The hard part isn't to get the implosion right. The real trick is to try and get the implosion to occur with a minimum amount of material, especially fissibile material.
And yes, you could use steel to do the trial and error to see that you got the proper esplosion geometry to crush metal, but ultimately you need to have the PhD in chemistry or nuclear physics because you need to understand the geometry of the Uranium and Plutonium atoms to make sure you have the explosions crushing the metalic "crystals" in the right directions to give you the best possible explosion. If you get it off by even a little bit, you end up with a "fizzle" like what North Korea found out the hard way. It is a bomb that blows up, but the error in geometry instead works against the explosion and reduces the yield considerably.
Keep in mind that in a "typical" nuke, the raw metal before the fission starts up is usually compressed to only 25% or even substantially less of its original volume. Think about that and remember this is compressing Uranium metal and what kind of energy is needed to pull that off. We are not talking about compressing diatomic hydrogen at 1 atm. pressure.
BTW, the Manhattan Project bomb was really quite simple. The Hiroshima bomb was actually a rather large (compared to current nukes in the U.S. arsenal) and had a partial sphere of U-235 (mostly) that had another hunk of U-235 that was pushed into that sphere via something that looked like an 18th Century cannon with a predecessor to C-4 acting as the trigger. Some special care was also given to reduce friction in the barrel and a few other things to make it work, but it was about as crude as you could make a workable nuke.
The bomb on Nagasaki, however, used Plutonium and was in comparison a much more advanced bomb using the explosion geometries mentioned above.
I remember a "suppliment" to the Science Fiction magazine "Analog" that included a section on "How to Build a Nuclear Bomb". This was about 20 years ago BTW.
Interestingly enough, they even had it detachable and strongly suggested that you give it to your friendly neighborhood terrorist, in big bold letters right across the cover of the suppliment.
Of course, as you got into it and tried to do a Tim McVeigh style of bomb construction using the directions, the terrorist had only about six months to live due to radiation exposure and plutonium poisioning, but who triffles with such minor details anyway. The instructions even described how to build an isotopic concentrator, so you would get more U-235 instead of U-238 in a given sample. The instructions also strongly recommended that you get the base metal ore from a nuclear power facility, as somebody with the raw resources necessary to pull it off would have a triffiling easy task of stealing the fuel rods from a nuclear plant even though it would have to be later refined to be improved. Starting with raw uranium ore was something that only major nations or commercial uranium producers would bother with.
Kids have been turning in Hydrogen Bomb kits (using clay instead of C-4 and steel instead of plutonium) for some time as science fair exhibits. This is a non-issue that has become an issue by non-techies who think building a nuke is really all that difficult. That is H-bomb, not just a conventional uranium nuke and significantly more difficult to manufacture.
And the so-called "dirty bomb" is even easier to build. The insurgants in Iraq seem to be pretty good bomb makers of conventional chemical bombs, so all that is really needed for that is some nuclear waste. Not even bomb-grade material.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. If Microsoft were to start asserting any patents that it thinks are incompatable with a given GPL'd software package distributed by somebody other than Novell (but also by Novell), Novell would have to also stop distribution as well.
The only thing this really does is save Novell stock holders from being sued by Microsoft, but it is a rather weak save at that. Microsoft at any time could kill entire product lines of Novell simply by open up a lawsuit against another distro that has the same software. Good for Microsoft, bad for Novell.
Talk about a way to kill competition when you want it gone.
Time capsules are an interesting phenomena as they were very popular during the 1950's and have periodic bursts of interest in subesquent time periods. Most notable were the time capsules that were opened around Y2K (a common date that seemed to have some significance). We are just beginning to see the real value of doing this type of action and what sorts of benefits it might bring up.
The #1 thing that I seemed to have encountered with an archivist involved in indexing a few Y2K time capsules was the incredible need to develop archival standards for multi-media content. One particular set of audio recordings from the 1950s involved the use of a wire recorder (quite common in the 1950's BTW). The archivist at a major research university could only find just a couple of working playback machines capable of reading that media format, and those were in museums and he considered himself very lucky to have been able to find those.
I could give other countless examples, and it should be pointed out that even now very good digital multimedia standards are still very difficult to find. Most of the current standards are far to propritary where when the company decides to discontinue support for the format, it simply disappears from existance. This is a huge issue.
What is interesting about the Wikipedia (aka MediaWiki software) database is that a complete history of every article and every edit is maintained. Some going back to the project founding itself, and (at the moment) even every deleted page, spam, offensive content, and as of about July of this year, every image that was uploaded and subsequently deleted.
Of course getting that full db dump for just en.wikipedia is getting close to a Terabyte now, but it is at least in theory possible. The only reason you would want to get subsequent snapshots is just in case the Wikimedia Foundation goes belly up and thrashes their servers completely, making it so the last db snapshot you obtained is all that has been archived.
My real concern is more about how long this full edit history is going to be available, and what the state of the database that is running MediaWiki (currently MySQL, if I'm not mistaken) can keep up with over 100 years of edit history on a particular Wikipedia article. The edit wars over the George W. Bush article certainly are going to be an interesting historical item of note to see what the perceptions of this man is going to be 100 years from now.
So if I am able to vote in 500 precincts in one day, my 500 votes should count over your 200, or the "honest person's" 1 vote?
Or can I and 10,000 of my friends from Utah go to California and all vote in the primary there, changing the voting tally for the mayor's race in a city that has only 4,000 people living in it?
How about I bring in 3 million Mexican nationals to vote for the next California Governor's race, paying them a paltry $100 each to do nothing but simply vote that day (presumably for the candidate I have suggested). Do you think it would have an impact?
The reason for the complex rules about who is able to vote has a very legitimate reason for existing. There has been substantial voting fraud in the past, and there continues to be such fraud right now (and likely to continue), precisely because people who shouldn't be voting are, or are voting more than once.
Much of the voting fraud with the punch card ballots in Florida was because voting managers of some precincts would take a stack of ballots after they had been cast and stick a wire down the "chosen" candidate. This is where many of the "chad" issues came up, not from any problem with the paper ballot itself in the first place.
As far as ommitting names from the lists of eligible voters, there are legitimate reasons for doing so. Just ask how JFK was elected with the 10,000 dead people in Illinois who ended up voting anyway, giving the electorial votes of Illinois to JFK instead of Nixon.
I have long argued that what really needs to be done is not just making a major 3rd party like the Libertarians or Greens to win, but get some very very obscure party that is plainly obvious that nobody really supported the candidate, and make it a near landslide victory for that party.
I've nominated a few suggestions like the Cthulhu Party or the National Fisherman's Party, but either would do the job very well.
To be honest, if you wanted to avoid spending too much time in jail, I would suggest the student body president of some major university instead as an election to hack instead of U.S. Congressional races or the Presidential election, as you can avoid violating federal election laws in that manner. It could still have the same impact in terms of letting people know what can happen, but the results wouldn't be so disasterous in terms of getting a major investigation and court proceedings to catch the would-be hackers. And publicize the hack in all of its gory detail.
Last time I made a suggestion I discovered that some university student body elections were indeed hacked like this, but it didn't use the current set of machines by Dibold that have been suggested so far.
I am very curious about where you get these statistics about the number of speakers of a given langauge.
And if you are going to bring up a generic "Chinese Language", it would be far better to be much more specific about dialectical differences as a spoken language. Even the written forms have some minor differences, but the spoken dialects of Chinese vary considerably to the point they are often unrecognizable between native speakers of each seperate dialect.
If you take the "high ball" number from the Wikipedia English Language article of 1.5 Billion people who speak English as a second language plus the 400 million native speakers of English, it is far and away the most widely spoken language on the Earth today, and about double the number of any single dialect of Chinese.
That said, I think your sentiment that most textbooks in languages other than English are not translations but original creations bears out fairly well. So much of a language is tied up to cultural concepts that a direct translation would often be very difficult, and what works well for American college students might not be so effective for similar aged students in Russia, for example.
Considering that there already is an existing Wiki effort supported by the Wikimedia Foundation for textbook writing, the infrastructure to accomplish this is already in place, except for the process of trying to pay for the effort.
If I were given the opportunity to make a decision in this regard (and my voice does carry some weight in the Wikibooks community) I would perhaps try to offer "prize" money for something like an X-prize type competition for textbooks that have been written on Wikibooks that achieve certain established academic standards. And finding those standards isn't particularly difficult either, as many have already been identified on Wikibooks as well.
The point here is that anybody can claim to start a book like this, but the problem is trying to get it into a final polished form that can be useful. There are several texts on Wikibooks right now that are oh so very close to being useful in a classroom, but for the find bit of polish needed from people with professional expertise, or at least strong editorial skills.
In addition, a very consistant theme by Jimbo Wales has been a democratization of content creation as well. Having letters at the end of your name is not necessarily a sign that you have the skills necessary to write a textbook. Hiring professionals to write content through a traditional book contract would, IMHO, provide inferior content and tend to stratify the user base in ways that can be quite damaging to any future projects.
In terms of how to provide accounting to determine who gets the money from such a process, there are already systems in place to help determine who has written a given percentage of the content from a Wiki edit. While the system can be gamed, safeguard can be in place to ensure that those who really are responsible for the majority of the content will be rewarded, or at least to be able to identify what "charitable" cause they want their winnings to be sent to.
The problem with the WTO and American law is that treaties are considered "the supreme law of the land" in the USA. Indeed, if a statutory law conflicts with treaty obligations, the treaty wins out and is what gets enforced by U.S. courts.
In other words, the WTO has real teeth in terms of overruling actions of the U.S. Congress.
About the only thing that the WTO can't do is to override the U.S. Constitution, which in theory trumps even treaties (and a prime factor to consider with copyright treaties, for example). The problem here is that the current members of the U.S. Supreme Court seem very reluctant to even override treaties based on this provision, nor does Congress really fight back hard if they are told "No" by international groups like the WTO.
So there are really two approaches that can be done in this situation:
Withdraw completely from the WTO, as per treaty requirements - This seems incredibly unlikely to happen with the current political makeup of the U.S. Congress, and it is Congress that has to create and pass enabling legislations that would withdraw from the WTO. The President nor SCOTUS can do that.
Pass a Constitutional Ammendment ignoring WTO sanctions - This is even more bizzare than withdrawing from the WTO and is even more unlikely to happen unless it is starting to cost elections by double digit margins on the issue. The process of making a consitutional ammendment is deliberately difficult (2/3rd of Congress + 2/3rd of all state legislatures). And people voting on this stuff tend to vote no simply to maintain the status quo.
In short, this is a big deal in the current American legal system. Hopefully this is going to be something that will be publicized so much that Americans will finally realize how much of their soverignty has been given up to silly groups of "international law experts", answerable to nobody other than themselves. There certainly is no check or balance to allow a group like the U.S. Congress to impeach these WTO judges if they abuse their position, nor any direct citizen involvement in deciding who gets to make these decisions.
The SSN is tied so deeply and the incentives such as massive tax deductions for people of modest income so large, that to not apply for an SSN for my infant children now has a social stimatism that reeks of fanatical behavior, and is likely to get my children taken from me by government officials under the guise of "protecting the innocent", likely by some child welfare "expert" who thinks your fanaticism regarding staying out of the system is a sign of a deranged mind and an indication you are somehow harming your kids in some other manner.
That also misses the point here, that my children have absolutely no say what so ever about if they wanted the SSN or not. They were less than a day old when I applied for crying out loud, and the most important thing they had to deal with at the time was trying to figure out how to eat and cry, and perhaps deficate. Debating the merits of having a SSN was certainly not on their mind at the time. And the government is encouraging this abuse so strongly that it might as well be manditory.
A stable, rugged, commoditized, low-power notebook platform would be awesome. But could we ever enjoy cheap prices on this platform if it wasn't supported by the quantities of the mass market?
I would argue that this is exactly the problem with the OLPC proposal. They ought to be taking advantage of the "mass market" and become a market unto themselves, where economies of scale coming straight from the sales of these computers to 1st world counties could be folded into purchasing components for these 3rd world nations. Even do a "charity" bit to say that profits are going to be used to help fund some of the computers sent to poorer countries.
The main purpose of this is in fact to help reduce the potential for corruption, simply because re-selling these things in the international market isn't going to be profitable unless you are doing wholesale theft. As it stands now, while theft is one way to make money off of these computers, corrupt education officials can also get into the act if for no other reason than to help increase their budgets through sources other than from taxes. That is always appealing to any government bureaucrat, regardless of what country you are from.
Basically, I don't see any legitimate way that these computers are going to be kept off of eBay as soon as they get into the hands of these bureaucrats, and it would be better if these profits realized by say Libyian officials diverting a few computers to get their wife some nice stuff would be better obtained directly by the OLPC project instead killing any potential market that these corrupt officials would have. Instead, a situation of artificial scarcity has been created, and the demand, including even a set price well above what these laptops are being sold for, has been established and is documentable by the on-line petition. Any economist with half a brain is going to tell you that this situation is going to be met and dealt with in one way or another. Legal steps to stop it are just going to make the situation and corruption worse, not better.
As far as what to do with religious fanatics of any flavor who try to impose their world views on mass populations, I think that situation will eventually take care of itself and burn out as well. But unfortunately before this current fanaticism is completely dealt with, more deaths even on a large scale will happen. It would indeed be sad that the OLPC project had to somehow become a part of that whole issue as well.
If it is an interest bearing account that is deposited in a bank insured by the FDIC, yes it is. The interest income is reported to the IRS. As are almost all checking accounts, especially with post 9/11 issues.
I suppose you can find some accounts that are not tied to the federal reporting statues, but those would not be the typical accounts that are offered by any banks that are federally or state chartered.
Of course, if the bank you are talking about is "off shore" that is a different issue altogether, but then you are essentially living outside of the USA and not within the American economy. That is the point. And the USA isn't the only country to ask for some identification number similar to the SSN to determine unique identities.
There really isn't an easy way for an ordinary American to avoid getting the SSN, even though technically you might be correct that it isn't specifically required by law. There are also vagrancy laws that will end up landing you in jail in all but the largest cities of the USA if you are without money or place to live.
You can't participate and get involved with the "legitimate" national economy of the USA without having a SSN except under the most extreme circumstances. Remember, Al Capone was arrested for tax evation, not smuggling alcohol.
Which dictator is that? HRM Queen Elizabeth II? The Illuminati? Council of 500?
What party to come to power? The National Fisherman's Party? The Pirate Party?
I don't think any of this is ever going to be meaningful change in the USA unless there is a major shakeup of congress by people outside of the two major political parties, but as you so eloquently stated, that has a snowball's chance on the sixth level of hell. Otherwise throwing out the current President of the USA is only going to replace him (in less than 3 years regardless of whatever else happens) with another idiot who is going to continue essentially the same policies. Especially in regards to the current economic system that rewards the current people in political and economic power in the USA.
However, there is a law that says that every employee involved in a business that conducts "interstate commerce" (that is about as vague as it comes) must file with the IRS and report the income payed to all of its employees. That is about 99% of all businesses in the USA, BTW, as even a burger store, locally owned and not even a franchise of a larger chain, is conducting "interstate commerce" if somebody from another state can potentially buy one of their hamburgers. Filing with the IRS requires the SSN.
About the only place that is excempt is a small family-owned farm, provided they don't sell their products to anyone but a local wholesale distributor. Even then, they could still get tripped up by the interstate commerce provisions. But farm laborers are notorious for avoiding income taxes and havens for illegal immigrants as a result.
The other way to avoid having an SSN is to be so filthy rich independently that you don't need to work. Of course, you can't have any of your money in a bank either, as you need the SSN (again for tax reasons) to open the bank account.
I didn't get my SSN until I was 16 years old (when I started to apply for jobs in the workforce), but apparently that is a huge exception today. I was coerced by the hospital to get SSNs for all of my children on the very day they were born, and that is also very common practice today in the USA.
I signed the petition knowing that I would love to get some of these things for my kids as well. I highly doubt that I will be able to get one, however, except off of eBay from some corrupt Libyian government official trying to make a little extra money.
Or perhaps that is how Libya is going to be able to afford it in the first place?
Who said that the kid wasn't a 19 year old Libyian police rookie, and instead of 25 bucks you offered him a 1 oz. gold coin instead (something almost always fungable, regardless of the politcal situation).
Besides, I do envision that these are going to show up on eBay very shortly anyway, likely to be offered by corrupt government officials realizing that people in the USA are willing to pay as much as $500 each for one of these things. Even $200 would be doubling their investment, assuming they didn't simply steal them directly from a government wherehouse without even having to pay for them.
I don't see how the OLPC folks are going to be able to keep this from happening at all, unless they open up and kill the market in the USA and EU with cheap computers as well.
Have you read the on-line petition? That is exactly what was proposed with the idea, that you would get one computer and the other two would go to some deserving 3rd world country.
Apparently the OLPC folks aren't even interested, even if the supposed 100,000 people do sign up. Besides, there are legal restrictions based on the component contracts by the OLPC group that simply prohibit their sale to 1st world nations like the USA or EU countries. Stupid but true.
I have been a long and outstanding critic of the OLPC program for many, many reasons. I feel that the OLPC is going to be a flash in the pan and will die a very quick death shortly.
That said, I think the basic idea of trying to provide a very simple and common portable PC platform that embodies through hardware what the open source movement offers through software is an idea whose idea has come, and it will be an experiment repeated several times in several different manners. Most PC hardware is not near a commodity status anyway, so trying to put stuff like this together isn't going to be all that difficult. Negroponte and others have set up a pattern than can then be followed, and what currently exists as the OLPC can be held up to demonstrate that the basic concept is sound, even if the approach that the OLPC group is using is flawed.
My major criticisms about the OLPC folks is that they are making far too many compromises over the short term, like selling only to certified by the United Nations 3rd world countries (they won't even sell to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which has offered to buy them and is the location for much of the effort), or completely refusing to sell them to individuals. But that isn't all, as they are also making deals with component manufacturers to fit this supposed business model, on the weird assumption that selling these computers to Nigeria is not going to make these components be in competition with similar components offered to consumers in San Jose, California. That and some very weird non-standard changes to network topology and wireless communications.
I just hope that the government of Lybia doesn't decide to do an act of war against the USA due to these laptops being screwed up when support for them is dropped due to the break-up of the OLPC group. Or that the OLPC group changes its ways and "sees the light" to stop these practices that are just shooting themselves in the feet.
There are laws against racial discrimination that could, with a good judge that is using his/her head, would also apply in this sort of situation as well in most cases. There certainly are racial characteristics that are mapped in DNA sequences. In fact, when DNA "profiling" is used for matching up parents with kids and in forensic evidence for like a police investigation, they specifically target those DNA sequences which are not related directly to specific racial profiles, but there isn't a law that says this absolutely must be the case.
The point here is that DNA sequencing researchers are very much aware of this issue, and the ethics and laws about this subject are not quite as unknown as you seem to apply. Still, if there were a database of genetic information, it would certainly be considered private medical information and could only be disclosed along similar kinds of laws as well.
I contend that they ought to be disclosed to anybody and everybody, because the SSN should not be used to establish identity other than to prove that you are a unique individual in the USA. It ought to be no more sacred than your telephone number, which is published in public directories. Why not the SSN?
It is how the SSN is being misued by banks, and other agencies when it is not what it was established to be used for.
The biggest problem is that the SSN is misused by far too many banks and other institutions as a password to prove identify. Instead, it should be used as a part of somebody's name, such as "I am John Q. "532-66-3321" Public".
If a SSN is used in any other context or manner, it is that context that is out of line. The same should be said for a mother's maiden name or any other "proof of identity" that is suggested. Instead, identify needs to be established with some sort of "trusted" group that makes a real-life face to face meeting with the person in some fashion and then offers that identity somewhere.
The SSN is one of the most mis-used identification systems in the USA, and the Federal Government as well as other law-enforcement agencies who use "scare tactics" regarding the misuse of the SSN are barking up the wrong tree requiring you to set up some other alternate identification code. Instead, the SSN should be through legislation be prohibited from being used to establish identity except to be used in the same fashion that a name would be also used.
It sounds like you don't understand the UDF file format. Besides, the point here is that the UDF file format is messed with in this schema.
It seems that they though this one through, and it is possible that the first "sector" for the file refered to by VIDEO_TS.IFO is instead a single byte file that contains just the EOF character. But there is more... Yes, most file systems also point to additional sectors on the disc.
BTW, the IFO files do not have a preditable length of which you are refering to.... other than being one full 2048 byte DVD sector in size (zero padded too, BTW). They are quite variable in length depending on what other features that you are invoking and added features you want to include, in addition to DVD-Video specific assembly instructions embedded within the IFO file. While most "typical" DVD discs tend to use the same DVD authoring system and general setup, giving you similar IFO files, it is not a part of the standard and will mess up playback if you try to screw around with the IFO files with that kind of assumption.
See my previous post on this that I made earlier today about how this "copy protection" really works.
The point I was trying to make, however, was that since this deliberately messes with the file system that copying the VIDEO_TS folder is not going to work with those disc "protected" in this manner. Or it would copy the IFO files as 0 byte files. That means that the "copy protection" works exactly as intended unless you make a work-around. BTW, this same stuff could also make all of the files, including the VOBs, be zero byte files. Or if you wanted to be really clever, misdirect to a bunch of files that instead do a simple 1-5 minute "Piracy is illegal and you just got caught" video clip. But I don't think that "ProtecDisc" is thinking that far ahead.
As far as making a workaround, all that is needed is to do the sector-level reading as an option if the IFO file doesn't seem to be loading properly. It mucks up the code a little bit, but it doesn't have to be in a time critical section as the logic would only apply in error trapping subroutines anyway. The non-trivial aspect is trying to make sure that the playback software routines can abstract to both data access systems and are not dependent on specific file access subroutines.
A custom "ripper" on the other hand would only need to read the sectors off of the DVD disc and "recreate" the files directly from the sector reads. Then you could re-burn the DVD with the "correct" file format as a very trivial exercise.
As has been said by others, this only screws up legitimate users who have paid for a legitimate copy of the content. It doesn't do anything to hurt the real mega-pirates who rake in the bucks reselling copied content. Very few people are willing to "donate" the bandwidth necessary for hundreds of DVD-quality downloads on a public webserver. And this is but a minor speed bump for hardcore pirates, including the amature variety.
This is mainly a little DVD-Video tidbit to explain how technically this works.
For the DVD-Video spec, the actual file system being used is irrelevant and is mainly used to "boot" the disc and discover where the very first data sector is located at on the DVD disc. From then on, at least in theory, all of the navigation to the rest of the DVD media is handled internally within the DVD-Video files themselves, including the MPEG data, as the navigation within the video data is handled with the use of special navigation packets.
So for a set-top box on your home television, the data scanners ignore the UTF file format and just march through the data according to the DVD-Video specs, not even aware that there might be a problem. Besides, these set-top boxes have just enough of a file system BIOS just to get to the "root" sector and not much more. Sometimes the "higher-end" ones will try to scan for MP3s or other kinds of media files, but that is a bonus and not required for playing the video data itself.
As for PCs, the operating systems are obviously designed to trust in the file system to believe that what the file system is telling you is also correct. Obviously you can mess with the order of the files and make something playable only on PCs and not set-top boxes, but usually you are more worried about the set-top ones rather than some hobbiest with some DVD playback software. The PC-based DVD-Video playback software is usually designed to trust in the file system and does the file requests through normal OS-related file requests rather than doing low-level sector navigation. This is a sign of good programming, not the lack thereof.
What is being done here is a very cheap hack that took the brains of a half-competent software engineering intern who knows just enough about the specs to get him/herself into some serious trouble and doesn't know the basics of trying to stick with known standards. Or to understand the need for redundant systems to try and protect data through multiple means of accessing the information. As has been pointed out, by doing this the file system is essentially corrupted, so normal OS file system requests will not be able to retrieve the data, unless you are accessing information on the DVD drive via individual sector requests instead (that would be the "hack" to break this "encryption" system). BTW, the "file size" of the IFO files is also recorded in the IFO file format itself as well, so "recreating" the IFO files is trivial in this situation if you can access the individual sectors.
I certainly hope that this idiot who designed this system didn't get a patent on the subject. I will go down right now as somebody to contact if you want to break the patent to testify that this is not a patentable idea in the first place. And as has been pointed out by others, this is clearly in violation of the DVD-Video standards and as such you can't claim compatability to DVD-Video by using this system. This is not a copy protection scheme but rather a corruption of the file system, as has been pointed out, and taking on a percieved weakness in the organization of the DVD-Video format.
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The hard part isn't to get the implosion right. The real trick is to try and get the implosion to occur with a minimum amount of material, especially fissibile material.
And yes, you could use steel to do the trial and error to see that you got the proper esplosion geometry to crush metal, but ultimately you need to have the PhD in chemistry or nuclear physics because you need to understand the geometry of the Uranium and Plutonium atoms to make sure you have the explosions crushing the metalic "crystals" in the right directions to give you the best possible explosion. If you get it off by even a little bit, you end up with a "fizzle" like what North Korea found out the hard way. It is a bomb that blows up, but the error in geometry instead works against the explosion and reduces the yield considerably.
Keep in mind that in a "typical" nuke, the raw metal before the fission starts up is usually compressed to only 25% or even substantially less of its original volume. Think about that and remember this is compressing Uranium metal and what kind of energy is needed to pull that off. We are not talking about compressing diatomic hydrogen at 1 atm. pressure.
BTW, the Manhattan Project bomb was really quite simple. The Hiroshima bomb was actually a rather large (compared to current nukes in the U.S. arsenal) and had a partial sphere of U-235 (mostly) that had another hunk of U-235 that was pushed into that sphere via something that looked like an 18th Century cannon with a predecessor to C-4 acting as the trigger. Some special care was also given to reduce friction in the barrel and a few other things to make it work, but it was about as crude as you could make a workable nuke.
The bomb on Nagasaki, however, used Plutonium and was in comparison a much more advanced bomb using the explosion geometries mentioned above.
I remember a "suppliment" to the Science Fiction magazine "Analog" that included a section on "How to Build a Nuclear Bomb". This was about 20 years ago BTW.
Interestingly enough, they even had it detachable and strongly suggested that you give it to your friendly neighborhood terrorist, in big bold letters right across the cover of the suppliment.
Of course, as you got into it and tried to do a Tim McVeigh style of bomb construction using the directions, the terrorist had only about six months to live due to radiation exposure and plutonium poisioning, but who triffles with such minor details anyway. The instructions even described how to build an isotopic concentrator, so you would get more U-235 instead of U-238 in a given sample. The instructions also strongly recommended that you get the base metal ore from a nuclear power facility, as somebody with the raw resources necessary to pull it off would have a triffiling easy task of stealing the fuel rods from a nuclear plant even though it would have to be later refined to be improved. Starting with raw uranium ore was something that only major nations or commercial uranium producers would bother with.
Kids have been turning in Hydrogen Bomb kits (using clay instead of C-4 and steel instead of plutonium) for some time as science fair exhibits. This is a non-issue that has become an issue by non-techies who think building a nuke is really all that difficult. That is H-bomb, not just a conventional uranium nuke and significantly more difficult to manufacture.
And the so-called "dirty bomb" is even easier to build. The insurgants in Iraq seem to be pretty good bomb makers of conventional chemical bombs, so all that is really needed for that is some nuclear waste. Not even bomb-grade material.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. If Microsoft were to start asserting any patents that it thinks are incompatable with a given GPL'd software package distributed by somebody other than Novell (but also by Novell), Novell would have to also stop distribution as well.
The only thing this really does is save Novell stock holders from being sued by Microsoft, but it is a rather weak save at that. Microsoft at any time could kill entire product lines of Novell simply by open up a lawsuit against another distro that has the same software. Good for Microsoft, bad for Novell.
Talk about a way to kill competition when you want it gone.
Time capsules are an interesting phenomena as they were very popular during the 1950's and have periodic bursts of interest in subesquent time periods. Most notable were the time capsules that were opened around Y2K (a common date that seemed to have some significance). We are just beginning to see the real value of doing this type of action and what sorts of benefits it might bring up.
The #1 thing that I seemed to have encountered with an archivist involved in indexing a few Y2K time capsules was the incredible need to develop archival standards for multi-media content. One particular set of audio recordings from the 1950s involved the use of a wire recorder (quite common in the 1950's BTW). The archivist at a major research university could only find just a couple of working playback machines capable of reading that media format, and those were in museums and he considered himself very lucky to have been able to find those.
I could give other countless examples, and it should be pointed out that even now very good digital multimedia standards are still very difficult to find. Most of the current standards are far to propritary where when the company decides to discontinue support for the format, it simply disappears from existance. This is a huge issue.
What is interesting about the Wikipedia (aka MediaWiki software) database is that a complete history of every article and every edit is maintained. Some going back to the project founding itself, and (at the moment) even every deleted page, spam, offensive content, and as of about July of this year, every image that was uploaded and subsequently deleted.
Of course getting that full db dump for just en.wikipedia is getting close to a Terabyte now, but it is at least in theory possible. The only reason you would want to get subsequent snapshots is just in case the Wikimedia Foundation goes belly up and thrashes their servers completely, making it so the last db snapshot you obtained is all that has been archived.
My real concern is more about how long this full edit history is going to be available, and what the state of the database that is running MediaWiki (currently MySQL, if I'm not mistaken) can keep up with over 100 years of edit history on a particular Wikipedia article. The edit wars over the George W. Bush article certainly are going to be an interesting historical item of note to see what the perceptions of this man is going to be 100 years from now.
"Vote early and vote often!"
Is that your motto?
So if I am able to vote in 500 precincts in one day, my 500 votes should count over your 200, or the "honest person's" 1 vote?
Or can I and 10,000 of my friends from Utah go to California and all vote in the primary there, changing the voting tally for the mayor's race in a city that has only 4,000 people living in it?
How about I bring in 3 million Mexican nationals to vote for the next California Governor's race, paying them a paltry $100 each to do nothing but simply vote that day (presumably for the candidate I have suggested). Do you think it would have an impact?
The reason for the complex rules about who is able to vote has a very legitimate reason for existing. There has been substantial voting fraud in the past, and there continues to be such fraud right now (and likely to continue), precisely because people who shouldn't be voting are, or are voting more than once.
Much of the voting fraud with the punch card ballots in Florida was because voting managers of some precincts would take a stack of ballots after they had been cast and stick a wire down the "chosen" candidate. This is where many of the "chad" issues came up, not from any problem with the paper ballot itself in the first place.
As far as ommitting names from the lists of eligible voters, there are legitimate reasons for doing so. Just ask how JFK was elected with the 10,000 dead people in Illinois who ended up voting anyway, giving the electorial votes of Illinois to JFK instead of Nixon.
I have long argued that what really needs to be done is not just making a major 3rd party like the Libertarians or Greens to win, but get some very very obscure party that is plainly obvious that nobody really supported the candidate, and make it a near landslide victory for that party.
I've nominated a few suggestions like the Cthulhu Party or the National Fisherman's Party, but either would do the job very well.
To be honest, if you wanted to avoid spending too much time in jail, I would suggest the student body president of some major university instead as an election to hack instead of U.S. Congressional races or the Presidential election, as you can avoid violating federal election laws in that manner. It could still have the same impact in terms of letting people know what can happen, but the results wouldn't be so disasterous in terms of getting a major investigation and court proceedings to catch the would-be hackers. And publicize the hack in all of its gory detail.
Last time I made a suggestion I discovered that some university student body elections were indeed hacked like this, but it didn't use the current set of machines by Dibold that have been suggested so far.
I am very curious about where you get these statistics about the number of speakers of a given langauge.
And if you are going to bring up a generic "Chinese Language", it would be far better to be much more specific about dialectical differences as a spoken language. Even the written forms have some minor differences, but the spoken dialects of Chinese vary considerably to the point they are often unrecognizable between native speakers of each seperate dialect.
If you take the "high ball" number from the Wikipedia English Language article of 1.5 Billion people who speak English as a second language plus the 400 million native speakers of English, it is far and away the most widely spoken language on the Earth today, and about double the number of any single dialect of Chinese.
That said, I think your sentiment that most textbooks in languages other than English are not translations but original creations bears out fairly well. So much of a language is tied up to cultural concepts that a direct translation would often be very difficult, and what works well for American college students might not be so effective for similar aged students in Russia, for example.
Considering that there already is an existing Wiki effort supported by the Wikimedia Foundation for textbook writing, the infrastructure to accomplish this is already in place, except for the process of trying to pay for the effort.
If I were given the opportunity to make a decision in this regard (and my voice does carry some weight in the Wikibooks community) I would perhaps try to offer "prize" money for something like an X-prize type competition for textbooks that have been written on Wikibooks that achieve certain established academic standards. And finding those standards isn't particularly difficult either, as many have already been identified on Wikibooks as well.
The point here is that anybody can claim to start a book like this, but the problem is trying to get it into a final polished form that can be useful. There are several texts on Wikibooks right now that are oh so very close to being useful in a classroom, but for the find bit of polish needed from people with professional expertise, or at least strong editorial skills.
In addition, a very consistant theme by Jimbo Wales has been a democratization of content creation as well. Having letters at the end of your name is not necessarily a sign that you have the skills necessary to write a textbook. Hiring professionals to write content through a traditional book contract would, IMHO, provide inferior content and tend to stratify the user base in ways that can be quite damaging to any future projects.
In terms of how to provide accounting to determine who gets the money from such a process, there are already systems in place to help determine who has written a given percentage of the content from a Wiki edit. While the system can be gamed, safeguard can be in place to ensure that those who really are responsible for the majority of the content will be rewarded, or at least to be able to identify what "charitable" cause they want their winnings to be sent to.
In other words, the WTO has real teeth in terms of overruling actions of the U.S. Congress.
About the only thing that the WTO can't do is to override the U.S. Constitution, which in theory trumps even treaties (and a prime factor to consider with copyright treaties, for example). The problem here is that the current members of the U.S. Supreme Court seem very reluctant to even override treaties based on this provision, nor does Congress really fight back hard if they are told "No" by international groups like the WTO.
So there are really two approaches that can be done in this situation:
In short, this is a big deal in the current American legal system. Hopefully this is going to be something that will be publicized so much that Americans will finally realize how much of their soverignty has been given up to silly groups of "international law experts", answerable to nobody other than themselves. There certainly is no check or balance to allow a group like the U.S. Congress to impeach these WTO judges if they abuse their position, nor any direct citizen involvement in deciding who gets to make these decisions.
The SSN is tied so deeply and the incentives such as massive tax deductions for people of modest income so large, that to not apply for an SSN for my infant children now has a social stimatism that reeks of fanatical behavior, and is likely to get my children taken from me by government officials under the guise of "protecting the innocent", likely by some child welfare "expert" who thinks your fanaticism regarding staying out of the system is a sign of a deranged mind and an indication you are somehow harming your kids in some other manner.
That also misses the point here, that my children have absolutely no say what so ever about if they wanted the SSN or not. They were less than a day old when I applied for crying out loud, and the most important thing they had to deal with at the time was trying to figure out how to eat and cry, and perhaps deficate. Debating the merits of having a SSN was certainly not on their mind at the time. And the government is encouraging this abuse so strongly that it might as well be manditory.
I would argue that this is exactly the problem with the OLPC proposal. They ought to be taking advantage of the "mass market" and become a market unto themselves, where economies of scale coming straight from the sales of these computers to 1st world counties could be folded into purchasing components for these 3rd world nations. Even do a "charity" bit to say that profits are going to be used to help fund some of the computers sent to poorer countries.
The main purpose of this is in fact to help reduce the potential for corruption, simply because re-selling these things in the international market isn't going to be profitable unless you are doing wholesale theft. As it stands now, while theft is one way to make money off of these computers, corrupt education officials can also get into the act if for no other reason than to help increase their budgets through sources other than from taxes. That is always appealing to any government bureaucrat, regardless of what country you are from.
Basically, I don't see any legitimate way that these computers are going to be kept off of eBay as soon as they get into the hands of these bureaucrats, and it would be better if these profits realized by say Libyian officials diverting a few computers to get their wife some nice stuff would be better obtained directly by the OLPC project instead killing any potential market that these corrupt officials would have. Instead, a situation of artificial scarcity has been created, and the demand, including even a set price well above what these laptops are being sold for, has been established and is documentable by the on-line petition. Any economist with half a brain is going to tell you that this situation is going to be met and dealt with in one way or another. Legal steps to stop it are just going to make the situation and corruption worse, not better.
As far as what to do with religious fanatics of any flavor who try to impose their world views on mass populations, I think that situation will eventually take care of itself and burn out as well. But unfortunately before this current fanaticism is completely dealt with, more deaths even on a large scale will happen. It would indeed be sad that the OLPC project had to somehow become a part of that whole issue as well.
If it is an interest bearing account that is deposited in a bank insured by the FDIC, yes it is. The interest income is reported to the IRS. As are almost all checking accounts, especially with post 9/11 issues.
I suppose you can find some accounts that are not tied to the federal reporting statues, but those would not be the typical accounts that are offered by any banks that are federally or state chartered.
Of course, if the bank you are talking about is "off shore" that is a different issue altogether, but then you are essentially living outside of the USA and not within the American economy. That is the point. And the USA isn't the only country to ask for some identification number similar to the SSN to determine unique identities.
There really isn't an easy way for an ordinary American to avoid getting the SSN, even though technically you might be correct that it isn't specifically required by law. There are also vagrancy laws that will end up landing you in jail in all but the largest cities of the USA if you are without money or place to live.
You can't participate and get involved with the "legitimate" national economy of the USA without having a SSN except under the most extreme circumstances. Remember, Al Capone was arrested for tax evation, not smuggling alcohol.
Which dictator is that? HRM Queen Elizabeth II? The Illuminati? Council of 500?
What party to come to power? The National Fisherman's Party? The Pirate Party?
I don't think any of this is ever going to be meaningful change in the USA unless there is a major shakeup of congress by people outside of the two major political parties, but as you so eloquently stated, that has a snowball's chance on the sixth level of hell. Otherwise throwing out the current President of the USA is only going to replace him (in less than 3 years regardless of whatever else happens) with another idiot who is going to continue essentially the same policies. Especially in regards to the current economic system that rewards the current people in political and economic power in the USA.
However, there is a law that says that every employee involved in a business that conducts "interstate commerce" (that is about as vague as it comes) must file with the IRS and report the income payed to all of its employees. That is about 99% of all businesses in the USA, BTW, as even a burger store, locally owned and not even a franchise of a larger chain, is conducting "interstate commerce" if somebody from another state can potentially buy one of their hamburgers. Filing with the IRS requires the SSN.
About the only place that is excempt is a small family-owned farm, provided they don't sell their products to anyone but a local wholesale distributor. Even then, they could still get tripped up by the interstate commerce provisions. But farm laborers are notorious for avoiding income taxes and havens for illegal immigrants as a result.
The other way to avoid having an SSN is to be so filthy rich independently that you don't need to work. Of course, you can't have any of your money in a bank either, as you need the SSN (again for tax reasons) to open the bank account.
I didn't get my SSN until I was 16 years old (when I started to apply for jobs in the workforce), but apparently that is a huge exception today. I was coerced by the hospital to get SSNs for all of my children on the very day they were born, and that is also very common practice today in the USA.
I signed the petition knowing that I would love to get some of these things for my kids as well. I highly doubt that I will be able to get one, however, except off of eBay from some corrupt Libyian government official trying to make a little extra money.
Or perhaps that is how Libya is going to be able to afford it in the first place?
Who said that the kid wasn't a 19 year old Libyian police rookie, and instead of 25 bucks you offered him a 1 oz. gold coin instead (something almost always fungable, regardless of the politcal situation).
Besides, I do envision that these are going to show up on eBay very shortly anyway, likely to be offered by corrupt government officials realizing that people in the USA are willing to pay as much as $500 each for one of these things. Even $200 would be doubling their investment, assuming they didn't simply steal them directly from a government wherehouse without even having to pay for them.
I don't see how the OLPC folks are going to be able to keep this from happening at all, unless they open up and kill the market in the USA and EU with cheap computers as well.
Have you read the on-line petition? That is exactly what was proposed with the idea, that you would get one computer and the other two would go to some deserving 3rd world country.
Apparently the OLPC folks aren't even interested, even if the supposed 100,000 people do sign up. Besides, there are legal restrictions based on the component contracts by the OLPC group that simply prohibit their sale to 1st world nations like the USA or EU countries. Stupid but true.
I have been a long and outstanding critic of the OLPC program for many, many reasons. I feel that the OLPC is going to be a flash in the pan and will die a very quick death shortly.
That said, I think the basic idea of trying to provide a very simple and common portable PC platform that embodies through hardware what the open source movement offers through software is an idea whose idea has come, and it will be an experiment repeated several times in several different manners. Most PC hardware is not near a commodity status anyway, so trying to put stuff like this together isn't going to be all that difficult. Negroponte and others have set up a pattern than can then be followed, and what currently exists as the OLPC can be held up to demonstrate that the basic concept is sound, even if the approach that the OLPC group is using is flawed.
My major criticisms about the OLPC folks is that they are making far too many compromises over the short term, like selling only to certified by the United Nations 3rd world countries (they won't even sell to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which has offered to buy them and is the location for much of the effort), or completely refusing to sell them to individuals. But that isn't all, as they are also making deals with component manufacturers to fit this supposed business model, on the weird assumption that selling these computers to Nigeria is not going to make these components be in competition with similar components offered to consumers in San Jose, California. That and some very weird non-standard changes to network topology and wireless communications.
I just hope that the government of Lybia doesn't decide to do an act of war against the USA due to these laptops being screwed up when support for them is dropped due to the break-up of the OLPC group. Or that the OLPC group changes its ways and "sees the light" to stop these practices that are just shooting themselves in the feet.
There are laws against racial discrimination that could, with a good judge that is using his/her head, would also apply in this sort of situation as well in most cases. There certainly are racial characteristics that are mapped in DNA sequences. In fact, when DNA "profiling" is used for matching up parents with kids and in forensic evidence for like a police investigation, they specifically target those DNA sequences which are not related directly to specific racial profiles, but there isn't a law that says this absolutely must be the case.
The point here is that DNA sequencing researchers are very much aware of this issue, and the ethics and laws about this subject are not quite as unknown as you seem to apply. Still, if there were a database of genetic information, it would certainly be considered private medical information and could only be disclosed along similar kinds of laws as well.
I contend that they ought to be disclosed to anybody and everybody, because the SSN should not be used to establish identity other than to prove that you are a unique individual in the USA. It ought to be no more sacred than your telephone number, which is published in public directories. Why not the SSN?
It is how the SSN is being misued by banks, and other agencies when it is not what it was established to be used for.
The biggest problem is that the SSN is misused by far too many banks and other institutions as a password to prove identify. Instead, it should be used as a part of somebody's name, such as "I am John Q. "532-66-3321" Public".
If a SSN is used in any other context or manner, it is that context that is out of line. The same should be said for a mother's maiden name or any other "proof of identity" that is suggested. Instead, identify needs to be established with some sort of "trusted" group that makes a real-life face to face meeting with the person in some fashion and then offers that identity somewhere.
The SSN is one of the most mis-used identification systems in the USA, and the Federal Government as well as other law-enforcement agencies who use "scare tactics" regarding the misuse of the SSN are barking up the wrong tree requiring you to set up some other alternate identification code. Instead, the SSN should be through legislation be prohibited from being used to establish identity except to be used in the same fashion that a name would be also used.
It sounds like you don't understand the UDF file format. Besides, the point here is that the UDF file format is messed with in this schema.
It seems that they though this one through, and it is possible that the first "sector" for the file refered to by VIDEO_TS.IFO is instead a single byte file that contains just the EOF character. But there is more...
Yes, most file systems also point to additional sectors on the disc.
BTW, the IFO files do not have a preditable length of which you are refering to.... other than being one full 2048 byte DVD sector in size (zero padded too, BTW). They are quite variable in length depending on what other features that you are invoking and added features you want to include, in addition to DVD-Video specific assembly instructions embedded within the IFO file. While most "typical" DVD discs tend to use the same DVD authoring system and general setup, giving you similar IFO files, it is not a part of the standard and will mess up playback if you try to screw around with the IFO files with that kind of assumption.
See my previous post on this that I made earlier today about how this "copy protection" really works.
The point I was trying to make, however, was that since this deliberately messes with the file system that copying the VIDEO_TS folder is not going to work with those disc "protected" in this manner. Or it would copy the IFO files as 0 byte files. That means that the "copy protection" works exactly as intended unless you make a work-around. BTW, this same stuff could also make all of the files, including the VOBs, be zero byte files. Or if you wanted to be really clever, misdirect to a bunch of files that instead do a simple 1-5 minute "Piracy is illegal and you just got caught" video clip. But I don't think that "ProtecDisc" is thinking that far ahead.
As far as making a workaround, all that is needed is to do the sector-level reading as an option if the IFO file doesn't seem to be loading properly. It mucks up the code a little bit, but it doesn't have to be in a time critical section as the logic would only apply in error trapping subroutines anyway. The non-trivial aspect is trying to make sure that the playback software routines can abstract to both data access systems and are not dependent on specific file access subroutines.
A custom "ripper" on the other hand would only need to read the sectors off of the DVD disc and "recreate" the files directly from the sector reads. Then you could re-burn the DVD with the "correct" file format as a very trivial exercise.
As has been said by others, this only screws up legitimate users who have paid for a legitimate copy of the content. It doesn't do anything to hurt the real mega-pirates who rake in the bucks reselling copied content. Very few people are willing to "donate" the bandwidth necessary for hundreds of DVD-quality downloads on a public webserver. And this is but a minor speed bump for hardcore pirates, including the amature variety.
This is mainly a little DVD-Video tidbit to explain how technically this works.
For the DVD-Video spec, the actual file system being used is irrelevant and is mainly used to "boot" the disc and discover where the very first data sector is located at on the DVD disc. From then on, at least in theory, all of the navigation to the rest of the DVD media is handled internally within the DVD-Video files themselves, including the MPEG data, as the navigation within the video data is handled with the use of special navigation packets.
So for a set-top box on your home television, the data scanners ignore the UTF file format and just march through the data according to the DVD-Video specs, not even aware that there might be a problem. Besides, these set-top boxes have just enough of a file system BIOS just to get to the "root" sector and not much more. Sometimes the "higher-end" ones will try to scan for MP3s or other kinds of media files, but that is a bonus and not required for playing the video data itself.
As for PCs, the operating systems are obviously designed to trust in the file system to believe that what the file system is telling you is also correct. Obviously you can mess with the order of the files and make something playable only on PCs and not set-top boxes, but usually you are more worried about the set-top ones rather than some hobbiest with some DVD playback software. The PC-based DVD-Video playback software is usually designed to trust in the file system and does the file requests through normal OS-related file requests rather than doing low-level sector navigation. This is a sign of good programming, not the lack thereof.
What is being done here is a very cheap hack that took the brains of a half-competent software engineering intern who knows just enough about the specs to get him/herself into some serious trouble and doesn't know the basics of trying to stick with known standards. Or to understand the need for redundant systems to try and protect data through multiple means of accessing the information. As has been pointed out, by doing this the file system is essentially corrupted, so normal OS file system requests will not be able to retrieve the data, unless you are accessing information on the DVD drive via individual sector requests instead (that would be the "hack" to break this "encryption" system). BTW, the "file size" of the IFO files is also recorded in the IFO file format itself as well, so "recreating" the IFO files is trivial in this situation if you can access the individual sectors.
I certainly hope that this idiot who designed this system didn't get a patent on the subject. I will go down right now as somebody to contact if you want to break the patent to testify that this is not a patentable idea in the first place. And as has been pointed out by others, this is clearly in violation of the DVD-Video standards and as such you can't claim compatability to DVD-Video by using this system. This is not a copy protection scheme but rather a corruption of the file system, as has been pointed out, and taking on a percieved weakness in the organization of the DVD-Video format.