Cupid

tlb wrote:But it does raise a question or more. How many petabytes of data are involved? What is the smallest portable device that could hold that amount of data in the Honorverse? If a thumb drive can hold multiple petabytes there, then what proof could ever be offered that copies were not made before the explosion?

The value of this would be diluted if too many copies existed and somehow fell into someone else's hands. Someone else's priorities may be different from North Hollow's, so they could choose to use the tidbits of pressure for other things.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:But it does raise a question or more. How many petabytes of data are involved? What is the smallest portable device that could hold that amount of data in the Honorverse? If a thumb drive can hold multiple petabytes there, then what proof could ever be offered that copies were not made before the explosion?

The value of this would be diluted if too many copies existed and somehow fell into someone else's hands. Someone else's priorities may be different from North Hollow's, so they could choose to use the tidbits of pressure for other things.

I did some math awhile back, you can fit ~100 Micro SD cards in a roughly 1 cubic inch box, and the latest version holds 1.5 TB/ card. So today we can easily get PB in less than a 2" square cube.

We'll probably see another 2-3 doublings of performance on SD cards in the next 5-10 years (Moore's Law 18 months doubling performance/halving costs), so seeing micro SD cards in the 10 TB range is not that outrageous. In which case, we're looking at a PB in a 1 cubic inch package or less in the near future.

So yes, a multiple PB "thumbdrive" isn't a crazy thought in the Honorverse.

You can bet that were at least was 1 backup copy somewhere - computer data handling being a standard thought in the future. Being the nature of the data, probably a offline backup drive in a very secure facility.

Georgia would have to make sure any backup was destroyed as well as the main database. Today it's impossible to verify if data has been copied unless special software is running on the PC, and even then it is possible to circumvent if you have physical access to the hardware. And backup drives (beyond encryption) offer no protection from copying, nor record of any activity.

Perhaps I am in error, but I think Georgia lamented about not having time to make any backups.

tlb wrote:I suggest Shannon Foraker and Herlander Simões; both are similar and it would be poignant, if their daughter proved to be a mathematics genius.

Shannon_Foraker wrote:Or, a threesome of Shannon, Sonja and Herlander.

For fun I could propose a match between Aldona Anisimovna and Tom Theisman (if their orientations matched), but that suffers from the same major defect as Lady Georgia Young and Jeremy X when compared to Shannon, Sonja and Herlander: proximity. Even if Aldona had been left behind as a free agent, there is no way that various intelligence services would let her near Tom; Georgia has a similar problem, in that there is no way she would allow herself to knowingly get near anyone from the Ballroom. Shannon, Sonja and Herlander, on the other hand, have numerous opportunities to meet and get to know each other during work at Bolthole and during whatever nightlife Bolthole offers.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:I suggest Shannon Foraker and Herlander Simões; both are similar and it would be poignant, if their daughter proved to be a mathematics genius.

Shannon_Foraker wrote:Or, a threesome of Shannon, Sonja and Herlander.

For fun I could propose a match between Aldona Anisimovna and Tom Theisman (if their orientations matched), but that suffers from the same major defect as Lady Georgia Young and Jeremy X when compared to Shannon, Sonja and Herlander: proximity. Even if Aldona had been left behind as a free agent, there is no way that various intelligence services would let her near Tom; Georgia has a similar problem, in that there is no way she would allow herself to knowingly get near anyone from the Ballroom. Shannon, Sonja and Herlander, on the other hand, have numerous opportunities to meet and get to know each other during work at Bolthole and during whatever nightlife Bolthole offers.

Awww, I was hoping to keep Aldona all to myself, but we Cupists are not supposed to fall in love with our charges.

I love the idea though. Talk about my previous notion of a power couple! My deviousness can foresee lots of good resulting from that union.

BTW, I need to check and see if Aldona is listed on the Top Ten Tacticians, Strategists list. Her long range complex devious plans are legendary.

But talk about pushing Tom to great heights politically. With Aldona's pillow talk in his ear, perhaps Tom will finally accept the notion of succeeding Pritchart.

You know what they say, "Behind every great man there stands a great woman."

cthia wrote:Awww, I was hoping to keep Aldona all to myself, but we Cupists are not supposed to fall in love with our charges.

I was not aware of "Cupist", so I looked it up. There is a company and this is their webpage:

CUPIST Inc. Details wrote:Throughout history, "love", has taken many different forms, values, and stories. Even when the word itself did not exist, it was still there. As representatives of Cupid, Cupist envisions a world where there is not one fixed version of love, but a world that respects all different forms, values, and stories of love. We strongly believe that the world would be a better place when everyone can freely express their own version of love and satisfy their desires of love. As our motto reads, "Do not define love". This allows us to look at the world from different perspectives and drives us to wake up every day to work towards a world in which everyone's desires of love are satisfied. Currently, Cupist runs a dating app called Glam and a sex toy brand, LOMA. However, we are not done just yet. We are looking to expand our portfolio into other areas such as robots and others to fulfill our brand mission of "Satisfy the desires of love". There are more projects to come to fulfill our mission and contribute to a better, happier world.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Awww, I was hoping to keep Aldona all to myself, but we Cupists are not supposed to fall in love with our charges.

I was not aware of "Cupist", so I looked it up. There is a company and this is their webpage:

CUPIST Inc. Details wrote:Throughout history, "love", has taken many different forms, values, and stories. Even when the word itself did not exist, it was still there. As representatives of Cupid, Cupist envisions a world where there is not one fixed version of love, but a world that respects all different forms, values, and stories of love. We strongly believe that the world would be a better place when everyone can freely express their own version of love and satisfy their desires of love. As our motto reads, "Do not define love". This allows us to look at the world from different perspectives and drives us to wake up every day to work towards a world in which everyone's desires of love are satisfied. Currently, Cupist runs a dating app called Glam and a sex toy brand, LOMA. However, we are not done just yet. We are looking to expand our portfolio into other areas such as robots and others to fulfill our brand mission of "Satisfy the desires of love". There are more projects to come to fulfill our mission and contribute to a better, happier world.

I thought I was coining a word. Wordplay. Their website began in 2015, I first used the term in 2014.

I did mention that I am a "senior level" Cupist?

Theemile wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The value of this would be diluted if too many copies existed and somehow fell into someone else's hands. Someone else's priorities may be different from North Hollow's, so they could choose to use the tidbits of pressure for other things.

So yes, a multiple PB "thumbdrive" isn't a crazy thought in the Honorverse.

You can bet that were at least was 1 backup copy somewhere - computer data handling being a standard thought in the future. Being the nature of the data, probably a offline backup drive in a very secure facility.

Georgia would have to make sure any backup was destroyed as well as the main database. Today it's impossible to verify if data has been copied unless special software is running on the PC, and even then it is possible to circumvent if you have physical access to the hardware. And backup drives (beyond encryption) offer no protection from copying, nor record of any activity.

I think it was Pavel's grandfather (9th Lord North Hollow) who started the infamous files, so ~3 generations of intel gathered, but the moment it started getting used, it would be extremely difficult keeping any possible off-site backups updated. Because once they started blackmailing anybody of importance, they'd have a pretty hard time sneaking anybody to any established Data Protection Facilities. Which means any backups are going to almost literally be "under a bed" because the Lords of North Hollow couldn't afford to let ANYBODY know where they might be keeping backups that could be hacked, deleted, or stolen.

However we also know that in at least one case, Pavel raped his own family servant (a pilot iirc) and his father used blackmail to keep it hushed up. Which implies some of the North Hollow files may have been used against their own employees/servants. Do you REALLY think they trusted people they were blackmailing with backups of the very same information you're using against them and countless others?


Dmitri Young was born somewhere in the 1810s PD, and prolong only became available to Manticore around 1820ish, so the 9th Lord of North Hollow had a maximum life expectancy of around 100, due to likely being as obese as his son and grandson were (Pavel was headed that way fast for being only ~47 upon death). So logically the 9th Lord North Hollow likely started his blackmailing by as early as ~1750-1760.

We do know Dmitri Young used the leverage from the infamous files to help grow it, and we can make a good guess that Grandpa North Hollow had to have done the same, otherwise Dmitri wouldn't have had as much influence. Especially not to track down things like how Janacek used insider information to sell his stocks with a military contractor and sparked a Market Crash prior to legal proceedings, despite Janacek using shell companies and other methods to avoid being traced.


The "seed file" backups that the 9th Lord North Hollow used to kickstart the whole process are no longer truly valuable to anybody except historians due to sheer age. Few families after almost 200 years would be willing to agree to anything a Young tried to make them do illegally. And Stefan strikes me as the sort of stupid who actually would leak to the press any remaining blackmail he may have in a fit of pique, to which the family in question simply has to admit that "yes we once let the Youngs blackmail us in the past, but when he tried to do it this month we refused to tarnish our name by helping them again." and Stefan lands himself in a nice prison cell right then and there.

Stefan getting imprisoned might actually kill the North Hollow title entirely, do we know of ANY other relatives who could take the seat? 'Georgia' Young is, afaik, still presumed dead in the explosion and I don't recall hearing of any other siblings or cousins, so would North Hollow revert to the Crown?

Somtaaw wrote:Stefan getting imprisoned might actually kill the North Hollow title entirely, do we know of ANY other relatives who could take the seat? 'Georgia' Young is, afaik, still presumed dead in the explosion and I don't recall hearing of any other siblings or cousins, so would North Hollow revert to the Crown?

It's possible Manticore has a law that allows the Crown or Parliament or both together to take a title over and extinguish the line. We do know that the title of Crystal Pine reverted to the Crown after the first and only Baroness Crystal Pine was convicted of orchestrating the murder of Duke of Serisburg, which is the only other title we know to have reverted to the Crown. In the case of Serisburg, we know the last Duke died with no issue and no relatives who could claim the title; Baroness Crystal Pine was unmarried so she had no children to inherit the title, but she may have cousins and we do know that titles can go to cousins (Devon Harrington inherited the title from his cousin, when she was presumed dead).

But those cases were at the dawn of the Star Kingdom and within one generation of the last strike of the Plague, so the inheritance lines were fragile.

If there's any title that would deserve being extinguished for wrongdoing, it would be North Hollow's. Except that the proceedings to do so might embarrass too many people and would require those very same records that were destroyed. So it's entirely possible that no such thing happened and a distant cousin of Stefan inherited the title.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Stefan getting imprisoned might actually kill the North Hollow title entirely, do we know of ANY other relatives who could take the seat? 'Georgia' Young is, afaik, still presumed dead in the explosion and I don't recall hearing of any other siblings or cousins, so would North Hollow revert to the Crown?

It's possible Manticore has a law that allows the Crown or Parliament or both together to take a title over and extinguish the line. We do know that the title of Crystal Pine reverted to the Crown after the first and only Baroness Crystal Pine was convicted of orchestrating the murder of Duke of Serisburg, which is the only other title we know to have reverted to the Crown. In the case of Serisburg, we know the last Duke died with no issue and no relatives who could claim the title; Baroness Crystal Pine was unmarried so she had no children to inherit the title, but she may have cousins and we do know that titles can go to cousins (Devon Harrington inherited the title from his cousin, when she was presumed dead).

But those cases were at the dawn of the Star Kingdom and within one generation of the last strike of the Plague, so the inheritance lines were fragile.

If there's any title that would deserve being extinguished for wrongdoing, it would be North Hollow's. Except that the proceedings to do so might embarrass too many people and would require those very same records that were destroyed. So it's entirely possible that no such thing happened and a distant cousin of Stefan inherited the title.

So, conceivably, Georgia could end up with everything? I'd like that very much.

From slave, to rags, to riches, to royalty. The Lord sure works in mysterious ways.