There is no way in h*** that the Lunar Embassy titles will be acknowledged. Besides, in order to enforce a property title, you have to be able to defend that title with the use of force. That courts might get into the fray mucks things up a little bit, but even then a judicial preceedent on the topic is only as good as the force of arms is able to bear upon enforcing that judgement.
If the Principality of Sealand wanted to claim the Moon, but actually got up there and blew up anybody who tried to land on the Moon without their permission, they would become the real owners of the Moon until somebody else tried to challenge them through the use of arms of some sort to offer a challenge. As such, the Lunar Embassy and their claims are incredibly weak indeed. Claims on Mars, Ganymede, and other objects are even more dubious still.
Until people get to the Moon and actually walk around there, you won't see a legal challenge to a Lunar Embassy title.
Not in the way that is described and coordinated by NASA. NASA will never by the primary space-related transportation services corporation, such as Amtrack currently is. And if NASA wants to be the "Amtrack" of space related organizations, they are shooting for the very wrong government agency to emulate.
If NASA decides to go there with this plan and time scale, they will meet Sir Richard Branson in a ready-made casino and hotel suites already preped for the astronauts... and a few hundred people waiting for them on the surface of the moon to see the "historic" return to the moon first hand. Provided Congress doesn't cancel the whole project before then after switching between parties two or three times and the NASA budget having gone through between 5-10 presidential administrations. Is there any government program besides Social Security that has survived intact with that many politicians adding their own $0.02 to the idea along the way?
I'd like to point out that the lunar lander guidance computers were hardly the only items using integrated circuits at the time. They were used, by NASA, for the control systems of many of the spaceship components, including the Apollo Guidance Computer in the Command Capsule, control systems at "Mission Control" and KSC, and other places including simulators. While it is true that NASA consumed at one point about 90% of all world-wide IC production, it wasn't just for the lander computers, nor was the development of ICs pushed by NASA either. That NASA (at the time) had the deepest pockets of any customers and were willing to pay high prices for them, others went for more descrete components instead.
It should also be noted that almost all of the ICs involved were very, very simply circuits, like AND, OR, NOT, and other basic gate ICs, mostly like (although they weren't) the 7400 series simple chips. It still takes a pile of those chips to make a basic CPU, and in many cases discrete components won out because they were more power efficient and smaller than the ICs at the time to do the same job.
Of course this early "investment" in IC production did eventually pay off in terms of buying new fabs for larger production chip runs with more complex designs, but that wasn't to happen until well after the Apollo flights after Apollo 17 were canceled. Certainly investment into those fab lines wasn't done to benefit NASA or any space-related activities, but to go after the commercial IC market instead. That eventually some of these chips did end up in more modern spacecraft eventually did help NASA, that was more of a side effect than somthing specifically caused by NASA. NASA spacecraft computers are a decade or more behind the rest of the computer industry for a variety of reasons, as there are some very unique environmental situations that spacecraft computers encounter that ordinary CPUs sitting in a cubicle don't experience. That usually requires setting up seperate fab lines and much tougher specs to meet than ordinary IC production, often at huge premium prices.
BTW, as far as NASA using commercial services instead of trying to develop capabilities "in house", I have to completely agree with you on that idea 100%. The re-development of a heavy lifter to replace the Saturn V in the 21st century is certainly something that (at the moment) is unique to the needs of NASA and not commercial transportation systems.
While wikipedia articles that have strong "popularity" (however you describe that term) are more likely to be balanced, there is a tendancy for particularly some of the more obscure articles to have a few strong defenders with a manifestly strong point of view and bias, where any changes to those articles moving away from that bias and point of view is met with out right hostility and anger, invoking every obscure rule of Wikipedia behavior to justify their words and discouraging any compromising edits. Often these "article tzars" have support of Wikipedia administrators and others in supposed position of authority.
That said, I have been successful in making some rather substantial changes in some articles explicitly by showing the paper tigers for which some of those POV biases can be seen. And given enough time and eyeballs, most of these problems do eventually get ironed out. But it takes time and much of what you see on Wikipedia is a work in progress.
In defense of the Chinese Wikipedia, they are a couple of years behind and a fair bit under-represented in comparison to the Chinese speaking population to what the English Wikipedia has going for it. That and "official actions" by the PRC that tends to discourage participation on Wikipedia. Those that do participate operate under a "Sword of Damocles that could be lowered at any time by the PRC government. As I've pointed out myself on many occasions, it would be an incredibly inept Chinese government that would not know exactly who the major Wikipedia participants are, even those who don't necessarily live in China proper (like being a Chinese speaker in the USA, as an example). I'm talking the full names, addresses, and other identifying information about these people. The use of psuedonyms does not hide this information from the Chinese government.
There is justified concern in term of avoiding prison or even losing their life if they try to push too hard for the NPOV that the English Wikipedia enjoys. As for the U.S. government keeping track of its citizens, I'm sure that happens as well, but there would be a nearly instant and major outcry if there were such a similar crackdown within the USA. I'm sure the/. post about U.S. government censorship of Wikipedia alone would have thousands of replies in a matter of just an hour.
The electorate of the United States hasn't really changed that much in the past 100 years, at least in terms of voting habits. To suggest otherwise is a huge fallacy, but OK, I'll say that more reliable comparisons must be done for those presidental campaigns that have been done via electronic broadcast media. Or even perhaps just television. That still gives you only generals, vice-presidents, and governors that have a more reasonable chance at becomming president.
The point of the matter is that no major political party is going to entrust their top position leading their slate of candidates unless they have demonstrated ample leadership in the past and have been something very substantial on the national level in terms of name recognition and involvement in the political life of America. That means that a school teacher from Ohio or a West Virginia coal miner is not likely, or indeed impossible to become POTUS. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with gender or race in the least and to suggest otherwise is disingenuous. And insulting to those of us who actually vote for these people.
The point I was trying to make is that for a woman or a person of color to achieve this office, you need to see many more people of these alternative descriptions in those other positions first. Only when there is a pool of several women of strong character who have been governors of more populous states (aka Ann Richards, to give an example of one who could have become POTUS, as her successor did move on to the national level) will you see a woman president. That also means that more women need to run on the local level as well such as city councils, sheriffs, or state legislatures. And women increasingly are elected to these positions and have substantial influence in term of the grass roots efforts to start political campaigns. In time I think you will find a woman as POTUS, but you need to really understand the political structure of America to note that the electorate of the USA is not necessarily racist, but it takes time to accomodate political changes.
That is not the logic. You need to prove that you have the command presence to be able to convince many people that you are capable of doing the job. While it is true that all previous presidents have been white men, that is not the prerequisite. Having positions of authority to demonstrate what you would do as president is important.
That most of those positions (not all of them) are currently filled also with white men will mean this "tradition" will continue for some time. This is not to say that no women will ever be president, but that it is a tough road ahead before it will happen. That Hillary is certainly the most qualified woman to come around in many years (particularly because she didn't get the job as senator because her husband kicked the bucket), being a senator here is more of a liability for her than an asset. If instead she ran for and won the governorship of New York and then tried to run for president, it would be almost a shoe-in for her.
She is the current Secretary of State, and in the (admittedly distant) past that was considered another avenue to become president, as some former Secretaries of State have gone on to higher office. Colin Powell is certainly fitting this mold as well, although his status as a former 4-star General who won a major military campaign (the Gulf War) fits more with your line of thinking.
Re: Rudy Guliani
While he certainly wasn't "governor", he was mayor of NYC, and that has a similar set of legislative and constituancy problems similar to a middle-sized state. Certainly very similar to Georgia and Arkansas (to name a couple of states where some recent presidents came from) in terms of population comparisons and fiscal responsibilities by comparing mayors and governors. Certainly the mayor of Taopi, Minnesota is not going to be considered in the same class of mayor as those from NYC.
In short, I wouldn't write him out, and indeed would put him much more likely to become president over John McCain. It is still an uphill fight, and Rudy would have to fight real hard even to get the nomination.
Re: Bill Gates
First and foremost, he will have to decide if he really wants the job in the first place. In some places (and in the much more distant past of U.S. history) some people were "drafted" to become president. I don't think that is possible today, and unless Mr. Gates is very active and agressive in trying to become president it will never happen.
If he decides to really go for it and do a serious run, even as an "independent", all bets would be off at that point. As Ross Perot demonstrated, it is possible for an outsider to become president provided you have some financial backing to help you out in getting the job done. All Ross Perot did that was wrong was to crack up at the end and get really weird to withdraw from the race and then try to get back into it, not to mention other really wacky comments he made that collapsed his campaign. I don't see a candidacy of Bill Gates going through that same sort of wackyness.
I see this excuse and scratch my head. I have seen some incredible GUI designs that fit onto a single floppy disc. Of particular note were the QNX distro (with a web browser to boot!) and GEO-works. Yes, that is a 1.44 MB floppy disc, not a CD-ROM even. I would dare say that if you can't get the UI honed into 2-4 MB, there is far too much cruft within the code base. The only possible exception would be to deal with CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) glyphs, but even that only should take up an additional 3-5 MB due to font issues.
128 MB is down right roommmmmmmy and is a problem only for those programmers who are just plain lazy to optimize their code, or a UI that is driven more by PR than by code doing what a UI is supposed to do: display information in a clean and unobstructed manner that the user can take advantage of. Even a secondary objective of being easy enough to use that a non-geek can understand how to access the information they need is also easily done. Buttons, spinners, edit and check boxes, and "movable windows" don't really take that much extra programming.
At least HTML v. 1.0 Other "enhancements" have really screwed things up and killed backward compatability.
The point here is that HTML is an "open" and "widely used" data format, so it is widely used. Plain HTML (and now even some variants of some XML) are now being used by groups like the Gutenberg Project as reliable enough to be used for permanent archiving, where the HTML and XML offers superior text formatting information that is not preserved with plain ASCII text documents.
And before you go off and say that HTML is ASCII, it is not. It is a mark-up language that does muck arround with the text and do things that sometimes make the text hard to read with just a plain ASCII text reader. Of course this is making a distinction between plain vanilla ASCII text files and something marked up like a web page.
As for propritary formats... the "conversion" subroutines that reformat to more modern data format: they "mostly" work correctly. Sometimes there are bugs in the conversion process, especially (as was common with older Microsoft Office formats) when there were "undocumented" features in the data format due to the propritary nature of the software using it. In other words, the documentation was in the source code in the form of algorithms and nowhere else. I've seen that far too often among programmers who write these file formats for this and many other file types where only a single application is assumed to use the data generated for that format. While you might be able to recover the raw text of the document through this conversion process, often the formatting is shot to hell at best, or even unusable.
If you avoided fancy formatting of the document and simply used "default settings" for most of your older documents, the conversion process is usually pretty good. It is only when somebody decided to get fancy and use some of the more obscure formatting styles that you get into some real problems. Unfortunately, those are often the most important documents that you want to access as well.
The saturn 5 launch system doesn't exist either and thats the part of this system which is really vapourware.
But, you must acknowledge that because the Saturn V has been built, did fly to the Moon and back, that it is certainly within reach technologically by early 21st Century tools and industrial practicies. Half the battle with developing a technology is proving that it can even be done at all, which building a moon rocket is not a problem.
Instead, it becomes "can we do it better than Von Braun". Or cheaper.
Some things we do know we can do much better than the Von Braun engineering team of the 1950's (when he started) is that metalurgical sciences have progress significantly since then with much improved alloys for much lighter spacecraft, and that the guidance electronics have also improved by many orders of magnitude. The entire Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) can be built on a single chip, for instance. An FPGA for that matter, and room to spare. Minaturization efforts as well as low-power embedded systems have also made a huge improvement for what is possible for manned spaceflight today. For crying out loud, the Mercury capsule used vacuum tubes for some of its components. I know we can do much better in terms of reliability and weight reduction today.
All this means that building a Saturn V today can be done both cheaper (inflation adjusted) and much more reliable than could ever be considered in the 1960's.
I would have to agree with some prominent scientists who have pointed out that of all thing things that we can possibly do as humans to hurt or harm the Earth, manipulation of asteroids is the one activity that is currently within reach of human technology.
As for climate modification (for good or ill), I would have to agree with your general sentiment: Atmospheric climate modification on a global basis, even if done with explicit intent and through some sort of Manhattan Project-style of endeavor with a major 1st world country (read USA but a combined EU initive here might also apply) still couldn't make any substantial changes.
I don't suggest here that we should abandon general stewardship principles here, and that a general goal of trying to make a healthier environment has some very positive benefits, but we don't have to do emergency steps "immediately" either to achieve a general goal: Breathable air, clean water, and a productive ecosystem that preserves some of our wilderness heritage for future generations.
I believe that this can all be achieved by going after the most destructive practices (read the Chinese coal mining industry here, and wanton filth and waste by emerging nations, or similar practices even in 1st world countries) and suggest viable alternatives.
As far as what this "article" posting is about, it is now within our grasp to be able to manipulate smaller bodies in the solar system for the good or ill of mankind. While the positive side of it is impressive, the concern I have is the opposite: the use of crashing bodies as a form of warfare! While the use of aerosol chloro-florocarbons has not been decisively linked to massive global extinctions, the impact of major meteors upon the earth certainly has been. Or at the very least for a very modest budget (in terms of an emerging nation like Iran or North Korea) could get ahold of rocks in space and crash them into the Earth at key selected targets, doing far more damage than any arsenal of nukes could possible even consider. And intercepting such incoming projectiles is completely outside of the ability of current technology, particularly if it were "guided" to avoid intercept attempts.
One reason why mathmatics is so heavily emphasized is because the CS departments were often appendages to the mathmatics departments, or were started in the mathmatics departments. About 30 years ago (showing my age here) when you couldn't even get a CS degree, most computer programmers had a BS degree in mathmatics. Almost all of the older CS professors usually had a PhD in Mathmatics, although one of my best CS profs had his PhD in Biology (and turned out to be the graphics algorithms teacher at my university... go figure).
I believe that largly due to this early emphasis on mathmatics, it has skewed the emphasis by some of those professors to more pure mathmatics concepts. While not bad by itself, I did find it boring after a fashion when one of these professors would get caught up with making a mathmatical proof of some CS theory.... particularly when you were in a class like compilers or data algorithms that had little to do with very abstract mathmatical proofs. Those younger professors who had a PhD in CS and spent time working "in the industry" tended to be much more grounded on coding fundimentals and teaching finite number theory instead.
For myself, while I think advanced mathmatics may have usefulness for hardcore computer science, that is the study of computer algorithms and computational theory, it doesn't have much of a practical application.
Of course I view myself as a software engineer seeking practical development of computer algorithms as opposed to a computer scientist that explores theoretical directions of computational concepts. In this regard, I consider software engineers to be very different from computer scientist.
Or more to the point, I think there ought to be a ratio of about 1 computer scientist to about 50 software engineers. Unfortunately, it is presumed that you would get a CS degree if you want to become a computer programmer. But if your school doesn't offer a software engineering degree (very, very rare) you are trained as a computer scientist first and a software engineer maybe as a supplimentary (sometimes optional) course.
Keep in mind that the gague of the railroad has a strong influence on how tight you can have a turn radius when bending track. Larger gague tracks simply require much more room to turn. Over flat prarie and meadows this isn't that big of a deal, but when you get into mountains or along a sea coast it becomes a huge deal.
For this reason alone, many of the mining railroads actually use a standard "narrow gague" for their tracks (and even a "cog" railroad to overcome the steep slope of the tracks). There is less room to turn for things like a switchback track, so therefore they need a narrower gague of track.
The point here is that the "standard gague" was something that came about through years of experience of having to deal with a large number of factors, which met the compromise from all of the competing problems. If 7 feet really were that much better, it certainly would have been used more often.
BTW, the petition to purchase the laptop for $300 failed to get enough signatures, but there was a pretty large (> 15000 signatures) support base for the idea. And that was for people who were willing to make a stand on an insignificant and poorly advertised web page for something that may not even happen even if all the signatures came in that were needed.
The OLPC organizers have said that they will not sell this computer to private individuals. The $300 figure is just a number pulled out of the air and has no basis for reality.
Forget about the warlord who confiscates the laptops. How about the Education Minister's brother Abdul who decides to "accidentally" drop these computers into a shipping container headed for Amsterdam instead?
The corruption will start at the top, and there is no legal means to prevent these computers from being resold in 1st world countries. The only way to stop that sort of behaivor is to flood the world market so shipping them to 1st world countries will cost more than you can possibly sell them at. Even then minor corruption will still occur, but at least some of these education ministers will get these computers where they were supposed to go in the first place: the hands of kids eager to learn about the world.
Considering that Massachusetts Governor Mit Romney has explicitly requested to purchase these computers for use by inner-city youth of Boston as well as for other lower-income families and school districts of Massachusetts, I don't see how anybody else could have much more pull to try and get them sold within America.
Of your sentiment in general, I think you are completely correct that they ought to be sold within the USA. And there is no logical reason other than an attempt by the parts suppliers of the OLPC to segrigate the world markets. Time will only tell when these things start to be sold on eBay or other on-line auction sites, much less a major "grey market" penetration by Chinese companies... even other companies who see the actual product and are willing to make knock-offs for about the same price.
The real question is if the OLPC organizers will take advantage of the demand in 1st world countries, or if they will ignore it and lose a valuable source of support and perhaps even funding to help subsidize significant efforts in 3rd world countries.
BTW, re: Brazil
I spent some time living there (mainly in Sao Paulo) and while the "middle class" of Brazil certainly are not hurting economically to the extent of say Ethiopia or Sudan, what is considered middle class in Brazil would be considered poverty conditions in the USA. The poor of the poor in Brazil are truly destitute and litterally struggle day to day to even get basic needs like clothing and food. The migrants from the Brazilian northeast to the industrial south live in slums that are simply beyond belief of people who have never left the geographical boundaries of the USA. Such living conditions simply do not exist within the USA.
I did missionary work within those slums, and there are some people who really are trying to get out of those conditions, but it is a major struggle that is often thwarted even by government regulations and corruption. The one thing I remember the most is the smell of raw sewage that seemed to penetrate everything in those neighborhoods, as the smell of sewage even today brings back memories of the work I did there.
I've also spent time with homeless people of urban America, and frankly they don't hold a candle to the problems in 3rd world countries. Oh, there are unfortunate circumstances and accidents that would make your heart bleed with sympathy, but a bright and resourceful homeless person in America doesn't need to stay homeless for that long. And there are plenty of social safty nets to help out if you are willing to take advantage of them.
There is also a huge misunderstanding of the difference between the judicial and legislative branches of the U.S. government. (Assuming that we are Americans here... not always true on/.) Of course it seems as though even congressmen and judges get confused about the distinction as well.
As citizens, it is in our interest to debate and hone in on what the law ought to be. And try to pressure legislators to change the law to become this model as we think it should be. This sort of debate is certainly healthy and there is no way that it should be prohibited, even though there are some that would try to convince you otherwise.
One problem with the judicial system in a democracy is that it is a reminant of the old monarchal system where "GOD"(pun intended) decides ultimately what is the law and that is interpreted through His appointed servants in a heirarchal system.
That would mean the end of free broadcasting the the requirement of a "broadcast" tax like is currently done in England and Germany.
No, I would not appreciate this precedent being acknowledged and supported by SCOTUS (upon eventual appeal). While there would be some short term gain, it would be disasterous in the long term.
Frankly, I doubt this line of reasoning would hold up anyway, and the GPL would change to accomodate this if it happened as well. Charging a penny per download of the software would end the argument cold. Or $1.
Voting blackmail was so incredibly prevelant that the "secret ballot" was the only way to overcome the problems. Even then, very, very, very strict rules have been put into place to try and prevent the problem, as it even now still happens.
This is a far larger problem than you who are pooh poohing right here. And has been the means to coerce large blocks of voters to vote for a specific candidate. That it isn't currently a big problem is more a result of decades or even a full century in the USA of trying to root this problem out of the voting booth, and you only see the results of that herculean effort, rather than the process it took to get there in the first place. Essentially a myopic vision because you aren't old enough to remember (or read history) to see when it was a huge problem.
This is also "voodoo" that is being encouraged by Diebold (and others) that are used to the commercial banking industry, where security through obscurity is reasonable and even effective. Unfortunately, even that has problems.
I have in my hands right now a "classified" document from Diebold that goes over operation machines for the voting machines in Utah. They were handed out like candy at the training meetings for precinct worker training meetings, but had the list of disclaimers typical for a high-tech company internal documents, and obviously this hasn't been "cleaned" to be ready as an external document. That is the only reason why it was "classified", where it should have been handed out via NDA. That was clearly not done here, nor do I think it was possible to classify this document in such a way because it became an official state government training manual. While Diebold may have a copyright claim on it, that would be the only legal defense they could have stopping its reproduction.
Of course, when the machines boot with Microsoft Windows CE, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know how the things work at that point.
As I mentioned in an earlier post on this topic, the whole voting system relies upon honest and intelligent precinct voting judges and county clerks who know what is going on and want a fair election. If you have corrupt precinct judges, all bets are off regardless of how much you want to try and clean things up. A stubborn and corrupt county clerk only makes things worse, and clearly have the opportunity to really screw things ups. An ordinary voter is not going to be able to hack into most of these voting machines without some inside help from a judge. And that really doesn't require an electronic voting machine, as any voting method can be corrupted by corrupt judges.
The "glitches" with the Utah machines, apparently, are that an "encoding machine" that poll workers have (mainly to identify which voting precinct you are in when casting your ballot.... multiple voting precincts are voting at the same location in most places in Utah) that enables the "smart cards" that you use to cast your vote were not working. This meant that in those voting locations you couldn't cast your ballot electronically.
However, all Utah election judges were given paper ballots (with the little bubbles to fill in with #2 pencils, like the SAT tests and other standardized tests) that voters could fill out as an alternative.
Unfortunately, most of the voting judges involved with this election, as is typical, are senior citizens who for the most part are intentionally clueless about technology and change in habits and procedures in general. Those judges are simply being overwhelmed right now with these new machines that require somebody with a clue to figure out how to turn them on. The older punch ballot machines didn't require an AC 110-V outlet in order to be used, and plugging something in the wall is often far too complicated for some people.
It should be noted that this is the second state-wide election that these machines have been used in Utah (the first being the primary elections). Unfortunately, not all of the judges participating in this election also were involved with the primary, so for the majority of the election judges this is the first time they have had to use this equipment.
My wife is the head election judge for our precinct, so I've seen the rather extensive training both she and all poll workers should have gone through in order to be in charge. Unfortunately, in addition to the senior citizen issue, many people get bored with lectures and don't pay attention until the actual event occurs. This is simply human nature and can't be avoided until people get real experience with these machines.
In addition, there are also the usual problems associated with any mechanical devices or computers in general. Plugs don't get pluged in, batteries stop working, monitors die or stop responding, or other problems. One problem my wife encountered during the primary was one of the computers wasn't "programed" with the election, so it had to be pushed to the side and ignored. I'm sure this and other issues came up. The comptuers were supposed to be set up with the election information (the list of offices and candidates) by the county clerks, and these sometimes have minor differences from precinct to precinct that need to be all worked out ahead of time. Again, avenues for human error that plague any election format.
One positive aspect of the Utah machines is that there is a voter-verified paper ballot that is generated by the machines when you cast your ballot. You, the voter, are responsible to make sure that the people who you vote for are listed correctly, and the information is printed in plain-text English in the format of:
Office (or Refferenda issue)
Candidate (or position on the Refferenda)
Unfortunately, this paper ballot is to be used only for auditing and recount purposes, not for the "official tally". At least there is a method of verification if the results are questioned.
From my own view of the Utah voting machines, there are avenues of attack to hack at them. There is of course the card reader, which also is how the precinct judge opens and closes the elections, as well as how the county clerk loads in the election data.
There are removable memory modules that hold the actual election data itself, and in theory a corrupt election judge can tamper with those memory modules. They are a non-standard format (at least in terms of the physcial connector package) from other typical memory modules, but otherwise non-remarkable. This is IMHO the least secure aspect of the system, but at least the Utah election officials are intelligent to acknowledge that the data must be shipped by sn
I think it is reasonable that Hussein wanted to hide or even completely dismantle the WMD programs he had in progress before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (that was certainly not the "second cold war" by any stretch of the imagination). I also think it was Hussein's intention to restart the process of building them once the attention of the USA was turned elsewhere, with major components and equipment moved to neighboring "friendly" countries.
BTW, my #1 complaint about both the Democrats in congress as well as President Bush, as both are co-conspiritors on this point, is that in order for an invasion to take place, there should have been a formal declaration of war by the congress of the USA before it happened. Bush was afraid of the possibility that congress would have said "No", and the democrats were so wishy-washy that they accepted the "authorization of the use of force" resolution. And because they both went only half-way to going to war against Iraq, we are currently in the political quandry that we are facing. Had this been a formally declared war instead, much of the anti-Iraq war discussions and protests would have been declared treasonous and many of the demonstrators been thrown into jail. Both Lincoln and Roosevelt did that and more during their administrations when war was declared.
Considering that neither major political party in the USA has the balls to declare a war, even in the midst of blatant invasions and conquest by the U.S. military like in both Granada and Haiti (respectively under Reagan and Clinton) without even a discussion by congress, much less a declaration of war ever being issued by congress since 1941 (with several major military actions since then even after the surrender of Germany and Japan), I don't give credence to either political party.
Actually, all you have to do is appear before an "officer" of the United States Government, like a Federal court judge. Of course this is made easier if you do it in an embassy, but it is not strictly necessary. I think even commissioned officers of the U.S. military can take such renoucements of citizenship.
Bombs like this can be made with either metal, as both U-235 and Pu-239 are very much fizzible isotopes. Obviously the "geometry" of the metalic crystals is simplified if you stick with mainly one type of metal as opposed to trying to deal with alloys of multiple metals.
One reason why Plutonium is often used is because it can be manufactured from the much more common U-238 isotope via a breeder reactor by "simply" adding a neutron to that atom to make Neptunium (Np-239) which rapidly decays to Pu-239. As a result, material that is otherwise discarded as a tailing is instead made usable into fizzible materials. And since this material is so much more common, most of the current atomic bomb research is going into working with Plutonium instead. Furthermore, refining Plutonium from Uranium is a "mere" chemical seperation technique as opposed to isotopic seperation for the various versions of Uranium.
The other problem with making a "gun style" bomb with Plutonium is simply because it is an incredibly hazardous chemical substance to work with, not to mention that it is highly reactive to oxygen. Plutonium is one of the most toxic atomic elements that can be absorbed chemically by the Human body, where even small quantities can result in a rather quick but painful death. This is completely discounting the radioactive effects entirely. If you are working with something so crude as a gun-barrel type bomb, you might as well work with the comparatively safer Uranium instead. Plus, that doesn't require the breeder reactor, only a working isotopic seperator.
Iraq had the triggers and the resources, for the most part. But it takes time to pull all of that together and the Israeli bombing of their main nuclear research reactor certainly pushed the time table back considerably as they had to start all over again and find another way to concentrate the neccessary fissile components. And their nuclear scientists had to do much more guessing about the details of Uranium and Plutonium atoms without having the necessary materials directly at hand in the quantities needed.
As far as Iraq having WMDs, it is obvious that Iraq had them because they were used against their own citizens. Chemical weapons count as a WMD in terms of what Bush and the CIA was talking about. Never did Pres. Bush say that Iraq had nukes, but it was also very obvious that Hussein wanted to build them for the same reasons why Iran and North Korea are building them.
And Iraq did otherwise have the resources necessary to build nukes, but they didn't have the time necessary to pull it off before they were invaded and occupied by the USA. Hiding stuff from the UN weapons inspectors didn't make it easy to accomplish either and set the timetable back even further.
Clearly Iraq did have at least the missile technology as well, as the Scuds which bombed Tel Aviv in the 1991 Gulf War could have been modified to carry a nuke without too much of a change. Tell the Israeli familes of people who died in that war that Iraq didn't have the technology to get there.
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There is no way in h*** that the Lunar Embassy titles will be acknowledged. Besides, in order to enforce a property title, you have to be able to defend that title with the use of force. That courts might get into the fray mucks things up a little bit, but even then a judicial preceedent on the topic is only as good as the force of arms is able to bear upon enforcing that judgement.
If the Principality of Sealand wanted to claim the Moon, but actually got up there and blew up anybody who tried to land on the Moon without their permission, they would become the real owners of the Moon until somebody else tried to challenge them through the use of arms of some sort to offer a challenge. As such, the Lunar Embassy and their claims are incredibly weak indeed. Claims on Mars, Ganymede, and other objects are even more dubious still.
Until people get to the Moon and actually walk around there, you won't see a legal challenge to a Lunar Embassy title.
Not in the way that is described and coordinated by NASA. NASA will never by the primary space-related transportation services corporation, such as Amtrack currently is. And if NASA wants to be the "Amtrack" of space related organizations, they are shooting for the very wrong government agency to emulate.
If NASA decides to go there with this plan and time scale, they will meet Sir Richard Branson in a ready-made casino and hotel suites already preped for the astronauts... and a few hundred people waiting for them on the surface of the moon to see the "historic" return to the moon first hand. Provided Congress doesn't cancel the whole project before then after switching between parties two or three times and the NASA budget having gone through between 5-10 presidential administrations. Is there any government program besides Social Security that has survived intact with that many politicians adding their own $0.02 to the idea along the way?
I'd like to point out that the lunar lander guidance computers were hardly the only items using integrated circuits at the time. They were used, by NASA, for the control systems of many of the spaceship components, including the Apollo Guidance Computer in the Command Capsule, control systems at "Mission Control" and KSC, and other places including simulators. While it is true that NASA consumed at one point about 90% of all world-wide IC production, it wasn't just for the lander computers, nor was the development of ICs pushed by NASA either. That NASA (at the time) had the deepest pockets of any customers and were willing to pay high prices for them, others went for more descrete components instead.
It should also be noted that almost all of the ICs involved were very, very simply circuits, like AND, OR, NOT, and other basic gate ICs, mostly like (although they weren't) the 7400 series simple chips. It still takes a pile of those chips to make a basic CPU, and in many cases discrete components won out because they were more power efficient and smaller than the ICs at the time to do the same job.
Of course this early "investment" in IC production did eventually pay off in terms of buying new fabs for larger production chip runs with more complex designs, but that wasn't to happen until well after the Apollo flights after Apollo 17 were canceled. Certainly investment into those fab lines wasn't done to benefit NASA or any space-related activities, but to go after the commercial IC market instead. That eventually some of these chips did end up in more modern spacecraft eventually did help NASA, that was more of a side effect than somthing specifically caused by NASA. NASA spacecraft computers are a decade or more behind the rest of the computer industry for a variety of reasons, as there are some very unique environmental situations that spacecraft computers encounter that ordinary CPUs sitting in a cubicle don't experience. That usually requires setting up seperate fab lines and much tougher specs to meet than ordinary IC production, often at huge premium prices.
BTW, as far as NASA using commercial services instead of trying to develop capabilities "in house", I have to completely agree with you on that idea 100%. The re-development of a heavy lifter to replace the Saturn V in the 21st century is certainly something that (at the moment) is unique to the needs of NASA and not commercial transportation systems.
While wikipedia articles that have strong "popularity" (however you describe that term) are more likely to be balanced, there is a tendancy for particularly some of the more obscure articles to have a few strong defenders with a manifestly strong point of view and bias, where any changes to those articles moving away from that bias and point of view is met with out right hostility and anger, invoking every obscure rule of Wikipedia behavior to justify their words and discouraging any compromising edits. Often these "article tzars" have support of Wikipedia administrators and others in supposed position of authority.
/. post about U.S. government censorship of Wikipedia alone would have thousands of replies in a matter of just an hour.
That said, I have been successful in making some rather substantial changes in some articles explicitly by showing the paper tigers for which some of those POV biases can be seen. And given enough time and eyeballs, most of these problems do eventually get ironed out. But it takes time and much of what you see on Wikipedia is a work in progress.
In defense of the Chinese Wikipedia, they are a couple of years behind and a fair bit under-represented in comparison to the Chinese speaking population to what the English Wikipedia has going for it. That and "official actions" by the PRC that tends to discourage participation on Wikipedia. Those that do participate operate under a "Sword of Damocles that could be lowered at any time by the PRC government. As I've pointed out myself on many occasions, it would be an incredibly inept Chinese government that would not know exactly who the major Wikipedia participants are, even those who don't necessarily live in China proper (like being a Chinese speaker in the USA, as an example). I'm talking the full names, addresses, and other identifying information about these people. The use of psuedonyms does not hide this information from the Chinese government.
There is justified concern in term of avoiding prison or even losing their life if they try to push too hard for the NPOV that the English Wikipedia enjoys. As for the U.S. government keeping track of its citizens, I'm sure that happens as well, but there would be a nearly instant and major outcry if there were such a similar crackdown within the USA. I'm sure the
The electorate of the United States hasn't really changed that much in the past 100 years, at least in terms of voting habits. To suggest otherwise is a huge fallacy, but OK, I'll say that more reliable comparisons must be done for those presidental campaigns that have been done via electronic broadcast media. Or even perhaps just television. That still gives you only generals, vice-presidents, and governors that have a more reasonable chance at becomming president.
The point of the matter is that no major political party is going to entrust their top position leading their slate of candidates unless they have demonstrated ample leadership in the past and have been something very substantial on the national level in terms of name recognition and involvement in the political life of America. That means that a school teacher from Ohio or a West Virginia coal miner is not likely, or indeed impossible to become POTUS. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with gender or race in the least and to suggest otherwise is disingenuous. And insulting to those of us who actually vote for these people.
The point I was trying to make is that for a woman or a person of color to achieve this office, you need to see many more people of these alternative descriptions in those other positions first. Only when there is a pool of several women of strong character who have been governors of more populous states (aka Ann Richards, to give an example of one who could have become POTUS, as her successor did move on to the national level) will you see a woman president. That also means that more women need to run on the local level as well such as city councils, sheriffs, or state legislatures. And women increasingly are elected to these positions and have substantial influence in term of the grass roots efforts to start political campaigns. In time I think you will find a woman as POTUS, but you need to really understand the political structure of America to note that the electorate of the USA is not necessarily racist, but it takes time to accomodate political changes.
That is not the logic. You need to prove that you have the command presence to be able to convince many people that you are capable of doing the job. While it is true that all previous presidents have been white men, that is not the prerequisite. Having positions of authority to demonstrate what you would do as president is important.
That most of those positions (not all of them) are currently filled also with white men will mean this "tradition" will continue for some time. This is not to say that no women will ever be president, but that it is a tough road ahead before it will happen. That Hillary is certainly the most qualified woman to come around in many years (particularly because she didn't get the job as senator because her husband kicked the bucket), being a senator here is more of a liability for her than an asset. If instead she ran for and won the governorship of New York and then tried to run for president, it would be almost a shoe-in for her.
Re: Condi Rice
She is the current Secretary of State, and in the (admittedly distant) past that was considered another avenue to become president, as some former Secretaries of State have gone on to higher office. Colin Powell is certainly fitting this mold as well, although his status as a former 4-star General who won a major military campaign (the Gulf War) fits more with your line of thinking.
Re: Rudy Guliani
While he certainly wasn't "governor", he was mayor of NYC, and that has a similar set of legislative and constituancy problems similar to a middle-sized state. Certainly very similar to Georgia and Arkansas (to name a couple of states where some recent presidents came from) in terms of population comparisons and fiscal responsibilities by comparing mayors and governors. Certainly the mayor of Taopi, Minnesota is not going to be considered in the same class of mayor as those from NYC.
In short, I wouldn't write him out, and indeed would put him much more likely to become president over John McCain. It is still an uphill fight, and Rudy would have to fight real hard even to get the nomination.
Re: Bill Gates
First and foremost, he will have to decide if he really wants the job in the first place. In some places (and in the much more distant past of U.S. history) some people were "drafted" to become president. I don't think that is possible today, and unless Mr. Gates is very active and agressive in trying to become president it will never happen.
If he decides to really go for it and do a serious run, even as an "independent", all bets would be off at that point. As Ross Perot demonstrated, it is possible for an outsider to become president provided you have some financial backing to help you out in getting the job done. All Ross Perot did that was wrong was to crack up at the end and get really weird to withdraw from the race and then try to get back into it, not to mention other really wacky comments he made that collapsed his campaign. I don't see a candidacy of Bill Gates going through that same sort of wackyness.
I see this excuse and scratch my head. I have seen some incredible GUI designs that fit onto a single floppy disc. Of particular note were the QNX distro (with a web browser to boot!) and GEO-works. Yes, that is a 1.44 MB floppy disc, not a CD-ROM even. I would dare say that if you can't get the UI honed into 2-4 MB, there is far too much cruft within the code base. The only possible exception would be to deal with CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) glyphs, but even that only should take up an additional 3-5 MB due to font issues.
128 MB is down right roommmmmmmy and is a problem only for those programmers who are just plain lazy to optimize their code, or a UI that is driven more by PR than by code doing what a UI is supposed to do: display information in a clean and unobstructed manner that the user can take advantage of. Even a secondary objective of being easy enough to use that a non-geek can understand how to access the information they need is also easily done. Buttons, spinners, edit and check boxes, and "movable windows" don't really take that much extra programming.
At least HTML v. 1.0 Other "enhancements" have really screwed things up and killed backward compatability.
The point here is that HTML is an "open" and "widely used" data format, so it is widely used. Plain HTML (and now even some variants of some XML) are now being used by groups like the Gutenberg Project as reliable enough to be used for permanent archiving, where the HTML and XML offers superior text formatting information that is not preserved with plain ASCII text documents.
And before you go off and say that HTML is ASCII, it is not. It is a mark-up language that does muck arround with the text and do things that sometimes make the text hard to read with just a plain ASCII text reader. Of course this is making a distinction between plain vanilla ASCII text files and something marked up like a web page.
As for propritary formats... the "conversion" subroutines that reformat to more modern data format: they "mostly" work correctly. Sometimes there are bugs in the conversion process, especially (as was common with older Microsoft Office formats) when there were "undocumented" features in the data format due to the propritary nature of the software using it. In other words, the documentation was in the source code in the form of algorithms and nowhere else. I've seen that far too often among programmers who write these file formats for this and many other file types where only a single application is assumed to use the data generated for that format. While you might be able to recover the raw text of the document through this conversion process, often the formatting is shot to hell at best, or even unusable.
If you avoided fancy formatting of the document and simply used "default settings" for most of your older documents, the conversion process is usually pretty good. It is only when somebody decided to get fancy and use some of the more obscure formatting styles that you get into some real problems. Unfortunately, those are often the most important documents that you want to access as well.
But, you must acknowledge that because the Saturn V has been built, did fly to the Moon and back, that it is certainly within reach technologically by early 21st Century tools and industrial practicies. Half the battle with developing a technology is proving that it can even be done at all, which building a moon rocket is not a problem.
Instead, it becomes "can we do it better than Von Braun". Or cheaper.
Some things we do know we can do much better than the Von Braun engineering team of the 1950's (when he started) is that metalurgical sciences have progress significantly since then with much improved alloys for much lighter spacecraft, and that the guidance electronics have also improved by many orders of magnitude. The entire Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) can be built on a single chip, for instance. An FPGA for that matter, and room to spare. Minaturization efforts as well as low-power embedded systems have also made a huge improvement for what is possible for manned spaceflight today. For crying out loud, the Mercury capsule used vacuum tubes for some of its components. I know we can do much better in terms of reliability and weight reduction today.
All this means that building a Saturn V today can be done both cheaper (inflation adjusted) and much more reliable than could ever be considered in the 1960's.
I would have to agree with some prominent scientists who have pointed out that of all thing things that we can possibly do as humans to hurt or harm the Earth, manipulation of asteroids is the one activity that is currently within reach of human technology.
As for climate modification (for good or ill), I would have to agree with your general sentiment: Atmospheric climate modification on a global basis, even if done with explicit intent and through some sort of Manhattan Project-style of endeavor with a major 1st world country (read USA but a combined EU initive here might also apply) still couldn't make any substantial changes.
I don't suggest here that we should abandon general stewardship principles here, and that a general goal of trying to make a healthier environment has some very positive benefits, but we don't have to do emergency steps "immediately" either to achieve a general goal: Breathable air, clean water, and a productive ecosystem that preserves some of our wilderness heritage for future generations.
I believe that this can all be achieved by going after the most destructive practices (read the Chinese coal mining industry here, and wanton filth and waste by emerging nations, or similar practices even in 1st world countries) and suggest viable alternatives.
As far as what this "article" posting is about, it is now within our grasp to be able to manipulate smaller bodies in the solar system for the good or ill of mankind. While the positive side of it is impressive, the concern I have is the opposite: the use of crashing bodies as a form of warfare! While the use of aerosol chloro-florocarbons has not been decisively linked to massive global extinctions, the impact of major meteors upon the earth certainly has been. Or at the very least for a very modest budget (in terms of an emerging nation like Iran or North Korea) could get ahold of rocks in space and crash them into the Earth at key selected targets, doing far more damage than any arsenal of nukes could possible even consider. And intercepting such incoming projectiles is completely outside of the ability of current technology, particularly if it were "guided" to avoid intercept attempts.
One reason why mathmatics is so heavily emphasized is because the CS departments were often appendages to the mathmatics departments, or were started in the mathmatics departments. About 30 years ago (showing my age here) when you couldn't even get a CS degree, most computer programmers had a BS degree in mathmatics. Almost all of the older CS professors usually had a PhD in Mathmatics, although one of my best CS profs had his PhD in Biology (and turned out to be the graphics algorithms teacher at my university... go figure).
I believe that largly due to this early emphasis on mathmatics, it has skewed the emphasis by some of those professors to more pure mathmatics concepts. While not bad by itself, I did find it boring after a fashion when one of these professors would get caught up with making a mathmatical proof of some CS theory.... particularly when you were in a class like compilers or data algorithms that had little to do with very abstract mathmatical proofs. Those younger professors who had a PhD in CS and spent time working "in the industry" tended to be much more grounded on coding fundimentals and teaching finite number theory instead.
For myself, while I think advanced mathmatics may have usefulness for hardcore computer science, that is the study of computer algorithms and computational theory, it doesn't have much of a practical application.
Of course I view myself as a software engineer seeking practical development of computer algorithms as opposed to a computer scientist that explores theoretical directions of computational concepts. In this regard, I consider software engineers to be very different from computer scientist.
Or more to the point, I think there ought to be a ratio of about 1 computer scientist to about 50 software engineers. Unfortunately, it is presumed that you would get a CS degree if you want to become a computer programmer. But if your school doesn't offer a software engineering degree (very, very rare) you are trained as a computer scientist first and a software engineer maybe as a supplimentary (sometimes optional) course.
Keep in mind that the gague of the railroad has a strong influence on how tight you can have a turn radius when bending track. Larger gague tracks simply require much more room to turn. Over flat prarie and meadows this isn't that big of a deal, but when you get into mountains or along a sea coast it becomes a huge deal.
For this reason alone, many of the mining railroads actually use a standard "narrow gague" for their tracks (and even a "cog" railroad to overcome the steep slope of the tracks). There is less room to turn for things like a switchback track, so therefore they need a narrower gague of track.
The point here is that the "standard gague" was something that came about through years of experience of having to deal with a large number of factors, which met the compromise from all of the competing problems. If 7 feet really were that much better, it certainly would have been used more often.
BTW, the petition to purchase the laptop for $300 failed to get enough signatures, but there was a pretty large (> 15000 signatures) support base for the idea. And that was for people who were willing to make a stand on an insignificant and poorly advertised web page for something that may not even happen even if all the signatures came in that were needed.
The OLPC organizers have said that they will not sell this computer to private individuals. The $300 figure is just a number pulled out of the air and has no basis for reality.
Forget about the warlord who confiscates the laptops. How about the Education Minister's brother Abdul who decides to "accidentally" drop these computers into a shipping container headed for Amsterdam instead?
The corruption will start at the top, and there is no legal means to prevent these computers from being resold in 1st world countries. The only way to stop that sort of behaivor is to flood the world market so shipping them to 1st world countries will cost more than you can possibly sell them at. Even then minor corruption will still occur, but at least some of these education ministers will get these computers where they were supposed to go in the first place: the hands of kids eager to learn about the world.
Considering that Massachusetts Governor Mit Romney has explicitly requested to purchase these computers for use by inner-city youth of Boston as well as for other lower-income families and school districts of Massachusetts, I don't see how anybody else could have much more pull to try and get them sold within America.
Of your sentiment in general, I think you are completely correct that they ought to be sold within the USA. And there is no logical reason other than an attempt by the parts suppliers of the OLPC to segrigate the world markets. Time will only tell when these things start to be sold on eBay or other on-line auction sites, much less a major "grey market" penetration by Chinese companies... even other companies who see the actual product and are willing to make knock-offs for about the same price.
The real question is if the OLPC organizers will take advantage of the demand in 1st world countries, or if they will ignore it and lose a valuable source of support and perhaps even funding to help subsidize significant efforts in 3rd world countries.
BTW, re: Brazil
I spent some time living there (mainly in Sao Paulo) and while the "middle class" of Brazil certainly are not hurting economically to the extent of say Ethiopia or Sudan, what is considered middle class in Brazil would be considered poverty conditions in the USA. The poor of the poor in Brazil are truly destitute and litterally struggle day to day to even get basic needs like clothing and food. The migrants from the Brazilian northeast to the industrial south live in slums that are simply beyond belief of people who have never left the geographical boundaries of the USA. Such living conditions simply do not exist within the USA.
I did missionary work within those slums, and there are some people who really are trying to get out of those conditions, but it is a major struggle that is often thwarted even by government regulations and corruption. The one thing I remember the most is the smell of raw sewage that seemed to penetrate everything in those neighborhoods, as the smell of sewage even today brings back memories of the work I did there.
I've also spent time with homeless people of urban America, and frankly they don't hold a candle to the problems in 3rd world countries. Oh, there are unfortunate circumstances and accidents that would make your heart bleed with sympathy, but a bright and resourceful homeless person in America doesn't need to stay homeless for that long. And there are plenty of social safty nets to help out if you are willing to take advantage of them.
There is also a huge misunderstanding of the difference between the judicial and legislative branches of the U.S. government. (Assuming that we are Americans here... not always true on /.) Of course it seems as though even congressmen and judges get confused about the distinction as well.
As citizens, it is in our interest to debate and hone in on what the law ought to be. And try to pressure legislators to change the law to become this model as we think it should be. This sort of debate is certainly healthy and there is no way that it should be prohibited, even though there are some that would try to convince you otherwise.
One problem with the judicial system in a democracy is that it is a reminant of the old monarchal system where "GOD" (pun intended) decides ultimately what is the law and that is interpreted through His appointed servants in a heirarchal system.
That would mean the end of free broadcasting the the requirement of a "broadcast" tax like is currently done in England and Germany.
No, I would not appreciate this precedent being acknowledged and supported by SCOTUS (upon eventual appeal). While there would be some short term gain, it would be disasterous in the long term.
Frankly, I doubt this line of reasoning would hold up anyway, and the GPL would change to accomodate this if it happened as well. Charging a penny per download of the software would end the argument cold. Or $1.
Voting blackmail was so incredibly prevelant that the "secret ballot" was the only way to overcome the problems. Even then, very, very, very strict rules have been put into place to try and prevent the problem, as it even now still happens.
This is a far larger problem than you who are pooh poohing right here. And has been the means to coerce large blocks of voters to vote for a specific candidate. That it isn't currently a big problem is more a result of decades or even a full century in the USA of trying to root this problem out of the voting booth, and you only see the results of that herculean effort, rather than the process it took to get there in the first place. Essentially a myopic vision because you aren't old enough to remember (or read history) to see when it was a huge problem.
This is also "voodoo" that is being encouraged by Diebold (and others) that are used to the commercial banking industry, where security through obscurity is reasonable and even effective. Unfortunately, even that has problems.
I have in my hands right now a "classified" document from Diebold that goes over operation machines for the voting machines in Utah. They were handed out like candy at the training meetings for precinct worker training meetings, but had the list of disclaimers typical for a high-tech company internal documents, and obviously this hasn't been "cleaned" to be ready as an external document. That is the only reason why it was "classified", where it should have been handed out via NDA. That was clearly not done here, nor do I think it was possible to classify this document in such a way because it became an official state government training manual. While Diebold may have a copyright claim on it, that would be the only legal defense they could have stopping its reproduction.
Of course, when the machines boot with Microsoft Windows CE, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know how the things work at that point.
As I mentioned in an earlier post on this topic, the whole voting system relies upon honest and intelligent precinct voting judges and county clerks who know what is going on and want a fair election. If you have corrupt precinct judges, all bets are off regardless of how much you want to try and clean things up. A stubborn and corrupt county clerk only makes things worse, and clearly have the opportunity to really screw things ups. An ordinary voter is not going to be able to hack into most of these voting machines without some inside help from a judge. And that really doesn't require an electronic voting machine, as any voting method can be corrupted by corrupt judges.
However, all Utah election judges were given paper ballots (with the little bubbles to fill in with #2 pencils, like the SAT tests and other standardized tests) that voters could fill out as an alternative.
Unfortunately, most of the voting judges involved with this election, as is typical, are senior citizens who for the most part are intentionally clueless about technology and change in habits and procedures in general. Those judges are simply being overwhelmed right now with these new machines that require somebody with a clue to figure out how to turn them on. The older punch ballot machines didn't require an AC 110-V outlet in order to be used, and plugging something in the wall is often far too complicated for some people.
It should be noted that this is the second state-wide election that these machines have been used in Utah (the first being the primary elections). Unfortunately, not all of the judges participating in this election also were involved with the primary, so for the majority of the election judges this is the first time they have had to use this equipment.
My wife is the head election judge for our precinct, so I've seen the rather extensive training both she and all poll workers should have gone through in order to be in charge. Unfortunately, in addition to the senior citizen issue, many people get bored with lectures and don't pay attention until the actual event occurs. This is simply human nature and can't be avoided until people get real experience with these machines.
In addition, there are also the usual problems associated with any mechanical devices or computers in general. Plugs don't get pluged in, batteries stop working, monitors die or stop responding, or other problems. One problem my wife encountered during the primary was one of the computers wasn't "programed" with the election, so it had to be pushed to the side and ignored. I'm sure this and other issues came up. The comptuers were supposed to be set up with the election information (the list of offices and candidates) by the county clerks, and these sometimes have minor differences from precinct to precinct that need to be all worked out ahead of time. Again, avenues for human error that plague any election format.
One positive aspect of the Utah machines is that there is a voter-verified paper ballot that is generated by the machines when you cast your ballot. You, the voter, are responsible to make sure that the people who you vote for are listed correctly, and the information is printed in plain-text English in the format of:
Unfortunately, this paper ballot is to be used only for auditing and recount purposes, not for the "official tally". At least there is a method of verification if the results are questioned.
From my own view of the Utah voting machines, there are avenues of attack to hack at them. There is of course the card reader, which also is how the precinct judge opens and closes the elections, as well as how the county clerk loads in the election data.
There are removable memory modules that hold the actual election data itself, and in theory a corrupt election judge can tamper with those memory modules. They are a non-standard format (at least in terms of the physcial connector package) from other typical memory modules, but otherwise non-remarkable. This is IMHO the least secure aspect of the system, but at least the Utah election officials are intelligent to acknowledge that the data must be shipped by sn
I think it is reasonable that Hussein wanted to hide or even completely dismantle the WMD programs he had in progress before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (that was certainly not the "second cold war" by any stretch of the imagination). I also think it was Hussein's intention to restart the process of building them once the attention of the USA was turned elsewhere, with major components and equipment moved to neighboring "friendly" countries.
BTW, my #1 complaint about both the Democrats in congress as well as President Bush, as both are co-conspiritors on this point, is that in order for an invasion to take place, there should have been a formal declaration of war by the congress of the USA before it happened. Bush was afraid of the possibility that congress would have said "No", and the democrats were so wishy-washy that they accepted the "authorization of the use of force" resolution. And because they both went only half-way to going to war against Iraq, we are currently in the political quandry that we are facing. Had this been a formally declared war instead, much of the anti-Iraq war discussions and protests would have been declared treasonous and many of the demonstrators been thrown into jail. Both Lincoln and Roosevelt did that and more during their administrations when war was declared.
Considering that neither major political party in the USA has the balls to declare a war, even in the midst of blatant invasions and conquest by the U.S. military like in both Granada and Haiti (respectively under Reagan and Clinton) without even a discussion by congress, much less a declaration of war ever being issued by congress since 1941 (with several major military actions since then even after the surrender of Germany and Japan), I don't give credence to either political party.
Actually, all you have to do is appear before an "officer" of the United States Government, like a Federal court judge. Of course this is made easier if you do it in an embassy, but it is not strictly necessary. I think even commissioned officers of the U.S. military can take such renoucements of citizenship.
Bombs like this can be made with either metal, as both U-235 and Pu-239 are very much fizzible isotopes. Obviously the "geometry" of the metalic crystals is simplified if you stick with mainly one type of metal as opposed to trying to deal with alloys of multiple metals.
One reason why Plutonium is often used is because it can be manufactured from the much more common U-238 isotope via a breeder reactor by "simply" adding a neutron to that atom to make Neptunium (Np-239) which rapidly decays to Pu-239. As a result, material that is otherwise discarded as a tailing is instead made usable into fizzible materials. And since this material is so much more common, most of the current atomic bomb research is going into working with Plutonium instead. Furthermore, refining Plutonium from Uranium is a "mere" chemical seperation technique as opposed to isotopic seperation for the various versions of Uranium.
The other problem with making a "gun style" bomb with Plutonium is simply because it is an incredibly hazardous chemical substance to work with, not to mention that it is highly reactive to oxygen. Plutonium is one of the most toxic atomic elements that can be absorbed chemically by the Human body, where even small quantities can result in a rather quick but painful death. This is completely discounting the radioactive effects entirely. If you are working with something so crude as a gun-barrel type bomb, you might as well work with the comparatively safer Uranium instead. Plus, that doesn't require the breeder reactor, only a working isotopic seperator.
Iraq had the triggers and the resources, for the most part. But it takes time to pull all of that together and the Israeli bombing of their main nuclear research reactor certainly pushed the time table back considerably as they had to start all over again and find another way to concentrate the neccessary fissile components. And their nuclear scientists had to do much more guessing about the details of Uranium and Plutonium atoms without having the necessary materials directly at hand in the quantities needed.
As far as Iraq having WMDs, it is obvious that Iraq had them because they were used against their own citizens. Chemical weapons count as a WMD in terms of what Bush and the CIA was talking about. Never did Pres. Bush say that Iraq had nukes, but it was also very obvious that Hussein wanted to build them for the same reasons why Iran and North Korea are building them.
And Iraq did otherwise have the resources necessary to build nukes, but they didn't have the time necessary to pull it off before they were invaded and occupied by the USA. Hiding stuff from the UN weapons inspectors didn't make it easy to accomplish either and set the timetable back even further.
Clearly Iraq did have at least the missile technology as well, as the Scuds which bombed Tel Aviv in the 1991 Gulf War could have been modified to carry a nuke without too much of a change. Tell the Israeli familes of people who died in that war that Iraq didn't have the technology to get there.