Currently the police officer just shows up in court and tells his story. That's all the proof they need because an LEO would never lie, of course. I expect this farce to continue as long as the current system stands.
A weapon like this relies on *mechanical* means to vary the amount of force. Add the user's responsibility to check which setting it is *supposed* to be on and you have a recipe for disaster.
Even beyond that. If you fire a bullet on "stun" speed and hit someone in the breast bone the guy will be uncomfortable. If you fire the same bullet at the same guy and hit him in the eye, chances are the bullet will go all the way to the other side of his skull. Can the LEO guarantee the aim under pressure, when everyone is running like crazy and shots are fired? If not then he becomes a deliberate killer.
These particular panels were guaranteed to deliver 90% of their rated peak capacity for at the twelve year mark, and 80% at the 25 year mark.
I take it these panels were tested for 12 and 25 years?
But of course they weren't. These numbers are just "estimates" from accelerated aging tests, which may or may not be accurate. Besides, any public company will be more than happy to sell you a warranty that you can't file a claim on for 25 years. It's very similar to a child's gender prediction service - "if we are wrong you get your money back!":-)
I am personally interested in energy generation, and I may elect soon to install solar or wind generator (I also live in California.) But so far solar requires considerable commitment of capital, as the guy did - not everyone has $50K just sitting around. Wind power, if wind is available, is much cheaper. One SkyStream unit produces about 2 kW at cost of $5,000 + tower ($3,000). You can have three wind generators, offering the same 6 kW, for $24K - even though the tower can be had for much cheaper if you are a ham and know towers. Wind is different from solar in fact that it is usually plentiful in winter in California, whereas solar is similarly plentiful in summer. If you live on a well illuminated hillside then one solar and one wind installation would be better, provided that you have enough land to meet the tower requirements (if it falls it must fall within your property, far enough from power lines etc.)
I vote for testing the proposal in a tank for at least 1,000 years. At least by that time we will know for sure what we had around year 2000 - global warming, global cooling, or just some politicians inventing a problem out of thin air. I suspect the latter.
Check out the "mouse" control panel applet - sensitivity and acceleration sliders are there for more than a decade. With a laptop that has 1400 to 1600 pixels across 15" of width you simply must use these controls if you plan to resize a window, for example - not to mention anything more complex.
will be usurped by touch screens and facial recognition
I guess the guy never used touch screens, that's why he is so sure. And nobody "used" facial recognition so far, that makes it even a better idea...
The most basic issue here is the interface. People don't write with facial contortions. We write with our hands. Why? Because our hands are the most precise tools that we have, and they are well built for the task.
However our hands (and arms) are not good for holding them, for hours, in front of a vertical surface of a screen. Many screens are positioned so that the "touch" interface is therefore impossible. Besides, there isn't enough precision in our fingers even if we wear claw-like stylus. Mouse can be, and often is configured to translate larger movement of the sensor into a very precise, sub-millimeter movement of the cursor. This is necessary in most applications, selecting from a menu being an example. Touch screens do not allow this "magnification" of the movement, as well as any non-linear response (that is also common.)
The input devices will likely change over time, but unless our bodies change also the mouse or a touchpad interface will remain useful for a long time, just like a keyboard. I personally believe that we will have direct brain control over the mouse and keyboard functions earlier than we will be able to replace the mouse with a better mouse - it's a simpler task. It's also probably possible to design a crude AI that is just enough to decode speech; but the speech interface is not very efficient either - try to talk for an hour and see what happens to your throat.
All these predictions are just noise made by people who want to attract undeserved attention. There is nothing wrong with a mouse as it is now, and there should be no rush to replace it with something that is not tested and by all reasoning can't even work. The mouse works, we test it for decades by now.
In "crypt mode" all memory fetches are decrypted in hardware, and all memory writes are encrypted.
The CPU is not the only entity who writes or reads RAM. Every DMA device does that, such as video, HDD, USB, Ethernet... in fact, most peripherals, including those mounted on the motherboard. Either the key has to be shared with them (which is not secure) or these DMA pages remain unencrypted (which is not secure.)
The one obvious solution here is to implement secure encrypted path to all these devices, like it's done [seemingly] for audio and video in MAFIAA mode. With a properly designed architecture it can be done. But then the prices of peripherals will go up, even though the problem is not relevant to 99.999999% of computer owners.
If anyone believes there is a market for secure computers, here is your chance - build the whole PC in a secure way, with all peripherals done per your needs. I'm sure DoD and other places will be interested.
Can LED's be dimmed? As far as I've seen it's not possible.
Not so. LEDs can be dimmed either by regulating the forward DC current (then they don't flicker at all) or by pulse-modulating some fixed current; the LEDs in the latter case will flicker only if the frequency of the pulses is too low. LEDs have very low capacitance and inductance, so they can be easily pulsed with any high frequency of your choice, though 1 kHz would be more than enough. And as I said the DC source works also.
If you have a shortwave scanner or CB radio, try hooking it up to the satellite dish
It would be just as effective as not connecting it at all. The HF band is 3-30 MHz. The satellite band (for this dish) is probably above 1 GHz. Even FRS would probably not work. But if you have a ham rig for the band it might be useful for EME.
I think the Gulf of Tonkin Incident comes perilously close. Colin Powell's performance in 2003 could be also construed as manufacturing evidence.
But, of course, 20th century provides us with the Gleiwitz incident which was 100% staged; it only started the World War II.
and there are HUGE liabilities associated with the latter. People would hang for that if it were ever discovered.
The risk is fairly low if you intend to nuke the site where your "evidence" is supposed to be. Besides, everyone who starts the war intends to win it, so the question of punishment when the war is lost is not even discussed.
I doubt people will buy it this time around if he tries the same thing again.
Trying the same thing again is not necessary. Remember the recent discovery of a copy of Photoshop in possession of Iran? Well, other countries, or Hollywood alone, have even better technology; if they can give you a perfectly realistic picture of Cthulhu rising from his grave in R'lyeh, it would be just a child's play to render a few missiles, observed from a satellite first, then flying ballistic, and then slamming into some large friendly installation (like a military base.) Thousands of dead bodies will be produced, photographed, and quickly cremated; they may be even human bodies, as far as the powers behind the deception are concerned. Show this on TV for several days non-stop and majority of population will support any genocide you'd wish to perpetrate. The trick is the same as in sales of used cars - pressure and more pressure; do not let the mark look around and ask for a second opinion.
Let's pretend that your are up for Phi Beta Kappa, or class valedictorian, and this putz hacks his grades to get enough A's to take that away from you and win the award. Suddenly your hard earned A's become less valuable, and you lost the award to someone who stole it.
This is an extreme and impossible to conceal case. You most likely know your grades, and grades of your competitors. The space at the top of Olympus is small, so you know who is who, and when some unknown guy suddenly shows up amidst local geniuses it will be instantly noticed, and the offended people will cry for blood (or at least for reexamination of papers.)
The trick to get away with such a forgery is to tweak the grades very carefully, so that nobody has any reason to look into the details. That's how this guy did it, and nobody noticed anything until he himself was stupid enough to attract attention.
Another example - what if you bought a bunch valuable original collectors items and want to sell them on Ebay for $100 each. Now someone else has made a bunch of cheap knock offs and few people can tell the difference. Now your item isn't worth as much
This is true, but only in a very small market. The educational market is anything but small. If I sell quality blank DVDs, and thousands of other sellers sell quality blank DVDs, it won't matter a bit that one guy somewhere sells fake DVDs for less, pretending that they are just as good. It happens all the time, with some people selling genuine software and with other people selling pirated fakes. So what? Some people will buy from him, but that's a drop in an ocean; if one out of thousands of your honest competitors catches flu then the balance tilts the other way. You shouldn't be afraid of competition *that much*:-)
There is always someone who competes "unfairly", whatever that means in your case. You study all night for an exam when someone else just hastily prepares a crib sheet, and you get a lower score - what do you do then? Nothing; just keep living, and focus on what really matters (school grades aren't it.) Cheaters won't get far with their stolen skills. And if they do, maybe the course wasn't that important to your trade and maybe you should have cheated also. In my days in university I had courses that are essential (like linear electric circuits) and courses that are utter garbage to me (like philosophy) - so why would I, being sane at the moment, want to memorize the birth date of Aristotle or Kant? I still have very faint idea of what these guys were teaching, but that doesn't stop me from developing embedded hardware and software, FPGAs and all, and I'm good at that.
To summarize, this is a harmless enough offense because the perpetrator can't afford a forgery that is large enough to be noticed. If he opens a mass forgery business then it's a different story. But bumping a few grades for himself and for a few of his buddies can't be even detected on the national scale, and that's the scale you use when you apply to universities that are not in your own town.
I used to know how to work on cars, since for years I helped my uncle to rebuild his vintage cars. I also had to work on my first car, since it was too cheap to just run:-) But these days I do not change oil myself because:
I need some space to store the tools and work on the car. I live in an apartment and have no such space.
The car has to be raised to access the drain plug. I have nothing of the sort, and though some stands can be bought and used with a jack, it's too much hassle, and crawling underneath a one ton car, lying on a dirty asphalt, is not how I usually like to spend my free time.
The old oil needs to be collected and recycled. I have no idea where to recycle it, and it will cost at least some time and maybe some money.
The new oil and filter need to be bought; that costs time.
In other words, there is absolutely no practical benefit of doing such a common maintenance task yourself. Any garage (and definitely any dealership) is better equipped to do it. When you have, for example, an intermittent electrical problem - that might be a different story, where your own time is cheaper to diagnose the problem. But oil change is so much streamlined at oil change places, it's not worth competing with them unless you already made a comparable investment in tools and equipment.
One thing to keep in mind is that the longer oil is at $130+, the longer it will be at $70 or less.
I don't see any reason why Saudis would want to sell two barrels of oil for the price of one (that they ask - and get - today.) If the demand goes down they'd rather lower the production. This way they get the same cash flow and use less of their non-renewable resources. Given that there are very few sellers of oil on this planet, compared to buyers, the sellers are already free to dictate their terms, and that's what they already do. The only constraint upon them is in reeling the line in slowly, so that the economies of buying countries have time to adjust to new realities.
It doesn't take a lot of code to whip up a new window manager theme, new sounds and new, completely different set of keyboard shortcuts for all the functions that exist since Windows 3.0. And don't forget to change the wallpaper images too. Once done, you have your Windows 7, ready to be shipped!
By giving himself all A's, he effectively stole all the hard earned hours of study from those who honestly earned it.
I don't get it. The other "A" students still have their A's, don't they? Or, imagine that this kid was just studying hard and getting his A's honestly - would that be also "theft" from his peers?
Just like stealing money
No; if he steals money then the money is not in victim's wallet any more. This crime is like photocopying someone's else money - doesn't hurt the "victim" and places you into a potentially illegal situation.
He will also steal chances that other students might have of getting into their choice of university
There are many universities, his "grade inflation" is a drop in a sea of graduates. Also, if a university can't tell a difference between an idiot with good grades and a genius with good grades then probably only an idiot would want to apply there. My own university, upon seeing my school grades, only allowed me to skip two lesser exams (language and something else, equally irrelevant) provided that I pass the mandatory exams (math and physics.) The admission was based on the results of exams, and not just on school grades. But it wasn't in the USA, I am unfamiliar with practices here.
38 years is harsh, maybe the kid should spend 4 years in jail, to offset the years other kids spent studying their books.
I completely agree with your numbers. But my reasons are different. I don't believe he caused any harm to anyone except himself. I would put him in jail just for breaking the law, and since he appears to be such an abhorrent personality I wouldn't be able to think of any reasons to reduce the guilt.
Isn't it possible any more to report an incident without providing the police with a guilty person at the same time? Tell them what happened, and they will investigate, that's what their job is about.
The email fails to connect several ideas. Most importantly, he does not say why "running Linux" requires anyone to make the sources available. We know why, but the email should have said that explicitly. The email does not look like a legal request, it looks like some stupid tech support question. I would write a starter email, for example, like this:
Dear Sir,
it came to my attention that your product XXX, which I purchased through YYY, uses software based on a licensed component ZZZ. The license (GPL) grants me, the user, the right to obtain a copy of the source, and places a specific legal burden onto your company to provide such a copy to users of your product for free, or for a nominal fee to cover copying and mailing. Please refer to ${URL} for specific terms.
As a user of your product, having been granted the right to obtain the source code, I wish to exercise this right. Would you be so kind to inform me how I can download, or otherwise access, the source code in question?
Thanks in advance,
${name}
${address}
${telephone}
Most tech support people will forward such an email to their manager, and the manager will send it to legal, where it will be reviewed, and a company lawyer will not dare to ignore an official, lawful request that is traceable, because they know that willful infringement is worse than ignorance, and now they know.
As someone else mentioned, Pakistan had to make the bomb in response to India doing it. But I agree, this is a very expensive business, even more so if the country does not use nuclear power. South Africa is yet another story, they seemingly lost their way and were overcome by political events.
You are absolutely correct. Stalin hasn't moved a finger until two weeks after the USSR was attacked. If Hitler kept the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement the Europe would be neatly divided between Hitler and Stalin. There would be a war later between those two, but many europeans would not be around to witness it.
"half the size and twice the power of the Chinese weapon, with far more modern electronics"
Both USA and USSR achieved these size and power about half a century ago. The "modern electronics" could not be in those designs. It likely is in modern US and Russia's bombs, but then the size and power are also an order of magnitude better (using fusion, and with yield being selectable, and so on.)
Considering this unique combination of medium performance, and modern electronics, and the size barely fitting a missile, the design can only belong to the newcomers to the nuclear club - such as India and Pakistan. North Korea probably does not have the technology.
Penalties come and go, but the bomb stays. I'm sure that's what they thought in India and Pakistan, and history proved them true, after political winds shifted.
You read too much of Clive Cussler. But the scenario is not too unreal. The only stopping factor is that it's so hard (and expensive) to obtain a nuclear device. A mega-corporation, or a government, like in that book, can do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Currently the police officer just shows up in court and tells his story. That's all the proof they need because an LEO would never lie, of course. I expect this farce to continue as long as the current system stands.
A weapon like this relies on *mechanical* means to vary the amount of force. Add the user's responsibility to check which setting it is *supposed* to be on and you have a recipe for disaster.
Even beyond that. If you fire a bullet on "stun" speed and hit someone in the breast bone the guy will be uncomfortable. If you fire the same bullet at the same guy and hit him in the eye, chances are the bullet will go all the way to the other side of his skull. Can the LEO guarantee the aim under pressure, when everyone is running like crazy and shots are fired? If not then he becomes a deliberate killer.
These particular panels were guaranteed to deliver 90% of their rated peak capacity for at the twelve year mark, and 80% at the 25 year mark.
I take it these panels were tested for 12 and 25 years?
But of course they weren't. These numbers are just "estimates" from accelerated aging tests, which may or may not be accurate. Besides, any public company will be more than happy to sell you a warranty that you can't file a claim on for 25 years. It's very similar to a child's gender prediction service - "if we are wrong you get your money back!" :-)
I am personally interested in energy generation, and I may elect soon to install solar or wind generator (I also live in California.) But so far solar requires considerable commitment of capital, as the guy did - not everyone has $50K just sitting around. Wind power, if wind is available, is much cheaper. One SkyStream unit produces about 2 kW at cost of $5,000 + tower ($3,000). You can have three wind generators, offering the same 6 kW, for $24K - even though the tower can be had for much cheaper if you are a ham and know towers. Wind is different from solar in fact that it is usually plentiful in winter in California, whereas solar is similarly plentiful in summer. If you live on a well illuminated hillside then one solar and one wind installation would be better, provided that you have enough land to meet the tower requirements (if it falls it must fall within your property, far enough from power lines etc.)
I vote for testing the proposal in a tank for at least 1,000 years. At least by that time we will know for sure what we had around year 2000 - global warming, global cooling, or just some politicians inventing a problem out of thin air. I suspect the latter.
One glass of water can kill you, if inhaled... and one ton of mercury will not kill you, if it's sealed in containers.
Check out the "mouse" control panel applet - sensitivity and acceleration sliders are there for more than a decade. With a laptop that has 1400 to 1600 pixels across 15" of width you simply must use these controls if you plan to resize a window, for example - not to mention anything more complex.
will be usurped by touch screens and facial recognition
I guess the guy never used touch screens, that's why he is so sure. And nobody "used" facial recognition so far, that makes it even a better idea...
The most basic issue here is the interface. People don't write with facial contortions. We write with our hands. Why? Because our hands are the most precise tools that we have, and they are well built for the task.
However our hands (and arms) are not good for holding them, for hours, in front of a vertical surface of a screen. Many screens are positioned so that the "touch" interface is therefore impossible. Besides, there isn't enough precision in our fingers even if we wear claw-like stylus. Mouse can be, and often is configured to translate larger movement of the sensor into a very precise, sub-millimeter movement of the cursor. This is necessary in most applications, selecting from a menu being an example. Touch screens do not allow this "magnification" of the movement, as well as any non-linear response (that is also common.)
The input devices will likely change over time, but unless our bodies change also the mouse or a touchpad interface will remain useful for a long time, just like a keyboard. I personally believe that we will have direct brain control over the mouse and keyboard functions earlier than we will be able to replace the mouse with a better mouse - it's a simpler task. It's also probably possible to design a crude AI that is just enough to decode speech; but the speech interface is not very efficient either - try to talk for an hour and see what happens to your throat.
All these predictions are just noise made by people who want to attract undeserved attention. There is nothing wrong with a mouse as it is now, and there should be no rush to replace it with something that is not tested and by all reasoning can't even work. The mouse works, we test it for decades by now.
In "crypt mode" all memory fetches are decrypted in hardware, and all memory writes are encrypted.
The CPU is not the only entity who writes or reads RAM. Every DMA device does that, such as video, HDD, USB, Ethernet... in fact, most peripherals, including those mounted on the motherboard. Either the key has to be shared with them (which is not secure) or these DMA pages remain unencrypted (which is not secure.)
The one obvious solution here is to implement secure encrypted path to all these devices, like it's done [seemingly] for audio and video in MAFIAA mode. With a properly designed architecture it can be done. But then the prices of peripherals will go up, even though the problem is not relevant to 99.999999% of computer owners.
If anyone believes there is a market for secure computers, here is your chance - build the whole PC in a secure way, with all peripherals done per your needs. I'm sure DoD and other places will be interested.
Can LED's be dimmed? As far as I've seen it's not possible.
Not so. LEDs can be dimmed either by regulating the forward DC current (then they don't flicker at all) or by pulse-modulating some fixed current; the LEDs in the latter case will flicker only if the frequency of the pulses is too low. LEDs have very low capacitance and inductance, so they can be easily pulsed with any high frequency of your choice, though 1 kHz would be more than enough. And as I said the DC source works also.
If you have a shortwave scanner or CB radio, try hooking it up to the satellite dish
It would be just as effective as not connecting it at all. The HF band is 3-30 MHz. The satellite band (for this dish) is probably above 1 GHz. Even FRS would probably not work. But if you have a ham rig for the band it might be useful for EME.
Pnakotic Manuscripts, of course.
I think the Gulf of Tonkin Incident comes perilously close. Colin Powell's performance in 2003 could be also construed as manufacturing evidence.
But, of course, 20th century provides us with the Gleiwitz incident which was 100% staged; it only started the World War II.
and there are HUGE liabilities associated with the latter. People would hang for that if it were ever discovered.
The risk is fairly low if you intend to nuke the site where your "evidence" is supposed to be. Besides, everyone who starts the war intends to win it, so the question of punishment when the war is lost is not even discussed.
I doubt people will buy it this time around if he tries the same thing again.
Trying the same thing again is not necessary. Remember the recent discovery of a copy of Photoshop in possession of Iran? Well, other countries, or Hollywood alone, have even better technology; if they can give you a perfectly realistic picture of Cthulhu rising from his grave in R'lyeh, it would be just a child's play to render a few missiles, observed from a satellite first, then flying ballistic, and then slamming into some large friendly installation (like a military base.) Thousands of dead bodies will be produced, photographed, and quickly cremated; they may be even human bodies, as far as the powers behind the deception are concerned. Show this on TV for several days non-stop and majority of population will support any genocide you'd wish to perpetrate. The trick is the same as in sales of used cars - pressure and more pressure; do not let the mark look around and ask for a second opinion.
Let's pretend that your are up for Phi Beta Kappa, or class valedictorian, and this putz hacks his grades to get enough A's to take that away from you and win the award. Suddenly your hard earned A's become less valuable, and you lost the award to someone who stole it.
This is an extreme and impossible to conceal case. You most likely know your grades, and grades of your competitors. The space at the top of Olympus is small, so you know who is who, and when some unknown guy suddenly shows up amidst local geniuses it will be instantly noticed, and the offended people will cry for blood (or at least for reexamination of papers.)
The trick to get away with such a forgery is to tweak the grades very carefully, so that nobody has any reason to look into the details. That's how this guy did it, and nobody noticed anything until he himself was stupid enough to attract attention.
Another example - what if you bought a bunch valuable original collectors items and want to sell them on Ebay for $100 each. Now someone else has made a bunch of cheap knock offs and few people can tell the difference. Now your item isn't worth as much
This is true, but only in a very small market. The educational market is anything but small. If I sell quality blank DVDs, and thousands of other sellers sell quality blank DVDs, it won't matter a bit that one guy somewhere sells fake DVDs for less, pretending that they are just as good. It happens all the time, with some people selling genuine software and with other people selling pirated fakes. So what? Some people will buy from him, but that's a drop in an ocean; if one out of thousands of your honest competitors catches flu then the balance tilts the other way. You shouldn't be afraid of competition *that much* :-)
There is always someone who competes "unfairly", whatever that means in your case. You study all night for an exam when someone else just hastily prepares a crib sheet, and you get a lower score - what do you do then? Nothing; just keep living, and focus on what really matters (school grades aren't it.) Cheaters won't get far with their stolen skills. And if they do, maybe the course wasn't that important to your trade and maybe you should have cheated also. In my days in university I had courses that are essential (like linear electric circuits) and courses that are utter garbage to me (like philosophy) - so why would I, being sane at the moment, want to memorize the birth date of Aristotle or Kant? I still have very faint idea of what these guys were teaching, but that doesn't stop me from developing embedded hardware and software, FPGAs and all, and I'm good at that.
To summarize, this is a harmless enough offense because the perpetrator can't afford a forgery that is large enough to be noticed. If he opens a mass forgery business then it's a different story. But bumping a few grades for himself and for a few of his buddies can't be even detected on the national scale, and that's the scale you use when you apply to universities that are not in your own town.
In other words, there is absolutely no practical benefit of doing such a common maintenance task yourself. Any garage (and definitely any dealership) is better equipped to do it. When you have, for example, an intermittent electrical problem - that might be a different story, where your own time is cheaper to diagnose the problem. But oil change is so much streamlined at oil change places, it's not worth competing with them unless you already made a comparable investment in tools and equipment.
I don't see any reason why Saudis would want to sell two barrels of oil for the price of one (that they ask - and get - today.) If the demand goes down they'd rather lower the production. This way they get the same cash flow and use less of their non-renewable resources. Given that there are very few sellers of oil on this planet, compared to buyers, the sellers are already free to dictate their terms, and that's what they already do. The only constraint upon them is in reeling the line in slowly, so that the economies of buying countries have time to adjust to new realities.
It doesn't take a lot of code to whip up a new window manager theme, new sounds and new, completely different set of keyboard shortcuts for all the functions that exist since Windows 3.0. And don't forget to change the wallpaper images too. Once done, you have your Windows 7, ready to be shipped!
I don't get it. The other "A" students still have their A's, don't they? Or, imagine that this kid was just studying hard and getting his A's honestly - would that be also "theft" from his peers?
Just like stealing money
No; if he steals money then the money is not in victim's wallet any more. This crime is like photocopying someone's else money - doesn't hurt the "victim" and places you into a potentially illegal situation.
He will also steal chances that other students might have of getting into their choice of university
There are many universities, his "grade inflation" is a drop in a sea of graduates. Also, if a university can't tell a difference between an idiot with good grades and a genius with good grades then probably only an idiot would want to apply there. My own university, upon seeing my school grades, only allowed me to skip two lesser exams (language and something else, equally irrelevant) provided that I pass the mandatory exams (math and physics.) The admission was based on the results of exams, and not just on school grades. But it wasn't in the USA, I am unfamiliar with practices here.
38 years is harsh, maybe the kid should spend 4 years in jail, to offset the years other kids spent studying their books.
I completely agree with your numbers. But my reasons are different. I don't believe he caused any harm to anyone except himself. I would put him in jail just for breaking the law, and since he appears to be such an abhorrent personality I wouldn't be able to think of any reasons to reduce the guilt.
Isn't it possible any more to report an incident without providing the police with a guilty person at the same time? Tell them what happened, and they will investigate, that's what their job is about.
Dear Sir,
it came to my attention that your product XXX, which I purchased through YYY, uses software based on a licensed component ZZZ. The license (GPL) grants me, the user, the right to obtain a copy of the source, and places a specific legal burden onto your company to provide such a copy to users of your product for free, or for a nominal fee to cover copying and mailing. Please refer to ${URL} for specific terms.
As a user of your product, having been granted the right to obtain the source code, I wish to exercise this right. Would you be so kind to inform me how I can download, or otherwise access, the source code in question?
Thanks in advance,
${name}
${address}
${telephone}
Most tech support people will forward such an email to their manager, and the manager will send it to legal, where it will be reviewed, and a company lawyer will not dare to ignore an official, lawful request that is traceable, because they know that willful infringement is worse than ignorance, and now they know.
As someone else mentioned, Pakistan had to make the bomb in response to India doing it. But I agree, this is a very expensive business, even more so if the country does not use nuclear power. South Africa is yet another story, they seemingly lost their way and were overcome by political events.
You are absolutely correct. Stalin hasn't moved a finger until two weeks after the USSR was attacked. If Hitler kept the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement the Europe would be neatly divided between Hitler and Stalin. There would be a war later between those two, but many europeans would not be around to witness it.
Both USA and USSR achieved these size and power about half a century ago. The "modern electronics" could not be in those designs. It likely is in modern US and Russia's bombs, but then the size and power are also an order of magnitude better (using fusion, and with yield being selectable, and so on.)
Considering this unique combination of medium performance, and modern electronics, and the size barely fitting a missile, the design can only belong to the newcomers to the nuclear club - such as India and Pakistan. North Korea probably does not have the technology.
Penalties come and go, but the bomb stays. I'm sure that's what they thought in India and Pakistan, and history proved them true, after political winds shifted.
You read too much of Clive Cussler. But the scenario is not too unreal. The only stopping factor is that it's so hard (and expensive) to obtain a nuclear device. A mega-corporation, or a government, like in that book, can do that.