As long as malvertising(1) exists, adblockers are basic security hygiene. You wouldn’t click a random link, so why would you allow an ad server to execute arbitrary code on your computer?
> Hoy said that long before stonecutters started struggling to breathe, the sheer amount of silica in many kinds of engineered stone — upwards of 90% — should have made it obvious that the material was risky to cut and grind, especially in workplaces without sophisticated measures to control dust.(1)
> But scientists and regulators have grown concerned about whether recommended strategies such as wet cutting, proper ventilation and wearing respirator masks can do enough to protect workers from dust so high in silica. Cal/OSHA officials have generally described silicosis as preventable, but also caution that with 93% silica(2) content, “safe use of engineered stone may not be possible” even with proper workplace practices.(1)
The single biggest problem with IoT devices is the black box, vendor-specific cloud platform nature. This causes privacy issues galore as well as requiring every manufacturer to reinvent the wheel to secure their devices, while also making huge quantities of ewaste when Random Manufacturer #484 goes out of business, taking their cloud with them.
How about instead, mandating that all IoT devices need to comply with an open standard? Customers would be free to connect their device to Siri or Alexa if they wanted, but by default the device just works with an open standard that you can control fully, hosted at home if desired.
It would also remove the cloud security onus from the manufacturer—they would fund the standards org, which would be responsible for the security of the interface.
We already have this concept for electricity, phones, networking. You don’t buy a “MA Bell” phone anymore or an “Edison-compatible” fan.
There are so many reasons to block ads. Aesthetics alone. Protecting your valuable time. Consenting to watching an ad is not the same as consenting to your entire life being tracked and monitored.
Given that neither Facebook nor Google can appropriately police the content of their own ad networks (to the extent that they're the two biggest purveyors of malware and scams on the internet - in this rando's opinion), there is no moral argument against blocking ads.
In fact, not blocking internet advertising is a security risk.
If they get their house in order my opinion may change, but there's currently no business reason for them to change their existing lax systems; no pressure or threat from regulation to hold them liable for what they allow on their advertising networks.
For that to work, the 1st wave ships would need to carry a power source capable of driving a pushing laser. This presents a number of significant challenges:
- the current plans for Breakthrough Starshot[0] are to send a centimeter-sized, ~1 gram mass spacecraft.
- even such a tiny spacecraft would require a 4x4-meter solar sail and 100 GW of laser power, because photons carry such small amounts of momentum
- a ground based nuclear power plant produces a couple GW of power. 100 GW of continuous laser power would require the entire output of 50+ nuclear power plants
- that amount of power is difficult enough on the ground, trying to put 50+ nuclear power plants worth of energy generation on a space craft would alone be a tremendous challenge
- assuming we could do that, it would weigh unfathomably more than a gram. Just the fuel alone in a ground based station is several tons; the infrastructure to turn that fuel into power is many thousands of tons more… times 50+. It would not be impossible for that amount of power generation to weigh a megaton.
- assuming it could be launched from earth or built in space, and pushed by solar sail, the solar sail needed for a ship weighing a megaton would be another level of challenge. If 16 square meters of sail are needed for every gram, then a megaton would require 16x10^12 square meters. That would be a manufactured object 4,000km on a side, or roughly the size of Russia.
- We haven’t accounted for the increased power needed to power this craft by sail from the ground. Momentum (let’s ignore relativity even though we are talking about reaching speeds where that starts to be important) is mass*velocity, so in order for our megaton-class spacecraft to be pushed with the same performance as a 1 gram spacecraft, we’d need to scale the momentum delivered by photons with the mass of the craft. That would require 10^12 (one trillion) times more laser photons, which would require one trillion times more energy to produce and 50+ trillion ground-based nuclear power plants.
- I think it’s safe to say that pushing a megaton-class starship with lasers and a solar sail is unfeasible. But wait, if we’ve managed to assemble and launch the craft, we don’t need the ground based lasers or the sail, we can just power the ship using all those power plants on board. [1]
- with a ship that large, we could take a city worth of people along for the ride, so is there still a use for the giant laser we’ve brought with us? Maybe interstellar package delivery?
How about thinking in terms of solar rather than nuclear? I think space-based solar can have similar output to earth-based nuclear plants. Very expensive to build and launch, of course, and for terrestrial power there's the issue of getting the energy back to earth, but for a space-based laser it may be the best option?
And for the deceleration with a backward laser idea, could the initial sail store some percentage of the laser energy that's used to propel it, along with solar energy from the target system's star, and use that for the deceleration laser? I'm sure that's still prohibitive in terms of mass, but probably much better than nuclear or any other fuel-based option.
Yeah, I was thinking space or moon based solar or solar + nuclear on this side. Why beam that energy down through atmosphere to earth, convert it to laser, then beam it back out? On destination side, I was thinking solar-powered (or whatever you call it when the star isn't Sol), but I like the idea of the sail storing laser energy (or would that break down - can a photon both impart momentum and have it's energy stored?) Your waves wouldn't have to be equal or limited to 2 waves : 1000 100MW wave 1 reverse-pushers could aim at slowing down 1 wave 2 probe, or a series of waves until wave N is slow enough to be caught by the star. Sounds like we're not slowing down at another star any time soon, but interesting to think about.
(1) https://www.tomsguide.com/us/malvertising-what-it-is,news-19...