cynar

@cynar@lemmy.world
1 Post – 521 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

A modern nuke is FAR from the "bang 2 rocks together" designs that were first designed. For a start, most are fusion devices. Fairly exotic reactions are used to make a small amount of fusion material to go critical. This creates a shaped charge on a fusion core. The compression wave sets fusion happening, which releases 95% of the energy. Most of Russia's arsenal is of this sort.

The downsides of these is the use of exotic elements. They often have a short half life, e.g. tritium, with 12.5 years. This means they decay. Even worse, some of the byproducts will actually poison the reaction. E.g. Rather than producing a flood of neutrons, they absorb them.

If any of this chain fails, then your fusion nuke becomes, at best, a low yield fission nuke. More likely, it becomes a dirty bomb. It's still nasty, but not the city destroying terror weapon it would be intended as.

It's less being stripped, and more a lack of maintenance. Nukes have a shelf life. The elements inside then can decay, this means they need replacing. This is a highly specialist job. It's also expensive, and can only really be cross checked by the same people who do the work (or detonating it).

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Hey, at least drugs will now be lacklustre, and unforfilling. The factory must grow to meet the demands of the expanding factory!

It depends on your exposure profile.

Installing malware and bloatware into an OS is relatively easy. Doing the same to a bios is doable, but a LOT harder.

If you're after a mini PC for home use or even a small business, wiping the os is likely fine. The concern would mostly kick in with larger organisations or government level targets.

It's a question of how many man hours of effort hacking you is worth. Even if they are compromised, they are unlikely to risk outing the breach for anything less than a high value target.

It's a combination of both, I believe.

The initial conditions had a definite rotational bias. This is preserved in the current orbital plane and direction.

On top of that, anything massively off that plane is liable to hit or interact with the material in the plane, given enough time. It will be flung around, eventually either out of the system or into the plane.

Stuff orbiting relatively close to the plane will have a biased pull towards the "average" plane. This will slowly flatten the orbits out.

All these processes take a lot of time. The solar system, in general, has had enough time to settle. The ort cloud and other outer bodies are still quite chaotic. We see a lot more off plane than within the traditional solar system. They experience the latter effects far less, and so take longer to equalise. They still have a bias towards the initial spin however.

Adrenaline with completely fuck up your higher brain functions, unless you've trained to cope with it. Its default effects are fight, flight, freeze or fawn. She went into freeze. She likely didn't want to make matters worse, and couldn't think it through, due to the adrenaline spike.

A rather dark survey I heard about years ago. Researchers couldn't find anyone who has self rescued from a submerged car, who hadn't planned for the eventuality. They had all worked out what to do if that happened to them. Many of the deaths had claw marks on the dashboard, and sometimes they hadn't even gotten their seat belts off. In the moment, their monkey brain couldn't even plan that far.

The issue is that carbon fibre is strong, hard, but brittle. When it fails, it fails catastrophically. It also doesn't show many/any signs of failure, till it fails.

A carbon fibre hull, under those loads, could be good for 5 dives or 100, depending on the vagaries of how it was made. It won't show the wear, until it fails. That is why most companies won't trust CF under those sort of loads.

I suspect it's related to the difficulty in processing. Kiwi fruit are quite small and non-trivial to extract the flesh from. This would make it more expensive to extract.

This is less of an issue now that a few decades back. However, most people are quite conservative on their juice choices. Low sales still mean higher cost, which reduces sales.

It's a steal, even at full price, particularly once you account for the various mods.

FYI, I've several friends who veto playing, or even talking about factorio. They can't afford to lose 100s of hours of their lives again to cracktorio, and dont want to be sucked back in again. Take from this what you will.

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Most people have an addiction button. The version for geeks and engineers is VERY hard to exploit at scale, to make money. Factorio pushes that button perfectly. It's a sustained dopamine stream that little can match.

On a completely unrelated note. Less than a month now! 😀

If anything, that would be worse. Imagine, you sue, and have a single lawyer, on a discount rate. They respond with a team of 100 highly paid lawyers. Your now paying 50-500x what your own lawyer is actually charging. This could also work in both directions.

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To his credit, Chamberlain wasn't as bad as he's made out. When he implemented his policy of appeasement, Britain was not actually capable of meaningfully resisting nazi Germany. He basically brought time to bring Britain back to a war footing. When it became obvious to the public that war was coming, he fell on his sword. This cleared the way for Churchill to take charge, without significant infighting. He also inherited Britain on a far better war footing, and even then it was a close thing.

Basically, Chamberlain knew his plan wouldn't work long term. He took one "for king and country", likely knowing how it would be perceived. I can at least respect him for that.

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You can always introduce your other half to multiplayer mode... :D

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Appeasement can work, just not in the obvious way. It's like throwing steaks at a pack of hungry wolves. It won't slow them for long, but it might give you enough time to find the shells, and load the shotgun.

What Trump is doing doesn't even rise to the level of appeasement. He's just begging like a whipped dog to his master.

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That would be very easy to weaponise, particularly against smaller companies. Once you're dealing with lawyers, you need to assume that worst case scenarios will rapidly become the default. You also then end up with even more red tape, deciding who should pay what, prior to the trial even starting.

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E.g. a competitor "encourages" multiple individuals to open cases. Perhaps with some "financial assistance". Suddenly, the company is dealing with the costs of 10 cases. Even worse, they can no longer use economies of scale to cope (e.g. have an in-house lawyer). They are on the line for the complainant's cost. The cases don't have to go far, the company pays the opposing lawyers either way.

Also, if you can't see how ambulance chasing lawyers couldn't exploit a guaranteed payout system (to the lawyers at least), I would question your imagination.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

  • Will Rogers

Now, how do you define what a reasonable budget is? That basically becomes a fee to sue.

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It did though. Hitler could have gone after Britain and france earlier. However, he thought Britain was staying out of things, and so played more safe and slow. This brought Britain the time it needed. Hitler honestly didn't expect Britain to declare war on him, and that slowed his assault on that front. If WW2 had gone serious even 6 months earlier, Britain would have been in serious trouble. The RAF would have collapsed under the luftwaffa, and WW2 would have been very different. Appeasement traded lives for time.

Don't get me wrong, it was a dick move, and threw others under the tanks tracks to save Britain. It's also worth noting that this is not what Trump is trying to do. He's just being a boot licker to the most powerful person who will talk to him. Appeasement at least had a positive goal.

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I've got a Miele washing machine that's the best part of 40 years old. It's required some maintenance over the years. However, it was designed with maintenance in mind, so all the repairs have been fairly painless.

My 5 year old dishwasher, on the other hand, has cost me more time, money and stress than the (very overworked) washing machine.

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The reason for this is that we tend to sleep deeper now than our ancestors. Because of this, we are more prone to roll onto a baby, and not wake up.

It can still be done, you just have to avoid things like alcohol, that stop you waking. You also need to make sure your sleeping position is safe. Explaining this to exhausted parents is unreliable, however. Hence the advice Americans seem to be given.

Fyi, if people want a halfway point, you can get cosleeping cribs. They attach to the side of the bed. Your baby can be close to you, while also eliminating the risk of suffocating them.

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Pig organs are approximately the same size and configuration as human ones. They also share a very similar immune system and biochemistry. We also have experience breeding and genetically modifying them. This makes them the easiest option to modify for human use. Still not easy, but easiest.

Screw thanking aliens, it's an incredible team of engineers that have the skills and dedication to do what seems impossible. This was 100% humanity at its best.

They rebuilt the most critical core code on a near antique spacecraft that has effectively left the solar system over an equally ancient radio link. They had 1 shot, and nailed it.

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It makes a lot more sense in the earlier versions of chess. The queen used to be the "Vizier". The sultan made the decisions, the Vizier ran around and implemented them.

I work in live sports TV.

Champions League Final (European Football). Kind of a big deal. Doing a money shot camera behind the goals. 4 minutes in, one of the cameras goes dead. I try all the fixes I can remotely, while all the while the director wants the camera back up and getting quite heated about it. The only thing left to try is to replug the remote head. That part is, unfortunately, 10m past the ad boards, on the grass.

I waited for play to be down the other end (and gave the security guy a heads up what I was about to do!). Jumped the ad boards, and replugged everything. At that moment, there's a roar from the crowd, as there is a break down the wing. I am VERY much NOT supposed to be on the grass! My brain tries to freeze, luckily, 100 million years of instincts kick in to save my arse. Next thing I know, I'm finishing a sort of head first leap/ airborne commando roll, over the ad boards to tuck in behind them.

The camera restarted just before a shot on goal. The operator captured it perfectly. Much to the directors relief/delight. I also, somehow managed to avoid being on any of the camera shots. I'm still not quite sure how.

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It's the little things that count.

  • The drain pump is just 3 bolts to take off (pump came back to life after I tipped it. The new one is still sat in the cupboard a decade later).

  • The electronics are mounted on their own door. They swing out, and are VERY easy to service.

  • The wiring diagram was in a plastic wallet inside the machine.

  • The shocks are easy to access and come off with an M10 spanner and are easy access.

Those are just the ones that have noticed explicitly, the whole machine was built with that mentality.

This is a good example of how AI can be used well.

Current AIs are effectively fuzzy pattern detection and matching engines. This one can sift all the data coming in, and spot patterns that previously corresponded to problems. It then flags them for human interpretation.

The AI chunks the vast sea of data. A human is then involved to sanity check what it has found, and react accordingly. E.g. a pattern appears that often precedes a broken rail within a month. A human can check the subset of the data, and schedule a maintenance team a week later. Conversely, a pattern that leads by hours would require an immediate response.

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Further to the other answers, "sovereign citizens" are an interesting variant on a "cargo cult" mindset.

The cargo cults, if you've not heard of them, came about after WWII. The Allied forces, advancing through the Pacific, set up airbases on various islands. These islands had tribes living on them. The tribes got a crash course in the wonders of modern society, American army style. Unfortunately, the gap between their experiences, and the world they were now exposed to was huge, and brief. A lot of misunderstandings were made (either due to insufficient background knowledge, or bored/malicious information from the troops involved).

When the allies upped stakes and left, the tribes were left a little shell shocked. They had the bright idea that if they recreated what the Americans had done, they too could summon the metal birds from the sky, full of a vast wealth of cargo! They then went about reproducing everything they had seen. They built runways, control towers, and fake planes, to bait down the cargo planes. But it never worked! They obviously weren't doing it exactly right. So they tried harder, recreating all they could as closely as they could.

Now to us, this seems crazy. Of course you can't summon a cargo plane by sitting in a wooden "control tower" talking into a coconut! We have a larger context however. We know that those planes were sent, not summoned etc.

"Sovereign Citizens" have a lot in common with these cults. However, they are focused on the legal system. Most legal systems are convoluted and arcane. They are less designed, than accreted over time. Lawyers, and the hyper rich who imply them, use this to run rings around the systems in place. They used complex legal entities to game the system to their advantage.

"Sovereign Citizens" see this and thought "why can't we do that?". Unfortunately, they didn't understand what was actually happening. They tried to recreate it, but lacked fundamental information. Even worse, a number of grifters found them, and decided they were excellent marks. They fed them additional bullshit, and gave them ever more complex instructions to make their plans work. When they failed, it's obviously because they did it wrong, or got out-spelled, not because the instructions were BS to begin with.

In short, "Sovereign Citizens" are a mix of the desperate, the stupid (not always the same thing!), the brainwashed and the grifters, all wrapped up in an almost religious cargo cult.

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Interestingly, this software was not tested. Testing was actually bypassed as per management’s request because the code change was small.

I don't think much needs to be said about this...

Potentially to skirt driving time limits?

Many lorry drivers are paid by the trip. If they get stuck in traffic, they are losing money. They are also required to take regular breaks, to avoid fatigue. If they jammed the GPS, then the company can't prove they didn't take their break, and worked through, to make up time.

It also allows for disallowed detours. "Sorry boss, I was stuck in traffic for over an hour". In fact they went for a pub lunch, on the clock.

In short, enlightened laziness.

I can turn the bedroom lights on and off, from my bed.

I can turn the bathroom light off, after my young daughter left it on, in the middle of the night.

My livingroom lights colour shift, to keep my family's sleep cycle in vague check.

I can turn my heating down room by room, if it's not needed. Conversely, I can preheat the house, on the way home.

While the setup took a bit of prep work, it's now highly reliable, and makes my life a lot easier.

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Labelled bag clips on all the stuff in the freezer. When something runs out, the clip goes onto a bit of string, hanging from the bottom of a cupboard. Instant freezer shopping list.

Edit to note: The only weakness is that you only add things to your shopping list when they run out. The workaround is to have 2 bags of everything, though this wouldn't suit everyone.

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It's even more horrifying. America does have 2 parties, it's just they've collectively dragged the overton window so far right that the "left" party is still to the right of most countries (extreme) "right" parties.

Similar results, but require very different fixes.

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Can you give an example? All the ones I've seen are either from the (far) right, or a direct reaction to the (far) right bucking traditional rules.

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The simple answer is cleanliness.

Straws of any sort are a pain to clean. You need to at least get a focused stream of water up the middle, and preferably a brush. Industrial dishwashers just can't do this reliably. You either need a specialist cleaning machine, or do it manually. Both are expensive.

There are also issues with preferences (metallic tastes, shape, etc), handling (metal straws are perfectly shaped to mess with the innards of dishwashers) and cost. But cleanliness is the BIG one.

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The body is weird when it comes to breathing. It doesn't measure one of the critical gasses. 3 things particularly send the body into a breathing panic.

  • Rising CO2 (via blood acidity)

  • Water in the airways.

  • Resistance to inflating the lungs.

Water boarding is particularly evil, since it creates just enough of the last 2 to trigger a full blown drowning reaction, but is light enough to not actually be dangerous. This lets the questioner hold the victim in that zone, without permanent physical harm (but massive psychological harm).

Nitrogen hypoxia doesn't set off any of those triggers. This makes it particularly dangerous to some workers. They don't realise anything is wrong until they pass out.

Also, to clarify. I am massively against the death penalty. It's both cruel, and not particularly effective as a deterrent. It's also no cheaper, in practice, than life imprisonment. However, if it is going to be used, it should be as humane as possible. Nitrogen hypoxia is about as humane as it can get.

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Watching, as an outsider, there's not. That fact is truly horrifying. The democrats are roughly aligned with the UK conservative party. Shitty but tolerable. The republicans are way off in the sticks, with no comparison.

By analogy, democrats are like being shot in the gut with a high power paintball gun. The republicans are like being shot with a high caliber revolver. Both involve getting shot, both are unpleasant, but one is still FAR worse than the other.

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The issue is that we used to have both irc and forums. Discord has taken on the role of both in 1. Unfortunately, that means that it also needs the remote search capabilities of a forum to not screw over the community, long term.

It's amazing the number of times a 3+ year old discussion on either a forum, or Reddit has bailed me out of a hole. Everything like that on discord is cut off, unless you know it exists.

An automated trust rating will be critical for Lemmy, longer term. It's the same arms race as email has to fight. There should be a linked trust system of both instances and users. The instance 'vouches' for the users trust score. However, if other instances collectively disagree, then the trust score of the instance is also hit. Other instances can then use this information to judge how much to allow from users in that instance.

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This was the reason it changed from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change". More energy is being dumped into the weather system. This makes everything more extreme. The heating is almost incidental to it. The extra energy is the killer.