"Safety first" literally is an absolutist mantra; no part of its wording is conditional. Of course people read into it a less absolute figurative meaning that may be useful for thinking about safety. However it can be politically and legally useful to speak using absolutes.
Using the example of viruses and the economy, it has been politically expedient for politicians to state that nothing should be done which puts life in danger, while making actions which balance safety and economics.
At it's heart I think the phrase is essentially a political one. It signifies at attempt to address the balance between success and safety, rather than skew completely towards success.
When I was in the army fellow officers would say their first priority was to get their soldiers home safely, to which the soldiers would joke "can you fly me home tomorrow then Sir?"
You're arguing from a place where metaphors don't exist. Aside from people who have already questionable judgement, nobody treats "The customer is always right" as a literal dictum. I am not compelled to "Love that chicken from Popeyes" and I can stop eating Pringles after one.
The decision is usually guided by practical limitations, such as grip, or the tolerance of parts. Limiting torque to improve acceleration, prevent skidding off the road, or not burn out the motor is a reasonable motivation in-line with the interests of the driver. Limiting torque to make your car feel like a less capable one is not.
That said, I can imagine some people may want a familiar driving experience, although it would make sense to make that a configurable option, e.g. 'sport mode' vs 'comfort mode'.
I wonder whether a more effective alternative would be to station troops in space. The Outer Space Treaty prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space, but not conventional weapons or combatants. An invasion from space could be made with virtually no warning. I'm not sure stealth would be possible due to the plasma created on entry, but decoys / countermeasures are possible.
With the potential for spacelaunch to become drastically less expensive due to reusable launch vehicles, a constellation of manned hypersonic glide vehicles may become economically practical.
As was mentioned in the article, monitoring isn't the only concern. Personal data stored on your work computer may still be problematic if your employer is involved in a lawsuit for instance.
I'll try to sum it up: Kong notes are electronic devices which allow whoever has access to them to use a smart contract which after a given date can retrieve a given amount of cryptocurrency. They hold a key which allows them to operate on this smart contract, but don't reveal it, and are designed to be physically impractical to tamper with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_cryptoprocessor).
There's a distinction that Kong is not payable on demand, until after expiry, but I'm not sure it's a useful distinction. Unlike a conventional bond, there isn't a question of default by the issuer; the Etherium is locked up in a smart contract, rather than relying on the issuer honouring the bond at maturation.
Rarely do users of cash care about the property of it being payable on demand by the issuer (conventionally a central bank), only the property that it be practical for physical commerce.
Here the risk is that the note becomes physically damaged in some trivial way and the value is lost forever. Maybe it's bent too far over in one direction, maybe something heavy falls on it, etc, etc.
That physical cash can become damaged is nothing new. Maybe this implementation could be easily damaged in some way, I don't think this threatens the concept of silicon cash generally.
The notes are more durable than linen currency and less durable than polymer currency. We found this to be an acceptable tradeoff. Most of the note can be destroyed but the funds still claimable. There is an envelope of durability properties associated with physical cash - Kong fits within most of these. Of course there is opportunity for improvement which we hope to address in future versions.
I'm not sure what you're making that assertion on the basis of. The note has redundant electrical connectors. You could melt the bulk of the note down and still claim the Etherium from the secure element. Hypothetically you could have redundant SEs.
I don't see how this is any more against network neutrality than regional mirrors / CDNs.
This is an optimisation which can be made by the game developer / host, where the alternative would be prioritisation by the ISP, which would go against net neutrality.
The ISPs charge lots of money for the CDNs and private networks that want to connect to their customer networks at the edge. This is the net neutrality argument; it's almost impossible to get good performance at scale without paying extra for it.
I actually think the problem this is meant to solve is an example of why, from a purely pragmatic sense, net neutrality is effectively impossible to deliver at scale. Someone has to eat the costs somewhere, and the publishers are the ones who benefit the most financially.
A bike courier or lawyer racing to the court house benefits far more from the roads then others but doesn't pay more. Common carrier regulations were widespread in moving atoms.
Toll roads charge you for travelling over them. They don't charge the business you're travelling to based on how much value you have to them as a customer.
not really a faster road as anyone stuck in an expresslane behind a prius will tell you, but a less congested road free of peasants. Not really sure how this analogy syncs up but just throwing in my $0.02.
That's how it works; no large telco I've ever worked for is willing to put third party gear (or really any gear that hasn't gone through extensive validation) into their head ends. An IXP is just a datacenter that the big ISPs and transit providers use to exchange traffic. The business agreements determine the price paid (which in some cases is zero, but often not, and is negotiated like any other business deal).
> The business agreements determine the price paid (which in some cases is zero, but often not, and is negotiated like any other business deal).
I do not understand this part: why is a business agreement necessary to simply discover BGP paths?
There is an ISP with users that want to go to Youtube or Akamai: the ISP has a router with the full BGP prefix list of the Internet, including for those of YT and A. YT and A are probably in most of the larger IXPs, and presumably the ISP in question is also at a few IXPs.
Why would a business agreement be necessary for the ISP to send traffic over the IXP's switches to the CDN(s)? What's the point of connecting into an IXP if you add the 'overhead' of business agreements?
> Why would a business agreement be necessary for the ISP to send traffic over the IXP's switches to the CDN(s)?
Because that's how distribution works and has always worked under corporate capitalism: the company making money off the content itself pays to distribute it (on the Internet, this is generally understood to be the originator of the packets). So the ISPs charge the CDNs and companies like Netflix to accept their traffic. A common argument is "well I already pay for that as a customer!" Telecom business models are a lot more complicated than that, and if 100% of their revenue came from subscription fees you'd be paying a lot more than you do now.
> What's the point of connecting into an IXP if you add the 'overhead' of business agreements?
Because it's a convenient location to house network gear with easy access to multiple large ISPs and upstream networks? An IXP is just a datacenter. What makes it an IXP is the fact that multiple large telco networks are hosted there.
From the wikipedia article linked above: "The Vancouver Transit Exchange, for example, is described as a 'shopping mall' of service providers at one central location, making it easy to switch providers, 'as simple as getting a VLAN to a new provider'. The VTE is run by BCNET, a public entity."
I am aware of paying for transit, which allows you to access larger swaths of the Internet through someone else's (better connected) network.
But if I am with an ISP A, and I want to watch something on YouTube, then given that I am paying my ISP for connecting me to "the Internet", and YT is on "the Internet", how/why would YT pay the ISP anything?
How exactly would an ISP charge a CDN, YT, or Netflix? The content distributors simply connect to the Internet and advertise via BGP: besides paying their own ISP(s), how would a content provider pay a 'distant ISP'? If a content provider is willing to pay for dark fibre and install their own gear into IXPs, how would any ISP issue an invoice to the CDN(s)?
And the "transit exchange" at VanIX seems to be separate from the open peering option available by simply advertising to the router servers. From the sentence right before the one you quote:
> When these conditions are met, and a contractual structure exists to create a market to purchase network services, the IXP is sometimes called a "transit exchange".
TorIX has the majority of participants doing simple peering:
> The Exchange also offers two BGP Route-Servers, which allow peers to exchange prefixes with each other while minimizing the number of direct BGP peering sessions configured on their routers.[3] Participation is voluntary, with approximately 85 percent of the membership using the free service.
This is not the net neutrality argument. It should be a cost saving for both the CDN and ISP to connect directly, because this saves both parties needing to pay for IP transit. That the ISP may charge the CDN for this is because in a vacuous regulatory environment they have been allowed to ransom their customers.
The behaviour of discriminating based on application or financial potential is not tolerated (legally or socially) in other common carriers like mail.
> It should be a cost saving for both the CDN and ISP to connect directly, because this saves both parties needing to pay for IP transit.
It almost always is a cost savings -- I've worked enough interconnect agreements and the dispute is always over value capture (who gets how much). Transit is expensive; but transit is paid by the originator. The ISPs incur indirect costs that are harder to measure, so it has to be negotiated.
> The behaviour of discriminating based on application or financial potential is not tolerated (legally or socially) in other common carriers like mail.
It's not? Because big companies absolutely get preferential treatment with mail too. USPS does things for Amazon they do not for anyone else.
It hasn't always been like this, but deregulation craze in the 90s/2000s weakened a lot of the protections we had against it.
"Safety first" literally is an absolutist mantra; no part of its wording is conditional. Of course people read into it a less absolute figurative meaning that may be useful for thinking about safety. However it can be politically and legally useful to speak using absolutes.
Using the example of viruses and the economy, it has been politically expedient for politicians to state that nothing should be done which puts life in danger, while making actions which balance safety and economics.