Tag: commented

Drones, Valor, and the Future of the Military – The Atlantic

Traditional definitions of valor don’t always account for the practitioners of advanced war-fighting tactics.

Without the enemy’s reciprocal ability to kill, war becomes a particularly brutal form of martial law.

Source: Drones, Valor, and the Future of the Military – The Atlantic

 

From Comments:

Hasn’t war always been that?

Certainly at some level(s), yes. But logistics challenges, local terrain/survival knowledge, and firearms all provided some aspects of levelling the battlefield — the kind of levelling that permitted the idea of “nation state borders” to exist even conceptually. That relative levelling (e.g. the infeasible logistics of Romania getting invaded and conquered by China in 1800, the financial and human costs of war even in victory) was quite shaken up with the advent of nuclear weapons, and I think they are getting shaken up again by remote warfare capabilities.

The American people were appalled by the Vietnam war and heavily protested it. They protested the Iraq war but mostly forgot about it after a few years. How could a war conducted exclusively remotely and perhaps a few hundred special operations soldiers have anything close to the same domestic impact as a war with significant citizen participation and casualty figures? Can a civilian population practically be mobilized to risk their personal safety to protest a foreign war that directly impacts only their wallets, not their children’s/communities’ lives?

And, like nuclear weapons, planetary-scale deployment of risk-free remote warfare capabilities will belong to relatively few nations (although local deployment will probably become commonplace).

In some ways, it seems like the post-modern incarnation of the proxy war — use armed drones and other remote weaponry instead of funding and supplying an intermediate nation or non-state actor.

“Internet of Things” security is hilariously broken and getting worse | Ars Technica

Shodan crawls the Internet at random looking for IP addresses with open ports. If an open port lacks authentication and streams a video feed, the new script takes a snap and moves on.

While the privacy implications here are obvious, Shodan’s new image feed also highlights the pathetic state of IoT security, and raises questions about what we are going to do to fix the problem.

Source: “Internet of Things” security is hilariously broken and getting worse | Ars Technica

 

If something advertises itself as “IoT” or “part of the Internet of Things”, you probably do not want it. Assume that whatever it does is completely public to the entire world.

Does it let you see some video from your phone? Assume that video is also broadcast to the rest of the world.

Does it let you turn your home security system on and off from your phone? Assume that everyone else with a phone can also turn that system on or off.

Does it let you change your thermostat from a web page while you’re at work? Or locate your car? Or notify you of pills grandpa didn’t take out of that smart pillbox? Assume everyone else on the internet also has access to that information and those controls.

After Hatton Garden, is it still possible to get away with a heist?

The Hatton Garden raid was meticulous in its planning, dazzling in its complexity – yet still the perpetrators were caught. In this interconnected age, has the Hollywood-style heist become a thing of the past?

Source: After Hatton Garden, is it still possible to get away with a heist?

 

If heists become widely understood to be impossible, is this the beginning of the end of heist movies. Will there never be an Ocean’s 11 style movie set in a sci-fi future? What about a “The Great Rocket Robbery”? I want to read a story about a small group that manages to steal an entire asteroid made of gold!

Destined for War: Can China and the United States Escape Thucydides’s Trap? – The Atlantic

In 12 of 16 cases [in which a rising power confronted a ruling power] over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.

Never before in history has a nation risen so far, so fast. In 1980, China’s economy was smaller than the Netherlands’. Last year, the increment of growth in China’s GDP was equal to the Dutch economy.

As Xi Jinping himself said during a visit to Seattle on Tuesday, “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.”

Source: Destined for War: Can China and the United States Escape Thucydides’s Trap? – The Atlantic

 
I looked, but can not be sure that the article’s definition of “rising” includes “surpassing substantially”. That would be nice to know.

Analysis specifically of the post-nuclear age may be more relevant. It is less likely that two nuclear powers will directly engage in a hot war because there would not be 100,000 casualties – it would be trivial skirmishes, or millions of casualties.

It is an interesting article with good support for an argument that we cannot hand wave “oh that’s impossible” – that we will have to actively work with China as it continues to demand a more important and powerful place in the world order, and China’s demands to alter the world order to China’s further benefit and preference.

The Secret to a Great Economy – Bloomberg View

Productivity: It’s the difference between wealth and survival.

The problem is, productivity growth is slowing. … A new report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, however, paints a more nuanced picture. … looked at productivity not at the global or national level, but at the corporate level. Different companies have different technologies, different management systems and different levels of talent. … At a small number of companies, productivity growth hasn’t slowed at all.

Much of Romer’s research is about “excludability,” or the degree to which companies can stop other companies from learning their secrets. Excludability means that new technologies don’t necessarily flow from one company to another. Romer has shown that excludability is, at least in theory, very important to economic growth.
…
[a] possibility — one not suggested by the OECD report — is that intellectual property law is making it harder for companies to use ideas developed at other companies.

Source: The Secret to a Great Economy – Bloomberg View

 

Are bad patent and copyright laws harming productivity and economic growth?

 

I am not sure what data I would use to support my position, but I think the logic is fairly sound: Yes. Bad patent and copyright laws, written for different mediums and a different time, are harming modern productivity growth.

More and more of the world runs on computer code and algorithms. This is born out in “Programmer” job figures, tech company valuation/market capitalizations, and our daily lives (How many things did you touch today that have code inside them as compared to 10 years ago?). Unlike novels, there *is* a single best way to write a lot of code. Prohibiting people from reusing the best code, and protecting/hoarding the best algorithms with patents or as trade secrets, prevents everyone else from benefiting from that code. That is exactly what patent and copyright systems are set up to do in order to encourage investment in creating these things, but I think it is more than fair to demand an accounting of what investment would not have occurred without patent and copyright protections.

  • If some code was going to be written a month later by someone else, should the first party to file claim really get a 20-year patent and 70-year copyright on it?
  • If any expert could have written a particular code solution within a year, had they been presented the problem, then do they deserve such long-lived special legal monopoly (consider that code is obsolete and replaced on average within 18 months)?

I don’t think we aren’t protecting anything new and original which wouldn’t have been created by someone else (and gets created by someone else anyway!) within a few months. We’re instead letting people patent “Doing X *on a computer*!” and letting people claim math a trade secret.

Perhaps one way to get some data would be to examine what kind of companies are in the article’s “Frontier Firms” category, and investigating the source(s) of their income as compared to industry competitors.

  • How many patents do they have and how many bring in licensing revenue?
  • What is the education breakdown of their employees? (not everyone can hire exclusively ivy league post-doc programmers)
  • How much do their intangibles (e.g. trade secrets, brand, network effects) affect revenue?
  • How do their costs, revenue, and profit margins compare to those of other companies? What about at the product level instead of the corporate level (i.e. are certain products or services performing uncharacteristically, possibly indicating the earning of economic rents)?
  • How many competitors, and how close, do they have? (possibly indicating that having no competitors is what makes them more productive)