Have you heard of 'perspective'? It's a fascinating notion, really.
In addition to making certain flavors of artistic realism possible, it suggests that 'a guy facing pressure to resign from his cushy leadership gig' and 'being sent to the guillotine by fanatical Jacobins' may actually be meaningfully different things. Cutting edge theory stuff, here.
Some sort of magic shield would be nice as well. There is mostly nothing but space in space; but there's nothing like colliding with it at the thick end of the speed of light to teach you that 'mostly nothing' and 'nothing' differ slightly.
As it happens, those methods are big on drama and small on results. By way of example: here's Europe, in millions, from the mid 19th century to more or less the present.
Notice the two tiny little dips around 1914 and 1939, and the effect (bugger all) if you take the longer view of, say, 1900-1975? That's two world wars, few genocides, and massive devastation of infrastructure. Not much population control per unit unpleasantness...(and if you think of this period as not especially 'sin'-pocked, maybe you would get along well with a certain old testament deity.)
Famine and plague are similarly good for painful, short-term, die-offs that just leave a bit of room below environmental carrying capacity that ends up being filled out by a new crop of poor fuckers within a generation or two. Disposable income and contraception, though? Now that will crater your birthrate more effectively, if less dramatically, than saturation bombing.
By the time we have the tech to build a starship we can just ship out as many embryos as we can fit in a freezer. Job done.
We might, depending on how Team AI makes out, need to have a nonzero number of humans either as an active population or in some flavor of cryo, to gestate and socialize Generation 0; but even with the technology we have today, right now, the idea of sending an entire human if you just need some genetic diversity seems slightly insane.
Especially for sperm, where you don't even have the difficulties associated with egg collection(by no means a pleasant process) or the mediocre success rates associated with iced embryos and current tech, why would you send 100kg of human(not counting legroom and life support) when you could send about a zillion sperm samples in the same payload space, with just refrigeration?
The tricky part would be designing a suitably sinister insane supercomputer to implement the dystopian eugenic experiment around which life in the new colony would revolve.
Let's just say that a previously extant human civilization with generation-ship level technology would have left an entry in the fossil record that makes anything we've dug up to date look trivial.
We've done a lot of digging and guess what we've failed to find?
All it takes is the right bootloader. Chromebooks arguably aren't draconian enough to qualify; but had Google omitted the unlock they provided, which they could have, they would qualify.
He was talking about the hardware: you 'own' the Roku or whatnot; but if its utility relies on the existence of one or more providers (often, thanks to OMG PIRACY!, ones you can't change unless the vendor happens to be in a good mood), you could end up 'owning' a glorified brick tomorrow, since your hardware will just sit there plaintively crying for its mothership rather than doing anything useful.
No matter who it is, how long it has been around, or what the service is... if it is a cloud service it will one day go away.
It's worth noting, as well, that you get extra demerits for a cloud service providing a proprietary set of capabilities.
Losing an email address or having to switch web hosts is a nuisance; but dropping a new configuration into your IMAP client or copying some files to another HTTP server is fairly trivial. The big kicker with something like Gamespy is that what it did was more or less conceptually standardized (matchmaking, CD key checks, etc.); but not standardized-standardized. Indeed, because of piracy fears and the general evil of console makers, it is more likely than not that the system was hardened against the introduction of protocol-interoperable 3rd party servers (whether it be fairly weak obfuscation, SSL-style cryptographic verification of the server, litigation-in-the-vein-of-BnetD, or whatever).
'Cloud' as in 'you can talk to an API rather than a salesman if you want to buy some' is a very, very, different story from 'cloud' as in 'irreplaceable or difficult-to-replace aspects of the process run on our systems and we deign to provide you with a client to access them'.
If you are willing to sacrifice the coolant, an atmosphere as feeble as Mars' shouldn't stop evaporative cooling (even on Earth, evaporative cooling with water works just fine in less humid regions), except possibly under the coldest conditions(if there is solid carbon dioxide on the ground, and still almost no atmosphere, you know you've found an unusually dramatic demonstration of the relationship between temperature and vapor pressure...) I'd imagine that the bigger issue would be finding something that has the right properties and is abundant enough.
If you are just running closed-loop, you can get away with any of the usual suspects because loss rates will be much lower and you have greater control over conditions...
I wonder how abrasive the dust storms are? There are some pretty decent wind speeds, so you could get away with using big radiators, lightly built, unless the grit eats them.
That would probably inconvenience the rugged outdoorsman of future-hypothetical-terraformed-Mars; but given that going 'outside' isn't really an option (you aren't necessarily in a building at all times; but you'll be wearing a fully sealed suit with atmospheric and probably thermal conditioning hardware, if you aren't indoors) it seems that just syncing the interior lighting to suit human preferences(presumably with the ability to voluntarily override at least outside of common areas and such, by hitting the light switch), and possibly throwing a few LEDs and variable-opacity helmet visors into the EVA suits would allow you to deal with that problem.
The problem with 'producers'/'TV'/'Reality show' is that they have an intense interest in getting the most emotionally-salient material possible, then publicising it as widely as possible.
Actual one way trip to Mars? Given how many people, even one with pretty good options by Earth standards, would line up to volunteer, I'm not sure the ethical problems would keep me awake at night. Everybody dies, a great many of them less pleasantly than even likely Martian failure scenarios, and often after lives rather more miserable besides.
The dry run? Definitely something you'd only want to do with volunteers, and you probably want to pull them out if they start to show signs of serious psych issues; but the ethics of having them potentially suffer serious psych issues on national television? What could possibly go right?
Depends. Mar's nominal temperature ranges from 'cold' to 'really cold, some of the ice is frozen carbon dioxide, some of it might be water'; but it also has a pretty tenuous(maximum is something like 1% of earth's, lower as you go higher) atmosphere, so heat transfer by direct conduction and convection would be weaker than you'd expect for earth(though greater than in orbit, where those basically aren't factors at all, and where you don't have the option of using the ground as a heatsink).
It wouldn't be as bad as orbit(where the nominal temperature is also damn low; but where being cooked alive because you've got nothing but black-body radiation to shed heat from your metabolic processes and suit hardware is the bigger potential danger); but the nominally freezing atmosphere would still cool you much less well than experience on earth would lead you to expect. I don't know exactly what sort of in-suit climate control the people who actually know this stuff properly estimate you'd need, and how much of the time it would be warming you, and how much active-cooling you.
Barring nontrivial advances, though, it would probably still be more suit than you really want to wear in a gravity well(even a fairly weak one), and the need to be gas-tight would presumably make it even more obnoxious than just the weight.
A spokesdemigod for the Mount Olympus Police Department praised the professionalism of the department's officers who he said had 'acted with restraint' and 'in full compliance with policy' in firing warning shots at a mortal suspected of trespassing and resisting arrest. "Thankfully, deterrence proved sufficient and neither the Olympians nor the interloper were harmed in the encounter."
You might be surprised. I can't find non-paywalled versions (fuck you, Elsevier); but don'tunderestimate what even eukaryotes can survive, and select extremophilic bacteria are even tougher.
Maybe I'm just a paranoid old crank; but I always have to wonder if the 'browser fingerprinting' guys have started to take advantage of the fact that people at the extreme end of browser-hardening are quite rare and, while their efforts to break some tracking mechanisms that would otherwise provide useful details, they also make them among the most atypical hits a server is likely to see...
There's also the fact that 'targeted ads' (even if we assume that they work perfectly) still may fail to be acceptable for entirely different reasons.
The body of highflown academic theory on the matter ("The Gaze", how many inscrutable French deconstructionists can we quote today?) can get a bit tedious; but people don't like being obtrusively stared at.
'Targeted advertising', when it isn't largely nonsense, implies a level of focused, continuous, involuntary, observation of the subject in the attempt to discern their potential buying patterns, that most of history's secret police forces would have envied. Maybe there are people who are A-OK with that, so long as the banner ads are for their preferred brand of toothpaste; but there are plenty of people who would far rather be bombarded with the most baffling and inscrutable advertisements that wildly miss even their broad demographic categories than be subject to that. Can't say as I blame them.
You have (at least) two sides with irreconcilable goals, so attacking the problem as a technological one, rather than a matter of power (with money sitting in the wings) seems like a category error(unless you count rounding up all the advertisers and rendering them into biodiesel as a 'technical solution', I'll give you that.).
If your goal is either to track somebody no matter what they think about the idea; that is a technological problem (cookies, then flash cookies, then various sorts of browser fingerprinting trickery, statistical system identification, etc, etc.) And, if your goal is to avoid tracking, whether Team Ads likes that or not, you similarly have a technical problem(cookie scrubbing, various sorts of script mitigation/disabling, browser anonymizations, onion routing, etc, etc.) Both of those are, if a continuing arms race, well understood to be technical problems.
A 'solution' or 'compromise' or similar such nonsense, though? Two people want overlapping things, it is not logically possible for them to both get what they want. Period. Not a technical problem, any more than 'peace and love in the middle east' just needs a few more RFCs...
I certainly hope he does, and he's definitely sharp enough to have a better-than-average chance of doing so. I think I've just gotten a bit jumpy about this sort of talk about 'security' since the whole electronic voting machines issue showed up (and, um, never actually went away, not that you'd know that by looking). Even some people I think of as atypically clueful and competent focused on the (genuinely alarming and sometimes downright comical) security flaws in the various early systems, and paid no apparent regard to the lingering issue that even a technically perfect machine, lacking all such flaws, was only step one to solving the problem of conducting an election with computers. Time will tell, and commercial imperatives and/or malignant spooks will probably have the last word anyway...
Does this mean bioengineered super-soldiers, or is that just a fancy way of saying "Yeah, we really miss having a biological warfare program, those were good times..."?
Only appliances with a valid support contract and maintenance agreement are entitled to receive firmware upgrades. Appliances without either of those, or that have been transferred to a third party without the authorization of the vendor or a licensed reseller are inelligble.
So far as it goes, what he says is true: this 'internet of things' will represent a major challenge to secure and problem if not secured; further, if the present state of security tells us anything, we sure as hell aren't prepared for it, much less what we do right now.
Fundamentally, though, treating it as a 'security' problem is making a dangerous and conceptually limiting mistake. "Security" ensures that a system operates as intended, provides only the access and capabilities intended to various parties, and so on. It Does Not specify who those parties are. Bad news, kids, based on everything we've seen so far, and how everything that was bad on the internet is even worse on 'mobile' and so on, do you really think that even perfect security would do much more than keep small-time criminals from inconveniencing 'respectable' advertisers and subscription-service pushers?
Unless you think that cellphones were some sort of abberation, totally different from everything else because, um, reasons; 'internet of things' is just a polite way of saying "EULAs, crypto bootloaders, 'consumer behavioral marketing', and who knows what else, baked into every device large enough to support some kind of NIC".
Yes, Cerf is correct in that having the 'internet of things' work out slightly better than "Hey, let's sell SCADA to home users!" would be a pretty good idea; but that's not even close to good enough. 'Security' just means that the wishes of the system creater are being followed. Do you think those wishes will be to your benefit?
The 802.11AC-era devices seem to have turned the tide a bit (even for Broadcom). Still lots of MIPS further down the pile; but the future doesn't look so rosy for them.
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Have you heard of 'perspective'? It's a fascinating notion, really.
In addition to making certain flavors of artistic realism possible, it suggests that 'a guy facing pressure to resign from his cushy leadership gig' and 'being sent to the guillotine by fanatical Jacobins' may actually be meaningfully different things. Cutting edge theory stuff, here.
Some sort of magic shield would be nice as well. There is mostly nothing but space in space; but there's nothing like colliding with it at the thick end of the speed of light to teach you that 'mostly nothing' and 'nothing' differ slightly.
As it happens, those methods are big on drama and small on results. By way of example: here's Europe, in millions, from the mid 19th century to more or less the present.
Notice the two tiny little dips around 1914 and 1939, and the effect (bugger all) if you take the longer view of, say, 1900-1975? That's two world wars, few genocides, and massive devastation of infrastructure. Not much population control per unit unpleasantness...(and if you think of this period as not especially 'sin'-pocked, maybe you would get along well with a certain old testament deity.)
Famine and plague are similarly good for painful, short-term, die-offs that just leave a bit of room below environmental carrying capacity that ends up being filled out by a new crop of poor fuckers within a generation or two. Disposable income and contraception, though? Now that will crater your birthrate more effectively, if less dramatically, than saturation bombing.
By the time we have the tech to build a starship we can just ship out as many embryos as we can fit in a freezer. Job done.
We might, depending on how Team AI makes out, need to have a nonzero number of humans either as an active population or in some flavor of cryo, to gestate and socialize Generation 0; but even with the technology we have today, right now, the idea of sending an entire human if you just need some genetic diversity seems slightly insane.
Especially for sperm, where you don't even have the difficulties associated with egg collection(by no means a pleasant process) or the mediocre success rates associated with iced embryos and current tech, why would you send 100kg of human(not counting legroom and life support) when you could send about a zillion sperm samples in the same payload space, with just refrigeration?
The tricky part would be designing a suitably sinister insane supercomputer to implement the dystopian eugenic experiment around which life in the new colony would revolve.
Let's just say that a previously extant human civilization with generation-ship level technology would have left an entry in the fossil record that makes anything we've dug up to date look trivial.
We've done a lot of digging and guess what we've failed to find?
So we are calling full x86 machines 'bricks'?
All it takes is the right bootloader. Chromebooks arguably aren't draconian enough to qualify; but had Google omitted the unlock they provided, which they could have, they would qualify.
He was talking about the hardware: you 'own' the Roku or whatnot; but if its utility relies on the existence of one or more providers (often, thanks to OMG PIRACY!, ones you can't change unless the vendor happens to be in a good mood), you could end up 'owning' a glorified brick tomorrow, since your hardware will just sit there plaintively crying for its mothership rather than doing anything useful.
No matter who it is, how long it has been around, or what the service is... if it is a cloud service it will one day go away.
It's worth noting, as well, that you get extra demerits for a cloud service providing a proprietary set of capabilities.
Losing an email address or having to switch web hosts is a nuisance; but dropping a new configuration into your IMAP client or copying some files to another HTTP server is fairly trivial. The big kicker with something like Gamespy is that what it did was more or less conceptually standardized (matchmaking, CD key checks, etc.); but not standardized-standardized. Indeed, because of piracy fears and the general evil of console makers, it is more likely than not that the system was hardened against the introduction of protocol-interoperable 3rd party servers (whether it be fairly weak obfuscation, SSL-style cryptographic verification of the server, litigation-in-the-vein-of-BnetD, or whatever).
'Cloud' as in 'you can talk to an API rather than a salesman if you want to buy some' is a very, very, different story from 'cloud' as in 'irreplaceable or difficult-to-replace aspects of the process run on our systems and we deign to provide you with a client to access them'.
If you are willing to sacrifice the coolant, an atmosphere as feeble as Mars' shouldn't stop evaporative cooling (even on Earth, evaporative cooling with water works just fine in less humid regions), except possibly under the coldest conditions(if there is solid carbon dioxide on the ground, and still almost no atmosphere, you know you've found an unusually dramatic demonstration of the relationship between temperature and vapor pressure...) I'd imagine that the bigger issue would be finding something that has the right properties and is abundant enough.
If you are just running closed-loop, you can get away with any of the usual suspects because loss rates will be much lower and you have greater control over conditions...
I wonder how abrasive the dust storms are? There are some pretty decent wind speeds, so you could get away with using big radiators, lightly built, unless the grit eats them.
That would probably inconvenience the rugged outdoorsman of future-hypothetical-terraformed-Mars; but given that going 'outside' isn't really an option (you aren't necessarily in a building at all times; but you'll be wearing a fully sealed suit with atmospheric and probably thermal conditioning hardware, if you aren't indoors) it seems that just syncing the interior lighting to suit human preferences(presumably with the ability to voluntarily override at least outside of common areas and such, by hitting the light switch), and possibly throwing a few LEDs and variable-opacity helmet visors into the EVA suits would allow you to deal with that problem.
The problem with 'producers'/'TV'/'Reality show' is that they have an intense interest in getting the most emotionally-salient material possible, then publicising it as widely as possible.
Actual one way trip to Mars? Given how many people, even one with pretty good options by Earth standards, would line up to volunteer, I'm not sure the ethical problems would keep me awake at night. Everybody dies, a great many of them less pleasantly than even likely Martian failure scenarios, and often after lives rather more miserable besides.
The dry run? Definitely something you'd only want to do with volunteers, and you probably want to pull them out if they start to show signs of serious psych issues; but the ethics of having them potentially suffer serious psych issues on national television? What could possibly go right?
Wouldn't mars be frostbitingly COLD though?
Depends. Mar's nominal temperature ranges from 'cold' to 'really cold, some of the ice is frozen carbon dioxide, some of it might be water'; but it also has a pretty tenuous(maximum is something like 1% of earth's, lower as you go higher) atmosphere, so heat transfer by direct conduction and convection would be weaker than you'd expect for earth(though greater than in orbit, where those basically aren't factors at all, and where you don't have the option of using the ground as a heatsink).
It wouldn't be as bad as orbit(where the nominal temperature is also damn low; but where being cooked alive because you've got nothing but black-body radiation to shed heat from your metabolic processes and suit hardware is the bigger potential danger); but the nominally freezing atmosphere would still cool you much less well than experience on earth would lead you to expect. I don't know exactly what sort of in-suit climate control the people who actually know this stuff properly estimate you'd need, and how much of the time it would be warming you, and how much active-cooling you.
Barring nontrivial advances, though, it would probably still be more suit than you really want to wear in a gravity well(even a fairly weak one), and the need to be gas-tight would presumably make it even more obnoxious than just the weight.
A spokesdemigod for the Mount Olympus Police Department praised the professionalism of the department's officers who he said had 'acted with restraint' and 'in full compliance with policy' in firing warning shots at a mortal suspected of trespassing and resisting arrest. "Thankfully, deterrence proved sufficient and neither the Olympians nor the interloper were harmed in the encounter."
Goodness no! Remember, citizens of the free world, it works like this:
Godless commie chinese and those fanatic heathen arabs we buy oil from? "Censorship" and "Surveillance".
The Good Guys? "Content Filtering" and "Lawful Intercept Capabilities".
I'm glad we cleared up that misconception.
You might be surprised. I can't find non-paywalled versions (fuck you, Elsevier); but don't underestimate what even eukaryotes can survive, and select extremophilic bacteria are even tougher.
Maybe I'm just a paranoid old crank; but I always have to wonder if the 'browser fingerprinting' guys have started to take advantage of the fact that people at the extreme end of browser-hardening are quite rare and, while their efforts to break some tracking mechanisms that would otherwise provide useful details, they also make them among the most atypical hits a server is likely to see...
There's also the fact that 'targeted ads' (even if we assume that they work perfectly) still may fail to be acceptable for entirely different reasons.
The body of highflown academic theory on the matter ("The Gaze", how many inscrutable French deconstructionists can we quote today?) can get a bit tedious; but people don't like being obtrusively stared at.
'Targeted advertising', when it isn't largely nonsense, implies a level of focused, continuous, involuntary, observation of the subject in the attempt to discern their potential buying patterns, that most of history's secret police forces would have envied. Maybe there are people who are A-OK with that, so long as the banner ads are for their preferred brand of toothpaste; but there are plenty of people who would far rather be bombarded with the most baffling and inscrutable advertisements that wildly miss even their broad demographic categories than be subject to that. Can't say as I blame them.
You have (at least) two sides with irreconcilable goals, so attacking the problem as a technological one, rather than a matter of power (with money sitting in the wings) seems like a category error(unless you count rounding up all the advertisers and rendering them into biodiesel as a 'technical solution', I'll give you that.).
If your goal is either to track somebody no matter what they think about the idea; that is a technological problem (cookies, then flash cookies, then various sorts of browser fingerprinting trickery, statistical system identification, etc, etc.) And, if your goal is to avoid tracking, whether Team Ads likes that or not, you similarly have a technical problem(cookie scrubbing, various sorts of script mitigation/disabling, browser anonymizations, onion routing, etc, etc.) Both of those are, if a continuing arms race, well understood to be technical problems.
A 'solution' or 'compromise' or similar such nonsense, though? Two people want overlapping things, it is not logically possible for them to both get what they want. Period. Not a technical problem, any more than 'peace and love in the middle east' just needs a few more RFCs...
I certainly hope he does, and he's definitely sharp enough to have a better-than-average chance of doing so. I think I've just gotten a bit jumpy about this sort of talk about 'security' since the whole electronic voting machines issue showed up (and, um, never actually went away, not that you'd know that by looking). Even some people I think of as atypically clueful and competent focused on the (genuinely alarming and sometimes downright comical) security flaws in the various early systems, and paid no apparent regard to the lingering issue that even a technically perfect machine, lacking all such flaws, was only step one to solving the problem of conducting an election with computers. Time will tell, and commercial imperatives and/or malignant spooks will probably have the last word anyway...
Well, park my Ford Nucleon and enjoy a refreshing Nuka-Cola, obviously!
Does this mean bioengineered super-soldiers, or is that just a fancy way of saying "Yeah, we really miss having a biological warfare program, those were good times..."?
Only appliances with a valid support contract and maintenance agreement are entitled to receive firmware upgrades. Appliances without either of those, or that have been transferred to a third party without the authorization of the vendor or a licensed reseller are inelligble.
So far as it goes, what he says is true: this 'internet of things' will represent a major challenge to secure and problem if not secured; further, if the present state of security tells us anything, we sure as hell aren't prepared for it, much less what we do right now.
Fundamentally, though, treating it as a 'security' problem is making a dangerous and conceptually limiting mistake. "Security" ensures that a system operates as intended, provides only the access and capabilities intended to various parties, and so on. It Does Not specify who those parties are. Bad news, kids, based on everything we've seen so far, and how everything that was bad on the internet is even worse on 'mobile' and so on, do you really think that even perfect security would do much more than keep small-time criminals from inconveniencing 'respectable' advertisers and subscription-service pushers?
Unless you think that cellphones were some sort of abberation, totally different from everything else because, um, reasons; 'internet of things' is just a polite way of saying "EULAs, crypto bootloaders, 'consumer behavioral marketing', and who knows what else, baked into every device large enough to support some kind of NIC".
Yes, Cerf is correct in that having the 'internet of things' work out slightly better than "Hey, let's sell SCADA to home users!" would be a pretty good idea; but that's not even close to good enough. 'Security' just means that the wishes of the system creater are being followed. Do you think those wishes will be to your benefit?
The 802.11AC-era devices seem to have turned the tide a bit (even for Broadcom). Still lots of MIPS further down the pile; but the future doesn't look so rosy for them.
I always just use orphans. Nobody seems to care about those.