"We want all the best things that modern life has to offer, we just want someone else to have to suffer the minor downsides and mild inconveniences of having things like data centers or power plants or landfills or offshore windmills spoiling our pristine view."
Don't be silly. They're just here to construct a hyperspace bypass, which will require the demolition of the Earth.
Oh, and don't bother complaining. The plans have been on file at the local office in Alpha Centauri, if you wanted to file a complaint, you should have done it then.
It's more cultural than technological. Technologically, smartphones are near ubiquitous, and Gigabit or better broadband is widespread there, so in that way, they're on par or ahead of the U.S., at least.
The difference is that in the U.S., fax machines were primarily a business tool, whereas in Japan, they were a common household item that everyone had, like a landline phone. Many people in the US still have landline phones, even if that number gets smaller every year as we increasingly go mobile only. With faxes though, you can't as easily fax to a mobile device, and if your boss/parents/etc want to fax you stuff, you're more likely to hang on to one yourself (especially if they're highly common, and therefore cheaply available).
Cyberpunk? Seems to me like it's already here, in many ways. Oh, sure, we haven't quite started on the whole implants bit, but wearables are already becoming a thing, and body modification is already an alt culture thing, so we're not far off there.
Corporations taking precedence over governments? Yeah, well on our way.
World wide connected network with people increasingly spending all their time plugged in? Check.
Hackers for hire breaking into to companies to steal information? Check.
Time travel is loads of fun though. I remember the first time I flew to the US from Japan, and realizing that I arrived before I left.
Even better was the time I flew from Korea to the US. I left on the evening of February 2nd, and arrived on the morning of February 2nd. It seemed rather fitting.
To some degree, the fact that nearly everyone else who's a hotshot in the tech industry is there means it's easier to find the talent you want there.
Eventually, though, the high prices will drive more and more of the companies to look at alternatives, until it gets to the point that Silicon Valley isn't the hub of the best tech talent anymore.
Yes - it's not about the earthquakes, it's about the fact that San Francisco and its residents don't want to change the "character" of their city. They don't want the kind of development and density that would be appropriate for the city given the cost of housing.
This would make sense. The gaming market, especially in Japan, has a lot of potential competition from people playing on their mobile phones. You're not just competing with Microsoft/Sony, you're competing with Apple/Google/etc. Being able to produce a product that competes with both, that you can play at home on the full console, but also detach and take on the go with you, would be an attractive proposition - sort of like buying a console and getting a 3DS thrown in free.
Of course, that assumes they can pull it off, and don't just wind up with a product that sucks as both a console and a mobile gaming device.
The problem is that they don't want to do anything substantial to vet the people buying the ads. All they care about is the money.
It seems to me like there needs to be some sort of significant penalty for any ad network found to have let something malicious slip through, otherwise they have very little incentive to clean their act up. They'll just go "oops, well, we won't sell ad space to CyberMafiaMan2000@gmail anymore", and turn right around and sell it to CyberMafiaMan2001@gmail instead.
Earth has only been broadcasting since the early 20th century. At 1500 LY away, they're still seeing light/etc from Earth around the end of the Roman Empire. Excluding the possibility of some sort of sensor/communication system that defies relativity, any aliens there won't see us until around 3420 AD our time. A response wouldn't be able to arrive until 5000AD or later, probably much more if they were trying to send actual ships.
At this point, only star systems within 100LY of Sol are the ones we would be concerned about - and we can be reasonably sure that the ones within 50LY either don't have anyone listening, or that they have elected not to respond in a way that we've noticed.
I seriously doubt that any politician is likely to go to jail in the present political climate, short of a smoking gun in their hand standing in front of a bunch of dead elementary school kids, the other hand full of bribe money from foreign criminals, with the video uploaded onto Youtube. Why? Not because the system is rigged to protect the powerful (though in many ways it is - see and compare Petraeus and Snowden or Manning), but because the political environment has become so hyperpartisan, and there have been so many witchhunts or perceived witchhunts, that roughly 30-40% or more of the country is primed to assume that's exactly what any sort of allegations against a politician are.
It's even more so with the Clintons, just because the average person is so desensitized to the constant allegations of scandal that have largely gone nowhere. It's entirely possible that Hillary did do something she should go to jail for - but try convincing those people, who have learned to ignore the constant cries of scandal and wrongdoing that have been lobbed against the Clintons for over two decades now, and that basically amounted to a giant nothingburger in the eyes of the public. Cry Wolf enough times, and well, don't be surprised when people are ignoring you when there really is a wolf.
The Beltway Bandits are several years ahead of you. They all glommed onto "cybersecurity" as the next big cash cow following the fading of "counterterrorism." 2009-2011 was a really good time to own a small contracting firm that specialized in cybersecurity, because Northrop, Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc, all went on a buyout spree trying to get both contracts and expertise. I only wish I'd had the foresight/connections at the time..
Don't worry - they're planning to partner with the Japanese robotics company, Cyberdyne ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... ) to make a powerful AI system that will protect their customers on the internet at first, and possibly even later in the physical world.
It's a combination of availability of family planning, less need for large families to help with farm work, and also the fact that advances in health and sanitation means that you don't need spares because all of your children are much more likely to survive to adulthood than they were a century ago.
The interesting question will be how we reach an equilibrium, because clearly we're not going to wind up just having entire countries disappear (such as would happen to South Korea by around 2700AD if their current birth rate continued). Immigration is the short term solution, which is why the US population has continued to grow despite our birth rate falling below the replacement level. It's also part of why Germany is stepping up to accept so many refugees. Still, there are limits on that, nevermind what happens when the source countries begin to have the same reduction. For instance, in 1970 Mexico had a birth rate of over 6 children per female. As of a few years ago, that was down to 2.2, which is just barely over the replacement rate (and roughly where the US birth rate was in 1970).
It's because productivity has become completely untethered from wages. Up until about the late 1970s, wages rose in rough correlation to productivity gains. After 1980, wages all but flatlined while productivity continued to increase at roughly the same rate it had before. The problem is that workers are getting less and less of a share of the value of the work (i.e. production) that they do.
The per capita GDP of the USA in 2014 was over $54k. You could put everyone in the country above the poverty line for less than half that (and that's not even counting the fact that it wouldn't cost nearly that much either, since the poverty line is a family income). Maybe we're not there yet, but at what point do we say "Okay, we're doing well enough, let's just shift to a basic income"?
Not really - if anything, we're defining the 'basic necessities' upwards.
In 1800 (to pick an arbitrary date in the past), basic necessities might be a shack with a wood stove and a bland, basic diet. Would that cut it today, in any modern countries? Building safety codes alone would mean it's going to be more expensive, nevermind things like utilities, or the fact that we wouldn't consider that bland diet to be anywhere near healthy/varied enough. What about things like a cellphone, or internet access? You may not need them to stay alive, but you certainly need them to pretty much do anything in today's modern society.
But is it really more expensive, in comparison to how much productivity has gone up? Per Capita GDP, adjusted for inflation, has risen by a factor of 50. This means that despite the increasing amount of stuff we're putting in the 'basic necessities' category, our productivity can much more easily support even that raised level, than we could the much more basic one back in 1800.
It's probably best to be clear that the ones most 'worried' about encryption are the FBI (and various other Federal Law Enforcement types). It may be telling that the FBI is so big on this, while the NSA seems less so. For all that people think of the NSA as the primary bad guys in all of this, the practical problem (as opposed to ethical/moral/etc) with NSA spying wasn't even the NSA having the information, it was what happens if/when the NSA gives that information to people like the FBI or DEA, who are very much interested in targeting American citizens.
Likely he's concluded that the benefits of strong encryption in protecting U.S. Government and private sector assets outweighs the potential lost intelligence monitoring capabilities. Part of this is because anyone overseas isn't going to bother using knowingly weaker stuff - Al Qaeda, ISIS, etc won't use stuff they know the FBI can backdoor, they'll get something from Russia or China, etc. Meanwhile, weaker crypto means our stuff is more likely getting read by those same Chinese/Russian/whoever intelligence services.
Meanwhile, the FBI doesn't care about that, because they're more interested in who they can go after domestically.
If they aren't already. Not to go all tinfoil hat, but in many ways, I've always felt that Facebook operates very much like an intelligence agency. They do everything they can to vacuum up every single bit of personal information about you they can, including who you talk to, what you do, what you like, etc... The biggest difference is in who they provide the information to, and why.
Slashdot Mirror
"We want all the best things that modern life has to offer, we just want someone else to have to suffer the minor downsides and mild inconveniences of having things like data centers or power plants or landfills or offshore windmills spoiling our pristine view."
Don't be silly. They're just here to construct a hyperspace bypass, which will require the demolition of the Earth.
Oh, and don't bother complaining. The plans have been on file at the local office in Alpha Centauri, if you wanted to file a complaint, you should have done it then.
It raises some interesting questions though.
What would he drink? Vodka Redbull, shaken, not stirred?
Would he go to Q branch to get the latest case mods and Metasploit modules?
It's more cultural than technological. Technologically, smartphones are near ubiquitous, and Gigabit or better broadband is widespread there, so in that way, they're on par or ahead of the U.S., at least.
The difference is that in the U.S., fax machines were primarily a business tool, whereas in Japan, they were a common household item that everyone had, like a landline phone. Many people in the US still have landline phones, even if that number gets smaller every year as we increasingly go mobile only. With faxes though, you can't as easily fax to a mobile device, and if your boss/parents/etc want to fax you stuff, you're more likely to hang on to one yourself (especially if they're highly common, and therefore cheaply available).
Cyberpunk? Seems to me like it's already here, in many ways. Oh, sure, we haven't quite started on the whole implants bit, but wearables are already becoming a thing, and body modification is already an alt culture thing, so we're not far off there.
Corporations taking precedence over governments? Yeah, well on our way.
World wide connected network with people increasingly spending all their time plugged in? Check.
Hackers for hire breaking into to companies to steal information? Check.
Time travel is loads of fun though. I remember the first time I flew to the US from Japan, and realizing that I arrived before I left.
Even better was the time I flew from Korea to the US. I left on the evening of February 2nd, and arrived on the morning of February 2nd. It seemed rather fitting.
To some degree, the fact that nearly everyone else who's a hotshot in the tech industry is there means it's easier to find the talent you want there.
Eventually, though, the high prices will drive more and more of the companies to look at alternatives, until it gets to the point that Silicon Valley isn't the hub of the best tech talent anymore.
Yes - it's not about the earthquakes, it's about the fact that San Francisco and its residents don't want to change the "character" of their city. They don't want the kind of development and density that would be appropriate for the city given the cost of housing.
Better to use the technology for good, than for evil.
It is, though mostly in supply email services (and media/ad network stuff).
In fact, you can almost date (non-tech industry) people based on their email addresses now. Gmail? Probably 20s-30s. Yahoo? 40s-50s. Aol? 60+.
This would make sense. The gaming market, especially in Japan, has a lot of potential competition from people playing on their mobile phones. You're not just competing with Microsoft/Sony, you're competing with Apple/Google/etc. Being able to produce a product that competes with both, that you can play at home on the full console, but also detach and take on the go with you, would be an attractive proposition - sort of like buying a console and getting a 3DS thrown in free.
Of course, that assumes they can pull it off, and don't just wind up with a product that sucks as both a console and a mobile gaming device.
The problem is that they don't want to do anything substantial to vet the people buying the ads. All they care about is the money.
It seems to me like there needs to be some sort of significant penalty for any ad network found to have let something malicious slip through, otherwise they have very little incentive to clean their act up. They'll just go "oops, well, we won't sell ad space to CyberMafiaMan2000@gmail anymore", and turn right around and sell it to CyberMafiaMan2001@gmail instead.
And on top of that, because their ad networks introduced massive security holes that malware/crime gangs regularly take advantage of.
Earth has only been broadcasting since the early 20th century. At 1500 LY away, they're still seeing light/etc from Earth around the end of the Roman Empire. Excluding the possibility of some sort of sensor/communication system that defies relativity, any aliens there won't see us until around 3420 AD our time. A response wouldn't be able to arrive until 5000AD or later, probably much more if they were trying to send actual ships.
At this point, only star systems within 100LY of Sol are the ones we would be concerned about - and we can be reasonably sure that the ones within 50LY either don't have anyone listening, or that they have elected not to respond in a way that we've noticed.
I seriously doubt that any politician is likely to go to jail in the present political climate, short of a smoking gun in their hand standing in front of a bunch of dead elementary school kids, the other hand full of bribe money from foreign criminals, with the video uploaded onto Youtube. Why? Not because the system is rigged to protect the powerful (though in many ways it is - see and compare Petraeus and Snowden or Manning), but because the political environment has become so hyperpartisan, and there have been so many witchhunts or perceived witchhunts, that roughly 30-40% or more of the country is primed to assume that's exactly what any sort of allegations against a politician are.
It's even more so with the Clintons, just because the average person is so desensitized to the constant allegations of scandal that have largely gone nowhere. It's entirely possible that Hillary did do something she should go to jail for - but try convincing those people, who have learned to ignore the constant cries of scandal and wrongdoing that have been lobbed against the Clintons for over two decades now, and that basically amounted to a giant nothingburger in the eyes of the public. Cry Wolf enough times, and well, don't be surprised when people are ignoring you when there really is a wolf.
The Beltway Bandits are several years ahead of you. They all glommed onto "cybersecurity" as the next big cash cow following the fading of "counterterrorism." 2009-2011 was a really good time to own a small contracting firm that specialized in cybersecurity, because Northrop, Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc, all went on a buyout spree trying to get both contracts and expertise. I only wish I'd had the foresight/connections at the time..
Don't worry - they're planning to partner with the Japanese robotics company, Cyberdyne ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... ) to make a powerful AI system that will protect their customers on the internet at first, and possibly even later in the physical world.
It's all perfectly safe....
It's a combination of availability of family planning, less need for large families to help with farm work, and also the fact that advances in health and sanitation means that you don't need spares because all of your children are much more likely to survive to adulthood than they were a century ago.
The interesting question will be how we reach an equilibrium, because clearly we're not going to wind up just having entire countries disappear (such as would happen to South Korea by around 2700AD if their current birth rate continued). Immigration is the short term solution, which is why the US population has continued to grow despite our birth rate falling below the replacement level. It's also part of why Germany is stepping up to accept so many refugees. Still, there are limits on that, nevermind what happens when the source countries begin to have the same reduction. For instance, in 1970 Mexico had a birth rate of over 6 children per female. As of a few years ago, that was down to 2.2, which is just barely over the replacement rate (and roughly where the US birth rate was in 1970).
It's because productivity has become completely untethered from wages. Up until about the late 1970s, wages rose in rough correlation to productivity gains. After 1980, wages all but flatlined while productivity continued to increase at roughly the same rate it had before. The problem is that workers are getting less and less of a share of the value of the work (i.e. production) that they do.
The per capita GDP of the USA in 2014 was over $54k. You could put everyone in the country above the poverty line for less than half that (and that's not even counting the fact that it wouldn't cost nearly that much either, since the poverty line is a family income). Maybe we're not there yet, but at what point do we say "Okay, we're doing well enough, let's just shift to a basic income"?
Not really - if anything, we're defining the 'basic necessities' upwards.
In 1800 (to pick an arbitrary date in the past), basic necessities might be a shack with a wood stove and a bland, basic diet. Would that cut it today, in any modern countries? Building safety codes alone would mean it's going to be more expensive, nevermind things like utilities, or the fact that we wouldn't consider that bland diet to be anywhere near healthy/varied enough. What about things like a cellphone, or internet access? You may not need them to stay alive, but you certainly need them to pretty much do anything in today's modern society.
But is it really more expensive, in comparison to how much productivity has gone up? Per Capita GDP, adjusted for inflation, has risen by a factor of 50. This means that despite the increasing amount of stuff we're putting in the 'basic necessities' category, our productivity can much more easily support even that raised level, than we could the much more basic one back in 1800.
Hey, it's not like we're talking Nuclear Fusion here. :)
The estimate that it will take centuries is probably what is the farthest off.
Sounds like it might a gamble to me.
It's probably best to be clear that the ones most 'worried' about encryption are the FBI (and various other Federal Law Enforcement types). It may be telling that the FBI is so big on this, while the NSA seems less so. For all that people think of the NSA as the primary bad guys in all of this, the practical problem (as opposed to ethical/moral/etc) with NSA spying wasn't even the NSA having the information, it was what happens if/when the NSA gives that information to people like the FBI or DEA, who are very much interested in targeting American citizens.
Likely he's concluded that the benefits of strong encryption in protecting U.S. Government and private sector assets outweighs the potential lost intelligence monitoring capabilities. Part of this is because anyone overseas isn't going to bother using knowingly weaker stuff - Al Qaeda, ISIS, etc won't use stuff they know the FBI can backdoor, they'll get something from Russia or China, etc. Meanwhile, weaker crypto means our stuff is more likely getting read by those same Chinese/Russian/whoever intelligence services.
Meanwhile, the FBI doesn't care about that, because they're more interested in who they can go after domestically.
If they aren't already. Not to go all tinfoil hat, but in many ways, I've always felt that Facebook operates very much like an intelligence agency. They do everything they can to vacuum up every single bit of personal information about you they can, including who you talk to, what you do, what you like, etc... The biggest difference is in who they provide the information to, and why.