Actually, according to Wikipedia, though not the best source available, it was based on OPENSTEP/NEXTSTEP.
No, it was supposed to be a successor to NeXTSTEP. And both OS's use a Mach kernel. IMHO, it's a poor successor, since NeXTSTEP had a unified filesystem structure. OS X lacks it, instead imitating OS 9 and below in the Finder and being rather UNIX-y everywhere else. And tools like Spotlight work poorly. Spotlight can be controlled (as root only) from a UNIX-shell. But it can't index networked volumes unless they're mounted via the Finder. No automounted volumes for example! Instead, in an office environment using LDAP, you need to automount a scripts directory then have a AppleScript in there that runs via a login job that mounts the volumes via Finder. Then have a script that runs via Cron and makes sure that volume's being indexed. Hopefully this shit will be addressed in 10,5.
Incidentally, chlorine gas, aka, mustard gas, is what you get when you mix ammonia and bleach in the right proportion.
AFAIK, they're not the same. Chlorine gas is Cl2. Mustard gas is an oily organic liquid of some type. Not sure what ammonia and bleach gets you, but I've heard not to try it at home:D
It is a bit hard to obtain in a condensed form, you know, without a plant mixed in? I'd like to see someone make a Polonium bead from tobacco plants.
Why bother? I've heard the nicotine in a pack of ciggs is enough to be fatal if concentrated. So just concentrate the nicotine and weaponise it somehow. Fortunately, we don't inhale all of it when we smoke.
Yes, but Polonium-210 will kill you if inhaled in quantities as small as a single dust mote, and there's no antidote.
The stuff sold by United Nuclear is encapsulated in ceramic, thus difficult to extract. Secondly, you'll need to buy a *lot* of it to approach a lethal dose for a number of people, which will raise red flags with United Nuclear and the Feds. Also, keep in mind that the majority of the particles dispersed won't actually be inhaled. Probably the worst you'll do is give some people an increased risk of lung cancer in 30 years. If you wanted to cause mass hysteria, you'd be better off doing certain chemical reactions involving chlorine bleach (NaClO + H2O) that release chlorine gas which *rots* the lungs - it was used as a war gas in WW I. Or even manufacturing a nerve gas like Sarin. All of which would have a larger terror effect than *maybe* causing some lung cancer a few decades down the line.
Acetaminophen aka Tylenol. Fatal dose is only about 4x the therapeutic dose. It's bitter, though, so I'm not sure how easily it would be to conceal. And alcohol makes the effect worse.
d the gamma source, being equally deadly at any of those three ranges
Wrong: refer to the inverse square law. As you walk away from a lamp, the light intensity is proportional to the inverse of the square of distance. Same goes for a gamma-emitter.
Then watch them go nuts for a few minutes before you finally explain to them that the postassium they need in their diet is a smidge radioactive.
Not to mention sleeping together with someone increases your dose from the Evil Potassium. (Still about 0.1 millirem per year extra:) By contrast normal background is about 50-100 mrem/yr, and smoking a pack a day gives you about 1000 mrem/yr.
Honestly, it's kind of odd that someone would have poisoned the guy with polonium. I mean, there are so many other types of poisons (most being much more effective) even in our own homes.
If it was the FSB (ex-KGB) of which I'm not 100% convinced, this may have been meant as a warning to their employees who are thinking about defection. Basically: "even if it takes us a decade, we *will* find you and we *will* kill you in a such a way so that you'll wish that you'd be dead long before you actually die."
The only problem I've had is finding a hydrometer to check my mixture of antifreeze and water, since IIRC, propylene glycol has a slightly different S.G. than ethylene glycol.
I thought that p.g. was used "neat", undiluted at atmospheric pressurs - i.e. the rad cap is open and not designed to hold the coolant under pressure. The boiling point is much higher than "normal" coolant, so you can get away with that, and the heat capacity is higher than ethylene glycol so you can use it undiluted (though the heat capacity is still a bit lower than mixed e.g./water).
Actually wrong. The law is enforced except if the following criteria are met: A licensed Coffeeshop, where only 18+ years old may enter (show id), a maximum of 5 grams per person is sold and maximum 500 grams is stored.
Which is still better than the US. NY City has one of the loosest laws - possession of "small quantities" carries a fine of ~$100 and no criminal record. In some states, you can actually go to jail or have to do community service for possession of even small amounts.
. Oh, wait, there are those pesky boat people on the Gulf coast.
Our Coast Guard does a pretty decent job fishing them out of the drink. They'd do a better job if there were more of them. Unfortunately, some of them are now stationed in the Middle East (yes, Coast Guardsmen are being sent to Iraq to guard US naval assets).
Which is why the phrase "loose lips sink ships" was coined. There have been numerous headline-grabbing items like this article on Slashdot and in the media in general which serve no purpose to anyone unless you're making money from the article or you're a terrorist looking for ideas.
Not to mention that this will draw unwanted government attention to United Nuclear which is already under investigation. So that people with a legitimate need for alpha sources (and, yes, I consider the needs of amateur scientists legit) will find them harder to obtain. If you want to murder someone with poison, there are far easier ways to do it than with polonium-210.
My VW takes propylene glycol antifreeze. And is quite common at anywhere there is a large number of EU cars.
Maybe the EU has laws mandating it or encouraging its use in new cars? My point was more that various nasty poisons are *already* available off the shelf for a lot less effort than it would take to buy enough polonium from United Nuclear and convert it into a bioavailable form.
Ooh, yeah, that'll work. Let's build two fences 3000 miles long! GENIUS!
Mexican border isn't 3k miles long, genius:) But I don't see how monitoring the border strip with electronic devices would be a huge problem - no need to build a physical fence. Just track illegal crossers and catch them later. That along with improved tech to see what's coming in to the US in vehicles.
By the way, most of the Al Qaeda hijackers came into the US *legally*, so increased restrictions on legal immigration from certain countries have my support, however politically incorrect they may be.
30 ml can be lethal to adults in some cases - usually more like 100 ml. And it tastes sweet, so it can be mixed into a drink or accidently drunk by a child or pet. Some variants are yellow or red rather than a sickly green. And (at least for dogs) the death produced is an unpleasant one - basically, it's metabolised into oxalate which then crystallises and slices the kidneys to death. The funny thing is that a safer alternative - propylene glycol - already exists but isn't common because it's about 2-3x as expensive.
No it isn't. That's the standard set by OSHA which is several orders of magnitude below the toxic dose in order to prevent health effects in people working with the stuff.
Assuming a fatal collision can't be stopped any other way you should throw the points and kill the person/people on the track.
But what if both trains happened to be empty but you didn't know it? Maybe the motorman jumped from train 1 and train 2 was a runaway train? (Neither has passengers):D
Is it better to kill by overt action because of the *possiblity* of saving lives?
But to say that they were afraid of people in the East seeing "how good" life in the West was at that time is pure cold war propaganda. The West had just come out of the great depression, which at the time was believed (by western economists) to be a result of the inherent instability of markets.
Do not confuse the Soviet lifestyle of the 1930s/1940s of the larger cities and towns with the lifestyle of the rural peoples. The rural people's lifestyle really hadn't changed that much since the time of the tsars - and like the serfs pre-1860, they were tied to the land - the only difference was that they were working for the state on a kolkhoz not for a manor lord.
Many of the soldiers came from such a background and were positively shocked at the abundance that they found in the Poland of the late 30s. Remember that the Russo-German hostilities didn't begin until 1941 - the Russian army marched into eastern Poland without as much opposition as one would expect since some thought that they were coming as allies to fight the Germans. So they got quite a few "undamaged" towns and cities. And promptly started looting them and taking everything that could be moved.
My grandparents *were* there in 1939 and my grandmother remembers Russian farmboy soldiers being positively fascinated with Western-made clocks and watches because they simply hadn't seen things like that before!
It is true that Stalin sent a lot of people coming back from the Great Patriotic War to the gulag, but most of them were generals, war heroes, and similar.
Now you're the one on crack! A lot of common soldiers got sent to the camps or forcibly relocated to settle Siberia. Remember, this is several *millions* people that we're talking about, so they couldn't have all been generals and notable figures. The camps were considered a key part of Soviet industry and they needed new meat to feed into the grinder.
No way in hell I'll get on one of these unless there is a pilot there to take control if something goes wrong. As a business traveler with over a million miles in the sky, I like knowing that there are humans in the front hearing and feeling everything that is going on.
Computers can sometimes route around trouble. But only trouble that they're designed for and that can be forseen by their human designers.
Case in point, United Flight 232. In 1989, over Iowa, a United DC-10's rear engine failed catastrophically, sending debris into all of the hydraulic systems. Such a failure wasn't ever forseen by the aircraft's designers, nor was it considered survivable. Yet the pilots brought the plane down to a controlled crash and I think half of the passengers survived due to the flight engineer steering the plane with the throttles alone (actually, the pilots dictated to the engineer what they needed done by moving their [inoperative] control yokes). An amazing case of human cooperation saving quite a few lives.
Such a plane could fly low and slow to save fuel, because it wouldn't have to worry about pilots or passengers getting tired.
Sort of like an Ekranoplan? Cool idea - you can get a lot of lifting capacity with less fuel usage. The only problem is more vulnerability to weather effects than current high-level jets, but I could still see a use in situations that aren't extremely time sensitive - if the weather's bad today, they'll simply fly tomorrow or route around trouble spots. Still probably faster than a 6-day ocean crossing by cargo ship.
Although I believe that can be great technology, I'd rather see more of an automated automobile, much like on Minority Report.
Actually much harder of a problem. Automobiles are seperated from other traffic by feet or even inches. Aircraft normally fly hundreds of feet apart (more for passenger planes). Furthermore, autos only have two degrees of freedom in which to move - aircraft can move in 3-D. You also don't usually have small children, deer, and other such things jumping out in front of planes. Part of the problem of designing a good car control system is moral. Assuming a child jumps out in front of the car, do we (a) hit the child, (b) swerve and hit a brick wall, possibly killing the occupants of the car (c) swerve the other way and t-bone another car, possibly killing its occupants. (Sort of like the railway switch problem presented in college ethics classes.[1])
-b.
[1]- there's a train running down a track on the collision course with another train. It's about to run into the last switch before collision becomes inevitable. There's a single person sleeping on the other track served by the switch. Do you (a) do nothing or (b) throw the switch, killing the sleeping guy/playing child/family in car but saving the passengers on the trains.
We should put these drone navigation/steering controls into planes with pilots. Let the pilots steer for 15 minutes an hour, to keep them engaged. Let them analyze the air traffic data, with visual confirmations, for their airspace, shared with each other and on the ground. Keep all the telemetry streamed to the global network in realtime, instead of trapped in mysterious black boxes on the endangered planes. Put their bodies on the line, and their minds to work on keeping everyone safe.
Larger planes are already very automated, except for takeoff and landing (and some takeoffs/landings can also be almost completely automated). Believe it or not, most commercial flights are already 95% done on autopilot.
Not that I see this coming to commercial flights any time soon (if ever), but: having the pilot not actually on the plane would make airplane hijacking a hell of a lot harder.
You mean easier, since the ground control transmitter can be overpowered if you know the appropriate frequencies and encryption codes? No need to even be on board the plane to turn it into a missile.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it was supposed to be a successor to NeXTSTEP. And both OS's use a Mach kernel. IMHO, it's a poor successor, since NeXTSTEP had a unified filesystem structure. OS X lacks it, instead imitating OS 9 and below in the Finder and being rather UNIX-y everywhere else. And tools like Spotlight work poorly. Spotlight can be controlled (as root only) from a UNIX-shell. But it can't index networked volumes unless they're mounted via the Finder. No automounted volumes for example! Instead, in an office environment using LDAP, you need to automount a scripts directory then have a AppleScript in there that runs via a login job that mounts the volumes via Finder. Then have a script that runs via Cron and makes sure that volume's being indexed. Hopefully this shit will be addressed in 10,5.
Blech.
-b.
Agh, that's just mean! Shooting them would have been kinder, dude.
-b.
AFAIK, they're not the same. Chlorine gas is Cl2. Mustard gas is an oily organic liquid of some type. Not sure what ammonia and bleach gets you, but I've heard not to try it at home :D
-b.
Why bother? I've heard the nicotine in a pack of ciggs is enough to be fatal if concentrated. So just concentrate the nicotine and weaponise it somehow. Fortunately, we don't inhale all of it when we smoke.
-b.
The stuff sold by United Nuclear is encapsulated in ceramic, thus difficult to extract. Secondly, you'll need to buy a *lot* of it to approach a lethal dose for a number of people, which will raise red flags with United Nuclear and the Feds. Also, keep in mind that the majority of the particles dispersed won't actually be inhaled. Probably the worst you'll do is give some people an increased risk of lung cancer in 30 years. If you wanted to cause mass hysteria, you'd be better off doing certain chemical reactions involving chlorine bleach (NaClO + H2O) that release chlorine gas which *rots* the lungs - it was used as a war gas in WW I. Or even manufacturing a nerve gas like Sarin. All of which would have a larger terror effect than *maybe* causing some lung cancer a few decades down the line.
b-.
Acetaminophen aka Tylenol. Fatal dose is only about 4x the therapeutic dose. It's bitter, though, so I'm not sure how easily it would be to conceal. And alcohol makes the effect worse.
-b.
Wrong: refer to the inverse square law. As you walk away from a lamp, the light intensity is proportional to the inverse of the square of distance. Same goes for a gamma-emitter.
-b.
Not to mention sleeping together with someone increases your dose from the Evil Potassium. (Still about 0.1 millirem per year extra :) By contrast normal background is about 50-100 mrem/yr, and smoking a pack a day gives you about 1000 mrem/yr.
-b.
If it was the FSB (ex-KGB) of which I'm not 100% convinced, this may have been meant as a warning to their employees who are thinking about defection. Basically: "even if it takes us a decade, we *will* find you and we *will* kill you in a such a way so that you'll wish that you'd be dead long before you actually die."
-b.
I thought that p.g. was used "neat", undiluted at atmospheric pressurs - i.e. the rad cap is open and not designed to hold the coolant under pressure. The boiling point is much higher than "normal" coolant, so you can get away with that, and the heat capacity is higher than ethylene glycol so you can use it undiluted (though the heat capacity is still a bit lower than mixed e.g./water).
-b.
Which is still better than the US. NY City has one of the loosest laws - possession of "small quantities" carries a fine of ~$100 and no criminal record. In some states, you can actually go to jail or have to do community service for possession of even small amounts.
-b.
Our Coast Guard does a pretty decent job fishing them out of the drink. They'd do a better job if there were more of them. Unfortunately, some of them are now stationed in the Middle East (yes, Coast Guardsmen are being sent to Iraq to guard US naval assets).
-b.
Not to mention that this will draw unwanted government attention to United Nuclear which is already under investigation. So that people with a legitimate need for alpha sources (and, yes, I consider the needs of amateur scientists legit) will find them harder to obtain. If you want to murder someone with poison, there are far easier ways to do it than with polonium-210.
-b.
Maybe the EU has laws mandating it or encouraging its use in new cars? My point was more that various nasty poisons are *already* available off the shelf for a lot less effort than it would take to buy enough polonium from United Nuclear and convert it into a bioavailable form.
-b.
Mexican border isn't 3k miles long, genius :) But I don't see how monitoring the border strip with electronic devices would be a huge problem - no need to build a physical fence. Just track illegal crossers and catch them later. That along with improved tech to see what's coming in to the US in vehicles.
By the way, most of the Al Qaeda hijackers came into the US *legally*, so increased restrictions on legal immigration from certain countries have my support, however politically incorrect they may be.
-b.
-b.
No it isn't. That's the standard set by OSHA which is several orders of magnitude below the toxic dose in order to prevent health effects in people working with the stuff.
-b.
But what if both trains happened to be empty but you didn't know it? Maybe the motorman jumped from train 1 and train 2 was a runaway train? (Neither has passengers) :D
Is it better to kill by overt action because of the *possiblity* of saving lives?
-b.
Unlikely to work as long as you have people parking where they live and unwilling to walk out of town just to pick up their cars.
Or (d) brake instantly.
That falls under "hit the child," since even at 30 mph you're not going to be able to stop if something jumps out 10 feet ahead of you.
-b.
Do not confuse the Soviet lifestyle of the 1930s/1940s of the larger cities and towns with the lifestyle of the rural peoples. The rural people's lifestyle really hadn't changed that much since the time of the tsars - and like the serfs pre-1860, they were tied to the land - the only difference was that they were working for the state on a kolkhoz not for a manor lord.
Many of the soldiers came from such a background and were positively shocked at the abundance that they found in the Poland of the late 30s. Remember that the Russo-German hostilities didn't begin until 1941 - the Russian army marched into eastern Poland without as much opposition as one would expect since some thought that they were coming as allies to fight the Germans. So they got quite a few "undamaged" towns and cities. And promptly started looting them and taking everything that could be moved.
My grandparents *were* there in 1939 and my grandmother remembers Russian farmboy soldiers being positively fascinated with Western-made clocks and watches because they simply hadn't seen things like that before!
It is true that Stalin sent a lot of people coming back from the Great Patriotic War to the gulag, but most of them were generals, war heroes, and similar.
Now you're the one on crack! A lot of common soldiers got sent to the camps or forcibly relocated to settle Siberia. Remember, this is several *millions* people that we're talking about, so they couldn't have all been generals and notable figures. The camps were considered a key part of Soviet industry and they needed new meat to feed into the grinder.
-b.
Computers can sometimes route around trouble. But only trouble that they're designed for and that can be forseen by their human designers.
Case in point, United Flight 232. In 1989, over Iowa, a United DC-10's rear engine failed catastrophically, sending debris into all of the hydraulic systems. Such a failure wasn't ever forseen by the aircraft's designers, nor was it considered survivable. Yet the pilots brought the plane down to a controlled crash and I think half of the passengers survived due to the flight engineer steering the plane with the throttles alone (actually, the pilots dictated to the engineer what they needed done by moving their [inoperative] control yokes). An amazing case of human cooperation saving quite a few lives.
-b.
Sort of like an Ekranoplan? Cool idea - you can get a lot of lifting capacity with less fuel usage. The only problem is more vulnerability to weather effects than current high-level jets, but I could still see a use in situations that aren't extremely time sensitive - if the weather's bad today, they'll simply fly tomorrow or route around trouble spots. Still probably faster than a 6-day ocean crossing by cargo ship.
-b.
Actually much harder of a problem. Automobiles are seperated from other traffic by feet or even inches. Aircraft normally fly hundreds of feet apart (more for passenger planes). Furthermore, autos only have two degrees of freedom in which to move - aircraft can move in 3-D. You also don't usually have small children, deer, and other such things jumping out in front of planes. Part of the problem of designing a good car control system is moral. Assuming a child jumps out in front of the car, do we (a) hit the child, (b) swerve and hit a brick wall, possibly killing the occupants of the car (c) swerve the other way and t-bone another car, possibly killing its occupants. (Sort of like the railway switch problem presented in college ethics classes.[1])
-b.
[1]- there's a train running down a track on the collision course with another train. It's about to run into the last switch before collision becomes inevitable. There's a single person sleeping on the other track served by the switch. Do you (a) do nothing or (b) throw the switch, killing the sleeping guy/playing child/family in car but saving the passengers on the trains.
-b.
Larger planes are already very automated, except for takeoff and landing (and some takeoffs/landings can also be almost completely automated). Believe it or not, most commercial flights are already 95% done on autopilot.
-b.
You mean easier, since the ground control transmitter can be overpowered if you know the appropriate frequencies and encryption codes? No need to even be on board the plane to turn it into a missile.
-b.