It will break if you have enough pairs of challenge images, and responses to analyize. There is no doubt about it. Even the Enigma had a bigger key space. You don't even need the advanced techniques to break this, as a slightly refined version of the brute force analysis, determining which segments on the card must be solid, and which must be clear in order to match the pairs you have could work. The advanced techniques could reduce the number of pairs needed somewhat.
The real fact is that the security is not ideal, but it very well may be better than the passwords the users would otherwise be using.
AIUI VPN's are basically just Ethernet proxy systems. (Sometimes it works at the tcp/udp layer instead), simulating being plugged directly into that network, while actually plugged in someplace else. The naming is absymal, but this is really useful for enterprises. Services can be blocked at the edge firewall, and off-site employees access them through the VPN. That is nice for several reasons, such as security, and the ability for employees to remotely access devices that would never be publicly exposed to the internet, such as printers.
The video shows a massively simplified prototype. The real version will have segments from 12 character positions. The pattern on the screen may contain segments also present on the card. Overlaying the cards will result in only around 6 valid digits. The remaining positions generate non-valid characters which are ignored.
The result is much more secure. If properly implemented server side, such that the chalenge code is generated before knowing the username, such that the challenge code itself cannot leak any information, I fully believe it will require an absolute minimum of 10-12 pairs of challenge images and responses to determine the pattern, and quite likely 30 or more.
This is definately quite weak cryptographically speaking, but remember that the card has segments for say 12 digits, but only around 6 digits would be entered. The rest of the characters form gibberish. Further, segments in the challenge may be presnet even if they are also present on the card.
So after 3-4 observed logins, you will most likely have gained enough information to successfully identify some segments, but I expect it would take a minimum of 10-12 to fully determine the code, and often more. That is still extremely poor by cryptographic standards, but is more than sufficient to overcome many phishing attacks, since most people will only use a phishing site once. However, local attacks like van-eck phreaking (TEMPEST), or spyware could easily be used to observe enough attempts to determine the pattern.
It also has a significant vulnerability not present with systems like that RSA token. Namely it has the same flaw standard physical keys have. Access to the card for long enough to get a sufficiently high quality photograph (seconds) is enough to be able to reproduce the card.
There is a mixture here of various security levels. At the most secure level this type of technology could create your token has random segments of say 12 7-segment display style digits. When you go to the site, on the logon page a random set of segments of 12 7-segment display style digits. Please note that this random pattern would be changed on every attempt, and is is fully independent of which user is logging in.
The user overlays his or her card. The combination of the two sets of random segments will result in between 0 and 12 (inclusive) well-formed digits. The user enters these. At the other end, the computer looks up the user id, to determine the window pattern of the user. It super imposes the window pattern on the random challenge pattern, and determines the well formed digits. It compares that to the code entered.
In this case, since the challenge segments do not in any way relate to the specific user (being purely random) this can leak no information about the users card.
Similarly lets say we had a phishing site. This site could control the pattern displayed to the user. If the user enters the code this gives relatively little information about window. This is because the site would know what numbers were formed, but it has no idea which of the character positions those digits came from. If one logs into the same phishing site enough times, it could eventually determine the pattern, but it is unlikely that a person would log into the same phishing site more than once.
Combined with periodic replacement of the card, this system could be reasonably secure in a practical sense, although fairly weak cryptographically speaking. Thus this should be used to complement an existing password, rather than replace it, and should be combined with standard anti-brute force protections.
I do know that a form of micro-evolution is how the body produces antibodies. The antibody producing cells attempt to produce mutations in the antibody gene. Some form of regulatory system promotes the cells that produce the antibodies that best bind to the pathogen, and destroys others. Eventually antibodies that bind really well to the pathogen will result.
I'm sure that is is simplified explanation, but that is roughly what I was taught in biochemistry.
But I don't think mutations otherwise occur at high enough a rate in other cases for micro-evolution to occur.
Perhaps the best option for cleaning up the mess, is to get both sides to agree to his return and reinstatement with him immediately (first act upon arrival back in the country) asking the congresses for an amendment with a proper removal system, based on impeachment. (The congress having already agreed with the proposed wording.) Then if the country so desires they can hold impeachment proceedings, and after giving him a chance to defend his actions in the proceedings, remove him or not as appropriate. In any event, he would agree to peacefully step down at the end of his constitutional term.
That would of course require both parties being willing to agree to that. It sounds to me like Congress and the courts, and even the new president might agree to that in order to help suppress any backlash (but no guarantees), but I have no idea if Manuel Zelaya would agree to this. If he really has dictatorial aspirations as some claim, he may not find that reasonable.
I'm guessing this works by having two liquid crystal layers.
A liquid crystal layer has two states. in one state light passes through with no change to the polarization. In the other state, there is a 90 degree change in polarization.
So take a bog standard LCD monitor. Add a large single segment liquid crystal layer to the front. So this new layer has just one giant pixel, making it very inexpensive. (In reality for performance reasons you would probably use multiple smaller segments, but you don't need anywhere near one per pixel.)
Now we need to add a bit more electronics. For 3d we need two image sources, but we only have one screen to display them. So we add some hardware to interleave the images. If we were going really high-end, we might use a monitor that supports a 120 Hz framerate. Then we can interleave the two 60 Hz images without any loss. Otherwise, we do every other frame, and thus lose half of our framerate.
Now all we do is swap that second liquid crystal layer to the opposite polarization at each Vsync. A trival way to do that would be to drive the monitor second liquid crystal from a toggle flip-flop, clocked by Vsync. In reality one would probably do something a bit more sophisticated, so as to ensure left single is always up/down, and right is always left/right, or vice versa.
Does anybody know if that is what they do? If not, are there any particular issues with what I described above?
Considering the nature of font files, I tend to doubt that there is any additional sandboxing beyond that provided by the system's OpenType (MPEG-4 Part 22) renderer. Sure, the kerning support features a Turing-complete language. At best that means a maliciously constructed font can run forever, hanging an application. There is also the possibility of exploiting a buffer overflow in the font renderer, although that is technically an OS vulnerability.
I would not be so sure of that. They post a screen shot in the story. The 12 50 comes out to 46.88, which while a bit steep could easily be the bill on filling up a fairly large gas tank, or buying 2 cartons of cigarettes. Or buying a carton of cigarettes and filling up a small tank.
Interestingly, at least one other story on this issue also happened to use the same value. Perhaps this bug was specific to the dollar amount 46.88 in some way.
Cats do have a strong independent streak. While they are often trainable, it does have a fair bit to do with them being willing to be trained. If they are willing or neutral about the activity being trained, they will be fairly receptive. If they dislike the activity being trained it can be difficult to impossible to train them. They most certainly can learn to come when you call them, although even well trained cats will occasionally choose not to come. My cat for example will often come to me if I talk in her direction, even if I do not use her name, and even if I am not talking to her. But at other times, she will not, because she has something else she wishes to do.
If a cat truly does not want to do something it is almost impossible to use training to compel them to do so. Similarly, if a cat really wants to do something (and does not require human assistance to do so), it can be difficult to stop them. If the activity is undesirable, then there are techniques that do work, but in the general case it can be quite difficult to convince them to do something else.
Cats are definitely very social creatures, and are perfectly willing to include humans into their social structure, although admittedly, humans are not counted as cats within this social structure. Feeding them definitely is part of why most domestic cats like their humans, but they do generally enjoy attention by humans.
Obviously much of the above does not apply well to completely feral cats, although even most feral cats can be domesticated.
It varies significantly. Google Documents for example is virtually all client side, which is why it supports offline mode if you have Google Gears installed.
We should just start referring to directories on a computer as "Bags of holding" or "That thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is"
By the way, how was one supposed to figure out that "That thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is", was some form of container? I believe I only came to realize that through spoilers for the puzzle that required it.
It's relative though, plutonium is pretty toxic and it's half-life is 25,000 years.
Pu-239 has a half life of about that. But then isn't the real radiation danger in Plutonium not due to direct decay, but through spontaneous fission chains? (Even in subcritical masses, significant (but not sustained) spontaneous fission chains can occur, no?)
Never the less, I may have been off by a bit in the numbers. I remember reading though that the fissile ash of an IFR contains short half-life highly radioactive components, as well as some other components with half-lives so large they do not emit enough radiation to be a concern for human health. (Obviously, the real analysis looked at the whole decay chain of said components, and other nuclear reactions involving the components that can occur naturally were also examined).
The secrecy was maintained after the war for so long for one reason and one reason only. Namely that the USA and UK were using the same techniques to read the secret messages of a number of countries and if it became known that the USA and UK had this technology, these countries would replace their codes with something a LOT more secure.
and you're saying that is a bad thing?
To the US and UK, losing the ability to break the codes of others sure seems like a bad thing.
Surely he does. He deserves two apologies. Unfortunately, one of them, namely the persecution for homosexuality is simply not possible. To apologize to him specifically for that, while not doing the same for all the others is tantamount to singling him out because he was also a codebreaker.
Apologizing for failing to recognize his code-breaking work is possible. There are a sufficiently small number of them (all with identities known to the Crown (i.e. in the records)) that apologizing to all of them is viable. However, people tend to be somewhat adverse to apologizing to the dead (with the exception of those known personally). So this also seems unlikely.
He is in good company though. Darn near everybody is owed apologies that will never come.
Only some Protestant denominations use grape juice. Others use wine, as does the Catholic Church. Also when it is back in the rectory, it still just food/drink. At that point it has still not been transformed (literally, symbolically, or whatever) into the Body and Blood.
Not that it really matters, being all a manifestation of defects in the Human thought process.
What about a magical soul that can move matter implies God?
For that matter, several common interpretations of quantum mechanics indicate that the world is not strictly causal. Yet few people claim quantum mechanics implies the existence of a magical soul.
I've not used it, but the following is my understanding based on the website:
Moblin is designed to support social networking, media viweing/playing, and web browsing.
Social networking integration is a main point. Update your flicker status from a drop-down panel of the main toolbar.
For media viewing the system intends to allow to to browse local and remote media, with integration with services like flicker and last.fm.
I did not see any IM integration in the short introduction video, although it is a fairly obvious idea. The status panel provides the obvious place to adjust IM status, and the people panel would be an obvious way to launch an IM conversation with somebody.
For web browsing it provides an integrated web-browser based on Gecko (the rendering engine found in Firefox). A decent web-browser is actually very uncommon in integrated environments like Moblin.
If you want to do just about anything else, you must either use the web-browser to do it, or launch a regular Linux application, in which case, as always, the entire experience falls apart.
I know many people who really don't use their computers for anything else, with the exception of some limited Word processing style work. If Google Docs is sufficent, then it might be a decent OS for them, once it has support for their favorite social networking sites fully integrated, and more kinks worked out.
Even those who do use their computer for more, they are not likely to use their netbook for that. After all these are exactly the sort of things a netbook is marketed for.
So the grandparent is using his netbook for more than it is marketed for. So when he tries an OS designed specifically around what netbooks are marketed for, he is not satisfied. Big surprise!
Dirty bombs don't even need a full scale power-plant to make. One could literally build a reactor in a backyard to generate excellent material for a dirty bomb. All the information needed is out there, although not in a handy "How to make a nuclear reactor in your backyard" packet.
Successfully building, transporting, and using a dirty bomb is the hard part. Relative to that, obtaining the radioactive material is terribly simple. So the IFR design is not a real risk for that.
The radioactive waste produced will decay to the level of natural uranium radiation in only 200 years, which is worlds better than the thousands of years it takes for the "spent" fuel of current systems to decay.
Since it will be much more radioactive than the spent fuel products of PWR then it is likely to be 'shorter' half life than those.
That sounds about right, with the exception of the few components that have half lives so long that they do not emit a significant amount of radiation. Half lives in the hundreds of thousands of years.
Though from other information I've read the 'fissile ash' of an IFR would take around 600 years to decay through all the daughter products. Now if only we could design an IFR reactor with an operational lifespan to match the decay characteristics of the spent fuel.
Why does it need to have an operational lifespan that long? If you build it using the design of "nothing, not even waste products ever leave", isn't the important thing that it be structurally sound, and be able safely contain the waste for that period, after it is shut down?
Fuel does not need to be precisely fabricated like in many other reactor designs. It can simply be cast into the correct shape.
The process is called "Pyroprocessing" and was a stage of the project that was not completed. It meant dissolving the spent fuel 'cartridge' of an IFR in an acid bath and using an electrolytic process to recover fissionable fuel. It was a significant component of the 'IFR' facility design which was meant to be contained completely underground. A 'Pyro-process' (a new type of fuel reprocessing facility) was planned to be sited with the reactor and fuel to and from the reactor facility went by underground tunnels. The fuel cartridges were to be made in a remote environment in an atmosphere of an inert gas (argon - I think). The idea, fissile material went into the facility and nothing comes out.
Fair enough. Obviously the reprocessing facility must be present, or it would simply be an LMR, not an IFR. My understanding is that in theory an IFR could be constructed such that the fissile ash could leave, although that creates real logistics problems. Such as storing the waste. The concerns being that the waste is even more radioactive than "normal" waste, but need not be stored nearly as long.
The reactor is not a serious proliferation concern, because once the fuel is started in the reactor it remains extremely radioactive until it is completely spent...
and decays through it's daughter products. The 'fissile ash' is very radioactive.
However that risk exists with conventional reactor designs, and is even worse, because of the larger amount of waste produced by those designs....even though an explanation of the design would make it clear that constructing such a plant would reduce proliferation risk.
IFR has three characteristics which make it a design worth developing
Weapons grade Plutonium can be used as fuel
Spent fuel from PWR can be used as fuel
U-238, or depleted uranium can be used as fuel
apart from the first two, being able to use up U-238 is a positive for this design. Unfortunately the IFR design is let down by current day materials technology - and the fact that a reactor of commercial scale would be cooled by roughly 60-100,000 tons of sodium. You want to make sure there is no chance of a leak *into* the system. Unless you could use a different type of metal the sodium is necessary to achieve the fuel burn-up rates of an IFR which are around 19% as opposed to the 0.3% of a PWR.
If nuclear power plants had to pay for waste disposal in proportion to how long the fuel takes to decay, that would almost certainly offs
Anybody who pays has the right to create a recording of the song and sell it. In the alternative they may buy a license to sell an existing copy of the work.
However, I was mistaken. The Compulsory license precludes any possibility of copyright protection on the new recording (as a derivative), despite the fact that the work would otherwise have that protection. That would apparently give the copyright holder full rights to the new recording, although obviously non-exclusive with respect to production and sale of the new recording.
Therefore, the original copyright holder can license the new recording under CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-SA.
This does leave the issue of somebody who creates a new recording of the song, but failed to obtain a compulsory license, and refuses to offer the work under the CC license. AIUI, they would have copyright protections on the recording, but due to being a derivative, cannot produce and sell copies without a license from the original copyright holder.
But lets say they ignored that, and just infringed the copyright of the original copyright holder. the result of this would be a copy of the work that cannot be used under a CC license since a copyright holder refuses to place the work under that license. In fact it can't be distributed at all without infringement. I don't believe even a compulsory license could make it distributable, since the phonorecord had been fixed without permission of a copyright holder and without utilizing the compulsory license.
The real nasty issue with these services are that they are claimed to be helpful to users. The issue is that it is not helpful. Modern browsers already provide options to redirect NXDOMAIN's to a search engine, or other useful things.
For example, Google chrome provides a nice page that says "DNS error - cannot find server" in the corner, and provides a helpful search box that is pre-filled with the words found in the domain name. (I have no idea what algorithm is being used to find the word breaks, but it seems to work reasonably well.)
If you have Google Toolbar installed in IE, it does the same thing (except for having Google Toolbar branding rather than Chrome Branding).
Other common search toolbars provide similar services.
I will admit that IE's default error page, and Firefox's default error page are not as helpful to most users, but rather than hijack DNS, why don't you (ISPs) just add the "feature" to the IE toolbar you provide on your Set-Up CD. Those who have no use for such a service don't use those CDs anyway.
No. A songwriter can license a work such that all recordings are either available under a CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-SA license, or are infringing. However, that does not buy you much. You cannot force the infringing copy to be relicensed (although one could force it to cease being distributed, and the performer may prefer relicensing to that). If you play that infringing copy on the radio, you owe royalties to the performer (assuming the work was licensed as such) even though the work is infringing.
Further, all of the above ignores the idiotic Compulsory Licensing, which as I understand it, would allow a performance to be neither CC licensed, nor infringing, providing they pay a third party a large sum, which will be held for you, but which you cannot access without signing a draconian contract, which will rid you of may of your rights to the work.
The sad fact is that US Copyright Law for music is highly corrupted, with multiple special exceptions that do not apply in the case of virtually any other kind of work.
Slashdot Mirror
It will break if you have enough pairs of challenge images, and responses to analyize. There is no doubt about it. Even the Enigma had a bigger key space. You don't even need the advanced techniques to break this, as a slightly refined version of the brute force analysis, determining which segments on the card must be solid, and which must be clear in order to match the pairs you have could work. The advanced techniques could reduce the number of pairs needed somewhat.
The real fact is that the security is not ideal, but it very well may be better than the passwords the users would otherwise be using.
AIUI VPN's are basically just Ethernet proxy systems. (Sometimes it works at the tcp/udp layer instead), simulating being plugged directly into that network, while actually plugged in someplace else. The naming is absymal, but this is really useful for enterprises. Services can be blocked at the edge firewall, and off-site employees access them through the VPN. That is nice for several reasons, such as security, and the ability for employees to remotely access devices that would never be publicly exposed to the internet, such as printers.
The video shows a massively simplified prototype.
The real version will have segments from 12 character positions.
The pattern on the screen may contain segments also present on the card.
Overlaying the cards will result in only around 6 valid digits. The remaining positions generate non-valid characters which are ignored.
The result is much more secure. If properly implemented server side, such that the chalenge code is generated before knowing the username, such that the challenge code itself cannot leak any information, I fully believe it will require an absolute minimum of 10-12 pairs of challenge images and responses to determine the pattern, and quite likely 30 or more.
Which is why the system lets you resize the image with a pull handle.
This is definately quite weak cryptographically speaking, but remember that the card has segments for say 12 digits, but only around 6 digits would be entered. The rest of the characters form gibberish. Further, segments in the challenge may be presnet even if they are also present on the card.
So after 3-4 observed logins, you will most likely have gained enough information to successfully identify some segments, but I expect it would take a minimum of 10-12 to fully determine the code, and often more. That is still extremely poor by cryptographic standards, but is more than sufficient to overcome many phishing attacks, since most people will only use a phishing site once. However, local attacks like van-eck phreaking (TEMPEST), or spyware could easily be used to observe enough attempts to determine the pattern.
It also has a significant vulnerability not present with systems like that RSA token. Namely it has the same flaw standard physical keys have. Access to the card for long enough to get a sufficiently high quality photograph (seconds) is enough to be able to reproduce the card.
There is a mixture here of various security levels. At the most secure level this type of technology could create your token has random segments of say 12 7-segment display style digits. When you go to the site, on the logon page a random set of segments of 12 7-segment display style digits. Please note that this random pattern would be changed on every attempt, and is is fully independent of which user is logging in.
The user overlays his or her card. The combination of the two sets of random segments will result in between 0 and 12 (inclusive) well-formed digits. The user enters these.
At the other end, the computer looks up the user id, to determine the window pattern of the user. It super imposes the window pattern on the random challenge pattern, and determines the well formed digits. It compares that to the code entered.
In this case, since the challenge segments do not in any way relate to the specific user (being purely random) this can leak no information about the users card.
Similarly lets say we had a phishing site. This site could control the pattern displayed to the user. If the user enters the code this gives relatively little information about window. This is because the site would know what numbers were formed, but it has no idea which of the character positions those digits came from. If one logs into the same phishing site enough times, it could eventually determine the pattern, but it is unlikely that a person would log into the same phishing site more than once.
Combined with periodic replacement of the card, this system could be reasonably secure in a practical sense, although fairly weak cryptographically speaking. Thus this should be used to complement an existing password, rather than replace it, and should be combined with standard anti-brute force protections.
I do know that a form of micro-evolution is how the body produces antibodies. The antibody producing cells attempt to produce mutations in the antibody gene. Some form of regulatory system promotes the cells that produce the antibodies that best bind to the pathogen, and destroys others. Eventually antibodies that bind really well to the pathogen will result.
I'm sure that is is simplified explanation, but that is roughly what I was taught in biochemistry.
But I don't think mutations otherwise occur at high enough a rate in other cases for micro-evolution to occur.
Perhaps the best option for cleaning up the mess, is to get both sides to agree to his return and reinstatement with him immediately (first act upon arrival back in the country) asking the congresses for an amendment with a proper removal system, based on impeachment. (The congress having already agreed with the proposed wording.) Then if the country so desires they can hold impeachment proceedings, and after giving him a chance to defend his actions in the proceedings, remove him or not as appropriate. In any event, he would agree to peacefully step down at the end of his constitutional term.
That would of course require both parties being willing to agree to that. It sounds to me like Congress and the courts, and even the new president might agree to that in order to help suppress any backlash (but no guarantees), but I have no idea if Manuel Zelaya would agree to this. If he really has dictatorial aspirations as some claim, he may not find that reasonable.
I'm guessing this works by having two liquid crystal layers.
A liquid crystal layer has two states. in one state light passes through with no change to the polarization. In the other state, there is a 90 degree change in polarization.
So take a bog standard LCD monitor. Add a large single segment liquid crystal layer to the front. So this new layer has just one giant pixel, making it very inexpensive. (In reality for performance reasons you would probably use multiple smaller segments, but you don't need anywhere near one per pixel.)
Now we need to add a bit more electronics. For 3d we need two image sources, but we only have one screen to display them. So we add some hardware to interleave the images. If we were going really high-end, we might use a monitor that supports a 120 Hz framerate. Then we can interleave the two 60 Hz images without any loss. Otherwise, we do every other frame, and thus lose half of our framerate.
Now all we do is swap that second liquid crystal layer to the opposite polarization at each Vsync. A trival way to do that would be to drive the monitor second liquid crystal from a toggle flip-flop, clocked by Vsync. In reality one would probably do something a bit more sophisticated, so as to ensure left single is always up/down, and right is always left/right, or vice versa.
Does anybody know if that is what they do? If not, are there any particular issues with what I described above?
Considering the nature of font files, I tend to doubt that there is any additional sandboxing beyond that provided by the system's OpenType (MPEG-4 Part 22) renderer. Sure, the kerning support features a Turing-complete language. At best that means a maliciously constructed font can run forever, hanging an application. There is also the possibility of exploiting a buffer overflow in the font renderer, although that is technically an OS vulnerability.
I would not be so sure of that. They post a screen shot in the story.
The 12 50 comes out to 46.88, which while a bit steep could easily be the bill on filling up a fairly large gas tank, or buying 2 cartons of cigarettes. Or buying a carton of cigarettes and filling up a small tank.
Interestingly, at least one other story on this issue also happened to use the same value. Perhaps this bug was specific to the dollar amount 46.88 in some way.
Cats do have a strong independent streak. While they are often trainable, it does have a fair bit to do with them being willing to be trained. If they are willing or neutral about the activity being trained, they will be fairly receptive. If they dislike the activity being trained it can be difficult to impossible to train them. They most certainly can learn to come when you call them, although even well trained cats will occasionally choose not to come. My cat for example will often come to me if I talk in her direction, even if I do not use her name, and even if I am not talking to her. But at other times, she will not, because she has something else she wishes to do.
If a cat truly does not want to do something it is almost impossible to use training to compel them to do so. Similarly, if a cat really wants to do something (and does not require human assistance to do so), it can be difficult to stop them. If the activity is undesirable, then there are techniques that do work, but in the general case it can be quite difficult to convince them to do something else.
Cats are definitely very social creatures, and are perfectly willing to include humans into their social structure, although admittedly, humans are not counted as cats within this social structure. Feeding them definitely is part of why most domestic cats like their humans, but they do generally enjoy attention by humans.
Obviously much of the above does not apply well to completely feral cats, although even most feral cats can be domesticated.
It varies significantly. Google Documents for example is virtually all client side, which is why it supports offline mode if you have Google Gears installed.
We should just start referring to directories on a computer as "Bags of holding" or "That thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is"
By the way, how was one supposed to figure out that "That thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is", was some form of container? I believe I only came to realize that through spoilers for the puzzle that required it.
It's relative though, plutonium is pretty toxic and it's half-life is 25,000 years.
Pu-239 has a half life of about that. But then isn't the real radiation danger in Plutonium not due to direct decay, but through spontaneous fission chains? (Even in subcritical masses, significant (but not sustained) spontaneous fission chains can occur, no?)
Never the less, I may have been off by a bit in the numbers. I remember reading though that the fissile ash of an IFR contains short half-life highly radioactive components, as well as some other components with half-lives so large they do not emit enough radiation to be a concern for human health. (Obviously, the real analysis looked at the whole decay chain of said components, and other nuclear reactions involving the components that can occur naturally were also examined).
The secrecy was maintained after the war for so long for one reason and one reason only. Namely that the USA and UK were using the same techniques to read the secret messages of a number of countries and if it became known that the USA and UK had this technology, these countries would replace their codes with something a LOT more secure.
and you're saying that is a bad thing?
To the US and UK, losing the ability to break the codes of others sure seems like a bad thing.
Surely he does. He deserves two apologies. Unfortunately, one of them, namely the persecution for homosexuality is simply not possible. To apologize to him specifically for that, while not doing the same for all the others is tantamount to singling him out because he was also a codebreaker.
Apologizing for failing to recognize his code-breaking work is possible. There are a sufficiently small number of them (all with identities known to the Crown (i.e. in the records)) that apologizing to all of them is viable. However, people tend to be somewhat adverse to apologizing to the dead (with the exception of those known personally). So this also seems unlikely.
He is in good company though. Darn near everybody is owed apologies that will never come.
Only some Protestant denominations use grape juice. Others use wine, as does the Catholic Church.
Also when it is back in the rectory, it still just food/drink. At that point it has still not been transformed (literally, symbolically, or whatever) into the Body and Blood.
Not that it really matters, being all a manifestation of defects in the Human thought process.
What about a magical soul that can move matter implies God?
For that matter, several common interpretations of quantum mechanics indicate that the world is not strictly causal. Yet few people claim quantum mechanics implies the existence of a magical soul.
In other words you have a false dichotomy there.
I've not used it, but the following is my understanding based on the website:
Moblin is designed to support social networking, media viweing/playing, and web browsing.
Social networking integration is a main point. Update your flicker status from a drop-down panel of the main toolbar.
For media viewing the system intends to allow to to browse local and remote media, with integration with services like flicker and last.fm.
I did not see any IM integration in the short introduction video, although it is a fairly obvious idea. The status panel provides the obvious place to adjust IM status, and the people panel would be an obvious way to launch an IM conversation with somebody.
For web browsing it provides an integrated web-browser based on Gecko (the rendering engine found in Firefox). A decent web-browser is actually very uncommon in integrated environments like Moblin.
If you want to do just about anything else, you must either use the web-browser to do it, or launch a regular Linux application, in which case, as always, the entire experience falls apart.
I know many people who really don't use their computers for anything else, with the exception of some limited Word processing style work. If Google Docs is sufficent, then it might be a decent OS for them, once it has support for their favorite social networking sites fully integrated, and more kinks worked out.
Even those who do use their computer for more, they are not likely to use their netbook for that. After all these are exactly the sort of things a netbook is marketed for.
So the grandparent is using his netbook for more than it is marketed for. So when he tries an OS designed specifically around what netbooks are marketed for, he is not satisfied. Big surprise!
Dirty bombs don't even need a full scale power-plant to make. One could literally build a reactor in a backyard to generate excellent material for a dirty bomb. All the information needed is out there, although not in a handy "How to make a nuclear reactor in your backyard" packet.
Successfully building, transporting, and using a dirty bomb is the hard part. Relative to that, obtaining the radioactive material is terribly simple. So the IFR design is not a real risk for that.
Since it will be much more radioactive than the spent fuel products of PWR then it is likely to be 'shorter' half life than those.
That sounds about right, with the exception of the few components that have half lives so long that they do not emit a significant amount of radiation. Half lives in the hundreds of thousands of years.
Though from other information I've read the 'fissile ash' of an IFR would take around 600 years to decay through all the daughter products. Now if only we could design an IFR reactor with an operational lifespan to match the decay characteristics of the spent fuel.
Why does it need to have an operational lifespan that long? If you build it using the design of "nothing, not even waste products ever leave", isn't the important thing that it be structurally sound, and be able safely contain the waste for that period, after it is shut down?
The process is called "Pyroprocessing" and was a stage of the project that was not completed. It meant dissolving the spent fuel 'cartridge' of an IFR in an acid bath and using an electrolytic process to recover fissionable fuel. It was a significant component of the 'IFR' facility design which was meant to be contained completely underground. A 'Pyro-process' (a new type of fuel reprocessing facility) was planned to be sited with the reactor and fuel to and from the reactor facility went by underground tunnels. The fuel cartridges were to be made in a remote environment in an atmosphere of an inert gas (argon - I think). The idea, fissile material went into the facility and nothing comes out.
Fair enough. Obviously the reprocessing facility must be present, or it would simply be an LMR, not an IFR. My understanding is that in theory an IFR could be constructed such that the fissile ash could leave, although that creates real logistics problems. Such as storing the waste. The concerns being that the waste is even more radioactive than "normal" waste, but need not be stored nearly as long.
and decays through it's daughter products. The 'fissile ash' is very radioactive.
IFR has three characteristics which make it a design worth developing
Weapons grade Plutonium can be used as fuel Spent fuel from PWR can be used as fuel U-238, or depleted uranium can be used as fuelapart from the first two, being able to use up U-238 is a positive for this design. Unfortunately the IFR design is let down by current day materials technology - and the fact that a reactor of commercial scale would be cooled by roughly 60-100,000 tons of sodium. You want to make sure there is no chance of a leak *into* the system. Unless you could use a different type of metal the sodium is necessary to achieve the fuel burn-up rates of an IFR which are around 19% as opposed to the 0.3% of a PWR.
Obviously you can use whatever license you want on your work. The problem is that if they don't like the license, they can bypass it just by paying.
The actual statute: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/115.html
Anybody who pays has the right to create a recording of the song and sell it. In the alternative they may buy a license to sell an existing copy of the work.
However, I was mistaken. The Compulsory license precludes any possibility of copyright protection on the new recording (as a derivative), despite the fact that the work would otherwise have that protection. That would apparently give the copyright holder full rights to the new recording, although obviously non-exclusive with respect to production and sale of the new recording.
Therefore, the original copyright holder can license the new recording under CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-SA.
This does leave the issue of somebody who creates a new recording of the song, but failed to obtain a compulsory license, and refuses to offer the work under the CC license. AIUI, they would have copyright protections on the recording, but due to being a derivative, cannot produce and sell copies without a license from the original copyright holder.
But lets say they ignored that, and just infringed the copyright of the original copyright holder.
the result of this would be a copy of the work that cannot be used under a CC license since a copyright holder refuses to place the work under that license. In fact it can't be distributed at all without infringement. I don't believe even a compulsory license could make it distributable, since the phonorecord had been fixed without permission of a copyright holder and without utilizing the compulsory license.
The real nasty issue with these services are that they are claimed to be helpful to users. The issue is that it is not helpful. Modern browsers already provide options to redirect NXDOMAIN's to a search engine, or other useful things.
For example, Google chrome provides a nice page that says "DNS error - cannot find server" in the corner, and provides a helpful search box that is pre-filled with the words found in the domain name. (I have no idea what algorithm is being used to find the word breaks, but it seems to work reasonably well.)
If you have Google Toolbar installed in IE, it does the same thing (except for having Google Toolbar branding rather than Chrome Branding).
Other common search toolbars provide similar services.
I will admit that IE's default error page, and Firefox's default error page are not as helpful to most users, but rather than hijack DNS, why don't you (ISPs) just add the "feature" to the IE toolbar you provide on your Set-Up CD. Those who have no use for such a service don't use those CDs anyway.
No. A songwriter can license a work such that all recordings are either available under a CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-SA license, or are infringing. However, that does not buy you much. You cannot force the infringing copy to be relicensed (although one could force it to cease being distributed, and the performer may prefer relicensing to that). If you play that infringing copy on the radio, you owe royalties to the performer (assuming the work was licensed as such) even though the work is infringing.
Further, all of the above ignores the idiotic Compulsory Licensing, which as I understand it, would allow a performance to be neither CC licensed, nor infringing, providing they pay a third party a large sum, which will be held for you, but which you cannot access without signing a draconian contract, which will rid you of may of your rights to the work.
The sad fact is that US Copyright Law for music is highly corrupted, with multiple special exceptions that do not apply in the case of virtually any other kind of work.