To be fair, your username kind of suggests you want to look inside everything anyway

Hail to the King, baby!

Obligatory shout-out for any Bullfrog games of that era, especially Dungeon Keeper 1 & 2. Lionhead’s Black & White is 1 year out of your window, but such a good game.

Also:
Syndicate Wars
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Grim Fandango
Rollercoaster Tycoon
Descent
Grand Theft Auto

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes ranks number one for me; the original story with updated control scheme and graphics is awesome. Then it’s a toss up between 2 and V. 2 is a solid game in the same mould as the first, but V allows me to Fulton extract unsuspecting enemies which is a genius mechanic that allows me an immense range of fuckery.

I’d forgotten all about Google+ until you made this observation

About how far does this leave us from a usable quantum processor? How far from all current cryptographic algorithms being junk?

BTRFS, wasn’t that Dennis Rader 🤔

Disclaimer: I have nothing more than a secondary education level of physics and a keen interest in physics in general.

It’s common scientific belief that all physical forces are backed up by a field, for example, magnetism by the electromagnetic field, gravity by a gravity field. It would follow that the strong and weak nuclear forces also have corresponding fields.

For a disruptor to work as seen in fiction, you’d probably be looking to disrupt the weak nuclear force, and would need a mechanism to locally change the properties of the corresponding weak nuclear field.

I don’t know if there is such a mechanism available to us currently. Hopefully someone else has a definitive answer.

I hope you also have a t-shirt that says, ‘stop staring at my face, the citation is down here’

It depends, I think. If it’s a scurrilous, untrue rumour about your sexual habits, then it will be preserved indefinitely. If it’s some critical information, that is only published in one place, and you need to cite it for a paper, then it’s either gone or modified beyond recognition.

Trans-galactic smuggler, Hana Solo