Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to circumvent international copyright laws.
The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation', and claims to be outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country.
The Pirate Bay says it is the world's largest 'bit torrent tracker', and is a popular way of sharing music, films, software and other copyrighted material online. It has been under the scrutiny of authorities in Sweden and around the world for some time.
The site was briefly closed down after raids by the Swedish police last May. After initially moving to the Netherlands, the site returned to Sweden in June. Swedish authorities have been put under pressure to do more to stop the site. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and the US government have all lobbied for The Pirate Bay's closure.
According to a website set up to secure the purchase of Sealand, The Pirate Bay plans to give citizenship of the micronation to anyone willing to put money towards the purchase.
"It should be a great place for everybody, with high-speed Internet access, no copyright laws and VIP accounts to The Pirate Bay," the organisation claims on its website www.buysealand.com.
The "island" of Sealand, seven miles off the coast of southern England, was settled in 1967 by an English major, Paddy Roy Bates. Bates proclaimed Sealand a state, issuing passports and gold and silver Sealand dollars and declaring himself Prince Roy.
When the British Royal Navy tried to evict Prince Roy in 1968, a judge ruled that the platform was outside British territorial waters and therefore beyond government control.
The British government subsequently extended its territorial waters from three to twelve nautical miles from the coast, which would include Sealand, but Prince Roy simultaneously extended Sealand's waters, claimed that this guaranteed Sealand's sovereignty.
The island is now being put up for sale by Prince Roy's son, Prince Michael, who styles himself head of state. A firm of Spanish estate agents has valued the island at £504 million (about 7 billion kronor), although Prince Michael told The Times of London that it is hard to gauge how much it will fetch in reality.
The Pirate Bay says it is looking at alternatives to buying the former naval platform.
"If we do not get enough money required to buy the micronation of Sealand, we will try to buy another small island somwhere and claim it as our own country," the organization says on its website.
A German retiree who wired up a high-voltage cable to try to wipe out the moles digging up his garden killed himself instead, police said Thursday.
Uwe Werner, police spokesman in Stralsund north of Berlin, said the 63-year-old retired construction foreman was found dead in the garden of his weekend house in Zingst next to a 380-volt cable and metal spikes rammed into the ground.
"The moles survived," Werner said, noting the voltage was enough to run a cement mixer or heavy-duty power saw. "It was in any event an unorthodox method to try to get rid of moles."
Posted by: Fred ||
01/12/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Moles probably didn't even know anything happened. Hint: That's why they call it "GROUND".
#2
A common mistake is not to use enough traps or too much electricity. If you have three active tunnels in the yard, use three traps. Traps are usually cheaper in the long run than most ineffective mole chemicals, poisons or noisy contraptions. When you're dealing with moles keep the grass short and well manicured. This will make spotting new mole tunnels a lot easier. Putting sod or top soil over mole tunnels can be a big mistake. It will add another dimension to the tunnel system and make spotting tunnels impossible. A great way to spot new mole activity and tunnels is to walk the lawn with the sun in your face. Mole tunnels will usually cast a distinct shadow through the lawn. They will also show up better if you look the day after the grass has been mowed. You might even get lucky and catch a mole working or adding on to a new tunnel. (The new tunnel will stick up higher than the surrounding cut grass.) If you choose to dig the mole out, be careful! They have sharp teeth and can bite!
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/12/2007 8:30 Comments ||
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#6
Germany.
380-volts is their '3-phase commercial' power component (similar to our 208-volts). They use 220-volts as "standard household" and up to 600-volts for "industrial". Less 'line-loss' as you raise the voltages and more efficiency. More dangerous too, but why tamper with 'efficiency'? After all, we're Germans.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
01/12/2007 8:58 Comments ||
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#7
Moles
file, varmit control. a few years ago I hot rod'ed a 9000 volt neon generator that zaps the hell out of shit bird pigeons. and a couple of years before that, I slapped together a WMD gas pump that kills even the Greater Pacifica Bull Gophers in the back yard.
well check this out; Fire in the hole Who wants to try one of these? I can't wait to make one!
#9
Simplest most effective method I've found: Attach one of those flexible metal tubes to the exhaust of a lawnmower (looks like the spiral armor you would put on electrical wiring). You have to figure out a way to weld it to a pipe that will thread into the exhaust port. Park that baby near the fresh mole hill, insert tube into said mole hill, close dirt over tube, start the lawnmower, and let it run for an hour or so. The little buggers sometimes close down tunnels, but not always, so repeat as necessary.
Caution: That tube will burn the crap out of your hand if you don't use gloves. Don't burn your mouse hand, whatever you do! :-)
A student on Thursday challenged the construction of a church in Peshawar University at the Peshawar High Court (PHC), saying that the churchs construction inside a Muslims institute would trigger sectarian anger.
A proud day for good ol' PU, indeed. Pfeh.
Masood Khan, a Peshawar University student, submitted the writ petition through Advocate Khurshid Khan under Article 199 of the Constitution. The student claimed that a church in the university was un-Islamic and that it would fan sectarianism. He requested the PHC to stop the churchs construction.
The Peshawar University vice chancellor issued a notification for the construction of the church after Chief Minister Akram Durrani laid the foundation stone for the construction of the United Church at a ceremony on December 19, 2006, at the campus.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/12/2007 00:00 ||
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Soldiers will be permitted to wear scarves outside their bases for first time in armys history; we will not accept situation whereby soldiers wear scarves as if they are participating in fashion show, IDF official says
According to a decision reached by the Israel Defense Forces in recent days, soldiers will be permitted to wear scarves outside their army bases for the first time in the armys history.
Until now soldiers were permitted to wear scarves during the winter months only within the confines of IDF bases and with the commanding officers authorization. Soldiers who violated these terms were slapped with a citation from Military Police officers.
The recent decision stated a number of limitations, which are meant to prevent soldiers from wearing scarves as a fashion item and restrict their use for warming purposes only. We determined that soldiers will be allowed to wear scarves during the winter months; we will not accept a situation whereby soldiers wear short-sleeved shirts and scarves as if they are participating in a fashion show, an IDF official told Ynet.
It was also determined that soldiers will wear only black-colored scarves; embroideries of any kind are forbidden
Calling all Romulans. The Enterprise will soon have cloaking skills...
The theorists who first created the mathematics that describe the behavior of the recently announced "invisibility cloak" have revealed a new analysis that may extend the current cloak's powers, enabling it to hide even actively radiating objects like a flashlight or cell phone.
Allan Greenleaf, professor of mathematics at the University of Rochester, working with colleagues around the globe, has announced a mathematical theory that predicts some strange goings on inside the cloak-and that what happens inside is crucial to the cloak's effectiveness.
In October, David R. Smith, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, led a team that used a circular cloaking device to successfully bend microwaves around a copper disk as if the disk were invisible. In 2003, however, Greenleaf and his colleagues had already developed the mathematics of invisibility.
"We were working on improving the mathematics behind tumor detection," says Greenleaf. "In the final section to one paper, we spelled out a worst-case scenario where a tumor could be undetectable. We then wrote a couple of additional articles describing when this could happen. At the time, we didn't think further about it because it seemed extremely unlikely that any tumor would be covered with the necessary material to be hidden that way."
This past summer, however, Greenleaf and his colleagues learned about a paper that researchers at Duke and Imperial College had published in the journal Science, which used nearly identical equations to give a theoretical proposal for a cloaking device. Once Greenleaf and his colleagues saw that their results could also be used to show how to "hide" an object, they decided to analyze and improve the proposed cloaking device, using the techniques they had developed in their earlier work. They knew that a crucial question would be: What was going on inside the cloaked region?
Smith, a physicist, gave a description of why the cloaking device should work. Greenleaf, as a mathematician, knew that to have any hope of extending and improving the cloaking, it was important to fully understand its mathematical underpinnings. Then, in October, Smith published another paper, describing how he and his team actually built a cloaking device. This made it even more crucial to carefully analyze the underlying structure.
Greenleaf and his collaborators used sophisticated mathematics to understand what must be happening inside the cloaked region. Everything seemed fine when they applied the Helmholtz equation, an equation widely used to solve problems involving the propagation of light. But when they used Maxwell's equations, which take the polarization of electromagnetic waves into account, difficulties came to light.
Maxwell's equations said that a simple copper disk like the one Smith used could be cloaked without a problem, but anything that emitted electromagnetic waves-a cell phone, a digital watch, or even a simple electric device like a flashlight-caused the behavior of the cloaking device to go seriously awry. The mathematics predicts that the size of the electromagnetic fields go to infinity at the surface of the cloaked region, possibly wrecking the invisibility.
Their analysis also revealed another surprise: a person trying to look out of the cloak would effectively be faced with a mirror in every direction. If you can imagine Harry Potter's own invisibility cloak working this way, and Harry turning on his flashlight to see, its light would shine right back at him, no matter where he pointed it.
Greenleaf's team determined that a more complicated phenomenon arises when using Maxwell's equations, leading to a "blow up" (an unexpected infinite behavior) of the electromagnetic fields. They determined that by inserting conductive linings, whose properties depend on the specific geometry of the cloak, this problem can be resolved. Alternatively, covering both the inside and outside surfaces of the cloaked region with carefully matched materials can also be used to bypass this problem.
"We should also keep in mind that, given the current technology, when we talk about invisibility, we're talking only about being invisible at just a narrow range of wavelengths," says Greenleaf. "For example, an object could be rendered invisible at just a specific wavelength of red; it would be visible in nearly every other color."
Smith's team at Duke is also working on improving their cloaking device. On Dec. 6, Smith and Greenleaf met for the first time and talked about Greenleaf's new math.
"Allan has been looking at the problem much more generally, and deriving the conditions for when true invisibility is or is not possible," says Smith. "We are very interested in what he and his colleagues come up with!"
Greenleaf and his coauthors are now working to confirm the relationship between their work and experiments. Some of the equations do not have solutions, so they are looking at what the physical consequences are, and whether a cloak's effectiveness would be compromised. Since any physical construction is only an approximation of the mathematical ideal that Greenleaf's team analyzes, Greenleaf says it would also be very interesting to understand the extent to which small errors in the construction degrade the cloaking effect.
Greenleaf's colleagues on this research are Matti Lassas, professor of mathematics at the Helsinki University of Technology, Yaroslav Kurylev, professor of mathematics at of Loughborough University, and Gunther Uhlmann, professor of mathematics at the University of Washington.
#1
The mathematics predicts that the size of the electromagnetic fields go to infinity at the surface of the cloaked region, possibly wrecking the invisibility.
I think infinite EM fields will do more than wreck the cloaking field.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
01/12/2007 11:11 Comments ||
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#2
The size (3 dimensions) of the EM fields go to infinity at the surface (2 dimensions) of the cloaked region?
#6
If the calculations say it goes to infinity, someone missed a sign change error, or forgot to add in a minor factor when setting up the equation. It'll come out in the rechecking, although likely the outside world will never hear about it.
Prior mathematics seemed to prove that there would always be some component of light/electromagnetic energy which would not be perfectly reflected, hence invisibility is impossible even at a given wavelength for objects which are active transmitters.
Greenleaf et al show that those maths depend on the assumption of upper and lower bounds on components of the associated tensors. That assumption does not hold under certain boundary conditions on the materials' surface and therefore it is theoretically possible to create a perfect reflectivity for any object at a given wavelength.
Posted by: James ||
01/12/2007 12:41 Comments ||
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#10
In any case, an imperfect cloak would be useful in that you could see out. If it was 90% effective, it would be like looking at "The Predator" in Schwarzenegger's movie. Looking out from a 90% effective cloak would be like looking through sunglasses, I suppose. And that is only for visible light. If you wanted to, you could see out just fine using night vision goggles or something.
#12
Maxwell's equations said that a simple copper disk like the one Smith used could be cloaked without a problem, but anything that emitted electromagnetic waves...
Erm? Unless it's at absolute zero, that copper disk is going to be emitting electromagnetic waves. I'm emitting them as we speak.
Greenleaf's team determined that a more complicated phenomenon arises when using Maxwell's equations, leading to a "blow up" (an unexpected infinite behavior) of the electromagnetic fields.
Pish posh. A little renormalization will take care of that.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
A German retiree who wired up a high-voltage cable to try to wipe out the moles digging up his garden killed himself instead, police said Thursday.
