{"id":18389,"date":"2018-11-22T18:00:56","date_gmt":"2018-11-23T00:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=18389"},"modified":"2018-11-22T18:00:56","modified_gmt":"2018-11-23T00:00:56","slug":"breaking-the-rules-isnt-always-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2018\/11\/22\/breaking-the-rules-isnt-always-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking The Rules Isn’t Always Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

I guess I wasn’t in on this secret, even though NewScientist<\/strong><\/em> (10 November 2018) claims<\/a> everyone knows it:<\/p>\n

IT IS no secret that Elon Musk wants to build a\u00a0space internet<\/a>. His company, SpaceX, has been granted permission by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to set up a vast network of thousands of low Earth orbit communication satellites. But the company has been tight-lipped about the project, known as Starlink.<\/p>\n

Now Mark Handley at University College London has created a detailed simulation of what Starlink might look like, which he will present at a conference next week.<\/p>\n

Although Musk has said he wants more than half of\u00a0all internet traffic<\/a>\u00a0to go through Starlink \u2013 Handley\u2019s simulation suggests that the project will be most appealing to\u00a0high-frequency traders<\/a>\u00a0at big banks, who might be willing to fork out large sums for dedicated, faster connections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But there’s a couple of things wrong here.<\/p>\n

First of all, the Internet was designed, and is successful, not because it has a centralized design, but because it has a decentralized<\/em> design. Routes can change dynamically as computers go offline and come online, as network link availability fluctuates.\u00a0Routing half of Internet traffic to go through a single entity, even dispersed, is an invitation to sudden hiccup and even downtime if that entity suddenly disappears – and I suspect Musk would run that as a monoculture, meaning that any problems that a particular node of that entity possesses will be a problem for all those nodes.<\/p>\n

Secondly, as long time readers know, high frequency traders get little sympathy from me. Their economic activity does not appear to improve society in general that I can find, and in fact probably amplifies the movements of the stock market to a degree unwarranted. That can be damaging to investors, experienced or not.<\/p>\n

But Musk will do what Musk will do, and we’ll all be blown about in the aftermath. Hell, I’m scheduled to test drive one of this Tesla 3 models tomorrow. I do not expect to buy one, but perhaps the salesman will be extra-persuasive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I guess I wasn’t in on this secret, even though NewScientist (10 November 2018) claims everyone knows it: IT IS no secret that Elon Musk wants to build a\u00a0space internet. His company, SpaceX, has been granted permission by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to set up a vast network \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18390,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18389\/revisions\/18390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}