You could encrypt content. That's something and the content could have been secure.

You are correct that encrypting routing encapsulation would be a whole other ball of wax, so who transactions were between may not have been protected.

Content would at least have been more private than it is today (until NSA used a big lever on hardware and software producers anyway).

The Internet was NEVER owned by no one.

It isn't a magic kingdom. It's hosted on servers and backbones that were *always* owned by someone(s). So the 'free as a bird' perspective is just blatant fantasy.

The earliest Internet tech was developed for DARPA/USGOV. It also appeared around the same time in academic uses. Neither of these was 'free' nor 'uncontrolled'.

It may have been not heavily policed in the early days, because nothing much of general public interest (or interest to the movers and shakers) was happening on the limited public Internet, but it sure as heck was all owned by someone.

I don't find it a stretch at all that engineers didn't consider encrypting for privacy and security at the start. It may not have been practical (either given public domain cryptosystems or hardware) but it may have been conceptually considered.

You send 3N of each type. (Of course, I am cherry picking - this assumes high (95-98%+ reliability) vessels and then 3 is the magic number for maximum redundancy I believe)

I'd send more than one type and more than one of each type. In fact, I'd figure out what my mission needs and dispatch 3 concurrently to the same place with minor separation (enough for something to happen to the first and another may avoid their fate or come in to save them).

Colonization is such a ludicrously big venture, it should be done on a big scale. By that point, Earth may well have a population of 9-13 Bn, so we can certainly spare about 120,000.

Whether we can beat the energy or resource limits is another issue entirely.

You do realize menstrual cycles all align with women on warships?

Can you just imagine what the colony would be like for several days out of every month?

And no men and you expect the them, over 300 years, to maintain a reasonable society that new folks would want to be born into? Not slagging women, just saying you are creating a gender imbalance in live population that cannot fail to have profound psychological and then cultural consequences.

This plan is a bad one.

The initial crop of people are volunteers.

Any subsequent generations are effectively prisoners in an ark. They may not LIKE the fact they are on an ark. They may not want to go ahead with a eugenics program or even participate in this whole mission. They may even want to turn the ship around or just tune out and do SFA while the 'volunteers' do the work.

It's going to be messy. The series 'The 100' on Netflix appears to be exploring a similar sort of situation. The initial show premise involves a pre-series nuke war, space stations of Earth survive and conglomerate to produce the Ark, plan to wait a few hundred years to return to earth, 100 years short they discover a critical problem with carbon scrubbers that will take 6 months to fix but life support will break down in 100.... and they've already had to start putting lots of people in detention because they a) have too many people by reproduction and b) they have people who don't feel like they owe the system anything. It's an interesting study in exactly how draconian people on these sorts of space missions may have to become to maintain order and deal with crises like overpopulation.

 

Well, supposedly, the study took levels of exercise into account -- and driving to work in the morning would account for 30 minutes of sunlight exposure, without any real exercise.

I often keep a dozen or more windows open on my web browsers. Doing that, and a couple more things, you can sometimes break 4GB RAM -- and that's using Linux.
For Windows 8 users, you need a couple of Gig just to get the machine off of the ground. more than 4 is needed to do almost anything more than stare at a blank screen.

I'm presuming that the beeps are Morse code for some silly message, but I only know enough Morse to recognize it, not 'read' it.

So you are comparing lifetime expenditures on various coin-op video games over years of time versus single limited-duration expenditures in a single game app? Seems a bit like comparing apples and oranges.

I probably spent a few hundred dollars in coin machines in my lifetime. I never spend more than about $10-15 in one place (even at my most excessive which was university and John Elway's Football or MLB baseball).

And I can only imagine spending $10K a month if I had more money than I needed and if so, I am quite sure that money could be deployed in a more worthwhile fashion.

The world has finite resources. People's access to them often has little to do with how well they will be expended. (Yes, there's a judgment of value inherent in that statement.)

Well, your point is perhaps accurate.

Still, with what can be done in the world with $10,000, anyone dropping $10,000/month on a virtual product in a game strikes me as wasteful and has an odd sense of the value of money and its uses.

That is, of course, just an opinion, not an assumption.

And why resort to insults and foul language? What did that add to your post?

This kind of chip has been designed. I am not quite sure if it has been produced, but if the people I know in the industry have a design sitting on the drawing board that they feel can be sold with a complete CA authority in it without fear of any tampering, then it is possible.

There are lots of different anti-tamper vectors you need to cover, but the truth is the tech exists to make it a really hard challenge for anyone, even a big agency. Of course, any backdooring in the software or hardware renders these protections rather moot.

Why do you suspect only apple has this software and can deploy it?

The latest exploit *we know of* made apple's update vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. If that's the case, then any OS module could be overwritten to introduce a backdoor, apps could be introduced which had backdoors, etc.

Beyond that, the 256 bit key is only as good as the RNG that cranked it out. That might or might not be a bulletproof one depending on where they got their key generation algorithm and implementation and what sources of entropy it uses to generate random numbers.

If Apple can do it, someone else can figure out how to. If the NSA can't keep its secrets and programs hidden in-house, what makes you think Apple can over the longer term? Or even has, for all you know?

There are many ways to make the memory inside it proof against intrusion.

I know of a company with a chip design that includes a mesh and a vacuum compartment. The mesh can detect electrical, thermal, or physical intrusions. The vacuum compartment, if breached, is another way of telling someone is trying to access the physical memory substrate. There's also some other detection mechanisms as well. All of them zeroize the memory well enough to prevent anyone getting anything useful off of it.

This sort of tech can also protect sea-of-gates style arrays in which code execution can live.

Although I generally agree with your thesis, I will point out those 'leaps' can be painful. The longer we can fight the slide towards statist or authoritarian rule, the longer we can make at least some progress before things get bad enough to need a bloody revolt.

So, keeping the slope of the decline as close to flat as we can by fighting attempts to hobble democracy still matters.

I do find it interesting that if you read the classics, you'll see Greeks and Romans arguing many of the issues of governance we face today. (Just further proof your thesis is spot-on.)

Macs are essentially an OS with the hardware attached, rather than the other way 'round. -- and they also have an OS 'tax' assigned to them. Macs also have well under 10% of the market, last time I looked.

This really only leaves Chromebooks, which, essentially are netbooks, not full blown notebooks or desktops.

If a consumer wants a 'real' machine with a choice of OS (or no OS at all), the pickings are incredibly thin -- and many of those pickings are from manufacturers who pay the tax to Microsoft, whether or not they ship the box with an OS on it. Often, they even pay an extra tax if they sell too many macines without a Microsoft OS on them.