h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was thinking about the device going through the X-Ray as being unshielded.

Radtiaon is hazardous, but it's not as bad as most people think it is. You just have to be careful about your dosages, times and protective equipment. People are living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't they?

Plutonium's spectacularly lethal if you're anywhere near to an unshield source of it so the pile of corpses by customs would provide telling circumstantial evidence. In any case, the gamma rays emitted by the plutonium should show up on an X-ray machine as they're a higher frequency.

Yeah fair point a big heavy lead box could be a bit of a giveaway at LAX customs. And if it isn't shielded it would burn you. By the way radioactive burns don't ever heal. Aparently it jiggers about with the DNA. (Insert Technical details here)

I think that perhaps Old Sam may have briefed 2bit on nuke survival during a war. I think that a soldier would probably survive a dosage for the full duration of a war. Shortly after he would not be able to have kids and die in 2 weeks mysteriously of Luekemia. Just like the poor guys at Chernobyl.

I am guessing that you would be best leasing a small cargo boat registered in the Philipines and sailing round North Korea. Picking up the Plute from our friend Borat in Kazakstan and pulling into a quiet Canadian coastal town. From there I guess Hertz Rent-a-Car will take care of the rest.

Any improvments on that strategy?

Given that an all-out nuclear war wouldn't last much over an hour, saying that soldiers would probably survive at least till it's over is unlikely to be a huge comfort .

Why bother going through Canada? I'm sure the US Coastguard do their best but Colombian imports must be getting in somehow: it's not as if the prairies are strewn with coca plantations. Anyway, why take chances when you could use a diplomatic bag?

All this terrorist talk is getting quite upsetting. No wonder why everyone wants to censor, moderate, limit access to the internet. It's to keep frieks like you guys from giving people ideas.
I use to believe that free speach was a good thing but listing to you guys makes me want to re-think my views.

You are begining to sound like Mr Bush. "There should be limits to freedom".

Isn't it a little naive to think that what we have discussed is to complicated for a North Korean Rocket Scientist and his Libyan Pen Friends.

I don't think we've really gotten into anything dangerous here. We havebn't discussed anything very specific about how to conduct terrorist opersations. We've only speculated about how difficult it would be to stop or how easy it would be to commit.

We seem to be pretty reasonable about it.

Incidently, my training is related to the early phases of cleanup after nuclear accidents. I think we had about a day of what to do in case of nuclear war in basic. Dealing with raditaion is a cake walk compared to having to deal with chemical weapons.

*tongue in cheek*

Here in the UK there is a law against possesion of information that may be usefull to terrorists. I've got a description of how to make a nuclear device, a train timetable and a map. All very usefull, does that make me liable to arrest under this law? Sure does, and I arrest all of you in the meantime!

*tongue out of cheek*

Just been reminded about the US's friend Libya, didn't they have an airliner shot down by US fighters for no good reson apart from supposed retaliation for their supposed involvement with blowing up a civilian plane over Locherbie?

Z.

"I may not agree with what you're saying, but I'll defend like hell your right to say it"- I can't remember who but it was probably someone important.



You people who live in Britain, what ever became of the "Regulation of Investigatory Powers" act? You know, the one that Blair was trying to get passed? I haven't heard much of it lately over here.

I can't remember who said it either, but if cash was involved then it was probably a lawyer.


The RIP Act came into effect around December 2000. It'll probably get torn to shreds if someone challenges it though, and anyway, Echelon already does the same job much more effectively

yeah, isn't that the truth

Those RIP powers are scary, hopefully someone soon will start picking holes in it soon! That was the law I was refferring too, quite suprised that you've heard about it abroad!

Z.

I'm doing a report on the IRA and just stumbled accross it on a number of websights and here on the guide too
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A218738
Unfortunatly it hasn't been deemed news worthy on any of the TV shows so the general public unfortunatly doesn't know, but I think it is the MOST newsworthy item in recent history! Imagine a life in which you need proof of innocence...

do check out the link though, it goes into more detail.

*drifting*
Not a bad link, I just posted the researcher asking them to put it in Gml. Have you seen the film "Michael Collins", possibly the best film about the IRA ever released.
*reigning in Drift*

One good thing to come out of recent US foreign policy is the classification of the IRA (namely the Real IRA) as terrorists and making it illegal to raise funds for them!

Z.

Yeah it isn't such a bad movie, that's how I'm going to start my presentation, with a clip from that film (I hope)

re: patriot missiles

As it happens, I'm a computer scientist, which means computer 'glitches' is part of what-I-ought-to-know. So you can pretend I'm an expert, if you like.

Anywho - the Patriot system did indeed suffer from a computer glitch. It works like this: as many of you may know, computers cannot accurately store the number 0.1 in a binary system because in binary it is a repeating fraction.

Now, the patriot missile system worked with a 'time step' of roughly one tenth of a second. It originally worked in 16 bits, so the time step was some 16 bit binary number. Then they upgraded part of the system to 32 bits, but not all of it. So the two parts of system (The targetting system and the launching system, if I recall) got slightly out of step. Over a period of (hours? days?), this became sufficient to result in one system being a few seconds behind the other, and the missiles perfectly intercepting the position when the incoming Scud was a few seconds ago. It may have caused other problems too, I don't know.

You can choose to believe me or not, but this is the truth, as has been reported on the comp.risks newsletter [hint to moderator: that's not a URL, it's what the newsletter is actually called] and elsewhere. If you don't believe me, I'll happilly dig out my lecture notes and provide you with academic references to back up my point.

Martin - 3rd yr CompSci, Cambridge, throwing his academic weight around for once.

Hehe... I believe you, Lucinda. As for myself, I wasn't actually "pretending" too hard to be an expert on that sort of system. I'm certainly not an expert on the Patriot system itself, but let's just say that I know a little something about what it takes to detect and destroy a missile in flight.

Colonel Sellers, former Aegis technician.

So lucinda, whatdo you think the computer problems of NMD will be, do you think it'll work?

Z.

The bugs are unpredictable - it's in the nature of the beast that any complex project will have some - though good techniques and testing can reduce the number significantly. If I could tell what they'd be, I'd be making a fortune using my clairvoyent skills to advise the USA.

Do I think it'll work... hmm.

The USA *need* to try and prove that their system actually works. That means that they'll end up providing a lot of information about how it works. The rest will leak - consider that most countries worldwide are fairly heavily opposed to the plan, and would love to see it fail by spreading the details fairly wide. Consider the past record on how to make nukes.

So, the attackers will have good details of the system, and a lot of time to study it for any weaknesses, and this can probably be done without detection. They won't know, of course, but they can just try. If they succeed, big explosion. If they fail - oh well, better luck next time.

Consider the battleground, too. You've got to have *really* sophisticated computer systems to intercept what's just an ultra simple rocket. So what happens when you give the attacking rockets a sophisticated computer system then? Sure, the plutonium radiation is going to slow you down, but radiation hardened electronics have been done before now. That's before you even start to consider attacks on listening posts and suchlike - and the attacker has ALL the cards: they can pick or choose any place, any time.

It'll certainly make it harder to nuke the USA, but not impossible, or even implausable. But that, after all, is the plan: they don't get nuked, we get nuked instead. Who says the USA is isolationist!?

Thanx for the synopsis Lucinda.

One more question is it worth all themoney and shud we, the uk, contribute financially, or with facilities such as flyindales?


Z