I bought a 97 Ford Taurus off a friend for $800 back in 2008. Her dad thought it was on its last legs at 155k miles so he wanted to sell it. I drove it for four years. It was running fine until someone blasted it out in front of my girlfriend’s house and drove off. At the time it had 206k miles. 50k miles for $800 was certainly one of my best purchases.
Don’t get me wrong, the vanilla versions of both games are great. But once you explore the higher end mods, it’s hard to play without them. I would recommend AI+, some of the expanded unit additions and there are some great diplomacy mods. I am not on my computer at the moment, but I’ll DM you tomorrow some of my must haves.
Civ 5 or Civ 6.
While I agree with the fear mongering on solar storms, it is quite common for radio disruptions and GPS interference from solar storms. HF radios used by airlines and HAM radio operators work by bouncing light waves off the bottom of the ionosphere (~ 100km). When storms hit, it rapidly heats this region up, which causes expansion downward. This results in the radio waves either being absorbed or reflecting at lower altitudes causing communication difficulties. GPS satellites work by bouncing light between a transmitter (the satellite) and a receiver (your car for example). Solar storms produce showers of additional electrons that interfere with the light waves between the satellite and ground based instrumentation. These are fairly common occurrences during moderate geomagnetic activity that happens frequently during solar maximum and even solar minimum. Large storms are much less frequent (maybe a handful of times during each solar maximum) and that’s when you get continental aurora and total radio blackouts.
I’ve read a couple of Dean’s books and I don’t regret it, but also didn’t find them that good.
Outside a couple of disappointments, everything I’ve read from King has ranged from really good (Salems lot, tommyknockers, etc) to outstanding (the dark tower series, the tailsman).
Some good advice I heard once is that you can’t change what happens to you but you can change how you react to it. Bad things will happen but how you react to those things makes such an impact. Reacting positively to negative things happening affects not only your mood, but also how you deal with those things. It takes time to shift to this style of thinking but it will definitely improve your way of life.
I spoke with a dental hygienist in a hot tub once (that’s how you know this information is solid). She did say to avoid rinsing or mouthwash after brushing with fluoride toothpaste. She also wasn’t a huge fan of alcohol mouthwash in general as it kills both good and bad bacteria. Too bad because I really do enjoy the “burn” feeling when I use it.
The theoretical limit for a solar flare is very high. These are called super flares. However, they are exceptionally rare and tend to occur in younger, larger stars than our sun. That said, it isn’t impossible for one to occur, and if a massive flare were to occur, the flare wouldn’t be the worst part. Simply put, a solar flare is magnetic energy being launched from the surface of the sun in the form of photons or particles of light. While this would create radio blackouts, satellite drag, and phenomenal aurora, it wouldn’t have a significant impact on Earth’s surface (except for the satellite issues). The real danger is the coronal mass ejection that would follow. A coronal mass ejection is protons, neutrons, alpha particles, and electrons being launched at insane speeds off the Sun’s surface. Because these particles are charged, they can impact our electric grid. And in an extreme case could, in theory, destroy it through massive electrical ground level enhancements. These enhancements would primary occur at higher latitudes because the charged particles would follow Earth’s magnetic field lines toward the poles, but could easily disrupt electric grids northward/southward of 30 degrees. That would mean most of Europe, America, much of Asia, Australia, half of South America and Africa all without power. Obvious chaos would ensue. The good news is governments are aware of this risk and have begun taking preventive mechanisms to prevent such a catastrophic failure. The other piece of good news is this type of event is very rare. The likelihood of it happening in anyone’s given lifetime is extremely low.
Yes and no. Starlink’s loss rate has to do with their two step launch process. For cost reasons, they launch a bunch of satellites to an initial altitude of much lower than LEO, typically between 200-300 km. At these altitudes, satellite drag is high and gets higher with solar activity. Then they use fuel to propel them into their operational orbit. This worked fine during solar minimum when space weather activity is low. However, as we approach solar max, this method will continue to cause more losses because of higher space weather activity. The February, 2022 incident when they lost 38 satellites was due to a moderate geomagnetic storm should have been a wake up call. That storm wasn’t even that big. If they continue to launch using this method over the next few years as we reach solar max, they will continue to lose more satellites.
Good question! Scientists have estimated the solar flare that occurred prior to the Carrington event might have at around an X-45 (Elvidge et al, 2018). I believe that this was the first flare ever recorded, but as you mentioned, we obviously we didn’t have modern detectors back then for measurement.
If your concern is whether your cellphone carrier has the ability to see who you are calling and for how long, this is true whether you have a smartphone or a “regular” phone.
Heliophysicst here. This is not true. The flare that hit Earth on December 14th was an X-2.6 flare. While this is a large flare and the largest of the current solar maximum, it is nowhere near the largest ever recorded. The largest was on November 4th, 2003 (referred to as part of the Halloween storms), which was so strong it actually saturated the detectors. It was measured at an X-28, which is more than two orders of magnitude larger than Thursdays, but was estimated to be much larger than that.
Doki Doki literature club. The first play through when you visit Sayori at home. If you know you know.
So for, here is what I can tell from specific countries:
On board with privacy destroying law:
Spain, Hungary, Cyprus
Mostly on board: (support on device scanning but not weakening E2EE)
Ireland, Denmark
Against:
Finland, Germany
Feel free to update this if you know more.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/europe-break-encryption-leaked-document-csa-law/
Right, the old “to save the children” argument.
“We obviously have tight security around any form of access to customers content.”
https://scotthelme.co.uk/the-adobe-hack/