We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The naming of planets is a difficult matter. Sedna may have strong references for the Inuit, but it means nothing at all to most of us. You could argue that Sedna is more thrilling than the planetoid’s original designation, 2003 VB12, but it doesn’t conjure up a fitting title for inclusion in Holst’s The Planets.
However, the sinister appearance of a red planet (and possible moon) reminds me of Dr. Who’s deadly enemies, cursed to wonder the frigid spaceways, enshrined in their tombs. Is this not the tenth planet, home of the Cybermen? And surely there can be no more fitting name than Mondas.
Prepare for child-like logic, silver suits and a puzzling vulnerability to gold.
Computerworld has an opinion article by Jay Cline about the privacy scare surrounding RFID technology who explains that the RFID hype has outpaced reality. Manufacturers and retailers have yet to agree on a universal electronic product code. RFID scanning is also far from error-free. But more important, RFID signals are so weak that they’re easily blocked by metals and dense liquids. It’s infeasible today for someone driving a vehicle down your street to intercept signals from RFID-tagged goods inside your home.
He also argues that the economics of RFID chips also limit how they’re used. Until the price of RFID chips comes down to about a penny apiece, they’ll mostly be used at the case and pallet level, clear of any personally identifiable activity. So we have several years to identify the privacy controls we want to see in RFID systems. Some companies are already creating these privacy controls. Chip makers and users are discussing how the principles of data privacy could be built into the RFID process. A top priority is notifying customers that certain items are tagged with these transmitters – which could be done by placing a common RFID logo on product packages. To give customers the ability to turn off the transmitters, some companies plan to make them peel-offs. RSA Security Inc. is also developing a chip that could be worn on watches or bags to block nearby RFIDs from transmitting certain information. So the RFID privacy ball is rolling.
Glad to hear that. Nevertheless, I will still be watching the RFID development with interest…
The first year of the DARPA Challenge race was held a few days ago and as expected, except by journalists, no one completed the 142 mile course. The prize of $1 Million will go to the first team to make it to the finish line. What makes this special is the vehicle must drive itself, off road, for 142 miles… with no human intervention. This is so far beyond the current state of the art it hardly bears discussion. The prize, while large, will not even cover the costs of one contestant for one year. They are out for the Challenge of doing something which ‘cannot be done’. The possibility of recognition gives them the excuse to do it… and helps win sponsorships.
Now, as to the home team… Regular readers doubtless know I am a Carnegie-Mellon engineer and that I spent a good chunk of my life in and around the place for one reason or another. In particular, I was a staff member of the Robotics Institute for awhile, so I must admit to a desire to cheer when I discovered the computerized Humvee of the Red Team of Dr Red Whitaker travelled the furthest (7 miles) of all but one of this years contestants. Only SciAutonics II managed the same distance.
If you look more closely at the times you will notice rather less equality in the performances. Red Team travelled the seven miles in about 40 minutes or so while SciAutonics II required two hours more. Seven miles in 40 minutes may be a bit slow, but seven miles in in two hours and forty minutes is positively glacial.
The race will be held again in one year and I predict we will see spectacular technical advances in autonomous robotics and a winner before the end of the contest in 2007.
CMU will win the prize of course.
Things have been awfully quiet (officially at least) over at XCOR. They are busy working on their suborbital spaceship design, Xerus is still in early days and remains a paper spaceship. However, unlike many other designs which exist only in POVRAY renderings, the engine technology is real and the team has already proven itself by building and flying and reflying and display flying a rocket plane.
Watch that space.
PS: They are also your fellow Samizdata readers, our ‘home team’ in the X-Prize contest as it were.
Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne has been repaired. As you may remember, the portside gear lock failed and the strut collapsed on landing after the historic first private rocket-powered supersonic flight on December 17th 2003. The recent March 11th test was an unpowered drop test. Beside the reported objectives it is likely they wanted at least one unpowered test to be certain of the gear and airframe repairs. As my flying instructor used to say, the most dangerous time to fly an aeroplane is the day you get it out of the shop at the local FBO.
Objectives: The twelfth flight of SpaceShipOne. Objectives included: pilot proficiency, reaction control system functionality check and stability and control and performance of the vehicle with the airframe thermal protection system installed. This was an unpowered glide test.
Results: Launch conditions were 48,500 feet and 125 knots. All systems performed as expected and the vehicle landed successfully while demonstrating the maximum cross wind landing capability.
According to a ‘knowedgeable aerospace source’, there is still a lot of envelope to test before they get to a ‘hot’ re-entry.
Rutan holds the distance record (non-stop around the world) and will soon hold the alititude record. A speed run would net him the third leg of the triple crown. This makes one wonder if the ablative they are using could handle the severe heat loads of ultra high-speed flight for long enough to allow such a record attempt.
It is perhaps something for Rutan to think about after he wins the X-Prize… and before he sends SpaceShipOne to join Voyager in the National Air and Space Museum.
Given my extremely low expectations, it takes a lot for a British government to actually amaze me.
Well they have managed to do exactly that. The people who rule us are not misguided, they are actually evil.
It takes a lot to amaze me, but Blunkett has done just that.
WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?
An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.
On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.
This is insane. The state locks someone up unjustly and then demands payment for room and board? This is the true face of the people who have power over us. It is actually evil.
If this astonishing development does not cause the mother of all political storms both in Westminster and society at large, then Britain as a society has clearly become so inured to authoritarianism and arrogance by its rulers that we must be past the point of no return. Blunkett must go. Now!
A mercifully uneventful journey for me on the London Underground this morning. Nonetheless, I reached my destination feeling ever-so-slightly disturbed.
No, I did not see anyone holding a Koran and muttering incantations while trying to wire two batteries together. Worse still, what I noticed was quite a few teenagers (who boarded and alighted separately so unlikley to be a group) dressed entirely in full-on, recreation 60’s hippy gear. Yes, I do mean the Indian scarfs, the bell-bottom jeans, flowers-in-hair, tie-dye T-shirts and white lipstick. And the girls were dressed exactly the same.
I was shocked, I tell you, shocked. Is this the latest trend? Is this what is ‘hot and happening’ among the ‘yoof’? Has anybody else observed this elsewhere? In America? Europe? Australia? Israel? Japan? Anywhere? Or is just the UK? Or perhaps just London?
I assure you this was not a mirage. These youngsters were genuine retro-hippies but what I want to know is whether this is the burgeoning new fashion or merely some isolated cases of severe mental disturbance that happened, by pure coincidence, to be travelling on the same train as me?
If it is a case of the former then I have a message for any impressionable teenagers who might be reading this and feeling the temptation to abandon themselves to a re-heated Age of Aquarius: for chrissakes, get a grip!!
I realise that you are too young to have been psychologically scarred by the 60’s first time round but, for heaven’s sake, do you realise just how nauseatingly sanctimonious all this flower-power mummery can be? What the world needs now is not love, sweet love but a swift and well-aimed kick up the jacksy. The last thing we need is for heaps of you to start mooning around looking for your Shakra. Or growing organic lentils on a commune in Wales.
So just stop it. Now
Of course, today’s teenagers can hardly be blamed for the cultural stony-desert in which we presently dwell but since they are forced to go trawling through the archives of late 20th Century youth sub-cultures for inspiration then I sincerely hope that they have the good sense and common decency to revive the snarling, anarchic (and far better dressed) age of Punk Rock.
Following last week’s atrocity in Madrid, the media are reporting London Underground’s plans to increase security. These plans include more plain clothes police patrolling the network and encouraging passengers to be vigilant.
There’s another aspect to the plans not mentioned in most reports. According to the BBC:
British Transport Police have also said more people using the Tube will be randomly stopped and searched
Increased security is definitely welcome, however random stop and search is worrying. It is vital that any such moves be clearly seen as a limited response to a specific threat and not allowed to become standard operating procedure.
Do we really want to live in a country where being randomly stopped and searched is considered an acceptable part of everyday life?
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Some of those opposed to the military ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime, such as libertarian isolationists like Jim Henley, for instance, have repeatedly maintained that there was little or no regular and operational contact between the unlamented dictator and operatives of al-Qaeda and other radical islamist forces. The lack of a clear link remains a central plank of opposition to George W. Bush’s doctrine of going after regimes which sponsor terror. At most, such critics contend that the Iraq links were no more than low-level and no justification for military action. Of course, much of the evidence for a link prior to 9/11 was circumstantial at best.
Well, if it were the case that no link existed, why did the statement purporting to be from al-Qaeda after the Madrid atrocities make such a big deal of Spain’s involvement in the Iraq liberation, when, according to the naysayers, Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda? In fact, the Islamo-fascists seem more convinced of a common cause with the fate of Saddam and his regime than antiwar types seem to do. Curious.
Of course, it may be that the islamists are opportunists, perceiving that anything that can sow discord between European nations and between Europe and the US is a good thing. It may also be the case that the islamists believe that any incursion by western, secular forces into a region they deem off-limits is a dishonour to them, and hence justification for retaliation. They obviously do not extend their islamic embrace to Shiite muslims, whom they have massacred in the hundreds.
Even so, the very fact that the Iraq and Afghan operations were mentioned as ‘justifications’ for the Madrid massacres ought to give pause to those who claim that those countries’ regimes had had no direct connection to islamist forces. Ousting the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were two major blows against fundamentalist terror. The terrorists know this better than anyone, which is why the message coming out of Spanish politics today is so troubling.
It is a very nervous time for those of us in Britain stupid enough to be self-employed, in this age of grasping government. Because Gordon Brown is desperately short of cash and he is also desperately scared of raising any more income tax from voters employed by large organisations. So where does that leave him? It leaves him staring at me and a few other hardy self-employed souls standing out here in living-on-our-own-wits land, ready to take the hit to fill his £10 billion black hole of unfunded borrowing.
Gordon Brown is a great fat sweating thieving spurt of the devil and I hate him with every twisted fibre of my being. But I think I am going to hate him even more on Thursday morning, after his UK government budget statement on Wednesday, because the small print is almost certainly going to show me owing Her Majesty’s Government up to 70% of my direct ill-gotten income, which I currently exploit out of the oppressed banks and City corporations of England.
If he does do this, by making me pay all sorts of national insurances on dividend income, for benefits I am ineligible to claim, to try to effectively turn me into an employee of the state, he may be clever enough to remove all of the wheezes we use out here in self-employed land, to get ourselves off the hook.
→ Continue reading: Entering Gordon’s black hole
Kids in Lee county, Florida are being thumb printed every time they get on or off a school bus. Yes, you read that right, thumb printed, in the name of safety. Could somebody please explain to me how thumb printing a kid when they get on or off a school bus increases their safety by one iota?
Is there any stupid idea that someone, somewhere won’t try and implement in the name of almighty safety? Good lord, this just boggles my mind! And what’s really sad is that these kids are going to grow up with this, never knowing a time when you didn’t just present your thumb print or any other identifying feature whenever asked. They’ll be used to constantly being surveilled and tracked, their lives fed into a computer and analyzed — all for their own good, of course. They’ll also never know a time when they didn’t have to watch anything they did or said because ears are everywhere and there is always some dipstick with a moronic zero-tolerance (zero-thought, more like) policy ready to toss you out on your ear should you say or do the slightest thing they might not like.
I read these stories, I wonder what kind of generation is being raised under these ludicrous “safety” rules, and I despair.
– Myria of It Can’t Rain All The Time
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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