I take serious offense to your comment about "degenerate gamblers".
OK, chill out dude- it was a joke! I didn't mean to imply "all poker players are scum"- in fact I said "customer / degenerate gambler" which I felt left enough room for nondegenerates to be "customers".
As a general rule, anyone who needs to steal money to gamble isn't on a winning streak.
I'd just assumed the opposite- that the guy hadn't stolen in order to gamble, but that he'd gambled in order to steal (after getting my card number and then being disappointed by the piss-poor balance). From the perspective of a fraudster, it's a no-lose proposition- either you fatten the account into something worth draining, or you just move on to the next stolen card number. Gambling with other people's money wouldn't bring on the same sort of adrenaline rush. Not for me, anyway. But what do I know? I never gambled. The charges turned out to originate from Cyprus. Maybe there's no gambling to be had in Cyprus except on the Internet?
I had a debit/ATM card compromised somehow last year. There wasn't very much in the account at the time, so the guy set up an account "for" me at a poker site and tried to gamble my balance up. He lost a few hundred. I noticed the withdrawls a few hours later and called the bank, after finding that my wife and I didn't have enough money to go out to a nice dinner that night. (The charges hadn't posted and were labeled as "ATM/POS activity", so I didn't know how they were spent. I just knew it wasn't me.) I called the bank and while I was on the phone with the bank rep, more weird charges were coming in! We were both watching someone gamble away all my money in real time. So he red flagged them all and gave me a claim code.
The next day the phone rings. "Hello, this is Planet Poker..." and without thinking I say "No thank you" and hang up. The phone rings again a few minutes later. "Planet Poker..." and I say "please take me off your list" and hang up, still thinking it's a telemarketing call. Which sounds stupid given the withdrawls the day before, but I didn't put two and two together. (It was Planet Poker calling me to welcome me as a new degenerate gambler / customer.)
The phone rings again. "Don't hang up we think someone used your credit card!" she says really fast. I said, oh yeah, I reported those charges to the bank yesterday.
Then she sounds sullen. "Well... I guess we'll be getting the chargebacks then..."
I said, "yeah, I guess so!"
Don't know if the guy was using a program to help him cheat, but he played really badly.
Well I don't believe that most people outside of the US are in a good position to understand US politics. The coverage the rest of the world get of the presidential candiates (to take an example) is slim.
I would argue the exact opposite. People outside the U.S. are far more likely to understand the positions of the presidential candidates (to take an example) than are Americans who are only exposed to media from their own country. The BBC, for example, is one of the most credible sources for American politics. The Canadian papers are good too. In the U.S. the press went downhill after they ditched the Fairness Doctrine. Now the sole objective of news programming is to make money, and you make money by telling people what they want to hear- and by telling them what you want them to hear so that you can make even more money. You can have it all. You can elect whoever you damn well please with no consequences. No matter how arrogant or incompetent he is, the world will still respect you and your country will still be #1 because you don't have to live with your decisions. People love to hear spin marketed as truth, especially if it avoids challenging their beliefs.
All the world sees of Bush is his speeches on Iraq or from F/911. They rarely get to see him as a human being while he's compaigning or mingling.
And irrelevant crap like that should influence your vote because...?
What he says about Iraq (for example) is exactly the sort of thing any voter would rightfully need to hear. Anything else- like how he mingles as a human being, or hunts, or fishes- is noise. Although it's interesting how Americans have become heavily indoctrinated into thinking that they're electing a fishing buddy here. It's what they're told is important. Do a Google News search for "Kerry" and "wind surfing", and you'll see why a proven incompetent like George W. Bush is still even in the race. The entire press minus CBS is gunning for him, and CBS just handed him a free pass on his festering Guard issue.
These are the people who think they should have a right to vote in the US elections.
Americans would make a better electoral decision- and probably vote more in line with their own interests to boot- if each one of them were assigned a random foreigner to tell him how to vote. Americans simply don't know what is going on in their own country.
I spoke to someone just back from the U.K. today at work. According to him, everyone across the political spectrum- practically without exception- is livid about this election. They believe it will affect their lives in the U.K. almost as much as it will affect Americans. But none of them can cast a vote against Bush. And until the campaign started, they had blithely assumed over there that Bush would surely lose the election because of Iraq.
but the problem with this bomb is almost all of the yield was from the casing, which is actually highly enriched weapons grade uranium. This has a half-life of 4.5x10^9 years.
That means it is U-238, which is depleted uranium, not highly enriched weapons grade uranium. HEU is a mixture of isotopes containing a larger percentage of U-235 which is required for the self-sustaining reaction in the center.
The DU in the casing increases the yield by fissioning when struck by neutrons from the center but DU can't support a chain reaction by itself. It doesn't release enough neutrons per fission event.
This is a perfect example of slashdot. You SOUND as though you know what you are talking about but then you get some basic thing totally wrong and your credibility as a know-it-all goes down the drain.
Yeah, this happens a lot. If you post within the first hour after a thread starts, with stuff that you think you remember from college, your post immediately floats up to a visibility of 5. Then you are promptly set upon by a roving gang of nuclear physicists.
You got that exactly backwards. The neutron bomb would release large amounts of neutrons and gamma radiation without the large explosion - thereby killing all living things within a large radius but causing explosion damage only within a small radius.
What I described was not a "neutron bomb" at all, as five or six people have pointed out. A neutron bomb was just an ordinary thermonuclear bomb with no U-238 jacket to scavenge the stray neutrons for a blast/neutron flux tradeoff. That only cuts the blast yield by a third or a half- the bomb inside is smaller too. There was a semiserious objective to entirely replace the fission trigger with some sort of nonnuclear trigger, and that's what I thought the term "neutron bomb" referred to. But chemical reactions never go higher than a few dozen eV (1 eV = 10000K) so it was never more than a dream. I always wondered how they were going to pull it off.
Close, very close, but not quite right. The trigger is a single fission bomb; the radiation it produces is redirected cleverly so as to compress the fusion charge (a concept referred to as a "Hohlraum").
http://www.chemistry-dictionary.com/hohlraum
a laboratory device to produce blackbody radiation. Consists of a closed metal tube, blackened on the inside, with a narrow slit cut into one of the flat ends. On heating the tube the radiation escaping from the slit is virtually identical with that expected from a blackbody.
In some designs there are more than two "stages" where fission triggers fusion, which then is used to trigger more fission or, in some cases, another fusion stage I was just going from my memory of an illustration I once saw in a really crufty old book from the fifties, where lots of little fission trigger bombs were shown surrounding an LiH tank. I assume better designs than that were around even then, all including at least one fission trigger.
By "fusion which then is used to trigger more fission" I assume you're referring to fission of U-238 by neutrons from an earlier fusion stage.
OK, so that's what a "neutron bomb" is. That's trivial then, and not what I was thinking. The depleted uranium jacket is a dirt cheap way to increase the yield. Depleted uranium may not support a self-sustaining chain reaction but it can parasitize one, and it releases plenty of energy if neutrons shine on it.
He is talking about the tritiated lithium hydride, not the Pu-239 used in the surrounding triggers (which is quite salvageable from both an engineering and a financial standpoint).
A thermonuclear bomb (at least as made in the fifties) is essentially a tank of deuterated and tritiated lithium hydride (LiH) that will explode with great fury if quickly raised to a temperature of millions of degrees within a span of milliseconds. It's very difficult to create the required temperatures quickly with chemical explosives- the easiest way to do it is to surround the tank with numerous small fission devices, which heat the tank to millions of degrees quickly and easily and are responsible for the radioactive fallout still associated with fusion bombs. (The "neutron bomb" was a planned attempt to replace the fission warheads with chemical explosives, creating a thermonuclear explosion with no radioactive fallout- a truly impressive feat if it were possible.)
Since the bomb was lost 46 years ago, which is about 4 tritium half lives, the maximum possible yield has in theory been reduced to 1/16 of what it was in 1958, and the actual yield is probably zero, as you would expect of a fusion device that has spent many tritium half lives on the seafloor. The tank is probably full of lithium oxide and all sorts of crap, although it may still contain enough H isotopes to make it worth recovering. But the Pu is undoubtedly going to be salvaged. In dollar terms, Pu makes Au look like Si.
No, I'd rather see it used on India to combat the offshoring problem.
Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.
This call may be recorded for purposes of quality assurance. Hello, tech support, "Guy" speaking. Yes, I'm having trouble with this global thermonuclear warhead, I can't get the BSD driver working! OK sir, to help you, I have to know whether you are using Windows 98/ME or Windows XP. This isn't either, it's BSD. I can't get the system to recognize the device at all. Could you please first to double click on the "My Computer"... You're from India aren't you! I'm taking this global thermonuclear warhead back to the store!
Why didn't you just say nothing at all then? The guy doesn't care about your conscience right now. He was looking for solutions.
Since when is that the criterion for a post adding to the discussion? You must think Ask Slashdot is a free consulting service we are running here. The discussions are for the benefit of everyone who participates, not just the OP, and posts that don't contain solutions are still allowed.
Several months ago a PHB posted an Ask Slashdot article asking for someone to write a shell script for his company. He was promptly excoriated by hundreds of unemployed geeks for being a cheap bastard. (Although his Ask Slashdot article was a success because someone did post a three-line shell script that met his stated requirements.) I don't remember any demands for downmoderations on posts with no shell scripts in them, or suggestions that people "just say nothing at all then" if they didn't have a shell script to post.
If someone from a corporate pig farm asks how to get the pig stink off his computers, posts about corporate pig farms in general should be expected and are entirely on topic for the discussion. The OP opened the door, and there's a lot to say about them. They crush family owned farms which can't compete with the vast economies of scale- which can only be achieved legally thanks to extensive lobbying and political corruption. The farms enjoy exemptions to environmental laws that still apply to everybody else. They regularly cause environmental disasters every time there is a flood. The stench they generate destroys real estate prices for miles downwind. People have lost everything when these farms get built near their homes. And unlike nuclear plants, jails, waste incinerators, or sewage treatment plants, NIMBY is entirely justified here since corporate pig farms do not serve the public interest at all. We aren't allowed to talk about this?
Frankly, 600 posts about rubbing alcohol does not make a very interesting discussion.
Kerning, the spacing between letters in a propotional font, is something a typewriter of that era is not capable of. It has no idea what letter came before it, and therefore can't space the letters the way computers can today. Doesn't matter WHAT font style it's in. Typewriters of that era are simply not able to do that.
That's the smoking gun in all this, and that's what proves those documents are fake.
Where did the Bush Administration get their copies of the "forgeries" that they released themselves the same day? Oh, from the Kerry campaign. You've got it all figured out.
Considering that these documents are forgeries, what this really shows is that the Democrats are so desperate to get rid of Bush that now they're actually forging documents to do so.
No helium or tritium... have they checked for (... pause while I google for what deuterium plus palladium form...) silver?
Ha ha ha... don't think they need to.
The strong electric field surrounding a palladium nucleus will provide plenty of shielding to keep any stray deuterons far away.
And palladium is heavier than iron. Fusion becomes an endothermic process for nuclei that heavy. They'd have to explain why the apparatus was suddenly getting cold.
Also check out Art of Illusion which is a full-featured cross-platform modeler/raytracer but has a POV-Ray export feature. I know the author from work and he is a genius.
Someone who successfully claims the Sun as his own property is exposing himself to an incredible amount of liability. When the Sun eventually runs out of hydrogen it will swell and increase in brightness 10X-100X until our oceans boil away. The Earth may actually fall into the Sun if it expands enough.
This guy better put his $10 in an interest-earning account today.
What this leads to over time is people in these third-world countries, as well as the people who are hiring them from around the world, gradually having a better life than they did before.
That is a logical consequence of importing Third World misery and desperation into the United States. If this country were to start acting in its own interests again, and not just the interests of its upper class, it would stop.
PENCIL AND PAPER?! Oh how primitive! You must feel so disenfranchised. How can you trust the results?
The problem with you Canadians is that your democracy requires too much human intervention. I'm glad I live in the U.S.A. On Election Day, we're going to pick the president with the machine that goes *ping*!
Slashdot Mirror
I take serious offense to your comment about "degenerate gamblers".
OK, chill out dude- it was a joke!
I didn't mean to imply "all poker players are scum"- in fact I said "customer / degenerate gambler" which I felt left enough room for nondegenerates to be "customers".
OK, that makes much more sense than any of my theories. I'd assumed the guy was just playing against the house.
As a general rule, anyone who needs to steal money to gamble isn't on a winning streak.
I'd just assumed the opposite- that the guy hadn't stolen in order to gamble, but that he'd gambled in order to steal (after getting my card number and then being disappointed by the piss-poor balance). From the perspective of a fraudster, it's a no-lose proposition- either you fatten the account into something worth draining, or you just move on to the next stolen card number. Gambling with other people's money wouldn't bring on the same sort of adrenaline rush. Not for me, anyway. But what do I know? I never gambled.
The charges turned out to originate from Cyprus. Maybe there's no gambling to be had in Cyprus except on the Internet?
I had a debit/ATM card compromised somehow last year. There wasn't very much in the account at the time, so the guy set up an account "for" me at a poker site and tried to gamble my balance up. He lost a few hundred. I noticed the withdrawls a few hours later and called the bank, after finding that my wife and I didn't have enough money to go out to a nice dinner that night. (The charges hadn't posted and were labeled as "ATM/POS activity", so I didn't know how they were spent. I just knew it wasn't me.)
I called the bank and while I was on the phone with the bank rep, more weird charges were coming in! We were both watching someone gamble away all my money in real time. So he red flagged them all and gave me a claim code.
The next day the phone rings. "Hello, this is Planet Poker..." and without thinking I say "No thank you" and hang up. The phone rings again a few minutes later. "Planet Poker..." and I say "please take me off your list" and hang up, still thinking it's a telemarketing call. Which sounds stupid given the withdrawls the day before, but I didn't put two and two together. (It was Planet Poker calling me to welcome me as a new degenerate gambler / customer.)
The phone rings again. "Don't hang up we think someone used your credit card!" she says really fast. I said, oh yeah, I reported those charges to the bank yesterday.
Then she sounds sullen. "Well... I guess we'll be getting the chargebacks then..."
I said, "yeah, I guess so!"
Don't know if the guy was using a program to help him cheat, but he played really badly.
Well I don't believe that most people outside of the US are in a good position to understand US politics. The coverage the rest of the world get of the presidential candiates (to take an example) is slim.
I would argue the exact opposite. People outside the U.S. are far more likely to understand the positions of the presidential candidates (to take an example) than are Americans who are only exposed to media from their own country. The BBC, for example, is one of the most credible sources for American politics. The Canadian papers are good too. In the U.S. the press went downhill after they ditched the Fairness Doctrine. Now the sole objective of news programming is to make money, and you make money by telling people what they want to hear- and by telling them what you want them to hear so that you can make even more money. You can have it all. You can elect whoever you damn well please with no consequences. No matter how arrogant or incompetent he is, the world will still respect you and your country will still be #1 because you don't have to live with your decisions. People love to hear spin marketed as truth, especially if it avoids challenging their beliefs.
All the world sees of Bush is his speeches on Iraq or from F/911. They rarely get to see him as a human being while he's compaigning or mingling.
And irrelevant crap like that should influence your vote because...?
What he says about Iraq (for example) is exactly the sort of thing any voter would rightfully need to hear. Anything else- like how he mingles as a human being, or hunts, or fishes- is noise. Although it's interesting how Americans have become heavily indoctrinated into thinking that they're electing a fishing buddy here. It's what they're told is important. Do a Google News search for "Kerry" and "wind surfing", and you'll see why a proven incompetent like George W. Bush is still even in the race. The entire press minus CBS is gunning for him, and CBS just handed him a free pass on his festering Guard issue.
These are the people who think they should have a right to vote in the US elections.
Americans would make a better electoral decision- and probably vote more in line with their own interests to boot- if each one of them were assigned a random foreigner to tell him how to vote. Americans simply don't know what is going on in their own country.
I spoke to someone just back from the U.K. today at work. According to him, everyone across the political spectrum- practically without exception- is livid about this election. They believe it will affect their lives in the U.K. almost as much as it will affect Americans. But none of them can cast a vote against Bush. And until the campaign started, they had blithely assumed over there that Bush would surely lose the election because of Iraq.
but the problem with this bomb is almost all of the yield was from the casing, which is actually highly enriched weapons grade uranium. This has a half-life of 4.5x10^9 years.
That means it is U-238, which is depleted uranium, not highly enriched weapons grade uranium. HEU is a mixture of isotopes containing a larger percentage of U-235 which is required for the self-sustaining reaction in the center.
The DU in the casing increases the yield by fissioning when struck by neutrons from the center but DU can't support a chain reaction by itself. It doesn't release enough neutrons per fission event.
This is a perfect example of slashdot. You SOUND as though you know what you are talking about but then you get some basic thing totally wrong and your credibility as a know-it-all goes down the drain.
Yeah, this happens a lot. If you post within the first hour after a thread starts, with stuff that you think you remember from college, your post immediately floats up to a visibility of 5. Then you are promptly set upon by a roving gang of nuclear physicists.
You got that exactly backwards. The neutron bomb would release large amounts of neutrons and gamma radiation without the large explosion - thereby killing all living things within a large radius but causing explosion damage only within a small radius.
What I described was not a "neutron bomb" at all, as five or six people have pointed out. A neutron bomb was just an ordinary thermonuclear bomb with no U-238 jacket to scavenge the stray neutrons for a blast/neutron flux tradeoff. That only cuts the blast yield by a third or a half- the bomb inside is smaller too.
There was a semiserious objective to entirely replace the fission trigger with some sort of nonnuclear trigger, and that's what I thought the term "neutron bomb" referred to. But chemical reactions never go higher than a few dozen eV (1 eV = 10000K) so it was never more than a dream. I always wondered how they were going to pull it off.
http://www.chemistry-dictionary.com/hohlraum
In some designs there are more than two "stages" where fission triggers fusion, which then is used to trigger more fission or, in some cases, another fusion stage
I was just going from my memory of an illustration I once saw in a really crufty old book from the fifties, where lots of little fission trigger bombs were shown surrounding an LiH tank. I assume better designs than that were around even then, all including at least one fission trigger.
By "fusion which then is used to trigger more fission" I assume you're referring to fission of U-238 by neutrons from an earlier fusion stage.
OK, so that's what a "neutron bomb" is. That's trivial then, and not what I was thinking. The depleted uranium jacket is a dirt cheap way to increase the yield. Depleted uranium may not support a self-sustaining chain reaction but it can parasitize one, and it releases plenty of energy if neutrons shine on it.
He is talking about the tritiated lithium hydride, not the Pu-239 used in the surrounding triggers (which is quite salvageable from both an engineering and a financial standpoint).
A thermonuclear bomb (at least as made in the fifties) is essentially a tank of deuterated and tritiated lithium hydride (LiH) that will explode with great fury if quickly raised to a temperature of millions of degrees within a span of milliseconds. It's very difficult to create the required temperatures quickly with chemical explosives- the easiest way to do it is to surround the tank with numerous small fission devices, which heat the tank to millions of degrees quickly and easily and are responsible for the radioactive fallout still associated with fusion bombs. (The "neutron bomb" was a planned attempt to replace the fission warheads with chemical explosives, creating a thermonuclear explosion with no radioactive fallout- a truly impressive feat if it were possible.)
Since the bomb was lost 46 years ago, which is about 4 tritium half lives, the maximum possible yield has in theory been reduced to 1/16 of what it was in 1958, and the actual yield is probably zero, as you would expect of a fusion device that has spent many tritium half lives on the seafloor. The tank is probably full of lithium oxide and all sorts of crap, although it may still contain enough H isotopes to make it worth recovering. But the Pu is undoubtedly going to be salvaged. In dollar terms, Pu makes Au look like Si.
No, I'd rather see it used on India to combat the offshoring problem.
Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.
This call may be recorded for purposes of quality assurance.
Hello, tech support, "Guy" speaking.
Yes, I'm having trouble with this global thermonuclear warhead, I can't get the BSD driver working!
OK sir, to help you, I have to know whether you are using Windows 98/ME or Windows XP.
This isn't either, it's BSD. I can't get the system to recognize the device at all.
Could you please first to double click on the "My Computer"...
You're from India aren't you! I'm taking this global thermonuclear warhead back to the store!
I can just imagine the Fry's "Final Indignity" scene at the exit.
"1 GLOBL THERM WARHD"... (looks in bag, marks receipt with purple magic marker)... OK, you're free to go!
It's going to end up on a shelf at Fry's with one of those stickers on the box.
Why didn't you just say nothing at all then? The guy doesn't care about your conscience right now. He was looking for solutions.
Since when is that the criterion for a post adding to the discussion? You must think Ask Slashdot is a free consulting service we are running here. The discussions are for the benefit of everyone who participates, not just the OP, and posts that don't contain solutions are still allowed.
Several months ago a PHB posted an Ask Slashdot article asking for someone to write a shell script for his company. He was promptly excoriated by hundreds of unemployed geeks for being a cheap bastard. (Although his Ask Slashdot article was a success because someone did post a three-line shell script that met his stated requirements.) I don't remember any demands for downmoderations on posts with no shell scripts in them, or suggestions that people "just say nothing at all then" if they didn't have a shell script to post.
If someone from a corporate pig farm asks how to get the pig stink off his computers, posts about corporate pig farms in general should be expected and are entirely on topic for the discussion. The OP opened the door, and there's a lot to say about them. They crush family owned farms which can't compete with the vast economies of scale- which can only be achieved legally thanks to extensive lobbying and political corruption. The farms enjoy exemptions to environmental laws that still apply to everybody else. They regularly cause environmental disasters every time there is a flood. The stench they generate destroys real estate prices for miles downwind. People have lost everything when these farms get built near their homes. And unlike nuclear plants, jails, waste incinerators, or sewage treatment plants, NIMBY is entirely justified here since corporate pig farms do not serve the public interest at all. We aren't allowed to talk about this?
Frankly, 600 posts about rubbing alcohol does not make a very interesting discussion.
Kerning, the spacing between letters in a propotional font, is something a typewriter of that era is not capable of. It has no idea what letter came before it, and therefore can't space the letters the way computers can today. Doesn't matter WHAT font style it's in. Typewriters of that era are simply not able to do that.
That's the smoking gun in all this, and that's what proves those documents are fake.
Gee, that's sure some "smoking gun" you've got there, since IBM introduced proportional spacing typewriters in 1941.
"Case Closed," indeed.
Where did the Bush Administration get their copies of the "forgeries" that they released themselves the same day? Oh, from the Kerry campaign. You've got it all figured out.
Considering that these documents are forgeries, what this really shows is that the Democrats are so desperate to get rid of Bush that now they're actually forging documents to do so.
Two words for you: Niger Uranium
Let's not forget who used forged documents to make a case for war.
Kerry made his vietnam service the centerpiece of his qualifications. The scrutiny of his service is therefor justified.
The Swift Boat attacks were always coming, whether Kerry "made Vietnam an issue" or not. Kerry's mistake was not preparing for it sooner.
No helium or tritium ... have they checked for (... pause while I google for what deuterium plus palladium form ...) silver?
Ha ha ha... don't think they need to.
The strong electric field surrounding a palladium nucleus will provide plenty of shielding to keep any stray deuterons far away.
And palladium is heavier than iron. Fusion becomes an endothermic process for nuclei that heavy. They'd have to explain why the apparatus was suddenly getting cold.
A free graphical front end for POV-Ray is Moray.
Also check out Art of Illusion which is a full-featured cross-platform modeler/raytracer but has a POV-Ray export feature. I know the author from work and he is a genius.
GnuPG, PGP, and the like are only useful for communication between nerds.
But why would you want to talk to anyone else?
Oh yeah... girls!
The submitter should have posted this URL instead:
http://batman.mech.ubc.ca/~hph/index2.html
That bypasses the huge intro graphic and reduces the load on the server.
Someone who successfully claims the Sun as his own property is exposing himself to an incredible amount of liability. When the Sun eventually runs out of hydrogen it will swell and increase in brightness 10X-100X until our oceans boil away. The Earth may actually fall into the Sun if it expands enough.
This guy better put his $10 in an interest-earning account today.
Yeah, but when I click on the icon it doesn't say what it is! :)
What this leads to over time is people in these third-world countries, as well as the people who are hiring them from around the world, gradually having a better life than they did before.
That is a logical consequence of importing Third World misery and desperation into the United States. If this country were to start acting in its own interests again, and not just the interests of its upper class, it would stop.
PENCIL AND PAPER?! Oh how primitive! You must feel so disenfranchised. How can you trust the results?
The problem with you Canadians is that your democracy requires too much human intervention. I'm glad I live in the U.S.A. On Election Day, we're going to pick the president with the machine that goes *ping*!