that they could never get a reactor working; one of the key reasons for that was their supply of heavy water was kept from them by Norwegian partisans working with British SOE. Their story is a pretty amazing one.
And finally, while it's not possible to make a plutonium gun bomb now; it should be possible in the very distant future. Pu-240 (the contaminant) has a much shorter half-life (about 6500 years) than Pu-239 (about 24,100 years). So, over (lots of) time, the proportion of the Pu-240 should gradually reduce. So maybe these Germans were just a little ahead of their time.../p
If you look at the diagram on this page, there seems to be what looks like a date on the upper right side. It seems to say "Halteose fur AS/12/44". Any ideas what that means?
Also, the associated article states that the bomb appears to be a hybrid fission/fusion device, which was far more advanced than the two fission-only devices used on Japan./p
Then to point out the even greater boneheadedness of this story, let's say that EvilMegaCorp went to court and said "oh, we didn't think you owned this copyright, we thought the FSF did" and the judge agreed, the FSF would be in court the next day saying "no, we didn't write it, we wrote the license, but if you'd like to name us as the author of the software we'll gladly defend the copyright on it."
So STFU and get back to teaching students how to swindle./p
I'm surprised there isn't a RBL for zonbies yet
There is
"cop-car beater"
It's got a cop motor: a 440 cubic inch plant. It's got cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks. It's a model made before catalytic converters so it'll run good on regular gas. What do you say, is this the new Bluesmobile, or what? - Elwood to Jake, The Blues Brothers