Posts by Ashton Black 332 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Dec 2010
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
I always had a bone to pick with that. Isn't it just as likely we'll combine with a neural lattice to enhance our own abilities, rather than use a separate created consciousness. In other words, by the time an A.I. can be considered to be "alive", we'll have extended our own intellect using similar technologies.
This must just be security theatre.
The problems, as I see them are that any reasonably paranoid person (criminal or not) would:
1) Not use his/her social media for anything that would arouse suspicion.
2) Alternatively, have multiple accounts, some of with which he/she could hand over to placate the authorities.
3) Not bring cell phones/laptops into the country that weren't sterilised, as it were.
I mean it's basic field craft and this has been pointed out numerous times to the authorities, which leads us to the conclusion that this isn't about finding criminals at all, but seeing to be doing "something" no matter how ineffective.
As an aside, I listened to a report on Radio 4 last week, which asserted that starting in the weeks the "Muslim ban" has been in place, the number of people of all ethnicities that have flown into the US has declined by 8%. (Compared to the year before and factoring in economic variables). The tourist industry must be loving Trump.
As much as I hate this, one can suspect our hand held computers, which sometimes get used as phones, are more geared, these days, for OTT services rather than pure voice. The market for voice is falling year on year, so it's bound to have hikes like this. (http://uk.businessinsider.com/ee-stats-on-decline-of-voice-calls-in-uk-2015-10?r=US&IR=T)
So I've been seeing this sort of article for years, but nothing ever substantial came from it. The big ISPs will still lie. At this point in my comment I would have, in the past, regale the other commentards with my shitty throughput stats. But I've signed up to a small ISP here in deepest Somerset called Wessex Internet which uses microwave to a fibre backbone. Now getting a solid 30Mb down and 10Mb up, with a static IP thrown in. It's been epic so far.
To be fair, the local council did help, with a voucher to partially cover the installation cost. (Our village pooled them together to get Wessex to run their network to us.) So thanks to "Connecting Devon and Somerset". This cost about £10,000.
As an aside, BT wanted £197,000 to do essentially the same.
We had 4 of these to protect against rocket/mortar attacks at Basra, Iraq. They're damn effective bits of kit, once calibrated they were getting a 90% kill rate, even on the 90mm jobbies. Interestingly the rounds the phalanx fires are set to explode after a certain period of time to prevent them from landing again in downtown Basra. This meant a farty sound when they fired and a popcorn popping sound a few seconds later. Plus at night they made pretty lights... oooo pretty.
Now add a Big frikken laser!
I client I had had been Dymo'ing labels in the "flag" style with a cheap "home and small business" Dymo. After a couple of years wafting in the outflow of the various servers and arrays they'd dry up and fall off. I persuaded him to by a bit more of an industrial wrap around type and had the dubious pleasure of replacing the labels in two data centres. It took weeks and about 20 rolls of tags to do the several thousand cables. Did not enjoy, but the client was happy.
In our little village in deepest Somerset, BT wanted, on top of any taxpayer cash given to it, £197,000 to connect us up to a fibre enabled cabinet. We're quite far from the nearest cabinet of any sort, to be fair. People in the village currently max out at about 1.7Mb. Wessex Internet have come along and offered to do a RF connection to their backbone. This would give us, each, about 30-50Mb with a low latency. They only required we pay £9000 in install costs, and set aside some land for the uplink, plus £25 per month per user. The setup cost is going to be covered by the Broadband Voucher Scheme from the "Connecting Devon and Somerset" council quango.
BT can eff off.
Which is fine where, off the shelf, non-sensitive, non-business critical data is held. On this I couldn't agree more. However, where we diverge in opinion is where there is customer sensitive data and all the legal, security and other implications of using the public cloud.
AWS have an uptime SLA of 99.95% and a penalty of 10% (in credits) so if they broke that SLA, no matter how long for, you'd get 10% off your monthly bill (assuming it was less than a month). Not really an inspiring SLA.
"The ESA's recent test demonstrated space-to-space optical communications, but ILLUMA will be a space-to-Earth communications system like NASA's previous optical demonstration, a 622 Mbps-down, 20 Mbps-up payload on its LADEE lunar probe."
Just wondering why, on a science probe the D/U ratio would be so skewed?. Would it not make more sense to have a greater upload, since the bulk of the data is coming from the probe?
Well, he isn't dumb. I would say he's a ruthless, amoral, doucehnozzle, but that's just my opinion.
That said, when one's fortune/power/influence depends on not understanding something, in this case the subtleties and consequences "backdooring" encryption protocols, then I'm pretty sure he can come across as thick as a whale omelet.
These days, before any major change Risk of failure isn't the only variable taken into account, it's just a multiplier. The impact of failure is the other factor and in this case, the impact is the highest it can be, even with the risk being small. Bad management for not knowing this and bad JF for not making the impact clear.
No "employee of the month" for anyone involved. :-)
That's an interesting take on it fung0, have an up. I agree in the main. I will disagree with the comparison between the Surface and the iPad, however. The surface (mine is a pro 3), is more of a decent laptop replacement that doubles as a content consumption device. The better comparison would be with the MacBook Air, where it compares quite favorably.
I seem to recall (I'll need to look it up) but both Voyagers used three computers, one of which was the GE-18bit TTL (the same as on the Viking probes) The other two were custom jobs based on that chipset. I think it's fair to say, that even if you knew the assembly language there will be many custom instructions to learn.
Ok, the only way we are going to survive long term is getting off this mudball, but with enough "stuff" that would allow whoever is not left behind to rebuild after some future catastrophe. (See Seveneves by Neal Stephenson for his take on just this point)
The trouble is, that getting that "stuff" up there, wherever that may be, costs a fortune in energy and keeping it running costs yet more. We've had a massive revolution in information processing but no concurrent revolution in energy storage/production. (The last major step was fission, back in 1939!)
Until such time as it's relatively cheap to do do, we're pretty much screwed.
To pay for independent experts, which I would suggest would not be cheap, either the cost of the patent process has to come from general taxation or from the fee recovered from the applicant. Either way, someone is not going to be happy. (Those without deep pockets, or Republican/Conservative/Libertarian "small state" types)
The harm is already done, as it were. Just from a quick search (not google) shows it doesn't take that long to get access to the data and it's in a place not mentioned in this case (granted it could be one of the 16 Roes). They will only create a longer trail to get access, not shut it off completely. Oh, and then there's the Streisand effect to consider.
Heathstone... very addictive and I have put many hours of play into it. Pretty much got the full set of Classic, Naxx, GvG and Blackrock cards. TGT cards are slowly incoming using the method described above, play dailies until 150G then play Arena and open all packs that come up.
I wouldn't like to have to start again, I spent many months getting to around rack 20-10. Now I average 5-10. I need to get much better to hit Legend, but I remain hopeful!
As for money, spending, say £10 per month to get packs isn't that bad, when you remember playing more to play games like WoW or Eve.
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