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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Sometimes the lads at NASA are slow learners. Back in 1989, George Koopman of AMROC offered to replace the dangerous Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB’s) of the Space Shuttle with a safe, throttleable hybrid version. NASA wasn’t interested and not long after George’s tragic death in a car accident, AMROC folded.
But never fear! Fourteen years later, NASA has discovered hybrids! Better late than never I suppose.
Why, you may ask, am I making such a big deal about a hybrid replacement for the SRB’s? They fixed all the problems on the Shuttle after the Challenger didn’t they?
No. They did not. Not because they didn’t want to, but because there is one problem inherent in the STS design which can’t be fixed without a big change: SRB’s cannot be shut down. Once those candles light, there is no survivable abort until they have burned out and SRBSEP has occured. (That’s “Solid Rocket Booster Seperation” in laymanese). You can’t do an early SEP either. I’ll try to explain why.
The current SRB’s are basically very large skyrockets. So large they have to be built in segments (with O-ring sealing gaskets in between the bolted together sections) because quality control on pouring the fuel/oxidizer mixture inside would be a nightmare on something that big. The stuff must be perfectly regular inside and have no voids (bubbles). There is a shaped void down the centerline which must be of the right shape. The SRB’s are ignited from the top and since the mixture contains both the fuel and the oxidizer, once they start burning, there is no stopping them until the gunk is all gone.
There is a way to stop the thrust however; there are explosive charges that blow the endcaps at an appropriate time so that dropped SRB’s don’t go flying off on their last legs somewhere they shouldn’t; opening the tube can also act as a brake. The recovery chutes are up there as well.
→ Continue reading: Light that candle!
The stories are circulating. President Bush will announce backing for the NASA Prometheus Project during his January 28th State of the Union Address. This is an effort to design and build an advanced, nuclear based rocket engine for manned solar system missions.
It is a major step forward for those of us who have spent our lives fighting to open the high frontier. My preference is for everything to be commercial and private, but I recognize there is simply no way on Earth this kind of propulsion system can be privately built in the political reality we live in.
If built, it suddenly makes the Moon an economically feasible place to do business and Mars a place that is reachable for settlement within our life times.
Given what I know of some of the people whom the Bush administration brought in for space policy, I expected good things. Even though I have been aware of such ideas being floated for over a year now, I was not prepared for goodness on this scale.
I intend to buy one of them a pint the next time I’m in DC.
Back when I was running an ISP here in Belfast, I was a regular reader and occasional poster on an email list about business in Eastern Europe. Steve Carlson, the list founder, moved with the times and the list expanded to general European internet business discussions; it spun off First Tuesday meetings all over Europe; then it became nowEurope, a more tightly edited Digest…
And now it’s a blog. They’ve got some good writers who have been involved with it from the beginning. I sort of dropped out as I moved on to other things. Well, truthfully, 90% of my writing goes to Samizdata now. So there!
The nowEurope blog looks interesting, but I hope they soon learn how important cross linking is: they currently are pretty stand-alone. So visit them and urge them to join the community.
In this age where ancient protections of Liberty are openly scoffed upon by the powers that be, it behooves us to proclaim loudly from the rooftops those rights they much prefer buried and forgotten. I wonder how many of you know it is a basic Right of an American Juror to judge not only on fact but on law as well? As this forum has a large libertarian readership, I wager it is far higher than in the general public – but still depressingly low.
Jury Nullification is an ancient right of law inherited from England. It is yet another of the many glorious innovations in the defense of liberty invented here and forsaken in the rush to fascism of the last hundred years. Jury trial, Double Jeopardy, Habeas Corpus and Innocence until Proven Guilty all seem destined to follow it into the Westminster tip.
These foundational protections are still fairly safe in America. It is also the case Jury Nullification is still valid law there. This is not a matter of strange interpretations. It is a dirty little secret which is not easily swept under the courthouse rug.
I’ve known a number of activists in the battle to pass Fully Informed Jury laws, so I’ve long been aware of the importance of this concept in American history. The ancestors of many black Americans owe their freedom to this not-so-arcane bit of legal history. Juries could not be found that would convict workers on the “Underground Railroad” which helped so many escape the degradation of being self portable property. In both English and American history, Jury Nullification has been a bulwark of Liberty. It does not matter who buys the legislature if the courts cannot find a Jury of Peers willing to go along – or be bullied into going along – with the scam.
This is why “The System” hates it so much. It lets you, the six-pack drinking slob on the street tell them the Law itself is unjust – and make it stick. It makes you, the citizen, the final arbiter of what is Just.
I bring this up tonight because I finally “got around to” reading a legal paper by Glenn Reynolds on the topic. It’s quite a good one and I think anyone interested in how the system used to work to protect liberty should read it.
Make sure everyone you know who might possibly be called for jury duty knows it as well, and knows if the Judge or Prosecutor threatens them… it is the Judge or Prosecutor who is breaking the law, not the Juror.
Real time speech translation, speech to text conversion, story summarization: all of these were “just around the corner” when I was a CMU grad student. I remember reading Dr. Raj Reddy’s proposal for a speech understanding system, what later became the Hearsay I project I believe. This was all going to happen in five years or so. By the time they developed Hearsay II his research group had a DEC PDP-10 (the cmub) pretty much to themselves. All the rest of us had to make do on the cmua.
That was in 1973.
So here we are, thirty years on, and it appears the real thing may really, finally be “five years in the future”. Some of the key elements are actually working under field conditions. It has always been inevitable we’d crack the speech understanding problem… eventually. It just took a couple years longer than we thought. [There were even more optimistic thoughts in the early 50’s, but that was computing before my time. Vacuum tube days. I think Fred Flintstone worked on the project.]
So here are a few very readable documents on the current state of military applications. The Phrasealator has been tested in Afghanistan by the guy who built it. The following are pdf documents. Right click and download.
- “An SBIR Success Story”, James Bass (script)
- “An SBIR Success Story”, James Bass (slides)
- “Human Language Technology TIDES/EARS/Babylon”, Charles Wayne (script)
- “Human Language Technology TIDES/EARS/Babylon”, Charles Wayne (slides) (large-ish)
PS: Note the military dune buggy at Kandahar Airport in James Bass’ slides. I want one!
There has been much discussion lately how assorted snooping organizations of assorted governments are creating the infrastructure of the Big Brother state as fast as their evil little hands can do so. Fortuneately for those who love Liberty more than Government, there are ways to defeat them. Long ago I said to some friends: “The hacker giveth and the hacker taketh away”, meaning what one programmer designs for a government or corporation, another programmer can bypass or subvert. It is, after all, nothing but patterns of ones and zeroes.
The advantage of numbers falls to our side. Whatever number of bright people any government collects for some nefarious project, there will be larger numbers of even brighter and perhaps more committed people out to undo the damage. There is a near certainty someone, somewhere on this large hunk of rock and water will find the work around. Minutes later, everyone will have it.
This brings me to the point of this ramble: those who are seriously interested in the technology of privacy may find of interest this talk from the 1999 Ottawa Linux Conference on “Linux and the Freedom Network” by Zero Knowledge of Canada. Right click and download. It’s a largish mp3 but well worth the effort. The sort of thing to drive Statists mad…
And that can’t ever be a bad thing.
It’s final. Instapundit reports DeCSS (a DVD encryption unscrambler) is legal… if you live in the free world.
We send our heartfelt congratulations to the author of DeCSS, Jon Lech Johansen, on his acquittal and total victory over the forces of evil.
Whilst looking for something entirely different I stumbled across the public domain slides and script for a talk given by John Poindexter: “Information Awareness Office Overview”. Since there was some discussion about this DARPA research project a few weeks ago, I have acquired copies and placed them on our server.
That way, if a slashdot occurs, instead of causing headaches for some unsuspecting research site administrator, I’ll only annoy the ISP that hosts us.
You will probably want to do “the rightclick download thing” as these are pdf documents.
- Information Awareness Office Overview script
- Information Awareness Office Overview slides
Cheers!
Addendum: If there is sufficient interest, I will acquire and post some of the other talks.
I picked up the following little titbit from an email newsletter of We The People. For those of you who don’t remember, that is Bob Schultz’s tax protest organization.
It seems that Congressman Henry Hyde thinks the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect is just a bit, well… passe:
“Congressman Ron Paul reminded the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations that the Constitution required a congressional Declaration of War before the armed forces of the United States could be applied in hostilities overseas, not H.J.R 114, a congressional Resolution authorizing the President to decide if and when to apply that force.
However, Chairman Henry Hyde is quoted, for the record, “There are things in the Constitution that have been overtaken by events, by time. Declaration of war is one of them. There are things no longer relevant to a modern society.Why declare war if you don’t have to? We are saying to the President, use your judgment. So, to demand that we declare war is to strengthen something to death. You have got a hammerlock on this situation, and it is not called for. Inappropriate, anachronistic, it isn’t done anymore…”
The 50-member Committee then went on to vote against the substitute amendment offered by Rep. Paul, which read simply (after the resolving clause), “That pursuant to Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, a state of war is declared to exist between the United States and the Government of Iraq and the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the United States Armed Forces to carry on war against the Government of Iraq and to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion.”
The Committee then went on to approve H.J. Resolution 114, which was eventually approved by Congress.”
Ron Paul is the nearest thing to a libertarian we have in public office. Although he is registered Republican… he is a libertarian. Some of you may remember his 1988 Presidential campaign with Andre Marrou as his Vice Presidential running mate. I was a Russell Means delegate at the nominating convention in Seattle that year, but that’s how it is in politics. Once the streamers and confetti have been swept off the convention floor everyone gets behind “the horse what won”. I wrote the Space Policy statements for them and thus had the chance to work with Ron and his campaign team on a number of occasions.
Ron’s congressional statements were not grandstanding. They were principled statements of his belief in the Constitution and in Liberty. That is just the sort of man he is.
For those space activists among us: Ron Paul is also the only Presidential candidate to ever appear at an International Space Development Conference: the 7th ISDC, held in Denver in May 1988. Some of the local Colorado LP were working his Denver visit and one of them was also on the ISDC conference committee (I had chaired the year before in Pittsburgh). He knew me in both my LP hat and my L5 hat… so I acted as liaison and briefer before Ron’s talk. We even had a heckler from Martin-Marietta to keep it interesting: Bob Zubrin!
There has been some discussion on the Libertarian Alliance Forum about “if they know where the weapons are, then why don’t they just tell the inspectors where to go?” I will attempt to tackle this question from a tacticians’ point of view.
Iraq is big: about the size of France and a hell of a lot emptier. There are miles of underground facilities. We can’t possibly be one hundred percent certain we’ve found everything. No matter how long the inspectors take there is uncertainty for the Searchers. However there is also uncertainty for Saddam. He can’t know what our spies have found out, if anything.
So we have a mathematical “game” with two players that might be likened to “battleship”, but is far more complex. It’s also deadly serious. There are potentially hundreds of thousands of lives at stake.
One player has assets on his hidden board and the other player is trying to find them. The second player knows where some of the assets are but can’t even be sure what percentage they know of; the other side knows all of its’ assets but can’t be sure how many of them the other side knows. This gives us a matrix of four possibilities:
- Searcher knows of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher knows of it.
- Searcher does not know of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher knows of it.
- Searcher knows of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher does not know of it.
- Searcher does not know of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher does not know of it.
What is the best strategy for each player?
The owner will be as helpful as possible on all the sites they believe the Searcher knows of. They can clean them out in advance and pretend great surprise at the inspection. The pretense also assists them in their game playing over the other three categories. → Continue reading: Why doesn’t the CIA tell them?
I recently had an email chat with Paul Blase, the CTO of TransOrbital, and he kindly provided me permission to publish his description of a winter night’s launch in Baikonur. I’ve known him for many years because we’ve both been involved with the Artemis [Lunar Settlement] Project, and my company (Village Networking Ltd) is also a proud member of the Artemis Group of companies. However I will be the first to admit that a small Linux, internet and software consulting and development company in Belfast, which barely (and I do mean barely!) makes ends meet is not nearly so interesting as TransOrbital. I’ll leave the rest to Paul. I had just asked him about O-rings in Russian winter…
The Dnepr is silo-launched, so environmental problems are minimal. Being an ICBM, though, they can launch the thing into a blizzard if necessary. Fortunately the night was very clear. At the launch last week it was -30 C with a nice breeze from the North. I had very warm boots and an insulated coverall. Even so, we all spent a lot of time in the tea-and-coffee trailer. Perhaps 60 people there, including the Italian launch team and the Kosmotras and Baikonur reps. (The Saudi professor got sick and went home, the German and American teams went home after the payload capsule was sealed and didn’t stay for the launch). Rather neat: it was dark so that we couldn’t see the silo proper, even with the full moon. They announced “liftoff” (they don’t use a countdown, just tell us the time left at about 15 second intervals) and suddenly this light appeared about 50 ft in the air. The sound didn’t hit for 20 seconds (the viewing stand is 7 km from the silo); not loud enough for a Shuttle launch, but definitely a rocket going off. The light soared away to the East and the night was clear enough that we could see it for a good 2 minutes, and even see the first stage cutoff and separation. They need to work a bit on their anouncer’s patter – their updates were mostly along the lines of “all systems functioning well”. It hit orbit and deployed the payloads at 915 seconds after launch, at about 5 second intervals.
Paul Blase
It looks like there are some very interesting air defense systems being brainstormed for future US aircraft carriers:
“The discussion about the CVN-21 has been around quite a bit, and again reminds you that the Navy was looking to start with what they call CVNX-1 in ’07, and then follow that with a second ship in FY ’11, that they call the CVNX-2. I think you are all familiar with sort of the general characteristics of it. And we had a long and very fruitful conversation with the Navy leadership on this, and they proposed — the Navy leadership proposed what we are now calling the CVN-21, which is a ship which will have roughly, give or take — don’t hold me to the number here — but roughly 80 percent of the kinds of new capability that as anticipated by the time we would have reached the CVNX-2. So that includes crew reductions, new flight decks, and maybe most importantly of all a new nuclear reactor power plant, which will provide upwards of three times the electrical output of the current power plant. And, that being so, it opens up the opportunity to begin experimenting with the kinds of weapons systems that heretofore were not possible with the kind of electrical power available. So whether those are electromagnetic rail guns, free electron lasers — I mean, there are all kinds of proposals that one has heard in the past which were impractical given the unavailability of power in large quantities that could be focused down for those kinds of purposes.”
The above item is from a DOD background briefing.
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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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