With Firefox and HTML5 you do not need Java and Flash for most content (not for any I consume)
Well to quote the title of this thread, Good for you. That's not the case for a lot of us. Some of us view content or, even worse, have jobs that require we use apps, that require Flash or Java. And regardless of whose fault it is, I've seen content that renders properly in Adobe Reader that does not render properly in other PDF viewers, or PDFs that use forms/signatures that seem to only work in Adobe Reader.
So *yay* for you. You have nothing better to do than secure an outdated OS by limiting what you do on that OS. Some of us don't have time for those kinds of shenanigans.
Yeah, great. It's true, you can secure even the most unpatched and insecure computer by deciding that the user doesn't actually need to use any of the features that could lead to security problems. Take it a step further: I've decided that users don't actually need the Internet, so just unplug the Windows XP machines from the network entirely. It's much more secure that way!
I deal with the same thing, but the reality is that it is very often a result of (A) user behavior; and (B) outdated software. That outdated software isn't always the OS, but often it's Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash Player, or the Java plugin. If I can make sure all the software on your system is completely patched and up-to-date, I will drastically cut your chances of infection. Don't even try to claim that having the latest patches for Flash/Java don't help your security. And how long will Adobe/Oracle support Windows XP once Microsoft drops support?
There's still the issue of "user behavior", which can be mitigated by using certain policies, but can't be stopped without severely inhibiting users. Still, by keeping things up to date, I can cut the chances of infection for all but the most persistently stupid users.
Well in that sense, you could be running 10 different AV packages, running constant scans, and still be running a rootkit. It might be an unknown rootkit that is very good at evading detection.
Which is a great argument if you are a "hacker" or the source of the hardware. But for the user of a agilent scope, the fact that its running XP instead of linux makes no difference. They can't get in and hack the kernel & sources for an unsupported 15 year old linux anymore than they can hack the XP.
If you're a business that is relying on an agilent scope (or whatever hardware) to keep the business operating, then either budget to buy a new agilent scope when support ends, or budget to pay for someone who can offer support.
The problem is, when the hardware (or software) solution will only run on a closed/proprietary system, you don't really have the option to pay for support. If I had the money budgeted, I could pay a couple of programmers to backport updates and patch an old version of Debian that has no official support. Or, if the original system ran on Debian, I could get the programmers to figure out what needs to happen in order to get the system running on a new version of Linux. Even if I have to pay programmers to keep it working properly, keep it up-to-date, and keep it secure, I have that option.
Not so with Windows. I guess you could pay programmers to try to hack patches back onto Windows, but that seems like an awful mess.
So if your point is, "I'm an individual hobbyist who wants to be able to run my little thing and I can't program!" then no, being open source doesn't help you. I'm talking more about businesses who complain, "I built my business around [insert hardware/software solution here], which only works on [insert obsolete closed proprietary platform here]. I can't afford to buy [new hardware/software solution], so I have to keep using [obsolete closed proprietary platform]." Every year I deal with these things, my sympathy for that situation diminishes, especially so when there are FOSS alternatives. Either way, if your business depends on some form of technology, have a strategy and a budget for either maintaining it or replacing it. If you can't budget for that, then you don't have a sustainable business model.
Everyone running old specfialized hardware which is not compatible with windows 7 or later feel the pain of the XP end of life.
Its not about refusing or not. Some simply don't have the choice and must stick with XP... A clear solution has still to be found...
I think this is actually a good argument as to why those people shouldn't be using Windows in the first place. There may be other arguments, e.g. "On a practical level, they had no choice," but I just want to point out that this is exactly the kind of thing FOSS advocates are talking about for years, while most of the world dismissed them as being paranoid.
If you're dependent on specialized hardware, and you will need ongoing support over years or decades, you might want to look for a system that uses an open source driver and/or runs on Linux or a BSD variant. It doesn't immediately solve all of your problems, but it leaves open the possibility that someone somewhere could provide maintenance or an upgrade path. For as long as you're buying specialized solutions that require a specific version of proprietary software, you're at the mercy of the vendor who sells/supports that proprietary software.
When you're planning to buy or build a system, you should always plan ahead. It's amazing to me how many people will buy or build huge expensive systems, build their entire business to depend on those systems, and yet have absolutely no plan or budget to maintain or replace those systems. So many toddlers building empires out of sand.
'I use a third-party firewall, a free virus checker, and run Housecall periodically,' says Appel. 'My Firefox browser uses Keyscrambler, HTTPS Anywhere, Ghostery, and Disconnect. I also have a VPN account (PIA) when traveling. For suspicious email attachments, I deploy private proprietary bioware (me!) to analyze before opening. All the "experts" say I am crazy. Thing is, I stopped the security updates in XP years ago after a bad update trashed my system, and yet I have never been infected, although online for hours each day...
Thing is, that does sound crazy to me. It sounds compulsive and anal retentive. I wouldn't be surprised if he also only operates his computers while wearing a tinfoil hat inside a Faraday cage that he built in his basement.
You know what I do? I install a modern operating system and pretty much leave it alone. I have never been infected, simply by keeping up to date and not engaging in high-risk behavior. I'd rather spend a few dollars now and then than sit around re-running security checks, but I guess I'm not retired and I don't have the time to be a kooky security nut. I know, someone is going to bash this post because Slashdot has a lot of kooky security nuts, as well as a strong contingent of people who like to hack together weird solutions for what may be non-existent problems. And that's fine as long as you're doing that because you like doing it. Just don't go pushing it as a good idea. You're making everything more difficult for those of us who have to support these things for a living.
The best strategy for most people, especially in terms of doing work for your business, is to stay relatively up-to-date with supported hardware and software.
Who's going to look after the embryo children if the generational population died out, or are crippled by genetic defects?
I don't know why you're being so obtuse about this: You don't have to wait until the population is completely inbred and then suddenly have all these babies from the embryos. You could start selectively introducing new genetic material within the first few generations. My point is that if you're bringing along 20k extra people who will make the trip harder, and you're only bringing them along in order to keep diversity, then why not just bring their sperm and eggs instead. Introduce them into the population as you go if you need to, but I don't think people will become crippled by genetic defects after a couple hundred years if you have a few hundred people.
What, did you write the article? Are you offended that someone might disagree?
Sure, the idea that the ship also hatches embryos en-route in case of gaps is fine, except for the catastrophe case (decimation of the population means the population is too weak or non-existent to even raise the in-ship hatchlings).
Yeah, well in a catastrophic case, you might lose the whole ship in any case, depending on the nature of the catastrophe. Hell, what if you had a catastrophe that meant only 150 people survived the trip? I bet those people would wish they had embryos to introduce genetic diversity.
(i.e., ignoring embyros and overloading the workload of the colonists to also raise loads of children on the side, rather than just a few children)
I don't see why you would ignore bringing additional genetic diversity along for the ride, and I don't see why you would have to have the colonists raise "loads of children on the side". Nobody said you would have to implant all of those embryos upon landing and suddenly have a hundred-thousand kids raised by 150 adults. My point was that you could reintroduce diversity over time. Along with everything else, having a load of diverse genetic materials could enable you to monitor the current lack of genetic diversity and choose to implant embryos specifically targeted to fill those gaps.
I don't think that question has an answer, because of the somewhat vague definition of what a species is.
That's skirting the issue a bit. Whether you officially consider it a separate species, I was thinking it was an interesting question to ask, "How many different animals would you need to bring with you, both different kinds of animals (e.g. species) and how many members of each kind.
It turns out that pathogens and disease vectors might play an important part in maintaining ecosystem diversity.
Now that's the kind of thinking I was hoping for. How many different diseases would you need? You might have to plan to bring viruses and bacteria that are infectious among many different kinds of animals (i.e. species). Or would you need to plan it out? Is it possible that you'd have to take so much assorted biology that you'd be certain to bring diverse diseases with you anyway?
I don't think it would be possible to bootstrap anything like the Earth's biosphere on another planet, at least not for millions of years.
I agree it doesn't seem possible with current technology, which is part of why I think it's an interesting thought experiment. You might try some different whacky approaches. For example, instead of starting from the smallest possible ship and adding to it until it's self-sustaining, you could start with an example that it known to work-- our solar system-- and take things away until you have the smallest thing that would still work. That is, clearly if you took a planet the size of Earth and with all the resources of Earth, put all of Earth's life on it, and put it in orbit around the orbit of a star comparable to our own, then it would do a pretty good job of sustaining life for a good long time. All you'd need to do then is to shove the star in the right direction to that inertia and gravity would take it along the course to your destination. So do you need the galaxy too, in order to make this work, or is the solar system enough? Do you need the other planets, or could you do it with just the Earth and the sun? If you did it with just the Earth and the sun, could you make the Earth smaller and still have it work? Could you make the star smaller, bring the earth closer? What's the bare minimum for a self-sustaining ecosystem?
I think that this question gets especially important if you want to travel to other star systems or possibly terraform another planet, but it might be a worthwhile thought experiment for the purpose of preserving our own ecosystem. This was, after all, part of why we've tried building enclosed bio-domes.
Why would you possibly need genetic variation from day one? Certainly you don't supplemental genetic variation for at least a generation or two? Like, lets assume the optimal number of people for the trip is 150 people-- is inbreeding going to be a big problem right away in the first generation born on the trip? I don't see why. I would guess that 150 people can have a few generations before it becomes a real issue.
Looking at the graph in the article, with 150 people, you would get about 100 years before the "variation of a hypothetical gene" would drop to 50%. That doesn't seem catestrophic. And you could always have a wide variety of frozen embryos, do regular genetic screening, and introduce embryos with the variations that have "died off" every once in a while. Even with the plan to bring embryos around for genetic diversity, you would have the option of dipping into the embryos before reaching the destination.
Now if we hypothetically come up with all the other technology to make this trip, figure out the practical concerns, and find that it's practical to transport 40k people, then by all means go for it. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that practical concerns would make such a high number difficult or impossible. Along with everything else, since you're going to want to minimize social strife during the trip, keeping it below Dunbar's number might be a good idea.
So overall, I stick with the idea: It would be better to plan to transport a number that would be optimal for making the trip, and then pack other genetic material for increasing diversity as needed.
Well that becomes a very interesting question when you consider the idea of a completely self-sustaining spaceship. Imagine you had to create a spaceship could contain an entire ecosystem ideal for human habitation, surviving indefinitely. What would that look like? How would you keep all the different populations alive, but also checking population growth? And let's ideally imagine that it could keep itself in check without too much intervention.
How many different species of life would you need? How big would it need to be? What kinds of outside supplementation (e.g. sunlight) would be needed?
Don't be a dick. I was exactly pointing out what you alluded to later in your post:
The best you could do would be to keep a slow but steady trickle of incubations going, no more than the current number of adult colonists can handle in addition to their natural offspring...
They're talking about the genetic diversity as a long-term issue for sustainable colonization of a planet. A controlled trickle of additional diversity over time would probably give you exactly what you need. The fact that you'll be living in "extreme frontier living" probably means that you don't want to start of with an enormous population right away. So again, you could (and probably should) focus on figuring out how many people are optimal for making the trip and starting the initial colony, and then figure out how to introduce additional genetic diversity once you arrive and establish yourselves.
I think the point was something more like, "We don't need to worry about genetic diversity if we can just pack embryos." That way, you can staff the spaceship with an appropriate number of people for making the trip and establishing a colony, and then use the embryos once you hit the point of needing genetic diversity.
Or pack eggs and sperm, mix as needed. Or just biological samples that can be cloned. Or hell, if we're getting really sci-fi here, maybe we can perform direct genetic manipulation by that point.
That's a fine way of looking at things, but then the most dramatic results you should report are "It appears to be a correlation, but more study is needed." There had better be no attempt to claim a causal linkage.
By your standard, the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies were "suicide missions"; the people who boarded the Mayflower never expected to come back. The first colonists to Mars will never return, and probably wouldn't want to.
I think part of the issue there is whether we can have a reasonable expectation that they can reach Mars safely, live on Mars indefinitely, and return to Earth eventually (if they desired). Not a guarantee, but a reasonable expectation. I think that's a great goal for us to be working towards, but I wouldn't expect us to be able to do that yet.
It's like trying to decide if gay marriage is "ethical". Unless you're one of the ones involved, nonya business trying to define ethics.
Not quite. It'd be a stretch to argue that the people involved in gay marriage are coming to harm as a result-- though I suppose someone might argue that their souls are in jeopardy or something. However, in the case of these missions, the astronauts are going to die.
Because of this, I think that it would be more comparable to talking about the ethics of assisted suicide, or performing dangerous medical experiments on willing patients. Or even the case in Germany where a man consented to being cannibalized. I'm not equating all of these things, but only pointing out that they're more comparable than gay marriage.
In these cases, we're forced to ask, "At what point do we respect a person's right to cause themselves harm?" If a twelve year old tries to kill himself because his girlfriend broke up with him, we intervene. If a dying 100 year old man says he doesn't want additional medical intervention to prevent his death, we respect that. Somewhere in between, we have to draw a line.
Yeah, I couldn't figure out if the article just wasn't meant for the general public, like maybe "Indie Statik" is only focused on game developers, and unless you were' heavily into that world, you shouldn't bother reading this.
I wondered about that because not only was there a lot of jargon, but there strange and unclear metaphors, and there were references to various things that seemed to assume you'd understand the reference. Half the time, I didn't know what the author was talking about. Maybe someone in the world of indie game development would understand it all?
I may be confused, but... are you questioning the whole idea of hypervisors on servers at all?
There are a lot of reasons for that. One of the simple reasons is that it's cheaper. When you're working in IT, you often have a bare minimum of hardware you have to buy with each server in order to be safe, e.g. dual hot-plug power supplies, hot-plug RAID enclosures and drives, lights-out management, etc. Because of that, each server you buy is going to end up being about $4k minimum, and the price goes up from there. If you have to buy 5 servers, you might be spending $25k even if they aren't powerful servers. However, you may be able to run all of those servers on a single server that costs $10k. In addition to the initial purchase being less, it will also use less power, take up less space, and put out less heat. All of that means it'll be cheaper of the long term. It will also require less administration. For example, if an important firmware update comes out that requires a certain amount of work to schedule and perform, you're doing that update on 1/5 of the servers you would be doing it on. Oh, and warranty renewals and other support will probably be cheaper.
So more directly addressing the question, which I think was, "Why not just buy one big server and install everything on it?" There are lots of reasons. I think the most important reason is to isolate the servers. I'm a big believer in the idea of "1 server does 1 thing", except when there are certain tasks that group well together. For example, I might have one server run the web and database services for multiple web apps, and another run DNS/DHCP/AD, but I don't really want one server to do both of those things.
And there are a few reasons for that. Security is a big one. There are services that need to be exposed the the internet, and then there are services where I don't want the server running them to be internet-accessible. Putting all of those services on the same physical server creates a security problem, unless I virtualize and split the roles into different virtual machines. Or it may be that I need to provide administrative access to the server to different groups of people, but each can't have administrative access to each other's data. Hosting providers are a good example of this: You and I could both be hosting our web application on the same physical machine at the same hosting provider, and we both might need administrative access to the server. However, I don't want you having access to my files and you don't want me having access to yours.
Another big reason you'll want to isolate your servers is to meet software requirements. I might have one application that runs on Windows, but is only supported up to 2008R2. I might have another application or role that needs to run on Linux. I might have a third role where I really want to use Windows 2012R2 to take advantage of a feature that's unavailable in earlier versions of Windows. How would I put those things on the same server without using virtual machines?
Isolating your servers is also good because it tends to improve stability. Many applications are poorly written can cause crashes or security problems, and keeping them on their own VM server prevent those applications from interfering with other applications running on the same physical hardware. I can even decide how to allocate the RAM and CPU across the virtual machines, preventing any one application from slowing down the rest by being a resource hog.
Aside from all that, there are a bunch of other peripheral benefits. For example, with virtual machines, you have more options for snapshotting, backing and replication, restoring to dissimilar hardware, etc. With traditional installs, I need special software to do bare-metal restores in case something goes wrong, and the techniques used in that software often doesn't work quite right. If virtualized machines, I just need the VM's files copied to a compatible hypervisor, and I can start it up wherever I need to. With the right software, I can even move the whole VM live, without shutting it down, to another physical server.
There are probably a few other benefits that I'm just not thinking of off the top of my head.
I would generally disagree. I could see having some weird old piece of hardware that is completely isolated from the internet running an old OS for a good long time simply because there's no reason to upgrade, but then again, 10 years is already a good long time.
Among most users, the problem is usually just poor planning and bad budgeting. Someone spent a bunch of money buying a solution that they then don't have the money to maintain properly. That's how you end with with businesses running internal custom apps that only run on IE6. That's how you end up with businesses relying on some junky old piece of hardware that constantly breaks down and nobody can fix. That's how you end up needing to rebuild your system from scratch because there's no upgrade path-- the upgrade path from v3 to v7 requires you upgrade through v4, v5, and v6, but v4 is completely unavailable now.
If you're spending 50k in hardware this year, you should have an estimated lifetime for that hardware, a maintenance plan for the lifetime of the hardware, and you should be budgeting for the replacement of the hardware once the lifetime expires. I don't have much sympathy for businesses that bought hardware 10 years ago with no maintenance plan or budget for replacements. If you're running your business and you can't afford to maintain and eventually replace business-critical systems as needed, then your business model isn't sustainable.
I'm not a programmer, but it seems to me that different programming strategies are required for different situations. In the case of someone writing a kernel or other low-level code, you may want to optimize the hell out of the code even if it makes things hard to read. The idea here is that whoever is working on the code should have a pretty good idea of what they're doing and could read the difficult code, but performance is among the top priorities. In that case, there is a certain elegance in creating code that's super-efficient even if it's apparently complex.
However, for most other programs I would agree with you-- one of the major priorities should be to keep the code simple and easy to read, keeping in mind that you want it to be as easy as possible for another programmer to come in after you and make updates without breaking anything. In that case, I'd think of "elegant code" as something that does powerful things while being almost transparent to a neophyte.
The court they have to go through has been shown to be a rubber stamp court and there is little evidence that AT&T/Verizon/etc are willing to put themselves on the line to protect their customers.
Even so, it still means that the NSA doesn't just have it sitting on their servers where they can look up the data they promised they wouldn't. They need the approval of the rubber-stamp court, but at least this way they actually need that approval rather than just casually logging into their own servers. I'm not claiming it's sufficient reform, but it would be a meaningful reform. What has been disturbing about the Snowden revelations is not only that they're spying on us without oversight, but that it's apparently also easy for an individual employee of the NSA or even an outside contractor to pull whatever data they want without even the rubber-stamp court approval.
I do when they don't have a specific reason to collect them given that the government has proven all too willing to circumvent or even flat ignore the 4th amendment.
Notice the second clause to that sentence that you quoted? "...so long as they are able to get a warrant that is in keeping with the 4th amendment." What I'm saying is I don't have a problem with the FBI or local police department tapping phones or gathering phone records, so long as they are following traditional 4th amendment rules. That includes that they need to have a specific target and that they're investigating for a specific crime.
It isn't as easy for the phone companies as one might think.
Yet they're already providing the records, so it can't be as hard as you're making it sound. Part of the reason I put in that condition is that I don't think the same rules translate very well to email, where tracking and storing email might create an undue burden for some providers. However, there are many circumstances where the government already requires organizations to keep email and chat logs for some retention periods.
I think it is going to be a distinction with little practical difference.
If the NSA has to go through two other entities (a court and a private business) in order to get the information, then it greatly increases the difficulty of abuse. It may not make a difference for when the NSA is operating within the rules, but it makes it harder to break the rules, which is largely what we want.
Just because they privatize the burden of data collection doesn't mean they are ending anything.
No, I think that depending on the implementation, it's a huge difference. I honestly don't have a problem with law enforcement collecting phone records, so long as they are able to get a warrant that is in keeping with the 4th amendment. I also don't have a problem with them saying to phone providers, "You must keep the phone records we might solicit for a period of X months, in case we do solicit them, and you must have the infrastructure to provide that information in a timely manner." Assuming it's easy, reasonable, and effective for phone carriers to do that, I don't really have a problem with the idea.
And I do think there's a huge difference between that and the NSA collecting the data themselves. The problem I have with the NSA spying is specifically that they collect and store this information on their own servers. The metaphor I've used to describe my problem with the NSA wiretapping is that the physical equivalent would be as though they regularly rifled through your belongings and recorded potential evidence, and then say, "But that's not a 4th amendment violation because we promise not to look at or think about this evidence unless we think you've done something wrong!" To that I say, no, you need to get the warrant first, and then you can collect evidence. You can't collect evidence first and then later get a warrant to use that evidence, since that system is too easy to abuse.
Of course, they should still have to get a real warrant, and not through some secret court where the charges and proceedings are all hidden from the public.
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With Firefox and HTML5 you do not need Java and Flash for most content (not for any I consume)
Well to quote the title of this thread, Good for you. That's not the case for a lot of us. Some of us view content or, even worse, have jobs that require we use apps, that require Flash or Java. And regardless of whose fault it is, I've seen content that renders properly in Adobe Reader that does not render properly in other PDF viewers, or PDFs that use forms/signatures that seem to only work in Adobe Reader.
So *yay* for you. You have nothing better to do than secure an outdated OS by limiting what you do on that OS. Some of us don't have time for those kinds of shenanigans.
Yeah, great. It's true, you can secure even the most unpatched and insecure computer by deciding that the user doesn't actually need to use any of the features that could lead to security problems. Take it a step further: I've decided that users don't actually need the Internet, so just unplug the Windows XP machines from the network entirely. It's much more secure that way!
I deal with the same thing, but the reality is that it is very often a result of (A) user behavior; and (B) outdated software. That outdated software isn't always the OS, but often it's Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash Player, or the Java plugin. If I can make sure all the software on your system is completely patched and up-to-date, I will drastically cut your chances of infection. Don't even try to claim that having the latest patches for Flash/Java don't help your security. And how long will Adobe/Oracle support Windows XP once Microsoft drops support?
There's still the issue of "user behavior", which can be mitigated by using certain policies, but can't be stopped without severely inhibiting users. Still, by keeping things up to date, I can cut the chances of infection for all but the most persistently stupid users.
Well in that sense, you could be running 10 different AV packages, running constant scans, and still be running a rootkit. It might be an unknown rootkit that is very good at evading detection.
Short of that kind of paranoia, I'm fine.
Which is a great argument if you are a "hacker" or the source of the hardware. But for the user of a agilent scope, the fact that its running XP instead of linux makes no difference. They can't get in and hack the kernel & sources for an unsupported 15 year old linux anymore than they can hack the XP.
If you're a business that is relying on an agilent scope (or whatever hardware) to keep the business operating, then either budget to buy a new agilent scope when support ends, or budget to pay for someone who can offer support.
The problem is, when the hardware (or software) solution will only run on a closed/proprietary system, you don't really have the option to pay for support. If I had the money budgeted, I could pay a couple of programmers to backport updates and patch an old version of Debian that has no official support. Or, if the original system ran on Debian, I could get the programmers to figure out what needs to happen in order to get the system running on a new version of Linux. Even if I have to pay programmers to keep it working properly, keep it up-to-date, and keep it secure, I have that option.
Not so with Windows. I guess you could pay programmers to try to hack patches back onto Windows, but that seems like an awful mess.
So if your point is, "I'm an individual hobbyist who wants to be able to run my little thing and I can't program!" then no, being open source doesn't help you. I'm talking more about businesses who complain, "I built my business around [insert hardware/software solution here], which only works on [insert obsolete closed proprietary platform here]. I can't afford to buy [new hardware/software solution], so I have to keep using [obsolete closed proprietary platform]." Every year I deal with these things, my sympathy for that situation diminishes, especially so when there are FOSS alternatives. Either way, if your business depends on some form of technology, have a strategy and a budget for either maintaining it or replacing it. If you can't budget for that, then you don't have a sustainable business model.
Everyone running old specfialized hardware which is not compatible with windows 7 or later feel the pain of the XP end of life. Its not about refusing or not. Some simply don't have the choice and must stick with XP... A clear solution has still to be found...
I think this is actually a good argument as to why those people shouldn't be using Windows in the first place. There may be other arguments, e.g. "On a practical level, they had no choice," but I just want to point out that this is exactly the kind of thing FOSS advocates are talking about for years, while most of the world dismissed them as being paranoid.
If you're dependent on specialized hardware, and you will need ongoing support over years or decades, you might want to look for a system that uses an open source driver and/or runs on Linux or a BSD variant. It doesn't immediately solve all of your problems, but it leaves open the possibility that someone somewhere could provide maintenance or an upgrade path. For as long as you're buying specialized solutions that require a specific version of proprietary software, you're at the mercy of the vendor who sells/supports that proprietary software.
When you're planning to buy or build a system, you should always plan ahead. It's amazing to me how many people will buy or build huge expensive systems, build their entire business to depend on those systems, and yet have absolutely no plan or budget to maintain or replace those systems. So many toddlers building empires out of sand.
Agreed.
'I use a third-party firewall, a free virus checker, and run Housecall periodically,' says Appel. 'My Firefox browser uses Keyscrambler, HTTPS Anywhere, Ghostery, and Disconnect. I also have a VPN account (PIA) when traveling. For suspicious email attachments, I deploy private proprietary bioware (me!) to analyze before opening. All the "experts" say I am crazy. Thing is, I stopped the security updates in XP years ago after a bad update trashed my system, and yet I have never been infected, although online for hours each day...
Thing is, that does sound crazy to me. It sounds compulsive and anal retentive. I wouldn't be surprised if he also only operates his computers while wearing a tinfoil hat inside a Faraday cage that he built in his basement.
You know what I do? I install a modern operating system and pretty much leave it alone. I have never been infected, simply by keeping up to date and not engaging in high-risk behavior. I'd rather spend a few dollars now and then than sit around re-running security checks, but I guess I'm not retired and I don't have the time to be a kooky security nut. I know, someone is going to bash this post because Slashdot has a lot of kooky security nuts, as well as a strong contingent of people who like to hack together weird solutions for what may be non-existent problems. And that's fine as long as you're doing that because you like doing it. Just don't go pushing it as a good idea. You're making everything more difficult for those of us who have to support these things for a living.
The best strategy for most people, especially in terms of doing work for your business, is to stay relatively up-to-date with supported hardware and software.
Who's going to look after the embryo children if the generational population died out, or are crippled by genetic defects?
I don't know why you're being so obtuse about this: You don't have to wait until the population is completely inbred and then suddenly have all these babies from the embryos. You could start selectively introducing new genetic material within the first few generations. My point is that if you're bringing along 20k extra people who will make the trip harder, and you're only bringing them along in order to keep diversity, then why not just bring their sperm and eggs instead. Introduce them into the population as you go if you need to, but I don't think people will become crippled by genetic defects after a couple hundred years if you have a few hundred people.
What, did you write the article? Are you offended that someone might disagree?
Sure, the idea that the ship also hatches embryos en-route in case of gaps is fine, except for the catastrophe case (decimation of the population means the population is too weak or non-existent to even raise the in-ship hatchlings).
Yeah, well in a catastrophic case, you might lose the whole ship in any case, depending on the nature of the catastrophe. Hell, what if you had a catastrophe that meant only 150 people survived the trip? I bet those people would wish they had embryos to introduce genetic diversity.
(i.e., ignoring embyros and overloading the workload of the colonists to also raise loads of children on the side, rather than just a few children)
I don't see why you would ignore bringing additional genetic diversity along for the ride, and I don't see why you would have to have the colonists raise "loads of children on the side". Nobody said you would have to implant all of those embryos upon landing and suddenly have a hundred-thousand kids raised by 150 adults. My point was that you could reintroduce diversity over time. Along with everything else, having a load of diverse genetic materials could enable you to monitor the current lack of genetic diversity and choose to implant embryos specifically targeted to fill those gaps.
I don't think that question has an answer, because of the somewhat vague definition of what a species is.
That's skirting the issue a bit. Whether you officially consider it a separate species, I was thinking it was an interesting question to ask, "How many different animals would you need to bring with you, both different kinds of animals (e.g. species) and how many members of each kind.
It turns out that pathogens and disease vectors might play an important part in maintaining ecosystem diversity.
Now that's the kind of thinking I was hoping for. How many different diseases would you need? You might have to plan to bring viruses and bacteria that are infectious among many different kinds of animals (i.e. species). Or would you need to plan it out? Is it possible that you'd have to take so much assorted biology that you'd be certain to bring diverse diseases with you anyway?
I don't think it would be possible to bootstrap anything like the Earth's biosphere on another planet, at least not for millions of years.
I agree it doesn't seem possible with current technology, which is part of why I think it's an interesting thought experiment. You might try some different whacky approaches. For example, instead of starting from the smallest possible ship and adding to it until it's self-sustaining, you could start with an example that it known to work-- our solar system-- and take things away until you have the smallest thing that would still work. That is, clearly if you took a planet the size of Earth and with all the resources of Earth, put all of Earth's life on it, and put it in orbit around the orbit of a star comparable to our own, then it would do a pretty good job of sustaining life for a good long time. All you'd need to do then is to shove the star in the right direction to that inertia and gravity would take it along the course to your destination. So do you need the galaxy too, in order to make this work, or is the solar system enough? Do you need the other planets, or could you do it with just the Earth and the sun? If you did it with just the Earth and the sun, could you make the Earth smaller and still have it work? Could you make the star smaller, bring the earth closer? What's the bare minimum for a self-sustaining ecosystem?
I think that this question gets especially important if you want to travel to other star systems or possibly terraform another planet, but it might be a worthwhile thought experiment for the purpose of preserving our own ecosystem. This was, after all, part of why we've tried building enclosed bio-domes.
Why would you possibly need genetic variation from day one? Certainly you don't supplemental genetic variation for at least a generation or two? Like, lets assume the optimal number of people for the trip is 150 people-- is inbreeding going to be a big problem right away in the first generation born on the trip? I don't see why. I would guess that 150 people can have a few generations before it becomes a real issue.
Looking at the graph in the article, with 150 people, you would get about 100 years before the "variation of a hypothetical gene" would drop to 50%. That doesn't seem catestrophic. And you could always have a wide variety of frozen embryos, do regular genetic screening, and introduce embryos with the variations that have "died off" every once in a while. Even with the plan to bring embryos around for genetic diversity, you would have the option of dipping into the embryos before reaching the destination.
Now if we hypothetically come up with all the other technology to make this trip, figure out the practical concerns, and find that it's practical to transport 40k people, then by all means go for it. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that practical concerns would make such a high number difficult or impossible. Along with everything else, since you're going to want to minimize social strife during the trip, keeping it below Dunbar's number might be a good idea.
So overall, I stick with the idea: It would be better to plan to transport a number that would be optimal for making the trip, and then pack other genetic material for increasing diversity as needed.
Well that becomes a very interesting question when you consider the idea of a completely self-sustaining spaceship. Imagine you had to create a spaceship could contain an entire ecosystem ideal for human habitation, surviving indefinitely. What would that look like? How would you keep all the different populations alive, but also checking population growth? And let's ideally imagine that it could keep itself in check without too much intervention.
How many different species of life would you need? How big would it need to be? What kinds of outside supplementation (e.g. sunlight) would be needed?
Whoosh.
Don't be a dick. I was exactly pointing out what you alluded to later in your post:
The best you could do would be to keep a slow but steady trickle of incubations going, no more than the current number of adult colonists can handle in addition to their natural offspring...
They're talking about the genetic diversity as a long-term issue for sustainable colonization of a planet. A controlled trickle of additional diversity over time would probably give you exactly what you need. The fact that you'll be living in "extreme frontier living" probably means that you don't want to start of with an enormous population right away. So again, you could (and probably should) focus on figuring out how many people are optimal for making the trip and starting the initial colony, and then figure out how to introduce additional genetic diversity once you arrive and establish yourselves.
I think the point was something more like, "We don't need to worry about genetic diversity if we can just pack embryos." That way, you can staff the spaceship with an appropriate number of people for making the trip and establishing a colony, and then use the embryos once you hit the point of needing genetic diversity.
Or pack eggs and sperm, mix as needed. Or just biological samples that can be cloned. Or hell, if we're getting really sci-fi here, maybe we can perform direct genetic manipulation by that point.
That's a fine way of looking at things, but then the most dramatic results you should report are "It appears to be a correlation, but more study is needed." There had better be no attempt to claim a causal linkage.
By your standard, the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies were "suicide missions"; the people who boarded the Mayflower never expected to come back. The first colonists to Mars will never return, and probably wouldn't want to.
I think part of the issue there is whether we can have a reasonable expectation that they can reach Mars safely, live on Mars indefinitely, and return to Earth eventually (if they desired). Not a guarantee, but a reasonable expectation. I think that's a great goal for us to be working towards, but I wouldn't expect us to be able to do that yet.
It's like trying to decide if gay marriage is "ethical". Unless you're one of the ones involved, nonya business trying to define ethics.
Not quite. It'd be a stretch to argue that the people involved in gay marriage are coming to harm as a result-- though I suppose someone might argue that their souls are in jeopardy or something. However, in the case of these missions, the astronauts are going to die.
Because of this, I think that it would be more comparable to talking about the ethics of assisted suicide, or performing dangerous medical experiments on willing patients. Or even the case in Germany where a man consented to being cannibalized. I'm not equating all of these things, but only pointing out that they're more comparable than gay marriage.
In these cases, we're forced to ask, "At what point do we respect a person's right to cause themselves harm?" If a twelve year old tries to kill himself because his girlfriend broke up with him, we intervene. If a dying 100 year old man says he doesn't want additional medical intervention to prevent his death, we respect that. Somewhere in between, we have to draw a line.
Yeah, I couldn't figure out if the article just wasn't meant for the general public, like maybe "Indie Statik" is only focused on game developers, and unless you were' heavily into that world, you shouldn't bother reading this.
I wondered about that because not only was there a lot of jargon, but there strange and unclear metaphors, and there were references to various things that seemed to assume you'd understand the reference. Half the time, I didn't know what the author was talking about. Maybe someone in the world of indie game development would understand it all?
I may be confused, but... are you questioning the whole idea of hypervisors on servers at all?
There are a lot of reasons for that. One of the simple reasons is that it's cheaper. When you're working in IT, you often have a bare minimum of hardware you have to buy with each server in order to be safe, e.g. dual hot-plug power supplies, hot-plug RAID enclosures and drives, lights-out management, etc. Because of that, each server you buy is going to end up being about $4k minimum, and the price goes up from there. If you have to buy 5 servers, you might be spending $25k even if they aren't powerful servers. However, you may be able to run all of those servers on a single server that costs $10k. In addition to the initial purchase being less, it will also use less power, take up less space, and put out less heat. All of that means it'll be cheaper of the long term. It will also require less administration. For example, if an important firmware update comes out that requires a certain amount of work to schedule and perform, you're doing that update on 1/5 of the servers you would be doing it on. Oh, and warranty renewals and other support will probably be cheaper.
So more directly addressing the question, which I think was, "Why not just buy one big server and install everything on it?" There are lots of reasons. I think the most important reason is to isolate the servers. I'm a big believer in the idea of "1 server does 1 thing", except when there are certain tasks that group well together. For example, I might have one server run the web and database services for multiple web apps, and another run DNS/DHCP/AD, but I don't really want one server to do both of those things.
And there are a few reasons for that. Security is a big one. There are services that need to be exposed the the internet, and then there are services where I don't want the server running them to be internet-accessible. Putting all of those services on the same physical server creates a security problem, unless I virtualize and split the roles into different virtual machines. Or it may be that I need to provide administrative access to the server to different groups of people, but each can't have administrative access to each other's data. Hosting providers are a good example of this: You and I could both be hosting our web application on the same physical machine at the same hosting provider, and we both might need administrative access to the server. However, I don't want you having access to my files and you don't want me having access to yours.
Another big reason you'll want to isolate your servers is to meet software requirements. I might have one application that runs on Windows, but is only supported up to 2008R2. I might have another application or role that needs to run on Linux. I might have a third role where I really want to use Windows 2012R2 to take advantage of a feature that's unavailable in earlier versions of Windows. How would I put those things on the same server without using virtual machines?
Isolating your servers is also good because it tends to improve stability. Many applications are poorly written can cause crashes or security problems, and keeping them on their own VM server prevent those applications from interfering with other applications running on the same physical hardware. I can even decide how to allocate the RAM and CPU across the virtual machines, preventing any one application from slowing down the rest by being a resource hog.
Aside from all that, there are a bunch of other peripheral benefits. For example, with virtual machines, you have more options for snapshotting, backing and replication, restoring to dissimilar hardware, etc. With traditional installs, I need special software to do bare-metal restores in case something goes wrong, and the techniques used in that software often doesn't work quite right. If virtualized machines, I just need the VM's files copied to a compatible hypervisor, and I can start it up wherever I need to. With the right software, I can even move the whole VM live, without shutting it down, to another physical server.
There are probably a few other benefits that I'm just not thinking of off the top of my head.
I would generally disagree. I could see having some weird old piece of hardware that is completely isolated from the internet running an old OS for a good long time simply because there's no reason to upgrade, but then again, 10 years is already a good long time.
Among most users, the problem is usually just poor planning and bad budgeting. Someone spent a bunch of money buying a solution that they then don't have the money to maintain properly. That's how you end with with businesses running internal custom apps that only run on IE6. That's how you end up with businesses relying on some junky old piece of hardware that constantly breaks down and nobody can fix. That's how you end up needing to rebuild your system from scratch because there's no upgrade path-- the upgrade path from v3 to v7 requires you upgrade through v4, v5, and v6, but v4 is completely unavailable now.
If you're spending 50k in hardware this year, you should have an estimated lifetime for that hardware, a maintenance plan for the lifetime of the hardware, and you should be budgeting for the replacement of the hardware once the lifetime expires. I don't have much sympathy for businesses that bought hardware 10 years ago with no maintenance plan or budget for replacements. If you're running your business and you can't afford to maintain and eventually replace business-critical systems as needed, then your business model isn't sustainable.
I'm not a programmer, but it seems to me that different programming strategies are required for different situations. In the case of someone writing a kernel or other low-level code, you may want to optimize the hell out of the code even if it makes things hard to read. The idea here is that whoever is working on the code should have a pretty good idea of what they're doing and could read the difficult code, but performance is among the top priorities. In that case, there is a certain elegance in creating code that's super-efficient even if it's apparently complex.
However, for most other programs I would agree with you-- one of the major priorities should be to keep the code simple and easy to read, keeping in mind that you want it to be as easy as possible for another programmer to come in after you and make updates without breaking anything. In that case, I'd think of "elegant code" as something that does powerful things while being almost transparent to a neophyte.
The court they have to go through has been shown to be a rubber stamp court and there is little evidence that AT&T/Verizon/etc are willing to put themselves on the line to protect their customers.
Even so, it still means that the NSA doesn't just have it sitting on their servers where they can look up the data they promised they wouldn't. They need the approval of the rubber-stamp court, but at least this way they actually need that approval rather than just casually logging into their own servers. I'm not claiming it's sufficient reform, but it would be a meaningful reform. What has been disturbing about the Snowden revelations is not only that they're spying on us without oversight, but that it's apparently also easy for an individual employee of the NSA or even an outside contractor to pull whatever data they want without even the rubber-stamp court approval.
I do when they don't have a specific reason to collect them given that the government has proven all too willing to circumvent or even flat ignore the 4th amendment.
Notice the second clause to that sentence that you quoted? "...so long as they are able to get a warrant that is in keeping with the 4th amendment." What I'm saying is I don't have a problem with the FBI or local police department tapping phones or gathering phone records, so long as they are following traditional 4th amendment rules. That includes that they need to have a specific target and that they're investigating for a specific crime.
It isn't as easy for the phone companies as one might think.
Yet they're already providing the records, so it can't be as hard as you're making it sound. Part of the reason I put in that condition is that I don't think the same rules translate very well to email, where tracking and storing email might create an undue burden for some providers. However, there are many circumstances where the government already requires organizations to keep email and chat logs for some retention periods.
I think it is going to be a distinction with little practical difference.
If the NSA has to go through two other entities (a court and a private business) in order to get the information, then it greatly increases the difficulty of abuse. It may not make a difference for when the NSA is operating within the rules, but it makes it harder to break the rules, which is largely what we want.
Just because they privatize the burden of data collection doesn't mean they are ending anything.
No, I think that depending on the implementation, it's a huge difference. I honestly don't have a problem with law enforcement collecting phone records, so long as they are able to get a warrant that is in keeping with the 4th amendment. I also don't have a problem with them saying to phone providers, "You must keep the phone records we might solicit for a period of X months, in case we do solicit them, and you must have the infrastructure to provide that information in a timely manner." Assuming it's easy, reasonable, and effective for phone carriers to do that, I don't really have a problem with the idea.
And I do think there's a huge difference between that and the NSA collecting the data themselves. The problem I have with the NSA spying is specifically that they collect and store this information on their own servers. The metaphor I've used to describe my problem with the NSA wiretapping is that the physical equivalent would be as though they regularly rifled through your belongings and recorded potential evidence, and then say, "But that's not a 4th amendment violation because we promise not to look at or think about this evidence unless we think you've done something wrong!" To that I say, no, you need to get the warrant first, and then you can collect evidence. You can't collect evidence first and then later get a warrant to use that evidence, since that system is too easy to abuse.
Of course, they should still have to get a real warrant, and not through some secret court where the charges and proceedings are all hidden from the public.
It *raises* the question. "Begging the question" is different.
Sorry. Otherwise you make an excellent point.