I prefer to assume that it was a criminal gang, on the basis that the officials of the KGB and its successor are not stupid. If a Russian mafia organisation has access to significant quantities of radioactives and the necessary laboratory facilities, this is a demonstration that they could potentially build a bomb, and transport bomb making materials on civil aircraft and around London. If the real KGB wanted to kill somebody, I am sure they could do it far more easily and less traceably, without causing a diplomatic incident.
There is an article in April Scientific American which exposes the twin facts that no screening currently exists that can detect significant amounts of weapons grade Uranium being brought into the US or Europe in shipping containers, and that the amount of weapons grade U on the loose is enough to make home made kiloton weapons possible. Although the article only cites public data, there are an awful lot of physicists and engineers about who could design a simple low yield nuclear device given access to enough enriched uranium.
I also wonder if the murder of the ex-KGB agent using polonium was a covert warning - because, of course, if you have access to enough polonium you can made a gadget to trigger a plutonium weapon, which can be quite small and, even if it fails to create a fission explosion, has enough HE to spread radioactives over a large area.
Our desire for cheap international trade based around largely uninspected shipping containers exposes us to an enormous risk.If all shipped goods had to be properly inspected at point of entry, trade would suffer a bit, it would be less attractive to make things cheaply in China or Thailand, but a huge hole in the security system would be fixed. It's ridiculous that air travelers are inspected at vast inconvenience and expense when it is literally possible to import a bomb's worth of uranium or plutonium with no real checks at all.
Amusingly, after demonstrating how pathetic the security systems for freight are, one of the authors of the article was put on the airport watch list for several months, thus demonstrating that the no fly and watch business is about control and shutting up awkward people.
which many people confuse with MTTF (mean time to failure) - which is relevant in predicting the life of equipment. It needs to be stated clearly that MTBF applies to populations; if I have 1000 hard drives with a MTBF of 1 million hours, I would on average expect one failure every thousand hours. These are failures rather than wearouts, which are a completely different phenomenon.
Anecdotal reports of failures also need to consider the operating environment. If I have a server rack, and most servers in the rack have a drive failure in the first year, is it the drive design or the server design? Given the relative effort that usually goes into HDD design and box design, it's more likely to be due to poor thermal management in the drive enclosure. Back in the day when Apple made computers (yes, they did once, before they outsourced it) their thermal management was notoriously better than that of many of the vanilla PC boxes, and properly designed PC-format servers like the HP Kayaks were just as expensive as Macs. The same, of course, went for Sun, and that was one reason why elderly Mac and Sparc boxes would often keep chugging along as mail servers until there were just too many people sending big attachments.
One possibly related oddity that does interest me is laptop prices. The very cheap laptops are often advertised with optional 3 year warranties that cost as much as the laptop. Upmarket ones may have three year warranties for very little. I find myself wondering if the difference in price really does reflect better standards of manufacture so that the chance of a claim is much less, whether cheap laptops get abused and are so much more likely to fail, or whether the warranty cost is just built into the price of the more expensive models because most failures in fact occur in the first year.
AKA "English mindless bureaucracy and cultural vandalism ltd."
English heritage is the thing we have that, had it existed at the time, would have prevented every single one of our ancient monuments from being built. They also employ people who, not to put too fine a point on it, lie about buildings and monuments in order to get them included in the scope of English Heritage. These are the plonkers who waited till Michael Eavis (he of Pilton Festival fame) had restored the Pilton Tithe Barn, then Grade A listed it, then tried to have the (local craftsmen built) facade of his house pulled down because it was no longer in keeping with their Grade A listed area. These are the low grade semi morons whose ridiculously over the top attempts to get pork barrel funding for the Stonehenge site redevelopment have prevented the relatively minor fixes to the roads around Stonehenge that would do much to ease the congestion. The worst thing about Stonehenge, in fact, is the nasty wire fence around it which is poorly maintained and does much to spoil the look of the site. The next worst thing is the awful visitor centre, which is only next worst because it is less visible from the road.
I'm afraid that, given the background of English Heritage and the dumbing down of the BBC, this is just a joke claim to try and get some funding for somebody's idiot project. Really we should get them to build a concrete model of Stonehenge - perhaps twice the size because most tourists comment on how small it is - near the Olympic site, then have the whole lot of them and their horrible visitor centre bugger off to London and leave Stonehenge to the locals. It is, after all, a Wiltshire monument, and people from London should stop trying to take over the entire country.
I wish I'd added that to my own post, because that is exactly the sort of environment you need. The comment "You'll learn to do much more than programming" could be amplified: you will probably learn skills that will help you eventually manage projects, and these are much harder to outsource..
Agencies, however, will probably not want you because they will want you to be buzzword compliant to the skills list they have sold the client is needed for the job. As I suggest above, do the research, send in your CV. In my experience, heads of IT in the States are more technically comeptent than their UK opposite numbers and so are more able to make decisions. Too often, UK CIOs are led by the nose by the agency because they do not know enough to know what they need.
In order to work productively in any kind of modern programming it is not enough to know the basics of a language. You must understand its hinterland - the various extensions and their APIs, and the programming patterns to which they lend themselves. I am far from a genius programmer, in fact quite mediocre, but I have stayed employed for many years through understanding how to write code which tightly couples databases, servers and client applications, and, more importantly, why you would want to do this. I find far too many programmers who, for instance, understand at an academic level how J2EE works, but have not the slightest idea what it is useful for.
Before getting involved in an Open Source project ask yourself - and this is a difficult thing to ask - what it is going to be useful for and what kind of business might use it. Is that the kind of business you want to be in? If you don't know, do some research. Remember a valuable fact: contribution to, say, the Linux kernel is easy for anybody anywhere in the world, whereas writing code that extracts and condenses human knowledge and then turns it into a system is far easier where the relevant human beings live. If you live in the Bay Area, it should not be too hard to work out where the business opportunities lie, where automation might cut costs or have other benefits, and what Open Source projects might be relevant. Then choose one, learn it, and send your resume round to people who might be interested.
What I am describing is a lot of hard work, by the way. But you already knew that, if you wanted to succeed in programming, you were going to have to work hard.
The original version of the Law said that gate density doubles every N months (12In case you hadn't noticed, web2.0 is largely about systems running many, many similar processes in parallel. These processes are usually quite independent. (Even on my laptop, running an Ethernet connection has little to do with editing a document on the hard drive.)
If you are working on a single user system such as a word processor, parallelism has little significance. But if you are a Google, wanting to deliver similar but isolated web services to many people, or if you are building a switching exchange such as a scalable email server, VOIP exchange, XMPP server, print server...you are very interested in parallelism. And any system which causes the number of parallel processes to expand in some way coordinated with the number of available cores or core threads is very interesting indeed.
What especially pleases me about this article is that I put my current sig up before it appeared. It now seems slightly prophetic.
And I am very actively considering whether we need to redesign core parts of our systems in Erlang, largely as a result of looking at the ejabberd XMPP server. My suspicion is that what we are seeing here may be more to do with the kind of work being done in different regions and by people at different experience levels. Work in the US and Europe is perhaps more likely to be user-facing, older programmers more likely to be developing end-user applications or working at the architectural level. Concurrency is more likely to be needed for back office, technical or distributed systems which are increasingly being designed outside the traditional areas.
There are, Samsung changes the design, might have to pay back royalties but the effects will be limited as Seagate don't have SSD products in the marketplace
There are, design can't be changed, they do a deal
There are, design can't be changed, Samsung IP lawyers dig up some stuff Seagate is violating somewhere, they do a deal
South Korean company buys Seagate
For Seagate, the issue is to a certain extent that they can't piss off their customers too much. Apple for instance use lots of HDDs but they also want to use SSDs and Seagate doesn't yet have a product - and when they do, where will they get the flash memory from? Oops...just pissed off both customers and suppliers.
If it is (I think it is) then the calculation of the date of Easter is an interesting demonstration of how the patriarchal Jewish religion has in fact got roots in a matriarchal religion, since its calendar is based on a lunar rather than a solar cycle. (I'm simplifying). There are plenty of clues in the OT for the educated - but educating a few Protestant fundies as to the real underpinnings of their religion might hopefully get them thinking, and thinking helps cure ignorance, and curing ignorance helps do things like stop school boards from requiring teaching Creationism. So yes, it is a scientific article.
Inkjet printer manufacturers are facing a little competition and we will have to see how this works out. Look at the Samsung CLP-300N. It's a color laser printer. Look at the consumable costs. Xerox are also selling this product and they are calling it the "inkjet killer".
The LED manufacturers will get hugely rich before they have replaced every incandescent in the world with LEDs; it will take over 20 years and by then they will be into a replacement cycle with their new, twice as efficient LEDs with a better spectrum. People will buy new LEDs to save money, no need to make the old ones wear out.
It obviously wasn't a very good joke, unfortunately. Is it a troll if you just try to find out how many politically correct people weren't around at the time?
Ada Countess of Lovelace (programming the Difference Engine) - died tragically
Jocelyn Bell (Pulsar researcher)- still with us fortunately
Rosalind Franklin (DNA structure)- died tragically
Sophie Wilson (Microcomputer pioneer) - AFAIK still with us
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (Early computer designer and COBOL originator) had the good sense to be a North American and so didn't have to watch the men steal all the credit.
Scientific American always carefully credits Jocelyn Bell for pulsars, although Hewish got the Nobel. Let's hope someone at the BBC can read/. and fixes the credits.
Because if you don't get your equipment certified, and somebody's house burns down as a result, the insurance company will see you in court. UL is the Underwriters' Laboratories - they are, basically, there to tell insurance companies what is safe and what is not.
Who is the equivalent agent in this case? Perhaps what is needed is a Federal Bureau of Electoral Fraud - which has the power to prosecute any supplier of voting machines which turn out to have backdoors, obvious security risks, or other means for perpetrating electoral fraud. Then you would see the voting machine manufacturers to get their equipment certified to give them a defense in court.
In Europe we rely more on compliance with Euronorms - it's a cultural, Roman law versus common law thing, I think, but the effect is the same. Write a standard for voting machines, get it adopted by ISO, embed it in Federal law, and then provide a route for certification.
People do seem (perhaps rightly) to be more afraid of fire than of the end of democracy. But it does seem right to hold voting machine manufacturers to the standard that must be met by, say, a coffee machine or a computer power brick.
The MiEV looks like it is really going to happen. The Mercedes A class was supposed to be the precursor of a fuel cell car - but fuel cells turned out to be wildly optimistic. Lithium ion batteries had the huge advantage that an application came up which paid for a lot of development, and it looks like Mitsubishi and Yuasa have cracked the main technlogy issues between them. Given the usual life of a lead acid battery set, I'm even getting hopeful that I may have bought my last set of lead acid marine batteries - because I hope that in a 3-4 year timeframe lithium replacements will appear, which means that I can expect to get twice the capacity, twice the life, and an electrolyte that doesn't dissolve steel when it leaks.
The MiEV looks like a concept which is actually intended to make a successful electric car, rather than just try to get makreting inches. The fact that Mitsubishi have produced several thousand gasoline-powered test beds with a conventional auto transmission, presumably as mobile test beds that people will actually pay for, shows they are taking it very seriously. And yes, banking crises aside, I plan to buy one of the first ones as a commuter vehicle. I can't be the only person who makes journeys almost entirely of 12 miles or less, and can easily live with recharging two or three times a week.
This is how it is with physicists and engineers, since Galileo damaged his sight looking through his telescope.
Remember the guys on the Los Alamos project who thought it was cool to have a lump of gold plated plutonium on a stand so you could feel how warm it was? And then there was the scientist I once had the pleasure of working with who thought it was clever to have his 5kV capacitor bank with the live prongs exposed and joined by a copper rod, though the CEO did get pushed out of the way before he could touch them and kill himself. As my physics teacher used to say "Physicists have their own version of natural selection", though he was talking about some people he had worked with who couldn't be bothered to use the shielding when working with X-rays.
A lot of people have commented on this but I don't think they have made the point clearly. Imagine you have an accurate 3-D CAD GA of an entire Cummins V-8 engine. Could you build an engine from that?
The answer is you could so long as you do not want something that works. To get something that worked, you would need metallurgists, textile and plastics engineers, mechanical engineers, a foundry, several machine shops, the correct raw materials, heat treastment, plating plants and skilled fitters. With all that, you would probably decide to design and build your own engine instead. The Wikileaks diagram misses off two highly important features of a bomb, but even if you knew that, you still could not build one from it. From the diagram you know nothing about the purity of the ingredients, the allowed contaminants, the actual explosives in use, or indeed a whole lot of other things. If you have enough knowledge and the facilities to produce all the things you would need to duplicate the bomb, then believe me, you have physicists and engineers enough to be able to build one anyway.And with all the technical progress since then, you would probably find it easier and cheaper to use a different design.
I can test networked applications on a single VMWare box without having to shell out for multiple copies of Windows. There. I'm a cheapskate. But why do I have to pay full rate for an OS that is used maybe eight hours a month, and consumes maybe 10% of processor time?
But that is US politics, which I stay out of. The ISS includes European tax income, and as I pay Gordon about $40000 a year, I think I have a right to comment on how some of my taxes are spent. I'm afraid I actually support what our Army is trying to achieve in Afghanistan, where the problem there is partly caused by US funding of the Islamic fundies in the 80s. Somebody has to take a stand against people who oppress women.
Prof. Hawking thinks the only hope for the human race is to colonise space. And after 50 years of trying, people still have to take their underwear home to wash it just as if they were students. The gap between the fantasy (sending large numbers of humans with the equipment to colonise other planets across vast distances) and the reality - it will take nearly three weeks of testing before they have the nerve to try to dock a 7 tonne pod to the ISS, and we can barely keep a few people going a few hundred miles up - is literally astronomical.
Given the huge success of unmanned missions to the planets, it really is very tempting to ask, why don't we just stop doing this stuff. Either we are going to have a planetary energy crisis, and will have to stop wasting vast amounts of fuel on sending people to orbit, or we will find a clever fix, and so be able to do this much more cheaply at some future date. It seems pointless to do something not very useful at the limit of human capability when there are so many more interesting engineering problems to solve - energy efficient housing and vehicles, efficient and cheap solar power, all need the technologies used in manned spaceflight, but on a different scale and in different ways. A ten year moratorium on manned spaceflight with the effort entirely going into solving energy supply and global warming problems could have a huge payback.
The one that teaches you not to take religious authorities for granted. The one that teaches you to learn to trust your own intuition. The one that rejects scriptures in favor of personal experience. The one whose focus on efficiency and minimalism contributed so much to the success of Japanese industry after WW2. The one which took the ideo of non-violence, and, realising that Japan's military class would not be deflected from war, created a cult of military honor in which it was wrong to kill women and children.
Not the wacky California fake Zen, the real thing (which can be hard work). Greed is contrary to Zen. Lies are contrary to Zen. Superstition is contrary to Zen. Personal truth and integrity, and the search for direct perception of the core of things - that's Zen.
I would also add the Episcopalians, the Reform Jews, the Sufis, the Quakers and the Unitarians, all of which have a history of attracting very intelligent people, but Zen was the first.
You don't need to spend $250k on a sailing boat. Assuming you don't have one and would like one, and assuming you have or can learn some basic engineering skills to cut down annual maintenance costs and the embarrassment of having to be rescued periodically (if you can make it through Nigel Calder's book, you can probably do it) you can have everything you really need for around $60000.
After years of dicking about the cost I finally went for it four years ago. I've spent $80k in total, spent a few hundred hours fixing and modernising, I have something I can live and work on if I want to. I should have done it 10 years ago.
Harrison's clocks were engineering achievements, not scientific. In fact, the scientific work was done by the astronomers who came up with the competing solution. The way the story is told by Dava Sobel is quite biased (it began badly with an unfair attack on Cloudesley Shovel, and after that I wasn't too surprised.) The scientific solution - star and planet tables and the method of using them - had the advantage that it relied on relatively cheap technology - paper and sextant/telescope - while the chronometer solution relied on hugely expensive technology which most of the merchant marine and many naval captains could not afford. Rather than turn the whole thing into a competition, it might have been better to identify the most promising routes and fund them independently, so that the agonists did not waste time trying to prove that the competition was wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer to assume that it was a criminal gang, on the basis that the officials of the KGB and its successor are not stupid. If a Russian mafia organisation has access to significant quantities of radioactives and the necessary laboratory facilities, this is a demonstration that they could potentially build a bomb, and transport bomb making materials on civil aircraft and around London. If the real KGB wanted to kill somebody, I am sure they could do it far more easily and less traceably, without causing a diplomatic incident.
I also wonder if the murder of the ex-KGB agent using polonium was a covert warning - because, of course, if you have access to enough polonium you can made a gadget to trigger a plutonium weapon, which can be quite small and, even if it fails to create a fission explosion, has enough HE to spread radioactives over a large area.
Our desire for cheap international trade based around largely uninspected shipping containers exposes us to an enormous risk.If all shipped goods had to be properly inspected at point of entry, trade would suffer a bit, it would be less attractive to make things cheaply in China or Thailand, but a huge hole in the security system would be fixed. It's ridiculous that air travelers are inspected at vast inconvenience and expense when it is literally possible to import a bomb's worth of uranium or plutonium with no real checks at all.
Amusingly, after demonstrating how pathetic the security systems for freight are, one of the authors of the article was put on the airport watch list for several months, thus demonstrating that the no fly and watch business is about control and shutting up awkward people.
Anecdotal reports of failures also need to consider the operating environment. If I have a server rack, and most servers in the rack have a drive failure in the first year, is it the drive design or the server design? Given the relative effort that usually goes into HDD design and box design, it's more likely to be due to poor thermal management in the drive enclosure. Back in the day when Apple made computers (yes, they did once, before they outsourced it) their thermal management was notoriously better than that of many of the vanilla PC boxes, and properly designed PC-format servers like the HP Kayaks were just as expensive as Macs. The same, of course, went for Sun, and that was one reason why elderly Mac and Sparc boxes would often keep chugging along as mail servers until there were just too many people sending big attachments.
One possibly related oddity that does interest me is laptop prices. The very cheap laptops are often advertised with optional 3 year warranties that cost as much as the laptop. Upmarket ones may have three year warranties for very little. I find myself wondering if the difference in price really does reflect better standards of manufacture so that the chance of a claim is much less, whether cheap laptops get abused and are so much more likely to fail, or whether the warranty cost is just built into the price of the more expensive models because most failures in fact occur in the first year.
English heritage is the thing we have that, had it existed at the time, would have prevented every single one of our ancient monuments from being built. They also employ people who, not to put too fine a point on it, lie about buildings and monuments in order to get them included in the scope of English Heritage. These are the plonkers who waited till Michael Eavis (he of Pilton Festival fame) had restored the Pilton Tithe Barn, then Grade A listed it, then tried to have the (local craftsmen built) facade of his house pulled down because it was no longer in keeping with their Grade A listed area. These are the low grade semi morons whose ridiculously over the top attempts to get pork barrel funding for the Stonehenge site redevelopment have prevented the relatively minor fixes to the roads around Stonehenge that would do much to ease the congestion. The worst thing about Stonehenge, in fact, is the nasty wire fence around it which is poorly maintained and does much to spoil the look of the site. The next worst thing is the awful visitor centre, which is only next worst because it is less visible from the road.
I'm afraid that, given the background of English Heritage and the dumbing down of the BBC, this is just a joke claim to try and get some funding for somebody's idiot project. Really we should get them to build a concrete model of Stonehenge - perhaps twice the size because most tourists comment on how small it is - near the Olympic site, then have the whole lot of them and their horrible visitor centre bugger off to London and leave Stonehenge to the locals. It is, after all, a Wiltshire monument, and people from London should stop trying to take over the entire country.
Agencies, however, will probably not want you because they will want you to be buzzword compliant to the skills list they have sold the client is needed for the job. As I suggest above, do the research, send in your CV. In my experience, heads of IT in the States are more technically comeptent than their UK opposite numbers and so are more able to make decisions. Too often, UK CIOs are led by the nose by the agency because they do not know enough to know what they need.
Before getting involved in an Open Source project ask yourself - and this is a difficult thing to ask - what it is going to be useful for and what kind of business might use it. Is that the kind of business you want to be in? If you don't know, do some research. Remember a valuable fact: contribution to, say, the Linux kernel is easy for anybody anywhere in the world, whereas writing code that extracts and condenses human knowledge and then turns it into a system is far easier where the relevant human beings live. If you live in the Bay Area, it should not be too hard to work out where the business opportunities lie, where automation might cut costs or have other benefits, and what Open Source projects might be relevant. Then choose one, learn it, and send your resume round to people who might be interested.
What I am describing is a lot of hard work, by the way. But you already knew that, if you wanted to succeed in programming, you were going to have to work hard.
Novell: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty case from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.
IBM: SCO's but a walking shadow.
Groklaw, chorus of Slashdot readers and industry analysts: Out, out brief candle!
Brain in neutral, the strange artefact there was an attempt to write 12<N<24.
If you are working on a single user system such as a word processor, parallelism has little significance. But if you are a Google, wanting to deliver similar but isolated web services to many people, or if you are building a switching exchange such as a scalable email server, VOIP exchange, XMPP server, print server...you are very interested in parallelism. And any system which causes the number of parallel processes to expand in some way coordinated with the number of available cores or core threads is very interesting indeed.
What especially pleases me about this article is that I put my current sig up before it appeared. It now seems slightly prophetic.
And I am very actively considering whether we need to redesign core parts of our systems in Erlang, largely as a result of looking at the ejabberd XMPP server. My suspicion is that what we are seeing here may be more to do with the kind of work being done in different regions and by people at different experience levels. Work in the US and Europe is perhaps more likely to be user-facing, older programmers more likely to be developing end-user applications or working at the architectural level. Concurrency is more likely to be needed for back office, technical or distributed systems which are increasingly being designed outside the traditional areas.
- There are in fact no relevant patents
- There are but the devices do not infringe
- There are, Samsung changes the design, might have to pay back royalties but the effects will be limited as Seagate don't have SSD products in the marketplace
- There are, design can't be changed, they do a deal
- There are, design can't be changed, Samsung IP lawyers dig up some stuff Seagate is violating somewhere, they do a deal
- South Korean company buys Seagate
For Seagate, the issue is to a certain extent that they can't piss off their customers too much. Apple for instance use lots of HDDs but they also want to use SSDs and Seagate doesn't yet have a product - and when they do, where will they get the flash memory from? Oops...just pissed off both customers and suppliers.Mind you, I do like the Momentus drives.
If it is (I think it is) then the calculation of the date of Easter is an interesting demonstration of how the patriarchal Jewish religion has in fact got roots in a matriarchal religion, since its calendar is based on a lunar rather than a solar cycle. (I'm simplifying). There are plenty of clues in the OT for the educated - but educating a few Protestant fundies as to the real underpinnings of their religion might hopefully get them thinking, and thinking helps cure ignorance, and curing ignorance helps do things like stop school boards from requiring teaching Creationism. So yes, it is a scientific article.
The LED manufacturers will get hugely rich before they have replaced every incandescent in the world with LEDs; it will take over 20 years and by then they will be into a replacement cycle with their new, twice as efficient LEDs with a better spectrum. People will buy new LEDs to save money, no need to make the old ones wear out.
It obviously wasn't a very good joke, unfortunately. Is it a troll if you just try to find out how many politically correct people weren't around at the time?
- Ada Countess of Lovelace (programming the Difference Engine) - died tragically
- Jocelyn Bell (Pulsar researcher)- still with us fortunately
- Rosalind Franklin (DNA structure)- died tragically
- Sophie Wilson (Microcomputer pioneer) - AFAIK still with us
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (Early computer designer and COBOL originator) had the good sense to be a North American and so didn't have to watch the men steal all the credit.Scientific American always carefully credits Jocelyn Bell for pulsars, although Hewish got the Nobel. Let's hope someone at the BBC can read /. and fixes the credits.
Who is the equivalent agent in this case? Perhaps what is needed is a Federal Bureau of Electoral Fraud - which has the power to prosecute any supplier of voting machines which turn out to have backdoors, obvious security risks, or other means for perpetrating electoral fraud. Then you would see the voting machine manufacturers to get their equipment certified to give them a defense in court.
In Europe we rely more on compliance with Euronorms - it's a cultural, Roman law versus common law thing, I think, but the effect is the same. Write a standard for voting machines, get it adopted by ISO, embed it in Federal law, and then provide a route for certification.
People do seem (perhaps rightly) to be more afraid of fire than of the end of democracy. But it does seem right to hold voting machine manufacturers to the standard that must be met by, say, a coffee machine or a computer power brick.
The MiEV looks like a concept which is actually intended to make a successful electric car, rather than just try to get makreting inches. The fact that Mitsubishi have produced several thousand gasoline-powered test beds with a conventional auto transmission, presumably as mobile test beds that people will actually pay for, shows they are taking it very seriously. And yes, banking crises aside, I plan to buy one of the first ones as a commuter vehicle. I can't be the only person who makes journeys almost entirely of 12 miles or less, and can easily live with recharging two or three times a week.
Remember the guys on the Los Alamos project who thought it was cool to have a lump of gold plated plutonium on a stand so you could feel how warm it was? And then there was the scientist I once had the pleasure of working with who thought it was clever to have his 5kV capacitor bank with the live prongs exposed and joined by a copper rod, though the CEO did get pushed out of the way before he could touch them and kill himself. As my physics teacher used to say "Physicists have their own version of natural selection", though he was talking about some people he had worked with who couldn't be bothered to use the shielding when working with X-rays.
The answer is you could so long as you do not want something that works. To get something that worked, you would need metallurgists, textile and plastics engineers, mechanical engineers, a foundry, several machine shops, the correct raw materials, heat treastment, plating plants and skilled fitters. With all that, you would probably decide to design and build your own engine instead. The Wikileaks diagram misses off two highly important features of a bomb, but even if you knew that, you still could not build one from it. From the diagram you know nothing about the purity of the ingredients, the allowed contaminants, the actual explosives in use, or indeed a whole lot of other things. If you have enough knowledge and the facilities to produce all the things you would need to duplicate the bomb, then believe me, you have physicists and engineers enough to be able to build one anyway.And with all the technical progress since then, you would probably find it easier and cheaper to use a different design.
I can test networked applications on a single VMWare box without having to shell out for multiple copies of Windows. There. I'm a cheapskate. But why do I have to pay full rate for an OS that is used maybe eight hours a month, and consumes maybe 10% of processor time?
But that is US politics, which I stay out of. The ISS includes European tax income, and as I pay Gordon about $40000 a year, I think I have a right to comment on how some of my taxes are spent. I'm afraid I actually support what our Army is trying to achieve in Afghanistan, where the problem there is partly caused by US funding of the Islamic fundies in the 80s. Somebody has to take a stand against people who oppress women.
Given the huge success of unmanned missions to the planets, it really is very tempting to ask, why don't we just stop doing this stuff. Either we are going to have a planetary energy crisis, and will have to stop wasting vast amounts of fuel on sending people to orbit, or we will find a clever fix, and so be able to do this much more cheaply at some future date. It seems pointless to do something not very useful at the limit of human capability when there are so many more interesting engineering problems to solve - energy efficient housing and vehicles, efficient and cheap solar power, all need the technologies used in manned spaceflight, but on a different scale and in different ways. A ten year moratorium on manned spaceflight with the effort entirely going into solving energy supply and global warming problems could have a huge payback.
Not the wacky California fake Zen, the real thing (which can be hard work). Greed is contrary to Zen. Lies are contrary to Zen. Superstition is contrary to Zen. Personal truth and integrity, and the search for direct perception of the core of things - that's Zen.
I would also add the Episcopalians, the Reform Jews, the Sufis, the Quakers and the Unitarians, all of which have a history of attracting very intelligent people, but Zen was the first.
After years of dicking about the cost I finally went for it four years ago. I've spent $80k in total, spent a few hundred hours fixing and modernising, I have something I can live and work on if I want to. I should have done it 10 years ago.
Harrison's clocks were engineering achievements, not scientific. In fact, the scientific work was done by the astronomers who came up with the competing solution. The way the story is told by Dava Sobel is quite biased (it began badly with an unfair attack on Cloudesley Shovel, and after that I wasn't too surprised.) The scientific solution - star and planet tables and the method of using them - had the advantage that it relied on relatively cheap technology - paper and sextant/telescope - while the chronometer solution relied on hugely expensive technology which most of the merchant marine and many naval captains could not afford. Rather than turn the whole thing into a competition, it might have been better to identify the most promising routes and fund them independently, so that the agonists did not waste time trying to prove that the competition was wrong.