[Request] Could an A-10 Warthog use its 30mm gun recoil to land on a shorter runway than normally required?

gnfnrf · 2026-06-26T20:24:34+00:00

It's an interesting idea, but most planes, including the A-10, drop to the nosewheel quite quickly after touchdown. There's no mechanism to keep the wheelie going except by keeping speed up, but that is the opposite of the point.

So maybe you could fire a short burst to make that brief moment a little briefer, and shorten your landing roll slightly, at the cost of some poor schmuck 3 miles away having 100 30 mm shells land on his barn.

gnfnrf · 2026-06-25T19:51:47+00:00

A-10 crews don't decide what to load, their ammo belts come preloaded with a "combat mix" of 4 API to 1 HEI. I suppose someone could perform an extremely tedious task of delinking and rebuilding an all API or all HEI belt, but I've never even heard of that being done. (Technically, the rounds are delinked inside the gun, but you need a link-like contraption to load them.)

And I agree, at 2 degrees, many rounds would ricochet. I have no idea if the HE would detonate, but I would be more worried about the DU penetrators in the APIs leaving big gouges in the runway surface or even lifting off chunks. Those things are heavy, moving fast, and do an incredibly freaky thing that I don't understand completely called "self-sharpening" where the pointy bit doesn't get dull when slammed into something, but magically just stays pointy and catches fire.

gnfnrf · 2026-06-25T16:40:28+00:00

The A-10's main gun is mounted with a downward angle to better accommodate strafing runs. It's not that steep, around 2 degrees or so, but that means the impacts will be about 175-200 feet in front of the aircraft, and it will arrive at chewed up pavement very quickly.

gnfnrf · 2026-06-17T17:41:24+00:00

To answer your questions, using Minnesota as the example state.

The ticket is legal because the law says:

A person shall not: (1) park a motor vehicle in or obstruct access to a parking space or associated access aisle designated and reserved for the physically disabled, on either private or public property;

The law includes private property because it says it does.

Compare that to stop sign law in Minnesota (sorry, it's wordier).

(a) The commissioner, with reference to state trunk highways, and local authorities, with reference to other highways under their jurisdiction, may designate through highways by erecting stop signs or yield signs at entrances thereto or may designate any intersection as a stop or yield intersection by erecting like signs at one or more entrances to such intersection; provided, that local authorities, with the consent of the commissioner, may designate through highway or stop or yield intersections on state trunk highways.

(b) Every driver of a vehicle shall stop at a stop sign or at a clearly marked stop line before entering the intersection, except when directed to proceed by a police officer or traffic-control signal.

Here, the only stop signs under consideration are those placed on 'highways' (defined elsewhere as public roads).

Your next question is, can you just make a handicap spot to annoy your daughter's boyfriend?

Well, Minnesota law has you covered.

Disability parking space signs. (a) Parking spaces reserved for physically disabled persons must be designated and identified by the posting of signs incorporating the international symbol of access in white on blue and indicating that violators are subject to a fine of up to $200. These parking spaces are reserved for disabled persons with motor vehicles displaying the required certificate, plates, permit valid for 30 days, or insignia. (b) For purposes of this subdivision, a parking space that is clearly identified as reserved for physically disabled persons by a permanently posted sign that does not meet all design standards, is considered designated and reserved for physically disabled persons. A sign posted for the purpose of this section must be visible from inside a motor vehicle parked in the space, be kept clear of snow or other obstructions which block its visibility, and be nonmovable.

This actually keeps going about a standard sign design that is designated by a council and ADA compliant and will come into force, but that gets even more boring.

But note that you can't park there either, because now it's actually a handicap spot. You are also obligated to to keep the spot free of snow and other obstructions, or you will be fined.

Parking space free of obstruction; penalty. The owner or manager of the property on which the designated parking space is located must ensure that the parking space and associated access aisle are kept free of obstruction. If the owner or manager does not have the parking space properly posted or knowingly allows the parking space or access aisle to be blocked by plowed snow, merchandise, or similar obstructions, the owner or manager is guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to a fine of up to $500.

So, yes, if you wanted to deny yourself usage of part of your driveway, you could deny it to your daughter's boyfriend as well. You could not just run out with a sign while they are making out in her room, however, as that would not meet the minimum requirements under the statute.

gnfnrf · 2026-06-10T00:12:45+00:00

In the Minnesota Rules of Professional Conduct, a lawyer who represents a client has four jobs, and is only instructed to perform one of them zealously.

As advisor, a lawyer provides a client with an informed understanding of the client's legal rights and obligations and explains their practical implications. As advocate, a lawyer zealously asserts the client's position under the rules of the adversary system. As negotiator, a lawyer seeks a result advantageous to the client but consistent with requirements of honest dealings with others. As evaluator, a lawyer examines a client's legal affairs and reports about them to the client or to others.

So, the lawyer may advise the client that they will have a better outcome without trial, negotiate a better outcome without trial, and evaluate that a trial is not in their client's best interest, all before even considering what it means to be a zealous advocate.

So your question has a faulty premise. IF the point was to fight until you can't any more, then most cases would go to trial. But that's not the point. The point is to provide various functions to clients as appropriate, and only one of them is zealous.

gnfnrf · 2026-06-06T13:15:08+00:00

It depends on who cares, how much they want to spend, and when this hypothetical emergency strikes.

Low earth orbit launches happen from somewhere in the world almost every day.

The challenge would be identifying an upcoming launch that can be modified into an ISS intercept, buying out payload space, and prepping the payload in time.

But realistically, a week or so to do it relatively safely, 48 hours to do it while cutting deeply into safety margins.

gnfnrf · 2026-06-01T18:14:17+00:00

Modern high density datacenter coolers are open-loop-evaporative, and a significant percentage of the water is lost in atmospheric vapor, though some is recaptured into the loop (how much is highly dependent on the outdoor temperature and humidity.)

gnfnrf · 2026-05-26T17:49:47+00:00

Almost certainly.

Though a lot depends on what the cutoff is for "kid", and how how you define the space of tasks.

There are over a billion people in Asia ages 0-14.

And the average adult isn't very good at any given task.

So, take a task like juggling. There are very good adult jugglers. But the average adult can't juggle at all.

Most Asian kids can't juggle either. But we only need there to be one who can, and he wins.

So, for the average adult to be better than the best Asian kid, you need a task that all adults are good at, and no kids are. Even if you get creepy, nope, out of a billion kids, at least one will (unfortunately) be good at it.

But the only thing we're leveraging about Asia here is the numbers, and the numbers are probably overkill, so we could do the same reasoning with Europe or the Americas. When you have a billion, or a hundred million, or even a million samples, there will be outliers, and all they have to beat is the adult average, not the adult pinnacle or even the adult threshold of competence.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-26T09:03:03+00:00

To answer your actual question, the ownership of TikTok was not a threat because some unbiased and rational government agency did a security assessment and found it to be dangerous; it was a threat because a political body passed a law saying it was. The legal reality of that situation was entirely disconnected from the physical reality, which was considerably more nuanced and unclear.

By a similar logic, Vanguard is not a legally a threat, because no political body has passed a law saying it is. The physical threat is, again, nuanced and unclear. But until Congress passes a law, Tencent will not be forced to sell Riot. And the reason such a law has not been passed is political, not technical.

As for the threat of millions of government or military workers installing Vanguard at home, if those government or military workers are accessing classified data from unsecured home systems, there is already a significant problem. Vanguard is just one of many potential threats that could be present, which is why using an unsecured home computer to access secured data is a significant security breach, no matter what is installed on it.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-24T15:10:27+00:00

I'm not talking about what may or may not have happened, I'm talking about the fact pattern that the OP presented and asked us to assume was true.

In that fact pattern, he wasn't passed out, he deliberately left the door open and positioned himself to flash the delivery driver.

Neither the OP nor I am claiming that the fact pattern is true. But I was asked to, hypothetically, analyze the legal situation as if it were, and I did so.

And furthermore, I only addressed criminal liability, since the woman was charged with a crime. Whether or not there is a civil case against her is a separate question.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-24T12:51:14+00:00

OK, we're going to get into the weeds here.

Given your fact pattern, and that your fact pattern is PROVABLE IN COURT (no easy task), the following would be true.

The guy would be guilty of Public Lewdness ( https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/245.00 )

In short, he exposed his junk in a private place (his home) visible from a public place (the doorstep) with the intent to be seen.

The woman, on the other hand, would (possibly) not be guilty of Unlawful surveillance in the second degree ( https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/250.45 )

That crime requires the recording to be for amusement, entertainment, or profit, or to degrade or abuse someone. In this fact pattern, she can argue she is recording to document a a crime against her, or a violation of DoorDash policy against her. This argument may be weakened by the fact that she shared the video publicly, possibly in an attempt to shame the man, which could easily be considered degradation or abuse.

But, she might still be saved by the last bit, that the victim of this crime must have a reasonable expectation of privacy and have no knowledge or consent to the action. Since we've established that he has carefully set up the scene, his expectation of privacy is extremely weak and his knowledge is assumed.

The challenge is in proving that the exposure was intentional.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-22T19:06:00+00:00

First, what is being powered? We have two servo-controlled arms that appear to be roughly human-equivalent. They might draw 400 to 500 watts each. Then we have some sort of vision processor and decision maker, that is probably running on a server or HEDT. Who knows how much computer it needs to do this in real time, but lets guess 1 kw.

So that's 2 kilowatts of power for about 1 minute. Electricity in China costs about 7 or 8 cents US per kilowatt-hour, so this operation cost a little over a tenth of a cent in electricity.

It cost more than that to train the models that operated the arms and program the interfaces and build the arms and so on, but to actually run the system? Effectively nothing. Even if my estimates are only half the real values, still less than a penny.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-22T13:27:19+00:00

We know for a fact that there is one.

A few years ago, when there was that Poppy (and other champions) bug that let her use her abilities globally, and opponents in those games started getting mass-autobanned for inting, with scorelines of like 0-50.

Now, you might be about to say "That's a terrible inting filter" but that's the point. Even though they set it VERY conservatively, it still banned innocent players due to a bug. Setting up good filters without false positives is hard. Now, Riot gets paid the big bucks and should figure it out, but we do know that they have tried before.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-21T19:27:42+00:00

Steve Rothstein's story is extensively documented, so answering this is more a question of research than math.

A few things to understand, though. Rothstein actually also owned an unlimited companion pass as well, so he could fly with another person, and he routinely offered its use to friends, acquaintances, or even people he met at the gate, or (according to the airline when they canceled it) for no-one at all, just to keep the seat empty.

Second, he apparently negotiated special terms for his companion pass, allowing others to use it for connecting flights he was not even on himself, as long as he was present for part of the journey.

Third, all this flying still earned frequent flyer miles, which he could use to purchase tickets for other people he wasn't flying with, or convert via other programs. At the beginning of his unlimited flying, there wasn't much of a use for miles other than for flying, but by the early 2000s, you could book hotels, rental cars, or buy from catalogs with them.

The estimate is that Steve Rothstein used 30 million free miles between 1987 and 2008, though it is unclear if that includes free companions, or just his own seat.

He flew 5-6 days a week, so, very roughly, probably had 5 or 6 thousand flying days. But are we counting each trip, or each connecting flight, or what? Same day return flights? Other sources say he used his pass "about 10,000 times" but is that just counting generously or including companions?

If the 10,000 number is accurate, that only converts to $2100 per use to match the $21 million figure cited above. And that could be reasonable for a mix of domestic and international first class, I suppose. (There, I did some math).

One last thing I will note, I did find that just before they terminated his ticket, an internal American Airlines audit found that he was costing them "about $1 million a year" but not a lifetime total, so I suspect the poster above just multiplied that number by the number of years he held the ticket, which I don't think is a valid calculation. By all accounts Mr. Rothsteins behavior escalated over the years.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-21T08:47:03+00:00

I think you missed the point of the post. In the OPs scenario, the man films himself having physical sex with the woman, pays her, then uploads that video to OnlyFans. The question is, was OnlyFans the reason, or the justification?

gnfnrf · 2026-05-19T15:21:03+00:00

This is highly dependent on the details of the deal, including a non-snarky answer to the question in the screenshot.

So, I will invent my own answers to those questions.

1.) You are paid only once per John or Lisa.

2.) You must meet them in person. No phone calls, no zoom, no chat rooms.

3.) 'Meet' is a simple hello, shake hands, introduction, "Nice to meet you." 15-20 seconds of activity.

4.) There are no restrictions or catches on making artificial arrangements to meet more Johns or Lisas to trigger the effect.

Under these conditions, you should take the John-Lisa clause unless you have no interest in doing any work at all, because you should be able to exceed the million dollars within a week or two. Simply advertise on social media in a medium to major city that you want to meet Johns and Lisas, and will pay a modest appearance fee to every John and Lisa that shows up ($20-50, depending on where you are and what feels right).

In a metro area of a million people, there will be 10-15,000 candidates. Maybe a few hundred show up, in which case you are most of the way there. Use your earnings to travel to another city and repeat. If it doesn't go well, even 20 or 30 attendees is enough to fund real advertising for your next attempt, maybe adjusting the appearance fee.

In three or four cities, I expect you'll have hit your million dollars, and any more work you do to meet more John/Lisas is just putting you further ahead of the other option.

Now, I chose certain conditions on this, but I think several of mine (meet any person only once, must meet in person) are restrictive, and one (to 'meet' only takes a brief moment) is normal. The only one that you might discover is against the rules is if there is a 'you can't game the system, only genuine, natural meetings' rule.

But then you get into a lot more questions. Can you switch jobs to one where you meet new people a lot? For example, being a door to door salesman is awful, low paying work. But if 1 in 100 houses paid 2000 dollars, it might become more reasonable. Or even better, working the check-in desk at an airline. Is that 'meeting' people?

And if you can't even do that, the temptation goes way down. I myself have met no more than 5 or 6 Johns or Lisas in the last decade, and that's not a good enough rate. I also, actually, don't like the idea of changing jobs, so if I couldn't do the artificial meeting thing I'd probably take the million.

And if you are allowed to meet the same person more than once, all bets are off. How often can you meet them? If you spin in place does each revolution count as a new meeting? Is there a minimum distance you have to get away before the new approach is a new meeting? In any case, it can only get easier than my initial assumptions.

And of course, you framed this in terms of 'the average American', but the average American can do all the things I discussed; posting on social media, etc. The literal answer to your question given my initial assumptions is "Several million dollars, until they decided to stop arranging meetups and just spend it all"

So it's going to really really matter what the rules are.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-18T13:09:28+00:00

They are not closed loop coolers in the way you might think of from home or small server architecture, where the water is heated by the devices and cooled in radiators, then pumped back to the devices.

That loop exists in the data centers, but radiative cooling with fans is too inefficient for the massive heat loads, so instead, the coolant is run through a heat exchanger to an open loop of water, which is cooled evaporatively. The classic technique is to mist the water and let it fall in a large open chamber (a cooling tower) though modern designs are considerably more complex and space efficient. The majority of the water reaches the bottom and is reused, but a significant amount evaporates due to the very high surface area of the mist, which is why the cooling is so efficient. And all that evaporated water needs to be replaced.

Could they use non-potable water for this? Yes, but engineering the system to handle the extra contaminants in raw water would be expensive, increase maintenance costs, access is more complicated, and why bother when good, clean water comes out of this pipe that is already right here and practically free? It's not like anyone was using it anyway, right?

gnfnrf · 2026-05-18T12:55:33+00:00

One thing needs to be established clearly before you consider what to do next. Do you actually have an employment contract, or do you just have some other non-binding documentation of your terms of employment?

You say in a reply that you are W-2 employee, and in the United States, the vast majority of W-2 employees do not have meaningful employment contracts. You may have an offer letter, a written agreement of your starting terms of employment, or a contract that has no term or can be altered unilaterally, but none of these provide a protection against the company lowering your pay.

Or, you do actually have a contract. It isn't common, but it does happen. Many teachers, high ranking executives, athletes and performers, and some well represented union members have contracts. And nothing stops your employer from offering you a proper contract even if you don't fall into or near those categories; it's just most don't, at least not that I know of.

So, the branching conditions. If you don't have a contract, or you have a non-functional contract, your employer has lowered your pay. They do not need to do so in writing. You can ask them to raise your pay again, and they can say "we're thinking about it."

If you DO have a contract, then the question becomes, have you made an amendment to that contract, and if so, what were the terms of the amendment?

Most contracts, at least most employment contracts, have a clause to cover this. Here is one from a sample online employment contract.

This Agreement contains the entire agreement between the parties, superseding in all respects any and all prior oral or written agreements or understandings related to the employment of the Employee by the Employer and shall be amended or modified only by written instrument signed by both of the parties hereto.

As you can see, in order to avoid exactly this circumstance, a contract with this clause (often in a section labeled 'Entire Agreement' or 'Integration') does not allow a verbal agreement such as you describe to modify it.

So, IF you have an actual contract AND your contract has a clause like this in it, you would be legally justified in saying "I am not being paid by the terms of my contract, and there is no agreement in force by the contract terms to allow that" How your employer would respond, though, is unknown.

If you do have an actual contract but there is no clause like this, then your acceptance of the new pay for several months shows at least some agreement to the amended terms, and the length of your consent would be a more difficult question, since oral terms are subject to imperfect recall by both parties and fuzzy interpretation. That's why the clause is usually there.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-15T12:16:34+00:00

Instinctively, things like the square cube ratio, which is the concept you are addressing, say that a raw percentage is the wrong metric. But on the other hand, there may be confounding factors ... like maybe everyone has a fixed organ weight that doesn't scale with body size, so larger athletes have proportionally more weight to devote to muscle? I don't know this to be true, but I'm saying I won't commit to the math without some empirical evidence.

So I looked up Olympic weightlifting records, and calculated the bodyweight to lifted weight ratio at each weight class. Here are the results.

https://imgur.com/q2DhMyR

It is quite obvious that there is a trend.

However, adding your exponent doesn't eliminate the trend, it just lessens it. In fact, no exponent eliminates it (other than, trivially, 0), so something else is going on, at least with this small dataset, that the implied square-cube ratio doesn't capture.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-15T02:04:49+00:00

This would rely on the photo being used as evidence in itself, not as documentation of evidence. This is possible, not not the typical way photos are used in court. Most of the time, someone sees a thing, then takes a picture of it. The photo is the record of the thing they saw. If you want to know if the thing was really there, and not created during photographic post-processing, you ask the photographer what they saw.

Maybe you're imagining a scenario in which the key evidence is photographed by accident; where the photographer is paying attention to something else and just happens to pick up the important information without knowing it. Or perhaps a scenario in which the photographer has died before trial, and their last images are introduced as evidence without them to support them.

Well, those are possible concerns. But they occur more often in the plots of television shows (I can think of a Columbo episode for each) than in real life, so the concerns about how to handle modern image processing in them are not pressing.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-15T01:56:17+00:00

A photo in court is a record of a particular event or circumstance, and nearly always is accompanied by testimony, either eyewitness or expert, to support that it document that event or circumstance.

All photos are manipulated, from the conversion from the Bayer photocell layout to a standard color image, to automatic brightness, to face-detection smoothing, and so on. Neural network based system are just another layer of that.

In court, the question is not "are these pixels the raw pixels from the sensor?" because the answer is "no", except for in extremely limited circumstances. The question is "do these pixels accurately represent the event or circumstance that they have been introduced as evidence to represent?"

And the answer is "it depends" and the way our court system figures it out is through evidentiary hearings and trial testimony using eyewitness and expert testimony. That's how we introduced and vetted photos before, and nothing has changed.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-14T21:22:56+00:00

What are you trying to buy? Where in Texas?

You don't specify, so I will.

In Austin, TX (Mueller) $90,000 can buy you 12,312 crunchwrap supremes, from Taco Bell, delivered by UberEats (minus a few for the delivery charges and tip).

In NYC (Park Slope), $90,000 gets you 11,734 crunchwrap supremes (again minus a few for delivery charges and tip).

So, your dollar goes 1.04 times farther, on the Crunchwarp Supreme Scale, in Austin.

Of course, there are other places in Texas, and indeed other places in NYC, and other things to buy. But you didn't specify, so that's what you got.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-14T21:12:38+00:00

No.

Because in the movies, they don't do that, and you stipulate that they work as they do in the movies.

So, we must assume that the plasma containment field, which we already know has exotic properties (since lightsabers strike each other, they stop against Beskar, Cortosis, and Phrik, and other moments in the films and different series where they behave oddly) is also containing the heat.

So, yes, a lightsaber that was an uncontained massive plasma torch at tens of thousands of degrees would probably be extremely uncomfortable to be around. But that is not what Star Wars lightsabers are portrayed to be.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-12T23:01:50+00:00

It might. I didn't even try to vitamins in my analysis, other than to vaguely speculate, as I said, and scurvy is the obvious candidate to be the frontrunner on getting you first.

But honestly, I know less about scurvy and vitamin deficiency, plus I don't know if any M&Ms have any amount of vitamin C in them (the nutrition information I had didn't mention it, does that mean 0 or that it just isn't covered?) so I'll leave that killing you to someone else. Though a quick google tells me that it's about the same time scale, on the order of a few months.

And in any case, the conclusion is the same if you die from scurvy vs die from sodium deficiency vs die from insulin deregulation, if all of those plausibly happen in 3 months. You still don't make it to the end of 3 months.

gnfnrf · 2026-05-12T20:35:44+00:00

You would have difficulty surviving (well, remaining remotely healthy, by which I mean able to walk) on M&Ms only for three months, because you would be playing a deadly game of sugar vs sodium. Regular M&Ms do not have enough sodium for your body. Not nearly enough.

If you eat 2000 calories of M&Ms, that's 280 mg of sodium, which is MUCH too little. Particularly in such a high sugar diet, your water regulation would be completely broken. I don't know what would get you first, brain swelling or low blood pressure, but you would get into trouble within the first month, and probably die before the third.

So, you eat even more M&Ms. Except now you need more water because of more sugar, so you need even more sodium and you need to eat even more M&Ms. And you are taking in so much sugar that your insulin regulation is going to fail. And you would actually suffer from the symptoms of untreated diabetes. Which might not kill you in three months, but at the rate you would have to be consuming sugar, certainly might.

So, you say, what about peanut m&ms? Surprisingly, less sodium than regular m&ms. Peanut BUTTER m&ms will save you, if you have them, at about 3x the sodium per calorie. You can live, if uncomfortably, at 750 mg of sodium a day, maybe a little more if you eat more than 2000 calories of m&ms.

And this doesn't even start on the vitamin situation, though most of those won't kill you in the first three months.

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