Donating to charity acting as a front to funnel money to terrorist organizations is a crime.
We're all very glad of that over in the UK, by the way. Otherwise, just imagine how much money the IRA would have been able to raise from American donations! Fortunately, the US government always took a very hard line on this and made sure that their citizens were not responsible for funding a terror campaign against their own allies.
See, before humans figured out how to smelt iron out of ore, there were weapons made out of meteorite iron. A certain number of meteorites are nearly pure iron, and better yet, some is even already alloyed with stronger metals. They were rare and more expensive than gold, but it was a weapon which could pierce right through a bronze cuirass, and was often credited with magical properties. Kings and nobles paid a small fortune for them.
cf: Turin Turambar. You probably wouldn't want to spend too long with that sword, mind...
Are you stating that if it is not American money (such as the Euro, German Deutchmark, British Pound, etc.) then it is not real money like the "gold coins" in WOW?
Money backed by a government, money backed by a game company... The only difference is the size of the economy it represents and the trustworthiness of the guarantor.
I'd far sooner have $10,000 worth of pounds than of Warcraft gold, for instance. I trust the British government not to recklessly print endless pounds, and I trust the strength of the British economy, and firmly believe that the kingdom will still be here tomorrow. Blizzard, on the other hand, could readily issue as many gold pieces as they like at any time. The strength of the Warcraft economy depends solely upon their whim, upon their profitability, and upon the absence of a cooler MMORPG; I cannot be so sure that the kingdom will still be here tomorrow. All it would take would be an update, or a difficulty rebalancing, or the issue of new and extra-rare and supercool prestige weapons, or anything like that which seriously devalues the gold and the equipment people already have. Investments in gameworld assets could be wiped out. Since Blizzard's concern as government of the kingdom is that the game be fun, not that its internal economy be successful, there's no reason they would hesitate to do such a thing.
It's all just a matter of degree. In the end, there's no such thing as real money or pretend money, only money people believe in and money people don't. And it only takes a quick look at eBay to see that there are plenty of people who believe Warcraft gold has real value, and that there's a going market price for it.
They are printing virtual money with no real limits, and now there appears to be enough connections ( permitted or not ) to real money that they are increasing the real-world money supply ( M1 ). They are not, at the same time, increasing the supply of tangible real-world goods. The increase in the money supply without a proportionate increase in real-world goods causes inflation.
Is a movie a tangible, real-world good? Or a song? Much of the American economy already depends on such things. I would say that a +5 Double Axe of Leetness is as much a real-world good as is a copy of Hit Me Baby One More Time. Any value that game money has is based solely on its ability to buy such things.
They can only tax actual income made from the sale of said items ingame. They cannot put a value on virtual goods until the actual event of purchase/sale occurs using real money.
Define 'real money'.
Suppose an American conducts a business of some kind in, shall we say, Luxembourg. He sends instructions to his agent there, and receives feedback. He runs the business well, and an account in his name fills up with euros. The European Central Bank backs this currency and it is exchangeable for goods and services within participating member states of the European Union.
Now suppose an American plays a game in World of Warcraft. He sends instructions to his character there, and receives feedback. He plays the game well, and an account in his name fills up with gold coins. Blizzard backs this currency and it is exchangeable for goods and services within the gameworld.
Both currencies are also exchangeable for dollars - euros at any bank, gold coins on eBay - at the prevailing market rate.
So: would an American conducting his business in France be taxed only when, or if, he converts his euros to dollars?
You want a post box with character? Here is a post box with character. Those red UK ones were made to last long after e-mail renders them useless.
I saw one in Dublin last time I was over in Ireland. Right outside the Post Office, scene of the equivalent in Irish national mythology of the Alamo, is a British post box with the initials V.R. (for Queen Victoria) on it in great big letters.
You'd have thought they'd have destroyed it. Symbol of the Empire and the British state and all that. But no. They didn't.
Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Or possibly 'Dimensions', depending on which Doctor you ask. The name TARDIS was supposedly given by Susan Foreman, the Doctor's granddaughter. It stuck.
For those that don't know, the TARDIS is the vehicle piloted by the Doctor in Doctor Who. Its use as a comparison here is quite apt: the TARDIS is disguised as a police box, which was once a common sight on British streets but which, as portable radios took over, fell into obsolescence. There are very few police boxes still around, but once they were so commonplace that a time traveller could disguise his time machine as one and expect it to go unremarked.
Now, it seems the iconic American mailbox is to fall into similar disuse...
Unless, of course, I've completely misunderstood the metaphor. Does the US postal service provide mailboxes which are far larger on the inside than on the outside?
Thing is, the DPRK doesn't have that much enriched uranium. Their plutonium production technology is much more advanced than their ability to enrich uranium.
True. I wrote in my post that they'd want the implosion design because it's more efficient, but they had to go for implosion. The gun-barrel model simply won't work with plutonium, and AFAIK that's all they have from the Yongbyong reactor. So the sure and simple design was never an option.
Something even more sobering on this is that the Russian bomb was actually toned down. (It was a dial-a-yield multi-stage device) It was originally going to be 69 MT IIRC but some saner heads reminded them that a yield of that magnitude would make 1000's or square miles poisonous for decades if not centuries.
Typically a three-stage bomb will yield about double its two-stage equipment. IIRC 'Ivan' or the 'Tsar Bomba', was about 5% yield from the fission stage (so, 2.5MT) and 95% from the fusion stage (47.5MT); the fission of the uranium tamper would have boosted that to 100MT. For testing purposes they replaced that with lead. As a result Tsar Bomba was about the cleanest nuke ever let off.
Besides the fallout from fifty megatons' worth of fission, another problem with detonating Tsar Bomba at full yield was that there was no way the plane that dropped it could possibly get to a safe distance in time...
Tsar Bomba
With all the information that is public, it *is* trivial to create a bomb.
This is gross abuse of the word "trivial".
Not all that gross. Not if you have access to engineering resources on the level of a nation. The physical principles of a nuclear bomb are very simple, and the basic mechanical operation is widely known and public. The main obstacle to building a working bomb is getting hold of the fissile material. Given that, it is indeed easy to build a bomb. Perhaps not an efficient bomb, perhaps not a powerful bomb, but a bomb nonetheless. Most of the secrets so highly prized by the great powers are on engineering tricks to make bombs smaller and lighter and use less plutonium.
That said, my bet on this issue is that North Korea messed up the engineering of an implosion bomb, which then fizzled. It exploded, but with nowhere near the designed force. It was a nuclear detonation... but not a very good one. So I wouldn't say it's trivial to do, but it's hardly a gross abuse of the word.
The revised seismic figures were (if I recall right) something like 0.5 kT equivalent. The smallest easy-to-build bombs (those that have supercritical assemblies without hyper-compression of the metal) yield something like 10-30 kT, so this was either a fizzled nuke or a large pile of ANFO (or something like that).
A gun-assembly bomb - Hiroshima type - would have yielded 10-30kT as you say, and it's so simple that I can't believe the North Koreans would be able to mess it up. The Americans didn't even bother to test the design, they just went right ahead and dropped it on Hiroshima in full confidence that it would work as advertised. Just slam one lump of weapons-grade uranium into another and boom.
I doubt they'd fake it, either - I think the talk that it might be a fake is a bit of wishful thinking. North Korea intended this pitiful yield?
My guess is that they went for an implosion design - Nagasaki type. They didn't get the design quite right, and had a fizzle. These types are tricky to build because you have to compress a ball of fissile metal completely evenly. Get it wrong and you don't get anywhere near the full design yield - part of the ball reaches criticality before the rest, fissions, explodes and blasts away the rest of the material. Hence the pitiful 0.5-1kT yield we've been hearing about. It's worth trying because it uses less nuclear material overall, which is good for a country whose problem is getting hold of the stuff.
Not as scary as some have said, then. If North Korea has other bombs already built - and even before this the world strongly suspected they had - they're suddenly uncertain that any of them will actually function. And without confidence in their engineering they'll have to conduct a larger test programme in order to have an arsenal they can rely on. Do they even have the fissile material available to do that? How much plutonium was in that reactor they opened? I heard it was enough for maybe half a dozen bombs - so they might well end up using most of their supply just trying to get the design right.
http://www.qrz.com/p/testing.pl has a nice online test so you can see how "easy" it is to get an amateur radio license.
I haven't a clue about amateur radio, or how it is regulated in the USA, so I got all the ones about the technical jargon wrong, but I passed with a 74.3% score using common sense and basic physics. I suspect most geeks would be capable of the same, especially anyone inclined to attempt transmitting their own analogue TV signals from their next-generation WLAN card...
This is strange. I ordered my Wii at Gamestation in Birmingham at 16:04 on 29th September. They'd been taking preorders for quite a while by then. I very much doubt there'll be any shortage - I was told that Nintendo had been ringing the store to ask how many they wanted - but I wanted to be certain I could get the thing on the release day. Possibly there's some problem with the earlier launch in the US? Or is this a marketing trick to make Wii seem scarcer than it is?
Extradition treaties are not carte blanche documents.
Unfortunately, the extradition treaty between the UK and the US is a carte blanche document, at least in one direction. The US may request the extradition of anyone it pleases, it need not present any evidence at all, and the UK will simply hand over the victim in question. Cf: 'Natwest Three'. This is all to protect us from Terrorism. The converse is not true - British courts may not similarly extradite US citizens, because Americans have constitutional rights. Cf: 'Vassal State'.
In other words, they might be able to get you hooked up at 100Mb/s, but you'd only be able to talk to your neighbors and other people on the local subnet at that speed.
A lot of ISPs complain about Bittorrent bandwidth usage, and about how it devours their resources. If I had 100Mb connectivity to others on the same ISP, and only ~ 6Mb connectivity to the wider internet, I'd surely connect by preference to people on the same ISP, and not affect their external connections. So would everybody else. Hell, the Bittorrent client designers would make it happen automatically.
While they're at it they could set up some game servers on their ultra-fast local network. Plenty of added value there.
Even if you can't get 100Mb to the whole internet, if you're on a large ISP, 100Mb to other users on the same network would still be pretty damn cool.
Why do the mass that enters black holes, or are in some way attracted to it (like for spiral galaxies) typically form a disc shape? I can see why water flowing out of a sink would have a disk shaped surface, but not really why black holes or even galaxies should.
The basic principle is that things are spinning. In the case of a galaxy, the whole thing would originally have formed from a collapsing gas cloud. This cloud would have had some small overall spin, which would be magnified during collapse by conservation of angular momentum (try it yourself: hold a brick in each hand, spin around and around as fast as you can with your arms outstretched, then quickly pull in your arms and hold the bricks to your chest...) So you've now got a smaller ball of gas which is spinning quite fast. Now it should be obvious how it flattens out: the spin stretches it at the equator, gravity collapses it at the poles, and before long you've got a disc.
As for black holes, that's spin again, but it works a little differently. Black holes are so powerful that they drag space itself around with them, and infalling matter really has no choice but to fall in line over the equator...
so is the black hole pulling things in from all directions as a spherical point? or does it have a shape?
It's conventional to treat the event horizon as the surface of the black hole - in which case, yes, it has a shape. The mathematically simplest black hole is the Chandrasekhar black hole, which is nonrotating and spherical. Realistically, however, a black hole will be formed by the collapse of a star, and conservation of angular momentum implies that it will be spinning very rapidly, at least to begin with. This is the Kerr black hole, and it has some very peculiar effects on the region of spacetime around it. There's a zone called the ergosphere, from which it is possible to escape, but in which it is completely impossible to stand still...
Marajuana has more tar and carcinegens than tobacco
True, but everyone knows somebody who smokes thirty cigarettes a day. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of stoners who, if provided with thirty spliffs full of the finest hydroponic skunk, would happily make the attempt, but I'd guess that after about the fifth they'd forget all about it...
Slashdot Mirror
We're all very glad of that over in the UK, by the way. Otherwise, just imagine how much money the IRA would have been able to raise from American donations! Fortunately, the US government always took a very hard line on this and made sure that their citizens were not responsible for funding a terror campaign against their own allies.
cf: Turin Turambar. You probably wouldn't want to spend too long with that sword, mind...
Use a different machine.
This kind of thing is going to kill PC gaming if it goes ahead. Well, that and the fact that a Wii costs about the same as a decent video card.
Money backed by a government, money backed by a game company... The only difference is the size of the economy it represents and the trustworthiness of the guarantor.
I'd far sooner have $10,000 worth of pounds than of Warcraft gold, for instance. I trust the British government not to recklessly print endless pounds, and I trust the strength of the British economy, and firmly believe that the kingdom will still be here tomorrow. Blizzard, on the other hand, could readily issue as many gold pieces as they like at any time. The strength of the Warcraft economy depends solely upon their whim, upon their profitability, and upon the absence of a cooler MMORPG; I cannot be so sure that the kingdom will still be here tomorrow. All it would take would be an update, or a difficulty rebalancing, or the issue of new and extra-rare and supercool prestige weapons, or anything like that which seriously devalues the gold and the equipment people already have. Investments in gameworld assets could be wiped out. Since Blizzard's concern as government of the kingdom is that the game be fun, not that its internal economy be successful, there's no reason they would hesitate to do such a thing.
It's all just a matter of degree. In the end, there's no such thing as real money or pretend money, only money people believe in and money people don't. And it only takes a quick look at eBay to see that there are plenty of people who believe Warcraft gold has real value, and that there's a going market price for it.
Is a movie a tangible, real-world good? Or a song? Much of the American economy already depends on such things. I would say that a +5 Double Axe of Leetness is as much a real-world good as is a copy of Hit Me Baby One More Time. Any value that game money has is based solely on its ability to buy such things.
Define 'real money'.
Suppose an American conducts a business of some kind in, shall we say, Luxembourg. He sends instructions to his agent there, and receives feedback. He runs the business well, and an account in his name fills up with euros. The European Central Bank backs this currency and it is exchangeable for goods and services within participating member states of the European Union.
Now suppose an American plays a game in World of Warcraft. He sends instructions to his character there, and receives feedback. He plays the game well, and an account in his name fills up with gold coins. Blizzard backs this currency and it is exchangeable for goods and services within the gameworld.
Both currencies are also exchangeable for dollars - euros at any bank, gold coins on eBay - at the prevailing market rate.
So: would an American conducting his business in France be taxed only when, or if, he converts his euros to dollars?
I saw one in Dublin last time I was over in Ireland. Right outside the Post Office, scene of the equivalent in Irish national mythology of the Alamo, is a British post box with the initials V.R. (for Queen Victoria) on it in great big letters.
You'd have thought they'd have destroyed it. Symbol of the Empire and the British state and all that. But no. They didn't.
They painted it green.
No, it's an acronym.
Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Or possibly 'Dimensions', depending on which Doctor you ask. The name TARDIS was supposedly given by Susan Foreman, the Doctor's granddaughter. It stuck.
Now, it seems the iconic American mailbox is to fall into similar disuse...
Unless, of course, I've completely misunderstood the metaphor. Does the US postal service provide mailboxes which are far larger on the inside than on the outside?
'Victory'?
True. I wrote in my post that they'd want the implosion design because it's more efficient, but they had to go for implosion. The gun-barrel model simply won't work with plutonium, and AFAIK that's all they have from the Yongbyong reactor. So the sure and simple design was never an option.
I'm glad to hear it. Phosphorus-239? It doesn't bear thinking about. So... many... NEUTRONS!
Oh, wait. Songun. My mistake...
Typically a three-stage bomb will yield about double its two-stage equipment. IIRC 'Ivan' or the 'Tsar Bomba', was about 5% yield from the fission stage (so, 2.5MT) and 95% from the fusion stage (47.5MT); the fission of the uranium tamper would have boosted that to 100MT. For testing purposes they replaced that with lead. As a result Tsar Bomba was about the cleanest nuke ever let off.
Besides the fallout from fifty megatons' worth of fission, another problem with detonating Tsar Bomba at full yield was that there was no way the plane that dropped it could possibly get to a safe distance in time... Tsar Bomba
This is gross abuse of the word "trivial".
Not all that gross. Not if you have access to engineering resources on the level of a nation. The physical principles of a nuclear bomb are very simple, and the basic mechanical operation is widely known and public. The main obstacle to building a working bomb is getting hold of the fissile material. Given that, it is indeed easy to build a bomb. Perhaps not an efficient bomb, perhaps not a powerful bomb, but a bomb nonetheless. Most of the secrets so highly prized by the great powers are on engineering tricks to make bombs smaller and lighter and use less plutonium.
That said, my bet on this issue is that North Korea messed up the engineering of an implosion bomb, which then fizzled. It exploded, but with nowhere near the designed force. It was a nuclear detonation... but not a very good one. So I wouldn't say it's trivial to do, but it's hardly a gross abuse of the word.
A gun-assembly bomb - Hiroshima type - would have yielded 10-30kT as you say, and it's so simple that I can't believe the North Koreans would be able to mess it up. The Americans didn't even bother to test the design, they just went right ahead and dropped it on Hiroshima in full confidence that it would work as advertised. Just slam one lump of weapons-grade uranium into another and boom.
I doubt they'd fake it, either - I think the talk that it might be a fake is a bit of wishful thinking. North Korea intended this pitiful yield?
My guess is that they went for an implosion design - Nagasaki type. They didn't get the design quite right, and had a fizzle. These types are tricky to build because you have to compress a ball of fissile metal completely evenly. Get it wrong and you don't get anywhere near the full design yield - part of the ball reaches criticality before the rest, fissions, explodes and blasts away the rest of the material. Hence the pitiful 0.5-1kT yield we've been hearing about. It's worth trying because it uses less nuclear material overall, which is good for a country whose problem is getting hold of the stuff.
Not as scary as some have said, then. If North Korea has other bombs already built - and even before this the world strongly suspected they had - they're suddenly uncertain that any of them will actually function. And without confidence in their engineering they'll have to conduct a larger test programme in order to have an arsenal they can rely on. Do they even have the fissile material available to do that? How much plutonium was in that reactor they opened? I heard it was enough for maybe half a dozen bombs - so they might well end up using most of their supply just trying to get the design right.
I haven't a clue about amateur radio, or how it is regulated in the USA, so I got all the ones about the technical jargon wrong, but I passed with a 74.3% score using common sense and basic physics. I suspect most geeks would be capable of the same, especially anyone inclined to attempt transmitting their own analogue TV signals from their next-generation WLAN card...
This is strange. I ordered my Wii at Gamestation in Birmingham at 16:04 on 29th September. They'd been taking preorders for quite a while by then. I very much doubt there'll be any shortage - I was told that Nintendo had been ringing the store to ask how many they wanted - but I wanted to be certain I could get the thing on the release day. Possibly there's some problem with the earlier launch in the US? Or is this a marketing trick to make Wii seem scarcer than it is?
... from what I've heard, it's essentially a 21st century Skool Daze. And that was a hell of a good game.
Unfortunately, the extradition treaty between the UK and the US is a carte blanche document, at least in one direction. The US may request the extradition of anyone it pleases, it need not present any evidence at all, and the UK will simply hand over the victim in question. Cf: 'Natwest Three'. This is all to protect us from Terrorism. The converse is not true - British courts may not similarly extradite US citizens, because Americans have constitutional rights. Cf: 'Vassal State'.
A lot of ISPs complain about Bittorrent bandwidth usage, and about how it devours their resources. If I had 100Mb connectivity to others on the same ISP, and only ~ 6Mb connectivity to the wider internet, I'd surely connect by preference to people on the same ISP, and not affect their external connections. So would everybody else. Hell, the Bittorrent client designers would make it happen automatically.
While they're at it they could set up some game servers on their ultra-fast local network. Plenty of added value there.
Even if you can't get 100Mb to the whole internet, if you're on a large ISP, 100Mb to other users on the same network would still be pretty damn cool.
This post is brought to you as part of the Elect Channard to Kansas School Board campaign.
The basic principle is that things are spinning. In the case of a galaxy, the whole thing would originally have formed from a collapsing gas cloud. This cloud would have had some small overall spin, which would be magnified during collapse by conservation of angular momentum (try it yourself: hold a brick in each hand, spin around and around as fast as you can with your arms outstretched, then quickly pull in your arms and hold the bricks to your chest...) So you've now got a smaller ball of gas which is spinning quite fast. Now it should be obvious how it flattens out: the spin stretches it at the equator, gravity collapses it at the poles, and before long you've got a disc.
As for black holes, that's spin again, but it works a little differently. Black holes are so powerful that they drag space itself around with them, and infalling matter really has no choice but to fall in line over the equator...
It's conventional to treat the event horizon as the surface of the black hole - in which case, yes, it has a shape. The mathematically simplest black hole is the Chandrasekhar black hole, which is nonrotating and spherical. Realistically, however, a black hole will be formed by the collapse of a star, and conservation of angular momentum implies that it will be spinning very rapidly, at least to begin with. This is the Kerr black hole, and it has some very peculiar effects on the region of spacetime around it. There's a zone called the ergosphere, from which it is possible to escape, but in which it is completely impossible to stand still...
True, but everyone knows somebody who smokes thirty cigarettes a day. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of stoners who, if provided with thirty spliffs full of the finest hydroponic skunk, would happily make the attempt, but I'd guess that after about the fifth they'd forget all about it...