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Comment encrypted but not authenticated (Score 1) 332

Currently we have a Wifi security mode that is unencrypted and unauthenticated (open) and several that are encrypted and authenticated (wep, wpa1, wpa2 etc) There is a need for a Wifi security mode that is encrypted but not authenticated. Which is essentially what this proposal is getting at. Of course the actual proposal fails miserably because WPA is not secure against attackers who know the shared secret. So we need a new security mode that fills this role in a secure manner.

Comment Re:Article and grandparent are just wrong. (Score 1) 361

1) What would you consider suitably big? Tsar Bomba was 50MT, that gives you a range increase of 7x.

2) From digging around it seems that it takes a couple of thousand rem to straight out kill someone, less than that and they are going to survive for at least a few days.
Cranking the numbers on yield (assuming no shielding) I figure you get a dose of about 3400 rem from a 50MT at 1000 miles. So it will probably be immediately fatal out to 1300 miles. And reliably fatal out to 2300 miles.
The 1MT nuke at 1000 miles would be essentially harmless and would only deliver immediately fatal doses out to a couple of hundred miles.
So it would appear that with a suitably large nuke and no radiation shielding you are correct.

3) True

Comment Re:not quite (Score 1) 361

to point high-power radar-reflection surveillance satellites at certain empty reaches of space

That isn't going to work for stealth spacecraft which are a trivial engineering problem next to propulsion. Space is huge, you're going to need very very powerful sensors to find anything the size of a ship.

It's not that big, about 40,000 square degrees for a full spherical sweep, a wide angle lens is 100 square degrees, so call it 500 exposures. Assuming the crew have turned off everything except life support then it'll be radiating at some 280 kelvin against a background of nearly 0. Which is good and bright in the thermal band. But to be conservative we'll assume that it needs a full minute per exposure, that's

Of course the real situation is much simpler than this needle in a hay stack approach. Presumably you know who your enemies are. So you know where they are coming from. There a basically 2 ways of getting from A to B in space. Transfer orbits and continuous thrust maneuvers. Transfer orbits greatly limit the amount of sky to be searched. And something thrusting continuously is going to be a lot lot more visible.

Comment Re:Article and grandparent are just wrong. (Score 1) 361

The dispersal of the radiation is going to follow the inverse square law.
A 1 megaton weapon delivers ~4e15 joules of energy. At a range of 1km thats 300megajoules per square meter. And it's going to come in a rather short pulse. Thats enough to solidly mess up your day, it will vaporize Aluminum and depending on the duration may even induce impulsive shock.
At 10km it's drops to 3Mj that's still enough to melt the surface of the Aluminum.
At 100km you are down to 300Kj, that's just going to make it moderately warm.
Obviously crew sensitivity to radiation is quite high, but I find your claim of thousands of miles quite dubious.
Additionally a thousand miles is a fairly close hit, the ISS for example covers that distance every 200seconds.

Comment Re:Not Python! (Score 1) 199

Tabs and spaces are treated as distinct, so a block indented with 'tab''sp''sp' is indented with precisely that and no other combination of tabs or spaces is acceptable.

Additionally the language doesn't care how much white space you indent with, only that there is some indentation and that it is consistent, so you could have a class and indent all the stuff in that class with 'tab''sp''sp' and then indent the bodies of the functions in the class with a further 'sp''sp''tab''tab' for a total of 'tab''sp''sp''sp''sp''tab''tab'. And of course this restriction only applies to white space at the start of statements, when you break statements across lines you can do whatever the hell you want. Although why you would want to do anything aside from a normal straight forward indenting scheme totally escapes me.

That said every serious programming project I have ever encountered (regardless of language) has had an indentation policy and anything that would have make it past any of those policies would be just fine with python.

As others have mentioned, it sounds wrong and for the first week or two you'll be constantly thinking about it worried you'll mess up somehow, but after that you indent you code just like you always do anyway and you don't notice.

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