... the amiga is so old that a HDD would be the size of a small suitcase. Yet this dude says that it's the smallest drive.
The Amiga 1200 used a 2.5" (laptop-style) drive. I assume that's what this guy had.
AFAIK all of the other Amiga models used normal 3.5" hard drives (if they had one at all).
Re:My 1541 drive was a speaker too!
on
Harddrive Speakers
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Didn't those disk drives contain their own processors?
Yes, they had an on-board CPU and RAM so it was possible to run custom programs on the disk drive. I had one disk-copy program that worked this way; it would automatically copy disks from one drive to another, without involving the main computer (the drives were connected by a daisy-chained serial bus, so you could even unplug the computer from the drive chain once you'd uploaded the program).
People, stop blindly applying this mantra to everything you come across! Much practical security comes directly from obscurity: passwords only known by a few people and protected against unintended disclosure, metal keys of unknown shapes, PINs that must be used in addition to account numbers,
"Security through obscurity" refers to obscurity of the algorithm, not to the presence of unknown keys, passwords, or PINs. The whole point is that a strong security system is still secure when everything except the key is known, whereas a "security through obscurity" one is compromised (often for all keys) once its inner workings are discovered.
I wish I could do that for all the IRL junk mail I get as well.
With junk mail that provides a postage-paid reply envelope, just throw out anything that has your name on it and mail the rest of it back to the sender. They can then re-use that material (saves trees), and it also creates jobs for the post office.
In Canada it is legal to rebroadcast television that has already been broadcasted*. This is how the cable/satellite broadcasters are able to broadcast the Canadian networks. So why can't this apply to the net as well?
Good question, but you're not the first one to ask it. See http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp00008e.html, "Consultation Paper on the Application of the Copyright Act's Compulsory Retransmission License to the Internet"
The main page includes more information, as well as links to comments that were received from the general public on this paper and other proposed (bad; DMCA-style) changes to the Canadian copyright legislation.
Interestingly, the electronics looked to be pretty intact for the temperature it was cooked at,
It's not too surprising; surface-mount components are attached to circuit boards by applying solder paste, then passing the whole board through a reflow oven to melt the solder.
And it is exactly that, sci-fi. Sure, carbon nanotubes are incredibly strong. And they're also on the order of a few microns long. Now, this cable needs to be a few hundreds of thousands of meters long. You do the math.
The semiconductor industry figured out how to make large single crystals of ultra-pure silicon, then pattern the surface down to a ridiculously fine resolution. The fiberoptic folks figured out how to make glass so clear that a light pulse can go through many many miles of it and still be recognizable at the other end. Molecular biologists can "amplify" single molecules of DNA into macroscopic quantities.
I wouldn't be so quick to say that we will never be able to make carbon nanotubes that are long enough to be useful as structural materials.
Not to dismiss the elevator out of hand, but wouldn't research into efficient space vehicle propulsion yield better long term results?
Not really, because the "efficient" propulsion systems probably won't be able to lift a rocket off the ground. E.g. the DS-1 ion engine, high efficiency but only about 0.1N of thrust - or nuclear engines that would be too dirty to run in the biosphere, but would work fine in interplanetary space.
If a space elevator could be built, the cost of lifting payloads into space could drop dramatically, and that would create a lot more incentive for companies to develop these efficient space-only engines.
That's because they got kicked off the NYSE. Only NYSE stocks have ticker symbols of 3 or fewer characters. As an OTC stock, they had to pick a new symbol.
They (ENRNQ) only got to pick the first 4 letters of their symbol - the "Q" suffix indicates the company is involved in bankruptcy proceedings. There's a table of codes here if anyone's interested.
I'm not a physicist or anything but doesn't faster than light communication allow for information to be sent backwards in time?
If you can send faster than light communication in two different reference frames that are moving past each other at a high (but sub-c) velocity, then the basic equations of special relativity (length contraction, etc) say that you'd be able to relay a signal back to its starting point before it was originally transmitted.
Please forgive my lack of knowledge in this area, but what you said just doesn't make sense to me. If you can send waves FTL, and send information on those waves, then it logically follows that you can send information FTL... What am I missing?
Take a look at this applet and this page. They give a good illustration of the concept:
[...]If dn(v)/dv is sufficiently negative, it can reduce the denominator in Equation (3) to less than one, yielding a group velocity greater than c. Why is this not a contradiction of special relativity? No energy or information needs to travel at the group velocity in order for the shape of the wave to exhibit features that move at that speed. If you tried to signal someone with a superluminal pulse by dropping a shutter in its path at the last moment, you'd find you were too late: the pulse would happily "pass through" the shutter, because every influence that was actually responsible for its appearance on the other side would have passed through already.
That's the least of your worries. Live anywhere near a gas storage facility? Toxic dump? Or even a gas filling station? How about within several states of a nuclear power facility?
The slightest thing going wrong with the containment at any of these places and you can kiss your ass goodbye.
How about Tooele, Utah (about 40 miles from Salt Lake City), home of a somewhat leaky nerve-gas storage and incineration facility? It's quite high on my list of places to avoid.
Wouldn't it be possible to make it go around the main loop several thousand times before going out?
It already does that. The way a cyclotron works is that charged particles in a magnetic field move in circles. It turns out that the radius of the circle increases as the particle's energy increases, but the time for one period remains constant. A cyclotron injects charged particles near the center, and they start moving in circles. Every time they cross the mid-line of the device, an AC field gives them an energy boost and moves them to a slightly greater radius (the field reverses polarity every half-orbit, so the field is always pushing the particles along their direction of travel). When the particles have gained enough energy to reach the outer edge of the device, they are extracted and sent down the beamline.
Cyclotrons are good at producing a very high number of particles per second (so they're great for isotope production), but they don't easily scale to the energy levels needed to create antiprotons.
I know very little about the practicalities of anti-matter creation. The only real assumption I was taking is that energy is convertable into either matter or antimatter.
Energy is converted into both matter and antimatter. You don't get to pick one or the other; there are conservation laws (some more absolute than others) that say you can't change the net amount of certain quantities. If you start with 0 electrons, you have to end up with 0 electrons (1 + (-1) = 0).
It was my understanding that anti-everythings exist, so you can have an electron, positron, anti-electron, and anti-positron, all with positive mass.
This is basically correct, but a "positron" is an "anti-electron" - two names for the same critter. However there are antiprotons and antineutrons, with positive mass.
Many particles don't exist in normal matter, but can be created in both positive and negative varieties. One is the "anti-" of the other, but the standard notation is just to indicate the particle and its charge (e.g. mu+ for a positive muon).
The premise about amount of matter and antimatter, is as you say, too tough. I dont think anyone *knows* why it seems there is an imbalance in the universe.
The sci.physics FAQ discusses this, but doesn't have a conclusive answer.
I guess the question i am most curious about is "Is it possible to "create" anti matter from anything other than pure energy in some form?", or do you have to (as your example) use pair-antipair creation?
The various conservation laws (e.g. electric charge) make it very difficult to do anything other than balanced pair production. Maybe you could feed normal matter into a microscopic black hole and get a 50/50 mix of particles and antiparticles back through Hawking radiation...
If you make anti-hydrogen you are able to store it in normal gas storage cyclinders.
No, you are not able to store anti-hydrogen in a (normal matter) gas storage cylinder. Kaboom, unless you have some way to prevent it from coming in contact with the cylinder walls (and electromagnetic fields won't work well on neutral atoms).
Same goes for any anti-atom. anti-matter only annihilate's when if touch's its couterpart. Simply(in theory) keep them apart.
Are you under the impression that an anti-hydrogen atom will annihilate with an atom of normal hydrogen, but not (e.g.) a normal iron atom? If so this is wrong; the annihilation takes place at the level of individual electrons and protons.
I was personally thinking a cyclotron would be better. They don't have to be 1 mile in diameter, they just use that for really energetic stuff. To produce antimatter AFIAK you only need a cyclotron around 50 metres in diameter.
The thing about a cyclotron is that it's a solid device (magnets, vacuum chamber, etc) so one that's "only" 50 metres in diameter would still be a helluva lot of material to haul around. TRIUMF's magnet is 18m in diameter, and it's the world's largest.
You also have to specify what type of antimatter you want to create. TRIUMF has a beam energy of about 500 MeV, so it cannot create antiprotons (which have a mass of 938 MeV, but which according to this page need 6 times that much energy to satisfy the necessary conservation laws when creating them). However TRIUMF has no problem creating positive muons or positrons (which still qualify as "antimatter").
A local company, Ebco Technologies, sells small cyclotrons for the production of medical PET radioisotopes. These aren't quite backpack sized, but they would easily fit into an apartment (provided the floor was strong enough and you had 80kW of electrical power available).
So you're saying that Altavista could send a description of their site back through a time warp and successfully sue Douglas Adams for trademark infringement?
Just like they found the person who was sending anthrax, right?
Expect to see an increased level of tracking, similar to what the courier companies have now.
One possibility would be to put individual serial numbers onto postage stamps (e.g. a 2D printed barcode). You'd show your national ID card when you bought the stamps, and that info would be recorded in a database in case there was ever an "incident" with one of your packages.
The postal system is going to have to "grow up" the way the Internet did. The past was convenient but trusting, with anonymous mail and cleartext passwords. The future will require increased accountability and authentication, like it or not.
Electromagnetic radation (nonionizing) like the microwave is different than particle beams (ionizing).
You're basically correct, although the situation is little more interesting than that. For example, anyone who's ever put a light bulb or an AOL CD into a microwave oven will have seen a fair bit of ionization. There are even industrial ultraviolet lamps that use microwaves to ionize mercury vapor inside a sealed bulb. However, in these cases electrons are being accelerated to high energies by the electric field of the microwave radiation, so it's not really the microwave radiation itself that is doing the ionizing.
Also, red light can be considered "ionizing radiation" if it happens to land on a molecule of chlorophyll. However, this is a special case. Normally electromagnetic radiation has to be in the ultraviolet or above before it is considered ionizing.
Quick review: gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves are all the same thing - electromagnetic radiation. Each "type" above refers to a particular range of frequencies. The energy per photon is directly proportional to the frequency. Microwaves therefore have less energy per photon than visible light, and much less energy per photon than x-rays or gamma rays.
The energy of an electron beam can range from something comparable to an x-ray photon (e.g. 25keV in a television) up to several GeV in nuclear physics research labs.
Some types of radiation, like positrons and neutrons, can affect matter even at near-zero kinetic energy. Positrons will combine with electrons, converting their mass into gamma radiation. Neutrons can be absorbed by an atomic nucleus, causing it to release other radiation or (in some cases, like uranium) fission.
What I think would be optimum is a very low intensity radiation at just the right frequency to excite the structure of the Anthrax such that it immediately shows up as a "hot spot" on the detector circuitry, yet with the beam kept at a low enough power that flash memory cards don't get erased or damaged, film doesn't get fogged, paper doesn't release noxious fumes, etc...
This sort of thing can be done to detect explosives, by measuring the ratios of certain chemical elements (e.g. explosives often contain high amounts of nitrogen). A neutron beam is directed at the target, and when a nucleus absorbs a neutron it emits a gamma ray at a distinctive energy level. By looking at the gamma spectrum, it's possible to tell what the target's made of.
However, this method can only measure bulk chemical properties. It would be hard for such a system to tell the difference between Anthrax and other benign organic substances like paper.
So what happens when someone puts some kind of explosive into a package that detonates when hit by an electron beam?
In that case, it would explode inside the e-beam machine (possibly injuring nearby workers, depending on the size of the explosive and how well shielded the machine was). Then the investigators would attempt identify the source of the package, and prosecute the sender. It wouldn't be too hard to have a camera taking pictures of each package as it went into the e-beam machine so they'd know exactly which package went boom.
I don't really see the point of this question. Anyone could send an explosive designed to go off at some point in the mail-delivery chain. E-beam treatment doesn't really add to this risk, and it does reduce the risk of people receiving biological agents through the mail. Conceptually, it's a pretty good idea. However, as these stories show, the actual implementation leaves something to be desired.
If it turns out that "normal" mail (paper, common plastics, ink, etc) will survive a radiation level that's high enough to be useful in killing the biological agents, then all that has to be added is a new "do not irradiate" option for the sensitive packages. Mail in this category would be screened more heavily, hand-inspected, require a verified return address, etc.
However, if it turns out that the level of irradiation needed to be useful against biological agents is so high that "normal" mail will always be toasted, then the whole idea is dead in the water.
One thought I had while watching it was that they could have ended the first movie with the escape from Moria and the entrance into Lothlorien. The balrog scene makes a nice dramatic climax for the movie, and the timeless land of Lorien seems a good place to park the characters for a year until the next movie.
The first book is the longest of the three, so the second movie wouldn't have to be cut too heavily to make room for the additional material from 'Fellowship' (In the book I have, 1/3 of the total page count is somewhere in the Mirror of Galadriel chapter).
Slashdot Mirror
... the amiga is so old that a HDD would be the size of a small suitcase. Yet this dude says that it's the smallest drive.
The Amiga 1200 used a 2.5" (laptop-style) drive. I assume that's what this guy had.
AFAIK all of the other Amiga models used normal 3.5" hard drives (if they had one at all).
Didn't those disk drives contain their own processors?
Yes, they had an on-board CPU and RAM so it was possible to run custom programs on the disk drive. I had one disk-copy program that worked this way; it would automatically copy disks from one drive to another, without involving the main computer (the drives were connected by a daisy-chained serial bus, so you could even unplug the computer from the drive chain once you'd uploaded the program).
> Security through obscurity reigns...
People, stop blindly applying this mantra to everything you come across! Much practical security comes directly from obscurity: passwords only known by a few people and protected against unintended disclosure, metal keys of unknown shapes, PINs that must be used in addition to account numbers,
"Security through obscurity" refers to obscurity of the algorithm, not to the presence of unknown keys, passwords, or PINs. The whole point is that a strong security system is still secure when everything except the key is known, whereas a "security through obscurity" one is compromised (often for all keys) once its inner workings are discovered.
I wish I could do that for all the IRL junk mail I get as well.
With junk mail that provides a postage-paid reply envelope, just throw out anything that has your name on it and mail the rest of it back to the sender. They can then re-use that material (saves trees), and it also creates jobs for the post office.
In Canada it is legal to rebroadcast television that has already been broadcasted*. This is how the cable/satellite broadcasters are able to broadcast the Canadian networks. So why can't this apply to the net as well?
Good question, but you're not the first one to ask it. See http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp00008e.html, "Consultation Paper on the Application of the Copyright Act's Compulsory Retransmission License to the Internet"
The main page includes more information, as well as links to comments that were received from the general public on this paper and other proposed (bad; DMCA-style) changes to the Canadian copyright legislation.
Interestingly, the electronics looked to be pretty intact for the temperature it was cooked at,
It's not too surprising; surface-mount components are attached to circuit boards by applying solder paste, then passing the whole board through a reflow oven to melt the solder.
I remember writing scripts for SAS, the stat package. To get your data read in you wrote "cards;"
The circuit simulator SPICE shares this legacy.
And it is exactly that, sci-fi. Sure, carbon nanotubes are incredibly strong. And they're also on the order of a few microns long. Now, this cable needs to be a few hundreds of thousands of meters long. You do the math.
The semiconductor industry figured out how to make large single crystals of ultra-pure silicon, then pattern the surface down to a ridiculously fine resolution. The fiberoptic folks figured out how to make glass so clear that a light pulse can go through many many miles of it and still be recognizable at the other end. Molecular biologists can "amplify" single molecules of DNA into macroscopic quantities.
I wouldn't be so quick to say that we will never be able to make carbon nanotubes that are long enough to be useful as structural materials.
Not to dismiss the elevator out of hand, but wouldn't research into efficient space vehicle propulsion yield better long term results?
Not really, because the "efficient" propulsion systems probably won't be able to lift a rocket off the ground. E.g. the DS-1 ion engine, high efficiency but only about 0.1N of thrust - or nuclear engines that would be too dirty to run in the biosphere, but would work fine in interplanetary space.
If a space elevator could be built, the cost of lifting payloads into space could drop dramatically, and that would create a lot more incentive for companies to develop these efficient space-only engines.
That's because they got kicked off the NYSE. Only NYSE stocks have ticker symbols of 3 or fewer characters. As an OTC stock, they had to pick a new symbol.
They (ENRNQ) only got to pick the first 4 letters of their symbol - the "Q" suffix indicates the company is involved in bankruptcy proceedings. There's a table of codes here if anyone's interested.
Can transparent aluminium be far behind?
It's already here, although in the form of an oxide rather than the pure metal.
I'm not a physicist or anything but doesn't faster than light communication allow for information to be sent backwards in time?
If you can send faster than light communication in two different reference frames that are moving past each other at a high (but sub-c) velocity, then the basic equations of special relativity (length contraction, etc) say that you'd be able to relay a signal back to its starting point before it was originally transmitted.
Please forgive my lack of knowledge in this area, but what you said just doesn't make sense to me. If you can send waves FTL, and send information on those waves, then it logically follows that you can send information FTL... What am I missing?
Take a look at this applet and this page. They give a good illustration of the concept:
[...]If dn(v)/dv is sufficiently negative, it can reduce the denominator in Equation (3) to less than one, yielding a group velocity greater than c. Why is this not a contradiction of special relativity? No energy or information needs to travel at the group velocity in order for the shape of the wave to exhibit features that move at that speed. If you tried to signal someone with a superluminal pulse by dropping a shutter in its path at the last moment, you'd find you were too late: the pulse would happily "pass through" the shutter, because every influence that was actually responsible for its appearance on the other side would have passed through already.
That's the least of your worries. Live anywhere near a gas storage facility? Toxic dump? Or even a gas filling station? How about within several states of a nuclear power facility?
The slightest thing going wrong with the containment at any of these places and you can kiss your ass goodbye.
How about Tooele, Utah (about 40 miles from Salt Lake City), home of a somewhat leaky nerve-gas storage and incineration facility? It's quite high on my list of places to avoid.
Wouldn't it be possible to make it go around the main loop several thousand times before going out?
It already does that. The way a cyclotron works is that charged particles in a magnetic field move in circles. It turns out that the radius of the circle increases as the particle's energy increases, but the time for one period remains constant. A cyclotron injects charged particles near the center, and they start moving in circles. Every time they cross the mid-line of the device, an AC field gives them an energy boost and moves them to a slightly greater radius (the field reverses polarity every half-orbit, so the field is always pushing the particles along their direction of travel). When the particles have gained enough energy to reach the outer edge of the device, they are extracted and sent down the beamline.
Cyclotrons are good at producing a very high number of particles per second (so they're great for isotope production), but they don't easily scale to the energy levels needed to create antiprotons.
howstuffworks.com has a bit more information.
I know very little about the practicalities of anti-matter creation. The only real assumption I was taking is that energy is convertable into either matter or antimatter.
Energy is converted into both matter and antimatter. You don't get to pick one or the other; there are conservation laws (some more absolute than others) that say you can't change the net amount of certain quantities. If you start with 0 electrons, you have to end up with 0 electrons (1 + (-1) = 0).
It was my understanding that anti-everythings exist, so you can have an electron, positron, anti-electron, and anti-positron, all with positive mass.
This is basically correct, but a "positron" is an "anti-electron" - two names for the same critter. However there are antiprotons and antineutrons, with positive mass.
Many particles don't exist in normal matter, but can be created in both positive and negative varieties. One is the "anti-" of the other, but the standard notation is just to indicate the particle and its charge (e.g. mu+ for a positive muon).
The premise about amount of matter and antimatter, is as you say, too tough. I dont think anyone *knows* why it seems there is an imbalance in the universe.
The sci.physics FAQ discusses this, but doesn't have a conclusive answer.
I guess the question i am most curious about is "Is it possible to "create" anti matter from anything other than pure energy in some form?", or do you have to (as your example) use pair-antipair creation?
The various conservation laws (e.g. electric charge) make it very difficult to do anything other than balanced pair production. Maybe you could feed normal matter into a microscopic black hole and get a 50/50 mix of particles and antiparticles back through Hawking radiation...
If you make anti-hydrogen you are able to store it in normal gas storage cyclinders.
No, you are not able to store anti-hydrogen in a (normal matter) gas storage cylinder. Kaboom, unless you have some way to prevent it from coming in contact with the cylinder walls (and electromagnetic fields won't work well on neutral atoms).
Same goes for any anti-atom. anti-matter only annihilate's when if touch's its couterpart. Simply(in theory) keep them apart.
Are you under the impression that an anti-hydrogen atom will annihilate with an atom of normal hydrogen, but not (e.g.) a normal iron atom? If so this is wrong; the annihilation takes place at the level of individual electrons and protons.
I was personally thinking a cyclotron would be better. They don't have to be 1 mile in diameter, they just use that for really energetic stuff. To produce antimatter AFIAK you only need a cyclotron around 50 metres in diameter.
The thing about a cyclotron is that it's a solid device (magnets, vacuum chamber, etc) so one that's "only" 50 metres in diameter would still be a helluva lot of material to haul around. TRIUMF's magnet is 18m in diameter, and it's the world's largest.
You also have to specify what type of antimatter you want to create. TRIUMF has a beam energy of about 500 MeV, so it cannot create antiprotons (which have a mass of 938 MeV, but which according to this page need 6 times that much energy to satisfy the necessary conservation laws when creating them). However TRIUMF has no problem creating positive muons or positrons (which still qualify as "antimatter").
A local company, Ebco Technologies, sells small cyclotrons for the production of medical PET radioisotopes. These aren't quite backpack sized, but they would easily fit into an apartment (provided the floor was strong enough and you had 80kW of electrical power available).
Wrong binding; babelfish (probably) === babelfish.altavista.com
So you're saying that Altavista could send a description of their site back through a time warp and successfully sue Douglas Adams for trademark infringement?
Just like they found the person who was sending anthrax, right?
Expect to see an increased level of tracking, similar to what the courier companies have now.
One possibility would be to put individual serial numbers onto postage stamps (e.g. a 2D printed barcode). You'd show your national ID card when you bought the stamps, and that info would be recorded in a database in case there was ever an "incident" with one of your packages.
The postal system is going to have to "grow up" the way the Internet did. The past was convenient but trusting, with anonymous mail and cleartext passwords. The future will require increased accountability and authentication, like it or not.
Who was it commenting on the "Sanctity of Life." Some comedian guy. More of a standup philosopher than a comedian.
George Carlin, CD "Back in Town".
Electromagnetic radation (nonionizing) like the microwave is different than particle beams (ionizing).
You're basically correct, although the situation is little more interesting than that. For example, anyone who's ever put a light bulb or an AOL CD into a microwave oven will have seen a fair bit of ionization. There are even industrial ultraviolet lamps that use microwaves to ionize mercury vapor inside a sealed bulb. However, in these cases electrons are being accelerated to high energies by the electric field of the microwave radiation, so it's not really the microwave radiation itself that is doing the ionizing.
Also, red light can be considered "ionizing radiation" if it happens to land on a molecule of chlorophyll. However, this is a special case. Normally electromagnetic radiation has to be in the ultraviolet or above before it is considered ionizing.
Quick review: gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves are all the same thing - electromagnetic radiation. Each "type" above refers to a particular range of frequencies. The energy per photon is directly proportional to the frequency. Microwaves therefore have less energy per photon than visible light, and much less energy per photon than x-rays or gamma rays.
The energy of an electron beam can range from something comparable to an x-ray photon (e.g. 25keV in a television) up to several GeV in nuclear physics research labs.
Some types of radiation, like positrons and neutrons, can affect matter even at near-zero kinetic energy. Positrons will combine with electrons, converting their mass into gamma radiation. Neutrons can be absorbed by an atomic nucleus, causing it to release other radiation or (in some cases, like uranium) fission.
What I think would be optimum is a very low intensity radiation at just the right frequency to excite the structure of the Anthrax such that it immediately shows up as a "hot spot" on the detector circuitry, yet with the beam kept at a low enough power that flash memory cards don't get erased or damaged, film doesn't get fogged, paper doesn't release noxious fumes, etc...
This sort of thing can be done to detect explosives, by measuring the ratios of certain chemical elements (e.g. explosives often contain high amounts of nitrogen). A neutron beam is directed at the target, and when a nucleus absorbs a neutron it emits a gamma ray at a distinctive energy level. By looking at the gamma spectrum, it's possible to tell what the target's made of.
However, this method can only measure bulk chemical properties. It would be hard for such a system to tell the difference between Anthrax and other benign organic substances like paper.
So what happens when someone puts some kind of explosive into a package that detonates when hit by an electron beam?
In that case, it would explode inside the e-beam machine (possibly injuring nearby workers, depending on the size of the explosive and how well shielded the machine was). Then the investigators would attempt identify the source of the package, and prosecute the sender. It wouldn't be too hard to have a camera taking pictures of each package as it went into the e-beam machine so they'd know exactly which package went boom.
I don't really see the point of this question. Anyone could send an explosive designed to go off at some point in the mail-delivery chain. E-beam treatment doesn't really add to this risk, and it does reduce the risk of people receiving biological agents through the mail. Conceptually, it's a pretty good idea. However, as these stories show, the actual implementation leaves something to be desired.
If it turns out that "normal" mail (paper, common plastics, ink, etc) will survive a radiation level that's high enough to be useful in killing the biological agents, then all that has to be added is a new "do not irradiate" option for the sensitive packages. Mail in this category would be screened more heavily, hand-inspected, require a verified return address, etc.
However, if it turns out that the level of irradiation needed to be useful against biological agents is so high that "normal" mail will always be toasted, then the whole idea is dead in the water.
One thought I had while watching it was that they could have ended the first movie with the escape from Moria and the entrance into Lothlorien. The balrog scene makes a nice dramatic climax for the movie, and the timeless land of Lorien seems a good place to park the characters for a year until the next movie.
The first book is the longest of the three, so the second movie wouldn't have to be cut too heavily to make room for the additional material from 'Fellowship' (In the book I have, 1/3 of the total page count is somewhere in the Mirror of Galadriel chapter).