But they're not just against the measles vaccine, they're against ALL of them, and pretty much anything else that can keep the unwashed masses happy and healthy.

The Bush family has been overheard referring to the rest of us as "useless eaters". As long as there are enough servants to attend their every whim they'd be happier if the rest of us just died off.

By all the gods above, below, and nonexistent, that's not even enough time for most people to read the title.

The Bush family has been overheard referring to us as "useless eaters".

Slashdot has been infested with Libertardians for years. They're like bedbugs, just when you think the space is clean they pop up again.

Which requires competent technical staff to write, and adequate political power to insist on it. The garden variety MBA political appointee would never have a clue, they just accept the garbage that the contracting company feeds them. "They're the experts, they must know!"

That all would be because your org can afford to hire competent people, and afford to pay to keep them around. The last half-century of fanatical budget constrictions and legislated 'lowest bidder' requirements ensure that can't happen any longer in the Untied States government orgs. Most of the competent techies still working in the public sector are there because of love for the job and a sense of obligation and/or civic duty, because they could easily make far more money elsewhere.

Though realistically, because 240Pu (from waste) is worse in a fission bomb than 239Pu - generally no more than ~20kT, and challenging to get more than a few kT - still enough to take out a city centre but not a metro area - you'll generally want a fusion weapon, which means deuterium and tritium supplies. And Ukraine doesn't run CANDUs, so you're not going to get tritium from the coolant. They'd need lithium targets / lithium in the coolant to breed tritium. Separation of tritium and deuterium are a mix of chemical, electrochemical, and/or physical separation, but are much easier than uranium isotopic separation (deuterium is double the mass of protium, and tritum triple the mass, so the chemical / electrochemical behavior is actually notably different in a lot of situations, unlike uranium).

For a fusion bomb they'd also want a depleted uranium tamper, but Ukraine probably has ample access to that, whether from weapons, armour, old Soviet stocks, etc. Even spent nuclear fuel is mostly 238U, if they don't mind the tamper being highly radioactive.

My personal best guess would be that Ukraine's unstated policy is to have "sprint capacity", like Japan and South Korea do. That is, to not make weapons or anything that would get them flagged as having a weapons programme, but to have everything needed that, if the word "Go" was given, that they could nuclearize very quickly.

Unlike your typical rogue state that seeks to get nuclear weapons, Ukraine has no need for mass centrifuge facilities or anything like that. They already have plutonium en masse, as they're a major nuclear power generation state with extensive waste supplies. Plutonium extraction via PUREX is merely metallurgy (it's not a simple metal to work with, but it doesn't require isotopic enrichment). You need nitric acid (bog standard, nobody will blink an eye), a reducing agent like ferrous sulfamate (not much of a red flag, it has tons of uses), and an organic solvent like tributyl phosphate (a little bit of a red flag, but it has other uses, and there are alternatives), and a bit of gallium (~1%) for alloying - not a problem. Ukraine could very readily have all of this on-hand, an underground lab ready to go, and a rolodex of people to staff it if the order is given. They'd need high explosives like PBXs or TATB, but nobody would blink an eye at Ukraine buying them. High speed switches for the detonators used to be a big red flag item, but today they increasingly overlap with power electronics for motors and power grids. You need neutron initiators, but there's a number of options for that. And running bomb physics simulations and doing small component tests is something they could easily have under the radar - if they don't outright have old Soviet design plans dusted off and ready to go.

The biggest red flag would be Ukraine inexplicably removing nuclear waste (for processing) and/or trying to defeat IAEA monitoring, so that would likely be not done unless nuclear tensions looked severe. Because if it looks like you're sprinting to a nuclear weapon, it increases the odds of a preemptive nuclear strike against you.

There was a default NTP server (time.microsoft.com IIRC), but there were at least four ways to easily change it to something like toc.usno.gov, and if you joined it to a domain the domain controller became the NTP server (Cerberus authentication a needs good time sync to work right.)

Then they wouldn't sell them "elsewhere". Amazon is exceedingly strict about access to customer data, when I worked in the AWS SOC the company was building a data center in western China to access the cheap solar power in the region. Having been assured that it would be as free from interference from the authorities as their DC in Beijing they were outraged when, before it even opened, local and military officials were demanding access. After a year of back and forth they abandoned the effort and sold the site at a loss, never having used it. That's how serious they are, they'll throw away a multi-hundred million dollar investment rather than allow access to customer data. Within the company you can literally access Jeff Bezos' personnel file easier than customer data.

Just FYI to everyone, home alarm systems are the very bottom of the priority list for police dispatchers, because over 95% of them are false alarms. Kids smoking weed in the park are literally a higher priority. If you want anyone to pay attention to your home alarm either 1) pay for guards to come check out alarms, or 2) get an outdoor alarm sounder so loud and obnoxious that the neighbors call the police to complain.

Price drops dramatically when you buy a gazillion of them.

Amazon does not sell customer data, ever. In my post higher in the thread I provide a link to the 'Ring Law Enforcement Guidelines'. It's not long, read it and realize what bullshit you've been fed by the concern trolls.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

Amazon does not sell customer data, ever. When I worked there we had to take a test every year about data security policies, I could literally access Jeff Bezos' personnel file with a lower access than customer PID (personally identifying data).