If you are willing to limit your applications to a common subset of instructions and interfaces, like WebAssembly and every high-level-programming language does, sure.
People could have agreed e.g. on the Commodore 64 to define the virtual machine to run downloaded code in, there already are C64 emulators for all major operating systems - perfect compatibility guaranteed.
Of course, you say: "But that would have limited what WebAssembly can do to what the C64 could do!" - yes, that is true, and any other "WebAssembly" virtual machine will have the same flaw: It will restrict the possibilities by defining a VM, trading in flexibility for compatibility.
Some soon coming day, a company (like MicroSoft) will state "we enhanced WebAssembly's limited capabilities by adding feature X" - and voila! - you'll have incompatible WebAssembly environments again, just like you have incompatible environments for running x86 assembler right now.
It's beyond me why people confuse operating systems with web-browsers. Being able to run code from somewhere on the net and executing it locally (either sandboxed in a virtual machine or directly on the hardware) is something every major operating system has been able to do for many years.
And there have been good reasons why operating systems got safety mechanisms to not overly trust code from somewhere on the net.
Having a browser instead of an operating system do that just means to exchange the expertise and security awareness of operating system programmers with the utter lack of skill and security awareness of pixel-pushing GUI application programmers.
If you read Linus' whole statement, you will also find the part where he writes "yes, in git we also end up using the SHA1 when we use "real" cryptography for signing the resulting trees, so the hash does end up being part of a certain chain of trust. So we do take advantage of some of the actual security features of a good cryptographic hash, and so breaking SHA1 does have real downsides for us."
Regarding our use of SHA-3: We use crypographic hash-sums as keys to cached data items that are not permitted for everyone to request. Thus we need to make sure that the cache keys cannot be "guessed" (like from knowing a valid cache key for a similar data item).
Both happened in 2005. And SHA-2 was published 4 years earlier. So yes, the sky is not falling, and git can be made secure, but it also wasn't really wise to use SHA-1 when git was implemented, first.
BTW: At the company I work for, we already replaced SHA-2 with SHA-3 for security reasons. Better safe than sorry.
Indeed, I have experienced the same with many other services. You would not believe how creative both the writers of corporate service licences are in inventing reasons why there customers shall pay them more, and how creative the corporate users of such services are in inventing more or less plausible/legal ways to circumvent the license fees.
Just one example: Vendor writes into the license contract a higher monthly fee for "pushed" updates instead of "pulled" (requested) data. A company using that service asks me to implement a proxy service that will pull at an insanely high frequency on its input and provide real "push updates" on data changes on its output.
Your statement, while true, totally fails to consider that the goal of making and selling such dolls is not to make children happy and to keep their privacy intact. These dolls are built to collect data, sell that data for profit, and deliver targeted advertisements to children.
The theory about Echo and such is that those are not disguised eavesdropping devices.
Which, of course, is only partially true, as 99.99% of all adults will not have the slightest clue (or ability to verify) when Echo records something, and whether or not that recording goes to some remote 3rd-party.
The US will probably need all that tax-payers money elsewhere to build the wall to Mexico, so why not use the European Galileo Satelite Navigation instead - which already provides for much better spatial resolution?
We need robots to take over the boring repetitive stuff of now so we can work on the jobs of the future.
The parallels to automation in the past might soon end: Could well be that robots are soon better then most humans at doing the creative, intelligent, innovative stuff, so the work left for humans to do in the future may be the awful kind of stuff for which expendable humans are less costly than expensive robots.
Actual movie theatres and actual "telegraph"-hardware (as in: the wire/fiber infrastructure buried into the ground) are still way beyond what most people on earth can afford. What has become relatively cheap are non-material services that either make use of expensive infrastructure for a short periods or consist of "software" that can be copied without adding material anywhere.
Robots useful for taking care of elderlies need to be strong, sophisticated physical devices, and it is not quite settled that such will become cheap at any point in time.
Yes, I am paying ~50% taxes on my income, most of which goes into social welfare. And no, I am not in the least trying to evade those taxes, like so many of my fellow well-off people do.
I haven't seen the expenses for healthcare decrease anywhere, regardless of technological advances.
Of course nobody can predict what will be in 50 or 100 years, but it is also quite possible that by then it might already have become commonplace to euthanize people who cannot cater for themselves anymore.
What makes you think this hasn't happened already? Go ask your friends for whom they are ultimately working - as in: Who is ultimately earning the profits. You'll find that today already a large share of people are working for mega-corporations of such convoluted ownership structure that they cannot name the human(s) to whom the profits flow (and the CEO is rarely the owner). Chances are that many corporations are already owned by institutions that leave their business decisions largely to computers.
... think again: The vast majority of elderly people do not have the monetary resources to acquire some "robot care taker". All those robot fantasies are based on the illusion that somehow, once there are enough robots around, people will magically start to share their wealth with others in need. It has been proven time and again that this does not happen. Not even with much more basic things like food/shelter/healthcare.
The more likely situation will be that a few robots will aide some rich elderly people, while a lot of armed robots will be in charge of putting down any rebellion from the have-nots.
1. you are correct - indeed any battery with significant higher energy density than the current ones is hard to make safe for use
2. Fusion energy is not only possible, but alreay available in excessive quantities, readily available at no cost to us from the big ball-shaped fusion reactor in the center of our solar system
3. CRISPR-CAS9 is already there to do that
4. Hmmm... not so sure this is of such great potential
5. That's just one disease of so many, and not quite the one killing/crippling the most people. Curing cancer would help much more people.
6. A nice thing, yes, but wouldn't it even better to avoid most of the totally unnecessary traffic done today?
7. VR is overrated. A nice gimmick for gaming, maybe a tool for a few kinds of work, but that's it.
8. If WiFi was possible without supplying energy, not only your "Smart"-devices and IoT-gadgets would spy on you, but many other things, too. I see more harm than good in that.
My favorite technical novelty would be a cheap electro-powered submarine, safe to use even for trips to 11 km of depth in the ocean.
I don't know about other countries, but where I live you could not expect any kind of private air-traffic allowed/tolerated that is as loud as all flying vehicles are today. Heck, even the relatively few airports around are under constant pressure to limit their noise emissions. And I think that is a good thing.
Regardless of whether something is called a "game" or a "sport" - it's most fun when played against opponents with a not-too-far-off skill level. So if you play an "online"-game against some stranger a reasonable server will match you with an opponent of similar strength, and it totally doesn't matter whether that strength is achieved by quicker fingers or some more suitable input device. Why should you bother whether you are matched against some clumsy person using a great keyboard or against a grandmaster using some half-defect controller? If that opponent's strength is comparable to yours, whatever input devices used, the game should be an entertaining challenge.
Or is the problem that people do not play for fun anymore, but for some questionable "reward" to hold some position in a high score table? How sad that would be...
Printers were probably the first devices to be connected to the Internet in vast amounts without any consideration of security.
Things do not seem to have changed.
Amazon might allow people to comment on goods they sell from 3rd-party manufacturers, but now that they are producers of movies themselves, they will certainly not like to see negative reviews of them on their own web page.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are willing to limit your applications to a common subset of instructions and interfaces, like WebAssembly and every high-level-programming language does, sure.
People could have agreed e.g. on the Commodore 64 to define the virtual machine to run downloaded code in, there already are C64 emulators for all major operating systems - perfect compatibility guaranteed.
Of course, you say: "But that would have limited what WebAssembly can do to what the C64 could do!" - yes, that is true, and any other "WebAssembly" virtual machine will have the same flaw: It will restrict the possibilities by defining a VM, trading in flexibility for compatibility.
Some soon coming day, a company (like MicroSoft) will state "we enhanced WebAssembly's limited capabilities by adding feature X" - and voila! - you'll have incompatible WebAssembly environments again, just like you have incompatible environments for running x86 assembler right now.
It's beyond me why people confuse operating systems with web-browsers. Being able to run code from somewhere on the net and executing it locally (either sandboxed in a virtual machine or directly on the hardware) is something every major operating system has been able to do for many years.
And there have been good reasons why operating systems got safety mechanisms to not overly trust code from somewhere on the net.
Having a browser instead of an operating system do that just means to exchange the expertise and security awareness of operating system programmers with the utter lack of skill and security awareness of pixel-pushing GUI application programmers.
Didn't the press insinuate time and again this hack - like so many - must have been done by "the Russians2?
Examples:
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/med...
https://www.welt.de/debatte/ko...
https://www.welt.de/politik/de...
If you read Linus' whole statement, you will also find the part where he writes "yes, in git we also end up using the SHA1 when we use "real" cryptography for signing the resulting trees, so the hash does end up being part of a certain chain of trust. So we do take advantage of some of the actual security features of a good cryptographic hash, and so breaking SHA1 does have real downsides for us."
Regarding our use of SHA-3: We use crypographic hash-sums as keys to cached data items that are not permitted for everyone to request. Thus we need to make sure that the cache keys cannot be "guessed" (like from knowing a valid cache key for a similar data item).
Your comment might have been funny if at least their was some algorithm called "SHA-7", but there isn't.
Both happened in 2005. And SHA-2 was published 4 years earlier. So yes, the sky is not falling, and git can be made secure, but it also wasn't really wise to use SHA-1 when git was implemented, first.
BTW: At the company I work for, we already replaced SHA-2 with SHA-3 for security reasons. Better safe than sorry.
I prefer to fly on airplanes that were not built by sleep-depraved, overworked slaves.
great, all going according to plan of our new robot overlords!
Indeed, I have experienced the same with many other services.
You would not believe how creative both the writers of corporate service licences are in inventing reasons why there customers shall pay them more, and how creative the corporate users of such services are in inventing more or less plausible/legal ways to circumvent the license fees.
Just one example: Vendor writes into the license contract a higher monthly fee for "pushed" updates instead of "pulled" (requested) data. A company using that service asks me to implement a proxy service that will pull at an insanely high frequency on its input and provide real "push updates" on data changes on its output.
Your statement, while true, totally fails to consider that the goal of making and selling such dolls is not to make children happy and to keep their privacy intact. These dolls are built to collect data, sell that data for profit, and deliver targeted advertisements to children.
The theory about Echo and such is that those are not disguised eavesdropping devices.
Which, of course, is only partially true, as 99.99% of all adults will not have the slightest clue (or ability to verify) when Echo records something, and whether or not that recording goes to some remote 3rd-party.
Except for some clothing suddenly falling to the ground on an empty pair of shoes with socks in them.
The US will probably need all that tax-payers money elsewhere to build the wall to Mexico, so why not use the European Galileo Satelite Navigation instead - which already provides for much better spatial resolution?
We need robots to take over the boring repetitive stuff of now so we can work on the jobs of the future.
The parallels to automation in the past might soon end: Could well be that robots are soon better then most humans at doing the creative, intelligent, innovative stuff, so the work left for humans to do in the future may be the awful kind of stuff for which expendable humans are less costly than expensive robots.
Actual movie theatres and actual "telegraph"-hardware (as in: the wire/fiber infrastructure buried into the ground) are still way beyond what most people on earth can afford. What has become relatively cheap are non-material services that either make use of expensive infrastructure for a short periods or consist of "software" that can be copied without adding material anywhere.
Robots useful for taking care of elderlies need to be strong, sophisticated physical devices, and it is not quite settled that such will become cheap at any point in time.
Yes, I am paying ~50% taxes on my income, most of which goes into social welfare. And no, I am not in the least trying to evade those taxes, like so many of my fellow well-off people do.
I haven't seen the expenses for healthcare decrease anywhere, regardless of technological advances.
Of course nobody can predict what will be in 50 or 100 years, but it is also quite possible that by then it might already have become commonplace to euthanize people who cannot cater for themselves anymore.
... anything from this, while Apple keeps stockpiling money in remote tax evasion havens.
What makes you think this hasn't happened already?
Go ask your friends for whom they are ultimately working - as in: Who is ultimately earning the profits. You'll find that today already a large share of people are working for mega-corporations of such convoluted ownership structure that they cannot name the human(s) to whom the profits flow (and the CEO is rarely the owner).
Chances are that many corporations are already owned by institutions that leave their business decisions largely to computers.
... think again: The vast majority of elderly people do not have the monetary resources to acquire some "robot care taker".
All those robot fantasies are based on the illusion that somehow, once there are enough robots around, people will magically start to share their wealth with others in need. It has been proven time and again that this does not happen. Not even with much more basic things like food/shelter/healthcare.
The more likely situation will be that a few robots will aide some rich elderly people, while a lot of armed robots will be in charge of putting down any rebellion from the have-nots.
1. you are correct - indeed any battery with significant higher energy density than the current ones is hard to make safe for use 2. Fusion energy is not only possible, but alreay available in excessive quantities, readily available at no cost to us from the big ball-shaped fusion reactor in the center of our solar system 3. CRISPR-CAS9 is already there to do that 4. Hmmm... not so sure this is of such great potential 5. That's just one disease of so many, and not quite the one killing/crippling the most people. Curing cancer would help much more people. 6. A nice thing, yes, but wouldn't it even better to avoid most of the totally unnecessary traffic done today? 7. VR is overrated. A nice gimmick for gaming, maybe a tool for a few kinds of work, but that's it. 8. If WiFi was possible without supplying energy, not only your "Smart"-devices and IoT-gadgets would spy on you, but many other things, too. I see more harm than good in that. My favorite technical novelty would be a cheap electro-powered submarine, safe to use even for trips to 11 km of depth in the ocean.
I don't know about other countries, but where I live you could not expect any kind of private air-traffic allowed/tolerated that is as loud as all flying vehicles are today. Heck, even the relatively few airports around are under constant pressure to limit their noise emissions. And I think that is a good thing.
Regardless of whether something is called a "game" or a "sport" - it's most fun when played against opponents with a not-too-far-off skill level. So if you play an "online"-game against some stranger a reasonable server will match you with an opponent of similar strength, and it totally doesn't matter whether that strength is achieved by quicker fingers or some more suitable input device. Why should you bother whether you are matched against some clumsy person using a great keyboard or against a grandmaster using some half-defect controller? If that opponent's strength is comparable to yours, whatever input devices used, the game should be an entertaining challenge.
Or is the problem that people do not play for fun anymore, but for some questionable "reward" to hold some position in a high score table? How sad that would be...
Printers were probably the first devices to be connected to the Internet in vast amounts without any consideration of security. Things do not seem to have changed.
Amazon might allow people to comment on goods they sell from 3rd-party manufacturers, but now that they are producers of movies themselves, they will certainly not like to see negative reviews of them on their own web page.