It's a combination of chemistry and geometry (and other factors). Maybe there's some luck.
There are ICs and components built for operating in extreme environments, like drilling. You can get SiC (silicon carbide) chips that operate above 200°C (473K), if that's important to you. There are also various semiconductors that are worse than silicon at handling high temperatures, like germanium. Old germanium circuits sometimes don't even work correctly on a hot day.
If we lived at 200K, I'm sure that there's a host of semiconductor materials which would be available to us which don't work at 300K.
well, depends how you define lucky. at cryogenic temperature, the leakage current of a transistor is so small that you virtually don't require DRAM refresh. I tested DRAM cells with discharge times of hours, and the transistor was not at all optimized. See https://www.rambus.com/blogs/part-1-dram-goes-cryogenic/ (not my work)
There is a bit of luck in even having any viable materials that work at the required temperature to choose from.
For example, humanity hasn't been able to find a single appropriate material for a superconductor at room temperature/atmospheric pressure despite significant research, but a civilization living below 100 K has a myriad of options to choose from. Superconductors are high technology to us, but if your planet is cold enough then superconducting niobium wire would be a boring household item like copper wire is for us.
Hum... We inhabit that temperature exactly because it allows for a wide range of chemical reactions in a controlled fashion.
The Anthropic Principle is not luck.
We are lucky that those interesting things are possible. We are also unlucky that many interesting things are not possible. But given that they are possible, it was almost inevitable that most of them would be possible around us.
It's also not an absolute. We don't actually know how common life is in environments significantly different from ours, so the part about "wide range of chemical reactions" is just our conjecture.
It’s lucky in the northern hemisphere there is an easily recognizable star pointing almost exactly at the North Pole, which makes navigation much easier.
It’s lucky some available material worked the right way to make a transistor.
It’s lucky some person smart enough to make that work got to work on that.
History is full of lucky coincidences like that. How many Einsteins have died out in the jungle, without access to our scientific knowledge or a way to add to it? For most of history and partly still today, being a scientist wasn’t possible for just about anyone, you had to be from the right family. It’s all about luck.
Imagine that you have to explain to drone pilots that even a very small drone is completely unacceptable in an airport vicinity. Yes, your 0.5kg drone can seriously damage the compressor of an engine!
GP's and parent's strawman fallacy based line of argument reminded a video where Putin was explaining why it is so hard to get a protest permit in Russia - "Imagine if your protest happens in front of a children hospital, and thus it can block a live saving delivery."
out of interest, in the hypothetical situation where drones are allowed near an airport, and a kid tries to film a plane landing and accidentally takes out a plane engine, doing 10s of millions of damage, who do you think should be responsible? Would insurance be required for things like this?
why would be drones allowed near airports? I mean, of course, in the future with drones integrated into automated traffic control where it makes sense, and it would make sense in sensitive areas, there can be imagined a need for the drones to fly near airports, yet today why everybody brings airports up when there are huge swaths of other space where drones and other stuff could have been flying if not for prohibition?
But there are lots of cases where people fly cheap commercial drones around an airport, and that is completely unacceptable. It could easily result in a criminal charge and even prison time.
It's literally the opposite. You "must" have a cryptographic device (a dongle) that is only doing that one thing, authentication. Doesn't have a built in radio (unless for NFC, if you want it), doesn't have any microphone or camera, doesn't store any data beyond what's needed to authenticate, doesn't communicate except to authenticate - bi-directionally, so phishing is no longer a thing, or at least it's a lot harder.
It's very hard to make a privacy case against FIDO. Practically speaking it's one of the best things that happened to privacy&security since the invention of asymmetric cryptography. The deployment of this tech reduces phishing effectiveness to near zero, or in many cases literally zero.
> It's very hard to make a privacy case against FIDO.
With username and password, I have full control over my privacy in a very easy to understand fashion: If I randomly generate them I know I cannot be tracked (as long as I ensure my browser doesn't allow it by other means).
With those keys I have a opaque piece of hardware which transfers an opaque set of data to each website I use and I have NO idea what data that is because I do not manually type it in. I need to trust the hardware.
Sure, I could read the standard, but it very likely is complex enough that it is impossible to understand and trust for someone who has no crypto background.
And I also have no guarantee that the hardware obeys the standard. It might violate it in a way which makes tracking possible. Which is rather likely, because why else would big tech companies push this if it didn't benefit them in some way?
> Which is rather likely, because why else would big tech companies push this if it didn't benefit them in some way?
They switched to this internally a long time ago which basically eliminated phishing attacks against employees. There are security teams inside those megacorps that have a general objective of reducing the number of account takeovers, and non trivial resources to accomplish that. Not everything is a conspiracy.
Also, I am sure you will be able to stick to just passwords for a pretty long time while the world moves on to cryptographic authentication. I'm not being sarcastic here.
Yes, they also track the behavior of their employees. It is security for them and not for the user in many cases. In a perfect world those incentives align but they don't have to.
With your password manager, you're trusting a lot more: the software of the OS and kernel, the software of the browser and its dependencies, the software of your password generator and your password storage. You also have to hope the developers and administrators of the website you're signing in to aren't storing your passwords in plain text (and I don't just mean in the database - overly-aggressive APM/logging might be storing POST request data in a log stream somewhere).
The only attack that's an issue for both passwords and security key-based sign-in is targeted attacks against a website, where they use your browser to execute malicious API calls to the website after you've signed in regularly.
I'm not familiar with FIDO, but passwords place a lot of effort into the user (must avoid repeating them, must avoid simple sequences, etc). After years of warnings, this has berely changed - people use lousy passwords and repeat them.
So I'm all up for considering different approaches.
No. Google's power to lock people out of their website is already here with the prevalence of 'Sign in with Google'.
FIDO is unrelated; it works by having the browser/device itself sync the virtual security keys[0], much in the same way they sync passwords currently. That's the only thing changing here, giving people the choice (and encouraging them) to sign in via "what you have" instead of "what you know".
Yup. Converted to gallons and the US dollar in Switzerland you have to pay $9.35 for gas (CHF2.3 per liter). Yet there's no shortage of cars on the highways here.
It's always hard to compare value internationally, but...
The median income in Switzerland is about $125k USD. That's more than twice the median in the US. It sounds like the affordability of $9/gal gas is greatly different. US politicians are actually suggesting things like a stipend or stimulus payment to help people pay for gas. Ridiculous, but that's how it is.
"The median income in Switzerland is about $125k USD."
I don't believe this for a second and sure enough the first few sources produced by a google search show a far different situations. The Swiss office of Federal Statistics says the median income is 50,120 CHF per year which is $53,880 USD at current exchange rates. Even the top 10% of the country's earners are only in the mid $90k, nowhere near $125k.
"It is measured by the median equivalised disposable income, after adjustment for differences in price levels between countries. This means that despite the high price levels in Switzerland, the population's financial situation, after deduction of obligatory expenditure, was in 2020 more comfortable than that of its neighbouring countries and countries in the European Union."
So the disposable median in Switzerland is about the same as the gross median in the US. It looks like the equivalised disposable income for the US is not calculated, so we can't compare that. Having a median disposable income that is about the same as the gross median of another country still seems to support my implication that the Swiss are more wealthy and can better afford the cost of gas as compared to the US.
It seems it's hard to get "good" sources for Swiss median income. They do list the median monthly wage as being around 6500. This doesn't include other income sources, and is still about double the US median income.
Distances driven in the US are often much higher as well. People I know regularly commute 30 to 60 minutes one way to get to work. Some tradesmen I know are driving 2 hours to get to the jobsite.
Have you seen what happened in the finance world with respect to Russia recently? Feels to me like it is perfectly possible with the right Zeitgeist. Pretty much all the on/off ramps for Russian money are gone at the moment.
Which I acknowledge above. You can ban exchange to fiat but it will only reduce value, not completely eliminate it as there are protocols which derive value from defi ecosystem itself.
I.e people will start directly using these currency for payments (which they already do) without exchanging to fiat. The stability is maintained by the defi collateral and shared acceptance.
So you would have to ban everyone to accept crypto currency and so on as payment but that is very catastrophic decision with large implications.
It also doesn't help crypto completely eliminates centralized authorities when moving across borders.
> people will start directly using these currency for payments (which they already do) without exchanging to fiat
Without fiat exchange, People can only accept crypto in an economically feasible manner as payments up to the rate that they have expenses/outflows that can be paid in crypto. The price will only be able to stabilize at a price that is orders of magnitude lower than today. How much lower exactly depends on the health of the black market for exchanging with fiat.
I don't understand how more people are not catching up to this simple fact that central bank "digital currencies" are nothing more than a by-pass of distributed private banking (brick and mortar + online banks). It's just moving more levers closer to central authorities.
Well... digital currency = programmable money = big differences... for example, giving people money which must be spent by a certain date on certain types of goods or services.
No one is talking about encouraging such behavior. But if the FBI undertakes a serious investigation to track them down, when they get tracked down, they may well end up in a Federal prison for a long time--especially if they can't afford a few hundred thousand dollars for the best legal support. Maybe they deserve to have their life ruined for probably poorly considered juvenile behavior but I'm not sure. There are societal costs associated with pursuing and prosecuting every crime to the max.
Folks aren't asking for people to be locked up forever for this. A comment in the thread mentioned about first offenders getting no jail time, but needing to publicly apologize, do community service, etc. Repeat offenders should likely serve some jail time, with each offense bringing stronger punishment.
Doing nothing about this does encourage its behavior, especially since there's entire communities around doing it (kiwi farms being one of the worst).
The main job of the CEO is to manage the board of directors (i.e. the shareholders). And the main job of the board of directors is to decide when to fire the CEO.
> The main job of the CEO is to manage the board of directors (i.e. the shareholders).
Uh, no. Dealing with the board is indeed part of the job for the CEO, but a relatively small part unless you're doing poorly.
The CEO is also managing the direction of the company, and managing the top-level managers of the various departments. The CEO has to fight the fires, and allocate limited resources to where they are needed across all departments.
Half-joking, but yeah. "Managing the board of directors" of course means keeping the board happy, which is done by what ansible wrote. Not just directly trying to talk them out of firing the CEO.
This is exactly what YouTube does already. In fact I see no reason why Twitter couldn't spill ad money to the content (tweet) creators within the next year or two, creating a similar ecosystem. Maybe the value attributable to individual creators would be too small? Videos are quite a bit bigger than tweets (in terms of what matters most, the eyeball time), after all.
