the older stuff is better labeled, but the newer stuff (1980's) is neat to look at, but the NSA doesn't really want to tell you what it does or what it's used for
That's cos the labels won't be declassified for another 30 years.
I might have to take another trip up there some time.
I don't think the NSA wants visitors picking the mushrooms.
Also, don't forget to get the kid's NSA coloring book they hand out.
Let me guess. The instructions are ROT13'ed and concealed in the image data. Outlines are drawn in invisible ink. Once completed, pages self-destruct in 5 seconds.
Farmer Giles is perfectly good as a children's book, as is Smith. "Tree and Leaf" is an excellent short story - a trifle allegorical, as it's obvious enough that Niggle is Tolkien himself and Parish is C. S. Lewis. Niggle's propensity for concentrating on the leaves rather than whole trees is an excellent description of how he left his stories, and I'm certain he intended it as such. Roverandum is said to be a good young children's story. His "Father Christmas" letters might prove amusing, too, although those and his (now lost) stories of Bill Posters really should be more inspiration for parents. The Tales of Tom Bombadil are wonderful nonsensical poems and rhymes that I think most kids would like. There may be other stuff, but that's about all I can think of.
I have argued many times, and will no doubt do so for many years hence, that there won't be one unique solution to this, that the quality possible using a full genuine ray-tracing and radiocity solution (ie: not just using shaders or other simple rendering techniques) conflicts with the requirements of fast action. The only sensible (IMAO) is to use a combination of methods, depending on rate of change. Where rate of change is below a critical threshold, then use full-blown ray-tracing (or perhaps cone-tracing) and radiosity. Because rays can be thrown at ever-finer angles, and because you can postpone multiple-generation light sources, you could even have relatively static images become progressively better. When change is too fast for ray-tracing, it's probably too fast for the eye to pick out the nuances, so downgrade the method. For mid-range rates of change, use a reasonably good but fast method of getting "good enough" results. For very high speeds, the eye certainly can't pick out details. Shaders would be quite good enough there.
If you neglect the impact of mobile objects on diffuse reflections, you CAN pre-generate an entire radiosity map for a game, which is good because it's slow. However, it's an important addition as the "texture", "warmth" and "naturalness" of an image depend on diffuse reflections, not direct reflections.
Ultimately, you need to consider diffuse reflections for all objects. There are a few ray-tracing techniques which, instead of assuming direct reflection only, define a distribution (usually some variant on Gaussian) over which the light is reflected. This isn't quite the same as cone-tracing - cone-tracing is generally a simplified form of this where the distributions are trivial and uniform. Wave-tracing is another method that can be used.
As for what should be done, I'd rather see hardware engineers focus on providing primitives that can support what is needed both now and in the future, as hardware changes relatively slowly. That frees software engineers to develop the best methods they can, without forcing them to wait when they reach the limits of the method.
The answers were extremely tactful and diplomatic, as you would expect with PR and security breathing down the General's back, and on par with those any politician could be expected to give. Indeed, I would have to give credit to the General for making a greater effort to talk in a considered and friendly manner than the vast majority of people who are paid to do so, yet keeping his answers safe from the censors. A few years back, the curator for the NSA's museum was asked questions and never responded at all. Whether that was due to a lack of time, an inability to answer even in general terms without violating some regulation, or whatever, I don't know. I doubt anyone will ever really know all of what happened there. An important part of these answers is that whatever happened in the NSA case did NOT happen here.
Now, on to the deeper issue of whether the answers were content-free. On the surface, yes. They have to be. There's no way that the General could be expected to reveal classified information or discuss tactical issues. Since that is a given, I don't consider that to be significant. Nor can the General be expected to say anything contary to official policy or current doctorine. The head of the US Navy was forced to resign after rumours of contradicting the official line. He was not even shown to have done so, it was merely speculation. A General is far more vulnerable and therefore is going to be far more careful. Again, since that is a given, it's not important.
Now, I said that on the surface, the answers were content-free. Does that mean there's buried content? Yes. Nobody can write independently of themselves, which is why textual analysis is sometimes better than a fingerprint. Now, one needs to be very careful when examining the nature of an answer, as it is extremely easy to read things in that aren't there. However, there are some things that are clear. The first thing that's obvious is that the General didn't regard Slashdot as a hostile audience. He put in far too much effort for him to have thought that.
The second observation is that he seems to consider Slashdot as a potential source of technically-savvy people, but didn't make his answers a recruitment drive. I suspect a degree of baiting may be there, an effort to get people intrigued enough to dig deeper, but no more so than most people would do in a similar situation. He's professional and still moderately enthusiastic about his work.
Finally, given the PR disaster the Pentagon recently faced over malware getting into their networks (and there being a decent chance this included secure classified networks), the measured tone of the discussion on cyber-threats was refreshing. He would likely have been aware at the time of making the replies that the Pentagon were planning an announcement, this sort of thing isn't done on the spur of the moment, which means that he could have either significantly played down (or up) the threat, according to whatever PR strategy is in place. He didn't, preferring to talk about ways that he'd like to see things move to improve the cyber-culture.
Neanderthals had flutes and discovered the octave. If we are to assume music is linked to string theory, then the problem of where they all went is solved! They were the aliens all the time! (Seriously, the paper is interesting, but you can always describe a simple system with a complex one. I'd want solid evidence that this is the reduced form.)
Transmitting all of the data at time of accident would be problematic, but I can't see an objection to the black box retaining abnormal data and transmitting that when landing or taking off. It might be a useful early-warning to prevent accidents in the first place, or perhaps give additional information helpful to investigators on where stresses or abnormalities aren't.
One airline was recently busted for ignoring those regulations for many years. The airlines are clearly doing their best to supply the data regardless.
Nash Equilibrium: The only winning strategy is one that is good for the group as wellas the individual. Thus, the interest rate cannot favour anyone.
Thermoeconomics: The theory that economics holds to the same general principles as thermodynamics, thus the second law must apply. Goods suffer entropy. By putting more energy/effort in, you must increase the total entropy, you cannot decrease it.
Assuming these to hold true, and the first is the basis of all modern economic theory (and socialism), then trade cannot suffer imbalance from near-lightspeed or relativistic effects.
The world's first stored-program computer only stored 32 words, where one word was 40 bits in length, making this 1/40th of the capacity of Alan Turing's "Baby" (aka Manchester Mk. 1) computer. Seriously, though, this is impressive in the sense that they got the thing to work at all. Storing and recovering data from a device this small is non-trivial, especially if they've got the read to be non-destructive. At this scale, the impact of carrying out the observation is non-trivial. If they need to cool to near absolute zero, it's obviously delicate enough that they need to damp down everything to keep the system working. But precisely because almost anything can be kept constant at that temperature, I'd consider this "cheating" a little. You could probably store and recover data on almost any sufficiently uniform structure if nothing is moving.
...is that the reasons for the different species claim are that the brain cavity shows differences from those found in diminutive humans and that the tools found are more advanced than might be expected from human brains scaled down to the same degree. Neither of these are convincing or definitive, but they are suggestive that this isn't simply the Island Rule or one of the genetic conditions identified as causing dwarfism. One of the problems with the research limiting itself to structure and form is that large genetic changes can produce very little change in form, but also very small genetic changes can produce gigantic changes in form. When studying fossils, you're kinda limited, but these are a paltry few hundred years old. Human bones and Neanderthal teeth in conditions just as hostile to complex organic molecules have yielded usable mtDNA and nucleic DNA when nearly a hundred times that age.
...as to whether there's any effort to use archaeological DNA extraction techniques to solve the mystery. Earlier Slashdot stories have covered extracting DNA from bones, teeth and (best of all) hair. If the DNA is roughly human and includes evidence of the genetic defect causing the suspected form of dwarfism, then the bones are human. If the DNA can't be sequenced that thoroughly, but the mtDNA shows bones definitely human are direct descendents of bones of uncertain origin, then the bones of uncertain origin cannot be a distinct species. I can understand there being concern over DNA extraction (which tends to be very destructive) when there's very little material, but that's no longer the case. I can also understand concern when there were very few labs capable of the work, but there is such a glut of DNA companies these days that many are barely surviving and are cutting jobs.
Yes, the work costs money and research grants tend to be minimal, but if the researchers in either camp really wanted answers, they'd find the money. Complicating things further, research funding tends to be proportional on papers published and/or cited. Arguing over the facts gets multiple papers published. Getting hard data gets one paper published. Ergo, it not only costs money now to get hard data, there are costs in the form of reduced funding later. The "best" outcome, from the perspective of the various departments and groups, is therefore to never resolve anything but to continually discover just enough to be able to keep publishing. Vroomfondle would be proud.
Anyone who used a PC back in the days of the 8087 maths co-processor has used heterogeneous cores. Anyone who has used an intelligent peripheral (eg: disk drive or printer with a CPU) has almost certainly used heterogeneous cores. Anyone who used the BBC Microcomputer with any processor other than a 6502 plugged into the Tube port has used heterogeneous cores. Almost anyone who used the Transputer will have used it with a host system, so used heterogeneous cores.
In other words, they're not just in almost every modern PC, they've been in almost every PC since the beginning and even pre-date the PC in some cases. And, yes, you're absolutely right. Libraries and frameworks are how almost everyone else has solved this particular problem. Dedicated offload processors are an ancient technology and there's no shortage of experience in handling them. (Another solution is to program at a higher level, then use source-to-source compiling to split the code into lower-level special-purpose programs, which can then be compiled for the individual CPUs. This would make sense in those cases where the programmer doesn't know the platform characteristics ahead of time.)
People are animals. Animals with sentience, self-awareness, conciousness, abstract thought, associative thought, delayed gratification, a concept of history (as opposed to simply of past), the ability to fictionalize, the ability to manufacture tools, and the ability to choose, but animals nonetheless, as demonstrated by the fact that few humans practice even a fraction of these in their lifetimes. Research demonstrates that some of these also exist in other animals, although it is as yet unclear the extent of this. At this time, no non-human animal has demonstrated irrefutable evidence of being equal to man, but since it wasn't so very long ago that no non-human animal was thought to demonstrate the ability to make tools, understand zero, or comprehend sign language (all of which have since been demonstrated), we have to accept the fact that some day, humans will NOT be seen as the only "people" (in the most abstract sense).
Will Fido or Fluffy be in the running? I doubt it. Humans have given cannines a raw deal for hundreds of thousands of years. If they were capable of true mind, humans would never have survived past the hunter-gatherer stage. Felines have never been totally domesticated, which is why they can survive very well if they "escape" or are abandoned. Their relationship with humans is one of mutual convenience and they can leave pretty much any time they like. Being independent is not the same as being intelligent, however, as many "independent" humans illustrate daily. Cats are certainly high up the rankings in the animal world, but they're highly optimized predators, and that comes at a cost. In their case, they dedicate so much of their physical and mental resources to awareness, stealth, accuracy and dedication that they simply don't have a whole lot left for the pursuit of philosophy, the arts, knowledge and non-material purpose.
(However, precisely because research keeps moving the dividing lines, something appearing unlikely today doesn't mean it'll appear unlikely next year.)
They would get much more on the black market, and their space tourism venture probably makes far more. Remember that RTGs use a mix of isotopes, plutonium being only one in the mix, and the entire mix for Pioneer 10 was a single pound of material. Also remember that Russia make and sell their own RTGs and would therefore make much more from selling the complete unit rather than one subcomponent. Russia's space program is desperately short of cash and forcing foreign space agencies to buy as much from the Russians as possible (possibly even paying the Russians to assemble the probes) would be much more in their interest. NASA has also been experimenting with non-radiosotope generators, which is part of why the Cassini probe drew so much fire. There's not much point in having alternative technologies if you don't use them. But if NASA did use them, then they wouldn't need to buy radioisotopes from overseas.
(Strictly speaking, they don't need to buy them anyway. A huge number of RTGs have crashed to Earth when rockets have failed, and more than a few are probably within reach. RTGs are designed to be able to withstand a high-speed impact with a planet without shedding any load, which is why the one on the Apollo 13 lander is still completely intact. If they wanted something with a bit more oomph, there's always the missing hydrogen bomb in the Carolinas. There should be enough remaining fissile material from the trigger to run quite a nice space program.)
That should be that they would sell the plutonium suitable for weapons, rather than the plutonium suitable for radioisotope thermoelectric generators in probes. The other consideration is quantity, which I neglected to point out. Probes are very small and need only a very small generator. The Cassini probe started with a massive 72 lbs. of radioisotopes (plutonium included), intended to last 7 years. Voyagers 1 and 2 used only 4.5 lbs. of radioisotopes, whereas Pioneers 10 and 11 used a mere 1 lb. The usable lifespan of any given RTG would depend on the power requirements of whatever used it and the exact fuel mixture, provided only natural decay occurs. As people don't generally build RTGs on the scale of self-sustaining nuclear reactors, this is normally the case.
Maybe, but someone else posted that the isotope was incorrect for it to be weapons-grade plutonium. Regardless, I'd have thought it equally important to get rid of plutonium that's totally exposed and available to anyone. It's starting to wash up rivers on the English coast from the sludge in the Irish Sea, the situation is so bad. Yes, the Russians are not careful over who they sell to, and nuclear material there is said to go missing on a routine basis, but material that has essentially no monitoring at all must surely be far more worrying.
Virtually all of Genesis comes from Akkadian stories, which in turn come from Sumerian legends. The Flood, for example, is almost word-for-word lifted from the tale of Gilgamesh, which was in turn a romanticising of a historical record by the Sumerians of an actual flood. The buildings in Sumerian cities show evidence of water damage up to about 5 or so feet. The Sumerians had an extensive fleet of boats capable of travelling long distances and carrying large cargos, as evidenced by their import of timber from Africa. The Semitic peoples who conquered Sumer and founded the Babylonian empire lacked such sea-faring skills and probably romanticised what was a relatively simple escape even further.
The story of creation (Genesis actually has two of them, "common" alternative Christian documents document another five or six, there are probably others in Christian theology) followed a similar path. Well, the one that appears at the start does. It's a simple derivative of much older Sumerian stories. Now, to avoid anyone accusing this of being flamebait, I'm not going to argue the correctness of any given religion. What I am going to do is argue that it's important to know what it is that is being argued over. Which Christian creation story? Should we use a Biblical version or the tale from which the Biblical account is derived?
I, personally, don't go in for Creationism, literal or otherwise. But even if I did, on what basis would I draw conclusions? Is one Christian Creation story better than another? How long are people supposed to have been in the Garden of Eden? Genesis supposedly chronicles when mankind was made, but was that the era of Lilith or Eve?
This is why it's so easy to get into flamewars. It's not even the religious factor, it's that if you multiply out the permutations, there are 180 different entirely "valid" ways of writing out the creation story that would be acceptable under one Christian doctorine or another. That's just Christian creationism. Most religions that have ever existed have at least one creation myth, though a hundred and eighty seems higher than average. If we assume that religion and language are associated, and there are several hundred thousand languages (including dead ones) that are known, you're looking at millions, possibly tens of millions, of such stories.
Selling Doritos to Ursa Major makes more sense than to try and argue, compare and contrast ten million creation stories, especially if you aren't aware of 9,999,999 of them ahead of time.
Heh. Isaac Asimov wrote a great short story in which the creation story had to be shrunk from 14 billion years to 7 days in order to save on the cost of papyrus.
...the whole bit about the hyperspace bypass was just to satisfy local galactic planning regulations. The Vogons have been aware for the past 50 Earth years that spamming space was inevitable.
....they COULD have bought plutonium easily enough from the British (their reprocessing plant produces a fair amount of extractable plutonium) and probably from the French. Possibly even from the Israelis. Buying from Russia makes no real sense, due to the security issues in the region, politics and the problems of safe transport. The British would seem to be the best bet, as they probably generate the most, have extensive experience in transporting nuclear material, and have a special relationship with the US. Except for the fact that the special relationship doesn't seem to include giving the British very much. For that matter, there's probably enough plutonium of the right isotope on the bed of the Irish Sea, due to questionable BNFL dumping practices and accidents at Sellafield. The sea is shallow and it shouldn't be hard for NASA to rig up some extraction system or other. Even if it were rocket science, they ARE rocket scientists.
I'm not sure what the origin of the name "Jodrell Bank" is - it's taken from the name of the local town. Placenames in Britain are curious - some that seem "obvious" are actually very old names where the spelling has been corrupted to remain sayable as the language in the region has been replaced. Sometimes, names have gone through up to four or five such corruptions. Occasionally, names will also be back-engineered - the Victorians were notable for that - where a name is modified or replaced to "make sense" with nearby names. And, then, sometimes places are actually relatively modern. You can never be quite sure. (Another poster mentioned Werneth Low. This may seem like an odd name for a hill, but actually "Low" is a corruption of a Celtic name for a type of round burial mound usually built on hills.)
Jodrell Bank was, I believe, where they first discovered pulsars. There are two dishes for astronomy there - the large Lovell dish and a midsized one. There's also a small radio telescope out front which can be used by visitors. It featured in one episode of the Channel 4 TV gameshow series "Treasure Hunt", where Anneke Rice had to go place to place in a helicopter to obtain clues the contestants had to solve.
Slashdot Mirror
That's cos the labels won't be declassified for another 30 years.
I might have to take another trip up there some time.
I don't think the NSA wants visitors picking the mushrooms.
Also, don't forget to get the kid's NSA coloring book they hand out.
Let me guess. The instructions are ROT13'ed and concealed in the image data. Outlines are drawn in invisible ink. Once completed, pages self-destruct in 5 seconds.
Farmer Giles is perfectly good as a children's book, as is Smith. "Tree and Leaf" is an excellent short story - a trifle allegorical, as it's obvious enough that Niggle is Tolkien himself and Parish is C. S. Lewis. Niggle's propensity for concentrating on the leaves rather than whole trees is an excellent description of how he left his stories, and I'm certain he intended it as such. Roverandum is said to be a good young children's story. His "Father Christmas" letters might prove amusing, too, although those and his (now lost) stories of Bill Posters really should be more inspiration for parents. The Tales of Tom Bombadil are wonderful nonsensical poems and rhymes that I think most kids would like. There may be other stuff, but that's about all I can think of.
If you neglect the impact of mobile objects on diffuse reflections, you CAN pre-generate an entire radiosity map for a game, which is good because it's slow. However, it's an important addition as the "texture", "warmth" and "naturalness" of an image depend on diffuse reflections, not direct reflections.
Ultimately, you need to consider diffuse reflections for all objects. There are a few ray-tracing techniques which, instead of assuming direct reflection only, define a distribution (usually some variant on Gaussian) over which the light is reflected. This isn't quite the same as cone-tracing - cone-tracing is generally a simplified form of this where the distributions are trivial and uniform. Wave-tracing is another method that can be used.
As for what should be done, I'd rather see hardware engineers focus on providing primitives that can support what is needed both now and in the future, as hardware changes relatively slowly. That frees software engineers to develop the best methods they can, without forcing them to wait when they reach the limits of the method.
What do you mean he's not God? Isn't that heresy? (Or was that written by someone else?)
Now, on to the deeper issue of whether the answers were content-free. On the surface, yes. They have to be. There's no way that the General could be expected to reveal classified information or discuss tactical issues. Since that is a given, I don't consider that to be significant. Nor can the General be expected to say anything contary to official policy or current doctorine. The head of the US Navy was forced to resign after rumours of contradicting the official line. He was not even shown to have done so, it was merely speculation. A General is far more vulnerable and therefore is going to be far more careful. Again, since that is a given, it's not important.
Now, I said that on the surface, the answers were content-free. Does that mean there's buried content? Yes. Nobody can write independently of themselves, which is why textual analysis is sometimes better than a fingerprint. Now, one needs to be very careful when examining the nature of an answer, as it is extremely easy to read things in that aren't there. However, there are some things that are clear. The first thing that's obvious is that the General didn't regard Slashdot as a hostile audience. He put in far too much effort for him to have thought that.
The second observation is that he seems to consider Slashdot as a potential source of technically-savvy people, but didn't make his answers a recruitment drive. I suspect a degree of baiting may be there, an effort to get people intrigued enough to dig deeper, but no more so than most people would do in a similar situation. He's professional and still moderately enthusiastic about his work.
Finally, given the PR disaster the Pentagon recently faced over malware getting into their networks (and there being a decent chance this included secure classified networks), the measured tone of the discussion on cyber-threats was refreshing. He would likely have been aware at the time of making the replies that the Pentagon were planning an announcement, this sort of thing isn't done on the spur of the moment, which means that he could have either significantly played down (or up) the threat, according to whatever PR strategy is in place. He didn't, preferring to talk about ways that he'd like to see things move to improve the cyber-culture.
Neanderthals had flutes and discovered the octave. If we are to assume music is linked to string theory, then the problem of where they all went is solved! They were the aliens all the time! (Seriously, the paper is interesting, but you can always describe a simple system with a complex one. I'd want solid evidence that this is the reduced form.)
Transmitting all of the data at time of accident would be problematic, but I can't see an objection to the black box retaining abnormal data and transmitting that when landing or taking off. It might be a useful early-warning to prevent accidents in the first place, or perhaps give additional information helpful to investigators on where stresses or abnormalities aren't.
One airline was recently busted for ignoring those regulations for many years. The airlines are clearly doing their best to supply the data regardless.
Assuming these to hold true, and the first is the basis of all modern economic theory (and socialism), then trade cannot suffer imbalance from near-lightspeed or relativistic effects.
The world's first stored-program computer only stored 32 words, where one word was 40 bits in length, making this 1/40th of the capacity of Alan Turing's "Baby" (aka Manchester Mk. 1) computer. Seriously, though, this is impressive in the sense that they got the thing to work at all. Storing and recovering data from a device this small is non-trivial, especially if they've got the read to be non-destructive. At this scale, the impact of carrying out the observation is non-trivial. If they need to cool to near absolute zero, it's obviously delicate enough that they need to damp down everything to keep the system working. But precisely because almost anything can be kept constant at that temperature, I'd consider this "cheating" a little. You could probably store and recover data on almost any sufficiently uniform structure if nothing is moving.
...is that the reasons for the different species claim are that the brain cavity shows differences from those found in diminutive humans and that the tools found are more advanced than might be expected from human brains scaled down to the same degree. Neither of these are convincing or definitive, but they are suggestive that this isn't simply the Island Rule or one of the genetic conditions identified as causing dwarfism. One of the problems with the research limiting itself to structure and form is that large genetic changes can produce very little change in form, but also very small genetic changes can produce gigantic changes in form. When studying fossils, you're kinda limited, but these are a paltry few hundred years old. Human bones and Neanderthal teeth in conditions just as hostile to complex organic molecules have yielded usable mtDNA and nucleic DNA when nearly a hundred times that age.
Yes, the work costs money and research grants tend to be minimal, but if the researchers in either camp really wanted answers, they'd find the money. Complicating things further, research funding tends to be proportional on papers published and/or cited. Arguing over the facts gets multiple papers published. Getting hard data gets one paper published. Ergo, it not only costs money now to get hard data, there are costs in the form of reduced funding later. The "best" outcome, from the perspective of the various departments and groups, is therefore to never resolve anything but to continually discover just enough to be able to keep publishing. Vroomfondle would be proud.
In other words, they're not just in almost every modern PC, they've been in almost every PC since the beginning and even pre-date the PC in some cases. And, yes, you're absolutely right. Libraries and frameworks are how almost everyone else has solved this particular problem. Dedicated offload processors are an ancient technology and there's no shortage of experience in handling them. (Another solution is to program at a higher level, then use source-to-source compiling to split the code into lower-level special-purpose programs, which can then be compiled for the individual CPUs. This would make sense in those cases where the programmer doesn't know the platform characteristics ahead of time.)
Will Fido or Fluffy be in the running? I doubt it. Humans have given cannines a raw deal for hundreds of thousands of years. If they were capable of true mind, humans would never have survived past the hunter-gatherer stage. Felines have never been totally domesticated, which is why they can survive very well if they "escape" or are abandoned. Their relationship with humans is one of mutual convenience and they can leave pretty much any time they like. Being independent is not the same as being intelligent, however, as many "independent" humans illustrate daily. Cats are certainly high up the rankings in the animal world, but they're highly optimized predators, and that comes at a cost. In their case, they dedicate so much of their physical and mental resources to awareness, stealth, accuracy and dedication that they simply don't have a whole lot left for the pursuit of philosophy, the arts, knowledge and non-material purpose.
(However, precisely because research keeps moving the dividing lines, something appearing unlikely today doesn't mean it'll appear unlikely next year.)
Cats own humans. Those aren't hairballs, those're ownership taxes imparted by The Council of Fluff.
(Strictly speaking, they don't need to buy them anyway. A huge number of RTGs have crashed to Earth when rockets have failed, and more than a few are probably within reach. RTGs are designed to be able to withstand a high-speed impact with a planet without shedding any load, which is why the one on the Apollo 13 lander is still completely intact. If they wanted something with a bit more oomph, there's always the missing hydrogen bomb in the Carolinas. There should be enough remaining fissile material from the trigger to run quite a nice space program.)
That should be that they would sell the plutonium suitable for weapons, rather than the plutonium suitable for radioisotope thermoelectric generators in probes. The other consideration is quantity, which I neglected to point out. Probes are very small and need only a very small generator. The Cassini probe started with a massive 72 lbs. of radioisotopes (plutonium included), intended to last 7 years. Voyagers 1 and 2 used only 4.5 lbs. of radioisotopes, whereas Pioneers 10 and 11 used a mere 1 lb. The usable lifespan of any given RTG would depend on the power requirements of whatever used it and the exact fuel mixture, provided only natural decay occurs. As people don't generally build RTGs on the scale of self-sustaining nuclear reactors, this is normally the case.
Maybe, but someone else posted that the isotope was incorrect for it to be weapons-grade plutonium. Regardless, I'd have thought it equally important to get rid of plutonium that's totally exposed and available to anyone. It's starting to wash up rivers on the English coast from the sludge in the Irish Sea, the situation is so bad. Yes, the Russians are not careful over who they sell to, and nuclear material there is said to go missing on a routine basis, but material that has essentially no monitoring at all must surely be far more worrying.
The story of creation (Genesis actually has two of them, "common" alternative Christian documents document another five or six, there are probably others in Christian theology) followed a similar path. Well, the one that appears at the start does. It's a simple derivative of much older Sumerian stories. Now, to avoid anyone accusing this of being flamebait, I'm not going to argue the correctness of any given religion. What I am going to do is argue that it's important to know what it is that is being argued over. Which Christian creation story? Should we use a Biblical version or the tale from which the Biblical account is derived?
I, personally, don't go in for Creationism, literal or otherwise. But even if I did, on what basis would I draw conclusions? Is one Christian Creation story better than another? How long are people supposed to have been in the Garden of Eden? Genesis supposedly chronicles when mankind was made, but was that the era of Lilith or Eve?
This is why it's so easy to get into flamewars. It's not even the religious factor, it's that if you multiply out the permutations, there are 180 different entirely "valid" ways of writing out the creation story that would be acceptable under one Christian doctorine or another. That's just Christian creationism. Most religions that have ever existed have at least one creation myth, though a hundred and eighty seems higher than average. If we assume that religion and language are associated, and there are several hundred thousand languages (including dead ones) that are known, you're looking at millions, possibly tens of millions, of such stories.
Selling Doritos to Ursa Major makes more sense than to try and argue, compare and contrast ten million creation stories, especially if you aren't aware of 9,999,999 of them ahead of time.
Heh. Isaac Asimov wrote a great short story in which the creation story had to be shrunk from 14 billion years to 7 days in order to save on the cost of papyrus.
...just illegal under the DMCA. If any aliens did visit to buy Doritos, they'd end up getting sued and their flying saucer confiscated.
But I got stuck here while researching the update for The Guide.
...the whole bit about the hyperspace bypass was just to satisfy local galactic planning regulations. The Vogons have been aware for the past 50 Earth years that spamming space was inevitable.
....they COULD have bought plutonium easily enough from the British (their reprocessing plant produces a fair amount of extractable plutonium) and probably from the French. Possibly even from the Israelis. Buying from Russia makes no real sense, due to the security issues in the region, politics and the problems of safe transport. The British would seem to be the best bet, as they probably generate the most, have extensive experience in transporting nuclear material, and have a special relationship with the US. Except for the fact that the special relationship doesn't seem to include giving the British very much. For that matter, there's probably enough plutonium of the right isotope on the bed of the Irish Sea, due to questionable BNFL dumping practices and accidents at Sellafield. The sea is shallow and it shouldn't be hard for NASA to rig up some extraction system or other. Even if it were rocket science, they ARE rocket scientists.
Jodrell Bank was, I believe, where they first discovered pulsars. There are two dishes for astronomy there - the large Lovell dish and a midsized one. There's also a small radio telescope out front which can be used by visitors. It featured in one episode of the Channel 4 TV gameshow series "Treasure Hunt", where Anneke Rice had to go place to place in a helicopter to obtain clues the contestants had to solve.