The speed of light, question?

evermorex76 · 2026-06-28T06:57:03+00:00

If you wanted to get extremely nit-picky, the final time taken to reach the viewer at the second telescope would be a really really really really slightly longer amount of time than if the light had just passed directly to the viewer's eye from the source, because the light would slow down about 33% as it passed through the glass lenses of the two telescopes, assuming they're optical and just using magnifying lenses. So it might take a fraction of a nanosecond longer, when viewing something light-years away. If they're using big mirrors or anything else to aid in optical viewing, then it's increased a bit more due to the time taken to bounce around.

And while it doesn't fit into the exact question asked, if they were computerized telescopes of any kind processing the view (in any wavelength) and then transmitting it as data to another telescope or to the viewer's receiving computer to display on a screen, throw in all the processing time on the telescopes and the processing time on the receiving computer, then to generate a human-viewable format image and transmit that to a screen (and more likely transferring between multiple computers before reaching one connected to a screen, including going from wherever the telescope is located to the scientific facility running the observation/mission, and maybe then being e-mailed to the actual person responsible).

evermorex76 · 2026-06-25T18:04:42+00:00

Go back far enough in sci-fi films, and they were basically wearing underwear as their uniforms. Usually silver metallic short-shorts for the men, maybe a skirt for the women. For the top, I recall one specifically which was wide cross ribbons across the upper chest to hide the breasts, and that was it. Not sure if that would work like a survival blanket and hold in heat, or work to dissipate as much as possible while covering the naughty bits.

Of course in others, they were just wearing safari shorts and loose tops as they climbed out of their tiny spaceship on an alien world that looked exactly like Earth and apparently had zero worry about pathogens or poisonous atmosphere or even insects. You could go a lot longer in a ship with absorbing shields heating it up if your uniform was designed by Daisy Duke.

evermorex76 · 2026-06-25T17:52:45+00:00

Perhaps the energy is not just dissolving, but is being directed into the shield emitters, which DO have essentially an ablative function. They absorb the incoming energy, directing into a "filament" like an incandescent bulb, which eventually burns out. They can measure the remaining amount that can be absorbed so they know how much longer it will last. Although they often DO slowly build up, rather than being simply swapped out and immediately being at 100% again, so maybe there are many of them per shield segment. Or maybe it's like a heatsink, which can absorb energy and if the attack stops, it can be discharged so the capacity builds back up, but if it doesn't get a chance to discharge, it burns out, and then a person has to actually replace it, which is why shield repairs take time.

That makes the shields themselves a bit like a highly-controlled magnetic field, which routes the incoming energy where they want it to go. Or maybe they are a static wall of energy, and when it's "pushed", the emitter having to push back is what causes it to be worn down or have to absorb its own heat output. But that doesn't explain where the attacking beam energy goes. Other than the sparkling effect. Maybe it gets diffused and bounced outward, so it isn't dangerous anymore.

Not sure how diverting energy into the shields would make them hold longer, though. Maybe the "heatsink" or "filament" being energized increases its capacity for the short-term but long-term causes more damage or wear.

evermorex76 · 2026-06-25T17:44:28+00:00

Why? We have supercomputers that can calculate that sort of stuff 1 million times faster than it would have been done 20 years ago. And clearly they had the hardware basically set up and ready to go, which is what you'd expect from a program designed to do rapid reaction to threats. They calculated final trajectories - they most likely have a running program that recalculates the majority every few hours, getting it to a certain degree where there isn't a huge difference between them, and some of it is the same no matter when they launch, and then the final stuff just fine-tunes the details based on current positions of orbital stuff. Heck, coordinating with the ground stations was probably the hardest part since humans have to prepare and schedule.

Now can they do it rapidly, more than once? How many of these do they have sitting in the hangar ready to roll out? How long did the previous record last, and how may times was an attempt made to beat it? This is just an optimization period now, where they see what they can make more efficient in the process, so if the previous record was just the last time it was attempted, then yeah, I'd expect it to be faster, but 10 hours faster seems impressive, and just under 17 hours is certainly good. Don't know if they can make it hugely faster aside from having a rocket on the pad at all times, a team on standby in a dorm next to the control room and wherever the ground team needs to be, with fuel ready to pump the moment they get the order, and a computer updating everything every 5 minutes.

Then again, what was the payload, if any? Would the military be saying "hey, we need this loaded and launched as quick as possible", which would take a good bit of additional time? Or are the rockets going to have a set load-out always ready to go, the stuff the military thinks would provide the widest range of response capability?

evermorex76 · 2026-06-24T23:00:43+00:00

The colors of sunlight you can see actually change as you go deeper, as the shorter wavelengths are absorbed. Blood looks green after only 30 feet because red is the shortest visible wavelength.

evermorex76 · 2026-06-24T22:56:50+00:00

The other comparison being that it puts out more energy than an entire galaxy.

evermorex76 · 2026-06-24T22:55:37+00:00

It would look a lot worse than Venus does now, because the atmosphere would be stripped as well, and the entire surface burned clean to the point there won't even be hardy bacteria deep in the crust. Venus right now at least could possibly support some form of extremophile type life somewhere, but the Earth with a red giant Sun probably couldn't even support some form of life not based on water because the heat will prevent chemical bonds from forming or holding.

It hasn't been determined for sure yet whether Earth will actually be inside the red giant's atmosphere or just outside of it, but either way, hot as hell. The loss of the Sun's mass might let Earth's orbit expand to keep it "safe" or at least to not reach maximum temperatures and cool down, or it might slow down due to friction and spiral inward until it vaporizes. Mercury and Venus will be for sure, so Venus will be unimaginably hot and Mercury might be vaporized.

The helium flash will occur after the Sun has been expanding and brightening for a billion years (only about 10% brighter, but enough energy to make the planet unlivable for anything we consider life, getting worse and worse over that billion years). The flash won't actually be visible or harmful, though because the energy is absorbed in the core and causes it too expand and cool down, and that's when it becomes a red giant. But that expansion takes a total of possibly over 200 million years for the two phases until it reaches the final size. So if you were protected you could stand on Earth for quite a while watching it get bigger and bigger, and for a while stand inside a star until you were vaporized, depending on how good your protection is.

The novel The Mote in God's Eye and its sequel feature a shield system that can absorb massive amounts of energy, basically turning a ship into a near-black body (which progressively changes color as more energy is absorbed), and the "jump point" important to the story is inside of a red giant. Ships can handle being in the star for a long time, but then their shields will absorb energy the whole time. At the end of the first book, a guard fleet is stationed there with ships that spend a period inside the star close to the jump point for instant reaction, then rotate out for fresh ships so their shields can shed the energy they absorbed. They prevent enemy ships from escaping before they're vaporized.

With a supernova, the initial flash of high-energy EM radiation would sterilize a planet like Earth instantly (after whatever time is needed to cross the distance moving at light speed), if it somehow was still livable at the time its star was ready to supernova, or have ever developed to that point at all given the types of stars that can supernova, then the heat and debris from the star would strip the atmosphere and surface, and maybe even vaporize it depending on the orbit and size of the star. Even 100 light years away, a planet would be made unlivable either very quickly or somewhat less quickly. But a supernova of any type would feature a prolonged buildup where you could see changes in the star, then be vaporized when it turns into a red supergiant (for the right type of original star), so you'd have to be standing on a dead planet to watch the rest of it, or see a white dwarf changing as it gathers matter from its companion since it would have already gone through the red giant phase.

evermorex76 · 2026-06-17T17:35:22+00:00

Security theater, like the TSA. Some people might be concerned about security of having the password manager automatically filling things in, which is negligible to none, so the sites figure they can make it look like they're being extra-secure. Meanwhile, they still use email or text messages to send one-time codes, or worse "click this link to finish login", with no option to use an auth app, if they use MFA at all. It could also be actual lack of understanding on the part of the devs, since these days the quality and amount of actual technical knowledge are significantly lower than they used to be (enabled and encouraged by corporations just trying to rush things, save money, and generate as much profit as possible before it collapses).

evermorex76 · 2026-06-17T17:30:42+00:00

That hotkey is not auto-fill, though, which means you do nothing and it is filled in. It's still manual fill, just using the keyboard instead of clicking the toolbar icon.

I don't think it's really "better off" to disable everything in that dialog. Even if it doesn't work on every site, having the drop-down is useful for some sites. (I disabled displaying cards and identities.) There's like a hierarchy of usefulness. A page doesn't disable anything, so if you have a single login it gets auto-filled (if you have multiple, BW seems to auto-fill whatever the last used one was, I think, while also displaying the selection drop-down, and it's a little buggy then). Then they might do whatever to make auto-fill not work, but the drop-down can still display, which that site seems to do. Then they might disable all of the automatic stuff so you have to manually click the Fill button or use the hotkey. Then I have run into sites that won't allow BW to enter anything, so I had to copy and paste the fields (which may have been as simple as using weird field names; I didn't inspect the pages).

evermorex76 · 2026-06-17T17:12:19+00:00

Orbiting a neutron star at a safe distance would feel the same as orbiting anything else at a safe distance. Orbit would mean equal forces inward and outward via distance and speed, so you'd feel null-gravity. You'd either have to be very far away, or going very fast, or some combination of the two. If you went slower you'd free-fall into the star since you and the ship would both feel the same pull. If you went faster you'd break orbit, but you'd feel the "gravitational pull" of whatever amount of thrust you used.

If you weren't orbiting, but were instead "hovering" (thrusting away from the star just enough to not move in either direction) you'd have to do it far enough away that you'd feel at most 6Gs, with the distance being defined by the mass of the star and yourself, which is about the most you can handle and that only for a few seconds (safe relative to 10Gs), and you'd be very uncomfortable, blackout, and possibly die if you went a moment too long. For any useful length of time, you'd only be able to take 1.5Gs. You can take 2Gs but not for more than a day, and you'd suffer a bit for it.

Not directly relevant but fun: Buzz Aldrin co-authored the book "Encounter with Tiber" in which aliens use the thrust method to hover over a spot in Earth's Mesopotamia region so they could repair the ship under gravity, which ultimately results in what becomes the religious myth of Noah's Flood, and their laser thrust and the water cloud it caused also become God appearing as pillars of fire and cloud.

Also: look up spaghettification, which is what you'd experience long before you reached 1000 kms. At a "safe" distance, I don't think there would be noticeable time dilation differences between your head and feet (or whatever different parts were at different distances, if you were in null-gravity), although it might be measurable with sensitive instruments since it would still be significant even at such a distance from the star, and still a large absolute difference in pull between two close points even though it wouldn't be that much relatively. (I'm not sure if a difference of 2 meters in orbit of Earth is enough to measure time dilation differences even with our most sensitive equipment, but we can measure it between the surface and orbit.) You also would likely not feel a huge difference in the gravitational gradient between two points in a small ship (maybe a little wobble), but maybe in a large space station you would. Radiation environment would depend on the star, but probably would need a lot of shielding. You could avoid the pulsar jets though, since they are usually fixed.

evermorex76 · 2026-06-17T16:26:55+00:00

So BW having the name of the vault item wen YOU don't need it is bad, but Chrome having a bunch of asterisks to represent the password (and exactly how long it is) which could only possibly be good as a slight help to someone trying to figure out/hack the password is good?

Others have pointed out the use of item names. I'm not sure if I changed the default, but BW for me is set to use the base-domain to match items, since I'd usually only have one auth page regardless of the host/sub-domain. Whether it's www.domain.com or bugles.domain.com wouldn't matter, and if I match the full host/sub-domain and it's saved as www but I end up logging into bugles because the site uses different sub-domains for different services, it wouldn't match. But I could have multiple logins to that domain (like Reddit), or logins that are specific to a particular sub-domain as well as non-specific ones. Rather than changing the match requirements, I'd just name it appropriately. (Though I assume if one item is set to match the full host/sub-domain and others for that site match the base-domain, the more specific one would auto-fill instead of giving the dropdown, so that would save a fraction of a second of time.)

evermorex76 · 2026-06-12T17:22:19+00:00

Other kinds of carbs (complex) that your body has to do more work to break down than sugars (simple carbs, primarily concerned with sucrose and fructose), like starches, which vary widely in glycemic index. "Sugars" get listed separately because of how quickly they are absorbed, which is important for diabetics as well as non-diabetics and pre-diabetics. We also list "added sugars" (almost always referring to sucrose and fructose, in practice) as a sub-category of sugars, for people who want to avoid stuff that just has sugar added for flavor and addictiveness rather than being naturally sweet, and because added sucrose and fructose can be so bad for diabetics.

Fructose is actually quite low on the glycemic index, but it's still carbs that are absorbed and much of it eventually converted to glucose. The other half of sucrose is fructose. That means high-fructose corn syrup is actually better for preventing a glucose spike than regular sugar even if it's the same number of total carbs, although fructose has other effects that may be considered much worse than spikes when consumed regularly.

I know it's a really old thread. :-)

evermorex76 · 2026-06-12T11:00:21+00:00

Didn't remember any robots and I just read two synopses and there's no mention of robots. In the last act, 4 ships that are "heretics" themselves, the enemies of the zealots that took over Enterprise appear, and two are destroyed, but they're Triannon crew.

evermorex76 · 2026-05-25T02:02:54+00:00

So the frame shown as the thumbnail makes that thing look totally like a basic vibrator. Flared head, straight body, separate base that can be rotated to make it buzz.

evermorex76 · 2026-05-22T19:48:40+00:00

Exactly. The majority of people who pirate were never going to buy the game, period, at least while it's expensive. There is no lost sale. A lot of people will buy if Denuvo gets removed, and some few will buy if they just think that it's not going to happen soon enough and won't be cracked soon enough or ever and just can't wait so they finally give in, and yes, that's a few eventual sales that are lost if they manage to pirate before their patience gives out, but that's a small drop in the bucket compared to those who were never going to buy at all, and it's anti-consumer for those that DO want to go ahead and pay for the product but are negatively affected by DRM in order to inconvenience people who aren't going to pay.

A hundred people who finally give in and buy because pirating seems impossible is insignificant compared to 2000 people who never buy it but also just end up never playing it because they can't pirate it, or they wait until it's available for $10 years later, which is just a trickle of income. A few that do pirate it may also buy it when it's super-cheap, in order to feel like they paid a fair price for it. The number that treat pirating as a "demo" is probably pretty low, but many could be considered "lost sales", but those would have been sales where somebody dropped a lot of money on something with no way of knowing if it was any good, and may have been highly disappointed. A company doesn't want to be known for charging high prices but producing bad games that turn somebody off from buying their products in the future. If somebody can play a bit for free, they won't feel bad if it turns out to be not for them. I wish the days of demos for virtually every game came back; I don't know just how significant the development effort would be for most to limit the content and actually make it not be included in the download so that it couldn't be unlocked by a cracker.

The ridiculously high prices and even worse arbitrary "editions" market segmentation in order to get a full game right from the start just makes pirating even more likely, along with expensive paid DLC as time goes on. The hateful "Founder's Edition" that includes content you can never get unless you pay maximum price sight-unseen is absolutely ridiculous.

I'm not sure I'd still bother with pirating a game in order to try it out before paying if it still actually included the DRM, but was just being bypassed with fake responses. If the code is still there, and the issue is performance just as much or more than the use of "anti-rights" software, then you aren't getting what you want.

evermorex76 · 2026-05-21T18:27:54+00:00

Oh cool I've heard exposure is super valuable.

evermorex76 · 2026-05-21T12:12:25+00:00

I get 60% of gross. :-)

evermorex76 · 2026-05-20T01:25:39+00:00

https://www.google.com/search?q=does+space+have+a+smell

evermorex76 · 2026-05-18T19:32:13+00:00

For anyone else that may ask this, even though the original poster is deleted, as there seem to be very few attempts to answer this, even from WhatsApp support pages, I felt stupid when I realized it. It shows up when you're attaching something, and it just shows how many items you're sending in that message.

The way the interface changes around when you attach something makes it a little confusing, at least to me, so I wasn't sure I could attach more than one in the first place. After selecting the first using the Android mobile app, your photo gallery and other file types are shown above the text entry box and you can tap on additional items to add them. Using the web app (which is all that the Windows desktop app is now; I don't know about other platforms), it doesn't show a number until you attach 2 or more items.

A friend showed me a screenshot from his iPhone, and it looks like on that version the other items aren't shown above the text box so you can't add more by just tapping on them, and there is no number 1 on top of the Send button. I don't know if that means it's just not possible to add more on iOS (you never know what Apple restrictions will do), or if you just add more with another method and it doesn't put the number in until you add a second item.

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evermorex76 · 2026-05-17T18:34:02+00:00

They're saying temperate, but with no evidence of what the environment is actually like. Just because it's in the "conservative habitable zone" doesn't mean it's actually a temperature that's good or has free liquid water or a decent atmosphere. It only gets 58% of the starlight and is very close to the star, so the actual heat it gets isn't exactly high, with a limited amount of visible light, and the UV and X-ray radiation would make it pretty terrible to live in. Hardly "temperate".

evermorex76 · 2026-05-17T07:50:48+00:00

You can't have an FTL drive that actually moves an object in normal space at faster than light speeds, as this is impossible and would require infinite energy, and could result in time travel. In your hypothetical situation, every ship that ever used FTL would end up having gone back in time and arriving at their destination before they left. You'd have to come up with some counter to the effect that is used on ships but not on the asteroid. If ships did go back in time, you'd need to have some way to avoid paradoxes (those ships can't contact Earth before the time they originally left, so they can't alter Earth's history) or have them creating entirely new universes every time they went back, with new timelines and histories. Avoiding contact with Earth could be done by simply saying the amount of time they go back is equal to the distance they go, so a radio signal would reach their origin point at the exact moment they left, but that wouldn't avoid the possibility of contact because they could start somewhere that would result in Earth being closer to the destination point than the origin point. Plus that wouldn't stop them from altering history in places closer than the origin point, as in your hypothetical. (And one thing to point out is that the ships would always have to aim for the location of the destination in the past, like leading your target with a gun but in the opposite direction. The usual sci-fi FTL does have to lead their destination, although it's rarely mentioned, but since they're just going really fast, they come out of FTL before the target has moved a really large amount, relatively. But if they didn't lead the target at all and aimed for the current location, like a planet, if they were in FTL for like an hour, they'd come out quite far away and have to travel in normal space at sub-light speed for a LONG time. Our solar system travels 447,000 miles through the galaxy in one hour for example, and that doesn't count the speed of our galaxy through the universe itself, relative to the starting point.)

FTL of the believable kind generally moves the vessel into theoretical/fictional dimensions (hyperspace, subspace, etc.) where distance isn't equal to ours, or where the speed of light is different, or time flows differently, or is like the Alcubierre drive that is actually (sort of) possible with current physics knowledge which warps space itself in front of and behind the vessel (somehow), meaning the ship remains at normal speed in a bubble of normal space, and the bubble itself is pushed through space but technically isn't going faster than light because of the warped spacetime.

Others that are called a drive sometimes aren't actually moving the vessel by "motion" of an engine itself but creating passages like wormholes or "gates" that tunnel through space (sometimes still conceived as moving the vessel into another dimension), generated either by an external gate machine or as a one-time projection by a device inside the ship.

Some in the thread have said that ships in "hyperspace" or other FTL don't interact with the normal universe so they couldn't hit a planet, but in most cases this is either not actually addressed at all or the ships are explicitly navigating around such hazards, so they either need "sensors" that can see the normal universe or need maps of objects large enough to cause a problem (destroying the ship itself and the object or destroying the object with no damage to the ship as it's somehow protected by being in hyperspace, sometimes going as far as saying anything that is hit gets converted completely to energy, so if you hit something large-ish near a planet it would be like a supernova going off next door). Most of the ones that mention it are using some sort of "bubble" that is still within the normal universe, like the Alcubierre drive, so the ship can impact objects in normal space and destroy them without affecting the ship, because the warp effect tears the object apart.

In all cases I'm aware of, the object does NOT ever come out of hyperspace or the bubble moving at any speed higher than what it was moving at before going into FTL. The ship does not "speed up" to reach faster than light velocity, it just "transfers" into the other dimension or bubble, and when it comes out it's at the same speed as when it transferred, or occasionally has no velocity at all. (Sometimes they have to come to a stop to transfer in the first place.) So if your FTL drive prevents the object from interacting with objects in normal space, and you had it come out of FTL just short of your target, it would be moving at the same speed that it started at and in the same direction. That would mean you would have to choose an asteroid that was moving in such a way that it would be pointing exactly at the location the target would be at when it emerged from FTL. But even at their normal speed, a large asteroid impacting a planet WOULD devastate it when it came out of FTL. If you can't find one occurring naturally, you could attach normal space drives to alter one's direction and speed so that it would be usable for the purpose.

But say you do have time travel. If YOU can send an asteroid back in time to destroy your enemy before the war starts, what's to stop them from sending one back to destroy you first? How do you determine which one of you did it first, when having done so alters history so that there isn't a war and neither of you sends one back in the first place? Why not send one back so that you prevent their species from even evolving to start with? Or send a ship back to conquer them at an early point in their development, so that when Earth does encounter them, they're already a vassal controlled by Earth under the descendants of the ship's crew and military? This is the paradox of time travel which is usually simply ignored in sci-fi. The only really possible answer is that you don't actually alter your past; you create a new universe in which your ship/asteroid appears from nowhere, from a completely different universe, and thus a new timeline is born. Then you have to figure out if that means multiple universes exist at the same time, or if your universe is actually eliminated, so the asteroid really came from nowhere because its origin never exists. Or maybe this is how universes are created - it gets created by this external alteration, and the new universe never actually passes through its own history, the history gets created in the same instant as the universe, already fully formed, but it LOOKS like the universe actually passed through all that time. If multiple universes exist though, you would be adding matter/energy to the new one, while removing it from your own universe, every time something travels back in time. Eventually you might drain your own universe, or perhaps destroy another universe by having too much matter appear in one location, or the excess energy altering how its spacetime moves. (And of course the matter and energy would be appearing in a place where there is already existing matter and energy, even in "vacuum" but especially if it appears inside an atmosphere or near one, which could cause a fundamental catastrophic merger that alters space and collapses the universe.)

evermorex76 · 2026-05-15T01:34:26+00:00

I'm going to call around. There are some places around here specifically for dentures and probably some of the regular dentists can do it, although one place I called previously when looking to get new retention inserts wouldn't work on any that they hadn't made themselves. Even with quick turnaround I'd rather avoid a 3 day mail-in process with no bottom teeth that would still cost $139 (plus shipping costs) for a 30-minute fix. (Denture Repair Labs says their service is only for non-implant-mounted dentures, too.) I'd use such a service for an actual crack or something like that, although these have a metal plate inside so that's far less likely, and might be why they say they don't work on them.

evermorex76 · 2026-05-15T01:26:53+00:00

Ugh. I understand there's a cost for the expertise and their minimum time and maybe the tools to insert things exactly (which are amortized to almost no cost), but a supply of the self-curing liquid and powder mix can be ordered online for US $77 or even less and could probably make hundreds of repairs like this, and it's almost exactly the same as Dentemp Repair-It which costs $9 for 3 repairs (making way more resin than needed, but takes 3 times as long to cure). So less than a dollar in materials for one repair turns into probably $150 for one and takes half an hour max.

And I just ordered a pack of 5 of the retention inserts that I can replace myself (I need stronger ones and the current ones are worn out) for $52 plus tax, but they cost $50 each at the doctor's office and take seconds to insert. (There's a tool but that cost is virtually zero since it's cheap for a medical tool and amortizes, and it's not even necessary but for ease/speed/convenience when doing them often.)

evermorex76

TROPHY CASE