lmilcin

I only have one rule: I only contact an open source developer if I believe resolving the problem would make the product better unless I am willing to offer them reasonable money to do it.

Polish guy here. And Lem fan, too. Ask anything you want.

Yes and yes.

As far as we know anti-atoms (antihydrogen in this case) are as stable as normal atoms.

To the point where it creates interesting questions -- if antiatoms are exactly as normal atoms, why we have abundance of normal matter but not antimatter?

I guess you can imagine similar evolution that a century ago drove invention of aircraft carriers. When it became clear that battleships would become too large, too heavy and too expensive to meet their primary goal of dominating the sea around them.

Ie mobile platforms that are essentially defenceless on their own but carry large armament of drones and other electronic devices inside enemy territory that is meant to quickly take over surrounding space (surface and overhead) and do quick job of neutralising various threats like enemy personnel, drones, etc.

But I am not sure about that. Planes require a landing strip to start from and large hangars to store them and that drove the basic form of aircraft carrier.

There is no such limitation for electronic equipment and small drone carriers travelling on land. And I think, rather than presenting a single high value target to the enemy, it makes sense to have a lot of specialised units functioning as one through information systems that cannot be disabled with a single successful strike.

I don’t think the the utility of a tank is completely obviated.

The whole point of tank, as the word suggests, is to be able to survive enemy fire.

With proliferation of easy to carry weapons that can pierce any tank it is largely relegated to being heavy, costly and fragile mobile cannon that needs a lot of support to stay alive. There are much better devices that can fill those roles.

You should no longer assume that you can ambush anything with your tanks -- with live overhead feed it is easy to spot any tanks encroaching on your position and place any antitank in the right spot.

And then you have drones that you can basically point and shoot any tank from.

I am pretty sure this is the last war where we see large number of tanks involved. Every country that is watching this is click spamming to buy as many drones as possible.

correction: literally 99.99999% of endpoints.

You made up a number with no grounding in reality because of your bias due to being "general public".

For corporate services it is actually quite common to use client certificates and mutual auth. Also popular with VPNs.

You might not be aware of this because corporations do not want to deal with people who do not know or can be forced to know how to generate signing request.

This is different when you control both the service and the users of the service and you have something valuable to protect.

As an example, I worked with credit card terminals and these used mutual auth with properly managed client certificates.

You wouldn't call DOS on all terminals and ATMS "insignificant".

There is very little reason to DOS a client and a lot of reasons to attack servers.

There is a huge number of public facing services that implement mutual auth and all those are potentially vulnerable to DOS. While clients can just decide to not connect to a web service that causes their browser to malfunction (and why have you connected there in the first place?), services are usually not at liberty to ignore a client at this stage.

So yes, those servers that do request client certificate are targets and my point still stands that servers are much more affected than the clients.

What would be an affected client? You keep connecting to this infected website that causes your browser to die? Somebody embedded some tracking on their page that now points to an infected website? Everybody will just move on and it is hard to say you are very much affected by this problem.

Whereas if you are a service and you are affected you absolutely need to implement a fix.

This vulnerability affects parsing maliciously crafted certificates, so it will mostly affect clients.

Actually, it is the opposite.

You seem to be unaware of the fact that servers do receive certificates from the clients which are then parsed.

Which is already mentioned in the advisory document:

  "Thus vulnerable situations include:

   - TLS clients consuming server certificates
   - TLS servers consuming client certificates <---- here
   - Hosting providers taking certificates or private keys from customers
   - Certificate authorities parsing certification requests from subscribers
   - Anything else which parses ASN.1 elliptic curve parameters"

I looked at the data from some places I knew very well for over 3 decades (like around where I grew up and are still visiting parents regularly) and it looks noisy and mostly incorrect, nothing like real tree cover change.

I think the main problem here is not necessarily the actual extent of the ice but rather rapid change and how we, people, are dependant on particular climate in particular parts of our planet.

We are all dependant on very fragile balance of various mechanisms that we do not fully understand.

For example, European climate depends very much on the mass of warm water transported by Gulfstream. Europe would be basically north Canada if not for all that warm water and precipitation that comes with it. But we also know that this stream itself depends on the water cooling up north and sinking to complete the cycle. If the water can't cool the cycle will be broken and Europe may suddenly change the climate dramatically at an astonishing rate.

I am not worried about plant and animal life -- these will migrate or adapt. Nature has always found a way in the past.

What I am worried is human toll, masses of people affected by rapid climate change that are unable to fend for themselves.

You can't "balance carbon cycle" because the problem is not the carbon cycle.

Carbon cycle is fine.

The problem is there is a huge amount of additional carbon that the cycle cannot accommodate. If I remember well, every decade we are adding more carbon than entire weight of biosphere.

Also, plants have higher albedo than most types of ground. Remember, they are built to capture light. This means they cause Earth to capture more energy.

Plants don't do much to atmospheric carbon if they can't be sequestered. Otherwise they just burn or rot -- causing carbon to return back to atmosphere.

The conditions for the plant carbon to be sequestered are not favourable nowadays.

I love plants and I want more plants and trees and all that. Just don't be naive thinking this is going to solve the problem.

Because that naivety more often than not causes lay people thinking something is being done when trees are being planted which is bad for us who would like something real done.

Believe or not, that project is already underway and will use our Sun as a gravitational lens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

I predict in couple decades we will learn to build swarms of drone craft that we will send to the right location and they will be able to image nearby planets (one per swarm...) with at least ~10-40km per pixel if not better.

There is a lot of occasions for observations if you are into it.

This photo is not a happy accident, though. It took careful preparation.

Let's see... it looks that at a distance of 400km we can see features of size roughly 1m (or even better). This points to resolution of 0.01 arcsecond which is fenomenal for an amateur setup.

No, the title is not a clickbait. This is best photo of ISS transiting Moon I have seen, by a large margin.

Well, I decided to check the number.

20% is for uncharged, non-rotating BH. 42% (maximum) is for rotating black hole.

I have to agree with 20%. 42% assumes that you are robbing the black hole of its momentum and that cannot be sustained infinitely, as you are throwing more and more stuff into it your best possible efficiency will drop asymptotically to 20%.

It should read "communication". The hardest think about engineering is communication.

Requirements is a communication problem.

You can help your engineering by making sure ideas are correctly named, that definitions stay true to principles and the same throughout the company.

When software is built on immutable principles then it hardly ever needs to change because principles do not change (or they are not principles).

I have worked developing various banking systems. Most of the time it is not requirements that change, it is people discovering they have different definition of something that other people have and the change is to accommodate differences in understanding.

You can also drop matter into black holes and this way recover energy necessary to sustain civilisation long after red dwarves are all dead cold.

Compared to stars, this process is much more efficient and allows converting something like 40% of mass of dropped object into energy.

And so with this mechanism we have much more energy available than all stars in the universe have and will ever have produced. Not only that, we can do it at any rate we want. Rather than radiate 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of it uselessly, we can make sure that most of it is used to power our civilisation.

The problems:

1) The visible universe shrinks, so much less matter will be available to us in trillions of years.

2) Before you drop matter into black hole you need to store it somewhere. The issue here is that over long periods of time orbits decay as gravitational energy is radiated away and so keeping mass in storage actually requires energy to be added.

3) Not gonna save us from Big Rip.

That identity has already been built on a lie. Russia invaded Poland on September 17th 1939 after secret deal with Germany to split Polish territory they agreed on before the war even started.

Then Russians cried foul when the bigger bully betrayed them. Unfortunately allies could not let Nazis overrun Soviets because with access to oil fields Nazis could make Europe their fortress.

And so Soviet crimes were overlooked in the name of greater good.

Oumuamua is a bit larger than a blanket on your couch.

Also, a mirror flying through space is very hard to detect. It reflects very well but only in some directions meaning it is basically black when looking at it from any other direction.

Lorentz factor at that speed is very small.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor

Any civilisation that can detect an object of that size and categorise it as being unnatural in origin would have vastly more advanced technology that would allow them to detect humans on Earth in the first place.

I am more interested in how they are planning to fit in all the apparatus in a probe that small and especially how they plan to send a usable signal back to Earth.

Storing UTC is not only not a silver bullet, in many cases it is just wrong.

Timezone is an important context of the event. You can't tell if something happened on Wednesday if you do not know the timezone.

I am continually amused that disposing nuclear waste is still such a hot (!) topic.

There is simple and effective way of disposing the most dangerous types of nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel) -- dig a deep hole in an ancient, stable, solid rock and bury it there forever. The place needs to be selected carefully but we know of a number of places that are perfect from geological point of view.

The only problem is that nobody wants that in their vicinity because of an irrational fear.

Send them to Poland and require to pass Polish driving license exam.

The problem has been present basically forever. Well before stackoverflow.

Massive (by weight) heatsink can be used as thermal mass. This delays the need to increase fan speed and allows spreading that increase over time. One thing that is more noticeable than fan speed is rapid fan speed changes -- avoiding those makes entire system seem quieter.

The M1 Ultra claims already look suspicious since the GPU graph tops out at ~120W & the CPU graph tops out at ~60W yet the M1 Studio is rated for 370W continuous power draw.

And that is expected, a lot has to be reserved for USB devices.

I studied theoretical math.

Step #0: make sure you know what math is

I can't stress it enough. I know this sounds funny, but when I went to study math a lot of people would drop out very quickly because they did not realise that what most people call math and what is taught at high school is completely different from actual theoretical math.

What most people think math is is a collection of formulas that you need to learn to "know math".

Math is actually a dynamic activity and is 100% about solving problems.

Just like programming is not about knowing programming languages. Programming is about solving problems (and knowing programming languages is necessary but not sufficient to be programming).

Take it for what it is. It is highly unlikely we will get authenticated document like that.

I red the document, it says a lot of things that I think would be pretty difficult to make up (not impossible, though).