The real problem is that, while 16GB is a tiny amount by contemporary standards, the media that define those contemporary standards are not rated or designed for long term data retention(with the possible exception of quite pricey tapes, and certain brands of CD-R that are probably lying).
Most Flash, for instance, is only rated for a decade's retention of data, even if you let a team of crack conservationists baby it as though it were a DaVinci original... HDDs don't tend to come with quite as concrete a drop dead date; but most of them have flashable firmware (which strongly suggests that lifespan numbers for flash might be worth checking...) in addition to the usual mechanical bearings/lubrication/dust and electrical tin-whiskers/ion migration/etc.
That's the real challenge with digital data retention. It's unbelievably fucking cheap, per gigabyte, compared to any time in human history; but basically nothing commonly available can be relied upon to be reliable without near-constant copying and re-copying and duplicating and so forth. On the plus side, you can copy it as many times as you like, without degradation; but, while the shoebox full of analog photos will be irrecoverably color-damaged in 50 years, the shoebox full of flash memory will be just plain unrecoverable.
Unless you really want backups to be your new second hobby, or fancy writing a device driver that makes a CNC mill cutting 2D barcodes into granite slabs show up as a WORM drive(I would be curious to know, with advances in modern machine tools and mathematics of barcodes, how well we could make classic stone/clay tablets perform...), outsourcing your backups to (at least one) online service providers can make a lot of sense.
This particular "solution" sounds like the result of somebody thinking in a human-shaped problem space, which is psychologically understandable enough; but is a bias you have to get over if you want to get anywhere in tackling internet problems. And that is my best attempt at a charitable interpretation. Worst case, somebody is a dumbass.
For the sake of charity, we will ignore obvious fuckuperry like "the project runs out of money in three months, and the keyservers go dark, millions of people's pictures(which, being users, they won't have backups of...) get hosed 15 months early" or "the keyserver gets rooted, a relatively small file called 'facebook_camwhores_dont_want_u_to_have_this.zip' appears on every torrent tracker on the wrong side of the tracks and the whole scheme collapses"...
First, the same psychological biases(excessive time discounting, poor inhibition triggering models, bad stability assumptions) and social processes(booze, peer pressure, etc.) that cause people to post pictures and stuff that they will later come to regret will, almost certainly, cause them to assign incorrect 'blackout dates' to the material they do post. 18 months is like, what, 3 failed attempts at "serious" relationships, a number of booze fueled rebounds, and an ill-advised make-up or two? It is also plenty of time for what you did last summer to appear before school officials, what you did a few semesters back to make the HR snoop's radar, etc. Even in a world of purely human, purely manual, threats, this scheme is going to be minimally effective in protecting the people who need it most(while, at the same time, managing to scotch a bunch of happily-married-high-school-sweethearts who have lousy backup practices).
Now, where this scheme really falls flat: This is the internet. It is more full of bots and spiders than is sci-fi written for the arachnid audience. Whatever tag or code is used to clue the plug-in in to the need for a decryption key is going to become a de-facto signal for "High probability of being juicy and/or embarassing". Now the bottom-feeding amateur porn sites won't even need humans or machine vision to find cheap filler content... Hell, facebook, and virtually all even slightly shady crawlers will likely fully support this scheme long before Apple approves iPhone support for it(Hey guys, now you can post your pictures to Facebook in a format your friends can't even see! Hooray!)...
That's the basic problem, right there. If the internet's long memory were confined to some specific location, the simple solution would just be to lean on them legally to provide twilighting tools. Trouble is, the internet's memory is long. And it is distributed across countless entities and jurisdictions. And much of the copying between memory stores is automatic. And records may not exist of a copy operation having occurred. And, with cheaper HDDs, even individual users on cheap laptops are now a formidable chunk of storage. If this scheme ever takes off(doubtful), how long do you think it will be before there exists the following: An OSX application called "iCrawl" that has an excellent UI, costs $20, and crawls and archives the facebook profiles of friends, friends of friends, out up to N levels, 3 competing win32 applications(one trialware, $19.99, with a totally custom widget set, one free, that crashes all the damn time and doesn't work, and one free and more or less functional; but installs a trojan), and a set of python wrappers for unixlike operating systems that make crawling your friends and fetching decryption keys as easy as writing a few scripts?
Barring the full-blown emergence of the dystopian trusted-computing future, with end-to-end DRM and hunter-seeker drones with worldwide lethal force authorization doing 24/7 traitor tracing, you don't get to time-limit stuff you put in widely accessible places on the internet. Sorry about that.
His use of "Open source" seems so loose as to be nearly pointless to try to comment on in the context of the software concept of the same name. If nothing else(and there are a variety of somethings else), his proposal involves diffirent areas looking at one another's activities and initiating what works. That may well be a good idea; but calling it "open source" seems to imply that those activities would otherwise be proprietary. Unless he is about to inagurate the 'Pan-Michigan mutual abolition of all forms of intellectual property', which I very strongly doubt, the stuff he is talking about is just broad-brush development ideas that have never been proprietary, and for which there is no current or expected near-future support in law for making proprietary. It's basically just a platitude. You might as well describe somebody recommending that you use a mutually-understood natural language to communicate with others as "advocating an open-source phoneme model"...
That said, the basically irrelevant Michigan thing aside, we actually know reasonably well where OSS works and where it doesn't. We can even get a pretty decent idea of which flavors of "open source" will crop up in which areas.
First, of course, the unit cost of reproduction has to be negligible. Second, and related to the first, free riders must not be a serious issue(this doesn't mean that they have to not exist, and they generally do; but it means that they have to cost little or nothing, and something must motivate some percentage of users not to free-ride). If the first doesn't hold, the second generally has a hard time holding. If the first does hold, the second can still fail to hold; but in successful OSS scenarios it does hold.
You have the GPL, and its close associates: tends to apply to software, occasionally to texts, schematics, etc., things where #1 definitely holds. #2's applicability is provided by a mixture of ideological altruists and the fact that 'share-alike' is legally prescribed. While it was designed with ideological purposes in mind, this gives it unexpected utility for the production of what are, essentially, informal development consortia.
LGPL, and similar, fall between GPL and BSD. Typically applied to the same class as GPL and BSD; but derives its resistance to free riders more from economics than from ideologues of either camp.
BSD and similar tend to apply to the same class of things as GPL, for reasons of #1; but obtain contributions from potential free-riders much more heavily from (a sometimes vehemently different set of) ideological actors.
CC:Noncommercial, and similar, tend to apply to non-capital-intensive cultural objects. People are typically willing to share these with other people(and, pragmatically, recognize that other people are unlikely to pay enough to be worth collecting for them); but are suspicious of, and unwilling to allow, their appropriation by commercial interests(who both rub people the wrong way emotionally, and are recognized as having a much higher willingness to pay).
If we are talking "small business" 'HR' is likely the owner or one of his immediate subordinates checking his email in what is otherwise(from an IT setup) disturbingly like a home environment.
Excepting, of course, small businesses that are in the business of being clueful about computers(IT consultancies and the like), it is eminently possible that 'HR' will in fact click on just about anything(and isn't patched against the latest flavors of Word macro).
Having a dedicated IT guy who is worth having is reasonably serious money by small business standards. Even calling in a consultant when you don't think that you absolutely need it will sting a bit. "Small business" IT is often disturbingly close to consumer grade, with all the horrors that that generally entails.
You don't generally see a dedicated IT guy skulking around and pissing people off for their own good with updates and AV and firewalls and such until you hit the small side of medium...
Neither "blowing up" nor "burning up" have much effect on mass. In an atmosphere, "burning up" is pretty close to losing mass because various gaseous oxides just go floating off in the breeze. "Blowing up", similarly, tends to reduce something recognisable into little bits that blend in with the dirt/rocks/whatever.
In space, neither usefully applies. To burn, you would have to bring your own oxygen, and you would leave a big, slowly expanding cloud of assorted oxides(I sure hope those don't like condensing on the solar panels or optics of other satellites...). An explosion just turns one piece of space junk, in a predictable orbit, into hundreds or thousands of shards, most travelling fast enough to ruin your whole day, in a wide variety of less predictable orbits(to be fair, some probably will be kicked into trajectories that force them to re-enter the atmosphere).
Even if you vaporized the satellite completely, space is cold and doesn't have any sort of breeze to disperse the vapor. Once the vapor mass had cooled by radiation, it would likely start to recondense into delightful slowly-cooling balls of molten satellite.
This is why the most polite practice is to nudge the satellite into an orbit that will decay fairly swiftly and re-enter the atmosphere, breaking up and burning in an area where people are unlikely to get upset if some bits hit the ground.
Unless these satellites are crazy cheap compared to historical implementations of satellite communication, they'll probably do nothing about it.
With occasional high-profile exceptions(often driven by diplomatic spats), China doesn't have much to gain by hassling well-heeled foreigners or the services that they use. They are too valuable as potential investors and sources of new technology, and tend to be ill equipped for local political disturbance.
If local troublemakers somehow get their hands on the necessary transmitters, it would entirely unsurprise me if they get roughed up and find that their equipment doesn't make it out of the evidence locker in working order(or unbugged); but shooting at a bunch of foreign satellites is Serious Business.
Iridium phones have allowed you to make phone calls from China for years; but they are politically irrelevant because of how expensive they are. Unless this is a fair few orders of magnitude cheaper, the odds that a bunch of disaffected students are going to be able to afford it, rather than a local landline or cell link, are basically nil, so why worry?
True; but things like Valkyries and whatever the Zerg AoE aircraft is were introduced in Brood War as a counter. Apparently, with the APS provided by an AI interacting through an API, you can even outrun those.
Since the competition was AI vs. AI, and the Berkeley guys cleaned up, they obviously deserve kudos; but it is arguably a weakness of Starcraft's design that such a lot of it revolves around high-speed micro. The AIs just make that more blatant.
The AI article was quite interesting, on all the various techniques that they had to use to avoid hardcoding exploitable behaviors and use heuristics to obtain desireable emergent behaviors. Fascinating stuff.
Disappointingly, though, the punch line boiled down to "We discovered a tactic that is functionally unbeatable if you have superhuman micro and aren't handicapped by starcraft's(sorry fans) frankly shitty interface". Much of the most interesting AI work was them allowing their team to survive long enough to build the unbeatable mutalisk swarm, along with a little bit to build a threat heat map and a target value map to guide the swarm as it picked the enemy apart.
Essentially, mutalisks' virtues were "balanced" by the fact that their range sucks and they tend to clump, which makes them easy meat for AoE AA attacks. It turns out, if your micro is inhumanly fast, you can break and reform the mutalisk clump fast enough to avoid most AoE attacks while still achieving concentrated fire on high value targets.
The fact that the adoring masses largely lapped it up didn't exactly do much to dissuade them from that approach...
The annoying thing about Blizzard is that they are currently in the "Obnoxiously prideful" stage; but that doesn't become the "Hubristic" stage unless they fuck up somehow....
It's a pity that Netflix doesn't support more aggressive caching. They obviously trust the DRM of their various streaming platforms enough to keep the wicked, wicked, stream-rippers at bay, so one would assume that an equal level of protection could be afforded to larger chunks on disk(that, and the fact that anybody who cares about quality would just pirate from the DVD or blu-ray, not a compressed stream).
Even a full DVD9(8.54GB) would take a touch under 13 hours at 1.5Mb/s. Assuming some amount of ISP lying and/or other use, call it 20-24 hours.
That is a factor of 10, in round numbers, too high for streaming; but it still beats out postal mail, were caching allowed.
Given that very few movies actually fill an entire disk, most cases would be better than that. Give the user the option to queue the various special-feature crap first, last, or not at all, and the volume shrinks further. Any reduction in quality would, of course, also reduce the time between starting the download and the time when you are close enough to the finish to watch straight through.
Obviously, not all Netflix streamer devices are physically capable of heavy caching(to reduce BOM costs, the Roku boxes and some of the netflix supporting DVD/blu-ray players just have a tiny amount of RAM to cache into); but it wouldn't exactly be rocket surgery to offer a "RokuStor" or something that either contained a low-end 2.5 inch drive, or had a USB port for BYO external drive. If the studios screamed about piracy, it would be easy enough to encrypt the caching drive with a key that never left the (presumably secure enough for them, since they are currently for sale) appliance.
For basically everybody but dialup users, internet delivery would still beat the postal service(assuming one disk at a time), and it wouldn't be a huge leap of imagination to build a "prepare stream" button into the website, so users with a cache-capable netflix device could initiate a download from offsite, then enjoy when they got home. For DVD quality or less, the cheapest HDDs you can buy these days would still hold a fair number of movies, and even a 1-2TB, enough to hold 20 or 40 full BRDs, is only $100-odd with a little shopping.
I'm actually a little surprised that they don't offer such a device, or such a feature in their software player. It would presumably expand the number of people who opt for (cheaper for netflix) streaming services, and the added BOM cost would only amount to a few months of upgraded ISP service, in most of the US...
Uncle Sam and Ma Bell go wayyy back if you know what I mean. You don't sass the latter unless you are ready to deal with the former in a very bad mood.
They did switch from "Engaged" to "It's complicated" a while back; but that part didn't change...
By the standards of "crazy shit that the US does unilaterally" abolishing FM radio and giving the spectrum back to the citizens would be a breath of fresh air...
In that case, you might be better off with a different sub-genre of lawcore rap.
Personal Injury Lawyer's Cash Justice: The Late-Nite TV EP was recently released under the CC:You don't pay until you win! license. They have been a big hit among fans of the Seattle grunge scene, and undocumented immigrants.
If you want something a touch more upmarket, The Paralegals' Straight Clerkin' offers some excellent covers of J.D. White Shoe, The Supreme 9, and others, at less than 10% of their billable rates...
Empirical results sugggest that, while people can and will turn to piracy if they cannot otherwise get what they want(and that there exists a pool of hardcore pirate/hoarder types for whom pirating as much as possible, much more than they could ever watch/play/listen to, is a hobby in itself), Joe User is actually pretty happy to pay a modest fee, so long as the experience is simple, frictionless, and Just Works.
The difference that this is supposed to make is as follows: Before, because of artificial delays in release for sale, there was a 6 week period where, unless Joe was actually willing to endure a barrage of talk jocks and ads in the hopes of hearing song X, his only alternative was to pirate it. It simply wasn't for sale; but the pirates probably had it even before it hit the radio.
Now, it will be hitting iTunes et al. the same time it hits radio. That won't change the behavior of serious pirates one bit; but Joe User can now drop $.99 and have the song he wants on his iDevice, which will reduce his incentive to spend 15 minutes dicking around on skeezytorrentz.ru.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing: I don't begrudge the dinosaurs their existence per se; but when radio and TV have their scaly antedeluvian asses planted right in the middle of a huge swath of sweet, sweet RF spectrum with good propagation characteristics they had better start showing some serious worth, and fast(as much as they like to pretend that spectrum is their god-given property, it is supposedly allocated in the interests of we the people. We can, and should, reconsider the bargain if it seems to no longer suit our interests...)
While, unfortunately, the realities of politics mean that any new spectrum that becomes available will probably fall into the hands of telcoes, I would love to see radio and TV sold for scrap, and their entire bandwidth allocation dedicated to "wifi-but with a slice of spectrum that doesn't totally suck". The possibilities for medium to wide area mesh networking and all sorts of other cool stuff would be amazing.
Yup, 1997 and they were still pretending that their precious "canon law", which has all the legal standing of the list of rules in some kid's clubhouse, takes precedence over civil punishment of known child rapists.
Easy; but not always invalid. Encrypted command and control communications have been standard in the better purely monetary botnets for at least a few years now.
Everything is easier from the peanut gallery; but the notion that you have to be at least as good at your game as is a public-ally known strain of criminal in order to be considered for "super-spy" status seems like a very fair rule of thumb.
I can see the argument to be made with music(it is arugably useful to draw the distinction between states produced by exogenous psychoactives and those produced by something stimulating the production of endogenous ones); but sex might actually be an edge case...
Humans secret a vast grab bag(much of it not yet fully characterized) of assorted substances into their saliva, sweat, sexual secretions, and so forth. At least some of those substances they also almost certainly absorb through their mucus membranes and other means. It certainly isn't as entirely chemical as doing a stiff line of cocaine, or as entirely external as music; but it seems quite likely that sexual partners(with the possible exception of the real hardcore latex set) are absorbing chemicals from one another which, one suspects, may well have evolved to (among a variety of other purposes) modify partner mood/attachment/behavior.
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The real problem is that, while 16GB is a tiny amount by contemporary standards, the media that define those contemporary standards are not rated or designed for long term data retention(with the possible exception of quite pricey tapes, and certain brands of CD-R that are probably lying).
Most Flash, for instance, is only rated for a decade's retention of data, even if you let a team of crack conservationists baby it as though it were a DaVinci original... HDDs don't tend to come with quite as concrete a drop dead date; but most of them have flashable firmware (which strongly suggests that lifespan numbers for flash might be worth checking...) in addition to the usual mechanical bearings/lubrication/dust and electrical tin-whiskers/ion migration/etc.
That's the real challenge with digital data retention. It's unbelievably fucking cheap, per gigabyte, compared to any time in human history; but basically nothing commonly available can be relied upon to be reliable without near-constant copying and re-copying and duplicating and so forth. On the plus side, you can copy it as many times as you like, without degradation; but, while the shoebox full of analog photos will be irrecoverably color-damaged in 50 years, the shoebox full of flash memory will be just plain unrecoverable.
Unless you really want backups to be your new second hobby, or fancy writing a device driver that makes a CNC mill cutting 2D barcodes into granite slabs show up as a WORM drive(I would be curious to know, with advances in modern machine tools and mathematics of barcodes, how well we could make classic stone/clay tablets perform...), outsourcing your backups to (at least one) online service providers can make a lot of sense.
This particular "solution" sounds like the result of somebody thinking in a human-shaped problem space, which is psychologically understandable enough; but is a bias you have to get over if you want to get anywhere in tackling internet problems. And that is my best attempt at a charitable interpretation. Worst case, somebody is a dumbass.
For the sake of charity, we will ignore obvious fuckuperry like "the project runs out of money in three months, and the keyservers go dark, millions of people's pictures(which, being users, they won't have backups of...) get hosed 15 months early" or "the keyserver gets rooted, a relatively small file called 'facebook_camwhores_dont_want_u_to_have_this.zip' appears on every torrent tracker on the wrong side of the tracks and the whole scheme collapses"...
First, the same psychological biases(excessive time discounting, poor inhibition triggering models, bad stability assumptions) and social processes(booze, peer pressure, etc.) that cause people to post pictures and stuff that they will later come to regret will, almost certainly, cause them to assign incorrect 'blackout dates' to the material they do post. 18 months is like, what, 3 failed attempts at "serious" relationships, a number of booze fueled rebounds, and an ill-advised make-up or two? It is also plenty of time for what you did last summer to appear before school officials, what you did a few semesters back to make the HR snoop's radar, etc. Even in a world of purely human, purely manual, threats, this scheme is going to be minimally effective in protecting the people who need it most(while, at the same time, managing to scotch a bunch of happily-married-high-school-sweethearts who have lousy backup practices).
Now, where this scheme really falls flat: This is the internet. It is more full of bots and spiders than is sci-fi written for the arachnid audience. Whatever tag or code is used to clue the plug-in in to the need for a decryption key is going to become a de-facto signal for "High probability of being juicy and/or embarassing". Now the bottom-feeding amateur porn sites won't even need humans or machine vision to find cheap filler content... Hell, facebook, and virtually all even slightly shady crawlers will likely fully support this scheme long before Apple approves iPhone support for it(Hey guys, now you can post your pictures to Facebook in a format your friends can't even see! Hooray!)...
That's the basic problem, right there. If the internet's long memory were confined to some specific location, the simple solution would just be to lean on them legally to provide twilighting tools. Trouble is, the internet's memory is long. And it is distributed across countless entities and jurisdictions. And much of the copying between memory stores is automatic. And records may not exist of a copy operation having occurred. And, with cheaper HDDs, even individual users on cheap laptops are now a formidable chunk of storage. If this scheme ever takes off(doubtful), how long do you think it will be before there exists the following: An OSX application called "iCrawl" that has an excellent UI, costs $20, and crawls and archives the facebook profiles of friends, friends of friends, out up to N levels, 3 competing win32 applications(one trialware, $19.99, with a totally custom widget set, one free, that crashes all the damn time and doesn't work, and one free and more or less functional; but installs a trojan), and a set of python wrappers for unixlike operating systems that make crawling your friends and fetching decryption keys as easy as writing a few scripts?
Barring the full-blown emergence of the dystopian trusted-computing future, with end-to-end DRM and hunter-seeker drones with worldwide lethal force authorization doing 24/7 traitor tracing, you don't get to time-limit stuff you put in widely accessible places on the internet. Sorry about that.
His use of "Open source" seems so loose as to be nearly pointless to try to comment on in the context of the software concept of the same name. If nothing else(and there are a variety of somethings else), his proposal involves diffirent areas looking at one another's activities and initiating what works. That may well be a good idea; but calling it "open source" seems to imply that those activities would otherwise be proprietary. Unless he is about to inagurate the 'Pan-Michigan mutual abolition of all forms of intellectual property', which I very strongly doubt, the stuff he is talking about is just broad-brush development ideas that have never been proprietary, and for which there is no current or expected near-future support in law for making proprietary. It's basically just a platitude. You might as well describe somebody recommending that you use a mutually-understood natural language to communicate with others as "advocating an open-source phoneme model"...
That said, the basically irrelevant Michigan thing aside, we actually know reasonably well where OSS works and where it doesn't. We can even get a pretty decent idea of which flavors of "open source" will crop up in which areas.
First, of course, the unit cost of reproduction has to be negligible. Second, and related to the first, free riders must not be a serious issue(this doesn't mean that they have to not exist, and they generally do; but it means that they have to cost little or nothing, and something must motivate some percentage of users not to free-ride). If the first doesn't hold, the second generally has a hard time holding. If the first does hold, the second can still fail to hold; but in successful OSS scenarios it does hold.
You have the GPL, and its close associates: tends to apply to software, occasionally to texts, schematics, etc., things where #1 definitely holds. #2's applicability is provided by a mixture of ideological altruists and the fact that 'share-alike' is legally prescribed. While it was designed with ideological purposes in mind, this gives it unexpected utility for the production of what are, essentially, informal development consortia.
LGPL, and similar, fall between GPL and BSD. Typically applied to the same class as GPL and BSD; but derives its resistance to free riders more from economics than from ideologues of either camp.
BSD and similar tend to apply to the same class of things as GPL, for reasons of #1; but obtain contributions from potential free-riders much more heavily from (a sometimes vehemently different set of) ideological actors.
CC:Noncommercial, and similar, tend to apply to non-capital-intensive cultural objects. People are typically willing to share these with other people(and, pragmatically, recognize that other people are unlikely to pay enough to be worth collecting for them); but are suspicious of, and unwilling to allow, their appropriation by commercial interests(who both rub people the wrong way emotionally, and are recognized as having a much higher willingness to pay).
I'm guessing that that is why they are hitting small businesses...
If we are talking "small business" 'HR' is likely the owner or one of his immediate subordinates checking his email in what is otherwise(from an IT setup) disturbingly like a home environment.
Excepting, of course, small businesses that are in the business of being clueful about computers(IT consultancies and the like), it is eminently possible that 'HR' will in fact click on just about anything(and isn't patched against the latest flavors of Word macro).
Having a dedicated IT guy who is worth having is reasonably serious money by small business standards. Even calling in a consultant when you don't think that you absolutely need it will sting a bit. "Small business" IT is often disturbingly close to consumer grade, with all the horrors that that generally entails.
You don't generally see a dedicated IT guy skulking around and pissing people off for their own good with updates and AV and firewalls and such until you hit the small side of medium...
"Skynet" had poor projected customer retention...
Neither "blowing up" nor "burning up" have much effect on mass. In an atmosphere, "burning up" is pretty close to losing mass because various gaseous oxides just go floating off in the breeze. "Blowing up", similarly, tends to reduce something recognisable into little bits that blend in with the dirt/rocks/whatever.
In space, neither usefully applies. To burn, you would have to bring your own oxygen, and you would leave a big, slowly expanding cloud of assorted oxides(I sure hope those don't like condensing on the solar panels or optics of other satellites...). An explosion just turns one piece of space junk, in a predictable orbit, into hundreds or thousands of shards, most travelling fast enough to ruin your whole day, in a wide variety of less predictable orbits(to be fair, some probably will be kicked into trajectories that force them to re-enter the atmosphere).
Even if you vaporized the satellite completely, space is cold and doesn't have any sort of breeze to disperse the vapor. Once the vapor mass had cooled by radiation, it would likely start to recondense into delightful slowly-cooling balls of molten satellite.
This is why the most polite practice is to nudge the satellite into an orbit that will decay fairly swiftly and re-enter the atmosphere, breaking up and burning in an area where people are unlikely to get upset if some bits hit the ground.
Unless these satellites are crazy cheap compared to historical implementations of satellite communication, they'll probably do nothing about it.
With occasional high-profile exceptions(often driven by diplomatic spats), China doesn't have much to gain by hassling well-heeled foreigners or the services that they use. They are too valuable as potential investors and sources of new technology, and tend to be ill equipped for local political disturbance.
If local troublemakers somehow get their hands on the necessary transmitters, it would entirely unsurprise me if they get roughed up and find that their equipment doesn't make it out of the evidence locker in working order(or unbugged); but shooting at a bunch of foreign satellites is Serious Business.
Iridium phones have allowed you to make phone calls from China for years; but they are politically irrelevant because of how expensive they are. Unless this is a fair few orders of magnitude cheaper, the odds that a bunch of disaffected students are going to be able to afford it, rather than a local landline or cell link, are basically nil, so why worry?
True; but things like Valkyries and whatever the Zerg AoE aircraft is were introduced in Brood War as a counter. Apparently, with the APS provided by an AI interacting through an API, you can even outrun those.
Since the competition was AI vs. AI, and the Berkeley guys cleaned up, they obviously deserve kudos; but it is arguably a weakness of Starcraft's design that such a lot of it revolves around high-speed micro. The AIs just make that more blatant.
The AI article was quite interesting, on all the various techniques that they had to use to avoid hardcoding exploitable behaviors and use heuristics to obtain desireable emergent behaviors. Fascinating stuff.
Disappointingly, though, the punch line boiled down to "We discovered a tactic that is functionally unbeatable if you have superhuman micro and aren't handicapped by starcraft's(sorry fans) frankly shitty interface". Much of the most interesting AI work was them allowing their team to survive long enough to build the unbeatable mutalisk swarm, along with a little bit to build a threat heat map and a target value map to guide the swarm as it picked the enemy apart.
Essentially, mutalisks' virtues were "balanced" by the fact that their range sucks and they tend to clump, which makes them easy meat for AoE AA attacks. It turns out, if your micro is inhumanly fast, you can break and reform the mutalisk clump fast enough to avoid most AoE attacks while still achieving concentrated fire on high value targets.
The fact that the adoring masses largely lapped it up didn't exactly do much to dissuade them from that approach...
The annoying thing about Blizzard is that they are currently in the "Obnoxiously prideful" stage; but that doesn't become the "Hubristic" stage unless they fuck up somehow....
We don't have to care: We made World of Warcraft.
Hugs and Kisses, Blizzard.
It's a pity that Netflix doesn't support more aggressive caching. They obviously trust the DRM of their various streaming platforms enough to keep the wicked, wicked, stream-rippers at bay, so one would assume that an equal level of protection could be afforded to larger chunks on disk(that, and the fact that anybody who cares about quality would just pirate from the DVD or blu-ray, not a compressed stream).
Even a full DVD9(8.54GB) would take a touch under 13 hours at 1.5Mb/s. Assuming some amount of ISP lying and/or other use, call it 20-24 hours.
That is a factor of 10, in round numbers, too high for streaming; but it still beats out postal mail, were caching allowed.
Given that very few movies actually fill an entire disk, most cases would be better than that. Give the user the option to queue the various special-feature crap first, last, or not at all, and the volume shrinks further. Any reduction in quality would, of course, also reduce the time between starting the download and the time when you are close enough to the finish to watch straight through.
Obviously, not all Netflix streamer devices are physically capable of heavy caching(to reduce BOM costs, the Roku boxes and some of the netflix supporting DVD/blu-ray players just have a tiny amount of RAM to cache into); but it wouldn't exactly be rocket surgery to offer a "RokuStor" or something that either contained a low-end 2.5 inch drive, or had a USB port for BYO external drive. If the studios screamed about piracy, it would be easy enough to encrypt the caching drive with a key that never left the (presumably secure enough for them, since they are currently for sale) appliance.
For basically everybody but dialup users, internet delivery would still beat the postal service(assuming one disk at a time), and it wouldn't be a huge leap of imagination to build a "prepare stream" button into the website, so users with a cache-capable netflix device could initiate a download from offsite, then enjoy when they got home. For DVD quality or less, the cheapest HDDs you can buy these days would still hold a fair number of movies, and even a 1-2TB, enough to hold 20 or 40 full BRDs, is only $100-odd with a little shopping.
I'm actually a little surprised that they don't offer such a device, or such a feature in their software player. It would presumably expand the number of people who opt for (cheaper for netflix) streaming services, and the added BOM cost would only amount to a few months of upgraded ISP service, in most of the US...
Uncle Sam and Ma Bell go wayyy back if you know what I mean. You don't sass the latter unless you are ready to deal with the former in a very bad mood.
They did switch from "Engaged" to "It's complicated" a while back; but that part didn't change...
By the standards of "crazy shit that the US does unilaterally" abolishing FM radio and giving the spectrum back to the citizens would be a breath of fresh air...
In that case, you might be better off with a different sub-genre of lawcore rap.
Personal Injury Lawyer's Cash Justice: The Late-Nite TV EP was recently released under the CC:You don't pay until you win! license. They have been a big hit among fans of the Seattle grunge scene, and undocumented immigrants.
If you want something a touch more upmarket, The Paralegals' Straight Clerkin' offers some excellent covers of J.D. White Shoe, The Supreme 9, and others, at less than 10% of their billable rates...
Are you insulting the musical quality of J.D. White-Shoe and the Amici Curiae?
If you doubt their ability to lay down some seriously funky briefs, just listen to their hit single: "Motion to diss and dismiss".
Empirical results sugggest that, while people can and will turn to piracy if they cannot otherwise get what they want(and that there exists a pool of hardcore pirate/hoarder types for whom pirating as much as possible, much more than they could ever watch/play/listen to, is a hobby in itself), Joe User is actually pretty happy to pay a modest fee, so long as the experience is simple, frictionless, and Just Works.
The difference that this is supposed to make is as follows: Before, because of artificial delays in release for sale, there was a 6 week period where, unless Joe was actually willing to endure a barrage of talk jocks and ads in the hopes of hearing song X, his only alternative was to pirate it. It simply wasn't for sale; but the pirates probably had it even before it hit the radio.
Now, it will be hitting iTunes et al. the same time it hits radio. That won't change the behavior of serious pirates one bit; but Joe User can now drop $.99 and have the song he wants on his iDevice, which will reduce his incentive to spend 15 minutes dicking around on skeezytorrentz.ru.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing: I don't begrudge the dinosaurs their existence per se; but when radio and TV have their scaly antedeluvian asses planted right in the middle of a huge swath of sweet, sweet RF spectrum with good propagation characteristics they had better start showing some serious worth, and fast(as much as they like to pretend that spectrum is their god-given property, it is supposedly allocated in the interests of we the people. We can, and should, reconsider the bargain if it seems to no longer suit our interests...)
While, unfortunately, the realities of politics mean that any new spectrum that becomes available will probably fall into the hands of telcoes, I would love to see radio and TV sold for scrap, and their entire bandwidth allocation dedicated to "wifi-but with a slice of spectrum that doesn't totally suck". The possibilities for medium to wide area mesh networking and all sorts of other cool stuff would be amazing.
Who wants to sit on Uncle Clippy's lap?
Dying of nerve gas is pretty much the highest possible form of agreement on the importance of acetylcholine...
Apparently because the Vatican ordered you not to...
Yup, 1997 and they were still pretending that their precious "canon law", which has all the legal standing of the list of rules in some kid's clubhouse, takes precedence over civil punishment of known child rapists.
Easy; but not always invalid. Encrypted command and control communications have been standard in the better purely monetary botnets for at least a few years now.
Everything is easier from the peanut gallery; but the notion that you have to be at least as good at your game as is a public-ally known strain of criminal in order to be considered for "super-spy" status seems like a very fair rule of thumb.
I can see the argument to be made with music(it is arugably useful to draw the distinction between states produced by exogenous psychoactives and those produced by something stimulating the production of endogenous ones); but sex might actually be an edge case...
Humans secret a vast grab bag(much of it not yet fully characterized) of assorted substances into their saliva, sweat, sexual secretions, and so forth. At least some of those substances they also almost certainly absorb through their mucus membranes and other means. It certainly isn't as entirely chemical as doing a stiff line of cocaine, or as entirely external as music; but it seems quite likely that sexual partners(with the possible exception of the real hardcore latex set) are absorbing chemicals from one another which, one suspects, may well have evolved to (among a variety of other purposes) modify partner mood/attachment/behavior.
9 out of 10 nerve gas victims agree!