On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 10:25 AM, Johan Wevers <joh...@vulcan.xs4all.nl> wrote: > On 14-11-2014 3:15, Robert J. Hansen wrote: > >> 10**38 attempts at 10**6 bitflips per attempt equals 10**44 bitflips >> total. At carpet-scuffing power, that's about 10**15 joules of energy, > [...] >> But to make our brute-forcer 10**30 times faster (so it >> can run in one year), our brute-forcer also has to release 10**30 times >> as much heat. >> >> I'm not an astrophysicist, but that's the kind of energy levels one >> normally associates with phrases like "perturb the false vacuum" and >> "unmake the universe at the speed of light." Look at the time, I must >> be going. > > Fortunately there's no false vacuum left to perturb. :-) > > Anyway, compared to the Sun's output of 3.82*10**26W that's still quite > large. > >> 10 billion is 10**10, > > PLEASE don't do that in a FAQ. The definitions of bilion, biljard etc. > differ wether one uses imperial or SI units, and thuis makes it very > confusing. For me, a bilion is 10**12. It wouldn't be the first estimate > that was off by some factors 10**6 due to mixing these up. Better to > avoid those terms completely.
Minor nitpick: the difference between the "long" and "short" scales are a bit more involved than just "imperial" vs. "SI". More details are at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales But yes, avoiding ambiguous words like "billion" is a good idea. Using notation like 10^9, 10^12, etc. would make things more clear to readers regardless of what words they use to describe those numbers. Cheers! -Pete -- Pete Stephenson _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
