This is my TEDatINTEL talk. It has my 5 rules for building a startup inside a big company:
1) Be right about the future
2) Keep it secret, keep it safe
3) Always cheat, always win
4) Find some users and make them happy
5) Make an attractive corpse

“Some key takeaways for me were:

1) The idea that “information technology should be neutral” is a great explanation of why the US gov’t wants an internet kill switch. Professional politicians will always be in favor of squelching dissent, and technology that treats all information equally – including information that is detrimental to the status quo – will therefore be perceived as a threat.”

Hard-link to the complete post is here:

http://dystopianliving.com/darknet-guy-speaks/

Alan gave me free reign to talk about whatever I wanted to (what on earth was he thinking?) so I took the opportunity to talk about the Darknet and, well, Everything.

Here’s my talk. I hope you enjoy watching it as much I enjoyed giving it.

The original Darknet paper is here: The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution

A neat 10 year anniversary retrospective of us publishing that paper is here.

The Michael Pollan article I reference in my talk, and that inspired me back in 1997 to examine nature as intrinsically dual-use, is here.

John Noveske

John Noveske was a shooter and rifle-smith. His company, Noveske Rifle Works, supplies extremely well-made weapons designed (and used) by spec ops and professional “harms way” shooters as well as enthusiasts. John died on Jan 4th 2013 in a car accident in Oregon.

I met John shooting the Thunder Ranch High Angle Rifle Training class in 2010. This HART was not a simple range-based class. Under normal conditions it’s a challenging class with very steep mountain climbing combined with challenging shooting positions, and you have to hump all your gear up and down cliffs each day.

In 2010 a spring storm came in and hammered the ranch for days before we started and was still at it when we arrived, so at times we were shooting in blizzard conditions. Far targets on the lower rifle range were sometimes obscured for seconds or more at a time, meaning we had to range or even shoot them using dead-reckoning off of trees or other landmarks (which was a learning experience in itself). Just the hiking would have been non-trivial, but with 60 pounds of shooting gear it was even tougher. To see the conditions we worked in, this photo shows the two of us on the line (on day one I think):

John Noveske (background, with the awesome hat) and I shooting Thunder Ranch HART in 2010.

And yet, there was John Noveske, climbing with a vanilla latte. I think that’s just how he rolled.

John was incredibly smart, a total smart-ass, a great shooter and while he didn’t insist on inserting himself into things he was not in the least bit reluctant to share his opinions once you were engaged with him. We spent some time riffing on things that we could do together someday and he remained one of those guys I always meant to call and get together with, but life got in the way. He was a really special man.

I wish I had made that call.

Heidi and Clint at Thunder Ranch are working on gifts and memorial. You can get more info on their Facebook page here.

Yes, invisible. Not just hard to detect, but actually invisible. How? Because you’ve been emitting light forever, and the light I emit or reflect hasn’t gone anywhere yet. I wasn’t there to emit or reflect light (nor any other wave or particle).

So, practically: I travel at FTL to a light year distant from your system. I check it out and decide that I want to control it for some reason. I then travel at FTL speeds (meaning I’m ahead of the reflection of my armada, which will reach you in a year) to 179,875,474.8 kilometers from your HS. When I pop out of FTL travel it will take my light 10 minutes to reach you, and that entire time I’m invisible. All my readings of you and your HS are only 10 mins old.

Now I jump to a mere 17,987,547.48 kilometers away and I’m 1 light minute out from your HS. My sensors can now pick up activity in your HS that is EARLIER than my last reading (I know, that kinda cooks my brain a little bit too) and I diff things so that I can predict where everything was (most likely) and will be (most likely). I plot my targeting appropriately.

Now I jump at FTL again to as close a distance as I possibly can without running into something bad (like a planet). I deploy my munitions (beam weapons? kinetics? missiles? fighters? all of the above?). I’ve got all my targets pre-plotted and depending on how close I can get to you in my final FTL jump you’ll have something like fractions of a second to seconds to react before my incoming attacks start to hit your HS. I will then plot follow-ups in real time (missiles and fighters are great for this because they can be steered).

All of this basically sucks if you’re a HS. There are basically four ways of solving this problem:

1. Go offensive – as soon as you can do FTL find and colonize or destroy every and any thing that might ever want to return the favor. This, unfortunately, might work. It explains the Romulans.
2. Mine the hell out of space between you and the rest of the universe. Make it so that it’s basically impossible to ever plot targets without getting destroyed. A dubious solution.
3. Abandon your HS for a life of space travel so that you are never sitting still long enough to be such an easy target. Also workable, but kind of a drag. Planets are nice places on the whole.
4.  Use FTL communications to mitigate the threat.

You’ll be happy to know that we earthlings are getting much closer to number 4 based on several amazing breakthroughs in quantum physics.

We’ve suspected for awhile that quantum tunneling will let us do something to something in one place and get an instantaneous (meaning infinitely FTL) response in another. Recent experiments are showing that this may actually be how things work.

This is the most recent example:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/quantum-measurements-on-one-island-determine-behavior-on-another/

How does this solve the above scenario? With FTL travel + a comms network based on quantum tunneling you can now build millions or even billions of what amount to solar powered quantum webcams. Once these are out there, far away from the HS, they are picking up light that is light seconds, minutes, hours or even more ahead of the light hitting the HS in real time, but they are reporting back to the HS in real time.

Now, if I decide I want to invade you, you can have a heads up that I’m coming based at least on how long it takes me to plot my targets – which ought to give you enough time to plot your defenses. You can start launching waves of kinetics now, hoping I find myself in a shit-storm of rapidly moving ball-bearings that weren’t there before. You can detonate nukes, get your own ships deployed in reasonable places, or launch missiles. You have choices. Options make the fight at least a little bit less one-sided for static targets like your HS.

Astute readers will note that once if you have FTL you ought to be able to do a hack solution for this based on physically moving objects from one place to another. For example you put an FTL drive on your webcams and then when it picks up something that the onboard computer thinks is bad (like my invasion armada) it jumps back to the HS and dumps the data. This might work but it’s got all sorts of impractical issues (unlike this deeply practical blog post). For starters FTL is likely going to cost vastly more energy than quantum tunneling. It’s kind of like those pneumatic tube systems. Neat but not particularly scalar.

So, let’s hear it for quantum physics! Solving problems you might not have thought about and will never have in your lifetime.

Science! Yay!

There was a lot of ambient noise (unfortunately) but I think this is a really fantastic homage to my father. Makes me really proud to be one of the people who knew him.

After that we shot new steel in new spots. One of the instructors (named Greg) sat down with me and helped me call wind. Boy howdy was he good. REALLY good. By the time we were done I felt like maybe I might be able to hit some stuff and I had a much more solid take on my dope.

We did a pistol drill in the afternoon. The XDm .45 I brought seems to be shooting a wee low but that’s okay. Was mostly stuff I know and there was too much standing around but I needed the trigger time on the pistol and the instructor was good.

Today was a down day. I fabbed up an aluminium spacer to increase my LOP, drive to Caspar, went to the briefing and found out I’m in group 1 and I’m shooter 16. I got the last minute deliveries from Amazon (hooray for prime!) and the ammo I shipped.

Competition starts tomorrow.

We started the day with zeroing on paper – my first two shots were high, second three lower but still high. Next group of 5 made one big hole which made me happy. I’m number 4.

But we aren’t here to shoot paper, and what followed was an enormously frustrating (but fun) day of shooting steel in 15-25 MPH winds out to 1400 yards. I missed a lot of shots – the most frustrating of which might have been the shot of a butterfly on my rifle. This is the closest I got to that shot.

So a day of a lot of missing. But I’m learning, so it’s good.

According to family lore it was inconceivable that a Private was capable of opening his mouth (no less teach) in a room containing Generals, so they promoted him high enough to magically become intelligible.

In the past few days Pops condition changed quickly – he went from being engaged and dynamic to more restful. The Kline Galland hospice staff refer to this as “transitioning” and in hindsight I think that’s exactly what it was. He was alert to the end but he had stopped really talking. He was transitioning.

At about 6pm yesterday I read Pops the New York Times and told him stories about work and the weekend we spent at Creekstone. He went to sleep at about 730 and never woke up again.

A wise and funny family member said “he woke up dead”, a saying I now love. I’m happy he’s no longer in pain nor discomfort, but I already miss him.

Life is short. It’s up to us to make it sweet. Hug your kids. Call your parents. Txt yer peeps. Love your friends.

Make it sweet.