Structured English text: roughly 1.5 bits of entropy per character, total complexity around 50 bits.
Ym=2f4tj
Random keyboard characters: 6.5 bits of entropy per character, total complexity 52 bits.
Congratulations! You've made your password much harder to remember, without making it any harder for a computer to guess. You've fallen into the trap the XKCD comic describes.
If you use something like "frozen biology department literally conducts every experiment after august but before march" then you have something with more entropy than you can crack in any practical amount of time even with offline methods (and even including the fact that it has grammatical ordering which reduces entropy some), but any idiot can memorize it in short order.
Using grammatical structure greatly reduces the randomness of your passphrase: a phrase consisting of words selected randomly from the 4000 most common English words has an entropy of about 12 bits per word; grammatically-correct English text has entropy of about 1 bit per character (so, around 5 bits per word).
I would also point out that the British had a lot of success against the French sticking to the longbow which they had been using for years before the crossbow came along. Yes the cross bow had more range and did more damage per a shot, but in the time it takes to reload the long bow men could have run the distance and the next reload they would have got several shots off. Also the shortbow (basically shortened version of the longbow could be used from horseback).
A skilled longbow archer could fire twenty aimed shots per minute for as long as the supply of arrows held out, a rate of fire not matched by any non-crew weapon until the early 1900s. A skilled crossbow archer could fire four aimed shots per minute. The reason why nearly everyone used crossbows is that it takes ten years to train a longbow archer to that level of performance, while a crossbow archer could be trained in a few months.
Try this one. Tell an Apple user that you do not think he is a complete faggot and fanboy and then ask him to honestly speak about the unified menu on a large screen setup. Handy no?
The nice thing about having the menu bar at the very top of the screen is that you can just fling your pointer up and it'll hit the menu bar -- there's no risk of overshooting it like you have on Windows. I find I can hit a top-level menu option much faster on Mac than on Windows or Linux, even though my Mac has the largest screen of any of my computers.
It really depends on the form the mercury is in. A gram of metallic mercury is no big deal -- it'll go in one end and out the other without causing much fuss. A gram of dimethylmercury, on the other hand, is enough to kill a half-dozen people.
or allowing a bomb to come off the rack while inverted
This is not necessarily a mistake: one of the methods for low-level delivery of a nuclear bomb while still giving the airplane time to get out of the blast radius is to release the bomb while performing a tight Immelmann loop. This has the effect of throwing the bomb upwards, and unless you've got perfect timing on the bomb release, releases the bomb when the aircraft is partially inverted.
There were a few points in the timeline where a different decision would have prevented the meltdown entirely, or kept it contained to the reactor building. Most of those decisions (the big ones being the design and location of various emergency systems) were made before the earthquake. However, two of the decisions made after the quake could have changed things significantly:
1) If the operators had left the gravity-feed cooling system on, it would have kept reactor #1 cool and prevented a meltdown after the tsunami wiped out the station's emergency power system. However, deciding to leave it on would have required knowing the future: if the tsunami hadn't destroyed the power system, the extra cooling would have cooled the reactor core too fast, causing the pressure vessel to fail.
2) If the crew who entered the reactor 1 building to open a valve to vent excess pressure from the containment vessel hadn't turned back when they exceeded the maximum allowed radiation dose, the hydrogen explosion that blew the roof off the reactor building would have been delayed or prevented, which would have kept most of the radiation contained inside the building and greatly simplified keeping reactors 2 and 3 under control.
The first decision would have reduced the disaster from a 7 on the INES scale to a 2 or 3, while the second would have reduced it to a 4 or 5. For comparison, the Windscale fire and the Three Mile Island accident were both INES 5.
And the nuts followed a flawed proceedure and shut off the gravity fed cooling system.
Nothing "nut" about it. Have you ever seen what happens when you heat up a glass container and then run cold water over it? That's what the gravity-feed cooling system was doing to reactor #1. If the tsunami had been the three-meter wave predicted rather than the 14-meter wave that actually hit them, leaving that cooling system on would have caused a major radiation release, as thermal stresses would have caused the containment vessel to crack.
One of the cool things that the original Model "T" Ford had was an auxiliary power take-off port where you could tap into the mechanical energy of the engine for purposes other than transportation (with the transmission in neutral). It was used to power electric generators, water pumps, and other kinds of farm machinery like a thresher, where a substantial group of inventors came up with several devices which hooked up to the car for power. That automobiles aren't used that way today is more of a lack of creativity, and that other power sources tend to be cheaper at the moment.... but it is interesting to think of the applications if you break preconceived notions about how you use some of these devices.
Actually, the reason that automobiles aren't used that way today is that the people who used the power take-off tended to be the same people who bought tractors -- and just about every tractor out there today has a power take-off shaft.
Dunbal, read the link I posted. Government doesn't have to borrow from other countries or the public in order to spend. It simply credits bank accounts, but that money doesn't have to be borrowed from anywhere
You might want to read this, about the last time a government decided to pay its bills by creating money out of thin air.
Welcome to marketing 101, they just got you to remember a product.
I'm sure the Macy's ad execs are happy that I'm remembering their product. I think they'd be somewhat less happy that I remember it because of a strong association with the stench of industrial solvents, thanks to the so-called "perfume samples" they send out with the Sunday paper. I suspect they'd be even less happy a decade from now, when I've forgotten the reason, but still have a feeling of stomach-turning revulsion every time I see that particular set of letters.
The Cold War was not particularly peaceful. I suspect that if you add up all the proxy wars, you'll get a death toll that easily exceeds that of World War I.
So, multiplying it all out gives this bomb a destructive capacity of 12 LOC.
Re:Any chance of breaking the Indus valley script?
on
Copiale Cipher Decoded
·
· Score: 1
Any chance of breaking the Indus valley script? It is probably 3000 years old. Or the word frequency analysis works only for familiar variants of European languages?
Not a chance. The total known corpus is only about 20,000 symbols, and it's likely that many of the known inscriptions are names rather than meaningful texts.
You could bury money in your back yard, and your great-great-great-grandson could dig it up 100 years later and buy as much flour with it as you could.
Plus or minus about 25%. The lack of long-term variation in the value of gold-backed currencies is nice if you're planning for the long term (say, setting up an inheritance for your grandson), but the high short-term variations can be horrible when planning for next year. Knowing that the $10,000 you put away for your grandson's college education will still buy about a year at school twenty years from now is good, but not when it means you don't know if next year's grocery costs will be $1500 or $2500.
The problem is not that this isn't amazing, it's that the Slashdot editors (and Wired) are presenting an 80-year-old discovery as something new -- and then describing it using the wrong terminology.
The database is more than just "what time is it in New York City?". It's also useful for answering questions like "On June 15, 1988 at 13:00 UTC, what time was showing on the clocks in Riyadh?".
(That particular question is why the zoneinfo entry for Saudi Arabia is almost ten times the size of any other entry.)
What it (and you) get wrong is to translate "gastar Ãrvores" as "spending trees" when it should probably be "killing trees" -- but unless "gastar Ãrvores" is an idiom in Portuguese that seems understandable, because it is the literal translation. It just doesn't come across properly in English because "spending" is not generally something you do to a tree (or paper).
When you're translating the sentence, you want to preserve the parallel construction in the second half of the sentence: whatever you're doing to the paper is what you're doing to the trees. It's a stylistic technique that increases the strength of the sentence, and is an example of why good translation requires the translator to be at least as good a writer as the original author.
Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on the GPS system. It's one of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, it could go down some time. What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
Sextant-and-chronometer navigation takes a significant amount of time to do each navigation fix, is only good to about five miles for the typical navigator, and requires the ability to see the Sun, Moon, or a star.
Compass navigation requires a good view of a coastline and a map that shows the features you're trying to triangulate off of. For the typical small craft, it's not much good more than about ten miles out from shore, and if you've got no idea where you are (say, you just came out of a rainstorm), it may take minutes to hours to get an initial navigation fix.
My password database just passed the 300-entry mark. How on Earth am I supposed to remember that many unique passphrases, especially for sites I might not visit for years at a time?
Slashdot Mirror
Structured English text: roughly 1.5 bits of entropy per character, total complexity around 50 bits.
Random keyboard characters: 6.5 bits of entropy per character, total complexity 52 bits.
Congratulations! You've made your password much harder to remember, without making it any harder for a computer to guess. You've fallen into the trap the XKCD comic describes.
Using grammatical structure greatly reduces the randomness of your passphrase: a phrase consisting of words selected randomly from the 4000 most common English words has an entropy of about 12 bits per word; grammatically-correct English text has entropy of about 1 bit per character (so, around 5 bits per word).
A skilled longbow archer could fire twenty aimed shots per minute for as long as the supply of arrows held out, a rate of fire not matched by any non-crew weapon until the early 1900s. A skilled crossbow archer could fire four aimed shots per minute. The reason why nearly everyone used crossbows is that it takes ten years to train a longbow archer to that level of performance, while a crossbow archer could be trained in a few months.
The nice thing about having the menu bar at the very top of the screen is that you can just fling your pointer up and it'll hit the menu bar -- there's no risk of overshooting it like you have on Windows. I find I can hit a top-level menu option much faster on Mac than on Windows or Linux, even though my Mac has the largest screen of any of my computers.
It really depends on the form the mercury is in. A gram of metallic mercury is no big deal -- it'll go in one end and out the other without causing much fuss. A gram of dimethylmercury, on the other hand, is enough to kill a half-dozen people.
I don't.
This is not necessarily a mistake: one of the methods for low-level delivery of a nuclear bomb while still giving the airplane time to get out of the blast radius is to release the bomb while performing a tight Immelmann loop. This has the effect of throwing the bomb upwards, and unless you've got perfect timing on the bomb release, releases the bomb when the aircraft is partially inverted.
There were a few points in the timeline where a different decision would have prevented the meltdown entirely, or kept it contained to the reactor building. Most of those decisions (the big ones being the design and location of various emergency systems) were made before the earthquake. However, two of the decisions made after the quake could have changed things significantly:
1) If the operators had left the gravity-feed cooling system on, it would have kept reactor #1 cool and prevented a meltdown after the tsunami wiped out the station's emergency power system. However, deciding to leave it on would have required knowing the future: if the tsunami hadn't destroyed the power system, the extra cooling would have cooled the reactor core too fast, causing the pressure vessel to fail.
2) If the crew who entered the reactor 1 building to open a valve to vent excess pressure from the containment vessel hadn't turned back when they exceeded the maximum allowed radiation dose, the hydrogen explosion that blew the roof off the reactor building would have been delayed or prevented, which would have kept most of the radiation contained inside the building and greatly simplified keeping reactors 2 and 3 under control.
The first decision would have reduced the disaster from a 7 on the INES scale to a 2 or 3, while the second would have reduced it to a 4 or 5. For comparison, the Windscale fire and the Three Mile Island accident were both INES 5.
Nothing "nut" about it. Have you ever seen what happens when you heat up a glass container and then run cold water over it? That's what the gravity-feed cooling system was doing to reactor #1. If the tsunami had been the three-meter wave predicted rather than the 14-meter wave that actually hit them, leaving that cooling system on would have caused a major radiation release, as thermal stresses would have caused the containment vessel to crack.
Mild steel: Mohs hardness of 4.
Glass: Mohs hardness of 7.
What do you think?
Actually, the reason that automobiles aren't used that way today is that the people who used the power take-off tended to be the same people who bought tractors -- and just about every tractor out there today has a power take-off shaft.
You might want to read this, about the last time a government decided to pay its bills by creating money out of thin air.
I'm sure the Macy's ad execs are happy that I'm remembering their product. I think they'd be somewhat less happy that I remember it because of a strong association with the stench of industrial solvents, thanks to the so-called "perfume samples" they send out with the Sunday paper. I suspect they'd be even less happy a decade from now, when I've forgotten the reason, but still have a feeling of stomach-turning revulsion every time I see that particular set of letters.
Not all publicity is good publicity.
"Minor scuffles"? You mean, like the one that killed my grandfather and two to four million other people? Or the one that killed upwards of a million? Or the one that killed anywhere from 800,000 to 3,000,000? Or...
The Cold War was not particularly peaceful. I suspect that if you add up all the proxy wars, you'll get a death toll that easily exceeds that of World War I.
So, multiplying it all out gives this bomb a destructive capacity of 12 LOC.
Not a chance. The total known corpus is only about 20,000 symbols, and it's likely that many of the known inscriptions are names rather than meaningful texts.
Plus or minus about 25%. The lack of long-term variation in the value of gold-backed currencies is nice if you're planning for the long term (say, setting up an inheritance for your grandson), but the high short-term variations can be horrible when planning for next year. Knowing that the $10,000 you put away for your grandson's college education will still buy about a year at school twenty years from now is good, but not when it means you don't know if next year's grocery costs will be $1500 or $2500.
Using "quantum" in the description makes it sound like a cool new discovery, rather than simply a demonstration of magnetic levitation using the Meissner effect and flux pinning.
The problem is not that this isn't amazing, it's that the Slashdot editors (and Wired) are presenting an 80-year-old discovery as something new -- and then describing it using the wrong terminology.
Looks to me like a demonstration of the Meissner effect, something that was discovered in 1933.
The database is more than just "what time is it in New York City?". It's also useful for answering questions like "On June 15, 1988 at 13:00 UTC, what time was showing on the clocks in Riyadh?".
(That particular question is why the zoneinfo entry for Saudi Arabia is almost ten times the size of any other entry.)
When you're translating the sentence, you want to preserve the parallel construction in the second half of the sentence: whatever you're doing to the paper is what you're doing to the trees. It's a stylistic technique that increases the strength of the sentence, and is an example of why good translation requires the translator to be at least as good a writer as the original author.
$ grep local-zone /etc/unbound/unbound.conf
local-zone: "facebook.com" refuse
local-zone: "fbcdn.com" refuse
Sextant-and-chronometer navigation takes a significant amount of time to do each navigation fix, is only good to about five miles for the typical navigator, and requires the ability to see the Sun, Moon, or a star.
Compass navigation requires a good view of a coastline and a map that shows the features you're trying to triangulate off of. For the typical small craft, it's not much good more than about ten miles out from shore, and if you've got no idea where you are (say, you just came out of a rainstorm), it may take minutes to hours to get an initial navigation fix.
My password database just passed the 300-entry mark. How on Earth am I supposed to remember that many unique passphrases, especially for sites I might not visit for years at a time?