News Thread

Discussion in 'Unrelated Discussion' started by tatsujb, October 18, 2015.

  1. cptconundrum

    cptconundrum Post Master General

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    The fear is that it reduces the response time to the point that mutually assured destruction is no longer assured. If I can drop a bunch of nukes on your own nukes before you have a chance to figure out what I'm doing and launch, I reduce the risk to myself. It could potentially change the game theory calculations to favor striking first.
  2. tehtrekd

    tehtrekd Post Master General

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    Or you could just use them for their EMP capabilities, since one nuke is probably enough to effect the entire USA.
    Can't launch nukes when your entire country's electrical and communication grid is destroyed. Can't even really defend against invasion at that point.
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  3. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    How is that different to now? The technology to build a nuke-missile that can go to space doesn't mean the nuke would go any faster to a target on earth. Rather slower, as it makes a detour through space?
    I dunno about the specifics, but I am doubtful about anybody could reach a state where they could unleash a strike that big without getting noticed ahead of time. You'd have to have nukes ready to obliterate half the planet. Not to mention there is the question of things like nukes stationed on submarines, getting those before they hit you would be even harder.
    Dunno about the EMP capabilities, EMPing the whole US at once seems pretty big, no idea if that is possible. Though just the US is probably not even enough, pretty sure the US has nukes stationed in allied nations as well.

    It's probably just really beyond me how anybody could be stupid enough to ever consider a nuclear first strike of that size. You have to be a really crazy person to want to do that, so I feel it's just such an unrealistic threat.
    Albeit I read some report about crazy US generals in the cold war who basically went to Kennedy with a very detailed plan on how to do just that. Dozens of nukes on dozens of cities. Plans to specifically target medical production facilities. Clearly aimed to obliterate any living human anywhere close to there enemy. When they noticed that the russian were not as ready as they thought at first to strike back they even pushed harder as in "We can turn russia and half of europe into ashes and be done with it, let's do it". Kennedy luckily wasn't as insane as his Generals were...
    Last edited: February 17, 2016
  4. tatsujb

    tatsujb Post Master General

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    no I think that may actually make it faster. but I digress because I much rather our nukes be turned into something useful rather then continue to threaten us. I do hope however that in an effort to make this whole operation a responsible event we make this a co-owned project requiring the keys of several nation to launch or something of the sort which may assure there is no evil use of it. having it be russian only does indeed sound dubious.
  5. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    Yeah, that seemed kind of incredible to me too, but then I looked up the Starfish Prime experiment where the US did detonate a nuke in (almost-)space (and accidentally took out ten satellites...). They broke electrical equipment 1400km away. So doing just one of those in the middle of the US will actually cause country-wide issues. Crazy!
  6. cptconundrum

    cptconundrum Post Master General

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    You're right about that. I did a drive-by forum post and didn't read what the topic was about. Nukes designed to hit an asteroid aren't a real issue other than the ability for them to be used to take out satellites, but many countries have that capability right now as it is. I thought you were talking about the old cold war idea of putting missiles in satellites to cut down on the time from launch to detonation. There are so many problems with that idea that I don't even know where to begin. Thank god they weren't stupid enough to try that decades ago, or we would all be dead by now. Some hacker would have taken control of them or a missile would have fallen from orbit and caused a full scale war.

    It's not about getting them all though. You just need to be confident that you can get enough that you come out less dead than the other country. Cold war math is pretty dark.

    I think I remember this being true. The fear was that the Soviets would attack as soon as they had the advantage, so some in the military concluded that the only option was to strike first. I'm sure there were people on the soviet side planning the same sort of thing, but luckily neither government wanted to start a war like that.
  7. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    Right, a "we have nukes in satellites above your head"-kind of thing would be a problem, but that's hard to justify with "we're researching how to bounce of asteroids technology".

    And taking out satellites... I dunno but I'd expect you don't need nukes for that.
    If you use nukes you'll be guaranteed to destroy a ton of your own satellites as well.

    While that probably would be quite a lot of damage to all the "naive" civilian technology that just assumes humans are too reasonable to do something like that, I'd expect that counter-strike nukes and relevant infrastructure are behind pretty thick shielding against such a thing?
  8. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    Sure, all you need is a big enough Faraday cage. I'm sure the military considered that one. Even if only to protect again the next major solar flare. (Quebec, Canada 1989)
  9. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    What I find problematic is that it seems to be a question of "does Apple help or not". It should be a question of "the data is encrypted and not even Apple can change it".
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  10. tatsujb

    tatsujb Post Master General

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    I read that article and to me it read as "we're fuckked" on a loop.
  11. tatsujb

    tatsujb Post Master General

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  12. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    I guess I should've actually read through the pages of articles on the topic, the issue isn't that problematic, as I found reading another shorter article.
    Since I do not own any apple stuff I didn't know that iPhones have an increasing "wait for the next try" on wrong pin inputs and also this:
    So other thing simply is that the FBI would like to brute force the pin, but the new iPhone software simply makes that a dangerous thing. They'd like a piece of software that lets them run their brute force attack at maximum speed without risk of data loss.
    So the encryption is fine, it is just that on devices like smart phones people tend to have too weak passwords in general...

    I guess once (hopefully) the FBI loses against Apple they'll have to take the risk.
  13. arseface

    arseface Post Master General

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    Here's an upload of the match. I'm currently about an hour and a half in and it gets better as it goes along. Early commentary is less good because they have less to talk about, later on they talk about relevant things in the match and the 0 seconds remaining thing pretty much goes away.

    This is the first match of the series between Lee Sedol(Go Grand Master) and Google's Deep Mind AI.

    If you have a go player, here's the replay file.sgf

    Deep Mind won the first match, which is pretty big.
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  14. tatsujb

    tatsujb Post Master General

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  15. squishypon3

    squishypon3 Post Master General

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    Breaking News: Unrelated Discussion Board is dead... Even to my dismay </3

    No but seriously! No posts since Thurdsday? Shameful. ;P
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  16. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    Didn't you hear? There is a new PTE and Legion games. :)
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  17. tehtrekd

    tehtrekd Post Master General

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    stuart98 likes this.
  18. pieman90

    pieman90 Active Member

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    stuart98 likes this.
  19. tehtrekd

    tehtrekd Post Master General

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  20. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    stuart98 and tatsujb like this.

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