Conditions on the moon would actually be pretty unenviable for heavy machinery. The low gravity would be a plus, allowing impressive feats of strength, and otherwise implausibly spindly construction(though remember that mass, and inertia, don't change. That one can be embarrassing). It's all downhill from there, though.
The lunar surface experiences no weathering, only meteorite and micrometerorite impacts, so it consists largely of fused globs and shards of glassy materials, as sharp as they day they formed. Without an atmosphere, static cling is a serious issue. Without much water(or the temperature envelope in which to use it) you can't just hose that stuff off. It worms its way into every crevice, and just grinds away. If you generate heat, conduction and convection work substantially less well than you would expect, since there is no atmosphere. The rock still conducts heat away from the work area; but any air-cooled machinery isn't exactly going to work very well...
I doubt that it is impossible; but it is a nasty pile of engineering challenges. Something like Mars, which is basically a desert that used to beat up and steal the lunch money of even the toughest earthly deserts might actually be much easier(despite being further away). They have actual weathering there, an atmosphere(albeit a rather thin one) for air-cooling, and a surface that isn't exclusively made of tiny shards of glass that just want to cling to you and grind away....
You bring up an important point: while launch tech is sexy(and, admittedly, not presently good enough for much, hence the desire for improvement) not dying the second you run out of canned food/water/air shipped direct from earth at a thousand bucks a kilo is ultimately the more serious problem.
There would be a lot to be said for doing the comparatively easy, comparatively cheap, comparatively extremely safe, and relatively quick, earth-based research on building sustainable small-scale environments. more than we do.
Since any attempt to colonize a planet that isn't already a near-earth paradise planet is doomed without airtight buildings, start with building those. Once you've mastered that, you can conduct all sorts of research for essentially peanuts, just by controlling the inputs to your airtight structure, and seeing how it goes(ie. impose an artificial comms delay equal to speed-of-light-delay for the planet you are simulating, provide only the supplies that could plausibly be brought on a ship of X size, provide "resupply" at intervals if desired, or not, if not. Erect a cheap warehouse over the whole operation and provide realistic lighting, to see if the agricultural attempts can take it, decide what "local resources" are available only for the cost of gathering/processing them, and so forth).
For the cost of a singe big, splashy, program that putzes around in earth orbit, you could be running dozens of concurrent experiments in extraterrestrial survival, just by putting up sealed buildings in places that are either inhospitable or just cheap, and exploring various approaches to survival; but with the bonus that, if an experiment fucks up, nobody dies horribly in the cold depths of space, that "supplies" just pay fedex shipping, rather than earth-to-mars shipping, and you don't have to spend ages waiting for results(hey, let's wait six months for our intrepid martian explorers to make planetfall, discover that some parameter was calculated wrong, asphyxiate, then wait another six months for the mission with that parameter tweaked to make it... That sounds like fun).
Plus, in addition to being fairly cheap, virtually every technology you would need to develop to build a working space colony on the ground likely has application to earth's less pleasant bits of real-estate, which makes funding easier to justify.
This is, of course, not a complete replacement for actual space stuff: we need robots out gathering data on what conditions are actually like if we are going to simulate them accurately, and simulating something like.3G or 1.6G on a 1G planet is going to be a touch tricky. And, of course, you ultimately do have to get there. However, you can do a lot of the groundwork research without ever leaving earth, and take advantage of fast turnaround times, trivial supply lines, low costs, and low risks.
Sending robots ahead of time, assuming suitable robotics tech, might well be a very good idea. Even if it is just the heavy earthmoving/fusing/cementing, it'll beat having a bunch of puny humans sucking up the oxygen and waiting for it to happen.
For general supplies, though, it isn't clear that separating the humans from the (initial) supply shipment is logical. First, being on the same boat as all your supplies is handy if schedules should slip for some reason. Second, a fair few types of supplies can function as radiation shielding(water, for instance) in sufficient quantity, and, unlike thicker walls, are also quite useful when you get where you are going. Unless being able to take off from the Earth's surface all in one piece is a hard requirement, any ship to mars is likely to be a big, ungainly looking, clump of modules and things, assembled in orbit, with the humans surrounded by tightly packed supplies and just enough shell to keep the air in...
Any idea why the hardware is that flaky?(fundamentally tricky design problems; because we can; etc?)
Off the cuff, I would think that somebody selling a very expensive service, to people who probably have their reasons for needing it, where most of the investment is in the satellites, would want the reliability of their ground hardware to be less of a joke, and more of a chuck norris joke...
Theoretically speaking, a foot pedal + reasonably sized reservoir kept sufficiently above working pressure + output regulator could be just as workable as either a compressor driven system, or something based on compressed gas cartridges. In practice, I'm assuming it goes something like this:
Foot Pedal Guy: *sweating like a pig* "This bloody sucks. It's, like, 106 in the shade, ambient humidity that would drown anything without gills, and the only way to distinguish the beer from the piss is that the former is warmer."
Medical Injection Dude: *experienced look* "Eh, the manual says 'Ensure that a reservoir pressure of at least Y PSI, but not more than Z PSI, is maintained at all times during injector use'. Y'know, though, don't knock yourself out. Kids have thin skins, and their alternative is getting smallpox, X PSI is totally good enough..."
I assume he is thinking of the original DES. Still not exactly useless, as not every script kiddie has a deep crack array in is closet and many messages only have to be secret for a relatively short time; but definitely "broken".
I doubt that it will make much difference, in practice. If somebody can sneak up and slap a patch on you, they can also sneak up and stab you with an umbrella...
More generally, the reason that this 'biocompatible microneedle array' stuff is considered medically interesting is because it lets you get the vaccine you want past the skin, rather than being forced to choose from agents that already pass through skin properly, or re-developing a vaccine from the drawing board to make sure that it is capable of soaking through skin without special treatment.
There are already thousands of compounds that soak through skin just fine(consult your friendly local MSDS, and remember what happened to poor Karen Wetterhahn. Yup, dimethylmercury. Sinks right through common lab gloves like they aren't even there, and skin about as easily. Then you die, the hard way.)
Even if you discount the gases, dusts, vapors, and droplet aerosols of the world, when formulating your sinister plan, there are plenty of chillingly skin-permeable options. This breakthrough is only news for doctors, who have to be much more selective: because there are thousands of toxins; but only a few vaccines or drugs for disease/condition whatever.
Unless the blood work being done specifically precludes it for some reason, a doctor might also be open to prescribing a short-acting anxiolytic for the procedure. One of the faster benzodiazapenes, or the like.
Not a perfect solution; but they use those against anxiety and panic disorders for a reason...
My understanding is that(at least in tropical medicine and military applications) the point isn't really that they are less painful than needles(and, even if they are, having some guy hold a big nasty-looking device up to your arm and make a pneumatic wh-thunk sound isn't calculated to give kiddo sweet dreams) its that they are much faster and more efficient and cheap.
Because there is no needle(which is either an expensive FRU or a temptation to ill-equipped medical staff in the ass-end of nowhere to wash out and re-use until it is blunt), you can skip all the fancy western hospital one-time-use assemblies that would be impractical in the field; but avoid the cross-contamination that occurs if you share needles. Depending on the design, there might be a simple pneumatic tip that gets replaced each use; but it makes lining up an entire village somewhere and pumping them full of vaccine much more logistically feasible.
It does open a few possibilities for practical jokes, though arguably not as many as the anything you can aerosolize and disperse already does...(for instance, has anybody else ever wondered what would happen if one were to crop-dust a heavily populated area with a suitably light-stabilized LSD solution? Or distributed a genetically engineered virus through the ventilation system of the DEA headquarters that spliced in the necessary DNA sequences to make those exposed capable of synthesizing endogenous THC?)
I'd be surprised if, in practice, they end up shipping GPG for the purpose; but such use could definitely be shoved under "mere aggregation" with minimal trouble. Heck, since this is the downloadable version, they could even assume net access and just grab a copy of the official GPG installer from its website(it'd be a dick move to do that; but that is how separate these things are), install it, and then dump it a couple of command lines. This isn't even some LGPL library situation, it's more of a bash-script/CMD batch level thing.
In practice, if only for aesthetic reasons, I'd assume that they'll go with some library that they can integrate tightly, with no trivially user-visible 3rd party stuff. Maybe something BSD/MIT licensed and built in, maybe calling one of the Windows-provided crypto APIs...
You can try people in absentia, Spain has been something of a trendsetter on that score; but the whole exercise is rather hollow unless you actually get a crack at taking them into custody to enforce your verdict.
Generally this requires winning, or a certain amount of stealth and disregard for national sovereignty(see, for instance, the various locations from which prominent Nazis found themselves 'removed' from cushy retirement by Israeli spook types).
Failing that, "trial" can be done; but is basically just a publicity exercise.
The main reason that I would suspect a distinct pre-release cryptographic mechanism is that such have been seen before(I believe some Steam titles have used them) and that they are so utterly trivial yet so functionally unbreakable.
You would simply take the release installer, and encrypt a copy with a key known only to you(and probably stored on a securely-locked-away air-gapped medium, to prevent leaks.
Add a little stub program that does nothing but check your website for the key, decrypt the installer binary, and start the installation.(Because a key doesn't need to be all that long in order to be functionally unbreakable, it is even practical for those without web access to type a suitably encoded version of the key in manually).
Absolutely no "innovating" needed. Basically any encryption method that isn't declared "deprecated" will work, and implementations of most of them are available under pretty much any license you want. The total implementation time will be a few hours for a competent programmer(and it need not be a competent programmer who has any knowledge of the project, this is quite a generic thing), possibly a man-day or two if the decrypter needs QA on 15 different Windows localizations and some attractive splash-screen art. And yet, despite the ease of implementation, even three letter agencies won't be able to get to it until you release the decryption key.
Aside from the fact that it is easy and robust, the main reason to use a separate system for the "release date control" vs. whatever DRM is used post-release, is that market research suggests that the financial damage of having your DRM cracked tapers off fairly rapidly post-release. Having would-be early adopters downloading pre-release cracked copies instead of buying $150 "platinum packs" with a couple of useless trinkets is financially painful. Having cheapskates a year from now picking up off the Pirate Bay rather than Ebay is virtually irrelevant. In between, the value falls over time, fast at first, and gradually tapering off.
If the installer binary is encrypted, would-be DRM-hackers don't even get to look at the DRM until release day(whereas, if you depended on the release-DRM, they would have the extra 10 days of hacking done before the game is even supposed to be released). This means that the chance of a pre-release pirate version(barring a penetration of your systems by hackers or inside guys) will be impossible, and the time-to-working-crack will be 10 days longer than it otherwise would be...
That sort of case is exactly why TI is working itself into a snit over any viable firmware-level modifications of their hardware.
Unless your teacher actually physically verified the integrity of the circuit board, and then broke out the JTAG to check on the mass storage, which seems unlikely, "reset to factory defaults" just means "politely ask the firmware to nuke any stored programs and modified user settings".
If the firmware is your firmware, it can easily enough interpret that request as "hide any stored programs and modified user settings until a specific secret key sequence is entered".
It would be a surprise. DRM is hard because it means giving the user the locked box, and the key, and then trying to order their computer to pretend that the key only exists on every second tuesday.
Conventional cryptography is very much up to the task of just giving the user the locked box, presumably with a dinky little stub program that will grab the decryption key when it is released.
There have been attacks, or inside jobs, before, so the decryption key(or a few vital binaries, if they went with that approach, or used it to augment this one), could theoretically get leaked; but the task of giving somebody something on day X and only releasing it on day X+Y is theoretically unproblematic. You have to actively fuck it up.
And, unfortunately, they aren't 100% effective at staving off rejection. A family friend's immune system just started demonstrating its ingratitude, with extreme prejudice, for his new heart. The doctors are hoping that they'll be able to tweak his drugs and get it to stop before serious damage occurs; but doing so without leaving you open to nasty infections and/or exotic cancers is apparently quite tricky.
In the meantime, we really ought to be playing up the coolness, economy, and sex appeal of riding a motorcycle... When it comes to providing otherwise healthy, mostly-intact-below-the-neck, donors, those things are second only to sinister Chinese prisons, and a lot less unethical.
And yet, somehow, medicine has advanced considerably even within my (relatively short) lifetime.
It's like passing a construction site: Every day, it's just a bunch of heavy equipment shoving dirt from point A to point B and back, while guys in hardhats scurry assorted mysterious objects around. It doesn't look like progress at all; but stuff demonstrably gets built.
Now, the number of projects that actually make it into clinical use is certainly smaller than the number whose developers said 5 years ago that they would be seeing use; but it is a lot larger than zero.
You've just met the publishers. Their friends say that they do a dirty but necessary job, like hangmen. Their opponents are less kind.
The actual scientists will usually have a copy floating around their website somewhere(for copyright reasons it will, of course, be a "preprint draft" not the "real thing" because the publishers generally own that; but the text is usually identical).
That's after they've fulfilled the "publish" side of "publish or perish", of course, the helpfulness or outright paranoia of scientists who have data they haven't gotten a paper out of yet varies widely...
"Its developers have spent hours stuffing it with broken, ill-configured, outdated, and exploitable software that makes it vulnerable to attacks. DVL isn't built to run on your desktop" is a chillingly accurate description of embedded systems design; but the risk you cite seems exceptionally remote. If the embedders are clueless and barely paying attention, they'll just default to the OS or distribution with the highest mindshare, which won't be this. If they are not clueless and barely paying attention, they'll select something approaching the right tool for the job, which won't be this.
I suspect that "salt water on their fields" in the sense of "field is actually under the sea" is going to be a relatively rare issue, except in places that are coastal already and extremely flat.
The big, ugly, much more widespread problem, though, is going to be aquifer infiltration. Groundwater is, well, underground, so your groundwater can easily be below sea level even if you are substantially above sea level(and, even if you are pumping from, say, 100 ft underground, you are getting water from a variety of levels, depending on the exact nature of the geological strata down there. Unless there is an impermiable layer just below your well depth, you'll have some amount of diffusion from below.).
Since virtually everyone is overpumping their aquifers anyway(though it is considered impolite to talk about it), even if sea levels stay exactly as they are it is expected that more groundwater is going to face seawater or deep saltwater(salt is a mineral, after all, and occurs in some geological strata quite naturally. If exposed to groundwater, it will form delicious brine just fine) infiltration. If the water you are using for irrigation is even slightly brackish, the salt levels in your fields will increase over time. Salt in the water gets sprayed on, water evaporates, salt doesn't, soil contains more salt. Repeat next season...
The "zOMG global warming, seas devouring the lands" angle is an easy way to give the story a topical flavor(plus, these guys are dutch, being underwater isn't a theoretical problem for them); but the need for agriculturally useful halophiles would exist even if sea levels don't budge at all, due to overuse and misuse of groundwater reserves.
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Conditions on the moon would actually be pretty unenviable for heavy machinery. The low gravity would be a plus, allowing impressive feats of strength, and otherwise implausibly spindly construction(though remember that mass, and inertia, don't change. That one can be embarrassing). It's all downhill from there, though.
The lunar surface experiences no weathering, only meteorite and micrometerorite impacts, so it consists largely of fused globs and shards of glassy materials, as sharp as they day they formed. Without an atmosphere, static cling is a serious issue. Without much water(or the temperature envelope in which to use it) you can't just hose that stuff off. It worms its way into every crevice, and just grinds away. If you generate heat, conduction and convection work substantially less well than you would expect, since there is no atmosphere. The rock still conducts heat away from the work area; but any air-cooled machinery isn't exactly going to work very well...
I doubt that it is impossible; but it is a nasty pile of engineering challenges. Something like Mars, which is basically a desert that used to beat up and steal the lunch money of even the toughest earthly deserts might actually be much easier(despite being further away). They have actual weathering there, an atmosphere(albeit a rather thin one) for air-cooling, and a surface that isn't exclusively made of tiny shards of glass that just want to cling to you and grind away....
You bring up an important point: while launch tech is sexy(and, admittedly, not presently good enough for much, hence the desire for improvement) not dying the second you run out of canned food/water/air shipped direct from earth at a thousand bucks a kilo is ultimately the more serious problem.
.3G or 1.6G on a 1G planet is going to be a touch tricky. And, of course, you ultimately do have to get there. However, you can do a lot of the groundwork research without ever leaving earth, and take advantage of fast turnaround times, trivial supply lines, low costs, and low risks.
There would be a lot to be said for doing the comparatively easy, comparatively cheap, comparatively extremely safe, and relatively quick, earth-based research on building sustainable small-scale environments. more than we do.
Since any attempt to colonize a planet that isn't already a near-earth paradise planet is doomed without airtight buildings, start with building those. Once you've mastered that, you can conduct all sorts of research for essentially peanuts, just by controlling the inputs to your airtight structure, and seeing how it goes(ie. impose an artificial comms delay equal to speed-of-light-delay for the planet you are simulating, provide only the supplies that could plausibly be brought on a ship of X size, provide "resupply" at intervals if desired, or not, if not. Erect a cheap warehouse over the whole operation and provide realistic lighting, to see if the agricultural attempts can take it, decide what "local resources" are available only for the cost of gathering/processing them, and so forth).
For the cost of a singe big, splashy, program that putzes around in earth orbit, you could be running dozens of concurrent experiments in extraterrestrial survival, just by putting up sealed buildings in places that are either inhospitable or just cheap, and exploring various approaches to survival; but with the bonus that, if an experiment fucks up, nobody dies horribly in the cold depths of space, that "supplies" just pay fedex shipping, rather than earth-to-mars shipping, and you don't have to spend ages waiting for results(hey, let's wait six months for our intrepid martian explorers to make planetfall, discover that some parameter was calculated wrong, asphyxiate, then wait another six months for the mission with that parameter tweaked to make it... That sounds like fun).
Plus, in addition to being fairly cheap, virtually every technology you would need to develop to build a working space colony on the ground likely has application to earth's less pleasant bits of real-estate, which makes funding easier to justify.
This is, of course, not a complete replacement for actual space stuff: we need robots out gathering data on what conditions are actually like if we are going to simulate them accurately, and simulating something like
Sending robots ahead of time, assuming suitable robotics tech, might well be a very good idea. Even if it is just the heavy earthmoving/fusing/cementing, it'll beat having a bunch of puny humans sucking up the oxygen and waiting for it to happen.
For general supplies, though, it isn't clear that separating the humans from the (initial) supply shipment is logical. First, being on the same boat as all your supplies is handy if schedules should slip for some reason. Second, a fair few types of supplies can function as radiation shielding(water, for instance) in sufficient quantity, and, unlike thicker walls, are also quite useful when you get where you are going. Unless being able to take off from the Earth's surface all in one piece is a hard requirement, any ship to mars is likely to be a big, ungainly looking, clump of modules and things, assembled in orbit, with the humans surrounded by tightly packed supplies and just enough shell to keep the air in...
Any idea why the hardware is that flaky?(fundamentally tricky design problems; because we can; etc?)
Off the cuff, I would think that somebody selling a very expensive service, to people who probably have their reasons for needing it, where most of the investment is in the satellites, would want the reliability of their ground hardware to be less of a joke, and more of a chuck norris joke...
I'm pretty sure that I've had cell plans that cost more than that, once I went over my "free with contract 5MB allotment for the month"...
Theoretically speaking, a foot pedal + reasonably sized reservoir kept sufficiently above working pressure + output regulator could be just as workable as either a compressor driven system, or something based on compressed gas cartridges. In practice, I'm assuming it goes something like this:
Foot Pedal Guy: *sweating like a pig* "This bloody sucks. It's, like, 106 in the shade, ambient humidity that would drown anything without gills, and the only way to distinguish the beer from the piss is that the former is warmer."
Medical Injection Dude: *experienced look* "Eh, the manual says 'Ensure that a reservoir pressure of at least Y PSI, but not more than Z PSI, is maintained at all times during injector use'. Y'know, though, don't knock yourself out. Kids have thin skins, and their alternative is getting smallpox, X PSI is totally good enough..."
Given how much generators enjoy things like vibration and being doused with saltwater, you might not even need to invoke Murphy's law...
I assume he is thinking of the original DES. Still not exactly useless, as not every script kiddie has a deep crack array in is closet and many messages only have to be secret for a relatively short time; but definitely "broken".
I doubt that it will make much difference, in practice. If somebody can sneak up and slap a patch on you, they can also sneak up and stab you with an umbrella...
More generally, the reason that this 'biocompatible microneedle array' stuff is considered medically interesting is because it lets you get the vaccine you want past the skin, rather than being forced to choose from agents that already pass through skin properly, or re-developing a vaccine from the drawing board to make sure that it is capable of soaking through skin without special treatment.
There are already thousands of compounds that soak through skin just fine(consult your friendly local MSDS, and remember what happened to poor Karen Wetterhahn. Yup, dimethylmercury. Sinks right through common lab gloves like they aren't even there, and skin about as easily. Then you die, the hard way.)
Even if you discount the gases, dusts, vapors, and droplet aerosols of the world, when formulating your sinister plan, there are plenty of chillingly skin-permeable options. This breakthrough is only news for doctors, who have to be much more selective: because there are thousands of toxins; but only a few vaccines or drugs for disease/condition whatever.
Unless the blood work being done specifically precludes it for some reason, a doctor might also be open to prescribing a short-acting anxiolytic for the procedure. One of the faster benzodiazapenes, or the like.
Not a perfect solution; but they use those against anxiety and panic disorders for a reason...
My understanding is that(at least in tropical medicine and military applications) the point isn't really that they are less painful than needles(and, even if they are, having some guy hold a big nasty-looking device up to your arm and make a pneumatic wh-thunk sound isn't calculated to give kiddo sweet dreams) its that they are much faster and more efficient and cheap.
Because there is no needle(which is either an expensive FRU or a temptation to ill-equipped medical staff in the ass-end of nowhere to wash out and re-use until it is blunt), you can skip all the fancy western hospital one-time-use assemblies that would be impractical in the field; but avoid the cross-contamination that occurs if you share needles. Depending on the design, there might be a simple pneumatic tip that gets replaced each use; but it makes lining up an entire village somewhere and pumping them full of vaccine much more logistically feasible.
It does open a few possibilities for practical jokes, though arguably not as many as the anything you can aerosolize and disperse already does...(for instance, has anybody else ever wondered what would happen if one were to crop-dust a heavily populated area with a suitably light-stabilized LSD solution? Or distributed a genetically engineered virus through the ventilation system of the DEA headquarters that spliced in the necessary DNA sequences to make those exposed capable of synthesizing endogenous THC?)
I'd be surprised if, in practice, they end up shipping GPG for the purpose; but such use could definitely be shoved under "mere aggregation" with minimal trouble. Heck, since this is the downloadable version, they could even assume net access and just grab a copy of the official GPG installer from its website(it'd be a dick move to do that; but that is how separate these things are), install it, and then dump it a couple of command lines. This isn't even some LGPL library situation, it's more of a bash-script/CMD batch level thing.
In practice, if only for aesthetic reasons, I'd assume that they'll go with some library that they can integrate tightly, with no trivially user-visible 3rd party stuff. Maybe something BSD/MIT licensed and built in, maybe calling one of the Windows-provided crypto APIs...
You can try people in absentia, Spain has been something of a trendsetter on that score; but the whole exercise is rather hollow unless you actually get a crack at taking them into custody to enforce your verdict.
Generally this requires winning, or a certain amount of stealth and disregard for national sovereignty(see, for instance, the various locations from which prominent Nazis found themselves 'removed' from cushy retirement by Israeli spook types).
Failing that, "trial" can be done; but is basically just a publicity exercise.
One guy, three years, house arrest.
The cynic might suggest that the US army(and, frankly, the US public), were more upset that it was discovered than that it occurred...
The main reason that I would suspect a distinct pre-release cryptographic mechanism is that such have been seen before(I believe some Steam titles have used them) and that they are so utterly trivial yet so functionally unbreakable.
You would simply take the release installer, and encrypt a copy with a key known only to you(and probably stored on a securely-locked-away air-gapped medium, to prevent leaks.
Add a little stub program that does nothing but check your website for the key, decrypt the installer binary, and start the installation.(Because a key doesn't need to be all that long in order to be functionally unbreakable, it is even practical for those without web access to type a suitably encoded version of the key in manually).
Absolutely no "innovating" needed. Basically any encryption method that isn't declared "deprecated" will work, and implementations of most of them are available under pretty much any license you want. The total implementation time will be a few hours for a competent programmer(and it need not be a competent programmer who has any knowledge of the project, this is quite a generic thing), possibly a man-day or two if the decrypter needs QA on 15 different Windows localizations and some attractive splash-screen art. And yet, despite the ease of implementation, even three letter agencies won't be able to get to it until you release the decryption key.
Aside from the fact that it is easy and robust, the main reason to use a separate system for the "release date control" vs. whatever DRM is used post-release, is that market research suggests that the financial damage of having your DRM cracked tapers off fairly rapidly post-release. Having would-be early adopters downloading pre-release cracked copies instead of buying $150 "platinum packs" with a couple of useless trinkets is financially painful. Having cheapskates a year from now picking up off the Pirate Bay rather than Ebay is virtually irrelevant. In between, the value falls over time, fast at first, and gradually tapering off.
If the installer binary is encrypted, would-be DRM-hackers don't even get to look at the DRM until release day(whereas, if you depended on the release-DRM, they would have the extra 10 days of hacking done before the game is even supposed to be released). This means that the chance of a pre-release pirate version(barring a penetration of your systems by hackers or inside guys) will be impossible, and the time-to-working-crack will be 10 days longer than it otherwise would be...
That sort of case is exactly why TI is working itself into a snit over any viable firmware-level modifications of their hardware.
Unless your teacher actually physically verified the integrity of the circuit board, and then broke out the JTAG to check on the mass storage, which seems unlikely, "reset to factory defaults" just means "politely ask the firmware to nuke any stored programs and modified user settings".
If the firmware is your firmware, it can easily enough interpret that request as "hide any stored programs and modified user settings until a specific secret key sequence is entered".
It would be a surprise. DRM is hard because it means giving the user the locked box, and the key, and then trying to order their computer to pretend that the key only exists on every second tuesday.
Conventional cryptography is very much up to the task of just giving the user the locked box, presumably with a dinky little stub program that will grab the decryption key when it is released.
There have been attacks, or inside jobs, before, so the decryption key(or a few vital binaries, if they went with that approach, or used it to augment this one), could theoretically get leaked; but the task of giving somebody something on day X and only releasing it on day X+Y is theoretically unproblematic. You have to actively fuck it up.
And, unfortunately, they aren't 100% effective at staving off rejection. A family friend's immune system just started demonstrating its ingratitude, with extreme prejudice, for his new heart. The doctors are hoping that they'll be able to tweak his drugs and get it to stop before serious damage occurs; but doing so without leaving you open to nasty infections and/or exotic cancers is apparently quite tricky.
In the meantime, we really ought to be playing up the coolness, economy, and sex appeal of riding a motorcycle... When it comes to providing otherwise healthy, mostly-intact-below-the-neck, donors, those things are second only to sinister Chinese prisons, and a lot less unethical.
And yet, somehow, medicine has advanced considerably even within my (relatively short) lifetime.
It's like passing a construction site: Every day, it's just a bunch of heavy equipment shoving dirt from point A to point B and back, while guys in hardhats scurry assorted mysterious objects around. It doesn't look like progress at all; but stuff demonstrably gets built.
Now, the number of projects that actually make it into clinical use is certainly smaller than the number whose developers said 5 years ago that they would be seeing use; but it is a lot larger than zero.
You've just met the publishers. Their friends say that they do a dirty but necessary job, like hangmen. Their opponents are less kind.
The actual scientists will usually have a copy floating around their website somewhere(for copyright reasons it will, of course, be a "preprint draft" not the "real thing" because the publishers generally own that; but the text is usually identical).
That's after they've fulfilled the "publish" side of "publish or perish", of course, the helpfulness or outright paranoia of scientists who have data they haven't gotten a paper out of yet varies widely...
"Its developers have spent hours stuffing it with broken, ill-configured, outdated, and exploitable software that makes it vulnerable to attacks. DVL isn't built to run on your desktop" is a chillingly accurate description of embedded systems design; but the risk you cite seems exceptionally remote. If the embedders are clueless and barely paying attention, they'll just default to the OS or distribution with the highest mindshare, which won't be this. If they are not clueless and barely paying attention, they'll select something approaching the right tool for the job, which won't be this.
I suspect that "salt water on their fields" in the sense of "field is actually under the sea" is going to be a relatively rare issue, except in places that are coastal already and extremely flat.
The big, ugly, much more widespread problem, though, is going to be aquifer infiltration. Groundwater is, well, underground, so your groundwater can easily be below sea level even if you are substantially above sea level(and, even if you are pumping from, say, 100 ft underground, you are getting water from a variety of levels, depending on the exact nature of the geological strata down there. Unless there is an impermiable layer just below your well depth, you'll have some amount of diffusion from below.).
Since virtually everyone is overpumping their aquifers anyway(though it is considered impolite to talk about it), even if sea levels stay exactly as they are it is expected that more groundwater is going to face seawater or deep saltwater(salt is a mineral, after all, and occurs in some geological strata quite naturally. If exposed to groundwater, it will form delicious brine just fine) infiltration. If the water you are using for irrigation is even slightly brackish, the salt levels in your fields will increase over time. Salt in the water gets sprayed on, water evaporates, salt doesn't, soil contains more salt. Repeat next season...
The "zOMG global warming, seas devouring the lands" angle is an easy way to give the story a topical flavor(plus, these guys are dutch, being underwater isn't a theoretical problem for them); but the need for agriculturally useful halophiles would exist even if sea levels don't budge at all, due to overuse and misuse of groundwater reserves.