In the event of alien invasion:

[Damburger]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/27/sixth_column_recycle/

They reckon we have to form an insurgency and start using IEDs against their flying saucers.

Oh, and apparantly Carl Sagan is a 'total jerk' :(

[Maksutov]

No problem.

Just send 'em back to Texas where they came from.

If they're not from Texas, and therefore extraterrestrial aliens (the "extra" being they're a dime a dozen), we might disarm them by inviting them to peace negotiations, during which we would discuss Hyper Dimensional Design, and thus crush them flatter than an HDD tetrahedron.


BTW, one wonders, what kind of engineers would have too much time on their hands?

:think:

[snowcelt]

If those aliens do not kill us it will only make us stronger.

[Ronald Brak]

If those aliens do not kill us it will only make us stronger.

Just like my polio. Don't let the iron lung fool you, I'm ready to do ten rounds with Cassius Clay.

[Gillianren]

Just like my polio. Don't let the iron lung fool you, I'm ready to do ten rounds with Cassius Clay.

Thank you; I've never liked that expression, either. (I just watched Warm Springs, starring Kenneth Branagh as Franklin Roosevelt, today, too!)

[Maksutov]

If those aliens do not kill us it will only make us stronger.Just like my polio. Don't let the iron lung fool you, I'm ready to do ten rounds with Cassius Clay.Based on my readings of Nietzsche, I'm pretty sure he was referring to one's mental strength.

Unfortunately many things he wrote have been misinterpreted by those with their own agendas. Not that Goebbels et al had such things.

[Ronald Brak]

Based on my readings of Nietzsche, I'm pretty sure he was referring to one's mental strength.

Well severe stress generally reduces one's ability to function and this can be both a short and long term effect. I could fault Nietzsche for failing to collect data to support his contention, but the poor guy quite possibly had lots of holes chewed in his brain by vicious spirochaetes, so I'm not inclined to be too hard on him.

[Doodler]

Europe and the US seem to be handling alien invasions well enough already.

[Damien Evans]

well we just lock ours up and ship them to nauru...

[Ronald Brak]

well we just lock ours up and ship them to nauru...

...and maybe the occasional resident who has schizophrenia.

[mugaliens]

What the...?

:question:

"We know that at least one star system (our own) within the Milky Way Galaxy has developed intelligent life . . . that suggests statistics of at least one civilisation per galaxy . . . So, there should be billions of star systems with intelligent civilisations."

Ok, so known life on one planet in a galaxy "suggests statistics of at least one civilization per galaxy..."

Evidently these guys need a crash course in statistics, because it suggests nothing of the kind.

It could be that the odds against life developing here on Earth was a quadrillion to one, which would mean that it would take thousands of galaxies before the event were repeated.

On the other hand, the odds could have been 99.37%, which means that perhaps one out of ten stars has a life-bearing planet on it. For that matter, we haven't been able to rule out some other heavenly bodies in our own solar system having life on them...

[Doodler]

One intelligent civilization per galaxy, and they're going to ignore hundreds of millions of empty star systems in said galaxy and come after ours.

I'm nonplussed.

[LurchGS]

hrm.. let's take a look at some figures...

we know of one object in space that has liquid water on it.
We know of at least two others that *might* have liquid water.
One of these is a planetoid orbiting a gas giant
The other is a ball of rock farther away than I'd go for Hagen Daaz

we know of one object in space that has life on it

it took 4 billion years for life as we know it to evolve on one planet
how long would it take for intelligent live to evolve at the bottom of an icy ocean on a moon, or on a planet in close orbit around a red sun? (of course, we can't answer that - any response would be 95% guesswork)

I've heard a statistician comment that zero and one are perfectly rational numbers. 2, on the other hand, implies infinity.

I'll not comment on Sagan, other than to point out that trying to assign cultural maturity to something for which he has no proof of existence, much less a reasonable sample, is not smart. We get after the ID crowd for similar thought processes - we should apply that rule to our own.

I've not read the book in question. I *have* read John Ringo, Eric Flint, Dave Freer and David Drake. These guys have a lot of experience in conflicts where one side has a decided technical advantage over the other. In a number of cases, the less technological group won. If one of this crowd says that this book is worth looking at, I'm gonna look. (Just like I'd look if BA were to say "this is a great Astronomy book" or if ToSeek were to suggest a web site)

The reporter also belittles the authors because they read Heinlein. Excuse me? If there is a modern author who should be required reading, it's Heinlein. Just because something is currently a little beyond our technology doesn't make it a bad idea. Also, just because it's an OLD idea (6th column) doesn't make it a bad idea.

In my opinion, the authors could have picked a MUCH worse author from whom to pluck ideas, and darn few (if any) better.

Doodler does raise a good point. Of course, the counter to this is easy, once you think on it. IF they come here, there are either no suitable empty planets out there and they hope to take ours, or they are after *us*.

"To Serve Man"

Finally, the critic complains that the book is no fun! Come on, now! since when did fun=good as an absolute? Sure, the book probably isn't fun - but its stated purpose is a serious treatise on national/planetary defense. If you were serious about this issue, would you read a book by Irma Bombeck, or would you rather read a book by General Powell?

[Mister Earl]

Or we can have Will Smith use a captured enemy saucer to deliver a human-written computer virus in a human-designed language that miraculously interfaces with the alien computer systems and causes thier shields to go down.

Meh... I remember the time I saw that movie in the theatres... when they infected the mothership, I remember saying out loud "You gotta be @#$@ing me!" causing lots of "SHH!".

[Doodler]

On the other hand, for some ridiculous reason, they'd written their code to interface with human technology (the signal coordination through satellites), which opened the door to a bug coming back the other way.

[LurchGS]

I agree with Mr Earl - in order to anything with a program, you have to know the language. In order to do something devastating, you have to know the language well. I really really have a hard time with anybody learning an alien computer language sufficiently well in .. what, 24 hours? Sure, it's all just ones and zeros - on human computers - but when was the last time you tried to run a windows application on a Mac?

And.. why not a trinary computer system? We're binary because of the transister - on or off. But an optical computer could use any number of 'states' - say, based on amplitude of the signal, or maybe color...

Fly an alien ship in one try? They assumed that the alien culture would think the way we do - push forward for faster/down, etc. If any ONE of the controls operated differently from our own, that mission would have been scrubbed at the front door - his pilot reflexes would almost certainly cause him to zig instead of zag.

I still enjoyed the movie (I've liked Will Smith for a long time), but combating my disbelief was much more difficult than it should have been.

[Damburger]

As much as I don't like Independence Day, I don't think alien computer technology would have to be fundamentally incompatible with our own. The mathematical principles behind a computer that can compute anything computable are universal, so alien computer languages are going to have many similarities with our own and can probably be picked up by a skilled programmer very quickly.

[Donnie B.]

Fly an alien ship in one try? They assumed that the alien culture would think the way we do - push forward for faster/down, etc. If any ONE of the controls operated differently from our own, that mission would have been scrubbed at the front door - his pilot reflexes would almost certainly cause him to zig instead of zag.In point of fact, the controls on the saucer did work backwards. Smith's character flew in reverse on his first try. He even flipped the sign on the control yoke around afterward (generally got a laugh in theaters, I believe).

I agree that the idea that we could have developed a virus that quickly is ridiculous, especially without any reference manuals, knowledge of the system architecture, or full access to the systems themselves. But hey, it's Hollywood. It was an action/fantasy movie, not a serious S/F film.

[Ronald Brak]

I agree that the idea that we could have developed a virus that quickly is ridiculous, especially without any reference manuals, knowledge of the system architecture, or full access to the systems themselves. But hey, it's Hollywood. It was an action/fantasy movie, not a serious S/F film.

Yes, but those aliens were obviously space Luddites who hated new technology. They hadn't changed the design of their ships since the Roswell incident. And despite having biomechancial suits that were presumably linked to their nervous system somehow, their ships were still operated by manual control. The logical explanation is they hate new technology and were attacking earth to protect themselves from new ideas such as firewalls and passwords and the theory of gravity.

[SeanF]

On the other hand, for some ridiculous reason, they'd written their code to interface with human technology (the signal coordination through satellites), which opened the door to a bug coming back the other way.
Not only that, but the humans did have access to an alien computer system in Area 51. In fact, wasn't it implied that a lot of our basic computer technology was reverse-engineered from the alien technology?

[Noclevername]

If the ID4 aliens had half a brain, they would have stayed in orbit and lazed all our military bases and infrastructure to the ground, instead of blowing up a few monuments of no combat value and then sending in snub fighters to get conveniently shot down. Likewise, any aliens who go through all the trouble of getting here will probably put together tactical and strategic plans before invading; they may even anticipate our guerrilla action. An orbital bombardment does not respond to fifth-column infiltration.

[Moose]

The mathematical principles behind a computer that can compute anything computable are universal, so alien computer languages are going to have many similarities with our own and can probably be picked up by a skilled programmer very quickly.

Really? What base is their computer system using? How many bits to their byte? How many bits long is an instruction? What's the extent of their instruction set? Is add instruction 4 or 17? Do the bits read leftwise or rightwise? In multi-byte storage, does the high-byte come first or last? Where's the sign bit? Is it explicit or implied?

When you have access to a compiler, interpreter, or assembler, these details are covered for you. But they didn't have access to any of these. They had to write raw machine code with absolutely none of this information, no information about network protocols or security, and no information about the OS and vulnerable points within it.

All we "know" is that they've been transmitting signal in binary, and that the 'pattern' used a recognizable number of bits. That's not enough information for a software-based attack, with the possible exception of a DDOS.

I have to disagree with Lurch, though. While I agree that you need advanced knowledge to intentionally and systematically damage a system you've not been granted access to, you don't need to know a system well do to damage inadvertantly.

I once crippled my university unix system while trying to fire up a slow (X-graphical) newsreader using the X-windows panel. I wasn't sure if you had to single-click or double-click. So I tried them. Both. Then again after ten or fifteen seconds as there was no response. By the time my neighbor (and soon to be friend) realized something was up and traced it to me, there were 15 or so newsreader windows trying valiantly to come up, and failing utterly. I learned the "kill -9" and "ps -u myusername" commands that evening.

[mugaliens]

One intelligent civilization per galaxy, and they're going to ignore hundreds of millions of empty star systems in said galaxy and come after ours.

I'm nonplussed.

I'm with you - there's probably a thousands of life-supporting planets, or planets already teaming with simple life, so why would they come after ours, that's teaming with some rather complex nasties such as humans, the flu, or even AIDS?

Stupid aliens...

(I'll probably get smacked by an admin for calling mythical aliens stupid...)

No! No! Wait!!! Aaaahhhh....

[Damburger]

Really? What base is their computer system using? How many bits to their byte? How many bits long is an instruction? What's the extent of their instruction set? Is add instruction 4 or 17? Do the bits read leftwise or rightwise? In multi-byte storage, does the high-byte come first or last? Where's the sign bit? Is it explicit or implied?


Whatever. If it is a computer of any kind it can still be reduced to a Turing machine. The rest can be worked out.


When you have access to a compiler, interpreter, or assembler, these details are covered for you. But they didn't have access to any of these. They had to write raw machine code with absolutely none of this information, no information about network protocols or security, and no information about the OS and vulnerable points within it.

All we "know" is that they've been transmitting signal in binary, and that the 'pattern' used a recognizable number of bits. That's not enough information for a software-based attack, with the possible exception of a DDOS.


They have a small ship with on-board software. That would probably be enough.

[Moose]

Whatever. If it is a computer of any kind it can still be reduced to a Turing machine. The rest can be worked out.

In 24 hours?

They have a small ship with on-board software. That would probably be enough.

You can figure out today's hardware having access to 50 year old technology? Fine.

You have Alan Turing's "Bronze Goddess" as reference hardware. You have 24 hours to write code to bring down a Cray II. You will be allowed to sit in a 50s era phone booth installed in the next room. The phone will be functional. You may use a PC of your choice, but you'll have to do it through the Appletalk protocol across the phone to connect to a Novell RAS server. You will not be provided a modem. You will not be provided with passwords or the network location of the Cray II. The phone gets plugged in five minutes before you're shot.

Go!

[Van Rijn]

I still enjoyed the movie (I've liked Will Smith for a long time), but combating my disbelief was much more difficult than it should have been.

I liked watching a fireball (and obviously intense pressure wave) go past an open door.

[Van Rijn]

In 24 hours?



You can figure out today's hardware having access to 50 year old technology? Fine.

You have Alan Turing's "Bronze Goddess" as reference hardware. You have 24 hours to write code to bring down a Cray II. You will be allowed to sit in a 50s era phone booth installed in the next room. The phone will be functional. You may use a PC of your choice, but you'll have to do it through the Appletalk protocol across the phone to connect to a Novell RAS server. You will not be provided a modem. You will not be provided with passwords or the network location of the Cray II. The phone gets plugged in five minutes before you're shot.

Go!

You just don't get it, do you? The modern Apple computers were based on the work at Xerox Parc, and as everybody knows, the Xerox Star (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star) was based on alien technology. The "Star" in the name is an obvious hint. The folks at Parc were part of a secret government program. They knew that it could one day be important that we know how to program and defeat alien computers, and set forth in a long term program to make us ready. Of course, Steve Jobs was brought in on this. Unfortunately, mind controlled agents working at IBM and Microsoft deliberately introduced incompatible technology, but luckily were not completely successful, and the rest is history.

[LurchGS]

Moose - you did it yourself - 'damage a system you've not been granted access to' - the one you were torturing is one you HAD been granted access to. Breaking into a system you know jack about is insanely difficult. THEN you have to figure what instructions cause things to break. Your problem sounds like just what you mentioned, essentially a DOS attack (though not deliberate... really... :) )

That's hard enough on a system you do know the ins and outs of. On a system you have only a <ahem> peripheral knowledge of? I don't buy it.

Donnie --
As for the flying bit - I didn't say he COULDN'T fly the disk - but that his reflexes would have caused him to crash it. Flying in combat situations is a LOT different from buzzing the airport in your Cessna - you don't *think* about certain things, you just *DO*..It's similar to martial arts - the military spends millions of dollars training specific reflexes into their pilots - the half second it may take to think about something could cost you your life. That's why you are certified in certain aircraft, too- your reflexes are trained to that craft [type]. Put you in a different plane and in an emergency, odds are good that you'll do the WRONG thing.

[Moose]

On a system you have only a <ahem> peripheral knowledge of? I don't buy it.

It was during my first month using UNIX, too. :D

[Moose]

and the rest is history.

I love technological history.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure what this is... ;)

[Damburger]

In 24 hours?



You can figure out today's hardware having access to 50 year old technology? Fine.

You have Alan Turing's "Bronze Goddess" as reference hardware. You have 24 hours to write code to bring down a Cray II. You will be allowed to sit in a 50s era phone booth installed in the next room. The phone will be functional. You may use a PC of your choice, but you'll have to do it through the Appletalk protocol across the phone to connect to a Novell RAS server. You will not be provided a modem. You will not be provided with passwords or the network location of the Cray II. The phone gets plugged in five minutes before you're shot.

Go!

Hey, I didn't say I could do it. My hacking is quite rusty. I mostly do websites these days.

[BigDon]

Oh c'mon guys! Everybody knows the mothership's system didn't crash because they uploaded a virus, it was because they also uploaded Windows 95 at the same time.

[mr obvious]

re:ID4 - Strategically, I wonder why the aliens bothered attack in the first round, when the second round would be the main assault. It seems kind of a waste to give away your intent, so to speak.

If they had done that, I doubt any Defense Plan on our part would have any meaningful effect.

[mugaliens]

Originally Posted by Moose
In 24 hours?

You can figure out today's hardware having access to 50 year old technology? Fine.

You have Alan Turing's "Bronze Goddess" as reference hardware. You have 24 hours to write code to bring down a Cray II. You will be allowed to sit in a 50s era phone booth installed in the next room. The phone will be functional. You may use a PC of your choice, but you'll have to do it through the Appletalk protocol across the phone to connect to a Novell RAS server. You will not be provided a modem. You will not be provided with passwords or the network location of the Cray II. The phone gets plugged in five minutes before you're shot.

Go!

Simple: 10010010100100100101010101010111001101010010010101 0

(It's microcode).

Either that or I could use a bronze sledgehammer, break out of the phone booth, knocking out the guy who's supposed to shoot me, stealing his corporate ID card (with company's name listed) and car keys, driving to the facility using his credit card to pay for gas, using the access card to gain access, and whacking the computer with the sledgehammer.

This usually prevents a reboot, too...

If I can't gain access to the facility, at least I know where it is, and it's really not all that difficult to bring down a region's power grid for more than twenty-four hours. Driving the car into the substation, using the sledgehammer to hold down the gas pedal while I jumped out the door is but one way.

And while I'm certain they would have and UPS for the power-hungry Cray, I'm reasonably certain it's not designed to provide juice for the next 24 hours, but rather, enough to save the current state of the cray's memory to storage before performing a controlled shutdown.

[Moose]

Your solution is physical damage then Mugs? Ironically, it's mine too. Unfortunately, that's not what happened in ID4. The puzzle I proposed is the approximate equivalent in terms of complexity of what they did with 24 hours of preparation and 5 minutes exposure to the network (most of which they spent hiding). Except instead of a physical phone and missing modem, they needed to puzzle out alien Bluetooth and get an appropriate transmitter/receiver on board.

My point is that yes, all of these things can be done, as they have been at some point of history or another. It only took 50 years and the resources of a planet to do it. Yes, it could be reverse-engineered, eventually, but the effort won't be measured in man-hours. (Try man-months to even enter the realm of plausibility.)

I don't care how smart your engineer is, without working low-level software to hand for analysis, or a high-powered microscope to so much as see the meat of a circuit (let alone trace it), you are not answering the questions I've posed. All of which (and others) must be answered before you can even begin to write functional code for a computer.

[cbacba]

Europe and the US seem to be handling alien invasions well enough already.

Only if you consider losing the battle still counts as 'well enough'.

[cbacba]

I'm with you - there's probably a thousands of life-supporting planets, or planets already teaming with simple life, so why would they come after ours, that's teaming with some rather complex nasties such as humans, the flu, or even AIDS?

Stupid aliens...

(I'll probably get smacked by an admin for calling mythical aliens stupid...)

No! No! Wait!!! Aaaahhhh....


They'd probably be coming for lunch - either that or merely floating along in a slow ship looking for the first opportunity of a new homeworld - without having any sort of super light speed abilities.

[mugaliens]

Your solution is physical damage then Mugs? Ironically, it's mine too. Unfortunately, that's not what happened in ID4.

True - they had to hack the mothership so the others would lose control and crash.

But they still nuked the mothership!

[cbacba]

Your solution is physical damage then Mugs? Ironically, it's mine too. Unfortunately, that's not what happened in ID4. The puzzle I proposed is the approximate equivalent in terms of complexity of what they did with 24 hours of preparation and 5 minutes exposure to the network (most of which they spent hiding). Except instead of a physical phone and missing modem, they needed to puzzle out alien Bluetooth and get an appropriate transmitter/receiver on board.

My point is that yes, all of these things can be done, as they have been at some point of history or another. It only took 50 years and the resources of a planet to do it. Yes, it could be reverse-engineered, eventually, but the effort won't be measured in man-hours. (Try man-months to even enter the realm of plausibility.)

I don't care how smart your engineer is, without working low-level software to hand for analysis, or a high-powered microscope to so much as see the meat of a circuit (let alone trace it), you are not answering the questions I've posed. All of which (and others) must be answered before you can even begin to write functional code for a computer.


It'd have made more sense if they had gone there with the intent of wanting to talk to them (establish a meaningful dialog) and accidently screwing up the mo-ship.

As for the war o the worlds combat scenario, that's rather major bs. All they would need is to pick up a few pebbles in the asteroid belt on the way in and drop them from orbit as needed. A few minor nukes engineered for emp set off in orbit would take care of communications and most everything else electronic - assuming they didn't have a simple machine to accomplish the same.

[mugaliens]

They'd probably be coming for lunch - either that or merely floating along in a slow ship looking for the first opportunity of a new homeworld - without having any sort of super light speed abilities.

I agree. If we're ever invaded by aliens, it'll be some form of intelligent fungus which can survive a 100,000-year trip.

[cbacba]

I agree. If we're ever invaded by aliens, it'll be some form of intelligent fungus which can survive a 100,000-year trip.


I agree - ET is probably a fungus. I do have a problem with intellegence, especially on the technology side. It may be that most species adapt biologically whereas some how or another we did so by intellegence and by tool using. Note the stupid report the other day about chimps being more genetically evolved than humans. They're adapting to conditions but not adapting to higher intellegence which implies that intellegence adaptation may be in lieu of genetics. However, most species considered intellegent - whales, dolphins, elephants are not going to have much luck with technology. No fingers, no opposing thumbs there and those elephants - well how far are they going to get trying to be dextrous in dealing with tools and technology using their nose?

We witness the dinosaur evidence. Bigger teeth and bigger claws made for good adaptation till everything went to hell in a handbasket and being big was bad news. Maybe raptors developed some iq, enough to work in teams and do some sort of abstract thinking associated with hunting - but it still came down to big teeth and big sharp claws.

Consequently, I've come to a few conclusions. First, that multicellular life forms are most likely a heck of a lot rarer than single cell forms, requiring inordinate amounts of rather stable development time which is probably very rare in our particularly turbulent universe full of gargantuan destructive events that doubtlessly provide a quality job of sterilizing vast regions. Second, intellegent life is far rarer than multicellular life. Intellegence is a very poorly defined concept, but lets say capable of communicating with each other beyond a bit of emotion, perhaps the ability to count - gotta get beyond puppy dogs here. Third, technology based intellegent life is required to be able to travel from planet to planet and that requires both intellegence and the ability to utilize technology - which won't be developed unless needed.

Once those conditions exist, then comes the next requirement, that technology be advanced (it must progress). We can see that even in human societies, technological development is not uniform or consistant. Some forms of societies are more amenable to technological development than others. In some, survival of the society (or perhaps survival of those controlling it) is what drives technological evolution and barring that, innovation may be virtually oppressed. In others, this evolution of innovation is promoted by factors in society other than the controlling factors (private sector vs gov. sector). Considering how fragile and varied technological progress is in our societies, one has to consider that it is also a rare commodity compared to even potential intellegent alien technological societies.

As for fungus and bacteria, it's possible that earth life came via panspermia (not invented here syndrome) at least at some stage and so we might have some relationship to alien fungus and bacteria. If that's the case, we could still possibly be 'lunch'. If not, then it's quite possible that we might not be digestible - but who knows about steel and alumininum in that case.

Again, the nature of intellegence comes up as what is the intellegence of multiorganism systems - like termite mounds and ant colonies. Is there a societal intellegence - above and beyond that of the individuals that compose it? One can even look at gov. bureaucracies and see it is a multiorganism entity with certain basic attributes such as a desire to feed and expand and continue its existance. Note though this is not really an intellegent entity, despite being composed of truly intellegent organisms (bureaucrats).

Anyways, that's why I figure mr spock and ET are fungus and that doesn't mean intellegent fungus or intellegent colonies of fungus. LOL

[LurchGS]

. <snip>
Consequently, I've come to a few conclusions. First, that multicellular life forms are most likely a heck of a lot rarer than single cell forms, requiring inordinate amounts of rather stable development time which is probably very rare in our particularly turbulent universe full of gargantuan destructive events that doubtlessly provide a quality job of sterilizing vast regions. Second, intellegent life is far rarer than multicellular life. Intellegence is a very poorly defined concept, but lets say capable of communicating with each other beyond a bit of emotion, perhaps the ability to count - gotta get beyond puppy dogs here. Third, technology based intellegent life is required to be able to travel from planet to planet and that requires both intellegence and the ability to utilize technology - which won't be developed unless needed.


I'll pick on this supposition alone.. I disagree. Life seeks to propagate. That generally means eliminating competition for resources. At a certain size, single cells can't support themselves - so, smaller ones clump together to gang up on singles. Larger clumps gang up on smaller clumps, and so on.

Pretty soon, you have cells that devote themselves to supporting the others (moving food/waste, moving the entire structure to the mouth can get to the food)

After that, it becomes a search for the *best* way to move the mouth. This is going to happen anywhere life arises.

At present, on this planet, *we* are the best way to move the mouth to the food, and barring planet killing devestation, we're likely to stay that way. Along with our ability to consume a very wide range of energy sources, we've got intelligence to point out competition - and eliminate it.

And, when you get right down to it, almost every other living creature on this planet is competition. If we start getting *hungry*, a lot of critters are going to suddenly find themselves very, very, lonely.

[Maksutov]

I love technological history.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure what this is... ;)Well if Lotus Jazz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Jazz) could make yuppies dance (http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?page_id=8241), then anything within the realm of software/hardware is possible.