UK customs also get pissy with cars full of booze and ciggies from Calais - the EU are likley to bitchslap them on this.
It's a tricky issue, there. The UK has much higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco than France - so much so that it's very cost-effective for people living in southeast England to get on a boat to France, load up on cheap drink and smokes and bring it all home. Calais is full of giant booze stores dedicated to serving the British, so much so that they speak English and accept payment in pounds.
Under European law you can bring back as much as you like for personal use. The single market, free trade and all that. But if you're bringing it in to sell on you have to pay British taxes on it, taxes which are frequently dodged by dodgy traders heading over to Calais with big vans. So Customs have this idea of a 'personal limit' - an amount above which they assume it's not for personal use. I think this is more or less based on what they used to allow, back before we joined the Common Market.
The personal limit is not a law, just a guideline... but the problem is that Customs tend to treat it like it's carved in stone and brought down the mountain by Moses. With a bit of luck Brussels will convince them otherwise, and we'll be able to stock up for our big New Year party or whatever it might be without worrying about having to explain ourselves to some neanderthal in an official hat.
If article 5 had been used, you'd have seen a lot more countries participating then the Brits and a few other NATO members. Basicly all member countries have the obligation to come to eachothers defense.
Well, they have to offer. All of NATO was available for the invasion of Afghanistan, but the US was quite capable of handling that by itself, and only really wanted extra help from British super-l337 infantry (because, as they said, 'we don't do mountains'...) You don't have to send along a few hundred guys from every member nation just to show the flag, if they're only going to lead to a confused command structure and the need to bring dozens of translators along.
After the invasion the occupation was taken over by NATO units: initially British and German for the most part, though since then they've been rotated several times and I really don't know who's out there at present.
It was the invasion of Iraq that spit the alliance, not Afghanistan.
Regarding NATO, ISTR that the US tried to invoke the alliance to get allied nations to send troops to Turkey, to help protect it from Iraq. But why, we asked, did Turkey think it might get attacked by Iraq? Oh, said the US, because we're about to attack Iraq and the Turks are helping.
Hmm. NATO is for mutual defence; OTOH, if one member of NATO is bloody stupid enough to start a war, are we obliged to step in to protect them from the consequences of their foolishness?
The way you tell the story, it almost sounds like you might be suggesting some Tory supporters tried to punish their candidate for wasting time, which seems unlikely.
IIRC, this was the sort of place where Labour never had a significant share of the vote...
A bit of googlery reveals the details. It was Winchester, in 1997.
The original result was Liberal 26,100, Tory 26,098, Labour 6,528. After the re-run, the result was Liberal 37,006, Tory 15,450 and Labour 944. Certainly some of those Labour votes would have gone Liberal, but it also seems that the party didn't even bother campaigning; there was a winnable by-election elsewhere on the same day. Notice also that the Liberal vote increased by more than the entire Labour vote from the original result, and that the Tory vote collapsed. It looks a lot like many Tory voters either stayed at home or switched to Liberal out of annoyance at their candidate playing silly buggers.
Oh, and the nostalgia... good old Screaming Lord Sutch on the hustings. I really miss seeing him at elections.
There was a precinct upstate who didn't turn their tallies in until 9 am the next morning after the 2004 elections. This made the news, in other counties (such as mine). They were repremanded by state politicians about how this was unacceptable.
Interesting... but that's, what, one out of how many in the state? Usually that won't affect the outcome, right?
In British elections, the polls are open all day Thursday (I have no idea why Thursday, AFAIK it's just traditional) and close at 10pm. Counting goes on through the night. Generally the result is clear by about 1 or 2am, and confirmed at about three or four once one party controls a majority of the seats. Early the next morning the Prime Minister is waving to the cameras from the steps of No. 10.
However, there are always a few constituencies where the count is delayed for whatever reason, or where a recount is demanded. Although the vast majority will have returned already, results continue to trickle in well into Friday daytime. This does not seem to bother anybody.
However, there was one case - I believe in 1997, when the Tory vote collapsed spectacularly - where one seat which the Tories had considered safely theirs for decades had returned a Liberal Democrat MP, by a very small majority. The Tory demanded a recount, as was his right, and the recount was held. Yep, the Liberal won, but the majority was even smaller than we thought the first time (in single figures, IIRC). The Tory then somehow forced the vote to be retaken... which resulted in a massive majority for the Liberal.
The lesson? Recounts and delays are all very well, but don't take the piss, mate:-)
The "sister" language, VBA, is ideal for vendors who want to provide rich, user-accessible scripting interface to their hardware or software products.
Also, the damn thing's everywhere. Suppose you have some dullish office data handling task. The sort of thing your average white-collar drone will spend several days working on in Excel, click, copy, paste, add up, repeat...
You're smarter than that. You know that this kind of repetitive shite is best done by a computer. Very well... but you aren't in the IT department, you don't have admin rights to install anything, and God help you if you download and run anything not authorised and signed off on by the Proper Authorities after at least seventeen two-hour meetings about it.
And yet here is VBA. Hiding just under the surface of every one of these mundane office apps you use every day. OK... for a = 1 to lots, sht.Cells(a,1), adodb.recordset, this, that, the other, output to here... done!
If you're a geek in the wilderness, VBA's a godsend. Or perhaps a deal with Mephistopheles... either way, it gets results:-)
hot fusion plant which loses containment will wreck some very expensive equipment and have to be left to "cool-down" before it can be properly decommisioned (likely for several years)
Probably not even that. As soon as you began to lose containment the fusion reaction would shut down completely. The temperature would drop like a stone as the gas expanded (PV = nRT and all that) and by the time it actually touched the walls I doubt it would be capable of doing any damage.
Encase it in ceramic and concrete and embed it deep in the Earth's crust. Plant it in a subduction zone. Eject it from the planet. Deposit it in an extremely deep oceanic trench. Just because you may not like these ideas doesn't mean they don't exist.
Personally, I think these are all bloody awful ideas. In fifty-odd years we'll be running short of the uranium fuel that our current reactors use - and which pebble-bed reactors will also burn. Unless nuclear fusion has really come on by then, at that point we'll begin building breeder reactors - which will burn the waste from the previous generation of plants.
That nuclear waste will suddenly represent an enormous fuel resource. You could probably run the UK for centuries just off the amount of fissile junk stacked up at Sellafield already. And we'll really be kicking ourselves if we've thrown it all into a subduction zone.
Bury it deep, sure - but bury it somewhere it can be dug up if we realise we actually want the stuff someday.
Desalinize sea water with it if you wish, but this is a waste of heat that could be used to produce electricity.
In a nuclear reactor, heat is cheap.
What you're doing with these things is using the heat from the nuclear reaction to boil water, then using the steam to spin turbines and thus turn dynamos to generate electricity. It's a giant steam engine.
Now, if you want to desalinate salt water, one way to do it is to boil the stuff. The salt is left behind, and once the steam condenses you have fresh water. So. Use your nuclear furnace to boil off some salt water from the sea. Direct the hot steam through your turbines. Generate electricity. Then condense the steam in your cooling towers and output fresh water.
There'll be some tricky engineering to be done to make sure you don't get salt deposits clogging up your plumbing, but in principle the idea is pretty sound.
I wonder how feasible it would be to convert nuclear plants to fusion plants later?
Very impractical. The principles are totally different; all they have in common is the word 'nuclear'.
Think about what it would take to refit a coal-fired power plant into a gas-fired power plant. You'd have to rip out and replace the entire furnace. Same with fission to fusion; you might be able to keep the boiler and turbines and so forth, but the heat source - the actual power core - would have to be totally replaced.
SMS + IM integration is a gold mine for telcos, and a rogue developer plus a small subscription based website/service can probably pull lower prices. Don't want that happening:)
Yes, it would be just terrible if something like that were to happen...
I've noticed direct connect and file transfer seldom work on it. Maybe this will help fix that.
Having had time to RTFA, I'd say it's unlikely the Gaim developers will touch this release. The licensing terms are incompatible; among other things, it forbids the creation of clients that are interoperable with other networks.
One might try arguing that a Gaim plugin using the AOL code does not in itself violate that - it's the end user who breaks the rule when they load in plugins for other networks - but I somehow think that won't fly in court.
I notice you also need separate licensing to create a client that runs on a mobile. Hmm. Something to do with mobile operators not wanting to lose all that SMS revenue from people using AIM instead, perhaps?;-)
... I mean, we've only been using Gaim for about five years now...
Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001
on
Alien Rain Over India
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The question is whether something like that could survive in the harsh radiation of space.
Apollo 12 landed near the Surveyor probe, which had landed a few years previously. The astronauts broke off a section and returned it to Earth. It was then found that bacteria had survived on Surveyor, on the Moon, in spore form - and once returned, came back to life and started replicating again.
I've also read lately (I believe it was in the current New Scientist) that an experiment on bacteria was sent up on Columbia. On being recovered, it turned out that the three cultures that were intended to be in there had all been killed off by the heat of reentry - but that a contaminant strain had survived and thrived inside the unbroken sealed container.
Bacteria are tough, and we can assume that anything leaving Earth is infested with them.
According to the current New Scientist...
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Alien Rain Over India
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· Score: 4, Interesting
... this may actually be blood. The particles do look quite like red blood cells, and that would explain the lack of DNA found in them.
It's almost as outlandish as 'the meteor was full of alien bugs', though; what we seem to have with this hypothesis was 'the meteor burst in the middle of a flock of bats and liquidised them'...
No link, the website article is subscription-only. Sorry.
1,468 gallons per citizen per day (according to NASA). I guess NASA assumes every man, woman, and child owns an automobile (and washes it every day) and takes a shower every two hours non-stop.
Think irrigation. You would probably be utterly amazed to learn just how much water it takes to produce the food you eat and the clothes you wear. I believe the cultivation of coffee and cotton are particularly thirsty enterprises.
In Norway, they drink their vodka with water.
In Sweden, they drink their vodka without water.
In Finland, they drink their vodka like water.
And in Russia, they drink their vodka instead of water.
One of the first things I did when I got my current cell phone, my first flip phone after a candybar Nokia 6190 and a Sidekick, was to figure out how to do a Jim Kirk-style one handed flip opening with it.
Heh. I've been looking at getting a new phone lately (my current one is suffering badly from Sony Ericsson Joystick Death) and getting interested in the LG 880 - a very Kirkish clamshell design. But before ordering it I had to actually poke and prod one in meatspace. So - earlier today I looked around some high street stores and found one of these things.
And, yes, there I was in the store with this dummy model phone in my hand, practising my Starfleet communication techniques. Pocket - hand - thumb in the crack to start it opening then flick - "Kirk to Enterprise!" YES! Works perfectly, just like it did on TV!
And best of all the damn thing's a 3G video phone. All it takes is some other geek to get one and we can have conversations holding the things Starfleet style! Not up to the ear, like a phone - but in front of the face, just like Spock!
All it takes once my lovely new phone arrives is to set my ringtone to 'bweepbeep!' - which I'm sure I'll be able to download from some Trek fansite - and practise my heroic pose and intonation. 'Mr Scott! Three to beam up!'
We can't really recreate the conditions under which language initially developed, but no doubt we will eventually be able to synthesize multicellular life.
But that would only tell us one way that life might form: in a test tube in some nanotech-era laboratory. That's probably not how it actually got started on Earth (although YMMV, especially if you're from Kansas.)
However, I don't think it's a lost cause. The fossil record won't tell us anything here, but evidence may well come from the details of the cell's structure and genetics. A bit like how you can see marks on an old arch bridge showing where there was scaffolding used to build it - so you might find genetic traces indicating how eukaryote life, and then multicellular life, got their starts.
Regardless of the legality of it, if you're going to buy music from allofmp3, you may as well pirate it for free, since the artist still gets nothing EITHER way.
Ah, but the pirate networks are full of incomplete, low-quality, low-bitrate, wrongly labelled, or downright fake files. Plus viruses everywhere. Meanwhile allofmp3.com provides unencumbered, technically legal, high-quality files at a very low cost. It's worth it to save the hassle.
The Americans also pulled France's ass out of the Viet Nam fire.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaa!
Oh God, that's the funniest thing I've ever read here. Please tell me you're not serious? The irony here is just incredible.
FYI, the French were having a war against the rebels in Vietnam, and were doing rather badly at it. They decided to give it up as a lost cause, and pissed off home. Then the Americans decided that if the French weren't going to fight the Commies in 'Nam, then by golly they'd have to do it themselves. And obviously the courageous and militarily successful Americans got a much better result in Vietnam than the French had managed...
Note that the French had pissed off home whether the Americans were coming or not. At that point they didn't give a damn who ended up running Vietnam. You guys got into that shithole all by yourselves, I'm afraid.
Japanese kids see a lot more and they don't have the mess we do.
Well, apart from that half of them are selling their underwear to perverted salarymen, and the other half have locked themselves in their rooms and won't come out...
We geeks idealise Japan, but the place has some serious problems of its own.
Even if you assume that they only release the energy of the least powerful nuclear bomb, which is 9 megatons, that would put the energy released by all the world's nuclear weapons at around 261,000 megatons. That's an extremely generous underestimate, too. I'm not positive, but I think the average nuke is about 50 megatons, which would put the total at 1,450,000 megatons. Where did they get the 10,000 number from?
It's not 1956 any more. Big nukes went out of style as rockets got more accurate; when there's less chance of a near miss on a hard target, you don't need such big overkill, and if it's a city you want to roast it's more cost-effective to use ten small bombs than one big bomb.
Fifty megatons is huge - the largest yield from any bomb ever detonated was some 57MT. Even one megaton is large for a modern weapon; I believe yields of a quarter to a half megaton are more typical.
Slashdot Mirror
That should be Dei Gratia. As in 'ELIZABETH II DEI GRATIA REGINA FIDEI DEFENSOR'. Gloria Deus would be 'the glory of God'.
It's a tricky issue, there. The UK has much higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco than France - so much so that it's very cost-effective for people living in southeast England to get on a boat to France, load up on cheap drink and smokes and bring it all home. Calais is full of giant booze stores dedicated to serving the British, so much so that they speak English and accept payment in pounds.
Under European law you can bring back as much as you like for personal use. The single market, free trade and all that. But if you're bringing it in to sell on you have to pay British taxes on it, taxes which are frequently dodged by dodgy traders heading over to Calais with big vans. So Customs have this idea of a 'personal limit' - an amount above which they assume it's not for personal use. I think this is more or less based on what they used to allow, back before we joined the Common Market.
The personal limit is not a law, just a guideline... but the problem is that Customs tend to treat it like it's carved in stone and brought down the mountain by Moses. With a bit of luck Brussels will convince them otherwise, and we'll be able to stock up for our big New Year party or whatever it might be without worrying about having to explain ourselves to some neanderthal in an official hat.
Well, they have to offer. All of NATO was available for the invasion of Afghanistan, but the US was quite capable of handling that by itself, and only really wanted extra help from British super-l337 infantry (because, as they said, 'we don't do mountains'...) You don't have to send along a few hundred guys from every member nation just to show the flag, if they're only going to lead to a confused command structure and the need to bring dozens of translators along.
After the invasion the occupation was taken over by NATO units: initially British and German for the most part, though since then they've been rotated several times and I really don't know who's out there at present.
It was the invasion of Iraq that spit the alliance, not Afghanistan.
Regarding NATO, ISTR that the US tried to invoke the alliance to get allied nations to send troops to Turkey, to help protect it from Iraq. But why, we asked, did Turkey think it might get attacked by Iraq? Oh, said the US, because we're about to attack Iraq and the Turks are helping.
Hmm. NATO is for mutual defence; OTOH, if one member of NATO is bloody stupid enough to start a war, are we obliged to step in to protect them from the consequences of their foolishness?
IIRC, this was the sort of place where Labour never had a significant share of the vote...
A bit of googlery reveals the details. It was Winchester, in 1997.
The original result was Liberal 26,100, Tory 26,098, Labour 6,528. After the re-run, the result was Liberal 37,006, Tory 15,450 and Labour 944. Certainly some of those Labour votes would have gone Liberal, but it also seems that the party didn't even bother campaigning; there was a winnable by-election elsewhere on the same day. Notice also that the Liberal vote increased by more than the entire Labour vote from the original result, and that the Tory vote collapsed. It looks a lot like many Tory voters either stayed at home or switched to Liberal out of annoyance at their candidate playing silly buggers.
Oh, and the nostalgia... good old Screaming Lord Sutch on the hustings. I really miss seeing him at elections.
Interesting... but that's, what, one out of how many in the state? Usually that won't affect the outcome, right?
In British elections, the polls are open all day Thursday (I have no idea why Thursday, AFAIK it's just traditional) and close at 10pm. Counting goes on through the night. Generally the result is clear by about 1 or 2am, and confirmed at about three or four once one party controls a majority of the seats. Early the next morning the Prime Minister is waving to the cameras from the steps of No. 10.
However, there are always a few constituencies where the count is delayed for whatever reason, or where a recount is demanded. Although the vast majority will have returned already, results continue to trickle in well into Friday daytime. This does not seem to bother anybody.
However, there was one case - I believe in 1997, when the Tory vote collapsed spectacularly - where one seat which the Tories had considered safely theirs for decades had returned a Liberal Democrat MP, by a very small majority. The Tory demanded a recount, as was his right, and the recount was held. Yep, the Liberal won, but the majority was even smaller than we thought the first time (in single figures, IIRC). The Tory then somehow forced the vote to be retaken... which resulted in a massive majority for the Liberal.
The lesson? Recounts and delays are all very well, but don't take the piss, mate :-)
Also, the damn thing's everywhere. Suppose you have some dullish office data handling task. The sort of thing your average white-collar drone will spend several days working on in Excel, click, copy, paste, add up, repeat...
You're smarter than that. You know that this kind of repetitive shite is best done by a computer. Very well... but you aren't in the IT department, you don't have admin rights to install anything, and God help you if you download and run anything not authorised and signed off on by the Proper Authorities after at least seventeen two-hour meetings about it.
And yet here is VBA. Hiding just under the surface of every one of these mundane office apps you use every day. OK... for a = 1 to lots, sht.Cells(a,1), adodb.recordset, this, that, the other, output to here... done!
If you're a geek in the wilderness, VBA's a godsend. Or perhaps a deal with Mephistopheles... either way, it gets results :-)
Come and get it, kids...
Probably not even that. As soon as you began to lose containment the fusion reaction would shut down completely. The temperature would drop like a stone as the gas expanded (PV = nRT and all that) and by the time it actually touched the walls I doubt it would be capable of doing any damage.
Personally, I think these are all bloody awful ideas. In fifty-odd years we'll be running short of the uranium fuel that our current reactors use - and which pebble-bed reactors will also burn. Unless nuclear fusion has really come on by then, at that point we'll begin building breeder reactors - which will burn the waste from the previous generation of plants.
That nuclear waste will suddenly represent an enormous fuel resource. You could probably run the UK for centuries just off the amount of fissile junk stacked up at Sellafield already. And we'll really be kicking ourselves if we've thrown it all into a subduction zone.
Bury it deep, sure - but bury it somewhere it can be dug up if we realise we actually want the stuff someday.
In a nuclear reactor, heat is cheap.
What you're doing with these things is using the heat from the nuclear reaction to boil water, then using the steam to spin turbines and thus turn dynamos to generate electricity. It's a giant steam engine.
Now, if you want to desalinate salt water, one way to do it is to boil the stuff. The salt is left behind, and once the steam condenses you have fresh water. So. Use your nuclear furnace to boil off some salt water from the sea. Direct the hot steam through your turbines. Generate electricity. Then condense the steam in your cooling towers and output fresh water.
There'll be some tricky engineering to be done to make sure you don't get salt deposits clogging up your plumbing, but in principle the idea is pretty sound.
Very impractical. The principles are totally different; all they have in common is the word 'nuclear'.
Think about what it would take to refit a coal-fired power plant into a gas-fired power plant. You'd have to rip out and replace the entire furnace. Same with fission to fusion; you might be able to keep the boiler and turbines and so forth, but the heat source - the actual power core - would have to be totally replaced.
Yes, it would be just terrible if something like that were to happen...
Having had time to RTFA, I'd say it's unlikely the Gaim developers will touch this release. The licensing terms are incompatible; among other things, it forbids the creation of clients that are interoperable with other networks.
One might try arguing that a Gaim plugin using the AOL code does not in itself violate that - it's the end user who breaks the rule when they load in plugins for other networks - but I somehow think that won't fly in court.
I notice you also need separate licensing to create a client that runs on a mobile. Hmm. Something to do with mobile operators not wanting to lose all that SMS revenue from people using AIM instead, perhaps? ;-)
... I mean, we've only been using Gaim for about five years now...
Apollo 12 landed near the Surveyor probe, which had landed a few years previously. The astronauts broke off a section and returned it to Earth. It was then found that bacteria had survived on Surveyor, on the Moon, in spore form - and once returned, came back to life and started replicating again.
I've also read lately (I believe it was in the current New Scientist) that an experiment on bacteria was sent up on Columbia. On being recovered, it turned out that the three cultures that were intended to be in there had all been killed off by the heat of reentry - but that a contaminant strain had survived and thrived inside the unbroken sealed container.
Bacteria are tough, and we can assume that anything leaving Earth is infested with them.
It's almost as outlandish as 'the meteor was full of alien bugs', though; what we seem to have with this hypothesis was 'the meteor burst in the middle of a flock of bats and liquidised them'...
No link, the website article is subscription-only. Sorry.
I think you miss the real problem.
What's stopping you watching a full cricket match on your mobile? Not the bandwidth. Not the provider. Not the licensing.
It's that a full cricket match lasts for a WEEK. Good luck finding a battery that lasts that long :)
Think irrigation. You would probably be utterly amazed to learn just how much water it takes to produce the food you eat and the clothes you wear. I believe the cultivation of coffee and cotton are particularly thirsty enterprises.
In Norway, they drink their vodka with water.
In Sweden, they drink their vodka without water.
In Finland, they drink their vodka like water.
And in Russia, they drink their vodka instead of water.
Heh. I've been looking at getting a new phone lately (my current one is suffering badly from Sony Ericsson Joystick Death) and getting interested in the LG 880 - a very Kirkish clamshell design. But before ordering it I had to actually poke and prod one in meatspace. So - earlier today I looked around some high street stores and found one of these things.
And, yes, there I was in the store with this dummy model phone in my hand, practising my Starfleet communication techniques. Pocket - hand - thumb in the crack to start it opening then flick - "Kirk to Enterprise!" YES! Works perfectly, just like it did on TV!
And best of all the damn thing's a 3G video phone. All it takes is some other geek to get one and we can have conversations holding the things Starfleet style! Not up to the ear, like a phone - but in front of the face, just like Spock!
All it takes once my lovely new phone arrives is to set my ringtone to 'bweepbeep!' - which I'm sure I'll be able to download from some Trek fansite - and practise my heroic pose and intonation. 'Mr Scott! Three to beam up!'
But that would only tell us one way that life might form: in a test tube in some nanotech-era laboratory. That's probably not how it actually got started on Earth (although YMMV, especially if you're from Kansas.)
However, I don't think it's a lost cause. The fossil record won't tell us anything here, but evidence may well come from the details of the cell's structure and genetics. A bit like how you can see marks on an old arch bridge showing where there was scaffolding used to build it - so you might find genetic traces indicating how eukaryote life, and then multicellular life, got their starts.
Ah, but the pirate networks are full of incomplete, low-quality, low-bitrate, wrongly labelled, or downright fake files. Plus viruses everywhere. Meanwhile allofmp3.com provides unencumbered, technically legal, high-quality files at a very low cost. It's worth it to save the hassle.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaa!
Oh God, that's the funniest thing I've ever read here. Please tell me you're not serious? The irony here is just incredible.
FYI, the French were having a war against the rebels in Vietnam, and were doing rather badly at it. They decided to give it up as a lost cause, and pissed off home. Then the Americans decided that if the French weren't going to fight the Commies in 'Nam, then by golly they'd have to do it themselves. And obviously the courageous and militarily successful Americans got a much better result in Vietnam than the French had managed...
Note that the French had pissed off home whether the Americans were coming or not. At that point they didn't give a damn who ended up running Vietnam. You guys got into that shithole all by yourselves, I'm afraid.
Well, apart from that half of them are selling their underwear to perverted salarymen, and the other half have locked themselves in their rooms and won't come out...
We geeks idealise Japan, but the place has some serious problems of its own.
It's not 1956 any more. Big nukes went out of style as rockets got more accurate; when there's less chance of a near miss on a hard target, you don't need such big overkill, and if it's a city you want to roast it's more cost-effective to use ten small bombs than one big bomb.
Fifty megatons is huge - the largest yield from any bomb ever detonated was some 57MT. Even one megaton is large for a modern weapon; I believe yields of a quarter to a half megaton are more typical.