Take a look at the perpetrator #1. He is not some run of the mill McD dude, he is Gustavo Fring! No wonder our nerd glasses dude got little bit roughed there.

I am thinking quietly now.

Wow, but isn't this perfect news for all who are worried of declining natural resources as a result of overpopulation? This behavior should be encouraged, not ridiculed or presented as an "alarming problem". Where is the problem? If women finish their studies more often than men and become leaders of the workplace and politics then we are in a women driven world. If these masses of Alpha Females feel that there is a mating problem then perhaps they should start making the first moves?


I remember seeing a ST:TNG episode of women driven society where men were the weaker sex and Riker had to wear some embarrassing clothes to please locals. :)

Too bad we were forgotten from TFA, in 2009 Google placed their server farm to an old paper mill in Hamina. Now the 5th nuclear power plant (1800MW, what we buy from abroads now) is "soon" completed (before 2015 I hope) and two more are coming.

We have cheap co2 free electricity and cold weather. I believe Finland is going to get a lot of data centers because in addition of chilly weather and good infrastructure here companies can buy a portion of nuclear power producer and get tax free electricity from their "own" nuclear power station. Other Nordic countries do not have such arrangements, there you pay the market price of electricity even if you own a power producer.

Yeah, if we continue with KISS principle:

- Roadblock IEDs - these may be complete unnecessary. Rent or steal fuel trucks and park them so that you can remotely detonate their fuel cargo on fire. Much more effective and takes a lot of time to put them out. IEDs make just craters (and are hard to make in these sizes) but tens of tons fuel make a burning lake and lots of smoke. Harder to bypass if you place them strategically near bridges or other places where congestion bypass takes a lot of time.

- If weapons predetonate then the game is over, it is impossible to collect plutonium droplets spread around.

- This was assumed to be a non-convoy transport without black helicopters or disguised military trucks carrying infantry.

- Citizens carrying firearms - not a problem. Dress yourself a fireman and steal/paint your truck to fire department colours. Or dress as an ambulance personel and park an Ambulance next to the crime scene.

I am glad you didn't ask about the 2) - it is missing because of a typo. :)

Your plot is too complicated. The foremost motive to steal a nuclear warhead is *not* to obtain a out-of-a-box working bomb - no - what you are after is plutonium metal. Everything else is rubbish. All bombs have very sophisticated dial-a-yield mechanisms and conditional detonation systems which render them useless for terrorists. So - forget the 50-man team making an epic firefight with ex-navy seals etc. If nuclear warheads are actually transported without convoys then you need two, maybe just one man to steal it.

Here is how:

1) A roadside bomb so powerful that it will destroy the tractor and the container. Two other under road bombs blocking all access to the site.

3) Small aircraft stored nearby where you have 500 yards of reasonably solid and even surface, a field will do in most cases. A good and simple plane with autopilot, like Cessna 182, is a good choice.

4) Fire extinguishers, metal cutting tools, hand trolley.

5) A lorry, a van, something parked 100km away. Just make sure it is well outside of 30min scrambling radius of any AF base.


What to do:

- Wait until the nuclear transport arrives.
- Detonate IEDs and eat popcorn while watching how the fireball kills the truck driver and ex navy seal "nuclear guard". Watch how the container breaks open and the secondary explosions finish the show. Other IEDs have blocked all direct road access to the scene giving you the 10 minutes you need.
- Locate warhead from the container and put out fires, if any. Use metal tools, if needed, to extract the warhead.
- Carry the warhead to the aircraft. (warheads are usually less than 200kg)
- Take off, set the autopilot course to the direction where your getaway vehicle is parked
- Parachute both you and the warhead when you reach the vicinity of you getaway car - remember to set the autopilot before you leave.
- Enjoy your freedom and laugh when goverment X is making the greatest firework show out of that autopiloted Cessna.

Now you have most sought out metal of this universe and can do all sorts of business with it.

Cost of all this is less than 30 000USD - then again with that amount of money you can probably bribe some Pakistani dude giving you the keys to that nuclear transporting lorry. Add a zero, or two zeros, to that number and you have an American nuclear bomb. Hell, it is still a bargain if it is intact and costs only $3M. :)

One thing more:

From TFA, this is comedy gold: "Both types of cooling systems will also kill fish by sucking them into equipment or trapping them against intake screens, but the once-through method is more deadly because it diverts more water than does a closed-cycle system."

Well, now when we know that the flow is 2.1 cubic meters per second. Lets assume that the nuke plant wants to build a super small intake screen, like 5m x 2m, now, how FISH-CRUSHING is this 2.1m3 flow through this screen? It is 500cm x 200cm x 20cm, which is twenty centimeters per second. That is eight inches of FISH-CRUSHING per second. I'm from the country of thousands of lakes and while swimming in our crystal clear waters I have not seen a fish that slow, not small or big.

Hey! You American fish. You disappoint me.

Time after time again you Americans are fed with articles which can not make any sense to you - not even to the most hard core imperial system users.
Lets translate some of the numbers of this article to the Human Readable units:

Power station has a grant to take 17 billion gallons of water annually.

Translation to human readable units which have some meaning:

17 billion US gallons = 64 352 000.3 m3 / year

How much that is per second?

66114626.5m3 / 365d = 181135 m3/d

181136m3 / 24h = 7574m3/d

7547m3/60min = 125m3/min

125m3 / 60s = 2.1m3/s

So, there you have it. Your shiny new nuke can take TWO POINT ONE CUBIC meters per second of water from a river which has average discharge of 172m3/second. Whoop-di-doo, this thing will KILL THIS RIVER AND AMERICA TOO... or how about NO?


From the Blue river www-site:

"The Blue Castle Project has leased water rights for 53,600 acre feet per year, already approved by the Utah State Division of Water Rights for coal fired power plants. These coal plants were never built and years later the water remains unused."


Writer of TFA should drown herself.. to the metric system and facts.

Just build a huge Kim Jong-Il statue behind that Christmas tree. :)

Yes, this is a good thing. When we have a good estimate of how many stars have planets and how many of them are in the habitable zone we can start counting for the day when we are supposed to get an answer from the stars.

The idea behind this quite simple:

Someday, hopefully not too far away in future, our radio emissions will have formed a sphere in space which includes statistically enough planets to have one with intelligent life.

It doesn't matter how advanced they are. Even if they use -communication by magic- or live in some virtual environment it is more than likely that they are interested observing the space. No matter how advanced you are but a mountain sized rock is a nasty thing if it hits you without a warning.

Maybe they even have radio amateurs of their world still tinkering with eons old designs. Advanced civilization will detect our noise and send a reply. Most likely it will be the exactly same thing we have been sending - decoding instructions with mathematics and then some basic "hello there, we are here" message. The only sad thing is that there is no FTL or instant communications. Our communications will be glacial slow, but it is / would be still better than nothing.

HSR is an investment to the post peak oil future. When Jet A1 fuel costs $5 per liter only the extremely wealthy can afford to travel by air. I hope you Americans are not counting on that, everybody is rich in future? :) Meanwhile the others (and you!) are landlocked either to low speed electric-hybrid cars or low speed trains, that is if you don't start building HSR now . The question here is that do you Americans want to continue your lifestyle of affordable travel after the fossil fuels are out of question, or do you want to isolate yourselves and remove the last of your competitive features: affordable movement of people and goods?


But then again - "Americans, yes they are that stupid".

What would happen if USA neglects building heterogeneous transport networks and stays on the current trend of fossil fuel automobiles and planes? It is not the end of the world after the oil gets too expensive for transportation. If only you can keep the agriculture running you will not starve and private enterprises will built HSR and electric induction roads very fast. The bad thing is that at that time the rest of the world have those and you are late, so very late that I am afraid someone else has the technological and political leadership in this world. As a North European I wouldn't like to see that happen. America(USA) means a lot to me and I want see you leading the world in the future too.

http://www.wordmagicsoft.com/dictionary/es-en/lumia.php Hahahah! :) Now where is my Mitsubishi Pajero?

Yep too bad this is already buried too deep in Slashdot. As a Finn I am really astonished when I see the ignorance of some people here. Delusional people who refuse to research this themselves. Fisker decided to start production of Karma in Finland 2008. That was more than year before your DOE started selling its loan to them. George W. Bush was the president of USA when Fisker signed final assembly contract of Karma (13.11.2008).

Someone who knows nuclear physics should comment this:

Boron has a large cross section for neutron capture, graphite on the other hand is used as a neutron moderator. Is it possible that graphene-boron nitride is also the optimal neutron shielding material?

No, this is Laser FISSION! They use a pulsed laser to activate a gold-thorium plate where heated gold produces ultra high energy electrons, neutron and ANTIMATTER. This process split thorium atoms releasing simultaneously a lot of extra power and radiation. http://www.aip.org/png/html/lfission.htm