Yeah, every military promotion above a certain level has to be ratified.
That is everybody at or above the rank of 2nd Lieutenant and Ensign (O-1).
Most of these are read off at the end of each daily congressional session and ratified without even a voice vote (the Senate chair says something like "are there any objections?" and then considers the appointment to be ratified), and there are some noted exceptions for things like battlefield promotions, but every military officer does get "confirmed" by the Senate. This also includes postmasters of rural post offices and forest rangers, so it isn't necessarily unique to the military even. Enlisted ranks don't get confirmed in Congress, which is where the process is different.
Heaven help you if you already got enemies in Congress when you are commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant, as that will pretty much sink your career before you get started.
Generals and Admirals generally get quite a bit more attention due to their rank and authority, and often even have to go through a more lengthy confirmation process. There is also a set limit established by Congress for how many general and flag officers are permitted for each branch, and they must be assigned to specific postings or billets in order to maintain that rank.
There is often some discretionary spending that Congress gives to some higher ranked individuals in the government to kind of make things work out that weren't foreseen during the budget process. Usually not a whole lot, but it can add up over time.
It looks like it was from some of this discretionary spending that was redirected for this "special project". All of it still has to be accounted for and reported even when that sort of money is spent. What is getting these congressmen bent out of shape here is that they didn't want that kind of money spend in that manner.
Nothing illegal was done, but it is a good excuse to make a political mountain out of a mole hill.
Actually, 68k for a change of table wood and leather color seems reasonable. Hear me out.
Everything that is intended to be used and mounted to an aircraft... including this "comfort pallet"... has to be air certified and put through crash tests and all kinds of other "nonsense" to show that it can handle the conditions in flight as well as in emergency situations.
It has to meet higher standards for being a flame retardant and other issues that standard leather used on a Lazyboy recliner simply isn't going to have to go through.
Documenting those changes, hiring engineers to look at those changes, evaluating new materials to meet the aviation standards and other similar issues can easily hit the 68k cost alone. Being a government contract adds about 50% or more to the cost just because of the government accounting standards, not to mention hiring the accountants to keep track of all this spending and others to verify and keep track of this paperwork.
Honestly, I think 68k for a change of that nature is quite cheap if you look at all of the things involved. Is it wasteful? Yeah, but imagine how much waste there would be if these accounting standards weren't there? Most of the aviation standards have been established mainly through the death of some unfortunate souls because somebody was careless and thought you could grab any sort junk from a local hardware store and make it work in an aviation environment.
While in this case it may be excessive, don't blame what you perceive as simple requirements here to what are long standing aviation standards that in the long run do protect passengers, crew, and cargo where even minor mistakes can and do result in death or serious injuries, or causing injury to additional folks like you and me as these vehicles go flying over our heads. I for one am glad that these standards are in place even if in this case it seems absurd.
On the contrary. Congress controls how much money is spent and how. Indeed, the Constitution explicitly notes who can start appropriation bills (the U.S. House only... the Senate only votes up or down on a house bill once it has been sent over) and even has a strict limit that all debts must be settled by the Army at the end of each fiscal year. The USAF was set up as a separate branch in part so they could get around this constitutional issue and be able to purchase aircraft that took more than one year to build.
If Congress didn't give authorization for a USAF general to spend money in a certain way, he is violating the law and misappropriating the money.
If the President gives an order to a USAF officer to act contrary to the will of Congress, it sets up a constitutional crisis and could result in the President getting impeached.
It is also a good thing, as it gives direct civilian oversight for military matters and diffuses the authority over the military to not just the President but also the 435 members of congress that literally demand and get accountability for how tax money is being spent.
I think you need to give these organizers of this "sport" a little more credit.
One of the things they are doing... perhaps precisely because of the wake issue you are bringing up... is that each rocket will be following a "different course" that will be plotted out with a GPS system. Ultimately all of the rockets will have to travel the same distance and the pilots will have to hit certain waypoints in order to qualify for the race, but the rockets are kept separated from each other during the competition.
The real trick to this "sport" is that the pilots have only a limited amount of fuel to fly their plane. I can't remember precisely the amount of fuel on board, but it is something on the order of about 100-150 seconds of thrust, where the pilot has to very precisely time how long he is going to be operating the motors and then shutting them down in a glide pattern until some more thrust is needed.
This will be happening in a venue similar to most air shows, where aviation demonstrations traveling at much higher velocities and altitudes are routine and have groups like the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angles who perform these demonstrations rather routinely.
As far as fuel waste, I don't see how these kind of rocket racers are going to be more wasteful than a bunch of F-16s flying in formation performing aerial demonstrations.
I should also point out one last thing: Although you may have looked at some CGI generated video (I don't know precisely what you saw), this/. posting was generated in response to an actual demonstration of the vehicle in California (Mojave Airport) in preparation for the annual Wisconsin air show.... where I'd also like to point out there are a great many other aircraft performing demonstrations as well.
If you want to see some non-CGI pics of one of these rockets in action, take a look at:
Certainly this is something worth looking at, and hopefully will answer some of your questions from a real vehicle rather than some theoretical musings.
As an engineer, I have had the opportunity to support systems that were sold in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. Sure it is nice that you have a spanish-speaking salesman, but what happens when the thing breaks? Providing even tertiary customer support in the primary language of the customer can be invaluable and cement business relationships.
While not strictly required, a strong knowledge of Spanish can certainly help you out. Furthermore, if you are working in some sort of manufacturing company that employs an immigrant workforce (ignoring issues of immigration status for the moment), a working knowledge of Spanish can make a huge difference when trying to explain ideas to the production floor.
I also found that a knowledge of the culture of China was also invaluable in high technology situations as an engineer.... and at least a basic understanding of the Chinese languages in some form or another. Bridging the cultures between America and China is much harder than it appears on the surface, especially if you are dealing with Chinese contractors or parts suppliers. Those engineers who fail to understand the differences are also the ones that cause the most problems.
I haven't found nearly the same trouble in terms of understanding Indians and the Hindi language/culture as they seem to be much more "westernized" than China. Still, there are some interesting cultural differences where a strong knowledge of the culture and a respect for that culture can be pivotal.
The main issue about e-voting fraud that is so much different than paper voting fraud is where the fraud must occur.
With paper voting fraud, it simply must happen at the local voting precinct level. This allows for thousands of dead people to vote for candidates like JFK and allows the 10's of thousands of votes for Al Gore to be added by poll workers being lazy and casting multiple ballots simultaneously (one of the chief reasons for all of the chad problems in Florida). Punch card ballots also could be manipulated by poking a stick through a stack of carefully aligned ballots that would either add votes for the preferred candidate or invalidate those ballots who voted for somebody else.
With hundreds of thousands of local voting precincts in the USA, some of this sort of fraud does occur in nearly every election. People do occasionally get caught, and legal penalties are on occasion also given to those who commit this kind of voting fraud.
With e-voting, the ballot fraud moves up the food chain and can happen at higher levels of government in addition to fraud at the precinct level. This is where some county tech decides to add a little bit of extra software to all of the machines in the county that causes a preferred party to have a few extra votes in key races over some other political party or philosophical point of view. It may not be much, but in tight races it may mean a difference.
One of the best defenses of preventing this kind of fraud is a full disclosure of the software used to operate the machine. I could go on about this, but that would create a whole separate thread.
This can get up past the atmosphere for about $200k-$400k (assuming that Virgin is trying to make a profit here... an obscene profit at that).
The Space Shuttle requires a minimum of $500m-$2b in order to go up.
Which one do you think is going to have a better impact on humanity being able to get into space.
Furthermore, Rutan does want to get into space in terms of something capable of LEO. The point here is that this is something where mere mortals can afford to go up at all and hopefully inspire a next generation of spacecraft that will do exactly what you are proposing.
Remember... LEO is half-way to the rest of the Solar System (in terms of delta-v). SS2 is about 50% of the way to LEO... and the tough half of that.
One of the things that is just driving me up the wall in nearly all of the advertisements about HD television is how it is so much better and improved over analog television.
I'll agree that in a rough technical sense there are more pixels than analog television, and under "ideal conditions" perhaps you get a better quality viewing experience. But I don't buy for a minute that analogy television is any better or worse than digital television.... it is only different.
For myself, I would rather have some occasional snow in my viewing picture and some background noise in the sound channel than having some awful MPEG artifacting, pops, clicks, chirps, and other audio artifacts that happen when digital signals start to seriously degrade. Or worse, right in the middle of some discussion you are seeing on the television the frame suddenly freezes or is jerky and only updates every 10 seconds or so with the audio dropping out entirely.
From my own experience, HD television is giving me far worse "quality of service" than analog television ever did... and rural areas are getting shafted even worse than in the days of analog television as well. Reception is worse, and dead spots that had problems with analog television are going to be even worse still.
The only thing that HD television has going for it right now is that some video engineers did have a chance to review the new standards with quite a bit of experience under their belts when it was developed. Analog television had decades of backward compatibility to earlier standards to work with including having to support the older B&W devices.
In spite of all of the advertisements about digital television, there are going to be a whole bunch of people pissed at the government, television stations, and others when the analog transmitters go off the air.
While I would agree that hydrogen isn't a primary energy source, neither is gasoline. A considerable amount of energy is consumed to prepare either substance so that it can be consumed in whatever device you would like to use it in.
Indeed, far more energy is consumed in the processing of gasoline than could ever be released from the gasoline even under ideal conditions. In other words, you could never have a gasoline-powered oil refinery as more than 100% of the fuel would be consumed in the refining process. Surprisingly (or not!), electricity is the preferred energy source for most refineries as it is more easily controlled and doesn't need as much maintenance in terms of the heating elements.
More to the point, more electricity is consumed in the refining process than the amount of energy you get when you put it into your car. Of course refineries purchase electricity at industrial rates, so they get that energy for dirt cheap prices.
Getting specific here, your argument doesn't hold any validity as nearly all forms of fuel have "to be manufactured, stored, and transported at enormous costs in energy". All that is different here is how the energy is stored and can be released when desired.
In this sense, Hydrogen is most certainly a fuel and I think you would find that the energy required to produce it would compare quite favorably to a great many other forms of energy. Furthermore, OPEC doesn't own a cartel on the world's water supplies or other readily available sources of hydrogen, and is quite difficult to set up a naval blockade preventing the consumption of water.
Keep in mind that the elements that we are talking about were forged in the heat of a nuclear blast.... where the temperatures (even temporarily) were far hotter than even the center of the Sun. Indeed, they were approaching temperatures normally found in Supernovas. This is particularly true for the "Hydrogen Bomb" tests that resulted in the discovery of Einsteinium and some other fun trans-uranium elements
Irradiation of the sort you are suggesting isn't going to forge these sort of elements. It may create some detectable radiation on the surface, but it certainly wouldn't create Strontium or Cesium. Assuming perhaps that may even be possible, getting the proportions to be exact with what you would expect with modern pigments would be incredibly difficult. A "false positive" that has twice the expected quantity of Strontium would certainly be a dead giveaway that it has been tampered with.
Also, what are you using as a source for a neutron emitter? You have two real choices: Highly radioactive material or a nuclear fusion reactor (and yes, I'm being serious here!) You can buy commercial fusion reactors that are a neutron source, but even they aren't exactly tiny things. And how are you going to get that into a museum in the first place when your object is to create false positives to throw off "evidence" and "prove" that this dating method is a pile of BS?
I still stand by my assertion that you would likely die as a tagger trying to create these false positives in the first place, and it would be far more expensive than to simply let things be. While it may be "possible" to deliberately create a false positive on classical art works, there is a huge difference between remotely possible and something that can be practical like defacing the works of Picasso with a can of graffiti spray paint. What kind of museum security do you think would even allow such mundane vandalism to works valuable enough to be considered an art forger's target?
A destructive test would be one that takes a small sample of the work of art and sends it through an isotopic centrifuge. This is what is commonly done for Carbon-14 dating, and a similar technique could also be applied for Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, just to give some examples.
Measuring beta and gamma emissions directly via a Geiger Counter might be one more passive method of at least checking for these elements, but it wouldn't be nearly so accurate. Legitimate radioactive sources from earlier material sources might still give a similar kind of reading, although I'm fairly certain you could get a good feel for if you should get into a more detailed analysis or if you can rule out these elements from paintings right away.
It is a sound concept on a scientific basis, and I could imagine several methods of being able to measure the isotopic proportions of the works of art being studied.
Carbon-14 dating has been used for decades, and all that is being suggested here is to use other radioactive elements and isotopes beyond the Carbon-14 ratios. I don't have the concrete stats to note what Carbon-14 dating has been in terms of identifying fakes, but I know it has been used successfully.
So no, I don't consider this vaporware although the actual equipment to perform the tests and do so in (hopefully) a non-destructive fashion may not have been created yet as applied to classic works of art.
Not quite. Prior to 1900, there wasn't any fission or even really atomic research going on at all. In fact, prior to the 1940's, there really wasn't any fission research at all.
The atmospheric nuclear bomb testing program did put a whole bunch of crazy elements into the atmosphere that previously simply weren't there. The elements that are being used for identification purposes here are relatively short-lived (in terms of our lifetime as a species) but do last for thousands or millions of years.
Please, with the false positive suggestion, tell me exactly how that would be done? Some sort of weird X-ray machine? A "spray bottle" of radioactive materials to coat the painting? "Nuking" the painting in some sort of weird oven?
This is something which is bound into the very fabric and structure of modern plants and animals due to all of us breathing these elements. These elements simply didn't exist in the atmosphere prior to the atomic bomb tests, and any "contamination" as you are suggesting here would be quickly and easily identified as being just that: Some idiot trying to spread radioactive materials in public places. Generally that is frowned upon as a terrorist act by itself, regardless of your application of that material on paintings or a doorway, not to mention that radioactive materials concentrated enough to be able to tag enough paintings in this way would likely end up killing the tagger through radiation poisoning.
The problem with growing your own flax in a fashion as you have suggested is that the radio-isotopic proportions for the elements have changed over the years, and it is nearly impossible to create such a pure laboratory environment as you are suggesting here.
I supposed if you are filthy rich and have a great pile of money to burn, that you could build isotopic centrifuges and extract out the basic isotopes of the essential elements necessary to grow plants... but I can't begin to express how expensive of a process that would be. Going through normal chemical processes, you simply can't isolate isotopes on the scale that you are suggesting.
I suppose that if you wanted to try something really unique and interesting, you could try to head to an asteroid and extract materials and components necessary to grow plants in an environment that avoids contamination from Earth-based sources like atomic weapons. Still, I think even with that sort of expense (IMHO a similar scale to the isotopic separation suggested above) you would be able to identify that the material was created in an extra-terrestrial environment through other measures.
Simply put, growing your own flax isn't going to work on a practical basis.
Something I have heard of is where an art forger would take a painting from a lesser-known artist of the same era and literally scrape the old pigments from the fabric or even "wash" it through some sort of chemical process to remove the paint. Subsequently you need to dig up the paint that comes from roughly the era when the painting supposedly came from. While not quite "your dad's garage", you can obtain paint samples that do date back hundreds of years... provided you have the money.
Even so, most forgery is caught because the forger makes some silly mistake along the way that betrays the origin of the item, such as using paint that is actually older by a century than the fabric that is used, or something else that is a dead giveaway. Making a "good" forgery is something that is quite difficult to accomplish.
All this article suggests is that the isotopic proportions in fabric and pigments is but one more tool to use to help identify fakes from the genuine article.
BTW, your "false positive" notion is also going to be way off. I have no idea what sort of material you are suggesting to "tag" art works in museums that would impact carbon atoms (or other elements) that are bound to the physical structure of the work of art. This isn't like you would have a bottle of Strontium (one of the elements released by the nuclear bomb tests) that could be applied on the surface of the object and not be identified for exactly what it is: Some idiot who is vandalizing art works in some weird fashion.
I think you miss what makes great art something of note and substance.
In a way, art does work like science. Philosophies and concepts have an origin and place to start from, and from there survive in the most Darwinian fashion against competing concepts.
What makes something "classical" such as van Gogh or Shakespeare is that their works have been shamelessly copied and improved upon by succeeding generations. Current artists... if they are deserving of the term... have studied the older masters and have come to understand the principles of their craft to know what can be improved upon and enhanced.
BTW, I'd say the same thing about scientists, where in fact they do study the works of the older philosophers. In fact, if you have an original edition of Principia Mathematica I'm sure you would have several physicists drooling in terms of wanting to have that book in their private collection... and certainly would treasure it as a gift.
In addition, to use your example of Newton, it is far more than a mere historical purpose that you have to go back and study what he wrote. The historical context of where we've been is important to understand in order to advance knowledge in any direction. I will guarantee that any reasonable physicist worthy of that title has read and applied Newton's ideas into their work at some level nearly every day. Ditto for Einstein and others.
Going back to the artifact that is the 1st edition of Principia Mathematica, even that has use in terms of providing a scientific baseline to note what has changed and what hasn't over the years. It is for this reason that the original U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence are so heavily guarded and protected in spite of being in public display. What was written and has it been altered over the years? Are you certain?
Furthermore, sometimes people apply the conclusions to the theories and don't understand the thinking that went into forming the theories in the first place. Again, this is the same in art as it is in science where going back to the "source" you can find out what was done, how it was done, and then do a "what if" to try and take things in a different direction.
This isn't ancestor worship as you are implying, but avoiding the need to "reinvent the wheel". As such, these artifacts that are called classical paintings and other such things have value because it provides that important context to fall back upon and not rely upon subsequent interpretation.
I will admit there is a certain amount of ancestor worship going on as well, which is why there is a kernel of truth to what you are saying here. But I think you are also missing out on other aspects of what is going on well beyond just the pure idolizing of things that are old just because they are old.
What made John Lennon and Paul McCartney so incredible wasn't just that they made great music.... it was because they studied the classical masters like Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart and were able to put some of that music into a much more modern context. You may love or hate their music, but it certainly will have an impact on you. __**THAT**__ is what defines great art, and not somebody who copies the work of somebody else and not understanding the context, like the host of Elvis impersonators.
The only problem with this line of thinking is mainly a sort of fraud that results when you claim one things but in fact it is something different.
If you claim to have a painting by Da Vinci but it was in fact created last year by Guido Da Vinci... yeah, I guess it is sort of truthful. But the problem is if you are trying to suggest that the painting was by the much more famous 15th Century inventor/artisan and not some "starving artist" who is likely just copying the master.
It really boils down to honesty and if you are claiming something that it isn't.
As far as its aesthetic value and how it looks on the wall... I'd have to agree. The $500 USD painting by a contemporary artist with no significant reputation can be as good as one of the classical masters. But don't claim it is anything else either. This isn't obsession about having the original but rather asserting something that isn't true at all.
If I remember correctly, the lifetime of a human-breathable atmosphere on Mars is on the order of millions of years. Short enough that Mars lost most of its atmosphere over the 4.5 billion years or so of its lifetime, but long enough that if an atmosphere were to be generated by human activity that it would last longer than we've existed as a species. Certainly long enough to have a planetary government on Mars to be able to create the technology necessary to replenish the atmosphere if necessary.
What is exciting here with this report is that you could build a "greenhouse" somewhere on Mars and simply cover over a given area of the ground to start growing a vegetable garden... if you decided to become a settler on Mars. This also demonstrates that the level of technology and the kinds of materials that would be needed in terms of bringing "stuff" from the Earth to get a Martian colony going wouldn't be nearly so large or complex.
I'm not trying to flamebait here, so please don't read this as something more than just a critical review of Sagan's books.
I've had the opportunity to read several of Dr. Sagan's books, and frankly I find them to be some of the worst prose that I've ever had the chance to read from anybody who put a pen to a piece of paper. I don't mean that lightly either, as I've read some awful content before as well, but in this case it was from a major publishing house and supposedly professionally edited.
This said, if you look past the awful writing and some of the cheesy plot elements (in the fiction like Contact) there are some kernels of very interesting and amazing ideas. If anything, it is these ideas that carry the books.
Contact is a good example of what I'm talking about, where more than once I had to throw the book into the corner of my bedroom as I was reading it due to the awful writing. I just couldn't spend that much time polluting my brain with such awful English. Still, the idea of E.T. contact was excellent, and as adapted into a movie (with Jody Foster!) made such an improvement over the book that I would strongly recommend that you skip the book and just watch the movie. Whomever the Hollywood producers got to write the script actually knew more about the English language and how to craft a story.
I'm not going to fault Dr. Sagan for not trying to express his ideas, but he is far more popular than the quality of his books.
BTW, I could say nearly the exact opposite of Dr. Feynman, as I think his writing is excellent and by far and away under-rated.
"This is something I've always looked at with a wondering if there might not be a financial conflict of interest by Mr. Wales and his association with the WMF for policies like this."
Good luck with that. Let me know how you make out with it.
I should point out that prior to the creation of Wikia (Wikicities as it was originally called), that the creation of Wikimedia sister projects was quite common, and several very interesting ideas were put forward that have been useful even to Wikipedia in a support role. Some of them have been closed down (aka the Klingon language version of Wikipedia and the 9/11/2001 project) and others are still struggling (Wikispecies).
The last sister project to gain approval from the WMF board was Wikiversity, and arguably even that project had its roots prior to the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation as well. My experience with the development of Wikiversity was that the WMF board simply couldn't ignore it due to such widespread support among other Wikimedia editors. In fact, Wikiversity is the only WMF sister project that has been developed under the current new project rules. The Wikimedia Incubator project is technically newer, but it was started in a manner that bypassed the new project development guidelines.
I can't get into the head of Mr. Wales, but it is amazing how such a policy change of dramatic proportions from experimentation of all kinds of crazy ideas on how to use wiki-related data to a very straight jacket approach on what might be acceptable for a sister project happened once Wikia was started as a company. Wikia is a for-profit corporation, and they are selling advertisement banner ads and other things that a great many of those involved with Wikipedia find quite objectionable. It is here that I find the financial conflict of interest.
If you want the low-down and the mathematical theory on the whole thing, you might want to read up on The Shannon Limit that establishes the basis for determining the capacity of network bandwidth. In this case, a "network" can mean a whole bunch of things, and the theory was originally developed to help determine how to best set up a telephone network.
Claude Shannon was an employee for AT&T, and responsible for a great many theories regarding network organization that still have applications today. It is a pity that the old Bell Labs doesn't exist (at least as it was function) to get things like this being developed/discovered today.
Wikipedia would be very interesting in terms of comparisons to the theoretical limits of this model. Of course, this is the absolute upper limit and in real life most networks have excess capacity well above even this limit.
Back in the 1970's and earlier, computer time (aka actually having access to the CPU in any form) was considered so valuable that most computer centers tried to run their CPUs at 100% capacity (or at least 95%+ capacity). With a 64k computer costing much more than $100,000, it isn't surprising that many businesses tried to get the maximum value out of those kinds of equipment.
I wouldn't say "isn't actually linked to the Wikimedia Foundation in any way".... it was "founded" by two members (at the time) of the board of trustees of the WMF. Wikia also provided for a time some technical support personnel, and also some financial gifts to the WMF. Bomis (another of Mr. Wales companies) was even more tied into the WMF at one point.
I'll agree that on a strictly legal basis there isn't any formal connection between Wikia and the WMF (other than Jimbo himself), there still are significant ties in between Wikia projects and WMF sister projects, including a great many shared administrators and cooperative content development.
And I'd also mention that there seemed to be a more or less defacto policy that any idea for creating a new sister project was instead strongly encouraged to become a Wikia project. This is something I've always looked at with a wondering if there might not be a financial conflict of interest by Mr. Wales and his association with the WMF for policies like this.
Having lived in Brazil for a couple of years and being an American, I can say one thing with a little bit of knowledge in regards to Brazilian gun control laws:
It is far easier to get nearly any kind of firearm in Brazil than it is in America. At least for a determined "native" of the country. This includes automatic weapons.
I can't say the same thing about England, although I'm not nearly as familiar with its customs and culture.
There is also in America this little itty bitty thing called the Constitution, but who reads that anyway. Certainly not those in Congress.
This is just something running on Hollywood OS. You know, that wonderful operating system that can perform network searches in a matter of just a few seconds finding the most trivial piece of data you ever could think of...
And of course being able to blow up a 240x320 jpeg image of a football stadium to be able to read not only the license plate number but also the serial number of the annual registration tag of the cool red Porsche that just happens to have the rear end pointed toward the camera. Now that is some really useful "image enhancement"!
How about the ability to hack into and read the contents of any hard drive on any computer in the world, even if it isn't even connected to a network. Really tough computers (like the Pentagon or NASA stuff) might take a couple of minutes to get into, but it isn't all that hard. Right?
Even more impressive, how about trying to crack a one-time-pad encryption that was generated from cosmic radiation in about 3 seconds. Yeah, Hollywood OS is something I'd love have too! I could go on about this stuff as well.
First of all, anybody with half a brain can at least make a crude nuclear weapon.... given the materials necessary to construct the beast (aka plutonium or at least U-235). We're talking physics here people, not something that is dependent upon a specific country's ability.
Rather detailed plans for nuclear bombs, including in published form that even included instructions for refining even ordinary yellow cake Uranium ore have been around for decades. I remember an issue of Analog magazine back in the 1970's that even openly proclaimed the full instructions, and even gave a pretty good design in terms of geometry necessary for a better than average bomb... with instructions to all of the magazine's readers to "give this magazine to your local terrorist". I kid you not on this either!
One really cute piece of information in the article was that the lifespan of a typical terrorist trying to follow the instructions without a huge amount of money would likely be dead in a month or two just from radiation poisoning. Perhaps even sooner. Trying to safeguard against radiation contamination simply is expensive and takes quite a bit of effort, not to mention that the construction of a radiation containment bay is likely to get the interest of the local government long before you actually get any processing of the materials to happen.
Simply put, you have to be a sovereign nation just to even consider the possibility of creating a nuke in the first place. That means you have territory that can be conquered and citizens to protect. No country in the world, even Tuvalu, is going to risk pissing off somebody else with the potential of getting wiped off the map in return unless the ruler of that country doesn't give a damn.
Nukes are also incredibly expensive... not just in terms of building them but also maintaining them for any "reasonable" length of time. They just aren't something that any remotely sane government is going to allow a private or even a non-commissioned officer to screw up and accidentally detonate one of these things. In the USA, they are put under the direct charge of a senior officer... usually a colonel or (naval) captain or higher rank. It is usually a career ending move if those nukes get mis-handled or treated trivially.
The expense comes from having to maintain a security zone, personnel who are not only elite guards (you don't trust this to just anybody) to secure the area, but also extensively trained. And the bunkers where the bombs are stored aren't exactly something cheap to construct either if you want to maintain the high security. Again, all of this is something you want to build even if you are the most brutal totalitarian dictatorship ever seen since Hitler, as the leaders of such a country only want the bombs detonating on targets they want to have destroyed, not something a junior officer thinks would make a cool fireworks display.
In other words, I'm not really worried even about Iran. If Iran uses a nuke, they know that Farsi will become an extinct language due to a lack of speakers, and Tehran will be uninhabitable for the next couple centuries. I just don't see them being that stupid, even if they use the nukes against Israel instead of the USA.
If a "terrorist" does get ahold of nukes + nuclear material, they are acting explicitly as agents of a nuclear power and are under orders of that country. This is not going to be something that will happen by a casual terrorist even of the financial support and large personnel base that was used to carry out the 9/11 attacks. The real trick will be to find out who "ordered" the nuclear attack to be made, but somehow I don't think that will ever be all that difficult. No self-finance terrorist group will ever be able to successfully use a nuke. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, every military promotion above a certain level has to be ratified.
That is everybody at or above the rank of 2nd Lieutenant and Ensign (O-1).
Most of these are read off at the end of each daily congressional session and ratified without even a voice vote (the Senate chair says something like "are there any objections?" and then considers the appointment to be ratified), and there are some noted exceptions for things like battlefield promotions, but every military officer does get "confirmed" by the Senate. This also includes postmasters of rural post offices and forest rangers, so it isn't necessarily unique to the military even. Enlisted ranks don't get confirmed in Congress, which is where the process is different.
Heaven help you if you already got enemies in Congress when you are commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant, as that will pretty much sink your career before you get started.
Generals and Admirals generally get quite a bit more attention due to their rank and authority, and often even have to go through a more lengthy confirmation process. There is also a set limit established by Congress for how many general and flag officers are permitted for each branch, and they must be assigned to specific postings or billets in order to maintain that rank.
There is often some discretionary spending that Congress gives to some higher ranked individuals in the government to kind of make things work out that weren't foreseen during the budget process. Usually not a whole lot, but it can add up over time.
It looks like it was from some of this discretionary spending that was redirected for this "special project". All of it still has to be accounted for and reported even when that sort of money is spent. What is getting these congressmen bent out of shape here is that they didn't want that kind of money spend in that manner.
Nothing illegal was done, but it is a good excuse to make a political mountain out of a mole hill.
Actually, 68k for a change of table wood and leather color seems reasonable. Hear me out.
Everything that is intended to be used and mounted to an aircraft... including this "comfort pallet"... has to be air certified and put through crash tests and all kinds of other "nonsense" to show that it can handle the conditions in flight as well as in emergency situations.
It has to meet higher standards for being a flame retardant and other issues that standard leather used on a Lazyboy recliner simply isn't going to have to go through.
Documenting those changes, hiring engineers to look at those changes, evaluating new materials to meet the aviation standards and other similar issues can easily hit the 68k cost alone. Being a government contract adds about 50% or more to the cost just because of the government accounting standards, not to mention hiring the accountants to keep track of all this spending and others to verify and keep track of this paperwork.
Honestly, I think 68k for a change of that nature is quite cheap if you look at all of the things involved. Is it wasteful? Yeah, but imagine how much waste there would be if these accounting standards weren't there? Most of the aviation standards have been established mainly through the death of some unfortunate souls because somebody was careless and thought you could grab any sort junk from a local hardware store and make it work in an aviation environment.
While in this case it may be excessive, don't blame what you perceive as simple requirements here to what are long standing aviation standards that in the long run do protect passengers, crew, and cargo where even minor mistakes can and do result in death or serious injuries, or causing injury to additional folks like you and me as these vehicles go flying over our heads. I for one am glad that these standards are in place even if in this case it seems absurd.
On the contrary. Congress controls how much money is spent and how. Indeed, the Constitution explicitly notes who can start appropriation bills (the U.S. House only... the Senate only votes up or down on a house bill once it has been sent over) and even has a strict limit that all debts must be settled by the Army at the end of each fiscal year. The USAF was set up as a separate branch in part so they could get around this constitutional issue and be able to purchase aircraft that took more than one year to build.
If Congress didn't give authorization for a USAF general to spend money in a certain way, he is violating the law and misappropriating the money.
If the President gives an order to a USAF officer to act contrary to the will of Congress, it sets up a constitutional crisis and could result in the President getting impeached.
It is also a good thing, as it gives direct civilian oversight for military matters and diffuses the authority over the military to not just the President but also the 435 members of congress that literally demand and get accountability for how tax money is being spent.
I think you need to give these organizers of this "sport" a little more credit.
One of the things they are doing... perhaps precisely because of the wake issue you are bringing up... is that each rocket will be following a "different course" that will be plotted out with a GPS system. Ultimately all of the rockets will have to travel the same distance and the pilots will have to hit certain waypoints in order to qualify for the race, but the rockets are kept separated from each other during the competition.
The real trick to this "sport" is that the pilots have only a limited amount of fuel to fly their plane. I can't remember precisely the amount of fuel on board, but it is something on the order of about 100-150 seconds of thrust, where the pilot has to very precisely time how long he is going to be operating the motors and then shutting them down in a glide pattern until some more thrust is needed.
This will be happening in a venue similar to most air shows, where aviation demonstrations traveling at much higher velocities and altitudes are routine and have groups like the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angles who perform these demonstrations rather routinely.
As far as fuel waste, I don't see how these kind of rocket racers are going to be more wasteful than a bunch of F-16s flying in formation performing aerial demonstrations.
I should also point out one last thing: Although you may have looked at some CGI generated video (I don't know precisely what you saw), this /. posting was generated in response to an actual demonstration of the vehicle in California (Mojave Airport) in preparation for the annual Wisconsin air show.... where I'd also like to point out there are a great many other aircraft performing demonstrations as well.
If you want to see some non-CGI pics of one of these rockets in action, take a look at:
http://mojaveskies.blogspot.com/2008/07/and-few-more-of-rocket-racer.html
Certainly this is something worth looking at, and hopefully will answer some of your questions from a real vehicle rather than some theoretical musings.
As an engineer, I have had the opportunity to support systems that were sold in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. Sure it is nice that you have a spanish-speaking salesman, but what happens when the thing breaks? Providing even tertiary customer support in the primary language of the customer can be invaluable and cement business relationships.
While not strictly required, a strong knowledge of Spanish can certainly help you out. Furthermore, if you are working in some sort of manufacturing company that employs an immigrant workforce (ignoring issues of immigration status for the moment), a working knowledge of Spanish can make a huge difference when trying to explain ideas to the production floor.
I also found that a knowledge of the culture of China was also invaluable in high technology situations as an engineer.... and at least a basic understanding of the Chinese languages in some form or another. Bridging the cultures between America and China is much harder than it appears on the surface, especially if you are dealing with Chinese contractors or parts suppliers. Those engineers who fail to understand the differences are also the ones that cause the most problems.
I haven't found nearly the same trouble in terms of understanding Indians and the Hindi language/culture as they seem to be much more "westernized" than China. Still, there are some interesting cultural differences where a strong knowledge of the culture and a respect for that culture can be pivotal.
The main issue about e-voting fraud that is so much different than paper voting fraud is where the fraud must occur.
With paper voting fraud, it simply must happen at the local voting precinct level. This allows for thousands of dead people to vote for candidates like JFK and allows the 10's of thousands of votes for Al Gore to be added by poll workers being lazy and casting multiple ballots simultaneously (one of the chief reasons for all of the chad problems in Florida). Punch card ballots also could be manipulated by poking a stick through a stack of carefully aligned ballots that would either add votes for the preferred candidate or invalidate those ballots who voted for somebody else.
With hundreds of thousands of local voting precincts in the USA, some of this sort of fraud does occur in nearly every election. People do occasionally get caught, and legal penalties are on occasion also given to those who commit this kind of voting fraud.
With e-voting, the ballot fraud moves up the food chain and can happen at higher levels of government in addition to fraud at the precinct level. This is where some county tech decides to add a little bit of extra software to all of the machines in the county that causes a preferred party to have a few extra votes in key races over some other political party or philosophical point of view. It may not be much, but in tight races it may mean a difference.
One of the best defenses of preventing this kind of fraud is a full disclosure of the software used to operate the machine. I could go on about this, but that would create a whole separate thread.
This can get up past the atmosphere for about $200k-$400k (assuming that Virgin is trying to make a profit here... an obscene profit at that).
The Space Shuttle requires a minimum of $500m-$2b in order to go up.
Which one do you think is going to have a better impact on humanity being able to get into space.
Furthermore, Rutan does want to get into space in terms of something capable of LEO. The point here is that this is something where mere mortals can afford to go up at all and hopefully inspire a next generation of spacecraft that will do exactly what you are proposing.
Remember... LEO is half-way to the rest of the Solar System (in terms of delta-v). SS2 is about 50% of the way to LEO... and the tough half of that.
One of the things that is just driving me up the wall in nearly all of the advertisements about HD television is how it is so much better and improved over analog television.
I'll agree that in a rough technical sense there are more pixels than analog television, and under "ideal conditions" perhaps you get a better quality viewing experience. But I don't buy for a minute that analogy television is any better or worse than digital television.... it is only different.
For myself, I would rather have some occasional snow in my viewing picture and some background noise in the sound channel than having some awful MPEG artifacting, pops, clicks, chirps, and other audio artifacts that happen when digital signals start to seriously degrade. Or worse, right in the middle of some discussion you are seeing on the television the frame suddenly freezes or is jerky and only updates every 10 seconds or so with the audio dropping out entirely.
From my own experience, HD television is giving me far worse "quality of service" than analog television ever did... and rural areas are getting shafted even worse than in the days of analog television as well. Reception is worse, and dead spots that had problems with analog television are going to be even worse still.
The only thing that HD television has going for it right now is that some video engineers did have a chance to review the new standards with quite a bit of experience under their belts when it was developed. Analog television had decades of backward compatibility to earlier standards to work with including having to support the older B&W devices.
In spite of all of the advertisements about digital television, there are going to be a whole bunch of people pissed at the government, television stations, and others when the analog transmitters go off the air.
While I would agree that hydrogen isn't a primary energy source, neither is gasoline. A considerable amount of energy is consumed to prepare either substance so that it can be consumed in whatever device you would like to use it in.
Indeed, far more energy is consumed in the processing of gasoline than could ever be released from the gasoline even under ideal conditions. In other words, you could never have a gasoline-powered oil refinery as more than 100% of the fuel would be consumed in the refining process. Surprisingly (or not!), electricity is the preferred energy source for most refineries as it is more easily controlled and doesn't need as much maintenance in terms of the heating elements.
More to the point, more electricity is consumed in the refining process than the amount of energy you get when you put it into your car. Of course refineries purchase electricity at industrial rates, so they get that energy for dirt cheap prices.
Getting specific here, your argument doesn't hold any validity as nearly all forms of fuel have "to be manufactured, stored, and transported at enormous costs in energy". All that is different here is how the energy is stored and can be released when desired.
In this sense, Hydrogen is most certainly a fuel and I think you would find that the energy required to produce it would compare quite favorably to a great many other forms of energy. Furthermore, OPEC doesn't own a cartel on the world's water supplies or other readily available sources of hydrogen, and is quite difficult to set up a naval blockade preventing the consumption of water.
Keep in mind that the elements that we are talking about were forged in the heat of a nuclear blast.... where the temperatures (even temporarily) were far hotter than even the center of the Sun. Indeed, they were approaching temperatures normally found in Supernovas. This is particularly true for the "Hydrogen Bomb" tests that resulted in the discovery of Einsteinium and some other fun trans-uranium elements
Irradiation of the sort you are suggesting isn't going to forge these sort of elements. It may create some detectable radiation on the surface, but it certainly wouldn't create Strontium or Cesium. Assuming perhaps that may even be possible, getting the proportions to be exact with what you would expect with modern pigments would be incredibly difficult. A "false positive" that has twice the expected quantity of Strontium would certainly be a dead giveaway that it has been tampered with.
Also, what are you using as a source for a neutron emitter? You have two real choices: Highly radioactive material or a nuclear fusion reactor (and yes, I'm being serious here!) You can buy commercial fusion reactors that are a neutron source, but even they aren't exactly tiny things. And how are you going to get that into a museum in the first place when your object is to create false positives to throw off "evidence" and "prove" that this dating method is a pile of BS?
I still stand by my assertion that you would likely die as a tagger trying to create these false positives in the first place, and it would be far more expensive than to simply let things be. While it may be "possible" to deliberately create a false positive on classical art works, there is a huge difference between remotely possible and something that can be practical like defacing the works of Picasso with a can of graffiti spray paint. What kind of museum security do you think would even allow such mundane vandalism to works valuable enough to be considered an art forger's target?
A destructive test would be one that takes a small sample of the work of art and sends it through an isotopic centrifuge. This is what is commonly done for Carbon-14 dating, and a similar technique could also be applied for Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, just to give some examples.
Measuring beta and gamma emissions directly via a Geiger Counter might be one more passive method of at least checking for these elements, but it wouldn't be nearly so accurate. Legitimate radioactive sources from earlier material sources might still give a similar kind of reading, although I'm fairly certain you could get a good feel for if you should get into a more detailed analysis or if you can rule out these elements from paintings right away.
It is a sound concept on a scientific basis, and I could imagine several methods of being able to measure the isotopic proportions of the works of art being studied.
Carbon-14 dating has been used for decades, and all that is being suggested here is to use other radioactive elements and isotopes beyond the Carbon-14 ratios. I don't have the concrete stats to note what Carbon-14 dating has been in terms of identifying fakes, but I know it has been used successfully.
So no, I don't consider this vaporware although the actual equipment to perform the tests and do so in (hopefully) a non-destructive fashion may not have been created yet as applied to classic works of art.
Not quite. Prior to 1900, there wasn't any fission or even really atomic research going on at all. In fact, prior to the 1940's, there really wasn't any fission research at all.
The atmospheric nuclear bomb testing program did put a whole bunch of crazy elements into the atmosphere that previously simply weren't there. The elements that are being used for identification purposes here are relatively short-lived (in terms of our lifetime as a species) but do last for thousands or millions of years.
Please, with the false positive suggestion, tell me exactly how that would be done? Some sort of weird X-ray machine? A "spray bottle" of radioactive materials to coat the painting? "Nuking" the painting in some sort of weird oven?
This is something which is bound into the very fabric and structure of modern plants and animals due to all of us breathing these elements. These elements simply didn't exist in the atmosphere prior to the atomic bomb tests, and any "contamination" as you are suggesting here would be quickly and easily identified as being just that: Some idiot trying to spread radioactive materials in public places. Generally that is frowned upon as a terrorist act by itself, regardless of your application of that material on paintings or a doorway, not to mention that radioactive materials concentrated enough to be able to tag enough paintings in this way would likely end up killing the tagger through radiation poisoning.
The problem with growing your own flax in a fashion as you have suggested is that the radio-isotopic proportions for the elements have changed over the years, and it is nearly impossible to create such a pure laboratory environment as you are suggesting here.
I supposed if you are filthy rich and have a great pile of money to burn, that you could build isotopic centrifuges and extract out the basic isotopes of the essential elements necessary to grow plants... but I can't begin to express how expensive of a process that would be. Going through normal chemical processes, you simply can't isolate isotopes on the scale that you are suggesting.
I suppose that if you wanted to try something really unique and interesting, you could try to head to an asteroid and extract materials and components necessary to grow plants in an environment that avoids contamination from Earth-based sources like atomic weapons. Still, I think even with that sort of expense (IMHO a similar scale to the isotopic separation suggested above) you would be able to identify that the material was created in an extra-terrestrial environment through other measures.
Simply put, growing your own flax isn't going to work on a practical basis.
Something I have heard of is where an art forger would take a painting from a lesser-known artist of the same era and literally scrape the old pigments from the fabric or even "wash" it through some sort of chemical process to remove the paint. Subsequently you need to dig up the paint that comes from roughly the era when the painting supposedly came from. While not quite "your dad's garage", you can obtain paint samples that do date back hundreds of years... provided you have the money.
Even so, most forgery is caught because the forger makes some silly mistake along the way that betrays the origin of the item, such as using paint that is actually older by a century than the fabric that is used, or something else that is a dead giveaway. Making a "good" forgery is something that is quite difficult to accomplish.
All this article suggests is that the isotopic proportions in fabric and pigments is but one more tool to use to help identify fakes from the genuine article.
BTW, your "false positive" notion is also going to be way off. I have no idea what sort of material you are suggesting to "tag" art works in museums that would impact carbon atoms (or other elements) that are bound to the physical structure of the work of art. This isn't like you would have a bottle of Strontium (one of the elements released by the nuclear bomb tests) that could be applied on the surface of the object and not be identified for exactly what it is: Some idiot who is vandalizing art works in some weird fashion.
I think you miss what makes great art something of note and substance.
In a way, art does work like science. Philosophies and concepts have an origin and place to start from, and from there survive in the most Darwinian fashion against competing concepts.
What makes something "classical" such as van Gogh or Shakespeare is that their works have been shamelessly copied and improved upon by succeeding generations. Current artists... if they are deserving of the term... have studied the older masters and have come to understand the principles of their craft to know what can be improved upon and enhanced.
BTW, I'd say the same thing about scientists, where in fact they do study the works of the older philosophers. In fact, if you have an original edition of Principia Mathematica I'm sure you would have several physicists drooling in terms of wanting to have that book in their private collection... and certainly would treasure it as a gift.
In addition, to use your example of Newton, it is far more than a mere historical purpose that you have to go back and study what he wrote. The historical context of where we've been is important to understand in order to advance knowledge in any direction. I will guarantee that any reasonable physicist worthy of that title has read and applied Newton's ideas into their work at some level nearly every day. Ditto for Einstein and others.
Going back to the artifact that is the 1st edition of Principia Mathematica, even that has use in terms of providing a scientific baseline to note what has changed and what hasn't over the years. It is for this reason that the original U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence are so heavily guarded and protected in spite of being in public display. What was written and has it been altered over the years? Are you certain?
Furthermore, sometimes people apply the conclusions to the theories and don't understand the thinking that went into forming the theories in the first place. Again, this is the same in art as it is in science where going back to the "source" you can find out what was done, how it was done, and then do a "what if" to try and take things in a different direction.
This isn't ancestor worship as you are implying, but avoiding the need to "reinvent the wheel". As such, these artifacts that are called classical paintings and other such things have value because it provides that important context to fall back upon and not rely upon subsequent interpretation.
I will admit there is a certain amount of ancestor worship going on as well, which is why there is a kernel of truth to what you are saying here. But I think you are also missing out on other aspects of what is going on well beyond just the pure idolizing of things that are old just because they are old.
What made John Lennon and Paul McCartney so incredible wasn't just that they made great music.... it was because they studied the classical masters like Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart and were able to put some of that music into a much more modern context. You may love or hate their music, but it certainly will have an impact on you. __**THAT**__ is what defines great art, and not somebody who copies the work of somebody else and not understanding the context, like the host of Elvis impersonators.
The only problem with this line of thinking is mainly a sort of fraud that results when you claim one things but in fact it is something different.
If you claim to have a painting by Da Vinci but it was in fact created last year by Guido Da Vinci... yeah, I guess it is sort of truthful. But the problem is if you are trying to suggest that the painting was by the much more famous 15th Century inventor/artisan and not some "starving artist" who is likely just copying the master.
It really boils down to honesty and if you are claiming something that it isn't.
As far as its aesthetic value and how it looks on the wall... I'd have to agree. The $500 USD painting by a contemporary artist with no significant reputation can be as good as one of the classical masters. But don't claim it is anything else either. This isn't obsession about having the original but rather asserting something that isn't true at all.
If I remember correctly, the lifetime of a human-breathable atmosphere on Mars is on the order of millions of years. Short enough that Mars lost most of its atmosphere over the 4.5 billion years or so of its lifetime, but long enough that if an atmosphere were to be generated by human activity that it would last longer than we've existed as a species. Certainly long enough to have a planetary government on Mars to be able to create the technology necessary to replenish the atmosphere if necessary.
What is exciting here with this report is that you could build a "greenhouse" somewhere on Mars and simply cover over a given area of the ground to start growing a vegetable garden... if you decided to become a settler on Mars. This also demonstrates that the level of technology and the kinds of materials that would be needed in terms of bringing "stuff" from the Earth to get a Martian colony going wouldn't be nearly so large or complex.
I'm not trying to flamebait here, so please don't read this as something more than just a critical review of Sagan's books.
I've had the opportunity to read several of Dr. Sagan's books, and frankly I find them to be some of the worst prose that I've ever had the chance to read from anybody who put a pen to a piece of paper. I don't mean that lightly either, as I've read some awful content before as well, but in this case it was from a major publishing house and supposedly professionally edited.
This said, if you look past the awful writing and some of the cheesy plot elements (in the fiction like Contact) there are some kernels of very interesting and amazing ideas. If anything, it is these ideas that carry the books.
Contact is a good example of what I'm talking about, where more than once I had to throw the book into the corner of my bedroom as I was reading it due to the awful writing. I just couldn't spend that much time polluting my brain with such awful English. Still, the idea of E.T. contact was excellent, and as adapted into a movie (with Jody Foster!) made such an improvement over the book that I would strongly recommend that you skip the book and just watch the movie. Whomever the Hollywood producers got to write the script actually knew more about the English language and how to craft a story.
I'm not going to fault Dr. Sagan for not trying to express his ideas, but he is far more popular than the quality of his books.
BTW, I could say nearly the exact opposite of Dr. Feynman, as I think his writing is excellent and by far and away under-rated.
I should point out that prior to the creation of Wikia (Wikicities as it was originally called), that the creation of Wikimedia sister projects was quite common, and several very interesting ideas were put forward that have been useful even to Wikipedia in a support role. Some of them have been closed down (aka the Klingon language version of Wikipedia and the 9/11/2001 project) and others are still struggling (Wikispecies).
The last sister project to gain approval from the WMF board was Wikiversity, and arguably even that project had its roots prior to the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation as well. My experience with the development of Wikiversity was that the WMF board simply couldn't ignore it due to such widespread support among other Wikimedia editors. In fact, Wikiversity is the only WMF sister project that has been developed under the current new project rules. The Wikimedia Incubator project is technically newer, but it was started in a manner that bypassed the new project development guidelines.
I can't get into the head of Mr. Wales, but it is amazing how such a policy change of dramatic proportions from experimentation of all kinds of crazy ideas on how to use wiki-related data to a very straight jacket approach on what might be acceptable for a sister project happened once Wikia was started as a company. Wikia is a for-profit corporation, and they are selling advertisement banner ads and other things that a great many of those involved with Wikipedia find quite objectionable. It is here that I find the financial conflict of interest.
If you want the low-down and the mathematical theory on the whole thing, you might want to read up on The Shannon Limit that establishes the basis for determining the capacity of network bandwidth. In this case, a "network" can mean a whole bunch of things, and the theory was originally developed to help determine how to best set up a telephone network.
Claude Shannon was an employee for AT&T, and responsible for a great many theories regarding network organization that still have applications today. It is a pity that the old Bell Labs doesn't exist (at least as it was function) to get things like this being developed/discovered today.
Wikipedia would be very interesting in terms of comparisons to the theoretical limits of this model. Of course, this is the absolute upper limit and in real life most networks have excess capacity well above even this limit.
Back in the 1970's and earlier, computer time (aka actually having access to the CPU in any form) was considered so valuable that most computer centers tried to run their CPUs at 100% capacity (or at least 95%+ capacity). With a 64k computer costing much more than $100,000, it isn't surprising that many businesses tried to get the maximum value out of those kinds of equipment.
I wouldn't say "isn't actually linked to the Wikimedia Foundation in any way".... it was "founded" by two members (at the time) of the board of trustees of the WMF. Wikia also provided for a time some technical support personnel, and also some financial gifts to the WMF. Bomis (another of Mr. Wales companies) was even more tied into the WMF at one point.
I'll agree that on a strictly legal basis there isn't any formal connection between Wikia and the WMF (other than Jimbo himself), there still are significant ties in between Wikia projects and WMF sister projects, including a great many shared administrators and cooperative content development.
And I'd also mention that there seemed to be a more or less defacto policy that any idea for creating a new sister project was instead strongly encouraged to become a Wikia project. This is something I've always looked at with a wondering if there might not be a financial conflict of interest by Mr. Wales and his association with the WMF for policies like this.
Having lived in Brazil for a couple of years and being an American, I can say one thing with a little bit of knowledge in regards to Brazilian gun control laws:
It is far easier to get nearly any kind of firearm in Brazil than it is in America. At least for a determined "native" of the country. This includes automatic weapons.
I can't say the same thing about England, although I'm not nearly as familiar with its customs and culture.
There is also in America this little itty bitty thing called the Constitution, but who reads that anyway. Certainly not those in Congress.
This is just something running on Hollywood OS. You know, that wonderful operating system that can perform network searches in a matter of just a few seconds finding the most trivial piece of data you ever could think of...
And of course being able to blow up a 240x320 jpeg image of a football stadium to be able to read not only the license plate number but also the serial number of the annual registration tag of the cool red Porsche that just happens to have the rear end pointed toward the camera. Now that is some really useful "image enhancement"!
How about the ability to hack into and read the contents of any hard drive on any computer in the world, even if it isn't even connected to a network. Really tough computers (like the Pentagon or NASA stuff) might take a couple of minutes to get into, but it isn't all that hard. Right?
Even more impressive, how about trying to crack a one-time-pad encryption that was generated from cosmic radiation in about 3 seconds. Yeah, Hollywood OS is something I'd love have too! I could go on about this stuff as well.
First of all, anybody with half a brain can at least make a crude nuclear weapon.... given the materials necessary to construct the beast (aka plutonium or at least U-235). We're talking physics here people, not something that is dependent upon a specific country's ability.
Rather detailed plans for nuclear bombs, including in published form that even included instructions for refining even ordinary yellow cake Uranium ore have been around for decades. I remember an issue of Analog magazine back in the 1970's that even openly proclaimed the full instructions, and even gave a pretty good design in terms of geometry necessary for a better than average bomb... with instructions to all of the magazine's readers to "give this magazine to your local terrorist". I kid you not on this either!
One really cute piece of information in the article was that the lifespan of a typical terrorist trying to follow the instructions without a huge amount of money would likely be dead in a month or two just from radiation poisoning. Perhaps even sooner. Trying to safeguard against radiation contamination simply is expensive and takes quite a bit of effort, not to mention that the construction of a radiation containment bay is likely to get the interest of the local government long before you actually get any processing of the materials to happen.
Simply put, you have to be a sovereign nation just to even consider the possibility of creating a nuke in the first place. That means you have territory that can be conquered and citizens to protect. No country in the world, even Tuvalu, is going to risk pissing off somebody else with the potential of getting wiped off the map in return unless the ruler of that country doesn't give a damn.
Nukes are also incredibly expensive... not just in terms of building them but also maintaining them for any "reasonable" length of time. They just aren't something that any remotely sane government is going to allow a private or even a non-commissioned officer to screw up and accidentally detonate one of these things. In the USA, they are put under the direct charge of a senior officer... usually a colonel or (naval) captain or higher rank. It is usually a career ending move if those nukes get mis-handled or treated trivially.
The expense comes from having to maintain a security zone, personnel who are not only elite guards (you don't trust this to just anybody) to secure the area, but also extensively trained. And the bunkers where the bombs are stored aren't exactly something cheap to construct either if you want to maintain the high security. Again, all of this is something you want to build even if you are the most brutal totalitarian dictatorship ever seen since Hitler, as the leaders of such a country only want the bombs detonating on targets they want to have destroyed, not something a junior officer thinks would make a cool fireworks display.
In other words, I'm not really worried even about Iran. If Iran uses a nuke, they know that Farsi will become an extinct language due to a lack of speakers, and Tehran will be uninhabitable for the next couple centuries. I just don't see them being that stupid, even if they use the nukes against Israel instead of the USA.
If a "terrorist" does get ahold of nukes + nuclear material, they are acting explicitly as agents of a nuclear power and are under orders of that country. This is not going to be something that will happen by a casual terrorist even of the financial support and large personnel base that was used to carry out the 9/11 attacks. The real trick will be to find out who "ordered" the nuclear attack to be made, but somehow I don't think that will ever be all that difficult. No self-finance terrorist group will ever be able to successfully use a nuke. Period.