My point is that , number one,the line between commercial vendors and amateur efforts, especialy in linux, can become very blurred and number two, that the people who draft the legislation desiding liability may not take into account what you would expect and make a clear and fair distinction and even if they did I could see certain cases where the whole issue could become very messy and regretably damaging to linux.
When legislators start making laws about software liabilty, you can bet your bottom dollar that big $oftware companies will pay out lots of money to lobbyists and political campaigns so those laws will have loopholes that allow them to avoid liability.
And it gets worse. They will have the legislators write those laws so people who provide open source software can not avoid liability. They will do this to discourage people from providing free software, and hence less competition for the big $oftware products.
Way back when Xerox sold copiers to the Soviets, they installed little microfilm cameras in them. The Soviets paid Xerox for maintenance contracts. The field technicians who serviced the copiers would secretly replace the microfilm cannisters when they changed the ink cartridges. The film cannisters were given to the US government as part of a separate service contract with the US.
Eventually, the Soviets figured out the ruse.
Obviously, the US government has taken advantage of US technology to bug the Chinese plane also. Just shows there is a benefit to being the world's technological leader. All your enemies have to come to the US for parts and service.
> But if you're Germany, smaller and under constant attack but with superior scientific traditions, what is to say that a more analytical approach might not have produced the same results?
Germany's superior scientific traditions were lost when all the best minds went to the other side of the ocean just at the Nazis were taking over. Many of the people who made the bomb fled Germany and Italy.
Also, German scientists were mostly theoreticians, not experimenters or engineers. Remember, these were the theoreticians who came up with quantum physics *theories*. They had hardly any "analytical approach" at all. When it came to making the bomb, among the hundreds of thousands of people working on the Manhattan project, the Americans employed hundreds of engineers for every theoretical scientist. Of the several hundered people employed by the Nazis to make the bomb, the people were mostly scientists and technicians. Most of the German engineers were working on the V2 and non-atomic bombs.
> On the Luftwaffe 1946 web site there are some very speculative but very interesting possibilities of how the Germans could have (a) been designing a totally different type of bomb (b) come up with a way of producing plutonium that did not require the full-blown nuclear reactors at Hanford.
The Nazis never made one atom of plutonium. They did not know how. Even if they did know, they did not have the resources. After the war, German scientists were astonished to discover how much the Americans knew about plutonium, how much the Americans made, and that one could make a bomb out of it.
> Heisenberg had estimated that a ton of U-235 was needed to reach critical mass, which was, of course, a huge overestimate. This is the reasoning he gave in a conversation with Otto Hahn immediately after being surprised by the news of Hiroshima (the conversation was secretly taped by the Allies):
> "If I have pure 235 each neutron will immediately beget two children and then there must be a chain reaction which goes very quickly. Then you can reckon as follows. One neutron always makes two others in pure 235. That is to say that in order to make 10^24 neutrons I need 80 reactions one after the other. Therefore I need 80 collisions and the mean free path is about 6 centimetres. In order to make 80 collisions, I must have a lump of a radius of about 54 centimetres and that would be about a ton."
> Can you see the mistake in his logic?
Mistake 1: The neutron release number is 2.3, not 2. So he only needs 66 collisions to produce 10^24 collisions.
Mistake 2: The mean free path is less than 6 cm since the U235 cross-section is larger than he estimated. (He should have done the experiment and known for certain instead of relying on theory alone.)
Mistake 3: The minimum radius is actually slightly less than the average free path length. Meaning that if one of the 2.3 neutrons escapes the uranium before hitting another nucleus, then the remaining 1 or 2 are sufficient to continue the chain reaction.
> It seems to me like everybody is now comparing Bohr vs Heisenberg directly as if they were in some kind of competition. What the hell does this mean:
> > Since Heisenberg was surprised, we may assume he simply did not know how to get enough weapons grade uranium.
> The US & Allies had thousands of people working on the project, but all the comments sound as if Heisenberg was a one-man-team developing the bomb for the Nazi's.
> There is a lot of speculation in this specific comment. (in other words, there is a lot of bullshit)
It is not speculation. Many scientists and historians have read the text of the Farm Hall tapes, read Heisenberg's notes, and followed his math and found out where his math failed. Heisenberg's notes from 1941 until 1945 are very consistently wrong. He kept over-estimating the critical mass by 2+ orders of magnitude. This was because he thought the neutron release number was 2 instead of 2.3, he assumed slow neutrons could not set off a chain reaction, and more importantly, he thought the mean neutron travel time was much larger.
The US had hundreds of thousands of people contributing to the Manhattan Project, with 50,000 alone at Hanford. The Nazis had only a few hundred people working on their reactor. The US threw over 2 billion $ at the Manhattan Project over the course of 6 years. Nazi funding was scant since the project was considered low priority. (I got the numbers from Physics Today, August 1995 issue, and American Scientist, June 1996 issue.)
Since many of the brightest minds in much of Europe went to England or the US as the Nazis took over, there weren't too many around to solve the many physics, engineering and chemical problems relevant to making a bomb. The German scientists consistently used the wrong numbers to assess how much critical mass is necessary. They honestly thought they needed several tons of *pure* U235.
Nor did they know how to separate U235 from U238 efficiently. They thought they could use a mass spectrograph. There is an old style mass spectrograph that can be used to vaporize a material. The substance was then ionized and pulled to one side with magnets. The slightly lighter U235 would follow a different path than the U238, and so could be isolated that way. But, this mechanism can not be easily scaled up from making microscopic quantities to making several kilograms.
Heisenberg thought the minimum mass for an atom bomb was several tons, and was hence unfeasible. He stated this several times in his notes, in meetings with Nazi officials, and at Farm Hall.
Seaborg was one among others to isolate U235 from U238. He is now best known as a codiscoverer of Pu. But, back in 1941, he was the last of several scientists to figure out how to isolate U235.
(From 1996 article in American Scientist. Parenthetical remarks by me.)
February 29, 1940. Alfred Nier at Minnesota separates microscopic samples of natural uranium into U238 and U235 for analysis. (His method did not isolate enough U235 to get a critical mass, or at least not fast enough at low cost.)
December 1940. Franz Simon submits a memorandum on isotope separation to the MAUD Committee, projecting that an isotope-separation plant using gaseous barrier diffusion will produce l kilogram per day of highly enriched U235 at a cost of £5 million.
November 1941. John Dunning and Eugene Booth in New York successfully enrich a measurable quantity of U235 using gaseous barrier diffusion with uranium hexafluoride.
December 1941. Electromagnetic isotope separation at Berkeley produces 1 microgram per hour of highly enriched U235. (I suspect this was Glenn Seaborg's work. Later in 1942, while in Chicago, Seaborg and Arthur Compton devised mechanisms for extracting and enriching sufficient amounts of Pu239 and U235. Seaborg left the Manhattan project in 1942, but stayed at the Metallurgical Lab in Chicago until 1946. Compton got much of the recognition for providing plutonium.)
Shortly after WWII, Werner Heisenberg was held captive by the British government at Farm Hall along with several other top German scientists. The British secretly taped the conversations at Farm Hall, and these tapes were declassified in 1992. (It took prolonged and strenuous efforts by several historians, and members of the Royal Society to persuade the government.)
Heisenberg was at Farm Hall when the US dropped the bombs on Japan in August of 1945. When he heard the news, he was astonished that the US had separated sufficient U235 from U238 to obtain critical mass. He was also surprised that the US also made a plutonium based bomb. (The methods used to extract U238 and Pu were made by a chemist working under Enrico Fermi in Chicago. Without
the knowledge provided by that chemist, the US would not have had either bomb for perhaps another year.) Since Heisenberg was surprised, we may assume he simply did not know how to get enough weapons grade uranium. Nor could he make enough and separate enough plutonium for a bomb.
He had enough uranium to make a small nuclear reactor. Which he did create in a cave in southern Germany. The US army found the cave and removed the materials. The assessment by US scientists was that the reactor was never put to use. Apparently war efforts hindered Heisenberg's attempt to get all the resources he needed. And, towards the end of the war, the effort was abandoned.
It is likely that Heisenberg knew he could not make a bomb and persuaded the Nazi government to allow him to make a reactor instead. Whether he had only technical reasons for the change in policy is unknown. He may have had moral reasons for preventing the Nazis from getting a bomb, but there is no public source of information to support that hypothesis.
In 1941, he may have wanted to make a bomb, or knew that the Nazis wanted him to make one. In either case, I think he went to Copenhagen to ask/tell/warn Bohr about the Nazi plans. During that evening, he and Neils Bohr went for a walk. Bohr's wife, Margerethe, reported that they both left the house that evening in a good mood. The walk in the dark was short, only a few minutes. Neils Bohr came back quickly, and in a foul mood. Heisenberg followed him back inside. They did not talk about much later that evening.
Later in the war, Bohr's family secretly got into a boat at night and left for England, and then America.
Heisenberg stayed in England for some time, as a "guest" of the British government. In 1947, he was allowed to visit Bohr, and his British handler went with him. During that meeting, he and Bohr agreed that "we both came to feel that it would be better to stop disturbing the spirits of the past." (From Heisenberg's memoirs.)
Bohr and Heisenberg continued their friendship after 1947, and until Bohr died in 1962. Bohr kept that friendship even though most Allied scientists shunned Heisenberg.
Read "Every Employee's Guide To The Law" by Lewin G. Joel III. It's published by Pantheon Books in the USA.
It contains a chapter on what to do if you have been wrongly fired. It also contains a lot of advice on how to handle discrimination issues before somebody ends up getting fired.
The caldera of Pavonis is right on the equator, so you can get maximum benefit from the rotation of Mars. Which is why people on Earth like to put their launch pads as close to the equator as possible. It requires less energy.
The top of Pavonis Mons is almost as high as Olympus Mons, so you would not need to go through the Martian atmosphere at that point either.
My understanding of autism is that there are several genes which contribute to it. If somebody has some of the genes, but not all or most, they may have some of the symptoms of Autism. Having some of the genes can be a benefit, but having all or most can be a detriment.
Same as with the gene for sickle-cell anemia. If you have 1 copy of the sickle-cell gene, you can survive malaria. If you have both genes, you're gonna get sickle-cell anemia.
Among my family members, I have a brother with Autism, and a nephew with Asperger's.
My brother is high-functioning. He does trig and exponential math in his head. (He compared calculators to himself and found mistakes in a calculator.) He can tell you the day of the week for any day from 1583 A.D. to 6482 A.D. And when Easter Sunday will occur on year in that time frame. He also taught himself 15 human languages by reading dictionaries and grammar guides. He can write math programs that run perfectly the first time. But, for social skills, he is like the character in the "RainMan" movie.
My nephew is still young (11 years), but he already has shown a lot of aptitude for math. He's still learning what skills he can develop, and with a supportive family, he will be encouraged to learn. His brother (13 years) is also a math whiz who has already built his own computer, and set up the device drivers for that computer.
Among my siblings, I have a sister with a masters degree in math and chemical engineering. She makes chips for Intel.
I have another brother who put his math, geography, and computer skills to work making mapping software.
I make software tools for people that design custom chips.
One member of my family does multi-dimensional calculus in his head.
Some of my extended family pick up new software languages quickly, and learning the nuances of it. We have many advanced degrees and unusual specialties. There is a wide range of social skills among us. The vast majority of us do just fine at getting along with others.
Apparently having some of the autism genes allows geeks to provide much needed skills to society. (And get the neat high $ jobs.)
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My point is that , number one ,the line between commercial vendors and amateur efforts, especialy in linux, can become very blurred and number two, that the people who draft the legislation desiding liability may not take into account what you would expect and make a clear and fair distinction and even if they did I could see certain cases where the whole issue could become very messy and regretably damaging to linux.
When legislators start making laws about software liabilty, you can bet your bottom dollar that big $oftware companies will pay out lots of money to lobbyists and political campaigns so those laws will have loopholes that allow them to avoid liability.
And it gets worse. They will have the legislators write those laws so people who provide open source software can not avoid liability. They will do this to discourage people from providing free software, and hence less competition for the big $oftware products.
Way back when Xerox sold copiers to the Soviets, they installed little microfilm cameras in them. The Soviets paid Xerox for maintenance contracts. The field technicians who serviced the copiers would secretly replace the microfilm cannisters when they changed the ink cartridges. The film cannisters were given to the US government as part of a separate service contract with the US.
Eventually, the Soviets figured out the ruse.
Obviously, the US government has taken advantage of US technology to bug the Chinese plane also. Just shows there is a benefit to being the world's technological leader. All your enemies have to come to the US for parts and service.
> But if you're Germany, smaller and under constant attack but with superior scientific traditions, what is to say that a more analytical approach might not have produced the same results?
Germany's superior scientific traditions were lost when all the best minds went to the other side of the ocean just at the Nazis were taking over. Many of the people who made the bomb fled Germany and Italy.
Also, German scientists were mostly theoreticians, not experimenters or engineers. Remember, these were the theoreticians who came up with quantum physics *theories*. They had hardly any "analytical approach" at all. When it came to making the bomb, among the hundreds of thousands of people working on the Manhattan project, the Americans employed hundreds of engineers for every theoretical scientist. Of the several hundered people employed by the Nazis to make the bomb, the people were mostly scientists and technicians. Most of the German engineers were working on the V2 and non-atomic bombs.
> On the Luftwaffe 1946 web site there are some very speculative but very interesting possibilities of how the Germans could have (a) been designing a totally different type of bomb (b) come up with a way of producing plutonium that did not require the full-blown nuclear reactors at Hanford.
The Nazis never made one atom of plutonium. They did not know how. Even if they did know, they did not have the resources. After the war, German scientists were astonished to discover how much the Americans knew about plutonium, how much the Americans made, and that one could make a bomb out of it.
> Heisenberg had estimated that a ton of U-235 was needed to reach critical mass, which was, of course, a huge overestimate. This is the reasoning he gave in a conversation with Otto Hahn immediately after being surprised by the news of Hiroshima (the conversation was secretly taped by the Allies):
> "If I have pure 235 each neutron will immediately beget two children and then there must be a chain reaction which goes very quickly. Then you can reckon as follows. One neutron always makes two others in pure 235. That is to say that in order to make 10^24 neutrons I need 80 reactions one after the other. Therefore I need 80 collisions and the mean free path is about 6 centimetres. In order to make 80 collisions, I must have a lump of a radius of about 54 centimetres and that would be about a ton."
> Can you see the mistake in his logic?
Mistake 1: The neutron release number is 2.3, not 2. So he only needs 66 collisions to produce 10^24 collisions.
Mistake 2: The mean free path is less than 6 cm since the U235 cross-section is larger than he estimated. (He should have done the experiment and known for certain instead of relying on theory alone.)
Mistake 3: The minimum radius is actually slightly less than the average free path length. Meaning that if one of the 2.3 neutrons escapes the uranium before hitting another nucleus, then the remaining 1 or 2 are sufficient to continue the chain reaction.
Mistake 4: He needs less than 10^24 collisions.
> It seems to me like everybody is now comparing Bohr vs Heisenberg directly as if they were in some kind of competition. What the hell does this mean:
> > Since Heisenberg was surprised, we may assume he simply did not know how to get enough weapons grade uranium.
> The US & Allies had thousands of people working on the project, but all the comments sound as if Heisenberg was a one-man-team developing the bomb for the Nazi's.
> There is a lot of speculation in this specific comment. (in other words, there is a lot of bullshit)
It is not speculation. Many scientists and historians have read the text of the Farm Hall tapes, read Heisenberg's notes, and followed his math and found out where his math failed. Heisenberg's notes from 1941 until 1945 are very consistently wrong. He kept over-estimating the critical mass by 2+ orders of magnitude. This was because he thought the neutron release number was 2 instead of 2.3, he assumed slow neutrons could not set off a chain reaction, and more importantly, he thought the mean neutron travel time was much larger.
The US had hundreds of thousands of people contributing to the Manhattan Project, with 50,000 alone at Hanford. The Nazis had only a few hundred people working on their reactor. The US threw over 2 billion $ at the Manhattan Project over the course of 6 years. Nazi funding was scant since the project was considered low priority. (I got the numbers from Physics Today, August 1995 issue, and American Scientist, June 1996 issue.)
Since many of the brightest minds in much of Europe went to England or the US as the Nazis took over, there weren't too many around to solve the many physics, engineering and chemical problems relevant to making a bomb. The German scientists consistently used the wrong numbers to assess how much critical mass is necessary. They honestly thought they needed several tons of *pure* U235.
Nor did they know how to separate U235 from U238 efficiently. They thought they could use a mass spectrograph. There is an old style mass spectrograph that can be used to vaporize a material. The substance was then ionized and pulled to one side with magnets. The slightly lighter U235 would follow a different path than the U238, and so could be isolated that way. But, this mechanism can not be easily scaled up from making microscopic quantities to making several kilograms.
Heisenberg thought the minimum mass for an atom bomb was several tons, and was hence unfeasible. He stated this several times in his notes, in meetings with Nazi officials, and at Farm Hall.
Seaborg was one among others to isolate U235 from U238. He is now best known as a codiscoverer of Pu. But, back in 1941, he was the last of several scientists to figure out how to isolate U235.
(From 1996 article in American Scientist. Parenthetical remarks by me.)
February 29, 1940. Alfred Nier at Minnesota separates microscopic samples of natural uranium into U238 and U235 for analysis. (His method did not isolate enough U235 to get a critical mass, or at least not fast enough at low cost.)
December 1940. Franz Simon submits a memorandum on isotope separation to the MAUD Committee, projecting that an isotope-separation plant using gaseous barrier diffusion will produce l kilogram per day of highly enriched U235 at a cost of £5 million.
November 1941. John Dunning and Eugene Booth in New York successfully enrich a measurable quantity of U235 using gaseous barrier diffusion with uranium hexafluoride.
December 1941. Electromagnetic isotope separation at Berkeley produces 1 microgram per hour of highly enriched U235. (I suspect this was Glenn Seaborg's work. Later in 1942, while in Chicago, Seaborg and Arthur Compton devised mechanisms for extracting and enriching sufficient amounts of Pu239 and U235. Seaborg left the Manhattan project in 1942, but stayed at the Metallurgical Lab in Chicago until 1946. Compton got much of the recognition for providing plutonium.)
Shortly after WWII, Werner Heisenberg was held captive by the British government at Farm Hall along with several other top German scientists. The British secretly taped the conversations at Farm Hall, and these tapes were declassified in 1992. (It took prolonged and strenuous efforts by several historians, and members of the Royal Society to persuade the government.) Heisenberg was at Farm Hall when the US dropped the bombs on Japan in August of 1945. When he heard the news, he was astonished that the US had separated sufficient U235 from U238 to obtain critical mass. He was also surprised that the US also made a plutonium based bomb. (The methods used to extract U238 and Pu were made by a chemist working under Enrico Fermi in Chicago. Without the knowledge provided by that chemist, the US would not have had either bomb for perhaps another year.) Since Heisenberg was surprised, we may assume he simply did not know how to get enough weapons grade uranium. Nor could he make enough and separate enough plutonium for a bomb. He had enough uranium to make a small nuclear reactor. Which he did create in a cave in southern Germany. The US army found the cave and removed the materials. The assessment by US scientists was that the reactor was never put to use. Apparently war efforts hindered Heisenberg's attempt to get all the resources he needed. And, towards the end of the war, the effort was abandoned. It is likely that Heisenberg knew he could not make a bomb and persuaded the Nazi government to allow him to make a reactor instead. Whether he had only technical reasons for the change in policy is unknown. He may have had moral reasons for preventing the Nazis from getting a bomb, but there is no public source of information to support that hypothesis. In 1941, he may have wanted to make a bomb, or knew that the Nazis wanted him to make one. In either case, I think he went to Copenhagen to ask/tell/warn Bohr about the Nazi plans. During that evening, he and Neils Bohr went for a walk. Bohr's wife, Margerethe, reported that they both left the house that evening in a good mood. The walk in the dark was short, only a few minutes. Neils Bohr came back quickly, and in a foul mood. Heisenberg followed him back inside. They did not talk about much later that evening. Later in the war, Bohr's family secretly got into a boat at night and left for England, and then America. Heisenberg stayed in England for some time, as a "guest" of the British government. In 1947, he was allowed to visit Bohr, and his British handler went with him. During that meeting, he and Bohr agreed that "we both came to feel that it would be better to stop disturbing the spirits of the past." (From Heisenberg's memoirs.) Bohr and Heisenberg continued their friendship after 1947, and until Bohr died in 1962. Bohr kept that friendship even though most Allied scientists shunned Heisenberg.
Read "Every Employee's Guide To The Law" by Lewin G. Joel III. It's published by Pantheon Books in the USA. It contains a chapter on what to do if you have been wrongly fired. It also contains a lot of advice on how to handle discrimination issues before somebody ends up getting fired.
Pavonis Mons would be better than Olympus Mons.
The caldera of Pavonis is right on the equator, so you can get maximum benefit from the rotation of Mars. Which is why people on Earth like to put their launch pads as close to the equator as possible. It requires less energy.
The top of Pavonis Mons is almost as high as Olympus Mons, so you would not need to go through the Martian atmosphere at that point either.
My understanding of autism is that there are several genes which contribute to it. If somebody has some of the genes, but not all or most, they may have some of the symptoms of Autism. Having some of the genes can be a benefit, but having all or most can be a detriment.
Same as with the gene for sickle-cell anemia. If you have 1 copy of the sickle-cell gene, you can survive malaria. If you have both genes, you're gonna get sickle-cell anemia.
Among my family members, I have a brother with Autism, and a nephew with Asperger's.
My brother is high-functioning. He does trig and exponential math in his head. (He compared calculators to himself and found mistakes in a calculator.) He can tell you the day of the week for any day from 1583 A.D. to 6482 A.D. And when Easter Sunday will occur on year in that time frame. He also taught himself 15 human languages by reading dictionaries and grammar guides. He can write math programs that run perfectly the first time. But, for social skills, he is like the character in the "RainMan" movie.
My nephew is still young (11 years), but he already has shown a lot of aptitude for math. He's still learning what skills he can develop, and with a supportive family, he will be encouraged to learn. His brother (13 years) is also a math whiz who has already built his own computer, and set up the device drivers for that computer.
Among my siblings, I have a sister with a masters degree in math and chemical engineering. She makes chips for Intel.
I have another brother who put his math, geography, and computer skills to work making mapping software.
I make software tools for people that design custom chips.
One member of my family does multi-dimensional calculus in his head.
Some of my extended family pick up new software languages quickly, and learning the nuances of it. We have many advanced degrees and unusual specialties. There is a wide range of social skills among us. The vast majority of us do just fine at getting along with others.
Apparently having some of the autism genes allows geeks to provide much needed skills to society. (And get the neat high $ jobs.)