Basically, they landed by parachute in Norway, infiltrated one of the most highly defended places in Nazi-controlled Europe, and set of some charges. The charges were placed next to some fat cables deep in a long tunnel. The cables were carrying enough current (many tens of thousands of amps) that the electromagnetic effects when they shorted blew a kilometer of tunnel to bits.
Elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned Dan Kurzman's book Blood and Water - it goes into great detail about the sabotage of the Norsk Hydro heavy-water plant, and the workings of the Nazi A-bomb effort. It's a riveting read, that makes James Bond look like a piker.
Aside from the German program, there was also a British program; rivalries with the Americans hampered both the US and British efforts.
Not mentioned in Blood and Water, Japan also had an A-bomb program of its own, and circumstantial evidence suggests that the Japanese managed to explode a test weapon. This is discussed in Robert K. Wilcox's work, Japan's Secret War (ISBN 1-56924-815-X). Much of this work was carried out in what is now North Korea. A giant industrial complex near Hungnam was dismantled by the Soviets and shipped to Russia after the war ended.
In October 1943, in a letter to Dutch scientist B. G. Casimir, Heisenberg wrote:
History legitimizes Germany to rule Europe and later the world. Only a nation that rules ruthlessly can maintain itself. Democracy cannot develop sufficient energy to rule Europe. There are, therefore, only two possibilities: Germany and Russia, and perhaps a Europe under German leadership is the lesser evil. [1]
In 1942, a prototype reactor in Leipzig exploded when heavy water leaked into a uranium shell, shortly before it would have reached criticality. [2]
We're DAMN LUCKY that Heisenberg's efforts ultimately failed.
[1] Blood and Water: Sabotaging Hitler's Bomb (ISBN 0-8050-3206-1), by Dan Kurzman, p.35.
[2] Ibid, p. 38.
The problem is, I suspect that the copy controls are less for the purpose of preventing piracy than for controlling individuals' ability to publish.
Example: Your spiffy Sony MiniDisc recorder sets the "do-not-copy" flag on anything you record, even if it's your own music that you're recording.
With a locked-down Internet and locked-down computers, you'll have to fork over big bucks if you want to actually distribute your own works to the public.
To me, it seems like it was only yesterday that 1200 bps was considered a fast connection. Of course, back then, few people had access to Usenet and even fewer to the Internet.
Dedicated 56K circuits used to be big bucks. Now at least the downstream side can be done over a dialup.
In any case, I think you hit the nail on the head regarding the broadband Catch-22: much of the reason I would want a broadband connection in the first place would be to run my own domain - which is prohibited by the TOS. With my own mail server, for instance, I could deal with spam quite effectively, rather than having to rely on an uncaring ISP to deal (or most likely not deal) with the problem.
I remember when cable modems were coming out, and reading an article somewhere that $BROADBAND_ISP was wondering why @USERS weren't putting up all sorts of broadband content (like video clips!) on their personal web pages. Of course, the problem was, $BROADBAND_ISP only allocated 10 MB of space for personal pages, cut off pages that exceeded an unreasonably small transfer limit, and forbade @USERS from running their own web servers, which would have made the 10 MB limit academic.
This morning, connectivity was still available, but the mail and news servers locked me out. I went out for a bike ride, and when I came back this afternoon, service was completely out (the CABLE light was not lit).
AT&T has lost what little goodwill I had for it. That's twice in one year that they've screwed high-speed internet access subscribers. My employer had a Northpoint-provisioned DSL circuit. Now this. I knew there was a reason I didn't cancel my 56K dialup account.
Broadband - it's as dead as disco.
Re:But what can mortals achive?
on
Biking @ 80 MPH
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· Score: 1
I'm 37 years old now. This spring, I started out on my mountain bike after eight years of not riding, going progressively longer distances. The longest I managed was 52 miles on it. I then bought a recumbent (mentioned in another thread), and started riding even longer distances. My longest ride was about 124 miles, averaging 15.9 MPH based on rolling time, or 12.7 MPH on clock time (including rest stops). On the recumbent, my typical cruising speed on level ground is about 18-20 MPH. Give me a slight downhill and it becomes 24-26 MPH; add a strong tailwind and it becomes 30-32. A steep downhill run can be 40 coasting. I haven't tried any mountainous territory with it
After being a couch potato for so long, I'm in much better shape this year. I've ridden with another recumbent rider who's near 70 years old, and he's a GO FAST rider, so you're never too old. That being said, I'm no Lance Armstrong...
Back in June, I bought a RANS Rocket, a short wheelbase bike available for about US$1000. When I went to the bike shop to test ride it, it took me about four tries to get going the first time. Once I figured it out, though, it was easy.
It has been a blast! I've ridden it 2200 miles (3540 km) in less than 3 months, and I've taken the longest rides I've ever taken, including a 124 mile (200 km) ride on August 26. No way I could have done that on an upright!
Other riders who have tried to draft me report that there is just a very small pocket really close to me that's draftable. I don't have a fairing or a tailbox on the bike.
In my experience, it is slower uphill, faster on flats, and much faster downhill. Some find certain designs more comfortable or prefer certain handling characteristics, so test rides are important. Short wheelbase is a bit tricky to ride at slow speeds (particularly turning, due to crank/wheel interference). At speed, the Rocket corners like a sports car. A very light touch is needed on the handlebars at regular riding speeds.
No chance of me breaking 80 MPH! I have made it to 40 on relatively serious downhills like one on the Illinois River bluff near Ottawa. In the mountains, I'd need some lower low gears to climb mountain grades, though; even some of the river bluff hills on the 200K ride were tough.
Maybe if your case isn't properly vented, or have a defective CPU fan.
I've run distributed.net on one of my machines for literally years on a continuous basis. I used to run my other boxen continuously too, but have stopped doing so recently, only because of power consumption.
I'm 36 now. Last spring, after years of steady weight gain, I had reached 245 pounds/111 kg. I decided that I really didn't want to hit 250. I was (and still am) a soda-holic, so I switched from the sugar variety to diet. A 20 fl.oz. bottle of sugar pop will pour 250 calories or so down your gullet, compared to zero for diet. I also started eating a little less, cutting down on snacks and eating slightly smaller portions. Throw out half your french fries; have one taco instead of two; eat a bagel instead of a doughnut!
In the year since I've made these little changes, I've steadily dropped poundage - I'm down to about 168 (76 kg) now. There's still a slight paunch if I slouch, but compared to last year, I look positively skinny now, and none of last year's pants fit me anymore. It's weird looking at that new, much smaller pair of pants and realizing that they fit me just fine!
I've normally been able to get about 20 minutes total of walking in on weekdays, walking from the train station to the office. Now, with Chicago fuel prices reaching insane (by US standards) levels, I've dusted off my bicycle and started pedaling, instead of hopping in the car and going for long weekend drives. Even though my new car is much more fuel-efficient than my old truck, the bike's better for me...
The World Government Individual Genome Index indicates that your genetic makeup contains 1,984 patented genes. Report to your local World Government office for summary castration.
There is a free codec being worked on - Ogg Vorbis, headed by Monty of cdparanoia fame. Currently it is not even alpha-test, but it is possible to encode audio with it. There's also a plugin for xmms, still a little buggy, but that'll be taken care of. You can also play Vorbis files with the example decoder, piped through sox, if your copy of sox has the 'ossdsp' code compiled in.
The Ogg project is as much about research as it is about coding - it looks like they're combing through existing signal processing research to come up with something that's patent-free.
With the ultra-bare-bones example encoder, I've encoded some songs - it sounds quite nice, at least as good as MP3, maybe a little better to my ears. Currently it only seems to do VBR streams, but I assume that will change in the future - the goal is to allow specifying fixed or variable rates, with floors and ceilings for VBR.
It'll be interesting to see if they make a video codec...
I have a Linux box running on a cable modem, serving IP Masq to the rest of the house. I used the PMFirewall package, heavily hacked for my needs, to generate an ipchains configuration that logs denied port accesses. Since December 4, 1999, when the cable modem went active, I've received 167 port probes from 48 different hosts. Here's a breakdown of ports... note that Back Orifice and NetBus are well-represented, but the kiddies are also looking for root exploits as well.
...I used one in a previous job. There were actually two different Z8000's, one with a segmented address scheme, and one without.
The box I used was a Central Data Multibus box, running an ancient, crufty version of Microsoft XENIX. As with anything Microsoft, it crashed fairly regularly.:-) A 386 would run circles around it...
Slashdot Mirror
Elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned Dan Kurzman's book Blood and Water - it goes into great detail about the sabotage of the Norsk Hydro heavy-water plant, and the workings of the Nazi A-bomb effort. It's a riveting read, that makes James Bond look like a piker.
Aside from the German program, there was also a British program; rivalries with the Americans hampered both the US and British efforts.
Not mentioned in Blood and Water, Japan also had an A-bomb program of its own, and circumstantial evidence suggests that the Japanese managed to explode a test weapon. This is discussed in Robert K. Wilcox's work, Japan's Secret War (ISBN 1-56924-815-X). Much of this work was carried out in what is now North Korea. A giant industrial complex near Hungnam was dismantled by the Soviets and shipped to Russia after the war ended.
In 1942, a prototype reactor in Leipzig exploded when heavy water leaked into a uranium shell, shortly before it would have reached criticality. [2]
We're DAMN LUCKY that Heisenberg's efforts ultimately failed.
[1] Blood and Water: Sabotaging Hitler's Bomb (ISBN 0-8050-3206-1), by Dan Kurzman, p.35.
[2] Ibid, p. 38.
As he put it:
-Frank Zappa, "I'm the Slime"
Example: Your spiffy Sony MiniDisc recorder sets the "do-not-copy" flag on anything you record, even if it's your own music that you're recording.
With a locked-down Internet and locked-down computers, you'll have to fork over big bucks if you want to actually distribute your own works to the public.
Maybe the Amish had the right idea after all.
Dedicated 56K circuits used to be big bucks. Now at least the downstream side can be done over a dialup.
In any case, I think you hit the nail on the head regarding the broadband Catch-22: much of the reason I would want a broadband connection in the first place would be to run my own domain - which is prohibited by the TOS. With my own mail server, for instance, I could deal with spam quite effectively, rather than having to rely on an uncaring ISP to deal (or most likely not deal) with the problem.
I remember when cable modems were coming out, and reading an article somewhere that $BROADBAND_ISP was wondering why @USERS weren't putting up all sorts of broadband content (like video clips!) on their personal web pages. Of course, the problem was, $BROADBAND_ISP only allocated 10 MB of space for personal pages, cut off pages that exceeded an unreasonably small transfer limit, and forbade @USERS from running their own web servers, which would have made the 10 MB limit academic.
Sigh. I'm this close || to pulling the plug.
Note that they can use a transparent proxy to log all of your (port 80) website visits. *breaks out tinfoil hat*
Gotta love those bang-path addresses converted to mailto: links!
Broadband - it's dead as disco.
This morning, connectivity was still available, but the mail and news servers locked me out. I went out for a bike ride, and when I came back this afternoon, service was completely out (the CABLE light was not lit).
AT&T has lost what little goodwill I had for it. That's twice in one year that they've screwed high-speed internet access subscribers. My employer had a Northpoint-provisioned DSL circuit. Now this. I knew there was a reason I didn't cancel my 56K dialup account.
Broadband - it's as dead as disco.
After being a couch potato for so long, I'm in much better shape this year. I've ridden with another recumbent rider who's near 70 years old, and he's a GO FAST rider, so you're never too old. That being said, I'm no Lance Armstrong...
It has been a blast! I've ridden it 2200 miles (3540 km) in less than 3 months, and I've taken the longest rides I've ever taken, including a 124 mile (200 km) ride on August 26. No way I could have done that on an upright!
Other riders who have tried to draft me report that there is just a very small pocket really close to me that's draftable. I don't have a fairing or a tailbox on the bike.
In my experience, it is slower uphill, faster on flats, and much faster downhill. Some find certain designs more comfortable or prefer certain handling characteristics, so test rides are important. Short wheelbase is a bit tricky to ride at slow speeds (particularly turning, due to crank/wheel interference). At speed, the Rocket corners like a sports car. A very light touch is needed on the handlebars at regular riding speeds.
No chance of me breaking 80 MPH! I have made it to 40 on relatively serious downhills like one on the Illinois River bluff near Ottawa. In the mountains, I'd need some lower low gears to climb mountain grades, though; even some of the river bluff hills on the 200K ride were tough.
I'd say it was the best $1000 I've ever spent.
Sony's CD Mavica digital cameras also use the 3" discs, FWIW.
On the other claw, I'd just as soon not support Sony, given its involvement with the MPAA and RIAA.
Too bad Olympus doesn't have a CD-based digicam...
I've run distributed.net on one of my machines for literally years on a continuous basis. I used to run my other boxen continuously too, but have stopped doing so recently, only because of power consumption.
--
In the year since I've made these little changes, I've steadily dropped poundage - I'm down to about 168 (76 kg) now. There's still a slight paunch if I slouch, but compared to last year, I look positively skinny now, and none of last year's pants fit me anymore. It's weird looking at that new, much smaller pair of pants and realizing that they fit me just fine!
I've normally been able to get about 20 minutes total of walking in on weekdays, walking from the train station to the office. Now, with Chicago fuel prices reaching insane (by US standards) levels, I've dusted off my bicycle and started pedaling, instead of hopping in the car and going for long weekend drives. Even though my new car is much more fuel-efficient than my old truck, the bike's better for me...
--
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.
Well, now, it's suddenly possible for everyone to publish to a worldwide audience. This scares the hell out of politicans and Big Media alike.
What little hope for the future that I had is fading fast. :(
--
OK, I'll feed the troll.
Small-time sites like Google and BBC News, for instance?
--
The World Government Individual Genome Index indicates that your genetic makeup contains 1,984 patented genes. Report to your local World Government office for summary castration.
--
Although they don't recommend using it for such purposes, Junkbuster can also be used for blocking.
--
Perhaps Babelfish could add L33t5p34K to their translation capabilities...
--
Worked fine for me when I brought it up...
--
The Ogg project is as much about research as it is about coding - it looks like they're combing through existing signal processing research to come up with something that's patent-free.
With the ultra-bare-bones example encoder, I've encoded some songs - it sounds quite nice, at least as good as MP3, maybe a little better to my ears. Currently it only seems to do VBR streams, but I assume that will change in the future - the goal is to allow specifying fixed or variable rates, with floors and ceilings for VBR.
It'll be interesting to see if they make a video codec...
--
Be sure to combine your crypto with steganography.
--
Of course, that doesn't solve the problem of clueless relatives sending you infected file attachments. :(
--
Isn't that the frequency used by microwave ovens?
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The box I used was a Central Data Multibus box, running an ancient, crufty version of Microsoft XENIX. As with anything Microsoft, it crashed fairly regularly. :-) A 386 would run circles around it...
--