I have a similar weird behavior where if I push in or out my chair from under my computer desk, my USB devices would disconnect and reconnect. My wild guess is that my secretlabs chair has some sort of magnet that’s causing it.
Someone else in the comments of this post has the same issue and they think it’s static from the weave of the material. (I lost track of the comment, sorry for not linking it)
I'm out of the loop. Why is single core performance important, since no one (I think) buys a multi-core CPU just to limit themselves to using only 1 core?
What makes you think anyone limits their computer to run only one core? I'm flabbergasted.
Many people choose the CPU that has the highest single core performance, for both gaming or real-time multimedia processing.
Games are usually optimized for a single core, or a low number of cores, not to use all 4 or 6 or 8 cores of a system. Therefore, for gaming single core performance is still very important.
You can read some opinions about people still choosing Intel because of single core performance in this very discussion.
Additionally, modern CPUs move running threads among cores to avoid a single core from overheating. It's a strategy for thermal management.
Just wondering, is it possible to use a big enough mirror and just reflect sunlight to do the same thing? Though this only means satellites can only be destroyed during daytime.
Missiles are easily tracked. Your opposition will know who, how, when and where someone was taking action against them. Light pressure could just subtly push a satellite off course as it passes overhead. They have finite propellant on board to correct for it.
That said, I don't think a big mirror reflecting the sun is all that practical when a big ass laser would do the same job and be easier to manufacture and operate.
Let me get this straight, a missile is easy to track, but a giant mirror reflecting a load of sunlight that would have to be LoS to the satellite wouldn’t be? Not to mention that bombing the mirror would be a lot easier than shooting down the missile...
A missile can be viewed from many angles. A beam of light is (mostly) only visible by whoever its aimed at. Light dispersion not withstanding. Sunlight is quite bright and will mask a lot of the scattered light as well.
The effects of a beam of light strong enough to push a satellite into a rapidly decaying orbit would bloom like mad through the atmosphere, and create very detectable thermal effects. It would be detectable in a number of wavelengths for a staggering distance. You’d also have to impact the satellite so strongly that its station-keeping thrusters would be insufficient, while account for losses through the atmosphere. It would have to work quickly enough that the satellite wouldn’t fly out of range, and your weapon would only work during the day in clear weather.
The atmosphere is hardly a problem. You'd use numerous beams simultaneously, fired from all over the country. No single beam would be powerful enough to cause atmospheric breakdown. The sensible choice is to surround every power plant with lasers.
No, this won't be undetectable.
Light pressure is fine, but probably not as productive as ionizing the surface to produce thrust. With high power, atoms at the surface can become multiply ionized. They get blasted off the surface. This would be pulsed, since otherwise the resulting ions would absorb some of the beam and there would be a risk of melting the surface.
If the thrust isn't enough, for example due to a very high orbit, you can just keep going until the target is gone.
Weather isn't much of a problem. There is probably clear weather somewhere over the country. Station keeping won't last forever.
Oh, and if you don't insist on a neat and tidy removal, you can just use non-pulsed beams to melt the target.
Right, the issue though isn’t if it’s technically possible, but that it would somehow be advantageous compared to a missile. I grant that it can be done, I’m still unsure as to why. Nonetheless I appreciate your analysis!
The timing of this article feels like it was written in response to Singapore banning a Swedish black metal band from performing at the very last minute.
I fly halfway across Japan about every two years for metal concerts in Osaka. Big-name extreme metal acts usually only visit Tokyo & Osaka. About 3-4 years ago Watain was headlining a show. I would have been PISSED, having bought a plane ticket and a hotel, only to find the headline act was cancelled due to some nonsense. \m/>_<\m/
Usually I just wait for something to pop up on my feed on Facebook, probably based on some of the bands I follow. Here's Osaka's most common metal venue:
I don't think it's right to say data is in the ocean though. They are stored in datacenters on land. And they travel through the ocean. Unless when we start putting more of these datacenters in the ocean like how some company has been experimenting with.
Like if someone used your number as an emergency contact. Or some hospital in the world trying to contact you because someone you know got hospitalized (touch wood).
But that's pretty much already a problem because most people, myself included, no longer answer calls from unknown numbers, unless we are expecting one. And my patience even for that is running thin -- more than once in the last few months I've been expecting an incoming call (e.g. Lyft driver) and have picked up an unknown number only to be greeted by spam.
If a legitimate business or other entity wants to get through to me and isn't in my contacts, their best bet is to leave a voicemail and hope I get around to taking a look at my visual voicemail transcriptions. Most robocalls don't leave voicemail, but some are starting to.
What happened 40 years ago when home phones were the only way to contact somebody?
I'm not trying to say it's not an issue, but the mentality that you need to be connected and accessible at all times is a relatively new phenomenon. If you are in a caretaker role than sure, but if my best friend is sick in hospital and I miss it because I'm out hiking or have turned my phone off, that's just life. People are not supposed to be 24/7 contactable in my view.
In those days, you would answer the phone when it rang because most calls were legitimate contact attempts. Then telemarketing came, but it was kept somewhat in check by the need to have a human make the call. Spam robocallers are a very recent phenomenon; but they've made it so that the overwhelming majority of unknown-number calls people get are spam.
To make matters worse, 40 years ago most people didn't even have answering machines... most of the time the phone just rang and rang. Somehow we muddled through. Your point is spot on re: not being reachable 24/7 by the entire world.
The BBC used to have a service that would send those messages over the radio. E.g "to the Travis family traveling in a blue sedan, number so and so on vacation in Northern Wales, please immediately contact Bristol General Hospital, your daughter is in critical condition"; the idea was that even if you didn't hear the broadcast, somebody near your would and would bring on the message.
This is a good reason for the telcos to actually fix their shit instead of slapping this bandaid on it. But until then people are just going to manually ignore calls from unknown numbers assuming they're spam calls and the result will be the same.
In this case, maybe sending the calls to voicemail instead of outright blocking them will work. AFAIK robocallers disconnect when encountering voicemail, whereas in a real emergency they'd leave a message to call back.
This is 100% a risk I’d be willing to take. I am not trading actual every day pain for extra safety in a carefully constructed trolley problem scenario
No doubt this depends on where you are in your life.
As a single guy with no children, I'm unlikely to get any emergency calls. But my friend who has two children in school and one in nursery? You bet they're going to call her if one of them gets sick or has an accident.
