The other three fighter craft available to the USAF were commissioned in 1976 (F-15), 1978 (F-16), and 1988 (F-15E). I know that the F-15 (I assume it's the 1970s units) have been exhibiting structural failures that have cost the loss of several craft and the grounding of all units a couple of times in recent years.
Is there a reason we can't build new F-15E airframes?
It would be pretty easy for a foreign power (Russia and China) to have a modern aircraft that can out perform something we designed and built 30+ years ago.
Would it? The F-22 project started over twenty years ago. And, as far as I know, the only thing out there that can top our F-15s to this day are our own F-22s. What planes are out there that we need the F-22 so badly for? (that's an actual question btw, not a rhetorical device).
The F-22 out-rates the F-35 by every metric, even though it will be 6 years older.
Unless your metrics include things like: size of landing strip required, ability to be carried on an aircraft carrier, or suitability for any mission that isn't killing other fighter planes.
Here's a metric raised by Sec Def Gates: Utility in any conflict we are fighting now, or in the foreseeable future. The F-22 is a big ol' fail by that metric. And that's a pretty important one!
What's important is, going forward, is whether it's better to buy 2 F-22s, or 3 F-35s... If it's me, I would always choose to build more of the superior plane as long as the extra cost isn't too high, and I don't consider the extra cost to be too different in this case.
I would always choose to build more of the plane that you could use more of because it is superior in more situations. I would build fewer of the plane that is useful in fewer situations.
The F-22 is a superior aircraft for one thing and one thing only: air superiority. Great. Now, how many conflicts are we going to be in between now and when the F-22 is itself as aged and obsolete as the F-15 where we don't have air superiority by default? And in this hypothetical scenario, exactly how many superior Air Superiority fighters do you need? Once you've achieved dominance in the air you need to make use of your air power to influence the conflict on the ground. Having a plane that can then switch to attack or strategic bombing missions, or that can be moved to relevant areas via aircraft carrier, is very important. Every "superior" fighter you bought beyond what you needed to achieve air dominance is 1.5 planes you could have had for relevant missions.
The F-22 is fine and all, and yes it's good that we have such a capable fighter in the event that achieving air superiority requires it. But we absolutely should not be building solely those at the exclusion of a more versatile fighter like the F-35. That makes absolutely no strategic or financial sense. 187 is enough.
Look, it's just not possible. The energy density for batteries is simply so far away from what you get with an internal combustion engine, that it's not funny.
Energy density of the fuel source is not the sole determining factor in the performance of vehicles. Power density of the motor is important too, and powerful ICEs are big and heavy. Compare the Tesla Roadster with the Ferrari F430 -- both have nearly identical 0-60 times, but the Ferrari has ~500lbs more curb weight. Top speed for the Tesla is given as 125mph electronically limited, but I'll assume that 'unlimited' it's less than the F430's 196mph. Great, but since essentially all an electric motor needs to produce more torque is to draw more current, that extra 500lbs could be used for more batteries and extra muscle (which they probably didn't do in the Roadster to keep the cost down).
Look at drag racing, where the star of electric vehicles is rising. Electric vehicles have a lot of promise for raw performance. They aren't there yet, but the steps to make them better performing don't necessarily require significantly higher energy density in batteries. That just limits making ones that are not only high performance but practical for consumers. So it's a big deal, but not a "zomg EVs can never outperform ICEs" type of deal.
The actual article headlines says "Rivals" and TFA text says "similar" and I think 250hp, 9s 0-60, and 100mph top end range I think qualifies as being "similar" or "rivaling", especially if you inherently view the EV as the underdog.
Of course accurately reporting things isn't/.'s style, so it was changed to "Outperform".
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug
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F-22 Raptor Cancelled
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Exactly what kind of conflict are you imagining where 187 F-22 Raptors is not enough to achieve Total Air Superiority, but 194 is?
No soldiers killed by enemy aircraft since 1951... We haven't fought a conflict since 1953 against anything close to a comparable Air Force. In the majority of conflicts we've fought in the time period of interest we had Total Air Superiority just by showing up. The only exception was a couple years in NK where the new Soviet MiGs gave us some trouble, but they weren't ground attack aircraft so yeah no "soldiers" were killed by them.
If you're imagining war against a nation with a major military, then you'd better just give up this notion of "Total Air Superiority". We didn't have it in NK, we won't have it against anyone who can stand up to a couple dozen F-15s, forget 200 F-22s. We might be able to maintain dominance in the air battle, but we won't be able to have free run of the skies like we enjoy today.
Of course in any such conflict, many, many soldiers will be dying regardless of what is happening in the skies. So... if that's really the concern, maybe there are better ways of approaching it.
Gates is right. The F-22 is not something we need.
They're attempting to create black holes. There aren't "controlled circumstances" for that outside of "We'll keep it really cold and we'll only make little ones."
No, they're not. And "Controlled" means an environment where they know that the only collisions are the one they create, and where the impact occurs in a vacuum surrounded by large amounts of highly sensitive detectors. The "uncontrolled" version happens constantly, yet here we are. Hard to comprehend, I know, but not surprising for someone who probably thinks that keeping it cold is related only making small black holes instead of huge ones.
The spirit of Stanley Milgram lives on very strongly in the LHC community. Not only are you all worshipping the ignorant as "knowing what they're doing" but you're arrogant about it as well. They're hypotheses include extra dimensions! How much more proof do you need that they aren't operating on "well-tested, documented, and understood physics"?
How much more proof do I need that you have no idea what you're talking about? None. The Higgs Boson that they're looking for is predicted by the Standard Model, for your information, not that this factoid would mean anything to you.
Like I said, I DON'T think they'll destroy the world. My bet is that they'll see the effects of a neutron bomb inside the LHC -- but I'm not pretending to KNOW what the odds are when I run a physics experiment that's strung up on metaphysical mathematics.
That's delicious irony there. You don't pretend to know what the odds are, even though if you could follow some pretty simple logic you could at least upper-bound the odds as being exceptionally small. Yet you do pretend to have any clue whatsoever about the physics these guys are using when you are as ignorant as a newborn babe. And of course ignorance begets arrogance, and you think your lack of understanding qualifies you to say the scientists don't know what they're doing, and make better predictions of the outcome than they. Neutron bomb, heh. I'd love to see your reasoning, assuming it's any different than your guess that it might possibly produce ice cream, i.e. "When you don't know anything, anything is possible!"
What gets me about AoD is that line wasn't in the director's cut. I believe the commentary track makes make mention that they like the revised line better than the original "I'm not that good."
Yeah I know... I don't know why a "director's cut" wouldn't use the dialog that the director liked best. I always thought that's what "director's cut" meant, that he would include/exclude whatever versions and cuts that he liked best, not that it was whatever state the movie was in before final editing.
That's so awesome. Someone actually sent them a crowbar and CERN played along. Well, my last concern (that there were no crowbars at CERN for Gordon to use) is finally assuaged.
It could make delicious, expensive icecream, for all we know. It could, in theory, destroy the world or a part of it. Given the evidence, I don't THINK it will destroy the world, but giving ridiculous odds against it (like winning the lottery 10 times in a row) is outright lying.
For all you know, sure, maybe the LHC will turn into a pack of Tyrannosaurs with opposable thumbs and big T-Rex sized mopeds that will terrorize the countryside.
Physicists don't know exactly what happens as a result of collisions like they will be creating in the LHC, though there's a lot of theory (much of which has experimental verification) to inform their expectations, that's why they need the LHC to study the results under controlled circumstances. However, they do know that collisions with even higher energies occur in our atmosphere on a constant basis and -- hold on, let me look out the window -- yep, earth still exists. Also, no reports of tyrannosaur moped gangs.
So sure, giving a precise probability of an earth-destroying black hole would be dishonest. However, we know how many times this has occurred, and could ballpark the number of interactions that have occurred over the Earth's billions of years of existence, and using that we could find out roughly how likely it is for the earth to have survived this long for any given probability for black hole creation. It's pretty easy to see that either the earth still existing is a long shot to end all long shots, or the odds of the LHC creating an earth-destroying black hole is in fact the long shot. "Winning the lotto ten times in a row" is a pretty good place to start when trying to get you to understand just how unlikely it is. No, we don't know exactly the odds. No, we don't need to be able to precisely calculate the odds to know that it is incredibly unlikely.
You laugh, but it takes a lot of confidence -- the kind that only comes with lots and lots of experience -- to stick something called a "mana strudel" in your mouth.
But this is Sam Raimi. It could be so bad that it might actually be good. Especially if Bruce Campbell plays both protagonist and Lich King.
Oh man, they could easily do that if they do the story of how the Lich King came to be and it would be awesome.
[In the snow of Northrend, Arthas, his mind already becoming corrupted, is confronted by a sinister doppelganger of himself]
Arthas: What demonic trickery is this?! What are you?
Bad Arthas: [mocking child-like voice] I'm baad Arthas. And you're good Arthas! You're a goodie little two shoes! [Bad Arthas dances back and forth, teasing Arthas and singing] Little-goodie-two-shoes. Little-goodie-two-shoes.
Arthas: Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the sword. [decapitates Bad Arthas with a single swipe of Frostmourne].
I am confused. The wind flowing over the blade induces a low pressure and causes the blade to move. The blade does not induce a low pressure from it's own movement. It seems to many people are thinking of these like propellers on a airplane or a window fan.
What's the fucking difference? In either case you have a pressure drop that exists only because the wind mill is sitting there. Whatever nit you're picking vis-a-vis what causes what, the bats and their exploded lungs don't care.
Oh, but for the record, anytime something is swinging through the air, there will be a low pressure zone behind it. Regardless of what is providing the motive force to the thing being swung. This is just the nature of a large object moving and displacing air. Not in front or behind the plane of the blades, like a fan, but in the same circle as the windmill's rotation (so it would not and obviously does not cause wind). It's passing through the blade's wake that kills bats, not the pressure difference in the air passing over the blades themselves.
Those weren't "points" to be refuted line by line, those were his feelings, the things that fueled his gaming addiction. He wanted to stop the addiction because it was distracting him from doing other stuff. Having the bot* playing the game nearby so that he could see it satisfied his game-related urges enough to let him do that other stuff. So even if willing and able to move into the meta-game of modifying the bots, he no longer felt the need to.
That's his subjective psychological response. I would imagine though that it wouldn't be an abnormal one among those who actually want to reduce their game playing. For someone deep in MMO La La Land and such, sure it might be like changing a cokehead's habit from sniffing to smoking rocks.
* Which if it's the one I'm thinking of may not be "provable most efficient", but plays a very conservative game and basically never dies and wins every time.
After that, the moon's orbit would continue to slow down until it, indeed, could only see one side of the earth. I.e., what you described, except it's not the earth stopping turning in relation to the moon, it's that the moon stopping moving around it....except, of course, it would have already crashed into the earth at that point, having no orbital velocity. You can't just sit there in orbit not moving.
Well for the moon to always see the same side of a tidally-locked-to-sun earth, then it wouldn't be not moving, it would have an orbital period equal to the earth's rotational period which would be equal to the earth's orbital period around the sun.
Hey wouldn't it be neat if this worked out in such a way that the moon was always between the sun and earth? It might have to, to pull the moon far enough from the earth that it would be in a geostationary orbit over an earth with a 1-year day. Solar eclipses would be a lot more common.:)
A nuclear power plant, in particular, those containing multiple reactor units, can easily produce well in excess of 1500 MW on a much smaller foot print than 59 square miles, and more consistently.
Why is land area the primary criterion? Why talk about wind farm land 'foot print' as though it were a big parking lot you plop down, as if it occupies land in the same way a nuclear plant does. One of the nice things about wind farms is that at ground level they consist of mostly empty space which can be used for farming, animal grazing, and so on. If it even matters. Nobody cares about squeezing multiple uses out of every square mile in west Texas, for example. Unless it's to put wind mills where you already have oil wells, which I've seen. There's plenty of land besides that isn't being used for anything else.
In my view, wind power is a fad. I'd wager in 20 years there will be a booming business in wind turbine demolition as it becomes painfully clear, even to many wind power advocates, that their efficiency is lousy and the ongoing maintenance, especially as the turbines age, far larger than inticipated
If they're tearing it down in twenty years, then they'll only be doing it to put up a new one, because they would have long since made a profit on the windmill. The farms that were built ten years ago have already turned nice ROIs. Even without a lot of incentives, it's profitable to run them. Unexpected maintenance issues late in life aren't going to change that. Forget some Oil-and-would-be-water Baron in the panhandle; there's a reason they're throwing up all those wind farms in west Texas.
Now I could see development slowing down if they start to run out of economical places to put them. But why would they tear down farms in places that have already proven to be profitable?
many will be glad to see the eyesores turn down.
Ah. Wishful thinking. Sorry you feel that way. I think a wind farm looks beautiful, personally. Some older models aren't very good looking, sure. But all the new ones they're building look elegant to me, a modern take on an old pastoral theme, and seen a hundred of them all carving out big circles at slightly different speeds is mesmerizing.
Solar, especially home and business installations on roofs, which basically unused space now, shows much promise - won't eliminate the need for the grid, but will reduce demand somewhat while saving people money.
Yeah, that's nice too. Economies of scale help here though just like with everything else, so it's not always as clear for a homeowner that it's a good ROI, but in the right conditions it does very well. My house used to have solar panels on it, but they were removed due to maintenance issues and a bad installation that affected the roof. It's possible I'll new ones up at some point. Commercial rooftops, though, sound like a fantastic place for solar.
Farms aren't just about growing, they're about harvesting too. In an apple farm, you grow apple trees and harvest apples. In a wind farm, you build windmills, and harvest wind energy. A solar farm harvests the energy of the sun, which is what the other two farms are doing indirectly. It works pretty well for me. I think the pastoral connotation of "wind farm" fits better than the industrial heavy-sounding "wind power plant".
Server farms are a different matter. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but a lot of computer-related terminology doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Maybe because our field is so abstract, our naming analogies are more whimsical. *shrug* No idea.
So a magnitude 7.5 sounds like a tame earthquake to you? And you figure it should be simple to make a wood building that survives such an earthquake, especially without siding or furniture?
this robot wouldn't be the first one to succumb to man-eating under extreme circumstances. the only way to be sure is to starve it, and lock it in a room with McCain.
Is McCain starved too? This could easily turn into the first test case for Robot Rights.
Your case was some nonsense about an attacker setting up a webcam, a physical-access scenario under which essentially any authentication method would be compromised.:)
Granted, but phishing is an entirely different thing --- more of a social attack that most technologies are susceptible too, than a cryptographic attack. It can and should be separately dealt with through user education, antivirus, proxies, etc.
It's also by far the more dangerous vulnerability, and it affects the other, more expensive multi-factor methods too.
And it's only in the phishing case where the "smallish number of tries" making-your-case-for-you scenario applies. Otherwise, how is the attacker getting the code that the user enters in order to deduce the PassWindow pattern? We're talking about being paranoid, but we're sending the passphrase to the real server in plain-text so anyone can snoop it? What?
Yep, no argument that it's better than 1-factor auth. Especially better than the normal approach of unchanging passwords based on the user's kid's name/DOB. Pretty much anything is better than that though.
If your intent is to imply that this is only marginally better, maybe not even better than having a strong password, then I disagree.
When I moved into my new house, the digital readout on my microwave oven got bumped around, and 2/3 of the LED segments stopped working.
Basically, my microwave's clock is now a PassWindow system for which I don't have the cool transparent keycard.
But since I know what I'm looking at is numbers, it didn't take me long to figure out which LED segments were dead, and now I can read the display just fine even though it's busted.
Now imagine that your microwave's LEDs weren't dead, and it was simply lying to you, lighting up some segments that should be dark and darkening ones that should be lit. The result might look like a perfectly valid number. Only by knowing which segments to ignore and what value to use instead would you know the real number. Oh and instead of a clock where you know the progression, it's always a new random number.
I doubt it's intractable, but I also doubt it would take only 5-10 tries.
How is this more secure than a key? Like an honest-to-goodness, metal-object-you-stick-in-a-lock, physical key?
It's not. It's not really trying to be. It is, in fact, supposed to be the online equivalent of a key, a physical device which you have to possess in order to gain access to something.
Haven't there been tons of discussions about why using flash drives to store passwords is a really bad idea, simply because the risk to your physical media being stolen is much higher than the risk of your passwords being divulged?
The idea here is to use both -- "something you know" in your password, and "something you have" in the PassWindow, and you combine your password plus the random number into a single larger password. The idea is that if one component is compromised, that still doesn't give them the other. Imagine you had both a keyed dead bolt and a combination lock on the door to your house. To get in, someone would have to snoop you entering in the code, and then steal your keys. If you dropped your key and someone picked it up, you wouldn't have to worry about them getting in if they hadn't seen your passcode, and vice versa.
but does it do anything to prevent social engineering the way a strong password or PIN does?
Strong passwords don't prevent social engineering, they prevent dictionary and other simpler-than-brute-force attacks. But if someone lures you to a malicious website that looks like the one you want to log in to, and you type in your password, you're hosed. With this and SecurID style multi-factor authentication, this risk is still there. If you type in your password+random# combo into the evil web page, then they have access for as long as that random # remains valid.
Slashdot Mirror
The other three fighter craft available to the USAF were commissioned in 1976 (F-15), 1978 (F-16), and 1988 (F-15E). I know that the F-15 (I assume it's the 1970s units) have been exhibiting structural failures that have cost the loss of several craft and the grounding of all units a couple of times in recent years.
Is there a reason we can't build new F-15E airframes?
It would be pretty easy for a foreign power (Russia and China) to have a modern aircraft that can out perform something we designed and built 30+ years ago.
Would it? The F-22 project started over twenty years ago. And, as far as I know, the only thing out there that can top our F-15s to this day are our own F-22s. What planes are out there that we need the F-22 so badly for? (that's an actual question btw, not a rhetorical device).
The F-22 out-rates the F-35 by every metric, even though it will be 6 years older.
Unless your metrics include things like: size of landing strip required, ability to be carried on an aircraft carrier, or suitability for any mission that isn't killing other fighter planes.
Here's a metric raised by Sec Def Gates: Utility in any conflict we are fighting now, or in the foreseeable future. The F-22 is a big ol' fail by that metric. And that's a pretty important one!
What's important is, going forward, is whether it's better to buy 2 F-22s, or 3 F-35s... If it's me, I would always choose to build more of the superior plane as long as the extra cost isn't too high, and I don't consider the extra cost to be too different in this case.
I would always choose to build more of the plane that you could use more of because it is superior in more situations. I would build fewer of the plane that is useful in fewer situations.
The F-22 is a superior aircraft for one thing and one thing only: air superiority. Great. Now, how many conflicts are we going to be in between now and when the F-22 is itself as aged and obsolete as the F-15 where we don't have air superiority by default? And in this hypothetical scenario, exactly how many superior Air Superiority fighters do you need? Once you've achieved dominance in the air you need to make use of your air power to influence the conflict on the ground. Having a plane that can then switch to attack or strategic bombing missions, or that can be moved to relevant areas via aircraft carrier, is very important. Every "superior" fighter you bought beyond what you needed to achieve air dominance is 1.5 planes you could have had for relevant missions.
The F-22 is fine and all, and yes it's good that we have such a capable fighter in the event that achieving air superiority requires it. But we absolutely should not be building solely those at the exclusion of a more versatile fighter like the F-35. That makes absolutely no strategic or financial sense. 187 is enough.
Look, it's just not possible. The energy density for batteries is simply so far away from what you get with an internal combustion engine, that it's not funny.
Energy density of the fuel source is not the sole determining factor in the performance of vehicles. Power density of the motor is important too, and powerful ICEs are big and heavy. Compare the Tesla Roadster with the Ferrari F430 -- both have nearly identical 0-60 times, but the Ferrari has ~500lbs more curb weight. Top speed for the Tesla is given as 125mph electronically limited, but I'll assume that 'unlimited' it's less than the F430's 196mph. Great, but since essentially all an electric motor needs to produce more torque is to draw more current, that extra 500lbs could be used for more batteries and extra muscle (which they probably didn't do in the Roadster to keep the cost down).
Look at drag racing, where the star of electric vehicles is rising. Electric vehicles have a lot of promise for raw performance. They aren't there yet, but the steps to make them better performing don't necessarily require significantly higher energy density in batteries. That just limits making ones that are not only high performance but practical for consumers. So it's a big deal, but not a "zomg EVs can never outperform ICEs" type of deal.
I just hate it when headlines lie.
The actual article headlines says "Rivals" and TFA text says "similar" and I think 250hp, 9s 0-60, and 100mph top end range I think qualifies as being "similar" or "rivaling", especially if you inherently view the EV as the underdog.
Of course accurately reporting things isn't /.'s style, so it was changed to "Outperform".
Exactly what kind of conflict are you imagining where 187 F-22 Raptors is not enough to achieve Total Air Superiority, but 194 is?
No soldiers killed by enemy aircraft since 1951... We haven't fought a conflict since 1953 against anything close to a comparable Air Force. In the majority of conflicts we've fought in the time period of interest we had Total Air Superiority just by showing up. The only exception was a couple years in NK where the new Soviet MiGs gave us some trouble, but they weren't ground attack aircraft so yeah no "soldiers" were killed by them.
If you're imagining war against a nation with a major military, then you'd better just give up this notion of "Total Air Superiority". We didn't have it in NK, we won't have it against anyone who can stand up to a couple dozen F-15s, forget 200 F-22s. We might be able to maintain dominance in the air battle, but we won't be able to have free run of the skies like we enjoy today.
Of course in any such conflict, many, many soldiers will be dying regardless of what is happening in the skies. So... if that's really the concern, maybe there are better ways of approaching it.
Gates is right. The F-22 is not something we need.
They're attempting to create black holes. There aren't "controlled circumstances" for that outside of "We'll keep it really cold and we'll only make little ones."
No, they're not. And "Controlled" means an environment where they know that the only collisions are the one they create, and where the impact occurs in a vacuum surrounded by large amounts of highly sensitive detectors. The "uncontrolled" version happens constantly, yet here we are. Hard to comprehend, I know, but not surprising for someone who probably thinks that keeping it cold is related only making small black holes instead of huge ones.
The spirit of Stanley Milgram lives on very strongly in the LHC community. Not only are you all worshipping the ignorant as "knowing what they're doing" but you're arrogant about it as well. They're hypotheses include extra dimensions! How much more proof do you need that they aren't operating on "well-tested, documented, and understood physics"?
How much more proof do I need that you have no idea what you're talking about? None. The Higgs Boson that they're looking for is predicted by the Standard Model, for your information, not that this factoid would mean anything to you.
Like I said, I DON'T think they'll destroy the world. My bet is that they'll see the effects of a neutron bomb inside the LHC -- but I'm not pretending to KNOW what the odds are when I run a physics experiment that's strung up on metaphysical mathematics.
That's delicious irony there. You don't pretend to know what the odds are, even though if you could follow some pretty simple logic you could at least upper-bound the odds as being exceptionally small. Yet you do pretend to have any clue whatsoever about the physics these guys are using when you are as ignorant as a newborn babe. And of course ignorance begets arrogance, and you think your lack of understanding qualifies you to say the scientists don't know what they're doing, and make better predictions of the outcome than they. Neutron bomb, heh. I'd love to see your reasoning, assuming it's any different than your guess that it might possibly produce ice cream, i.e. "When you don't know anything, anything is possible!"
So keep up the ironic trolling, it's hilarious.
What gets me about AoD is that line wasn't in the director's cut. I believe the commentary track makes make mention that they like the revised line better than the original "I'm not that good."
Yeah I know... I don't know why a "director's cut" wouldn't use the dialog that the director liked best. I always thought that's what "director's cut" meant, that he would include/exclude whatever versions and cuts that he liked best, not that it was whatever state the movie was in before final editing.
That's so awesome. Someone actually sent them a crowbar and CERN played along. Well, my last concern (that there were no crowbars at CERN for Gordon to use) is finally assuaged.
It could make delicious, expensive icecream, for all we know. It could, in theory, destroy the world or a part of it. Given the evidence, I don't THINK it will destroy the world, but giving ridiculous odds against it (like winning the lottery 10 times in a row) is outright lying.
For all you know, sure, maybe the LHC will turn into a pack of Tyrannosaurs with opposable thumbs and big T-Rex sized mopeds that will terrorize the countryside.
Physicists don't know exactly what happens as a result of collisions like they will be creating in the LHC, though there's a lot of theory (much of which has experimental verification) to inform their expectations, that's why they need the LHC to study the results under controlled circumstances. However, they do know that collisions with even higher energies occur in our atmosphere on a constant basis and -- hold on, let me look out the window -- yep, earth still exists. Also, no reports of tyrannosaur moped gangs.
So sure, giving a precise probability of an earth-destroying black hole would be dishonest. However, we know how many times this has occurred, and could ballpark the number of interactions that have occurred over the Earth's billions of years of existence, and using that we could find out roughly how likely it is for the earth to have survived this long for any given probability for black hole creation. It's pretty easy to see that either the earth still existing is a long shot to end all long shots, or the odds of the LHC creating an earth-destroying black hole is in fact the long shot. "Winning the lotto ten times in a row" is a pretty good place to start when trying to get you to understand just how unlikely it is. No, we don't know exactly the odds. No, we don't need to be able to precisely calculate the odds to know that it is incredibly unlikely.
I'm thinking it'll probably end up like this.
But the Lich King started as Arthas, the most annoying pally of all. It's perfect!
You laugh, but it takes a lot of confidence -- the kind that only comes with lots and lots of experience -- to stick something called a "mana strudel" in your mouth.
But this is Sam Raimi. It could be so bad that it might actually be good. Especially if Bruce Campbell plays both protagonist and Lich King.
Oh man, they could easily do that if they do the story of how the Lich King came to be and it would be awesome.
[In the snow of Northrend, Arthas, his mind already becoming corrupted, is confronted by a sinister doppelganger of himself]
Arthas: What demonic trickery is this?! What are you?
Bad Arthas: [mocking child-like voice] I'm baad Arthas. And you're good Arthas! You're a goodie little two shoes! [Bad Arthas dances back and forth, teasing Arthas and singing] Little-goodie-two-shoes. Little-goodie-two-shoes.
Arthas: Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the sword. [decapitates Bad Arthas with a single swipe of Frostmourne].
I am confused. The wind flowing over the blade induces a low pressure and causes the blade to move. The blade does not induce a low pressure from it's own movement. It seems to many people are thinking of these like propellers on a airplane or a window fan.
What's the fucking difference? In either case you have a pressure drop that exists only because the wind mill is sitting there. Whatever nit you're picking vis-a-vis what causes what, the bats and their exploded lungs don't care.
Oh, but for the record, anytime something is swinging through the air, there will be a low pressure zone behind it. Regardless of what is providing the motive force to the thing being swung. This is just the nature of a large object moving and displacing air. Not in front or behind the plane of the blades, like a fan, but in the same circle as the windmill's rotation (so it would not and obviously does not cause wind). It's passing through the blade's wake that kills bats, not the pressure difference in the air passing over the blades themselves.
Those weren't "points" to be refuted line by line, those were his feelings, the things that fueled his gaming addiction. He wanted to stop the addiction because it was distracting him from doing other stuff. Having the bot* playing the game nearby so that he could see it satisfied his game-related urges enough to let him do that other stuff. So even if willing and able to move into the meta-game of modifying the bots, he no longer felt the need to.
That's his subjective psychological response. I would imagine though that it wouldn't be an abnormal one among those who actually want to reduce their game playing. For someone deep in MMO La La Land and such, sure it might be like changing a cokehead's habit from sniffing to smoking rocks.
* Which if it's the one I'm thinking of may not be "provable most efficient", but plays a very conservative game and basically never dies and wins every time.
Best. Video game commercial. Ever.
*smack smack*
Hmm... It's unlike any cheese I've ever tasted.
After that, the moon's orbit would continue to slow down until it, indeed, could only see one side of the earth. I.e., what you described, except it's not the earth stopping turning in relation to the moon, it's that the moon stopping moving around it. ...except, of course, it would have already crashed into the earth at that point, having no orbital velocity. You can't just sit there in orbit not moving.
Well for the moon to always see the same side of a tidally-locked-to-sun earth, then it wouldn't be not moving, it would have an orbital period equal to the earth's rotational period which would be equal to the earth's orbital period around the sun.
Hey wouldn't it be neat if this worked out in such a way that the moon was always between the sun and earth? It might have to, to pull the moon far enough from the earth that it would be in a geostationary orbit over an earth with a 1-year day. Solar eclipses would be a lot more common. :)
A nuclear power plant, in particular, those containing multiple reactor units, can easily produce well in excess of 1500 MW on a much smaller foot print than 59 square miles, and more consistently.
Why is land area the primary criterion? Why talk about wind farm land 'foot print' as though it were a big parking lot you plop down, as if it occupies land in the same way a nuclear plant does. One of the nice things about wind farms is that at ground level they consist of mostly empty space which can be used for farming, animal grazing, and so on. If it even matters. Nobody cares about squeezing multiple uses out of every square mile in west Texas, for example. Unless it's to put wind mills where you already have oil wells, which I've seen. There's plenty of land besides that isn't being used for anything else.
In my view, wind power is a fad. I'd wager in 20 years there will be a booming business in wind turbine demolition as it becomes painfully clear, even to many wind power advocates, that their efficiency is lousy and the ongoing maintenance, especially as the turbines age, far larger than inticipated
If they're tearing it down in twenty years, then they'll only be doing it to put up a new one, because they would have long since made a profit on the windmill. The farms that were built ten years ago have already turned nice ROIs. Even without a lot of incentives, it's profitable to run them. Unexpected maintenance issues late in life aren't going to change that. Forget some Oil-and-would-be-water Baron in the panhandle; there's a reason they're throwing up all those wind farms in west Texas.
Now I could see development slowing down if they start to run out of economical places to put them. But why would they tear down farms in places that have already proven to be profitable?
many will be glad to see the eyesores turn down.
Ah. Wishful thinking. Sorry you feel that way. I think a wind farm looks beautiful, personally. Some older models aren't very good looking, sure. But all the new ones they're building look elegant to me, a modern take on an old pastoral theme, and seen a hundred of them all carving out big circles at slightly different speeds is mesmerizing.
Solar, especially home and business installations on roofs, which basically unused space now, shows much promise - won't eliminate the need for the grid, but will reduce demand somewhat while saving people money.
Yeah, that's nice too. Economies of scale help here though just like with everything else, so it's not always as clear for a homeowner that it's a good ROI, but in the right conditions it does very well. My house used to have solar panels on it, but they were removed due to maintenance issues and a bad installation that affected the roof. It's possible I'll new ones up at some point. Commercial rooftops, though, sound like a fantastic place for solar.
Farms aren't just about growing, they're about harvesting too. In an apple farm, you grow apple trees and harvest apples. In a wind farm, you build windmills, and harvest wind energy. A solar farm harvests the energy of the sun, which is what the other two farms are doing indirectly. It works pretty well for me. I think the pastoral connotation of "wind farm" fits better than the industrial heavy-sounding "wind power plant".
Server farms are a different matter. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but a lot of computer-related terminology doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Maybe because our field is so abstract, our naming analogies are more whimsical. *shrug* No idea.
We might not be able to prevent a large-scale die-off, but at least we can preserve enough specimens to start breeding programs in a handful of zoos.
If you want to save the Trolls you'll have to do that anyway, since they are rarely if ever known to breed in the wild.
So a magnitude 7.5 sounds like a tame earthquake to you? And you figure it should be simple to make a wood building that survives such an earthquake, especially without siding or furniture?
I'm not very impressed with you.
this robot wouldn't be the first one to succumb to man-eating under extreme circumstances. the only way to be sure is to starve it, and lock it in a room with McCain.
Is McCain starved too? This could easily turn into the first test case for Robot Rights.
You pretty much made my case for me here.
Your case was some nonsense about an attacker setting up a webcam, a physical-access scenario under which essentially any authentication method would be compromised. :)
Granted, but phishing is an entirely different thing --- more of a social attack that most technologies are susceptible too, than a cryptographic attack. It can and should be separately dealt with through user education, antivirus, proxies, etc.
It's also by far the more dangerous vulnerability, and it affects the other, more expensive multi-factor methods too.
And it's only in the phishing case where the "smallish number of tries" making-your-case-for-you scenario applies. Otherwise, how is the attacker getting the code that the user enters in order to deduce the PassWindow pattern? We're talking about being paranoid, but we're sending the passphrase to the real server in plain-text so anyone can snoop it? What?
Yep, no argument that it's better than 1-factor auth. Especially better than the normal approach of unchanging passwords based on the user's kid's name/DOB. Pretty much anything is better than that though.
If your intent is to imply that this is only marginally better, maybe not even better than having a strong password, then I disagree.
When I moved into my new house, the digital readout on my microwave oven got bumped around, and 2/3 of the LED segments stopped working.
Basically, my microwave's clock is now a PassWindow system for which I don't have the cool transparent keycard.
But since I know what I'm looking at is numbers, it didn't take me long to figure out which LED segments were dead, and now I can read the display just fine even though it's busted.
Now imagine that your microwave's LEDs weren't dead, and it was simply lying to you, lighting up some segments that should be dark and darkening ones that should be lit. The result might look like a perfectly valid number. Only by knowing which segments to ignore and what value to use instead would you know the real number. Oh and instead of a clock where you know the progression, it's always a new random number.
I doubt it's intractable, but I also doubt it would take only 5-10 tries.
How is this more secure than a key? Like an honest-to-goodness, metal-object-you-stick-in-a-lock, physical key?
It's not. It's not really trying to be. It is, in fact, supposed to be the online equivalent of a key, a physical device which you have to possess in order to gain access to something.
Haven't there been tons of discussions about why using flash drives to store passwords is a really bad idea, simply because the risk to your physical media being stolen is much higher than the risk of your passwords being divulged?
The idea here is to use both -- "something you know" in your password, and "something you have" in the PassWindow, and you combine your password plus the random number into a single larger password. The idea is that if one component is compromised, that still doesn't give them the other. Imagine you had both a keyed dead bolt and a combination lock on the door to your house. To get in, someone would have to snoop you entering in the code, and then steal your keys. If you dropped your key and someone picked it up, you wouldn't have to worry about them getting in if they hadn't seen your passcode, and vice versa.
but does it do anything to prevent social engineering the way a strong password or PIN does?
Strong passwords don't prevent social engineering, they prevent dictionary and other simpler-than-brute-force attacks. But if someone lures you to a malicious website that looks like the one you want to log in to, and you type in your password, you're hosed. With this and SecurID style multi-factor authentication, this risk is still there. If you type in your password+random# combo into the evil web page, then they have access for as long as that random # remains valid.