New form of Encryption

Thankfully it's a small file.

I'm pretty sure that would be a message of the pants-shitting variety and any hidden booze would come out. Like you demonstrated, it can be restored, as we back up literally everything at any given moment, but it would take hours at the least to get it all running properly again. Our backup library is massive.

If it happened during the day, we would have too many users trying to access it at once, despite us telling everyone and their grandma not to login until IT said it was ok.

Well then. There it is I guess. I can see how it wouldn't be the intern's fault in that situation. Who the hell puts super user creds in a training document?

That is just begging for that exact situation to happen. If you don't have backups, and who doesn't as bp nowadays, then you fucked up.

Here's a sneak peek of /r/cscareerquestions using the top posts of the year!

#1: Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job, and was told to leave, on top of this i was told by the CTO that they need to get legal involved, how screwed am i?
#2: This sub is getting weird
#3: I'm Steve Huffman, programmer and Reddit CEO. AMA.

---

^{I'm a bot, beep boop | Downvote to remove | Contact me | Info | Opt-out}

My favorite thing from that site is the script which deletes a random file from your computer and doesn't tell you what it was.

What's that do? Just output results from netcat into the trash?

This is a good prototype, but if you're making a webscale service you need to add monitoring, so your final service should probably look like this: nc -l localhost 80 | pv -r -b | tee dev-null-service.log /dev/null

I think this is from after he went in - IIRC, the whole point of that scene is that the reader doesn't understand why Zaphod was able to take the Vortex so well.

No, they're acting on different objects

Yes it does, but that's different. I'll try to explain, but this is a somewhat deep issue and I'm only an undergrad.

The first thing to understand is that while you are correct, that is almost never applicable. For example, there is a lot of mass directly below us (i.e. the earth) and, while there is also mass in all other directions, it's pretty far away compared to the ground, so we end up feeling the net effect of the earth anyway. Similarly, if we were to achieve escape velocity and go towards Jupiter or whatever, then for a while we'd be largely free of planetary influences, but then we'd still have the sun to deal with, whose gravity is quite strong- the only reason you didn't notice while on the earth was because you were only thinking about motion relative to the earth, and disregarding the earth's motion around the sun. Then if we escape the sun, the galaxy, if we escape the galaxy, the local cluster/supercluster, and if finally we escape that then, well, we'd have to find a nice patch of void equally distant from all nearby superclusters and then we might be able to claim freedom from the accelerational influence of gravity. So sure, you can "cancel" gravity directionally, but its effects are so incredibly long-range you're going to have to account for the entire universe to do so. On the other hand, you don't even need to bother with considering electrical effects when modeling cosmology as a whole (well, after the universe is big enough to ignore them- this is a common theme in physics. The point is, nothing is ever big enough to ignore gravity.)

Ok, now on to why that's different. So suppose there's two planets fixed in place (ignore how, or say they're co-orbiting, it doesn't matter), and you are exactly between them. For the sake of argument, assume that nothing else with mass exists in the universe. You experience no net force, and so stay still. But a curious thing happens- because you are in the presence of both planets, you can still perceive the effect of gravity. This is because one of the things gravity does is bend time- if you are in a strong gravitational field, time moves slower for you. So suppose that you can also see a clock that is further away from the planets than you are. If you have an identical clock on your person, you can compare the time that passes on the both of them, and yours will run slower. Thus, while gravity does cancel directionally in some sense, it does not cancel absolutely.

Electric charges are different in this regard- positive cancels negative in an absolute sense, although you run into issues with them not being exactly on top of each other so you can still get dipole effects etc. That's why electromagnetism is important in the small scale- once you get close enough to be able to perceive the small differences in position, they can affect you. However, the reason we don't feel those on a large scale is because dipole effects (and higher-order effects like quadrupole etc.) fall off like 1/r³ or worse, where here r is distance. Gravity or bare charges, on the other hand, fall off like 1/r^2. The reason this is important fundamentally has to do with area- you can think of the force expanding in a sphere, which has area 4pir^2, while the force falls off as 1/r^2, and so they end up cancelling out and you can feel the effects even infinitely far away. But if there's too many powers of r in the denominator, then the limit goes to 0 at infinity, so we barely feel it at all from "far away".

The above is a pretty hand-wavey explanation, and I'm sorry I don't have better for you. There's some great online resources out there that will be able to do better though- look for something about the multipole expansion, though depending on how much you've studied E&M and series expansions before, you might need quite a bit of background before you can really get to the physical meaning of it all.

Idk mods specifically removed my post when I did something similar, citing that as the reason. It's also in the sidebar. Maybe you are just special.

It works on mobile. u/WaterGuy12 you better be using your phone for all the damn comments, my dude