The other thing is: tritium decays by beta decay, to helium-3. Helium-3 is a neutron sponge; it'll soak them up like crazy to become the much more stable helium-4. This means that the fission reaction will likely fizzle, and the yield of this device will be significantly lower than it otherwise would have been.
This is probably the reason for using lithium in hydrogen bombs. It's stable until neutron irradiation.
The decay tree for a fission reaction is really complicated, though: there's a multitude of ways each atom in the sample can decay, and it may stop for a very long time as some long-lived low-level isotope before heading on down the chain.
The decay of the results of a fission reaction is complex because the fission process produces multiple isotopes of multiple elements. At the same time throwing neutrons around which can be captured changing the isotope mix. The fission products are very unlikely to decay to any form of lead, given that they tend to be in row 5 of the periodic table. Hence Sr90 and I131 being present. N.B. many of the isotopes produced by fission have such short half lives that they are difficult to detect.
Well they don't necessarily have to have nefarious designs, they just have to lack it and want it, not everyone who wants to build nuclear weapons wants to blow people up with them, some of them just want in on the game.
Especially if they are threatened by a nuclear armed state.
That said, some of them are bloody loonies
Some of the "bloody loonies" already have both the weapons and delivery systems. Also AFAIK no nuclear armed state has provisions for keeping nutcases out of high political office.
Pu is totally worthless nowdays, the US has about 18 tons of excess Pu that it would like to get rid of, the Russians likewise..
Worthless to the US and Russia who have dismantled a fair fraction of their nuclear arsenal. But very valuable to countries who need more electrical generating capacity and who are under threat of invasion by a larger country. Both of these are applicable to Iran.
A legal extortionist, say, a patent troll or industry trade group, has to consider how much they can actually get out of a victim, since there are legal costs involved in filing the suit in the first place.
Assuming there is always a clear demarkation between "legal" and "illegal" extortion.
These organized criminal enterprises, on the other hand, only have to do some hacking, and then fling their crap in every direction to see what sticks. Just as street criminals drive small businesses out of neighborhoods, leaving nothing but blight and boarded-up, rat-infested buildings, these online criminals could drive all the small e-commerce sites off the web and essentially cripple the web as a business method for all but the largest, wealthiest companies.
These being the same big wealthy companies who break the law when it suits them and put quite a bit of effort into buying laws...
Rubbing alcohol is not necessarily just isopropyl and water. Sometimes (or usually) it's also cut with glycol (or other jells which cut down the drying nature of isopropyl). In a couple of cases, I've seen it be an ethanol mix.
If the name of the substance ends in "ol" then it is an "alcohol". Which is a hydrocarbon which has one or more OH groups attached to a carbon atom. The term "glycol" generally means that there is more than one OH group. Ethan-1,2-ol, propan-1,2-ol, propan-1,2,3-ol, etc would be refered to as "glycols". Whereas methanol, ethanol, propanol and propan-2-ol are simple alcohols.
The problem is that it interferes with the universities wireless network. I would bet that you arent even allowed to have 2.4Ghz phones. This is very common. My university (Drexel) was the first totally wireless campus. They have had these rules from the begining.
Did they have a fence around the campus and search anyone entering for any kind of device capable of transmitting at 2.4 Gig?
The thing is that a lot of times some things written into lease agreements that are legally unenforcible. hence a clause that says if any portion is unenforcible, it does not invalidate the entire contract.
This is a common piece of boiler plate added to all sorts of contracts to protect the contract itself. It is also not uncommon for contracts to contain questionable (or even completly uneforcable) clauses. Especially where it is unlikely that it will be closely examined by a suitably competent lawyer before being signed.
If you try to use your unregulated wireless device in my house, I can kick your ass out. I don't even have to give a reason. I also believe that the courts would support me.
The view a court would tend to take would depend if whoever you intended kicking out was simily a visitor or someone paying you for accomodation.
No, it's called a lease agreement, with a change clause.
The point is that such agreements operate within the "law of the land". They cannot supercede applicable statute and case laws. A university campus is not an independent soverign state, regardless of how much that university's administration may wish it to be.
Keeping Windows up to date is the admin's job. Not something the users should ever do, or have access to in the first place.
Which is at the heart of the problem. Windows (and many Windows apps) tends to follow the design of a personal computer. Thus allowing, even insisting on, the end user carrying out system admin tasks.
There is absolutely NO economic evidence that IP laws have ANY positive effect on the production of art or inventions.
With the current attempts at "globalization" of copyright laws it would be rather hard to find such evidence.
From the beginning, it has merely been some people's THEORY that this is true - most of these people in government or business with other agendas than the free dissemination of ideas.
It's quite possibly that IP laws, like a lot of other things, can have positive effects in moderation but negative effects when taken to excess. (In the same way that a tiny quantity of a chemical can cure a disease whereas a larger quantity can poison someone.) It may also be the case that the paradigms of IP laws which were useful a couple of centuries ago no longer make sense. Thus what might be needed would be radically different kinds of laws. As opposed to continued copyright extensions, justified by highly questionable claims.
Um, no. Copyright is defined in the Constitution. It grants the creator of the work thr right to control how and when the a copy of the work is created and distributed.
Which Constitution is that? Assuming you mean the US Constitution, section 8, clause 8, it acually states "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;". The only rights granted here are those enabling (but not requiring) the US Congress to pass legislation along certain lines.
If this right did not exist, there would be drastically less incentive to create, and the public domain would become void of artistic works.
Artistic works were created prior to the US Constitution being written and prior to the (earlier) invention of the concept of copyright.
Of course, the copyright system itself is the reason we have book, media, etc.
Books (and libraries) predate the concept of copyright by a very long time.
The system allows for the (supposedly limited) monopoly on ideas so that artists could make a living and produce their content.
Actually copyright was invented to give the state control over use of the printing press. Resulting in the business model of the third party publisher. Media invented afterwards copied the same business model.
Without such laws in the first place, it's unlikely that we'd have the variety and multitude of movies, books, television shows, etc. that are out there.
Movies and televison postdate the invention of copyright, so it's anyone's guess how they might work without it. Whereas books predate the concept by thousands of years. It's very much evident that authors will write books without copyright even existing. It's also far from clear that the existance of copyright does much to encourage authorship anyway.
The owners of copyrighted material often say they suffer "harm" and "economic loss"
resulting from illegal copying.
These "owners" are quite likely to not be the people who actually created it in the first place.
Like most arguments put forth by copyright enthusiasts, it holds little water - for several reasons:
The claim is mostly inaccurate because it presupposes that the copying individual would otherwise have bought a copy from the publisher. That is occasionally true, but more often false; and when it is false, the claimed loss does not occur.
The copier may be someone who would never buy a copy. As well as someone who may only buy a copy because they have previewed it. There's also the senario of someone who might well be a potential customer, but the publisher won't sell to. Because the publisher wants to have different release dates for their record/movie/game/etc in different parts of the world. Here the publishers are moaning that their customers won't assist them with the business model the publishers want. As opposed to the publishers changing their business model to suit what their customers want.
A more fitting description would be that the bookstore and publisher get less income than they might have got. The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book. In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them.
However a physical (even an online) book store is unlikely to tell a customer "We can't serve someone with your address until next week/month/year." Any business which did this would be considered foolish and alienating customers. Yet with the likes of "staggered releases", region coding of DVD, etc. this is effectivly the sort of thing many transnational publishing companies are doing.
The claim is begging the question because the idea of "loss" is based on the assumption that the publisher "should have" gotten paid.
Can't the MPAA be sued for hacking? The MPAA was not given specific permission to enter another person's computer. Why can't anyone who's been sued by the MPAA countersue using the DMCA against them?
Depends what the terms of service were on the FTP/Website were.
Why should they ? If these letters are sent automatically, it's much faster to skip any checks and just send the letter whenever there's even the slightest cause of suspicion.
This is not that different from the way spammers appear to think.
After all, the false positives won't hurt the them, just the poor bastard whose ISP gets such a letter and cuts the service.
False positives can hurt them. If each one were to generate complaints from both the ISP and the ISP's customer.
Since you would have nothing to fear, the files are not in fact copyrighted (assuming that you file name is general enough not to infringe their trademarks), you would have very little to risk other than your time.
Unless the contents of the files has explicitally been placed in the public domain then they are copyright. (However liberal the licence might be.) If you are the copyright holder you could probably reasonably send a letter that you suspect them of copyright infringement.
There is nothing on their website that I could see that discusses an "xfile" as anything other than some organization software and certainly not any "seasons." These folks are very arrogant in their assumptions that the word "xfile" will always mean the tv show of the same name.
Maybe someone will start quoting this episode as an example of the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) principle. Maybe a suitable response would be to send them a copy of Gordon R. Dickson's short story "Computers Don't Argue":)
Re:Copyright windfalls are irreversible
on
European DRM News
·
· Score: 1
How is the United States going to get out of the Berne Convention in order for that to happen?
The US manages to ignore all sorts of treaties anyway. What's one more...
In addition, doesn't the Fifth Amendment prohibit Congress from taking private property such as so-called "intellectual property" for public use?
AFAIK the US Constitution never makes use of the term "intellectual property" in the first place.
Won't help much if the PCM loudspeaker's construction is tamper-evident,
Unless the enclosure was 100% effective magnetic shielding (whilst still letting the sound out) then you wouldn't even need to open it.
and the speaker feeds such evidence back to the DRM module on the player.
This would make the speaker considerably more complex and expensive. Especially since it would need to proof against a small hole drilled anywhere in the case. All of this complex engineering still being trivial to defeat with a microphone.
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The other thing is: tritium decays by beta decay, to helium-3. Helium-3 is a neutron sponge; it'll soak them up like crazy to become the much more stable helium-4. This means that the fission reaction will likely fizzle, and the yield of this device will be significantly lower than it otherwise would have been.
This is probably the reason for using lithium in hydrogen bombs. It's stable until neutron irradiation.
It produces mostly lead, ultimately.
The daughter element of Pu239 is U235.
The decay tree for a fission reaction is really complicated, though: there's a multitude of ways each atom in the sample can decay, and it may stop for a very long time as some long-lived low-level isotope before heading on down the chain.
The decay of the results of a fission reaction is complex because the fission process produces multiple isotopes of multiple elements. At the same time throwing neutrons around which can be captured changing the isotope mix. The fission products are very unlikely to decay to any form of lead, given that they tend to be in row 5 of the periodic table. Hence Sr90 and I131 being present. N.B. many of the isotopes produced by fission have such short half lives that they are difficult to detect.
Well they don't necessarily have to have nefarious designs, they just have to lack it and want it, not everyone who wants to build nuclear weapons wants to blow people up with them, some of them just want in on the game.
Especially if they are threatened by a nuclear armed state.
That said, some of them are bloody loonies
Some of the "bloody loonies" already have both the weapons and delivery systems. Also AFAIK no nuclear armed state has provisions for keeping nutcases out of high political office.
Pu is totally worthless nowdays, the US has about 18 tons of excess Pu that it would like to get rid of, the Russians likewise..
Worthless to the US and Russia who have dismantled a fair fraction of their nuclear arsenal. But very valuable to countries who need more electrical generating capacity and who are under threat of invasion by a larger country. Both of these are applicable to Iran.
A legal extortionist, say, a patent troll or industry trade group, has to consider how much they can actually get out of a victim, since there are legal costs involved in filing the suit in the first place.
Assuming there is always a clear demarkation between "legal" and "illegal" extortion.
These organized criminal enterprises, on the other hand, only have to do some hacking, and then fling their crap in every direction to see what sticks. Just as street criminals drive small businesses out of neighborhoods, leaving nothing but blight and boarded-up, rat-infested buildings, these online criminals could drive all the small e-commerce sites off the web and essentially cripple the web as a business method for all but the largest, wealthiest companies.
These being the same big wealthy companies who break the law when it suits them and put quite a bit of effort into buying laws...
Instead of deleting the files, they should encrypt the files. :-)))))))
The decryption key will be provided when the product is registered.
This is likely to be only slightly less illegal than deleting someone's files.
Effectivly you'd be holding someone's data to ransom.
Rubbing alcohol is not necessarily just isopropyl and water. Sometimes (or usually) it's also cut with glycol (or other jells which cut down the drying nature of isopropyl). In a couple of cases, I've seen it be an ethanol mix.
If the name of the substance ends in "ol" then it is an "alcohol". Which is a hydrocarbon which has one or more OH groups attached to a carbon atom. The term "glycol" generally means that there is more than one OH group.
Ethan-1,2-ol, propan-1,2-ol, propan-1,2,3-ol, etc would be refered to as "glycols". Whereas methanol, ethanol, propanol and propan-2-ol are simple alcohols.
The problem is that it interferes with the universities wireless network. I would bet that you arent even allowed to have 2.4Ghz phones. This is very common. My university (Drexel) was the first totally wireless campus. They have had these rules from the begining.
Did they have a fence around the campus and search anyone entering for any kind of device capable of transmitting at 2.4 Gig?
The thing is that a lot of times some things written into lease agreements that are legally unenforcible. hence a clause that says if any portion is unenforcible, it does not invalidate the entire contract.
This is a common piece of boiler plate added to all sorts of contracts to protect the contract itself. It is also not uncommon for contracts to contain questionable (or even completly uneforcable) clauses. Especially where it is unlikely that it will be closely examined by a suitably competent lawyer before being signed.
If you try to use your unregulated wireless device in my house, I can kick your ass out. I don't even have to give a reason. I also believe that the courts would support me.
The view a court would tend to take would depend if whoever you intended kicking out was simily a visitor or someone paying you for accomodation.
No, it's called a lease agreement, with a change clause.
The point is that such agreements operate within the "law of the land". They cannot supercede applicable statute and case laws. A university campus is not an independent soverign state, regardless of how much that university's administration may wish it to be.
Keeping Windows up to date is the admin's job. Not something the users should ever do, or have access to in the first place.
Which is at the heart of the problem. Windows (and many Windows apps) tends to follow the design of a personal computer. Thus allowing, even insisting on, the end user carrying out system admin tasks.
No, copyright is not defined in the Constitution. Go read it sometime. It says that Congress, at its pleasure, may institute a copyright system.
It isn't even that specific. A copyright system being one of a number of possible things which could be implimented.
There is absolutely NO economic evidence that IP laws have ANY positive effect on the production of art or inventions.
With the current attempts at "globalization" of copyright laws it would be rather hard to find such evidence.
From the beginning, it has merely been some people's THEORY that this is true - most of these people in government or business with other agendas than the free dissemination of ideas.
It's quite possibly that IP laws, like a lot of other things, can have positive effects in moderation but negative effects when taken to excess. (In the same way that a tiny quantity of a chemical can cure a disease whereas a larger quantity can poison someone.)
It may also be the case that the paradigms of IP laws which were useful a couple of centuries ago no longer make sense. Thus what might be needed would be radically different kinds of laws. As opposed to continued copyright extensions, justified by highly questionable claims.
Um, no. Copyright is defined in the Constitution. It grants the creator of the work thr right to control how and when the a copy of the work is created and distributed.
Which Constitution is that? Assuming you mean the US Constitution, section 8, clause 8, it acually states "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;". The only rights granted here are those enabling (but not requiring) the US Congress to pass legislation along certain lines.
If this right did not exist, there would be drastically less incentive to create, and the public domain would become void of artistic works.
Artistic works were created prior to the US Constitution being written and prior to the (earlier) invention of the concept of copyright.
Of course, the copyright system itself is the reason we have book, media, etc.
Books (and libraries) predate the concept of copyright by a very long time.
The system allows for the (supposedly limited) monopoly on ideas so that artists could make a living and produce their content.
Actually copyright was invented to give the state control over use of the printing press. Resulting in the business model of the third party publisher. Media invented afterwards copied the same business model.
Without such laws in the first place, it's unlikely that we'd have the variety and multitude of movies, books, television shows, etc. that are out there.
Movies and televison postdate the invention of copyright, so it's anyone's guess how they might work without it. Whereas books predate the concept by thousands of years.
It's very much evident that authors will write books without copyright even existing. It's also far from clear that the existance of copyright does much to encourage authorship anyway.
The owners of copyrighted material often say they suffer "harm" and "economic loss" resulting from illegal copying.
These "owners" are quite likely to not be the people who actually created it in the first place.
Like most arguments put forth by copyright enthusiasts, it holds little water - for several reasons: The claim is mostly inaccurate because it presupposes that the copying individual would otherwise have bought a copy from the publisher. That is occasionally true, but more often false; and when it is false, the claimed loss does not occur.
The copier may be someone who would never buy a copy. As well as someone who may only buy a copy because they have previewed it.
There's also the senario of someone who might well be a potential customer, but the publisher won't sell to. Because the publisher wants to have different release dates for their record/movie/game/etc in different parts of the world. Here the publishers are moaning that their customers won't assist them with the business model the publishers want. As opposed to the publishers changing their business model to suit what their customers want.
A more fitting description would be that the bookstore and publisher get less income than they might have got. The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book. In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them.
However a physical (even an online) book store is unlikely to tell a customer "We can't serve someone with your address until next week/month/year." Any business which did this would be considered foolish and alienating customers. Yet with the likes of "staggered releases", region coding of DVD, etc. this is effectivly the sort of thing many transnational publishing companies are doing.
The claim is begging the question because the idea of "loss" is based on the assumption that the publisher "should have" gotten paid.
An idea which is at odds with "Capitalism".
One of the most useful filters I can think of would be an import filter for MS Publisher.
Which version of MS Publisher? IME it tends to have problems opening files created by a different version of the program.
Can't the MPAA be sued for hacking? The MPAA was not given specific permission to enter another person's computer. Why can't anyone who's been sued by the MPAA countersue using the DMCA against them?
Depends what the terms of service were on the FTP/Website were.
Why should they ? If these letters are sent automatically, it's much faster to skip any checks and just send the letter whenever there's even the slightest cause of suspicion.
This is not that different from the way spammers appear to think.
After all, the false positives won't hurt the them, just the poor bastard whose ISP gets such a letter and cuts the service.
False positives can hurt them. If each one were to generate complaints from both the ISP and the ISP's customer.
Of course the only way the MPAA could figure out that they had been fooled would be to download a big ass file, try to unzip it (its encrypted).
:)
Don't you mean "DRM protected"
If they ever go forth with a lawsuit, the host is in the clear, the files contain no pirated video, they are just gobbly gook. Case dismissed.
Or even better the MPAA found guilty of DMCA violation...
Since you would have nothing to fear, the files are not in fact copyrighted (assuming that you file name is general enough not to infringe their trademarks), you would have very little to risk other than your time.
Unless the contents of the files has explicitally been placed in the public domain then they are copyright. (However liberal the licence might be.)
If you are the copyright holder you could probably reasonably send a letter that you suspect them of copyright infringement.
There is nothing on their website that I could see that discusses an "xfile" as anything other than some organization software and certainly not any "seasons." These folks are very arrogant in their assumptions that the word "xfile" will always mean the tv show of the same name.
:)
Maybe someone will start quoting this episode as an example of the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) principle.
Maybe a suitable response would be to send them a copy of Gordon R. Dickson's short story "Computers Don't Argue"
How is the United States going to get out of the Berne Convention in order for that to happen?
The US manages to ignore all sorts of treaties anyway. What's one more...
In addition, doesn't the Fifth Amendment prohibit Congress from taking private property such as so-called "intellectual property" for public use?
AFAIK the US Constitution never makes use of the term "intellectual property" in the first place.
Won't help much if the PCM loudspeaker's construction is tamper-evident,
Unless the enclosure was 100% effective magnetic shielding (whilst still letting the sound out) then you wouldn't even need to open it.
and the speaker feeds such evidence back to the DRM module on the player.
This would make the speaker considerably more complex and expensive. Especially since it would need to proof against a small hole drilled anywhere in the case.
All of this complex engineering still being trivial to defeat with a microphone.