Right - I was trying to point out that for the star to lose entropy it would have to shed alot of mass and by doing so probably wouldn't have enough to form the said gravstar.
The problem with the loss of mass is that by doing so you would think that to lose the required amount of entropy the mass of the star would have to be greatly decreased which just might prevent it from forming the gravstar and instead forming something like a neutron star.
20+ bugs is not a high figure considering spy vs. spy type of stuff. Consider this. How do you know it was only 20? Maybe they just planted a group of 5 that was realy easy to find, another group of 5 kindof hard to find and so on and so forth. For all the chinese know the thing has about 500+ bugs installed in it. And they might never, ever know how many where really installed.
As for the diplomatic incident - not really. Nations spy on each other (remember the whole China stealing Nuke secrets from US) and, for the most part, just generally make a lot of huss and fuss about it and don't really do anything about it.
Ok, my physics is a little rusty but.. this doesn't make sense.
As the article mentions - you just CANT go around violating the second law of thermodynamics like they do (i.e. for a gravstar to form it must 'lose' entropy).
According to these guys the spherical outer shell (a standing gravitational wave) would balance out with the incoming matter. Now waiiit just a minute. Eventually the matter on the shell would exceed the force of the inner substance supporting it - then what do you have? They say that it would cause the sphere to wiggle and radiate away energy - well every struture has it's limits, what would happen when, say, a more massive gravstar impacts a less massive gravstar? Or two gravstars of equal mass impact each other?
Just b/c our understanding of physics breaks down at the singularity doesn't mean it does not exist (remember we can't describe in physical terms just what the first few picoseconds of the big bang where like - the physics just can't cope with the amount of matter/energy involved).
Now, we can *never* actually observe a black hole (God Abhors a Naked Singularity) which doesn't mean they don't exist.
"infalling matter inside the shell would do a U-turn and head back out to the shell, while matter outside the shell would still rain down on it." TO do so the matter woudl have to exceed the speed of light. Right.
Mozilla is far better than any previous version of Netscape BUT i have to say for sheer speed factor *nothing* beats Opera 6.0, and you can't say that doesn't run on everything. Plus the MDI interface rocks.
I onetime opened up 34 browser windows simultaneously in 36.4 seconds (cable modem). Yeah. I'd like to see IE/Mozilla do that.
Of course opera has serious problems running JavaScript so all is not perfect.
RIAA say's Casette Players will Destroy their Business
by jOe Schmoe
RIAA has launched a major campaign to ban the use of casette players across america saying that the players will "disatrously impact the music business and put thousands of Americans out of work" according to the RIAA spokesman Mr. Iam Evil. He also goes on to say that those who do are 'thieves' and out to be punished to the maximum extent of the law.
The new casette player technology allows people to freely copy music off the radio, or from their friends tapes, without purchasing anything from record company's. The RIAA maintains that such flagrant copyright abuse is stealing and will doom the entire industry and demands that the US government immediately enact legislation forbiding the copying of music off of the airwaves and off of other tapes.
Sen. Owned b. RIAA (R-Ar-kansas) says that he immediately intends to introduce a bill aimed at putting all of these thieves behind bars and forcing radio stations and tape deck manufactures to introduce copy protection schemes into their products. Says Sen. RIAA "This bill is needed to protect the music industry and the American people from those who would steal music without paying for it."
Opponets of the law point out that such regulations would interfere with consumer's right to fair use of a product. Sen. Owned and the RIAA dismiss those claims by pointing out that "All this means is that you will have to buy a new tape for every place you want to play it, in the car, your home Tape player, a special "XP" version to play on your new walkmen, really nothing abnormal."
In other news today he Motion Picture Association of America began its campaign to ban VHS recorders across american saying that the new technology would ruin the music business...
Yeah reliability can be a big issue for some people, I have a cable modem from time warner/roadrunner and have not had a minute of downtime since it was installed 6 months ago but then again I do believe I am in the minority.
At any rate my friends who live upstairs work at a state-wide ISP here in Lincoln, Nebraska. The best are the horror story's they have dealing with outages from the local telco Alltell. Here are some of my favorites
Story #1: Customer calls inet complains about ping time/packet loss/slow download speeds whatever. Nope nothing wrong at our end call Alltell. Calls alltell. Isn't on the phone for more than 3-4 minutes (well after hold times) when they tell her that of course it is Internet Nebraska's fault, not their gold-plated-diamond-encrustuced-super-duper-ultra- magical-lines. This goes on.. and on.. and on..
Story #2
Somebody signs up for DSL, they install it (alltell ain't so bad at waiting lists-about 7-10 days) and then the tech leaves, excited customer goes to check it out and.. ahh doesn't work. At this point repeat Story #1.
Story #3. My personel favorite. The ISP needed more phones lines, customers started to get busy signals, but the conduit into the building was full. This meant that Alltell had to come in and replace the conduit as well as install more phone lines. 18 Months, 3 FCC warnings, and a whole lot of money wasted later the conduit and phone lines where installed.
If you don't believe that they could cause a chernobyl youa re misinformed. Chernobyl was a partial reactor breach. What you have at these sites are the equivelents of 13-14 Chernobyl's (in terms of the amount of spent fuel stored).
Breeder reactors are a great idea that we should really use - except that they don't use all of the waste only most what do you do with old contaminated piping, reactor vessels, etc? And it will never happen b/c people will be outraged about the weapons-grade plutonium produced at these reactors (terrorism etc). Not that I don't think they are a good idea mind you.
How many inexperienced users, inquisitively switching to Opera or something else, switched back to IE when seeing this, thinking that Opera is the app that's screwing up and not the char set?
Yeah perfect example of how microsoft leverages it's monopoly - my mom uses Opera until just recently when she started complaining that it didn't display things right. Oh it did - the pages she was trying to view where not HTML compliant and relied on Javascript/flash/IE only tags.
Of course you can't explain that to someone who barely has any knowledge of computers. Sigh. I may hate microsoft but they are quite smart at leveraging they're market share.
You also want to make sure that you change the charset from what word has it to 8859-1. Otherwise you are using Microsoft's own, not supported, Characterset (makes NO SENSE to have a proprietary char set that nothing supports... except to microsoft).
Basically this makes all ' look like O's with an accent mark above them and other annoying features when viewed with Opera.
I never meant to implie that the government was right in this matter - indeed they should never have studied this site 20 years ago, or put it on their proposal because it was N. american land stolen by the US government.
However, what I was trying to point out was that as of right now we can't wait another 20 years to find another solution. The nuclear waste is starting to pile up and is being stored in hazardous places not suitable for storage. Waiting any longer could result in a disaster of epic proportions. Think chernobyl - except for the fact that you have New York, Baltimore, DC, etc downwind. Sound Bad? It would be. It owuld make 9/11 look like a mugging and Hiroshima like a bad car accident.
The rights of the Shonshoe people are being trampled on - and have been for centuries. The government was, and is, wrong for taking their land. However as I mentioned above the situation is just too critical to wait.
Yucca mountain presents the best case scenario for the US government. Let's face it: 20 years and untolds billions later even if the site is unsuitable what can we do? Wait another 20 years with mountains of unstable radioactive waste slowly building up around the US?
Now this isn't nevada's problem. It's the problem of the United States as a whole, a problem created by short-sided politicians 30-40 years ago, long dead (well except Strom). And what are they doing now? THE UNTHINKABLE! They are spending billions of dollars and decades studying a site to make sure that it can hold the waste for the thousands of years neccassary. And, of course, people crucify them for it.
You point to the defects in Yucca Mountain that the government 'glossed over'. Perhaps they did. But, one thing is damm certain, if that site was really unsafe it wouldn't be built - no self-respecting group of scientists (remember thousands) would declare a site safe knowing that in 30-40 years they could all be glowing green if they where wrong. Instead two-three scientists disagree with something that was in the official report and people start yelling 'disaster.'
Nobody wants this stuff in his/her backyard. Their isn't a place in the united states where you could try to put this without people frothing at the mouth at telling you about losing your freedoms and destroying the communities, etc, etc. It also doesn't help the matter that this is land that was stolen from Native American tribes long ago. Which presents us with a problem: what do we do?
Do we stop all work on Yucca mountain and begin a search again for a new site knowing full well that it will likely take another 20 years and 80 billion dollars?
Or do we build the damm thing anyways ignoring the few people who say the site has problems, knowing that any little defect could result in us ruining a huge stretch of the Western Us? Also, build the thing knowing full well that the land was stolen from the people who orginally owned it?
My opinion (like a**holes I know) is that we have little choice: the radioactive waste is hazardous and presents a huge problem to the US. We have a place that is (reasonably) safe and fairly remote . Build the damm thing.
They also forgot to mention a very, very major problem if those containers, for whatever reason, bust open.
Consider: at Yucca if the containers break what do you have? A really radioactive mountain in the middle of a god-forsaken desert.
And if these containers break at the bottom of the sea floor what do you have? A disaster of epic proportions as you could, concievable, nearly wipe out all life in a large chunk of the ocean with the amount of radioactive waste we have and poision the rest for hundreds of years.
Of course they haven't answered the questions of saftey - they're is no way they can. No place on earth is *designed* to hold nuclear waste or, really, suitable. However the U.S. has a 50 year stockpile of the stuff sitting around in temporary containters that are a hell of a lot less safe than Yucca mountain.
What you should be saying is that you are glad that after 80 billion dollars (if that is the real amount) and 20 years of study Yucca still looks like the best choice. For us to *not* spend every possible resource to dispose of radioactive waste which will be harmful for 10,000 years would be a criminal affront to future generations. You should be glad that your government is doing it's best to look ahead for future generations, hell future governments, and making sure that this waste is disposed of probably.
Looking up the facts in the book right now.(Making of Atomic Bomb, p.486-489) The problem with uranium/plutonium production is that it is a very gradual process (centrifuge upon centrifuge to seperate the gas's, each stage gradually producing higher grades). Plutonium is a little different but the same idea applies (many stages to purify it). The aluminum/silver was used in the construction as a one-time type cost (so for one year) while the electricty was a continuing usage.
Erp totally wrong on that troy ounces of silver by the way - 395 million troy ounces is what was needed.
1.) 2 bombs built (2 uranium, 1 plutonium). By August 10 1945).
2.) A large amount of paritally purified uranium/plutonium was used for testing.
3.) The book states no official figure - only the fact that each plant was able to produce enough for one bomb a month (rougly 30 kilograms/month for uranium bomb, 22 kilo/month for plutonium).
The general consensus among historians is a definite NO b/c
1.) German industrial power was nothing like the US and didn't have access to the resource's US did.
2.) The german effort was 2 years behind the US's in theory terms - not counting materials.
3.) It is *highly* doubtful the US strategic command would've let anything like Oak Ridge plant be built in Germany without bombing the shit out of it. You can't hide a facility that covers hundreds of acres - nor can you protect it. The vibrations from the bombs impacting close to the seperators are enough to destroy them.
4.) Actually the entire manhatten project was run like a command economy - everything had to provided and NOW (the silver for the seperators was actually taken out of the US Treasury, some 3$ billion dollars worth , in 1943 dollars).
If the germans would've gotten a few more years headstart, or could've delayed the US for 2-3 more years it is possible yes. But remember this, by that time the US would've had the bomb.
Doesn't matter how much more efficent you are.. here is a interesting factoid for you:
In 1944 the entire German war machine was able to produce something like 25,000 fighter/bomber's.
In 1944 FOUR american west coast manufacturing plants where able to produce 27,000 fighters/bombers. Note: this doesn't include the hundereds of other plants strewn across the US. Remember: efficiency only goes so far.
Actually german industry *increased* production in 1944 and was at it's peak. (a testament to the genius of Albert Speer, nazi war armaments minister) despite allied strategic bombing.
As for the figures in 1943 I imagine the U.S. still had a lead - however I could be wrong and I bet the farther back you go (1942,41) Germany probably had a lead at some point int he early stages of the war.
Yes they did - almost an entire continent. But to put it into perspective: in 1945 the United States controlled FIFTY PERCENT of the WORLD's industrial output. Germany had like 17%, soviet union had something like 15%.
The book making of the Atomic bomb is also quite interesting as it goes into a great deal of detail about the Bohr-Heisnberg relationship. NY times misread the book , I believe, when they said that heisenberg simply failed. In actuality the book paints a picture of Heisenberg not wanting to develop the bomb at all - and turning the german research team away from a number of key discoveries. Now the book doesn't say that this was intentional - perhaps heisenberg was simply mistaken. Judge for yourself.
The most interesting fact I learned from that book was this:
To seperate,process, and manufacture the uranium nad plutonium neccassary for the a-bombs it required 32% of the United States Electrical output, 23% of the US's Silver output (144,000 Troy Ounces was the figure I believe), and 14% of the US's aluminum output to construct the plants (at Oak Ridge, Tennesse and Hartford, Washington). Remember this is 1944 people - height of america's industrial might. Now ask yourself if germany could've done the same...
Unless my physics is off yes it would be heavier - but you really wouldn't be able to tell. A electron weights something like.0123 of a Proton (which is 1 atomic weight). So in theory yes but you couldn't tell.
Some ISP's seem to be trying to provide DSL etc in rural area's. In Nebraska a local ISP just rolled out it's first wireless system in Valentine, Nebraska (don't ask - only city in the largest county in the US if that helps). It provides dsl or better speeds.. the problem is that you have to be within a few miles of the tower and LOS.
BTW I've heard that pretty much everybody with COX road runner hates it while people with Time Warner road runner love it...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah netscape 6.0 was bad but on the good side Mozzila has really turned around and isn't so bad.
Oh and if you want a *real* superior product use Opera (http://www.opera.com). Nothing, and I mean nothing, is as fast as Opera.
Here Here! I use Opera all the time, then mozilla if that fails me and finally IE. It get's tiring.
...
Or how bout the unthinkable - actually making IE conform to W3C standards? *Gasp* No! We can't.. you can't make us!
Resitance if Futile
Right - I was trying to point out that for the star to lose entropy it would have to shed alot of mass and by doing so probably wouldn't have enough to form the said gravstar.
The problem with the loss of mass is that by doing so you would think that to lose the required amount of entropy the mass of the star would have to be greatly decreased which just might prevent it from forming the gravstar and instead forming something like a neutron star.
20+ bugs is not a high figure considering spy vs. spy type of stuff. Consider this. How do you know it was only 20? Maybe they just planted a group of 5 that was realy easy to find, another group of 5 kindof hard to find and so on and so forth. For all the chinese know the thing has about 500+ bugs installed in it. And they might never, ever know how many where really installed.
As for the diplomatic incident - not really. Nations spy on each other (remember the whole China stealing Nuke secrets from US) and, for the most part, just generally make a lot of huss and fuss about it and don't really do anything about it.
Ok, my physics is a little rusty but.. this doesn't make sense.
As the article mentions - you just CANT go around violating the second law of thermodynamics like they do (i.e. for a gravstar to form it must 'lose' entropy).
According to these guys the spherical outer shell (a standing gravitational wave) would balance out with the incoming matter. Now waiiit just a minute. Eventually the matter on the shell would exceed the force of the inner substance supporting it - then what do you have? They say that it would cause the sphere to wiggle and radiate away energy - well every struture has it's limits, what would happen when, say, a more massive gravstar impacts a less massive gravstar? Or two gravstars of equal mass impact each other?
Just b/c our understanding of physics breaks down at the singularity doesn't mean it does not exist (remember we can't describe in physical terms just what the first few picoseconds of the big bang where like - the physics just can't cope with the amount of matter/energy involved).
Now, we can *never* actually observe a black hole (God Abhors a Naked Singularity) which doesn't mean they don't exist.
"infalling matter inside the shell would do a U-turn and head back out to the shell, while matter outside the shell would still rain down on it." TO do so the matter woudl have to exceed the speed of light. Right.
Mozilla is far better than any previous version of Netscape BUT i have to say for sheer speed factor *nothing* beats Opera 6.0, and you can't say that doesn't run on everything. Plus the MDI interface rocks.
I onetime opened up 34 browser windows simultaneously in 36.4 seconds (cable modem). Yeah. I'd like to see IE/Mozilla do that.
Of course opera has serious problems running JavaScript so all is not perfect.
1980's
RIAA say's Casette Players will Destroy their Business
by jOe Schmoe
RIAA has launched a major campaign to ban the use of casette players across america saying that the players will "disatrously impact the music business and put thousands of Americans out of work" according to the RIAA spokesman Mr. Iam Evil. He also goes on to say that those who do are 'thieves' and out to be punished to the maximum extent of the law.
The new casette player technology allows people to freely copy music off the radio, or from their friends tapes, without purchasing anything from record company's. The RIAA maintains that such flagrant copyright abuse is stealing and will doom the entire industry and demands that the US government immediately enact legislation forbiding the copying of music off of the airwaves and off of other tapes.
Sen. Owned b. RIAA (R-Ar-kansas) says that he immediately intends to introduce a bill aimed at putting all of these thieves behind bars and forcing radio stations and tape deck manufactures to introduce copy protection schemes into their products. Says Sen. RIAA "This bill is needed to protect the music industry and the American people from those who would steal music without paying for it."
Opponets of the law point out that such regulations would interfere with consumer's right to fair use of a product. Sen. Owned and the RIAA dismiss those claims by pointing out that "All this means is that you will have to buy a new tape for every place you want to play it, in the car, your home Tape player, a special "XP" version to play on your new walkmen, really nothing abnormal."
In other news today he Motion Picture Association of America began its campaign to ban VHS recorders across american saying that the new technology would ruin the music business...
</FLASHBACK>
Yeah reliability can be a big issue for some people, I have a cable modem from time warner/roadrunner and have not had a minute of downtime since it was installed 6 months ago but then again I do believe I am in the minority.
- magical-lines. This goes on.. and on.. and on..
At any rate my friends who live upstairs work at a state-wide ISP here in Lincoln, Nebraska. The best are the horror story's they have dealing with outages from the local telco Alltell. Here are some of my favorites
Story #1: Customer calls inet complains about ping time/packet loss/slow download speeds whatever. Nope nothing wrong at our end call Alltell. Calls alltell. Isn't on the phone for more than 3-4 minutes (well after hold times) when they tell her that of course it is Internet Nebraska's fault, not their gold-plated-diamond-encrustuced-super-duper-ultra
Story #2
Somebody signs up for DSL, they install it (alltell ain't so bad at waiting lists-about 7-10 days) and then the tech leaves, excited customer goes to check it out and.. ahh doesn't work. At this point repeat Story #1.
Story #3. My personel favorite. The ISP needed more phones lines, customers started to get busy signals, but the conduit into the building was full. This meant that Alltell had to come in and replace the conduit as well as install more phone lines. 18 Months, 3 FCC warnings, and a whole lot of money wasted later the conduit and phone lines where installed.
Welcome to broadband hell.. sigh.
If you don't believe that they could cause a chernobyl youa re misinformed. Chernobyl was a partial reactor breach. What you have at these sites are the equivelents of 13-14 Chernobyl's (in terms of the amount of spent fuel stored).
Breeder reactors are a great idea that we should really use - except that they don't use all of the waste only most what do you do with old contaminated piping, reactor vessels, etc? And it will never happen b/c people will be outraged about the weapons-grade plutonium produced at these reactors (terrorism etc). Not that I don't think they are a good idea mind you.
How many inexperienced users, inquisitively switching to Opera or something else, switched back to IE when seeing this, thinking that Opera is the app that's screwing up and not the char set?
Yeah perfect example of how microsoft leverages it's monopoly - my mom uses Opera until just recently when she started complaining that it didn't display things right. Oh it did - the pages she was trying to view where not HTML compliant and relied on Javascript/flash/IE only tags.
Of course you can't explain that to someone who barely has any knowledge of computers. Sigh. I may hate microsoft but they are quite smart at leveraging they're market share.
You also want to make sure that you change the charset from what word has it to 8859-1. Otherwise you are using Microsoft's own, not supported, Characterset (makes NO SENSE to have a proprietary char set that nothing supports... except to microsoft).
Basically this makes all ' look like O's with an accent mark above them and other annoying features when viewed with Opera.
I never meant to implie that the government was right in this matter - indeed they should never have studied this site 20 years ago, or put it on their proposal because it was N. american land stolen by the US government.
However, what I was trying to point out was that as of right now we can't wait another 20 years to find another solution. The nuclear waste is starting to pile up and is being stored in hazardous places not suitable for storage. Waiting any longer could result in a disaster of epic proportions. Think chernobyl - except for the fact that you have New York, Baltimore, DC, etc downwind. Sound Bad? It would be. It owuld make 9/11 look like a mugging and Hiroshima like a bad car accident.
The rights of the Shonshoe people are being trampled on - and have been for centuries. The government was, and is, wrong for taking their land. However as I mentioned above the situation is just too critical to wait.
Yucca mountain presents the best case scenario for the US government. Let's face it: 20 years and untolds billions later even if the site is unsuitable what can we do? Wait another 20 years with mountains of unstable radioactive waste slowly building up around the US?
Now this isn't nevada's problem. It's the problem of the United States as a whole, a problem created by short-sided politicians 30-40 years ago, long dead (well except Strom). And what are they doing now? THE UNTHINKABLE! They are spending billions of dollars and decades studying a site to make sure that it can hold the waste for the thousands of years neccassary. And, of course, people crucify them for it.
You point to the defects in Yucca Mountain that the government 'glossed over'. Perhaps they did. But, one thing is damm certain, if that site was really unsafe it wouldn't be built - no self-respecting group of scientists (remember thousands) would declare a site safe knowing that in 30-40 years they could all be glowing green if they where wrong. Instead two-three scientists disagree with something that was in the official report and people start yelling 'disaster.'
Nobody wants this stuff in his/her backyard. Their isn't a place in the united states where you could try to put this without people frothing at the mouth at telling you about losing your freedoms and destroying the communities, etc, etc. It also doesn't help the matter that this is land that was stolen from Native American tribes long ago. Which presents us with a problem: what do we do?
Do we stop all work on Yucca mountain and begin a search again for a new site knowing full well that it will likely take another 20 years and 80 billion dollars?
Or do we build the damm thing anyways ignoring the few people who say the site has problems, knowing that any little defect could result in us ruining a huge stretch of the Western Us? Also, build the thing knowing full well that the land was stolen from the people who orginally owned it?
My opinion (like a**holes I know) is that we have little choice: the radioactive waste is hazardous and presents a huge problem to the US. We have a place that is (reasonably) safe and fairly remote . Build the damm thing.
They also forgot to mention a very, very major problem if those containers, for whatever reason, bust open.
Consider: at Yucca if the containers break what do you have? A really radioactive mountain in the middle of a god-forsaken desert.
And if these containers break at the bottom of the sea floor what do you have? A disaster of epic proportions as you could, concievable, nearly wipe out all life in a large chunk of the ocean with the amount of radioactive waste we have and poision the rest for hundreds of years.
Of course they haven't answered the questions of saftey - they're is no way they can. No place on earth is *designed* to hold nuclear waste or, really, suitable. However the U.S. has a 50 year stockpile of the stuff sitting around in temporary containters that are a hell of a lot less safe than Yucca mountain.
What you should be saying is that you are glad that after 80 billion dollars (if that is the real amount) and 20 years of study Yucca still looks like the best choice. For us to *not* spend every possible resource to dispose of radioactive waste which will be harmful for 10,000 years would be a criminal affront to future generations. You should be glad that your government is doing it's best to look ahead for future generations, hell future governments, and making sure that this waste is disposed of probably.
I brought the book out just to give people some facts/figures:
395 million troy ounces of silver was needed for the construction of the Cyclotrons in oak ridge
The US, with British help, acquired all of the known mines for uranium as/of 1943.
The gaseous diffusion plant at Hartford was a U-shaped building half mile long, 1/5 mile in width with 42.7 acres under it's roof.
Hartford required the construction of 2,892 gaseous diffusion traps.
Construction of the reactor pile required 17,400 cubic yards of concrete, 50,000 concrete blocks, 390 tons of structual steel
There are more equally impressive figures but I didn't have time to hunt them down.
Looking up the facts in the book right now.(Making of Atomic Bomb, p.486-489) The problem with uranium/plutonium production is that it is a very gradual process (centrifuge upon centrifuge to seperate the gas's, each stage gradually producing higher grades). Plutonium is a little different but the same idea applies (many stages to purify it). The aluminum/silver was used in the construction as a one-time type cost (so for one year) while the electricty was a continuing usage.
Erp totally wrong on that troy ounces of silver by the way - 395 million troy ounces is what was needed.
1.) 2 bombs built (2 uranium, 1 plutonium). By August 10 1945).
2.) A large amount of paritally purified uranium/plutonium was used for testing.
3.) The book states no official figure - only the fact that each plant was able to produce enough for one bomb a month (rougly 30 kilograms/month for uranium bomb, 22 kilo/month for plutonium).
The general consensus among historians is a definite NO b/c
1.) German industrial power was nothing like the US and didn't have access to the resource's US did.
2.) The german effort was 2 years behind the US's in theory terms - not counting materials.
3.) It is *highly* doubtful the US strategic command would've let anything like Oak Ridge plant be built in Germany without bombing the shit out of it. You can't hide a facility that covers hundreds of acres - nor can you protect it. The vibrations from the bombs impacting close to the seperators are enough to destroy them.
4.) Actually the entire manhatten project was run like a command economy - everything had to provided and NOW (the silver for the seperators was actually taken out of the US Treasury, some 3$ billion dollars worth , in 1943 dollars).
If the germans would've gotten a few more years headstart, or could've delayed the US for 2-3 more years it is possible yes. But remember this, by that time the US would've had the bomb.
Doesn't matter how much more efficent you are.. here is a interesting factoid for you:
In 1944 the entire German war machine was able to produce something like 25,000 fighter/bomber's.
In 1944 FOUR american west coast manufacturing plants where able to produce 27,000 fighters/bombers. Note: this doesn't include the hundereds of other plants strewn across the US. Remember: efficiency only goes so far.
Actually german industry *increased* production in 1944 and was at it's peak. (a testament to the genius of Albert Speer, nazi war armaments minister) despite allied strategic bombing.
As for the figures in 1943 I imagine the U.S. still had a lead - however I could be wrong and I bet the farther back you go (1942,41) Germany probably had a lead at some point int he early stages of the war.
Yes they did - almost an entire continent. But to put it into perspective: in 1945 the United States controlled FIFTY PERCENT of the WORLD's industrial output. Germany had like 17%, soviet union had something like 15%.
Like I said - no real contest.
The book making of the Atomic bomb is also quite interesting as it goes into a great deal of detail about the Bohr-Heisnberg relationship. NY times misread the book , I believe, when they said that heisenberg simply failed. In actuality the book paints a picture of Heisenberg not wanting to develop the bomb at all - and turning the german research team away from a number of key discoveries. Now the book doesn't say that this was intentional - perhaps heisenberg was simply mistaken. Judge for yourself.
The most interesting fact I learned from that book was this:
To seperate,process, and manufacture the uranium nad plutonium neccassary for the a-bombs it required 32% of the United States Electrical output, 23% of the US's Silver output (144,000 Troy Ounces was the figure I believe), and 14% of the US's aluminum output to construct the plants (at Oak Ridge, Tennesse and Hartford, Washington). Remember this is 1944 people - height of america's industrial might. Now ask yourself if germany could've done the same...
Unless my physics is off yes it would be heavier - but you really wouldn't be able to tell. A electron weights something like .0123 of a Proton (which is 1 atomic weight). So in theory yes but you couldn't tell.
Some ISP's seem to be trying to provide DSL etc in rural area's. In Nebraska a local ISP just rolled out it's first wireless system in Valentine, Nebraska (don't ask - only city in the largest county in the US if that helps). It provides dsl or better speeds.. the problem is that you have to be within a few miles of the tower and LOS.
BTW I've heard that pretty much everybody with COX road runner hates it while people with Time Warner road runner love it...