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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Many people, Samizdatistas included, have wondered just where all of those billions of dollars of UN Oil for Food money went. It was rather apparent food and medicine were among the last things for which they were used.
Someone has finally decided to audit the accounts. According to Senior CPA Advisor Dan Senor:
In response to allegations of the former regime’s misconduct in the
administration of the oil-for-food program, Ambassador Bremer has issued a directive to interim Iraqi ministers, CPA senior advisors and regional governance coordinators to safeguard all information related to the oil-for-food program. This includes contracts, amendments and annexes to contracts and supporting materials. The directive stated that documents should be inventoried and recorded and inventories provided to CPA as soon as possible. Irregularities, including any evidence of bribes, kickbacks or corruption, should be noted. CPA officials will review submitted inventories and may seek access to any or all records associated with the oil-for-food program. These documents will be made available to investigations, some of which are being conducted by the United Nations, the U.S. Congress and Iraqi officials. The coalition is also assisting interim Iraqi ministers in identifying any current ministry officials who may have knowledge of misconduct arising from the administration of the oil-for-food program.
I can hardly wait to find out which bureaucracy embezzled more: the United Nations or Saddam’s Baathists.
Here is a new hack that has been making the rounds of the computer security community. It seems bluetooth lays many very common mobile phones wide open to one or more attacks. On at least one Nokia (the very one I have in fact), someone walking past you on the street can lift your entire address book and calendar even if your Bluetooth setting is HIDDEN. There are other sorts of possible abuse as well: read the article.
No, I did not get caught out. I spend too much time in bad company to trust any system which hasn’t been source-code audited by people I trust. Since mobile phones are all based on proprietary code, I have always taken the precaution of only enabling such features (on mobiles or other systems) during time of use.
For those of you who religiously follow slashdot, this is probably not news. Most of our readers are not engineers so this may be news to them.
If you have bluetooth, turn the bloody thing OFF!!!!
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.
Did you know your twenty dollar bills have RFID tags in them? That is what these people think… and they have the burned bills to prove it.
A year or so ago I suggested microwaving as a way to de-louse items with RFID tags in them. From the state of the bills in the picture, I think we will need a gentler method of disinfection.
It is apparent to me that the chips are just soaking up too much energy from the rather high intensity inside an oven. It doesn’t really take all that much to waste a chip so a much milder power source is called for. Suggestions and experimental results are welcome.
All you need is some engineering creativity and money to burn.
Our good friends at Slugger O’Toole were featured on the Northern Ireland TV show “Hearts and Minds” tonight. Politicians from across the spectrum heaped praise on what the blog has accomplished for local politics.
We had Mick Fealty’s smiling face in multiple cuts. The previous time I saw it was after about six pints (or so) in the local, well… locals some months ago. He didn’t look quite the same on TV as when I last saw him that night, searching for his coat under the legs at the bar…
There is a reason why the military is one of the few areas in which the State operates successfully. It is Darwinian. Bad soldiers die at a faster rate than good soldiers; bad generals lose battles and are replaced; nations with bad armies cease to exist.
So it is with defense programs in war time. No matter how technically sweet a weapon system may be, it must fulfill an actual current battlefield need. It must be able to survive in the battlefield that actually exists and perform the actual missions required in war as it is, rather than as it was imagined.
So it is with heavy heart we say goodbye to a truly magnificent and now still-born aircraft: the Comanche. The US Army announced it will be cancelled. The money will instead be used to buy more Longbows and Blackhawks and to upgrade survivability across the fleet and especially in the National Guard units.
The SAM’s of Iraq spoke… and the US Army listened.
What does the FBI do if it has a search warrant to track down one miscreant on a network? Why they seize the whole data centre of course!
I’ll attempt to make the seriousness of this more apparent in a non-cyber world example. Imagine the local police are looking for a document that is evidence of a possible crime. The Judge gives them a warrant based on probable cause. When they search the file cabinet at that address, they can’t find what they are looking for. So they corden off the entire apartment building and seize all the file cabinets containing all of the personal and business records of everyone living there. They cart those off with total disregard to the impact on lives and businesses. Then they tell everyone their file cabinets will be returned as soon as they’ve made a permanent State copy of their entire contents.
What sort of society would you say you were living in if that happened?
About a year ago I predicted the US was in the first stages of disentangling itself from global tarbabies. Invading Iraq was one of the items I expected as there was no real path out of the Middle East so long as Saddam was there. Northern and Southern Watch would have continued for decades. This is not to say America will not be stuck there for quite a few years to come, only that there is a plausible exit strategy where there once was none.
The BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) process is due to culminate in a report in mid-March and will include what may well be the greatest re-organization of American overseas basing since the end of WWII. I expect to see the buzz word ‘capabilities based defense’ used as an explanation for greatly decreased numbers of Americans in overseas bases.
The third part is South Korea, and I give you these two items from Jane’s to take as thou wilt:
Seoul’s AEW&C buy will reduce reliance on US.
The relaunch of the E-X airborne early-warning and control (AEW&C) programme by the Republic of Korea (RoK) Ministry of National Defence (MND) on 4 February is intended to reduce the country’s reliance on US Air Force E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS) aircraft (JDW 11 February).
[Jane’s Defence Weekly – first posted to http://jdw.janes.com – 13 February 2004]
South Korea haggles over procurement programme. The Republic of Korea Ministry of National Defence (MND) established its Korea Multirole Helicopter (KMH) Programme Management Office (PMO) last month to lead the country’s largest-ever defence procurement programme, with a value of some $12.5 billion.
[Jane’s Defence Weekly – first posted to http://jdw.janes.com – 13 February 2004]
We will see agreements for unrestricted bases containing pre-positioned supplies in in places convenient to expected trouble spots. There will only be enough local American staff to handle peace-time security, inventory and infrastructure. Perhaps there will be some intelligence, training and Special Forces as well, but the ‘footprint’ will be small. As much as possible will be handled by civilians, on base where absolutely required and otherwise ‘outsourced’ to a back-office in the US.
Naval basing will be an exception. A primarily maritime power still needs home ports for the Fleet that are within reasonable sailing distances of trouble spots.
We are entering an era in which our military will be kept at home and deployed only when and where required. It will take most of this decade to get there.
After reading this article you will no doubt sense a bit of hostility towards Senator Kerry from young Iranians:
We have read how you refer to the theocratic regime in Iran as a ‘democracy’ we have heard how, if elected, as the president of the United States you intend to ‘engage’ this barbaric regime; this very terrorist regime that your own State Department lists as the most active ‘State Sponsor of Terrorism’.
Why is it, Senator, in all your statements, you don’t, even once, mention the oppressed and suffering masses of Iran? Obviously, as long as there is such preoccupation with appeasing the regime the people of Iran don’t even enter your equation!
These are among the less heated statements about Kerry’s plans to work closely with terrorists or ‘engage’ them if you will. I really would be interested in knowing what new set of american values he intends to institute. Like the Iranian students, I cannot see how any existing ones would apply.
Do you remember Liberia? There was a big fuss about it awhile back. Yeah, that one, the place in West Africa. The one with the bridge surface scattered with enough brass to build a Napoleonic cannon. The one with the guys who couldn’t hit a barn door at point blank range with a full AK47 clip.
It seems the post-Taylor era is working out as well as could have been expected. The violence has subsided, bands of marauding ‘rebels’ are disarming, loads of aid is flowing in and the new government is in place. Unknown to most of us, due to lack of media interest, US President Bush found time to keep on top of the affair and meet with Liberians.
Colin Powell says the former ‘President’ of Liberia will eventually pay for his crimes.
You can catch up on it here. You have not been hearing much because without doom and gloom, where is the story?
If you believed the media you would think there were no place in the world without a dead body or two casually laying about.
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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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