Should everyone manage their own local physical infrastructure?
(and everyone includes corporations and gov agencies)

I honestly don't think that's currently a good solution.
- it costs much more
- it requires much more skills and fails much harder with the lack of it

I really prefer to see my gov/corps to finance The Cloud than pay an incompetent idiot to cluelessly manage bare metal servers or a huge opportunistic service provider that will take 50k$ and provide a 50$/month-worth thing.

@CobaltVelvet Would you like to have a private police paid for with taxes, too?

Excuse the irony, but it's the same case. “Let's give (probably foreign) private companies control over our data and our processes. What could go wrong?”

@josemanuel Entirely depend on the contact. I don't care if the police is private, if they have decent law and constraints to follow and are responsible for their doings, and that is managed by a neutral entity I more-or-less approve of (which would now be the government).

It already is, just on a individual level. Having an entity in between doesn't change *anything* at all.

@josemanuel You can make contracts that will guarantee your rights on your data, there are cloud providers dedicated to these use cases and, globally, that's just enterprise-grade stuff, nothing exotic.

@josemanuel (and I never said anything about it having to be foreign; surely the French government /should not/ host its top secret data on US servers, *but* there are regional providers too, and AWS would still be better than some things we can see in the wild)

@CobaltVelvet As the govt being a huge user of computing resources, they are almost certainly large enough to benefit of operating their own "cloud" solution. That doesn't have to mean they don't buy any 3rd party solutions or contract anything, but there just should be at least very solid "in-house" expertise in form own govt employees being actual experts.

@CobaltVelvet I think we already learned the lesson, not just with the IT infrastructure, but all kind of infra. Like, road building, when the government was reduced to only being able to contract and had no own experts, just hired consultants, it didn't end up well. There just seems to be a lot of correlation in keeping the costs low and having strong in-house expertise or competing public bidders.

@pinkpony yes, they can and should

@CobaltVelvet ...and for businesses in Europe, a concern right now is legal protections against access by US authorities in particular, since that endangers their compliance to local privacy regulations. The courts know that "privacy shield" is a farce, even if politicians won't admit to it.

Anyway, "it's just someone else's computer" probably doesn't mean a lot to todays users, who have been growing up on tablets and smartphones that are backed by "cloud" services by design.

@bob @CobaltVelvet We have actually been debating if Cisco's "Smart Licensing" for ASA-V is a business continuity risk. I mean, Germany is not in danger of ending up on some US export blacklist - but who knows with the imbeciles being in charge all over the world right now... What does a company do when it's not allowed to do business in the US anymore for whatever reason, and Cisco is being forced to revoke your licenses? And that's not even "real" Cloud.

@bortzmeyer all contracts are legally binding, yes, that the one thing keeping professional relations working.
Though I haven't said I want the gov to contract foreign businesses, "local clouds" are fine. (not the patriotic bullshit, just businesses based in EU)

The point being: hating efficient solutions because there's "cloud" on a marketing page is stupid. In many instances it is a good solution and people don't even know what the "cloud" means in that context.

@bortzmeyer Of course now if the government would have its own cloud and department dedicated to administrating it and keeping it secure, it would be even much better.

@skquinn seeing virtual data as a physical entity isn't good in all cases; I like my music locally but also Netflix. Sometimes not having to handle storage yourself is more important than the benefits of doing so.

My point being it's especially true for small businesses that cannot/don't want to manage it properly and would be in fact better off with an external service.

@CobaltVelvet If you buy a physical DVD (or download the file) of a Disney movie, you can watch it when you want. If you buy a streamling license, Disney can shut it off when they want--and they did just that for all their Christmas/holiday films during December a couple years ago. People were livid, but this is why there will always be a market for non-DRMed downloads and physical media.

@skquinn that's why I still keep movies locally, but it's no DVD since even the physical thing is DRM'd these days. :p

but I still balance it with Netflix - it's really enjoyable to not have to download it, find a decent source and encoding, then keep it stored and monitor free space and buy more drives and keep the RAID clean and...

@CobaltVelvet I just can't justify spending money on a company which has based its entire business model on DRM. It just has too high a squick factor for me.

@skquinn well the "thing" is that it's simply not ownership if it's full of DRMs, so you can hardly legally own any content anymore.

@CobaltVelvet CDs still don't have DRM on them (the attempts at "copy protecting" CDs failed after they broke too many legitimate players). Agree with most post-VHS video, though, but at least the DRM on DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray has been cracked. (Yes, it's against the law to do so, but so is rolling a stop sign or going 61 mph with a 60 mph limit.)

@CobaltVelvet

or perhaps,

- you hosted it in the US, and the NSA ordered <cloud company> to turn over your data and also to not tell anybody about it

Related exemple seen 5 minutes ago:

A: "Instances shouldn't ban other instances"
B: "We should ban whoever we want"
[...]
A: "if you're transparent enough with your users it's fine"
B agrees.

Both expect something more extreme from the other party that isn't true, but don't directly know it.
How many arguments are solely because of one missing precision then beating around the bush for ages?

and now that's just summing up world politics and the source of any conflict ever.

Of course, the singularity is a solution to that issue.

Fixing communication loss too, but I have more hope for a hive mind.

@CobaltVelvet

> the source of any conflict ever

I could agree it's the source of MOST conflict but not all

there are occasionally fundamental conflicts, they're just far rarer than people think, IMO

@sydneyfalk still not sure about that.

Any conflict can be factualized and essentialized up to a point where there is no other way except agreement. (excluding purely antisocial behavior)
The common good is much more universal than people think, too, if they're ready to selflessly accept a common good.

@CobaltVelvet

> excluding purely antisocial behavior

> if they're ready to selflessly accept a common good

these are essentially the fundamental conflicts I'm referring to

@sydneyfalk well then :p
the conflict itself is not really a fundamental opposition of ideology; it's just than one person is too much of an asshole to understand the other. They could, and reasonably should, but they chose not to.

I'm not sure they even see that the only outcome is an agreement, but it is, and they just delay it by denying all sense.
Some will indeed die before they admit being wrong. But they are nonetheless.

@CobaltVelvet

> the only outcome is an agreement

There are people who disagree this is the case.

They disagree it pretty hard sometimes, in fact. And I'm not sure how that differs in a meaningful way from a "fundamental opposition of ideology". (But I try not to discuss ideology, so that's probably why I don't see the difference.)

> they just delay it

things you can delay until after your death are known to humans as "irrelevancies", for the most part :(

@sydneyfalk
I can't imagine any problem in which even while knowing every possible aspect of each side, both people couldn't agree.

The exception being, agreeing in theory but publicly disagreeing because it gives you an advantage, even unconsciously.

@sydneyfalk Example:
*phobia could be avoided by making everyone deeply understand the oppression they inflict, but also by having them bear it. Oppression couldn't exist if the people doing it had to suffer as much as the targeted group.

BY HAVING A SINGULARITY

@CobaltVelvet

> Oppression couldn't exist if the people doing it had to suffer as much as the targeted group.

this is LITERALLY only possible with a post-Singularity situation

and even then knowledge cannot be perfect and complete, only "so much greater than ours as to seem so", IMO

(but anyway -- until and unless that theoretical becomes actual, I mostly worry about the unsolved world I live in)

@CobaltVelvet

these are two things that cover the precise issues, IMO

> while knowing every possible aspect

this is literally impossible

even for some ultimate AI, no problem space is completely knowable except in abstract

> agreeing in theory but disagreeing in public because it gives you an advantage

this makes me think of everybody who ever said "I'm only a Republican because taxes"

well

okay, if money is more important to them than society, I guess so

@sydneyfalk yes, society is ruined by greed.
See? Essentilize enough and we can only agree. :p

an ultimate AI couldn't know *everything*, but could know everything *about itself*.

Imagine arguing with someone and instantly knowing every reasons they have to argue and every feeling they have related, and reciprocally.
Do you think you could still disagree in any way except by concluding "I am more important than you"?

@CobaltVelvet

> an ultimate AI couldn't know *everything*, but could know everything *about itself*

I actually disagree on this -- I'm one of those people that thinks a mind cannot accurately comprehend all the elements of its own consciousness, and by that definition an AI is not going to understand itself completely

> Imagine arguing with someone and instantly knowing every reasons they have to argue and every feeling they have related, and reciprocally.

I literally can't.

@sydneyfalk How can you disagree if you only have one example, that you belive you cannot understand? :p

> I literally can't.
that's unfortunate. uh, think about it, it's an interesting and important concept

@CobaltVelvet

> you believe you cannot understand

because I can't understand it :\

> think about it, it's an interesting and important concept

No, I mean I literally CANNOT do that.

I can't know every reason someone argues about a point, I can't know every feeling they have *even on a single point*, and I certainly can't know those things instantly.

This is like asking me to compute the square of purple cheese -- for those words, that question is, IMO, meaningless. :(

@CobaltVelvet

If I spent my entire life trying to grasp why Siskel and Ebert disagreed about one film getting a thumbs up or thumbs down, that still couldn't be settled completely by the end of it.

I can know MOST of the reasons, maybe. I can know the likely "relevant" factors, in the 80/20 sense.

But I cannot EVER know ALL of it.

There's always some item I didn't get to in my lifespan, or some factor I couldn't perceive.

There's no 'perfect knowledge' to be had, IMO.

@sydneyfalk I wouldn't ask you to count to infinity, but to think about what it means in math -

Let's imagine we toggle a switch and share memory.
Let's imagine, theoretically, we can share facts and experiences directly from our brains.
Not *everything* about *everything*, but for any existing argument, both sides would then know, without having to describe them and make examples, the underlying opposed ideas.

...

@sydneyfalk Both parties would then know as much about their own points than the opposed one, completely removing the rhetoric.
They don't know everything, but at least it's symmetrical. They know everything that they could known, they didn't block any information between them.

Can they disagree now? I'd think not.

Did that "that they could know" change everything in my sentence and was it sadly lost until now, leading to a disagreement that isn't actually one? :p

@CobaltVelvet

I don't really trust any conclusions I come to after a certain amount of theoretical elements are involved. That threshold gets passed after "share facts and experiences directly from our brains", because I don't think that's ever going to be possible -- we interpret things contextually.

For us to 'share facts and experiences', completely, we'd have to have the SAME experiences already, and we can't.

This is why I think of this less as "count to infinity" and...

@CobaltVelvet

...more as "square of purple cheese".

"Count to infinity" has one element I cannot really grasp: Infinity.

"Square of purple cheese" has elements that don't mesh together usefully to me. How does one square purple? Is cheese the 'modifier'? Is 'purple'? Is 'purple cheese' something that has nothing to do with purple or cheese?

If we assume somehow that X and N and Z, what's that like?

No idea -- because I barely get X and N and Z don't make sense to me.

@sydneyfalk fair enough

@sydneyfalk we'll continue this in 50 years and see if we get any practical examples. :p

see? not even a disagreement, a delay because we're reasonable people lacking facts and aren't obsessed with our answers. But, given enough time, we'd be forced to agree or hide in delusion.

@CobaltVelvet

> we'll continue this in 50 years and see if we get any practical examples. :p

have fun with that, I'll be dead! ^_^

(like, statistically speaking -- and if a thoughtmass of some sort tried to 'include' me I'd strive hard to avoid being part of it, because I wouldn't want to inflict myself on it

so in all meaningful ways, I will likely be dead in fifty years, singularity or no)

@CobaltVelvet I have an alternative version of Godwin's Law:

As the length of an Internet argument approaches infinity, the probability of it becoming POINTLESS approaches 1.

@CobaltVelvet If one has had more than four responses with another person in an Internet discussion, and no consensus has been reached, it's best just to drop it and give up.

@mdm wise