The _really_ hot stuff has already decayed. High output = short half-life. The most dangerous stuff is not dangerous because it's especially hot, but because the human body likes to retain and concentrate it (cesium-137, for example).

My understanding was that a lot of the moisture that CA usually gets was from the north pacific, carried by winds that are (lately) being diverted by an unusually strong high pressure zone. It seems conceivable that a patch of warm water could make a patch of warm wet air, that would divert more overall moisture than it carries.

Of course, not being a meteorologist, my understanding is probably somewhat flawed. But I don't think it's quite as simple as "this patch has more evaporation therefore CA gets more water".

Thank you for finding actual evidence. However, I think one of your numbers is off. Angular resolution says ~1 arc-second per pixel; field of view says ~120 degrees horizontal that's binocular. The two together says 7200 pixels wide, not 4000 (and more if you're willing to go outside the binocular zone, up to about 12k).

However, that does imply that 8k would probably be "enough" for most purposes, because yeah, to get in close enough to see pixels you have to let some go outside the field of binocular vision.

and this is one reason I want another VW bug. (Plus it's just fun. Given a real engine, anyway...)

yeah, but that way lies a long list of which food, clothing and medical expenses are worthy of being tax exempt and which, being "obviously" luxuries, need not be.

Wouldn't it be easier to tax everything and rebate minimum cost of living expenses?

Hmmm. That implies that you're using 15.9 bit characters, or pretty much all of unicode. How do you manage that?

hmmm. Well, I was going to say I did, but on reflection they do tend more to be 6 words instead.

7776^7 possibilities (in a seven word phrase) is a "small surface"? That's 15 million years to brute force, on average; what duration are you looking for?

Go for it. that's 1.7 * 10^27 possibilities for the 7 word set. At 1 trillion (aka 10^12) tries per second it'll only take a quadrillion seconds, or 30 million years.

yep. Which is why hashes are long and getting longer - more inputs to try in order to find the output needed.

Math issue: 6 words from a list of 1000 is 1000^6 possibilities, not 1000^4, so you're looking at a million seconds rather than 1, or 11 and a half days. Not a whole lot better, but one more word makes it a billion seconds, or 31+ years. (I think you got the 4 from the number of letters per word, which as you point out is not really a relevant factor.)

For cases where the only difference is who was making the decisions, I'd say liability should be with the manufacturer. Other cases are similar to existing with-driver cases: parts failure (manufacturer), skipped maintenance (owner), poorly performed maintenance (shop that did the work).

In the end, like with FAA investigations, everything boils down to pilot error and equipment failure, and in many cases "not dealing with equipment failure properly" is considered pilot error. The only question is who's the pilot.

So, falling back to first principles... the following car should be prepared for the lead car to do pretty much anything, including drop a bumper (which will come to a stop far faster than either car can brake). If you're not leaving enough room to avoid hitting a fallen bumper, you're too close. Follower at fault, next case.

This. They've discovered that stringbuffers are faster than repeated string concatenation, is all.

yeah. Looks like they're comparing concatenation (with all the attendant object creation and obsoletion) with the equivalent of using a stringbuffer (that happens to be held by the kernel). Shock, amazement.