That drains the power capacitors - but not necessarily charge stored in the electronics themselves. In DRAM for example, every bit is implemented as an independent capacitor. Other devices, even those that aren't intended to act as capacitors may also be capable of storing an internal charge with unpredictable lingering effects.
That almost always works. Unfortunately, charges can linger in the chips themselves as well. Rare, but can cause no end of headaches when the wrong bit(s) remain set and you don't realize that's possible.
Sadly, I recently discovered that those only offer software-based protection - i.e. they tell the computer "don't write to me", but rely on the software to honor that request, and don't actually do anything to protect your data from a malfunctioning or compromised computer. Unlike write-protect tabs on floppy disks for example, where the drive would simply return an error to the OS if you tried to write to a protected disk.
Don't forget disconnecting from power and leaving it switched ON for an extended period, to make sure to drain any lingering charge. That's the bit many people often forget, since it usually doesn't matter, except when the ghost of random chance decides to $#@! with your day.
I've looked at those before, and it does look like a nice drive, but has tons of features I don't have any use for and is ridiculously expensive ($45 for an 8GB drive?). Meanwhile a $5 16GB drive does everything I need, except for lacking a $0.10 write protect switch, and is cheap enough that I don't care about losing it.
I wonder if they did a half-hour+ "thorough reset", or just a quick power removal. I.e. did they just get unlucky that a "soft" reset left some bad data behind in volatile memory, or if the EEPROM itself was modified.
I miss the old days when you had to physically move a motherboard jumper if you wanted to modify the EEPROM. Almost as much as I miss the existence of hardware-enforced write protection toggles on removable media. (My first USB drive had one - I don't think I've even seen one since, though I've heard a couple companies do in fact make them)
This is true. But it's also only a problem with the choices currently built into the Bitcoin network itself, not with the basic technology, nor with distributed digital currencies in general.
Bitcoin strikes me as something like the moon landing - it proved that a decentralized currency really could be created, and changed the perceptual landscape of the world. All that remains is to figure out how to do it well enough to be more generally viable. Bitcoin even proved itself extremely useful for a while as a medium for wiring money, before it's value skyrocketed based on speculation. We'll see if it ever recovers, but in the meantime many other cryptocurrencies are drawing on it's technology and/or fame and attempting alternate solutions to the problem that will hopefully find better solutions than Bitcoin did.
And hey, unlike the space industry, the barriers to creating a new cryptocurrency are extremely low, so there's lots of room for experimentation and failure to let the good ideas rise rapidly to the surface.
You're correct that, at present, any randomly selected service provider is unlikely to take bitcoin. That could easily change though, given the extremely low entry barriers to doing so, and as I recall is already beginning to do so in some nations where governments are subjecting local currencies to extreme inflation. (I think bitcoin specifically has its own issues that would work against it becoming common to use for everyday transactions, but that's not an inherent problem with decentralized digital currencies)
But you're completely off the rails when you say >there is no practical mechanism to exchange services for fractional coins. Since bitcoins are just tallies on a ledger, rather than actual coins, fractional transactions are exactly as easy as any other. You're not transferring any sort of digital token, you're just making an indelible public ledger entry that I (wallet #123456) am hereby transferring 0.000005273bitcoin from my recorded balance to (wallet #987654), That's it. There is no such thing as an actual bitcoin, and thus nothing to actually be transferred, fractionally or otherwise. And the network protocols are currently set up to deal with transactions measured in value increments of 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin. (aka 1 satoshi).
You've got the distance, but I can't find any use of "candle" as time, am I missing one?
Megacubits per fortnight?
Or you could add in a bunch of extraneous self-cancelling measures so that things all cancel out to still get a single distance per time ratio e.g. Poncelet per sthène (power/force = distance/time) or if you want to get really ridiculous oxgang-spuculum-calories per batman-hogshead (d^2) (t) (m*d^2/t^2) / (m) (d^3) = d / t
>depending on what it's mounted to. That's the catch, isn't it? If you happen to have a well-aligned roof to attach to - great. Mostly though you need to build some more substantial mounting structure as well. And you'll note I said *building* - you've got to factor in the cost of labor as well.
Actually I recall a study recently that suggested that statistically speaking herbivores are as intelligent as carnivores. One example being elephants, who are one of the more intelligent species on the planet, quite likely more-so than chimpanzees. Might not carry to large-herd animals that rely on shear numbers for safety - but for more individualist species figure that predators are trying to out-think lunch, while prey are trying to out-think more immediate death. Which do you suppose applies the stronger selective pressure? There's usually stupider prey to be found. In fact, it might well be mid-sized omnivores, who are both predator and prey, that tend to become the most intelligent since they're under pressure from both ends.
Where human intelligence is concerned, it seems likely that one of the major defining moments in our evolution may have actually happened a very long time ago, when primates evolved to have constant-sized neurons, unlike most species whose neurons scale with body size (like basically all other cell types do). The result being that as body size increased, so did intelligence, even as the brain/body ratio remained the same.
Then, above some organism size threshold, the metabolic cost of larger brains was substantially less than the increase in intelligence. Of course to get to where we are now also requires an environment that offers substantial rewards for intelligence. Our other cousins among the higher primates seem to have mastered their environment well enough, and saw their intelligence plateau, while something happened to our ancestors to continue rewarding increased intelligence - perhaps it was when we ventured from the trees to the plains - unwilling or unable to compete with our relatives for prime space in the trees, and began a long migratory journey of adapting to new environments despite comparatively weak physical assets.
>LEO spends almost half its time in earth's shadow.
Actually that depends very much on the specific orbit - only roughly equatorial LEO orbits spend almost half their time in Earth's shadow, more polar orbits can improve that ratio immensely. Or more relevantly, significantly higher orbits (even those far below than geostationary, which would be the ideal for nationally-controlled solar) can easily avoid Earth's shadow altogether.
Meanwhile, the combination of no atmosphere (or specifically, winds) and microgravity means you can actually reduce the cost per square meter dramatically compared to Earth. Picture if you will a massive parabolic reflector made of ultra-thin mylar, spin-stabilized so that it needs no supporting structure beyond it. Focusing acres of sunlight onto a few square meters of high-power photovoltaics, while contributing minimal mass to launch costs (which are themselves falling rapidly - most orbital infrastructure plans don't really become feasible before a 10-100x cost reduction)
On Earth we're already at the point where building the supporting structures for solar panels is more expensive than the panels themselves, specifically because they need to resist gravity, wind, and other weather.
You are correct that terrestrial solar will make more sense for the immediately foreseeable future. Though, there are nations such as Japan that possess both the wealth and technical skills to seriously contemplate an orbital endeavor, while also lacking the land area to host terrestrial panels themselves, or close neighbors with whom they'd be willing to make themselves vulnerable to by depending on for power.
Actually from what I can find NASA currently tracks pretty much everything larger than a couple inches in LEO. Their resolving power falls off with distance though, so they could miss things as large as a yard across by the time you reach geostationary orbit (which would be an appealing destination for power satellites if transmission over those distances becomes feasible).
Of course the flip side is that debris density falls off very rapidly with size - every orbital collision and maintenance mishap is likely to create micrometeors - lost nuts and bolts, paint chips, etc. While larger debris is fairly rare - only so many foot-sized chunks you can get off a satellite, and you pretty much need a direct high-speed satellite collision to create them - which is extremely uncommon. Especially in geosynchronous orbits, which have long benefited from international agreement to boost retired satellites into a higher "graveyard" orbit where tidal forces will slowly push them ever-further from Earth.
True, but also relatively unlikely to cause a problem.
Most large-scale orbital solar collector designs call for massive parabolic mylar-film mirrors focusing sunlight on comparatively tiny photovoltaics. No wind or friction in space means such mirrors are far easier to create - as one example picture a giant parabolic "umbrella" focusing light onto high-yield photovoltaics on the "handle". Punch as many holes through the umbrella as you like, it doesn't really matter. Production will eventually drop noticeably as the reflector suffers from death by a thousand pin-pricks, but you may well be ready to retire it for other reasons before that becomes a problem.
Of course your photovoltaics are in fact still a vulnerable point, even if they are small enough to be relatively safe, but how often do existing solar-powered satellites lose their panels to micrometeorites? A certain amount of attrition is just part of doing business in space.
Plus, orbital solar power stations will quite likely be in geostationary orbit, which is *much* cleaner than low earth orbit, for the simple reason that it's considerably more expensive to reach, and not actually all that appealing for most orbital applications.
Yep, that is one of the major features. Who doesn't want an orbital death ray at their command?
That said, it's only really an issue if you intentionally design the array to be able to focus the beam much more tightly than normal power transmission designs call for - typical designs call for receiving antennas several square miles specifically to avoid that problem, keeping transmitted power densities on par with normal sunlight.
I can't help but notice that "Ancilliary Services" is way down at feature #7 of 8 total on the list you link too. Meanwhile #1 is Peak Shaving and #2 is Load Shifting (aka time shifting), which are what most every article claims the SA batteries are for.
Of course that's Tesla's general-purpose PR page and says nothing about SA's actual installation goals, but it does undermine your argument rather badly.
What are you talking about? Layers 4-7 are implemented by the communication endpoints and simply turn the raw data stream into something useful - 4-6 are typically implemented at the network card driver or operating system level, and I've not heard *any* claims about anything non-neutral about them. If you can successfully establish a communications link with a server, then Layers 1-7 have all done their job.
Even layer 7, the Application layer, has nothing to do with the applications themselves - it's simply the services the client and server can establish between them. HTTP, FTP, SNMP, etc. You can access the Facebook website? Then layer 7 is doing its unbiased job and establishing an HTTP connection between you and the server, allowing the sending and receiving web pages
You seem to be thinking of censorship and content-shaping, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the OSI Network model. And you're getting onto dangerous constitutional grounds as soon as you start telling private entities what they must (or must not) say. I'm all for encouraging social media networks to be less evil about how they censor and shape content, but I don't see a clear way to do so without imbuing that same potential for evil into the government itself - which is frankly a LOT more disturbing. I can choose not to use Facebook. About the safest approach I could see is to declare any service designed to facilitate communication between third parties to be a de-facto public utility, and regulate it as such, just as the FCC had done with ISPs.
A quick review of the upper levels of OSI - about the only way to interfere with them is for the server to refuse your connection (in which case, that should be their right, should it not?) Or for the operating system/driers to disrupt the connection before it reaches the server software (in which case yeah, lets go after the %$#!ers making such malignant software)
Layer 7: The application layer. This is the layer at which communication partners are identified (Is there someone to talk to?), network capacity is assessed (Will the network let me talk to them right now?), and that creates a thing to send or opens the thing received. (This layer is not the application itself, it is the set of services an application should be able to make use of directly, although some applications may perform application layer functions.)
Layer 6: The presentation layer. This layer is usually part of an operating system (OS) and converts incoming and outgoing data from one presentation format to another (for example, from clear text to encrypted text at one end and back to clear text at the other).
Layer 5: The session layer. This layer sets up, coordinates and terminates conversations. Services include authentication and reconnection after an interruption. On the Internet, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) provide these services for most applications.
Layer 4: The transport layer. This layer manages packetization of data, then the delivery of the packets, including checking for errors in the data once it arrives. On the Internet, TCP and UDP provide these services for most applications as well.
Layer 3: The network layer. This layer handles the addressing and routing of the data (sending it in the right direction to the right destination on outgoing transmissions and receiving incoming transmissions at the packet level). IP is the network layer for the Internet.
Fixed that for you. Smartphones are certainly far worse about it, making it relatively easy for world+dog to track you 24/7 if you install their app, but any cellphone will provide for moderately detailed tracking by the provider as a necessary part of its functioning. You can't receive phone calls unless they know where you are at all times.
Furthermore, as I recall *all* cell phones sold for the last many years in the US are required by law to have GPS trackers built in under the justification of providing emergency service/911 locating services when needed - but you're trusting your provider (and everyone who has backdoor access to their systems) not to perform far more detailed tracking.
There's a world of difference between "I drive around town in relatively unpredictable patterns all day, every day, and use superchargers regularly" -i.e. a taxi service, and "I normally spend large amounts of time parked at a few constant locations, charging from non-superchargers, and occasionally travel extended distances where I do use superchargers." - i.e. commuting and then occasionally going on vacation.
The second vacation scenario is *exactly* what Musk has previously stated are the Superchargers primary purpose. Or do you know a lot of people that hire taxis to go on road trips?
I'm inclined to agree about resources - other than possibly exotic matter which may not be possible to synthesize by the species involved. Magnetic monopoles, useful strangelets, negative-density unobtanium to enable antigrav or FTL, - the sort of things that might have immense value, and cannot be synthesized from local materials.
And obviously that could extend into useful organisms, or perhaps even just seed "cell-lines" that could be used to create clonable alien "zygotes" using synthesized "DNA" that can be transmitted later, since it might prove extremely difficult to synthesize an entire living cell based on completely alien biochemistry - perhaps easier to bootstrap the recipient with a tiny bio-culture from which other organisms could be created. Likewise nanotech, or other self-replicating "technology" - things where a comparatively tiny cargo can grow to deliver massively outsized value. Basically information in one sense, but information coupled to physical realization. "Pure" information is likely more easily sent by tightbeam transmission.
As for raw (elemental) materials - there's probably not a whole lot of interest on Earth - the gas giants have neatly concentrated most of the useful gasses in quantities dwarfing anything available on Earth, and the Oort cloud likely has far more rocky materials than the inner system. Unless some sort of very patient roving planet-eaters venture here with the intent to strip-mine the solar system we're probably okay.
Though... interstellar "locusts", intelligent or otherwise, are certainly something to consider. If humanity develops the technology to travel to the stars, either personally or in multi-generational world-ships stocked with enough energy to drift leisurely between stars, we might well become just such a species ourselves. After all, if we choose to colonize the outer solar system, our habitats will likely grow to be large and self-sustaining enough that a thousand-year migration to a nearby star would not be overly burdensome.
Rail against my pointing out that we don't actually know whether Kaspersky is already compromised or only vulnerable to it, while accusing the US government of the same abuses against those in their sphere of influence, and then finish with declaring invalid everything except whitelists - the epitome of "guilty until proven innocent" philosophy.
And hey - who gets to do the whitelisting? Are you certain they're competent, thorough, and incorruptible?
Are you certain of that? I didn't follow the details, but has anyone actually done a thorough, independent source-code audit? (after confirming the source does in fact compile to the distributed binaries of course). That's gotta be thousands of man-hours to do a halfway decent job, and would still almost certainly miss skillfully obfuscated malware or vulnerabilities.
Slashdot Mirror
That drains the power capacitors - but not necessarily charge stored in the electronics themselves. In DRAM for example, every bit is implemented as an independent capacitor. Other devices, even those that aren't intended to act as capacitors may also be capable of storing an internal charge with unpredictable lingering effects.
That almost always works. Unfortunately, charges can linger in the chips themselves as well. Rare, but can cause no end of headaches when the wrong bit(s) remain set and you don't realize that's possible.
Sadly, I recently discovered that those only offer software-based protection - i.e. they tell the computer "don't write to me", but rely on the software to honor that request, and don't actually do anything to protect your data from a malfunctioning or compromised computer. Unlike write-protect tabs on floppy disks for example, where the drive would simply return an error to the OS if you tried to write to a protected disk.
Don't forget disconnecting from power and leaving it switched ON for an extended period, to make sure to drain any lingering charge. That's the bit many people often forget, since it usually doesn't matter, except when the ghost of random chance decides to $#@! with your day.
I've looked at those before, and it does look like a nice drive, but has tons of features I don't have any use for and is ridiculously expensive ($45 for an 8GB drive?). Meanwhile a $5 16GB drive does everything I need, except for lacking a $0.10 write protect switch, and is cheap enough that I don't care about losing it.
I wonder if they did a half-hour+ "thorough reset", or just a quick power removal. I.e. did they just get unlucky that a "soft" reset left some bad data behind in volatile memory, or if the EEPROM itself was modified.
I miss the old days when you had to physically move a motherboard jumper if you wanted to modify the EEPROM. Almost as much as I miss the existence of hardware-enforced write protection toggles on removable media. (My first USB drive had one - I don't think I've even seen one since, though I've heard a couple companies do in fact make them)
This is true. But it's also only a problem with the choices currently built into the Bitcoin network itself, not with the basic technology, nor with distributed digital currencies in general.
Bitcoin strikes me as something like the moon landing - it proved that a decentralized currency really could be created, and changed the perceptual landscape of the world. All that remains is to figure out how to do it well enough to be more generally viable. Bitcoin even proved itself extremely useful for a while as a medium for wiring money, before it's value skyrocketed based on speculation. We'll see if it ever recovers, but in the meantime many other cryptocurrencies are drawing on it's technology and/or fame and attempting alternate solutions to the problem that will hopefully find better solutions than Bitcoin did.
And hey, unlike the space industry, the barriers to creating a new cryptocurrency are extremely low, so there's lots of room for experimentation and failure to let the good ideas rise rapidly to the surface.
You're correct that, at present, any randomly selected service provider is unlikely to take bitcoin. That could easily change though, given the extremely low entry barriers to doing so, and as I recall is already beginning to do so in some nations where governments are subjecting local currencies to extreme inflation. (I think bitcoin specifically has its own issues that would work against it becoming common to use for everyday transactions, but that's not an inherent problem with decentralized digital currencies)
But you're completely off the rails when you say
>there is no practical mechanism to exchange services for fractional coins.
Since bitcoins are just tallies on a ledger, rather than actual coins, fractional transactions are exactly as easy as any other. You're not transferring any sort of digital token, you're just making an indelible public ledger entry that I (wallet #123456) am hereby transferring 0.000005273bitcoin from my recorded balance to (wallet #987654), That's it. There is no such thing as an actual bitcoin, and thus nothing to actually be transferred, fractionally or otherwise. And the network protocols are currently set up to deal with transactions measured in value increments of 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin. (aka 1 satoshi).
You've got the distance, but I can't find any use of "candle" as time, am I missing one?
Megacubits per fortnight?
Or you could add in a bunch of extraneous self-cancelling measures so that things all cancel out to still get a single distance per time ratio e.g.
Poncelet per sthène (power/force = distance/time)
or if you want to get really ridiculous
oxgang-spuculum-calories per batman-hogshead
(d^2) (t) (m*d^2/t^2) / (m) (d^3) = d / t
>depending on what it's mounted to.
That's the catch, isn't it? If you happen to have a well-aligned roof to attach to - great. Mostly though you need to build some more substantial mounting structure as well. And you'll note I said *building* - you've got to factor in the cost of labor as well.
Actually I recall a study recently that suggested that statistically speaking herbivores are as intelligent as carnivores. One example being elephants, who are one of the more intelligent species on the planet, quite likely more-so than chimpanzees. Might not carry to large-herd animals that rely on shear numbers for safety - but for more individualist species figure that predators are trying to out-think lunch, while prey are trying to out-think more immediate death. Which do you suppose applies the stronger selective pressure? There's usually stupider prey to be found. In fact, it might well be mid-sized omnivores, who are both predator and prey, that tend to become the most intelligent since they're under pressure from both ends.
Where human intelligence is concerned, it seems likely that one of the major defining moments in our evolution may have actually happened a very long time ago, when primates evolved to have constant-sized neurons, unlike most species whose neurons scale with body size (like basically all other cell types do). The result being that as body size increased, so did intelligence, even as the brain/body ratio remained the same.
Then, above some organism size threshold, the metabolic cost of larger brains was substantially less than the increase in intelligence. Of course to get to where we are now also requires an environment that offers substantial rewards for intelligence. Our other cousins among the higher primates seem to have mastered their environment well enough, and saw their intelligence plateau, while something happened to our ancestors to continue rewarding increased intelligence - perhaps it was when we ventured from the trees to the plains - unwilling or unable to compete with our relatives for prime space in the trees, and began a long migratory journey of adapting to new environments despite comparatively weak physical assets.
That would have been funnier if you used units that could actually measure speed.
Even more importantly, if it somehow *does* go out, we're completely so %$#@!ed anyway that there's no point planning against it.
>LEO spends almost half its time in earth's shadow.
Actually that depends very much on the specific orbit - only roughly equatorial LEO orbits spend almost half their time in Earth's shadow, more polar orbits can improve that ratio immensely. Or more relevantly, significantly higher orbits (even those far below than geostationary, which would be the ideal for nationally-controlled solar) can easily avoid Earth's shadow altogether.
Meanwhile, the combination of no atmosphere (or specifically, winds) and microgravity means you can actually reduce the cost per square meter dramatically compared to Earth. Picture if you will a massive parabolic reflector made of ultra-thin mylar, spin-stabilized so that it needs no supporting structure beyond it. Focusing acres of sunlight onto a few square meters of high-power photovoltaics, while contributing minimal mass to launch costs (which are themselves falling rapidly - most orbital infrastructure plans don't really become feasible before a 10-100x cost reduction)
On Earth we're already at the point where building the supporting structures for solar panels is more expensive than the panels themselves, specifically because they need to resist gravity, wind, and other weather.
You are correct that terrestrial solar will make more sense for the immediately foreseeable future. Though, there are nations such as Japan that possess both the wealth and technical skills to seriously contemplate an orbital endeavor, while also lacking the land area to host terrestrial panels themselves, or close neighbors with whom they'd be willing to make themselves vulnerable to by depending on for power.
Actually from what I can find NASA currently tracks pretty much everything larger than a couple inches in LEO. Their resolving power falls off with distance though, so they could miss things as large as a yard across by the time you reach geostationary orbit (which would be an appealing destination for power satellites if transmission over those distances becomes feasible).
Of course the flip side is that debris density falls off very rapidly with size - every orbital collision and maintenance mishap is likely to create micrometeors - lost nuts and bolts, paint chips, etc. While larger debris is fairly rare - only so many foot-sized chunks you can get off a satellite, and you pretty much need a direct high-speed satellite collision to create them - which is extremely uncommon. Especially in geosynchronous orbits, which have long benefited from international agreement to boost retired satellites into a higher "graveyard" orbit where tidal forces will slowly push them ever-further from Earth.
True, but also relatively unlikely to cause a problem.
Most large-scale orbital solar collector designs call for massive parabolic mylar-film mirrors focusing sunlight on comparatively tiny photovoltaics. No wind or friction in space means such mirrors are far easier to create - as one example picture a giant parabolic "umbrella" focusing light onto high-yield photovoltaics on the "handle". Punch as many holes through the umbrella as you like, it doesn't really matter. Production will eventually drop noticeably as the reflector suffers from death by a thousand pin-pricks, but you may well be ready to retire it for other reasons before that becomes a problem.
Of course your photovoltaics are in fact still a vulnerable point, even if they are small enough to be relatively safe, but how often do existing solar-powered satellites lose their panels to micrometeorites? A certain amount of attrition is just part of doing business in space.
Plus, orbital solar power stations will quite likely be in geostationary orbit, which is *much* cleaner than low earth orbit, for the simple reason that it's considerably more expensive to reach, and not actually all that appealing for most orbital applications.
Yep, that is one of the major features. Who doesn't want an orbital death ray at their command?
That said, it's only really an issue if you intentionally design the array to be able to focus the beam much more tightly than normal power transmission designs call for - typical designs call for receiving antennas several square miles specifically to avoid that problem, keeping transmitted power densities on par with normal sunlight.
I can't help but notice that "Ancilliary Services" is way down at feature #7 of 8 total on the list you link too. Meanwhile #1 is Peak Shaving and #2 is Load Shifting (aka time shifting), which are what most every article claims the SA batteries are for.
Of course that's Tesla's general-purpose PR page and says nothing about SA's actual installation goals, but it does undermine your argument rather badly.
What are you talking about? Layers 4-7 are implemented by the communication endpoints and simply turn the raw data stream into something useful - 4-6 are typically implemented at the network card driver or operating system level, and I've not heard *any* claims about anything non-neutral about them. If you can successfully establish a communications link with a server, then Layers 1-7 have all done their job.
Even layer 7, the Application layer, has nothing to do with the applications themselves - it's simply the services the client and server can establish between them. HTTP, FTP, SNMP, etc. You can access the Facebook website? Then layer 7 is doing its unbiased job and establishing an HTTP connection between you and the server, allowing the sending and receiving web pages
You seem to be thinking of censorship and content-shaping, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the OSI Network model. And you're getting onto dangerous constitutional grounds as soon as you start telling private entities what they must (or must not) say. I'm all for encouraging social media networks to be less evil about how they censor and shape content, but I don't see a clear way to do so without imbuing that same potential for evil into the government itself - which is frankly a LOT more disturbing. I can choose not to use Facebook. About the safest approach I could see is to declare any service designed to facilitate communication between third parties to be a de-facto public utility, and regulate it as such, just as the FCC had done with ISPs.
A quick review of the upper levels of OSI - about the only way to interfere with them is for the server to refuse your connection (in which case, that should be their right, should it not?) Or for the operating system/driers to disrupt the connection before it reaches the server software (in which case yeah, lets go after the %$#!ers making such malignant software)
Layer 7: The application layer. This is the layer at which communication partners are identified (Is there someone to talk to?), network capacity is assessed (Will the network let me talk to them right now?), and that creates a thing to send or opens the thing received. (This layer is not the application itself, it is the set of services an application should be able to make use of directly, although some applications may perform application layer functions.)
Layer 6: The presentation layer. This layer is usually part of an operating system (OS) and converts incoming and outgoing data from one presentation format to another (for example, from clear text to encrypted text at one end and back to clear text at the other).
Layer 5: The session layer. This layer sets up, coordinates and terminates conversations. Services include authentication and reconnection after an interruption. On the Internet, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) provide these services for most applications.
Layer 4: The transport layer. This layer manages packetization of data, then the delivery of the packets, including checking for errors in the data once it arrives. On the Internet, TCP and UDP provide these services for most applications as well.
Layer 3: The network layer. This layer handles the addressing and routing of the data (sending it in the right direction to the right destination on outgoing transmissions and receiving incoming transmissions at the packet level). IP is the network layer for the Internet.
>Do you have a cellphone?
Fixed that for you. Smartphones are certainly far worse about it, making it relatively easy for world+dog to track you 24/7 if you install their app, but any cellphone will provide for moderately detailed tracking by the provider as a necessary part of its functioning. You can't receive phone calls unless they know where you are at all times.
Furthermore, as I recall *all* cell phones sold for the last many years in the US are required by law to have GPS trackers built in under the justification of providing emergency service/911 locating services when needed - but you're trusting your provider (and everyone who has backdoor access to their systems) not to perform far more detailed tracking.
That seems rather unlikely though, doesn't it?
There's a world of difference between "I drive around town in relatively unpredictable patterns all day, every day, and use superchargers regularly" -i.e. a taxi service, and "I normally spend large amounts of time parked at a few constant locations, charging from non-superchargers, and occasionally travel extended distances where I do use superchargers." - i.e. commuting and then occasionally going on vacation.
The second vacation scenario is *exactly* what Musk has previously stated are the Superchargers primary purpose. Or do you know a lot of people that hire taxis to go on road trips?
Which is why you should be suspicious of anything that makes the police's work easier. That door swings both ways.
I'm inclined to agree about resources - other than possibly exotic matter which may not be possible to synthesize by the species involved. Magnetic monopoles, useful strangelets, negative-density unobtanium to enable antigrav or FTL, - the sort of things that might have immense value, and cannot be synthesized from local materials.
And obviously that could extend into useful organisms, or perhaps even just seed "cell-lines" that could be used to create clonable alien "zygotes" using synthesized "DNA" that can be transmitted later, since it might prove extremely difficult to synthesize an entire living cell based on completely alien biochemistry - perhaps easier to bootstrap the recipient with a tiny bio-culture from which other organisms could be created. Likewise nanotech, or other self-replicating "technology" - things where a comparatively tiny cargo can grow to deliver massively outsized value. Basically information in one sense, but information coupled to physical realization. "Pure" information is likely more easily sent by tightbeam transmission.
As for raw (elemental) materials - there's probably not a whole lot of interest on Earth - the gas giants have neatly concentrated most of the useful gasses in quantities dwarfing anything available on Earth, and the Oort cloud likely has far more rocky materials than the inner system. Unless some sort of very patient roving planet-eaters venture here with the intent to strip-mine the solar system we're probably okay.
Though... interstellar "locusts", intelligent or otherwise, are certainly something to consider. If humanity develops the technology to travel to the stars, either personally or in multi-generational world-ships stocked with enough energy to drift leisurely between stars, we might well become just such a species ourselves. After all, if we choose to colonize the outer solar system, our habitats will likely grow to be large and self-sustaining enough that a thousand-year migration to a nearby star would not be overly burdensome.
Heh heh heh. Good one.
Rail against my pointing out that we don't actually know whether Kaspersky is already compromised or only vulnerable to it, while accusing the US government of the same abuses against those in their sphere of influence, and then finish with declaring invalid everything except whitelists - the epitome of "guilty until proven innocent" philosophy.
And hey - who gets to do the whitelisting? Are you certain they're competent, thorough, and incorruptible?
>Sure, it's not currently compromised
Are you certain of that? I didn't follow the details, but has anyone actually done a thorough, independent source-code audit? (after confirming the source does in fact compile to the distributed binaries of course). That's gotta be thousands of man-hours to do a halfway decent job, and would still almost certainly miss skillfully obfuscated malware or vulnerabilities.