I'm only interested in black and white prints so this doesn't apply to me, but you may want to be wary of the cost of Kodak paper. The word on the street is that their ink costs are lower, but they make up the difference by requiring you to use their special paper to get good colors. Alternative photo papers don't appear to work because of a difference in the texturing of the paper. (The printer can't feed it properly.)
The other issue to watch out for is driver bizarreness. Various reports have complained of odd problems with the printer becoming unavailable, missing parts of the print job, PC crashes, and other driver-related oddities.
So as long as you can either fix, workaround, or otherwise avoid these issues, it should be a good printer. However, I still recommend a laser if you don't need color.:-)
I'm not sure if I can give a good answer on the Brother yet, but my experience with laser printers in the past has been that Laser toner holds up better over time than inkjet cartridges. It's not entirely clear if the ink dries up or it's completely the fault of the protection circuitry, but the inkjets I've used stop putting sufficient ink on the paper if I let them sit for a month or two. I have never had that problem with a laser. In fact, I've previously let lasers sit for months at a time and still gotten a good quality print out of them.
Standard disclaimers apply, but I think you'll get a much better experience with a laser printer.
Back in the day, I used to have an Epson laser printer. The manufacturer stopped producing toner after only a year or two of service. Which was really enough to peeve anyone off, considering how much they cost back then. By remanufacturing the same cartridge over and over, the printer was able to last for YEARS after Epson gave up on the unit. And since the cartridges held so much ink back them (big bastards, too!) remanufacturing only needed to be done every year or so. Thankfully the drum held out too (it was one of those combination cartridges) because that would have been hard to replace.
Your suggestion for an HP printer is well taken, but I've got to be honest with you. I just don't need the hassle. Changing the ink cartridges is only half the battle. Dealing with drivers going bonkers, protection circuitry, broken parts, feed jams, ink splots, slow prints, and other typical inkjet issues just isn't worth my time. Much better to have a laser which feeds paper through at a good clip. Especially a nice unit like these Brothers that are well supported on Mac/PC/Linux and scalable to nearly any situation I can come up with. Amazingly, the software isn't half-bad either! (I think that's the first time I've ever said THAT about a printer.)
So thank you for the suggestion, but I think I'll hang on to this laser. I will consider remanufacturing though.:-)
My notebook computer is that much closer to devolving into a pen-and-paper notebook.
I believe that's the point. If we can merge the advantages of paper with the advantages of electronic information, there will no longer be such thing as "paper copies". Imagine having a sheet of paper to scribble on. Now imagine that someone half-way around the world can see what you're scribbling. Imagine an architect rolling out blueprints for a client, then making changes right there as they speak. Imagine being able to add annotations to any document without damaging the original. Imagine being able to put up an advertisement poster that never needs to be removed.
Some of these items can be partially accomplished today with laptops and various display technologies. However, electronic paper would drive down the price of displays and increase the convenience and effectiveness of the interface.
As if I didn't already spend enough money on those damn cartridges.
That right there is why I decided to purchase a laser printer. The Brother MFC-7840W may cost $300 up front ($238 from Amazon w/free shipping), but the cartridges are only $46 and last for thousands of pages. (Standard cartridge is rated at 1,500 pages, though you can get more out of it.) In addition, the unit is an office-quality copier, scanner, and fax machine. All over a wireless network.
I've gotten into the habit of scanning my documents to PDF, then sticking the original paper version into a "safe place" where I'm sure it will never be found again. Which doesn't worry me because I can electronically pull the document and reprint. Because it's a laser, reprinting is not an issue now that I don't have to wait all friggin' day for my printouts!
Sure, there's no color. But it's not like I've been trying to get a color printer anyway. Compare to the HP and Lexmark I had previously where the ink cost twice as much, "dried up" before I managed to print more than 50 pages (stupid protection circuitry), had the flimsiest of paper trays that could only hold a dozen sheets, would only work if both the color and BW cartridges were full, and regularly crumpled the paper and jammed while they ponderously swung the print head back and forth.
I'm never going back to inkjets. Ever. I'd rather live without a printer than subject myself to such horrors again. If anyone here is thinking of making a printer purchase, consider upgrading to a laser. You'll save yourselves a fortune in the long run, and you'll send a message to these greedy printer companies that we don't want to deal with their crappy ink cartridges any longer.
Top Secret is as high as it goes. What you're thinking of is the "Need to Know" aspect of classified information. Unless the government decides that you are in a position where you "Need to Know" the designs for these weapons, then you will NOT get access to the information even if you have Top Secret clearance.
The President of the United States has the ultimate authority in deciding who gets access to Top Secret information, but that authority is often delegated to various department heads.
For quite some time, Sun was undercutting Dell on AMD64 servers. I have been told that you can still get the servers cheaper if you have a rep. The problem is that Sun gave up on the rest of the market after only a short push. (You might remember the "rhymes with hell" ads here on Slashdot.) And dealing with a central sales rep is a pain and a half when any segment of a large company can order a server through Dell.com.
So I'm not surprised that you think Sun doesn't compete with Dell. As I said, they have a massive failure in their marketing department and no real commitment to expanding their business.
The third just needs to be informed, but you probably won't reach them from/.
I don't know. It seems like we're seeing more and more uninformed posters on Slashdot these days. For example, this fellow seems to think that an SVG drawing on Wikipedia is sufficient to build a plutonium implosion device. Most uninformed posters seem to have slightly more sense than that, but there doing seem to be a serious brain-drain on Slashdot as of late.
Well then, why not explain what really was happening?
Um, they did? The high-altitude weather balloon experiment is also a matter of public record after Project Mogul was declassified in the 90's. The news stories at the time even managed to dig up a few witnesses and show them reproductions of the weather balloon. The witnesses confirmed that the space-age materials shown to them (which were very foreign in the 1940s) were in fact what they saw back at Roswell.
As you said, it hasn't stopped people from believing.
...that marketing trumps technology. Sun has some incredible tech and even delivers x86 servers at highly competitive prices. Yet because Sun's marketing sucks worse than a black hole, generating new customers is a huge issue for them. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of their business is still through customer reps with little attention paid to the market as a whole.
I personally think that Sun could be successful in quite a few areas of the market. Not the least of which is as a serious competitor to Dell's server business. But first, Sun has to figure out how to communicate with the average customer. Giving their software complex prefixes like "Sun Java System", branding everything with "SPARC" even when it isn't SPARC, changing their market ticker to JAVA, and giving up on new markets before they've made inroads aren't exactly painting Sun in a positive light.
Dear Mr. Schwartz: Please hire a real marketing department and see to it that your product line makes sense to the average consumer. KTHXBYE.
The U.S. military is experimenting with secret but terrestrial technologies there.
The frustrating part is that the successes of Area 51 are a matter of public record. The U-2 flew out of Area 51, the SR-71 flew out of Area 51, the F-117 was developed out of Area 51. With all these planes known to come out of Area 51, you'd think that people would give up on the whole "aliens from Roswell" thing. There are no flying saucers coming out of that area. Merely highly classified projects throughout the Cold War. There's even evidence to suggest that Area 51 operations have wound down in today's post cold-war culture. (See the government's official admission of Area 51's existence in 2003 for an example.)
Excuse me, Sir? With all due respect, you're full of crap. Not a single point in your post is correct. Conventional explosives are NOT sufficient to aresolise nuclear materials, conventional explosives are NOT sufficient to disperse the materials over a wide area, Uranium is NOT highly radioactive, some forms of Plutonium ARE reasonably radioactive but primarily degrade as Alpha radiation (effectively harmless since aresolising Pu-238 is difficult and ineffective), being near Uranium or Plutonium does NOT pose a significant health hazard, millions of people will not die, and you sir have become a pawn of terrorism. Just as the media has. There is no real-world basis for the claims you are making about dirty bombs.
If you want to save lives from radiation dispersion, stop coal plants from dispersing radioactive materials in their smoke. Stop people from smoking cigarettes. Stop the use of oil and natural gas. Stop foreign nations from performing nuclear tests. (The US and Russia already contaminated the world back in the 50s and 60s.) Because those are the REAL sources of contamination. Coal burning alone outweighs the effects of a dirty bomb by several orders of magnitude.
So with all due respect, please educate yourself before propagating misinformation.
But once you have Plutonium READY in your hands, you just need just a handful of people to make a working implosion device. It is not as difficult as you are feeling.
And what do you base this opinion on... what exactly? The casing for implosion devices has to be perfect. That's why easily half the locations for the Manhattan Project were devoted to manufacturing and metal works. In fact, implosion devices had originally been discounted altogether due to the difficulty in constructing one. It was only after the researchers realized that a gun-type plutonium device would not work that Oppenheimer redirected efforts toward an implosion device.
Don't devalue the amount of work and number of tests that went into making the Trinity test a success. From Wikipedia:
Born out of a small research program in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly $2 billion USD ($24 billion in 2008 dollars based on CPI). It resulted in the creation of multiple production and research sites that operated in secret.
The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory, now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. Project research took place at over thirty sites across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
That's an insane amount of resources to pour into a project. And even with some of the world's best nuclear scientists on the job, they went from scratch to a successful test in a little less than a decade. Can your average terrorist organization throw those kinds of resources at a project AND still ensure a successful first test?
As a terror weapon, it works. The people who do not understand the difference vastly outnumber the ones who do. BOMB? Radiation!?! SERIOUS PANIC
This is true. However, the terrorists only get one shot. After the dirty bomb fails to do significant damage, its effectiveness as a weapon will drop. Each succeeding failure will reduce the effectiveness of the panic attack until the "dirty" part of the bomb is completely ignored by the public.
On the bright side, we'd have a lot less ignorance about nuclear power.;-)
For your sake, I hope this is a joke. The tolerances of implosion nuclear weapons are incredibly tight. The type of plans necessary to create a functioning implosion device are state-held secrets and have only been seen by a select few with Top Secret clearance. Anything you can get out of a textbook or off the internet is simply not detailed enough to produce a functional weapon.
Think of it this way. You need to pack C4 in a casing such that:
1. The force of the C4 is completely contained.
2. The force is evenly applied to the plutonium sphere such that it won't shift or move about during detonation.
3. The force is projected as close to spherically as possible.
Those are tall orders for any engineer! As I said, the tolerances are so tight that the most likely outcome of any detonation is a fizzle. Only with very sophisticated R&D can any superpower even hope to create an implosion device.
Gun type on the other hand, are easy. Just slam two hemispheres of Uranium together hard enough and BOOM. With that kind of ease of use, why would any non-superpower bother with implosion devices? (For the record, gun-types were retired by the military due to safety concerns. If anything accidentally sets off the explosive trigger... BOOM! Whereas implosion devices can be designed to fizzle if accidentally detonated before arming.)
They're also highly ineffective. Very little fallout can be spread through conventional means. And of the fallout that does spread, you'll kill very few people. The explosion intended to disperse the materials is guaranteed to kill more people than the radioactive fallout.
Rule of thumb: If the fallout is hot enough to kill a large number of people, it's hot enough to completely degrade within hours to months. The only place you're going to find those sorts of materials is inside a live reactor. For obvious reasons, it's not really feasible to get a hold of such materials.
Worst case scenario, you give a half-dozen people lung cancer. Not exactly an effective weapon.
Relatively speaking, building a space shuttle is easy once you have enough fuel. Relatively speaking.
Sorry, but no. The implosion part of the weapon is incredibly difficult. Far more difficult than your average terrorist organization could pull off. One of the reasons why the US restricts supercomputers and monitors for large detonations is that development tends to require both a computer simulation (to get the design right) and experimentation to ensure the quality of construction. If you have enough materials, you can forgo the former part and just experiment.
Perhaps you're thinking of gun-type weapons? Those are stupidly simple to build in comparison to an implosion device. However, they are made from Uranium rather than Plutonium.
Any such organization can fabricate an atomic bomb, using a grapefruit-sized piece of plutonium, without undue difficulty or expense.
That is such a bizarre statement that I'm just going to stare at you in shock.
*stares*
You do know that working Plutonium implosion devices are super-hard to create, right? Unless you have everything precisely calibrated, the bomb will merely fizzle rather than fission. So even with a safe full of Plutonium, it will be a long time until someone sets us up the bomb. (Say, about 92 years?:-P)
Also from the article I read that corrupt retailers and waiters use portable card readers to steal all mag data on the card. How would you protect yourself against that kind of attack?
As long as we use credit cards, you and I can't protect ourselves. However, the credit card companies could. Using public key authentication via smartcard technology would make it easy to verify physical access to a credit card. Yet the only instance I can think of, of anyone trying to roll this out is American Express's Blue card. Even that was mostly ineffective as the smart card circuitry appears to go mostly unused.
He leaked classified information to the blonde he was banging and she used it to kill billions of people.
Not directly. She was posing as a military contractor who helped him build some of the Colonial defense programs. She was pretty deeply embedded. Enough to where she must have had the trust of multiple people, not just Baltar.
Besides, it's easy enough to leave that part out. Spin, spin, spin. Say, she was a military contractor who worked on the same project as Baltar. He thought they were in love. Turns out she was working to undermine Colonial defenses and probably cared nothing for him. Now he's the victim and no one can prove otherwise.
Baltar's actions directly caused the destruction of 12 colonies and the loss of billions of lives.
I guarantee that he wouldn't see it that way. And he'd do a good job of making others see it his way. Besides, it was already known that the cylons infiltrated his computer code. (Something which he admitted without blinking an eye. Hmm.) Since no one tried to put him on trial for it, he should probably get the rest out as quickly as possible. Before the political winds shift out of his favor.
He is then left on the only ship in the fleet under something more akin to martial law where he can be killed out of hand for treason.
The stark reality of this situation didn't become apparent until much later. Both for him and for those in command. He had plenty of time to be using that positive situation (all things considered) in his favor. Furthermore, he knew that the President and Adama needed him. As long as he was valuable, they wouldn't get rid of him. Why wait until his survival becomes politically inconvenient?
As characters go, Baltar's portrayal can be surprisingly dumb at times.
He's escaping being held responsible, but he's personally admitting to himself that he's responsible. A person like Baltar does not believe he's responsible for anything. It's always someone else's fault. And that's exactly how it would have come out.
"I didn't do anything wrong. We were tricked! Worst yet, I bet that President Adar was aware of these skin-jobs and failed to protect us!"
The great thing about dead people is that they make wonderful scape goats. Especially when the situation leaves little reason for people to hold their memory in honor.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm only interested in black and white prints so this doesn't apply to me, but you may want to be wary of the cost of Kodak paper. The word on the street is that their ink costs are lower, but they make up the difference by requiring you to use their special paper to get good colors. Alternative photo papers don't appear to work because of a difference in the texturing of the paper. (The printer can't feed it properly.)
The other issue to watch out for is driver bizarreness. Various reports have complained of odd problems with the printer becoming unavailable, missing parts of the print job, PC crashes, and other driver-related oddities.
So as long as you can either fix, workaround, or otherwise avoid these issues, it should be a good printer. However, I still recommend a laser if you don't need color. :-)
I'm not sure if I can give a good answer on the Brother yet, but my experience with laser printers in the past has been that Laser toner holds up better over time than inkjet cartridges. It's not entirely clear if the ink dries up or it's completely the fault of the protection circuitry, but the inkjets I've used stop putting sufficient ink on the paper if I let them sit for a month or two. I have never had that problem with a laser. In fact, I've previously let lasers sit for months at a time and still gotten a good quality print out of them.
Standard disclaimers apply, but I think you'll get a much better experience with a laser printer.
Back in the day, I used to have an Epson laser printer. The manufacturer stopped producing toner after only a year or two of service. Which was really enough to peeve anyone off, considering how much they cost back then. By remanufacturing the same cartridge over and over, the printer was able to last for YEARS after Epson gave up on the unit. And since the cartridges held so much ink back them (big bastards, too!) remanufacturing only needed to be done every year or so. Thankfully the drum held out too (it was one of those combination cartridges) because that would have been hard to replace.
Your suggestion for an HP printer is well taken, but I've got to be honest with you. I just don't need the hassle. Changing the ink cartridges is only half the battle. Dealing with drivers going bonkers, protection circuitry, broken parts, feed jams, ink splots, slow prints, and other typical inkjet issues just isn't worth my time. Much better to have a laser which feeds paper through at a good clip. Especially a nice unit like these Brothers that are well supported on Mac/PC/Linux and scalable to nearly any situation I can come up with. Amazingly, the software isn't half-bad either! (I think that's the first time I've ever said THAT about a printer.)
So thank you for the suggestion, but I think I'll hang on to this laser. I will consider remanufacturing though. :-)
I believe that's the point. If we can merge the advantages of paper with the advantages of electronic information, there will no longer be such thing as "paper copies". Imagine having a sheet of paper to scribble on. Now imagine that someone half-way around the world can see what you're scribbling. Imagine an architect rolling out blueprints for a client, then making changes right there as they speak. Imagine being able to add annotations to any document without damaging the original. Imagine being able to put up an advertisement poster that never needs to be removed.
Some of these items can be partially accomplished today with laptops and various display technologies. However, electronic paper would drive down the price of displays and increase the convenience and effectiveness of the interface.
Somewhat off topic, but I just had to share.
That right there is why I decided to purchase a laser printer. The Brother MFC-7840W may cost $300 up front ($238 from Amazon w/free shipping), but the cartridges are only $46 and last for thousands of pages. (Standard cartridge is rated at 1,500 pages, though you can get more out of it.) In addition, the unit is an office-quality copier, scanner, and fax machine. All over a wireless network.
I've gotten into the habit of scanning my documents to PDF, then sticking the original paper version into a "safe place" where I'm sure it will never be found again. Which doesn't worry me because I can electronically pull the document and reprint. Because it's a laser, reprinting is not an issue now that I don't have to wait all friggin' day for my printouts!
Sure, there's no color. But it's not like I've been trying to get a color printer anyway. Compare to the HP and Lexmark I had previously where the ink cost twice as much, "dried up" before I managed to print more than 50 pages (stupid protection circuitry), had the flimsiest of paper trays that could only hold a dozen sheets, would only work if both the color and BW cartridges were full, and regularly crumpled the paper and jammed while they ponderously swung the print head back and forth.
I'm never going back to inkjets. Ever. I'd rather live without a printer than subject myself to such horrors again. If anyone here is thinking of making a printer purchase, consider upgrading to a laser. You'll save yourselves a fortune in the long run, and you'll send a message to these greedy printer companies that we don't want to deal with their crappy ink cartridges any longer.
Top Secret is as high as it goes. What you're thinking of is the "Need to Know" aspect of classified information. Unless the government decides that you are in a position where you "Need to Know" the designs for these weapons, then you will NOT get access to the information even if you have Top Secret clearance.
The President of the United States has the ultimate authority in deciding who gets access to Top Secret information, but that authority is often delegated to various department heads.
Seems that someone confused their b with their d. It happens a lot with kids in preschool and kindergarten.
I knew that the Slashdot readership was getting younger, but I didn't realize HOW young!
For quite some time, Sun was undercutting Dell on AMD64 servers. I have been told that you can still get the servers cheaper if you have a rep. The problem is that Sun gave up on the rest of the market after only a short push. (You might remember the "rhymes with hell" ads here on Slashdot.) And dealing with a central sales rep is a pain and a half when any segment of a large company can order a server through Dell.com.
So I'm not surprised that you think Sun doesn't compete with Dell. As I said, they have a massive failure in their marketing department and no real commitment to expanding their business.
I don't know. It seems like we're seeing more and more uninformed posters on Slashdot these days. For example, this fellow seems to think that an SVG drawing on Wikipedia is sufficient to build a plutonium implosion device. Most uninformed posters seem to have slightly more sense than that, but there doing seem to be a serious brain-drain on Slashdot as of late.
Um, they did? The high-altitude weather balloon experiment is also a matter of public record after Project Mogul was declassified in the 90's. The news stories at the time even managed to dig up a few witnesses and show them reproductions of the weather balloon. The witnesses confirmed that the space-age materials shown to them (which were very foreign in the 1940s) were in fact what they saw back at Roswell.
As you said, it hasn't stopped people from believing.
...that marketing trumps technology. Sun has some incredible tech and even delivers x86 servers at highly competitive prices. Yet because Sun's marketing sucks worse than a black hole, generating new customers is a huge issue for them. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of their business is still through customer reps with little attention paid to the market as a whole.
I personally think that Sun could be successful in quite a few areas of the market. Not the least of which is as a serious competitor to Dell's server business. But first, Sun has to figure out how to communicate with the average customer. Giving their software complex prefixes like "Sun Java System", branding everything with "SPARC" even when it isn't SPARC, changing their market ticker to JAVA, and giving up on new markets before they've made inroads aren't exactly painting Sun in a positive light.
Dear Mr. Schwartz: Please hire a real marketing department and see to it that your product line makes sense to the average consumer. KTHXBYE.
The frustrating part is that the successes of Area 51 are a matter of public record. The U-2 flew out of Area 51, the SR-71 flew out of Area 51, the F-117 was developed out of Area 51. With all these planes known to come out of Area 51, you'd think that people would give up on the whole "aliens from Roswell" thing. There are no flying saucers coming out of that area. Merely highly classified projects throughout the Cold War. There's even evidence to suggest that Area 51 operations have wound down in today's post cold-war culture. (See the government's official admission of Area 51's existence in 2003 for an example.)
Excuse me, Sir? With all due respect, you're full of crap. Not a single point in your post is correct. Conventional explosives are NOT sufficient to aresolise nuclear materials, conventional explosives are NOT sufficient to disperse the materials over a wide area, Uranium is NOT highly radioactive, some forms of Plutonium ARE reasonably radioactive but primarily degrade as Alpha radiation (effectively harmless since aresolising Pu-238 is difficult and ineffective), being near Uranium or Plutonium does NOT pose a significant health hazard, millions of people will not die, and you sir have become a pawn of terrorism. Just as the media has. There is no real-world basis for the claims you are making about dirty bombs.
If you want to save lives from radiation dispersion, stop coal plants from dispersing radioactive materials in their smoke. Stop people from smoking cigarettes. Stop the use of oil and natural gas. Stop foreign nations from performing nuclear tests. (The US and Russia already contaminated the world back in the 50s and 60s.) Because those are the REAL sources of contamination. Coal burning alone outweighs the effects of a dirty bomb by several orders of magnitude.
So with all due respect, please educate yourself before propagating misinformation.
Intellivision!
Wait... what were we talking about?
And what do you base this opinion on... what exactly? The casing for implosion devices has to be perfect. That's why easily half the locations for the Manhattan Project were devoted to manufacturing and metal works. In fact, implosion devices had originally been discounted altogether due to the difficulty in constructing one. It was only after the researchers realized that a gun-type plutonium device would not work that Oppenheimer redirected efforts toward an implosion device.
Don't devalue the amount of work and number of tests that went into making the Trinity test a success. From Wikipedia:
That's an insane amount of resources to pour into a project. And even with some of the world's best nuclear scientists on the job, they went from scratch to a successful test in a little less than a decade. Can your average terrorist organization throw those kinds of resources at a project AND still ensure a successful first test?
This is true. However, the terrorists only get one shot. After the dirty bomb fails to do significant damage, its effectiveness as a weapon will drop. Each succeeding failure will reduce the effectiveness of the panic attack until the "dirty" part of the bomb is completely ignored by the public.
On the bright side, we'd have a lot less ignorance about nuclear power. ;-)
For your sake, I hope this is a joke. The tolerances of implosion nuclear weapons are incredibly tight. The type of plans necessary to create a functioning implosion device are state-held secrets and have only been seen by a select few with Top Secret clearance. Anything you can get out of a textbook or off the internet is simply not detailed enough to produce a functional weapon.
Think of it this way. You need to pack C4 in a casing such that:
1. The force of the C4 is completely contained.
2. The force is evenly applied to the plutonium sphere such that it won't shift or move about during detonation.
3. The force is projected as close to spherically as possible.
Those are tall orders for any engineer! As I said, the tolerances are so tight that the most likely outcome of any detonation is a fizzle. Only with very sophisticated R&D can any superpower even hope to create an implosion device.
Gun type on the other hand, are easy. Just slam two hemispheres of Uranium together hard enough and BOOM. With that kind of ease of use, why would any non-superpower bother with implosion devices? (For the record, gun-types were retired by the military due to safety concerns. If anything accidentally sets off the explosive trigger... BOOM! Whereas implosion devices can be designed to fizzle if accidentally detonated before arming.)
They're also highly ineffective. Very little fallout can be spread through conventional means. And of the fallout that does spread, you'll kill very few people. The explosion intended to disperse the materials is guaranteed to kill more people than the radioactive fallout.
Rule of thumb: If the fallout is hot enough to kill a large number of people, it's hot enough to completely degrade within hours to months. The only place you're going to find those sorts of materials is inside a live reactor. For obvious reasons, it's not really feasible to get a hold of such materials.
Worst case scenario, you give a half-dozen people lung cancer. Not exactly an effective weapon.
Relatively speaking, building a space shuttle is easy once you have enough fuel. Relatively speaking.
Sorry, but no. The implosion part of the weapon is incredibly difficult. Far more difficult than your average terrorist organization could pull off. One of the reasons why the US restricts supercomputers and monitors for large detonations is that development tends to require both a computer simulation (to get the design right) and experimentation to ensure the quality of construction. If you have enough materials, you can forgo the former part and just experiment.
Perhaps you're thinking of gun-type weapons? Those are stupidly simple to build in comparison to an implosion device. However, they are made from Uranium rather than Plutonium.
That is such a bizarre statement that I'm just going to stare at you in shock.
*stares*
You do know that working Plutonium implosion devices are super-hard to create, right? Unless you have everything precisely calibrated, the bomb will merely fizzle rather than fission. So even with a safe full of Plutonium, it will be a long time until someone sets us up the bomb. (Say, about 92 years? :-P)
As long as we use credit cards, you and I can't protect ourselves. However, the credit card companies could. Using public key authentication via smartcard technology would make it easy to verify physical access to a credit card. Yet the only instance I can think of, of anyone trying to roll this out is American Express's Blue card. Even that was mostly ineffective as the smart card circuitry appears to go mostly unused.
Not directly. She was posing as a military contractor who helped him build some of the Colonial defense programs. She was pretty deeply embedded. Enough to where she must have had the trust of multiple people, not just Baltar.
Besides, it's easy enough to leave that part out. Spin, spin, spin. Say, she was a military contractor who worked on the same project as Baltar. He thought they were in love. Turns out she was working to undermine Colonial defenses and probably cared nothing for him. Now he's the victim and no one can prove otherwise.
Tada! Spin control. Gotta love it.
I guarantee that he wouldn't see it that way. And he'd do a good job of making others see it his way. Besides, it was already known that the cylons infiltrated his computer code. (Something which he admitted without blinking an eye. Hmm.) Since no one tried to put him on trial for it, he should probably get the rest out as quickly as possible. Before the political winds shift out of his favor.
The stark reality of this situation didn't become apparent until much later. Both for him and for those in command. He had plenty of time to be using that positive situation (all things considered) in his favor. Furthermore, he knew that the President and Adama needed him. As long as he was valuable, they wouldn't get rid of him. Why wait until his survival becomes politically inconvenient?
As characters go, Baltar's portrayal can be surprisingly dumb at times.
He's escaping being held responsible, but he's personally admitting to himself that he's responsible. A person like Baltar does not believe he's responsible for anything. It's always someone else's fault. And that's exactly how it would have come out.
"I didn't do anything wrong. We were tricked! Worst yet, I bet that President Adar was aware of these skin-jobs and failed to protect us!"
The great thing about dead people is that they make wonderful scape goats. Especially when the situation leaves little reason for people to hold their memory in honor. ;-)