Bob’s Junkmail, #207
Model Rocket
If you happen to wandering around Price, Maryland next Saturday, stop in at Higgs Farm and you might be able to see a model rocket launch. This model is 1,600 lbs and 36 feet tall. It will go 3,000 to 4,000 feet, hopefully up.
http://www.rocketryplanet.com/…/2829/38/1/0/
JPG and Raw Photos
Most digital photo files are stored in .jpg format, also called .jpeg. It stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, which is not important, but jpg is the most commonly used image file format on this end of the universe.
Jpg files are compressed, which makes them convenient to store and transmit. A jpg photo from a digital camera may be 8 or 10 times smaller than it would be if it were uncompressed.
Jpg compression is lossy compression. That means that some of the color and clarity of a photo is lost whenever it is saved. How much? It depends on the amount of compression used when the file is saved. The smaller the file, the lower the quality.
I ran a few tests with this 3648×2736 picture. The small rectangle is the area I zoomed in on in the following examples. These thumbnail images link to .png files, which have lossless compression, so you can see it exactly how it was in the camera.
Here’s the sample from the original file from the camera. It was 4,757 KB in size, taken with the highest quality option on the camera, a jpg compression value of 2.
One interesting thing in this photo is the lighter green line against the left edge of the red petals. This was added by the internal camera software as part of the “normal” level of sharpening.
Saving at a compression value of 15 (range: 2-255) shows no visible change, but the size on the hard drive went down to 2,567 KB.
These photos saved with a compression of 100, 200, and 255 show some picture quality degradation. The sizes on the hard drive is down to 450 KB, 345 KB, and 316 KB.
Why not use jpg compression 15 all the time for all photos? It’s usually not a problem, but each time you save and reload a photo, you lose just a little bit of quality. You can load a photo as much as you want, of course, but if you save, load, save, load, etc., the error compounds, like interest on investments once did.
Here is a photo I took in Panama with my baby daughter Melinda. This is not Melinda. Melinda doesn’t dress that well.
Using jpg compression of 15, I saved and reloaded this file 50 times…
and 100 times:
You can see some color loss and some square pixelation in the results.
What if you don’t want any loss of quality? A lot of cameras can save in Raw format in addition to jpg. Back in the stone age of digital imaging, raw images contained pixels and nothing else. Today, most camera manufacturers refer to their own proprietary formats with lossless or nearly lossless compression as the raw image format. Nikon’s raw format uses lossy compression, but it apparently loses very little.
In addition to the better photo quality, the raw images are generally not processed to add things like contrast, sharpness, or saturation.
Raw image files are about 7 to 10 times larger than the highest quality jpg files available on a digital camera. This makes it slower for the camera to save to your flash card, and slower to copy onto your computer.
How much better are they? Here are some examples from a Panasonic FZ-50. (They’re saved as .png files here, but they came from .jpg file and .raw files.) This is the photo. The samples are taken from near the bottom center.
First, a .jpg file using the “normal” settings for enhancing the contrast, sharpness, and saturation. I zoomed this in 2x before saving it, so each pixel from the photo will take up 4 pixels on your screen now (after you double click on the photo below). You can see some irregularities along the edges of the blue and the black. At the bottom is a ruler with 1/16″ marks. I took these indoors without a flash, and I took a picture of printed material. Both of those should make it easier to see jpg artifacts and other quality flaws.
I changed the camera settings to low sharpness, contrast, and saturation adjustments. The noise level was already on low, the minimum. You can see that this sample is a little clearer, especially if you look at the letter o’s.
The raw image is quite a bit brighter (or the .jpg images are darker?). This is caused by some weirdness in the camera and shouldn’t normally happen. The clarity is better in the raw photo, which does normally happen. The colors are also supposed to be more “true,” but I can’t really tell. You can see a little bit of random noise on white part — the small colored specs. I guess the noise reduction gets rid of this in jpg images at the cost of a little clarity. You would never see this noise at a normal size.
What’s the result? These variations are almost imperceptible when you look at the entire photo (except for the brightness difference in the raw image, which shouldn’t really be there.)
I use jpg, highest quality, and lowest possible settings for adjustments such as sharpening, contrast, saturation, and noise reduction. I can always make those changes on the computer if I want them, but I can’t undo them if the camera did it.
If you plan to sell your photos for publication, publishers might prefer raw images, or a tiff or png derivation. If you plan to print your own photos or put them on the web, jpg format should be fine.
What about 35mm vs. point and shoot? What’s the best camera to get? That changes almost daily. A very informative web site with unbiased, detailed reviews and lots of sample photos is http://dpreview.com. I always spend some time there before I buy a camera. And my FZ50 is almost three years old — maybe it’s time to go read some reviews.
Car Tracking
I have just about decided against going on a nationwide bank-robbing spree, primarily because I don’t like to wait in line. But if I did, the FBI might be tracking my car. How? There are several interesting ways.
A method commonly used in novels and movies is cell phone triangulation. Police and other law enforcement people can find out from a cell phone company which cell towers a phone is communicating with, and using that information they can get a rough idea of the phone’s location.
A variation on this theme is to use the GPS receiver that is embedded in the phone for 911. The police can get a phone’s precise location from the cell phone company. I believe they can also lock a phone into “emergency mode” so it continues transmitting its location even after it’s turned off. So after you rob a bank, you might want to toss your cell phone onto a passing freight train or remove the battery.
A third way to track a cell phone is a little more original, and the police don’t have to bother with cell phone companies, search warrants, or claim “threat to national security.” They use a “triggerfish.”
A triggerfish is a device that they place along side a road, temporarily or permanently. It sends a request for acknowledgement to passing cell phones. The cell phones reply with their identification, as they normally do when a cell tower makes the same request. The triggerfish then logs all active cell phones that pass it on the highway.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081116-foia-docs…
Another way to track a car is using the license tag. If you were to place traffic cameras that can recognize tag numbers at most major intersections in the country, then connect them in a large computer network (such as the internet), you could track almost any car whose tag number is not covered with mud.
Some privacy fans consider these techniques a violation of their rights to privacy on public roads, but I think they’re all pretty good ideas. I consider cameras that issue speeding tickets quite rude, however.
DNA Database
The FBI is expanding their DNA database to include people who have been arrested but not convicted. Some privacy fans don’t like this. It seems to me like a good way to make law enforcement more efficient and accurate. But, like the car tracking, I can see where it could be abused. Hopefully those privacy fans will keep everybody in line. If not, there might be a lawsuit concerning DNA records.
There are now 6.7 million DNA samples in the FBI’s database; 6,700,001 if you include O.J. Simpson. In two or three years they expect to be adding 1.2 million new samples per year, about 15 times more than they do now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/us/19DNA.html
The Road to Nowhere
Some politicians had plans to build a bridge from Ketchikan, Alaska to the Ketchikan airport. It was not such a big deal, as it cost well under half a billion dollars. $398,000,000, to be exact. Sometime during the last presidential campaign, some of the same politicians decided that it would be a good idea not to build that bridge, and they cancelled the project.
I think it might have been cheaper to move the airport to Ketchikan’s island than to build a giant bridge. They might be able to fit it in southwest of Settler’s Cove, up toward Connell Lake, or north of Herring Bay. But strangely enough, nobody asked what I thought. That was all right with me because I really don’t care whether Ketchikanians (and I, when I visit) take the ferry between the airport and town.
So the infamous bridge to nowhere was cancelled, but the road from the airport to the bridge that isn’t wasn’t. The road only cost $26,000,000, mere pocket change by today’s standards. Since nobody needs to go to a bridge that isn’t, and very few, if any, live near that road, it doesn’t see a lot of traffic. That’s good, because the $26 million wasn’t enough for a paved road. They only managed to build 3.2 miles of gravel road with that much money. I think somebody made some profit on on that deal.
http://www.propublica.org/special/map-palin-admin-overs…
But I am happy to report that the $26 million was not wasted. Ketchikan Parks and Recreation is planning a bike race on August 22, tentatively on the road to nowhere. Be there!
http://www.ketchikanrunningclub.org/pages/calendar.html
Cyber Attack!
The headlines read like Chinese hackers broke into computers in the Pentagon and stole complete plans for the F-35 Strike Fighter. I wondered what the military was doing putting stuff like that on a computer connected to the internet. In fact, they weren’t.
The facts are that some computers in Turkey and one other unnamed NATO member were accessed, and a bunch of classified material was copied. As far as I can tell, no military computers inside the U.S. were accessed. It seems to me that if all the NATO countries had the design specifications, it couldn’t be too long before Russia and China managed to get their hands on a copy.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124027491029837401.html
Another popular worry about cyber attacks is that foreign countries will hack into the power grid and turn off the electricity. I suspect people who manage that sort of thing are smart enough isolate computers that switch electrical service from the internet. If not, they will probably learn a valuable lesson before very long.
Either way, worrying about the Chinese turning off my electricity does not take up a lot of my time. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is a lot more likely to have an adverse effect on my lifestyle than anyone in China. It looks like I could be thrown in jail before long for going to an airport to fly my airplane without a Homeland Security ID Badge and FBI background check. I wonder if I’ll have to take my shoes off in order to get a badge.
http://www.aopa.org/advocacy/articles/2009/090490tsa.ht…
http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_12079380
http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/region/2009/090416montana.html
UAV
Homeland Security has been flying Predator UAVs along the Mexican border for a while. That program has been so successful in stopping illegal immigration that they’re using them along the Canadian border now. They’ve had some in North Dakota, where they helped out with the Red River flooding this year, and have begun using them out of Alpena Michigan.
Some people don’t like this. I’m undecided. I don’t like too much surveillance, but a UAV will get out of my way a lot better than one of the tethered blimps they use in Florida.
http://www.freep.com/article/20090401/COL27/90401135/
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are coming to a location near you! I talked to an A-10 pilot a few years ago, and he told me the A-10s and most fighters would be replaced by UAVs in the future. It made sense, but at the time it was hard to see that much change coming.
Now, the Department of Defense official policy is moving in that direction. They’ve decided to stop production on the F-22 after 187 have been built. UAVs will be used on some of the missions that F-18s, F16s, and F-15s have been used for in the past.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=53831
The Predator UAV has been around for a few years. The MQ-9 Reaper is a larger, more powerful version of the Predator, in operation since 2007. The Predator was designed for surveillance, and the Reaper was designed for shooting things. I guess that’s why Homeland Security is using Reapers instead of Predators over Detroit. Make sure you get the frequency right when they tell you to contact Cleveland Center. It would be embarrassing to be shot down by a machine.
The MQ-9 is a single-engine turboprop, just like the PC12. Beyond that, there’s not much similarity.
The MQ-9 Reapers are available for the low, low price of 4 for $53.5 million, plus a little for inflation, design changes, and cost overruns.
Reaper Specifications:
| Wingspan | 66 feet |
| Max Takeoff Weight | 10,500 lbs |
| Range | 3,200 nautical miles |
| Cruise Speed | 200 knots |
| Ceiling | 50,000 feet |
| Payload | 3,750 lbs |
http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet_print.asp?fsID=6…
Turing Test
Go for the extra points.
Google Machines
Where do your bits go when you do a Google search?
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/04/the-beast-…
Low Power CPUs
Here’s an interesting article about a company that makes low power CPUs for handheld devices and small, cheap laptops. These people are abusing Moore’s law!
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=…
Google Tax
YouTube had some music videos on its U.K. site. The people who owned the videos said they wanted to be paid each time someone viewed one. That’s reasonable. YouTube said they couldn’t make money doing that, so the took down the videos. That’s reasonable too.
But now, the people are claiming that Google, who owns YouTube, is obligated to host their videos and to pay royalties on them. That makes no sense to me. Why should Google be forced to lose money?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/05/so-now-everything-…
But wait. Maybe I could video myself playing the piano and demand royalties. If I practice, I might be able to do something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b……
Blast Off
Some good Mount Redoubt eruption photos.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/alaskas_mount_…
Save the Cows!
Did you know you can protect your cows from nuclear attack using hay bales?
http://www.archive.org/details/rural_civil_defense_tv_s…
Bogus Numbers and Copyrights
Howard Berman, MPAA, and the RIAA are pushing for new regulations on the internet and DVD players. They are using blatantly false statistics to support their cause.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/rep-how…
One of the common “facts” publicized by the recording industry is that they have lost X billion dollars due to illegal downloads. They estimate the number of downloads, which is a wild guess in itself, and then they multiply that number by the retail price of a CD. There are several things very wrong with this.
- Even if this number were correct, which it is not, it would represent lost sales, not lost money. Since record companies do not make 100% profit, their loss is the profit they would have made on the CD sales, NOT the entire retail price of the CDs. Those pesky expenses such as packaging, distribution, store expenses, and taxes make up the majority of the price of a CD.
- The recording industry did not lose this money, since they never had it in the first place. They lost potential profits instead.
- People who download movies or music illegally would not have bought a copy of everything they downloaded if they couldn’t have downloaded it. The recording industry assumes this to be the case when they do their estimates of loss due to piracy. Most people I know who download a lot of movies don’t even watch them all. They certainly would never buy a copy of all of them. They just download the files because they are available and they’re free.
- Some people who download files illegally buy a legitimate copy of a movie or CD if they like what they see. Many people who download files illegally will pass recommendations by word of mouth about music or movies they like, and their friends and acquaintances may buy legitimage copies. Illegal downloads provide some value in free advertising.
Movie theater revenue has been going up over the past two years. CD sales have gone down. Online music purchases have gone way up. The music, TV, and movie markets are changing, largely due to digital content. The music and movie companies are positioning themselves to get the most out of the change, even if it means suing their customers and blocking new technology.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090414/1750504513.shtml
It irritates me enough that I won’t even buy a CD anymore. That is, unless I like the music.
Associated Press
I read in an AP article that the Associated Press going to a crack down on “misappropriated” content. That means you aren’t supposed to summarize a news article without their permission. Oops. That legal argument is a little weak anyway.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/ap-laun…
AP puts videos on YouTube. They include embed codes so people can embed the videos in their web sites. A small AP affiliated radio station embedded some of the videos in their web site. But AP told the radio station to remove the links from their web site. AP wouldn’t say why everybody in the world except the small radio station (who is a paying AP customer) is allowed to link to the AP videos.
I usually avoid linking to AP stuff in Junkmail because they tend to take it down after a couple of weeks.
Retail Scales
New York Times Headline: “Retail Chains Report Further Drop in Sales in March.”
Let’s see… Wal-Mart’s sales were up. Costco’s sales were up. BJ’s Wholesale Club sales were up. TJX sales were up. Ross Stores sales were up. Buckle sales were up. Hot Topic sales were up. Aeropostale sales were up.
Several other stores had drops in sales, but the headlines didn’t quite tell the whole story.
Threat to National Security
Don’t send any teabags politicians, in case your tea is deadly.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_12100982
You should send powdered donuts instead.
Spring Break
It’s those derned Reeses and Bachmans again! (My cousins’ kids.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBqyccRoCR8
Conficker II
Here is a good, detailed article on the Conficker worm.
http://www.honeynet.org/files/KYE-Conficker.pdf
Marathon
I entered the New York Marathon several years ago, but I haven’t finished yet. Maybe I should try the North Pole marathon.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7995748.stm
Creative Commons
Some people don’t like to worry about copyrights so much, like me, for example. Creative Commons makes it easy for you to share your photos, writings, and etc., with certain strings attached. You can pick and choose any of these four conditions in a Creative Commons License:
- Attribution — The copier agrees to tell where he got the stuff.e got the stuff.
- Share Alike — The copier agrees to share the stuff under identical terms.
- Noncommercial — The copier agrees not to sell the stuff.
- No Derivative Works — The copier agrees not to modify the stuff.
If you don’t want any of these restrictions, you can just say your photo or writing or whatever is in the public domain. Then anybody can copy it for any purpose. If, for example, you want to let people copy a photo as long as they put your name with it and share it under the same terms, you can use the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
How do you use this license? Basically, just post it with your photo to tell people that’s the way it is.
Wikimedia Commons is a collection of shareable photos, books, and other copyrightable work. Most of them are shared under a Creative Commons License or are in the public domain. Flickr has a section of photos you can search for under Creative Commons sharing.
The BBS has released a program under Creative Commons licensing called R&D TV. You can download it here:
http://ftp.kw.bbc.co.uk/backstage/rdtv/
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/bbc-launches-…
Oxford University recently released the book Lessons from the Identity Trail, a collection of essays about computer privacy and anonymity.
http://www.idtrail.org/content/view/799
If you intend to make money selling photos, books, TV programs, etc., then you might want to consider something other than a Creative Commons license. If you think all this is license stuff is not worth the trouble, then you could use the Junkmail approach: ”Copy the heck out of it!”
Tail Strike
If you fly certain airliners and pull up too hard on takeoff, you can hit the tail of the plane on the ground. If you do a good enough job, you can destroy an Airbus A340.
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1350-full…
Not Lightning
This hole in a plane has been flying around the internet with a caption saying it was caused by lightning thousands of feet in the sky. In fact, it was caused by an electrical fire on the ground.
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1350-fu…
Spammin’
According to Symantec, the amount of spam sent grew from 119.6 billion messages in 2007 to 349.6 billion in 2008. I got most of it.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12134686
Improv Everywhere
Improv Everywhere is a group in New York City that collects people and “causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places.”
Last year they got 207 people together, went to Grand Central Station, and they all froze at the same time for five minutes.
http://improveverywhere.com/2008/01/31/frozen-grand-central/
Sixteen of them did a short musical at a mall food court.
http://improveverywhere.com/2008/03/09/food-court-musical/
Since 2001, Improv Everywhere has done over 80 “missions.” On April 1, 2009, which happened to come on April Fools Day this year, Improv Everywhere released a fake video on YouTube of a couple dozen people or so crashing a funeral. Lots of people on YouTube were appropriately offended — those who forgot what day it was.
The TV station got ahold of the funeral video and broadcast a somewhat derogatory news story on it. The people at the TV station fell for the April Fool joke!
Improv Everywhere couldn’t resist, and they added the news footage to their YouTube site. When the TV station learned they were stupid, they contacted YouTube and demand that they remove the news clip, claiming violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1803 (or something like that). YouTube pulled it, without further investigation.
After the news clip was banned from YouTube, it became an overnight hit on the internet. This is called the Streisand effect, and seems to be adhered to more closely thanMoore’s Law.
In the news clip, the TV station used Improv Everywhere’s video, without permission. Improv Everywhere now has the TV news clip on their web site. I think that’s really funny. But I’m easy to amuse.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090414/2105504516.shtml
Search and Seizure
One more reason to keep a current backup: FBI Raids!
Core IP Networks provides web and email servers to about 50 companies. Earlier this month, the FBI shut them down and took their computers. As near as I can tell, Core IP Networks had their computers seized by the FBI when one of their customers was operating a scam to steal bandwidth from ATT and Verizon.
Their 50 customers lost their web sites and email for a few days, even though they were not involved with the scam. I think Core IP Networks was not involved either, but they FBI hasn’t said that in so many words.
http://cbs11tv.com/technology/Core.IP.Networks.2.975776.html
Sometime around April Fools Day, the Boston police came to visit a computer science student named Riccardo at Boston College. They took his computer, cell phone, and iPod. They kept them for at least two weeks. Riccardo’s roommate had told the police that Riccardo was involved in some computer hacking incidents.
Riccardo supposedly hacked into Boston University’s records and changed grades, which is very unlikely, and sent out mass emails which linked to a fake profile of Riccardo’s roommate on a gay web site, which is more likely and kind of funny.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10218460-38.html
What do you do when seizing computers gets boring? Seize the whole internet! Anew law, if passed, will allow the President to declare a Cyber Emergency and seize control of any “critical infrastructure information system or network.” Of course, that would only happen in the event of an “imminent threat.”
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090403/1346154383.shtml
Science and Technology
In their continuing effort to get me to stop watching their channel and keep me off their website, CNN has fired their entire science, technology, and environment news staff. They will now rely on The Onion for their science and technology news.
http://www.theonion.com/content/scitech
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/cnn_cuts_entire_scie…
CNN, to the relief of millions around the world, will be able to continue their in-depth coverage of Susan Boyle’s attire.
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20274069,00.html
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/04/social-medi…
Touring Cuba
In 1962, the Soviet Union built some nuclear missile sites in Cuba. There was some serious fussing between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and that was just about as close as the earth has ever been to a major nuclear war.
Part of the repercussions of the Cuban Missile Crisis was a trade embargo with Cuba, implemented shortly after Pierre Salinger bought 1,200 Cuban cigars for President Kennedy. Cuba, as a Communist ally of the Soviet Union, was considered a threat to the United States. That was pretty accurate, considering that Cuba had been pointing nuclear missiles north.
Today, the most of the Soviet Union is now Russia. Russia is more friendly and open with the U.S. than the Soviet Union was in 1962, despite a few Bear flyovers.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/03/19/us.russia.p…
(I guess CNN hasn’t run me completely off yet.)
Cuba’s military threat to the U.S. is now somewhere near zero, and has been for years. But for tradition’s sake (it must be tradition, there is no other reason) the U.S. keeps the trade embargo with Cuba alive and well. In fact, in 2005-2006 they tightened the rules.
I tried to sail The Minnow to Cuba in 2006. Since I preferred not to have the boat seized by the Coast Guard, I applied officially with the Commerce Department (after going through the State Department, Customs, and some other agencies) for authorization to go to Cuba. Among other things, I had to write (not call or email) to get an application. I was required to type the application on a typewriter. It was a long application, and it used carbon paper duplicates that are hard to correct.
Eventually I completed the application and jumped through some other hoops, only to be rejected. I was spurned by the Commerce Department! They said that they were not allowing any private boats to go to Cuba, even if the people on the boat spent no money. This new rule had been implemented a few months earlier.
Quite a few people go to Cuba now. Cuba is happy to receive visitors. The U.S. prohibits its citizens from visiting Cuba, however, except under special circumstances.
You can go to Cuba for an educational institution, for government business, or on a religious mission. You can fly from the U.S. to Mexico or the Bahamas, then fly to Cuba and vacation, but that is a little illegal. Under no circumstances, however, will the U.S. government allow me to fly my plane or sail my boat to Cuba. The U.S. Coast Guard seizes U.S. boats it finds headed for Cuba. I have flown OVER Cuba before, but the U.S. would not allow me to land.
I think the U.S. government is exhibiting very bad manners in prohibiting my trip to Cuba. I can go to China and spend all the money I want. I can sail my own boat or fly my own plane there. China is a Communist country with a totalitarian government. Why not Cuba? I believe I should have the freedom to visit any place I can get to, on or off earth.
With all this in mind, I was very happy to hear the President say he would improve relations with Cuba. I think they should change the cold-war relationship and abolish the 1962 trade embargo. Cuba is certainly no longer a threat to the United States, except possibly in baseball.
Earmarks
Weren’t they going to stop this sort of thing?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20…
Office 2007 Documents
Microsoft Office 2007 uses some new file formats (xlsx, docx and pptx) that are incompatible with earlier versions. These file formats are xml based.
If you’re using an earlier version of Office and someone emails you an Office document that won’t open, it’s probably because of the new file formats. I use Office 97. It’s a lot faster than the newer versions. It opens everything up to but not including Office 2007 documents.
Office 2007 users can save files in older formats, but that’s not the default option so it rarely happens.
What to do? Google Docs can read the new Office formats and save them in something more reasonable for the rest of us.
http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/20/google-docs-adds-offic…
Google Docs is kind of like a web-based version of Microsoft Office. It saves your documents to Google’s hard drive instead of your own, unless you ask for a download. You can access your Google Docs docs from just about any computer on the internet.
Not Torture
There is a lot of talk lately about torture, aggressive interrogation, and other party games. About a half-dozen years ago I mentioned that this would become a big deal.
http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk128/junk128.htm#detainees
There are a lot of politicians who say there is nothing wrong with “aggressive interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding. But none of them has offered to demonstrate this on themselves. That seems odd.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html
Online Magazines
There are a lot of online magazines, but this one looks like a paper magazine. I really like this format, even though most of their fish don’t live in Oklahoma.
http://www.simplyfishingmagazine.com/pages/april-may-20…
Pictures of Today!
Last summer Josh, Melinda, and I hiked up Kasatochi Volcano in the Aleutians.
Here are some photos from the volcano:
http://xpda.com/aleutians/kasatochi
Three weeks later, the volcano erupted in a big way. Here is an “after” photo, taken by Jerry Morris on October 23, 2008. The change is unbelievable.
A combine ran over a truck…
The tracks:
The birds, west of Pryor on 9th Street:
An Oil Well:
A giant anchor, outside Helena, Oklahoma:
The End
Bob’s Junkmail, Number 206
Economic Comics
Warning: This section might be boring, so here’s a picture that has nothing to do with Economics. Maybe it will alleviate some of the tedium. I met this lady when I was driving down a dirt road in Ecuador. We talked for a while, but she spoke something other than Spanish and I spoke my rough approximation of English, so neither of us understood a word. It was just like home.
CNN Headline: Banks Must Start Lending. And all along I thought the problem was that they made too many loans too people who didn’t repay. If banks are loaning money to X number of people, they generally pick the X people most likely to repay the loans. That’s because when a bank makes a bad loan, the bank usually loses money, and businesses should make money, not lose money.
If, all of a sudden, banks start loaning money to twice as many people, then the new loans will be riskier because, on average, the best borrowers have already borrowed. So when Congress yells at banks to make more loans, they’re yelling at the banks to take more risk on questionable loans. Isn’t that what started all these economic problems in the first place?
The U.S. Government is spending a lot of money it doesn’t have. This is not new, although the amount of spending and the deficit are very high. The budget deficit is, in theory, the amount of additional debt the country incurs in a given year. However, politicians like to cheat on the numbers. For example, George Bush always left the cost of the Iraq War out of the budget, listing it as an "emergency." Obama is including that in the 2009 budget.
A good way to measure the federal budget deficit is as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This takes into account the effects of inflation, the economy, and the results of the NCAA basketball tournament.
The 2009 U.S. budget deficit is a little over 12% of the projected GDP. This is the highest it’s been since World War II, when it hit 28%, 22%, and 24%. In 1918 and 1919, around the end of the first World War, the U.S. budget deficit was just under 12% and 17%.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_deficit_cha…
How does the government borrow money? They issue Treasury securities (bonds, etc.) and sell them at auction. If I buy a 5-year Treasury bond, the government may pay me interest every six months and then will pay principal amount back after five years. This is considered the safest investment on earth, even better than gold, commodities, or Citibank stock (of which I am a proud owner).
Who buys these bonds? I’ve heard a lot about China financing the U.S. National Debt. In fact, China (government plus private companies) owns more U.S. Treasury securities than any other country, about $522 billion last June, and around twice that if you include other government debt. This is about 1/6 of the total owed by the U.S. to other countries. In January, China had increased its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities to $729 billion, or 11 percent of the total amount outstanding.
http://www.ustreas.gov/tic/shlptab2.html
The stock market has gone down a lot in the past year or so, but what about the U.S. Economy? The U.S. GDP increased 1.1 percent in 2008, compared to 2.0 percent in 2007. But in the last quarter of 2008, the GDP dropped 1.6 percent (6.3 percent annual rate). Even so, that doesn’t seem so bad. Why did the stock market go down by 50%? I can’t answer that. I guess it’s a combination of downward trend, lower projections, higher budget deficit, higher unemployment, and a little hysteria.
http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrel…
The U.S. GPD is around $14 trillion, about three times larger than any other country, followed by Japan, China, Germany, the U.K., and France. China’s GDP was about $4.2 trillion in 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(…
Unemployment is up, but the constant news about it seems disproportional to the problem. Three states are at their highest unemployment since before 1976 (Georgia, North Carolina, and Rhode Island), but all the other states had higher unemployment in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. Michigan, the state we hear about most, hit 16.9% unemployment in 1982, compared to 12.0% in February. Oklahoma is at 5.5% unemployment, up from 2.1% in 2001 but down from 9.4% in 1986.
http://www.bls.gov/web/lauhsthl.htm
If I were going to bet on it, I’d say the current recession is not the end of civilization as we know it. In fact, it’s not even the end of Google, Microsoft, or Intel (which some equate to civilization as we know it). People are still living their lives. I still have to wait in line at the Arby’s drive-thru. There may be a lower demand for houses, cars, airplanes, and boats, but I’m pretty sure there will still be plenty of houses, cars, airplanes, and boats around in the future.
Be Original!
It is rewarding and effective to use novel phrases in the English language. I believe this is also true of the Georgian language, but I’m not certain so I’ll stick with English for the moment.
Take, for example, "worm brained gooberhead." You will not find this term anywhere else on the entire internet (as of today). It works quite well as a replacement for the ubiquitous profane term of maternal incest, and clearly outshines any reference to a canine of the female gender.
Furthermore, "worm brained gooberhead," merely combining the characteristics of a worm, a peanut, and a brain with its container, is not considered foul language. It is equally useful in communicating with people, animals, and inanimate objects, and can be used in the presence children without fear of being labeled a sex offender for life. I find this term particularly useful when referring to my children or conversing with telephone solicitors.
If everybody would come up with eloquent terms of endearment such as this, the world would be a much more interesting and entertaining place.
Fun in Financial America
Merrill Lynch former boss John paid $1.2 million to decorate his office last year. I may be a bit uncultured, but I can not imagine a time when I would ever consider spending $1.2 million dollars to decorate an office. Even if the money is not my own.
John, the brilliant executive, was fired when his failing company was bought by Bank of America. Maybe he should have spent less time decorating.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid…
Banks are conservative institutions, with enough experience, knowledge, and business savvy to avoid wasting money on things like $1.2 office redecorations. Well, sort of. Citibank is now planning to spend $10 million on new offices for their boss Vikram and his assistants.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive…
When asked about the lavish offices, Citibank said, "No problem! The government just gave us 4,500 times that much. $10 million is nothing." (I might have paraphrased that quote.)
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
An airliner from Mexico City took off last January for Seattle. When they neared Seattle, the airport was foggy. They couldn’t land or even attempt an approach because of low visibility. So they landed at an alternate airport, Portland, Oregon. It was the closest international airport they could land at.
In Portland, the plane waited on the ground for four hours. The police threatened to arrest anybody trying to get off. U.S. Customs would not process the passengers, because they "didn’t have enough customs agents." Finally, the plane returned to Mexico City with all the passengers.
In fact, there were not enough customs agents at the airport at that time. But why didn’t they call some? U.S. Customs and Border Protection has 56,000 employees and a budget over $10,000,000,000 per year. I’m surprised they couldn’t find anybody to clear that airplane into the U.S. Maybe they were redecorating.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/01/22/us.mexico.flight/i…
Elementary Geography
Where are these places? There are some new countries since I took fourth grade Geography.
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/just_fun/games/mapgame.html
Conficker
What is a Conficker and where can you find one? Conficker is a relatively new computer virus / worm. Hopefully you’ll have to look somewhere other than your own computer to find one. An easy way to check is to visit http://microsoft.com. If you can get there (or to most virus protection sites), then Conficker is not on your computer.
The reason Conficker has been in the news is that the date April 1, 2009 is hard-coded in the program, spawning a lot of news articles telling people to "be afraid!"
In addition to being afraid of your computer dying, you should be afraid that the duct tape holding the plastic sheets over your windows and doors will leak when terrorists release poison gas. You should be afraid that you’ll run out of tuna and powdered milk under your bed. And you should worry about the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow. But I digress.
April Fool’s day came, and my computer did not spontaneously combust at 4:03 a.m. Even if your computer was nice enough to host a copy of Conficker, it probably didn’t melt down into a lump of molten silicon. This is good because silicon melts at around 1414°C.
If we’d think just a little bit, we’d figure out that the most likely reason for April 1 to be coded in a worm / virus / trojan / malware is indicated by the date — it’s a joke! If the Conficker people really wanted to do some damage, they would do it when the rest of us were not expecting it so it would be more effective.
For example, in January Conficker version B installed itself on over a million computers in less than 10 days. They didn’t announce the date because it would not have been possible to spread in such unprecedented numbers if they had. Today, there are about 10 million copies of Conficker residing on generous hard drives around the world.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090116-conficker…
Conficker initially spreads using a bug in the Windows Remote Procedure Call function — the bug that should have been resolved when you installed the Windows Security Patch from last October. You did update Windows since then, didn’t you?
Conficker scans the internet looking for computers without that fix. When it finds one, it installs itself and uses a fake Windows patch to make it look like the computer is secure. Then it puts itself on all shared drives it has access to, and all removable writeable drives. Then, it tries to login to all the computers on the local network using a bunch of common usernames and passwords.
This site has a list of the passwords it checks, under the Analysis tab. It also has an interesting writeup of how Conficker works:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/Entry.aspx?Nam…
After Conficker is on a computer, it can do essentially anything it is told buy the people behind Conficker. Who are they? I’m not sure, but Microsoft has offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to their arrest and conviction.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02-…
Every day or so, each copy of Conficker (the latest version, anyway) generates about 50,000 pseudo-random domain names and tries to download a file from 500 of them. The people in charge of Conficker can register one of these domains and put a payload file there that will then be downloaded to some of the 10,000,000 copies of Conficker that currently reside on unsuspecting computers. The payload file will then be passed to other Conficker computers on the local network.
The payload file is a program to run on these computers. It can do anything a program can do — send spam, conduct a DoS attack, collect passwords, record keystrokes and forward them to the former CEO of General Motors, or format the hard drive.
Microsoft and some other companies have taken unprecedented steps to combat Conficker. I think this is because it’s so successful in infiltrating corporate networks it could make Windows look bad. Or it already has.
https://forums2.symantec.com/t5/Malicious-Code/Coalitio…
Maybe those companies could stop Spam while they’re at it.
How do you keep from acquiring Conficker and similar programs? Update Windows regularly. A firewall and/or antivirus software can help. AVG is a good free antivirus program. And don’t click on executable email attachments!!!!
I use Zone Alarm firewall. I like it because, in addition to limiting incoming internet traffic, it tells me when a program on my computer tries to access the internet. Then I can prevent it if I want to.
A lot of applications try to check for updates whenever the computer boots or the application runs, and some access the internet periodically for no apparent reason. This can really slow things down if I’m on a slow connection such as a dialup, satphone, or semiphore.
Spamming
Who sends out all this spam, anyway? Millions of people who host computer viruses. Some viruses install remote-control spamming software. Some people at Berkeley (Chris, Christian, Kirill, Brandon, Geoffrey, Vern, and Stefen) managed to get control of about 1.5 percent of the Storm Botnet. They intercepted a few hundred million spam emails and inserted some fake web sites and other information for analysis.
The paper they wrote is really interesting. It explains just how the botnet operates, including the command and control, redundant redundancy, and getting a new "worker" bot up and running. In the three examples they tested, they recorded results that are not overly surprising, except that there are still a few idiots around who will give up their credit card info to someone spamming pharmaceuticals. At least nobody falls for the Nigerian 409 scams any more. Or do they?
http://www.katu.com/news/34292654.html
Well, at least a bank could never be suckered into a Nigerian scam. Or could it? Surely not Citibank?
http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/02/online-thi…
The economics of the results imply that the spammers operate most of the sites advertised in the spam. You probably won’t get rich spamming people unless you control the botnet, and even then the profit margins might be a little thin by U.S. standards.
Here’s the paper on spam:
It seems to me that it should be easy to shut down most spam — just shut down the people advertising in the spam email. It’s already against the law, but the federal government does not enforce the Can-Spam legislation that was so highly publicized when it was enacted in 2003.
Actually, the government does enforce Can-Spam, but very selectively. Last November they fined a Facebook user named Adam $873,277,200 for advertising on Facebook. I don’t think Adam has that much money.
Last year McColo, a major ISP hosting spammers, was shut down. Spam levels dropped significantly. For about a week.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081112-spam-sees…
Open Source Voting Software
A lot of people think it would be a good idea to use public source code for voting machine software. Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold, apparently thought this was a good idea. They used some open-source software in their systems. However, the GPL license requires users to only use the open source software in other open source software.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20081104/1621182738.shtml
Antimatter
They’re making Antimatter in California. At Lawrence Livermore Labs, they’re shooting really short (picosecond) really intense (1020 watts per cm2) laser pulses into a sheet of gold. This produces a bunch of positrons, antimatter electrons. So far we don’t have a matter-antimatter reactor for space travel or power generation. I guess that will have to wait for their new laser.
http://focus.aps.org/story/v23/st8
https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2008/…
Stupid Patents
Apparently Encyclopaedia Britannica is having problems in the encyclopedia business and they’re getting into the legal business. They’ve sued GPS manufacturers for supposedly violating a 1993 patent concerning multimedia on a CD-ROM.
I’m sure you remember the infamous patent 5,241,671, right? It has been thrown out two or three times, but still keeps coming back. The patent is obvious, competes with prior art, and has nothing to do with GPS systems.
This time, finally, it looks like they drove a wooden stake through its abstract.
http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2008/11/en…
http://www.google.com/patents?id=_9MAAAAAEBAJ&dq=5,…
Here’s one way to cut down on people patenting existing ideas: Post them online and offer bounties for prior art.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081118-startup-c…
Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO, 1991: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today… A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose."
Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel, 2007: "Protection for software patents and other intellectual property is essential to maintaining the incentives that encourage and underwrite technological breakthroughs. In every industry, patents provide the legal foundation for innovation. The ensuing legal disputes may be messy, but protection is no less necessary, even so."
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/microsoft…
This is a copyright controversy, not a patent, but it’s just as stupid. The University of the South is threatening to sue the guy behind a one-man play, "Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire."
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090206/1241493676.shtml
Stupid patents are even threatening international cooperation and exploration in Antarctica.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090206/0931323669.shtml
A good article on software patents and their history:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/01/resurre…
Mammoth Genes
A team of 21 people led by a guy named Stephan have reconstructed 2/3 of the genome of the Wooly Mammoth. They’re using some hair from a Siberian mammoth. I’m waiting for them to finish the other 1/3 and complete the genome synthesizer so I can have a pet mammoth.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20…
Wind Power
Windmills are sprouting everywhere!
There is now more wind power generated in the U.S. than in any other country. The U.S. took the lead from Germany in 2008 with a 50% increase in wind power. I knew I was seeing more and more windmills, but I didn’t realize there were more in the U.S. than anywhere else. China more than doubled its wind power capacity last year. Denmark generates 19% of its electricity using wind power; Spain and Portugal 11%; and the U.S. 1.3%. In the U.S. in 2008, 42% of new electrical generation was wind power.
|
Annual Wind Power Generation(thousand mwh)
|
||||
| 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | |
| U.S. | 9,149 | 11,603 | 16,818 | 25,170 |
| Germany | 18,415 | 20,622 | 22,247 | 23,903 |
| Spain | 10,028 | 11,615 | 15,145 | 16,740 |
| China | 1,260 | 2,604 | 6,050 | 12,210 |
| India | 4,430 | 6,270 | 8,000 | 9,587 |
| Italy | 1,718 | 2,123 | 2,726 | 3,736 |
| France | 757 | 1,567 | 2,454 | 3,404 |
| U.K. | 1,332 | 1,963 | 2,389 | 3,288 |
| Denmark | 3,136 | 3,140 | 3,129 | 3,160 |
| Portugal | 1,022 | 1,716 | 2,150 | 2,862 |
I’ve been trying to figure out how many of these giant windmills it takes to equal a power plant, and I think I finally have a good estimate. One popular windmill model is the Suzlon S88-2.1. It’s rated at 2.1 megawatts, but I think you can expect more like .5 megawatts generation in actual practice. The S88 has a diameter of 88 meters or 288 feet. That is tall. Duke Energy is using the S88 in one of its new wind farms in Wyoming.
http://www.duke-energy.com/news/releases/2009040101.asp
In the U.S., windmills generate 24% of their rated capacity on average. This is because the wind doesn’t blow hard all the time, except in Washington DC where blowhards abound. The Suzlon S88 generates 2.1 megawatts in wind between 31 mph and 56 mph. (Above 56 mph it turns itself off.) At 15 mph, it generates a little over .5 megawatts. In a year, at 24% capacity, it will generate around 4,418 mwh.
The GRDA coal power plant at Chouteau generates 5,000-5,500 gwh per year. It would take 1,100 Suzlon S88’s to match that, and a little over 3,000 of the windmills to generate as much electricity as the Russellville, Arkansas nuclear plant.
Some people think there is a future in nuclear power. I’m one of them. France uses nuclear power plants to generate 87.5% of their electricity, and they haven’t melted yet.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/03/nuclear-pow…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
SpaceX
In 2002, the guy named Elon who founded PayPal started a new company called SpaceX. Last September, SpaceX launched a rocket into orbit. It was their fourth test launch, and first success.
The liquid-fueled rocket was 70 feet tall and 5.5 feet in diameter. The first commercial launch is scheduled for April 21, a satellite for Malaysia.
SpaceX’s Falcon I is supposed to be the cheapest way to get your satellite into orbit, but their 2009 price list has not been posted yet. You can check out the Falcon I user’s guide here:
http://www.spacex.com/Falcon1UsersGuide.pdf
The SpaceX Falcon 9 is a larger rocket, 180 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter. Its first test launch was scheduled for last year, but it was apparently delayed. Maybe they had to make some changes for NASA, who awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the Space Station when the Shuttles are shut down in 2011. Orbital Sciences also got a contract for Space Station missions, for $1.9 billion.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20…
In case you’re interested in launching a heavier satellite, here’s the user guide for the Falcon 9:
http://www.spacex.com/Falcon9UsersGuide_2009.pdf
If you’re building your own rocket, you will be relieved to know you can now use ammonium perchlorate for fuel without treating it as an explosive.
http://www.rocketryplanet.com/content/view/2788/30/
Skycatcher
Cessna has developed and is testing its Skycatcher 162, a 2-seat light sport aircraft. Both prototypes have gotten into unrecoverable spins, but the test pilots were not hurt.
Last September the pilot was doing a power on, cross-controlled stall (rudder one way and ailerons the other), and the plane entered an unrecoverable spin. He tried to deploy the plane’s parachute, but it wouldn’t. So he used his own parachute and let the plane make its own way to the ground.
Last month a second Skycatcher prototype crashed, also in an unrecoverable spin. Cessna had made the tail bigger, but apparently that didn’t help, or maybe the additional weight in the rear offset the benefits of the increased tail size.
This time, the pilot launched the plane’s parachute and was floating down. Then he tried to release the parachute, which would allow him to fly away under control, but the parachute wouldn’t release like it’s supposed to. So he and the plane ended up in a field. The plane didn’t have much damage until the parachute caught the wind and dragged the plane more than a half mile into a barbed wire fence.
The Skycatcher is being built for Cessna in China by the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation. Cessna has caught some flack for this because they’ve laid off a few thousand people lately. But the layoffs are due to customers canceling and delaying orders for new planes. There would be more cancellations and likely more layoffs if they raised the price of the Skycatcher enough to manufacture it in the U.S. Sometimes people forget that if a company doesn’t make money, they don’t have anything to pay their employees with.
Commas and Decimal Points
Once upon a time, it was a major faux pas to put your decimal point in the wrong place. If I owed someone $0.50, they would not be happy if I paid only $0.05. Except Mike, and he’d never know the difference.
Today I have noticed that there is not much oversight when it comes to comma placement, and a comma is worth three decimal points. There seems to be very little difference in a million, a billion, and a trillion. They’re all numbers too big to comprehend unless you’re talking about computers or light years.
Take, for example, our illustrious Speaker of the House, Nancy. She promised that 500 million people in the U.S. will lose their jobs each month unless a stimulus package is in place. While it’s not unusual for a politician to be slightly out of touch with reality, there aren’t 500 million people in the entire country. Maybe she meant 500 people will lose their jobs, or 50. Or maybe she thinks 39.3 percent of us will get a new job and get fired twice each month.
Government Security
I went to the FAA web site not long ago to get Notices to Airmen, or Notams, before I took off to fly somewhere. Maybe those are called Notices to Airhumans now, since "men" can’t be used any more.
When I arrived at the proper web site, I was greeted with a message saying "pilotweb.nas.faa.gov uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown."
Those imposters! Wait until the TSA hears about this! I guess they figured out something was wrong, because it’s fixed now.
ACTA Informatica
This ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, being secretly negotiated between the recording industry and various countries around the world.
Some people are pushing to make information on these negotiations public, claiming secret deals, encroachment of personal privacy and civil rights, and hair loss.
All this is pretty normal and pretty boring, except the part about the U.S. The U.S. trade representative is refusing to release documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act, claiming it would threaten the national security. That is funny!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10195547-38.html
Elsewhere in the federal government, the FAA is sealing records on bird strikes. This is understandable, as birds are known to gather in flocks and fly out in front of speeding airplanes, clearly a threat to national security. I flew into a goose once myself. The goose died.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-03-26-faa-bird…
Intel Plants
Intel got a lot of press when they closed down 5 older plants and laid off 5,000 people. They didn’t make nearly the headlines in February when they announced they’ll spend $7 billion on new 32-nanometer manufacturing in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico. They laid off 5,000 people earlier, but it will take around 4,000 people to build the new manufacturing facilities.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_11674924
Satellite Crash
An Iridium satellite crashed into an old Russian military satellite in February. The Russian satellite was effectively dead and couldn’t maneuver, but that didn’t stop some U.S. politicians from accusing them of bad driving.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7885051.stm
Another Airline in the Water
Pan Am Flight 943 in 1956.
http://www.mercurynews.com/centralcoast/ci_11602402
Submarine Collision
A French submarine and a British submarine collided in the Atlantic last February. I guess they were each quieter than the other expected.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/def…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7892294.stm
Utah Scammed
The state of Utah lost $700,000 to some scammers who forged documents to hijack a state bank account, and then sent fake invoices to collect $2.5 million. The bank seized about $1.8 million, but the crooks got away with the rest. So far.
http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/02/online-thi…
Icelandic Economics
Iceland has had some real economic problems lately. Now they may shut down the Iceland Defense Agency. But this might not be such a big deal. The agency has only been operating since June.
http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_…
Hiking and Climbing
This is a good site where you can learn what not to do in the backcountry — a variety of hiking and climbing accidents and incidents.
http://hikerhell.blogspot.com/
I like this lady:
http://hikerhell.blogspot.com/2009/04/90-year-old-woman…
GOCE
The European Space Agency launched a satellite from the Plesetsk cosmodrome…in northern Russia. It will map the earth’s gravity in some amazing detail. This will give information on land and sea elevation changes, gain information on ocean heat and mass transfer, and help model underground structures. This is a great simplification of its mission.
http://spacefellowship.com/News/?p=8453
"A few minutes later, the missile will transport a satellite into space:"
Transporting the Soyuz to the launch pad:
Tonga Eruptions
A couple of weeks ago there was a major eruption of an undersea volcano near Tonga. Here are some great photos.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/undersea_erupt…
Ghostnet
Some people ran across a botnet the other day, which is not too unusual. However, this botnet (called Ghostnet) compromised 1295 computers in 103 countries. About 30% of them were "high value" computers, e.g., government, banks, news organizations, etc. The remote control came from China, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the Chinese government is behind it.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13731776/Tracking-GhostNet-In…
Obligatory RIAA and MPAA Harrassment
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090205/0319043658.shtml
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090206/0916313668.shtml
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Arti…
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090206/0858403667.shtml
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090204/1731533649.shtml
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090203/1719013633.shtml
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090202/2234313613.shtml
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090130/0328003585.shtml
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/i-thoug…
Miscellany
Gears of War game’s copy protection (DRM) protected it from being used at all.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090130/0321403584.shtml
The fall of Silicon Graphics.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12049610
Submersibles are moving a lot of cocaine into the U.S. — maybe 1/3 of it.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/14/drug.subs/index.html
You mean the wheels go down BEFORE you land?
http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/news/C17BellyUpLanding_…
Here’s an interesting sailing article. It gets better after the shipwreck.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/features/20051219-99…
Russia knows how to throw a proper election.
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/03/26/the_worl…
Photo Mud
You can try out a test version of Photo Mud, if you don’t mind being added to the GhostNet. Let me know how to crash it, or what it needs, or what you can’t figure out. Did I mention it’s a test version? I don’t think it will format your hard drive, but there are no guarantees.
This is the only program I’m aware of that can print a calendar, using your own photos, with the birthdays of Turing Award recipients.
Pictures of Today!
Breckenridge Skier:
Nuclear cooling towers are BIG! Look at the stairs.
This old house
I went to Ecuador a few weeks ago and, among other things, hiked up Mount Cotopoxi.
Ecuador Flower
Mount Cotopaxi, 19,347 feet tall.
This fox was over 15,000 feet elevation.
The top of Cotopaxi
This is the shadow of Cotopaxi on 17,218 foot Illiniza at sunrise
Crevasse:
Ice
You can see more Ecuador photos here, if you’re interested:
The End
Junkmail 205
Anchoring Youth
Dr. Bob Ballard is famous for discovering the wreck of the unsinkable Titanic 1985. But he also made a couple of other stops on that trip — to the wrecks of the only two U.S. nuclear submarines ever lost.
USS Thresher, a nuclear attack sub, was launched in 1960. In 1962, while moored at Port Canaveral, Florida, a tug hit the Thresher and damaged a ballast tank. The sub was repaired at Groton, CT and tested off Key West. Then they were back in a dockyard for “refurbishment.” In April 9, 1963, the Thresher left port for sea trials.
On the morning of April 10, 1963 the Thresher began deep-dive tests a couple hundred miles east of Cape Cod. As the submarine neared its test depth of 1300 feet, it had some problems and tried to blow its ballast to surface. Shortly afterward, the submarine broke apart and sank. All 129 people aboard died.
This is what probably happened: At 9:09 am, a high pressure saltwater pipe in the engine room started leaking because it was brazed instead of welded. It sprayed saltwater onto an electrical panel, or maybe something shorted out because of the flooding, which resulted in an automatic reactor shutdown. This would not have been enough to sink the submarine, only enough to stop the propellers. In a situation like this, the submarine would normally blow its ballast tanks and surface. But there was another problem — a design problem.
High pressure air tanks are used to feed air into the ballast tanks, which pushes the water out, which causes the submarine to float. When air (or any gas) goes from high pressure to low pressure, it gets colder. In this case, the air leaving the high pressure air tanks cooled to below freezing. This is not normally a problem, but that time the air in the tanks contained a lot of moisture. Enough of the moisture froze on strainers in the lines to block the flow of air into the ballast tanks. As a result, the submarine began to descend, tail first, until it collapsed under the pressure of the water. At 9:17 the Thresher reported exceeding test depth. At 9:18 the submarine imploded.
The USS Scorpion sank on May 22, 1968 in about 10,000 feet of water, about 400 miles southwest of the Azores. It did not have a sub tender nearby, so the details of the Scorpion’s demise are not clear. Somehow, the submarine “suffered catastrophic failure of its pressure hull” and sank with 99 people on board. The Scorpion was probably sunk by one of its own torpedoes. Probably the torpedo started up on its own in the torpedo room, had to be jettisoned, and circled around and exploded near the sub. This happened on the Scorpion in 1967 with an unarmed torpedo. Some people think it was a Soviet torpedo that sank the Scorpion, a few weeks after the Soviet sub K-129 was lost in the Pacific.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/awards/Scorpion…
After mapping the two submarine wrecks in 1985, Bob Ballard and the research vessel Knorr had 12 free days to find the Titanic — and they did it.
The last I heard, they were in the Black Sea exploring 1500-year-old shipwrecks. The lack of oxygen there has kept the ships and artifacts from decomposing, so there is some amazing undersea archeology to be found there.
On March 31, Dr. Bob Ballard is coming to Pryor to give a presentation for the “Anchoring Youth” fundraising event, raising money for Green Country Boys and Girls Clubs and for Immersion Presents. You can reserve your table for 8 (or 10?) now for with a donation of $1500. I believe they are even considerate enough to accept larger donations. These are both really good organizations. You can get details at (918) 824-1908, or maggiegurley@sbcglobal.net.
Icy Landing
Two guys named Oliver and Troels were flying a Cessna Skymaster from the U.S. to Sweden last month. When they were nearing Iqaluit over the Hudson Strait, both engines on the Skymaster quit. They landed on the ice and then watched their plane sink almost immediately. The next morning, a fishing boat picked them up off an ice floe. Those are two lucky people. I never did hear what killed the engines, but since they both died it makes you wonder if they ran out of gas.
Here are Oliver and Troels on the ice just before their rescue:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/12/09/1228584809193.html
http://www.thestarphoenix.com/Pair+survives+Arctic+cras…
Y2K
In 1998 and 1999, there was a great crisis. Forgot Y2K already? Or maybe youwere just 7 years old then and were worried about different crises. People were afraid that the dumb programmers couldn’t handle a date change from 1999 to 2000, or from 99 to 00.
Software literate people tended to ignore Y2K as a non-event, or to exploit it as a means of additional income. “Experts” on television promised massive power blackouts, technological failures, and transportation stoppages. Had all this occurred, it might have adversely affected my drive-thru diet.
As time has a habit of continuing with or without a crisis, the year 2000 arrived. The world did not stop. I did not need emergency equipment and supplies, which was nice because had not acquired any. The newscasters were almost as disappointed as they are when a hurricane fizzles.
The worst thing about Y2K was the overreaction of the press and the overreaction of the politicians. The U.S. government required businesses and other organizations to come up with Y2K plans dealing with how the Y2K crisis would affect them, and how they would perform once the anarchy started. Billions of dollars were wasted, studying the impending, imaginary disaster.
Billions more were spend studying old computer source code to make sure there were no rollovers to the year zero. It was the last heyday of Cobol dinosaurs. Hopefully. I should mention that I have programmed in Cobol before, qualifying at least as a stegosaurus. But I didn’t like it.
Countries who didn’t join in the fray were accused of irresponsibility and of threatening civilization as we know it. Afterward when nothing happened? Nobody cared. People seemed to embarrassed to talk about the stupidity, although a few claimed credit for saving the world.
Terrorism
In 2001, a couple dozen suicidal idiots flew some airliners into some buildings. Most people were surprised when the Word Trade Centers collapsed. I don’t think even the guys who rammed the buildings thought they would collapse. But they did, and as a result, about 3000 people died. Another airliner hit the Pentagon, but it was not hurt very bad.
Just like Y2K, the real damage came from the overreaction. We retaliated by taking over Afghanistan, which is reasonable since that’s where these people were based, and Iraq, which is really strange because they had nothing to do with it. But the politicians and the press convinced people that Iraq was planning nuclear and biological attacks on the U.S., and that “ya gotta be afraid!” Since then over 4000 U.S. citizens have died in the Iraq War — many more than in the World Trade Centers.
The major damage from the 2001 attacks, in my opinion, is in the reaction of the U.S. Government. The fear-mongering included things like recommending that everybody buy plastic sheets and duct tape for protection against biological weapons, and to keep tuna fish and powdered milk under your bed. Really!
We built (and are still building) a huge Department of Homeland Security that will keep us safe from terrorists. Homeland Security has capitalized on the terrorism hysteria and has acquired other federal agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Authority, the Border Patrol, U.S. Customs and Immigration, and even the U.S. Coast Guard. It’s empire building at its finest!
Now, to fight terrorism (remember there were only a couple of dozen of those idiots when we started?), we blithely submit to surveillance and eavesdropping that used to be unconstitutional. Police and FBI officers have gone to jail in the past for what is common practice now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la…
Even worse, we take off our shoes when we get onto an airliner! I think this is something akin to a religious rite, to remind us we are in constant danger from terrorists and that we need the government to protect us. It’s odd that passengers flying into the U.S. from another country don’t have to take their shoes off.
But there’s good news! Homeland Security has declared that airliners are now secure. The bad news: They say that since a terrorist can no longer hijack an airliner, they will hijack smaller private planes. So now the government has implemented a bunch of security rules that apply to private planes. I did not make this up! Most of the rules apply to planes 12,500 lb and above, but some are across the board.
Department of Homeland Security
Other Aircraft Operator Security Program
Doesn’t anybody see the absurdity of this? Never, in the history of the world, has a private plane been hijacked for terrorism, not even before 1903. We are jumping through hoops and wasting money to fix a problem that does not exist.
This is a significant milestone, because for the “first time in the history of the United States, governmental review and authority will be required before a person can operate his/her own personal transportation conveyance.”
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1252-full…
Nearly 70 percent of private pilots who fly internationally said they would do so less often under new rules for international flying. They require prior approval by internet for anybody who wants to enter or leave the U.S. by private plane. I’ve never had to get government permission to leave the country before. They used to be glad to see me go.
I wonder what they’ll target after they’ve decided that private planes are safe. Maybe I’ll have to take my shoes off before I drive my car. It seems to me that the Department of Homeland Security has too much money and too many people, and they’ll keep encroaching on my life as long as they have an unlimited budget.
Over the past several years, we have begun to accept whatever the government says, so long as they use magic words “terrorism” or “national security,” and sometimes “child pornography.” We accept lies and corruption as necessary to fight the war on terrorism. Millions of dollars missing in Iraq? Unavoidable. Lies from the government? It’s for your own good. Criticize the government? “If you’re not with us, you’re against us — you’re unpatriotic.”
I say it’s a patriotic duty to criticize the government. It’s also kind of fun.
Economy
This brings us to the third fiasco of the decade. If we look back into the early economic history of September 2008, we recall that President Bush gave a speech warning of worldwide financial panic if the Treasury Department did not get authorization to spend $700,000,000,000.00 to bailout financial institutions. And, by the way, he needed it by Monday.
This was to bail out banks that were caught in a bind because a lot of mortgage-backed securities were not worth the paper they weren’t written on. The government said they planned to buy these securities that were worthless or worth less.
Instead, the government decided to buy stock in some banks and spend some money on other stuff. They refuse to say just what they’ve spent the money on, or in whose pocket it is ending up. I imagine there are some lawyers, consultants, bankers, and other executives who will be buying some large boats and airplanes next year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/us/29bank.html
I like this: $1,600,000,000 was spent for executive retention pay. That means that we are paying the people who messed things up extra money to stay on the job. The technical term for this is inverse performance bonus. We still don’t know which executives were retained, how much money they got, or even which companies they work for. AIG spent $503 million on its top executives, but I don’t know whether this is included in the $1.6 billion.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20…
These brilliant and brilliantly retained executives had to know (or certainly should have known) that if real estate prices dropped, then enough people would default on their new mortgages to cause a market bust in mortgage-backed securities. Instead, they chose to ride the gravy train. When real estate prices started to decline, they were hoping it was just a blip. When they kept going down, they got a little worried. Of course, they had to keep it quiet or the lack of market confidence would compound the problem of unsound fundamentals, and things would really get bad. Then things really got bad.
In typical form, the solution to this problem seems to be doing more damage than the problem itself. The government is going into debt big-time, as never before. The administration is giving money to people and companies without disclosing who’s getting it to the public or to Congress. In fact, they are not even keeping track of it!
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid…
In a couple of years when the books come out, we’ll be appalled at the level of corruption. If someone can get just one millionth of this bailout money into a personal bank account, that’s a cool $350,000. But this corruption will likely be legal because the administration is authorized by Congress to pass out the money to anybody, and they don’t even have to tell who got it. It’s even better than lame-duck Presidential pardons.
I could go on for a few hours, because the level of stupidity is amazing, but I’ll spare you. Here are a few points:
- To improve their financial statements, banks in trouble have used bailout money to buy healthy banks and other companies.
- When the government pays bailout money to a bank to buy mortgage-backed securities, the money is spent on the securities. When the government pays bailout money to buy stock in a bank holding corporation, the corporation is free to spend the bailout money on management perks… and executive retention bonuses.
- GMAC is a car finance corporation. They called themselves a bank, got government approval, and got billions of dollars in bank bailout money for their trouble. This money was not supposed to be used to create new banks — it was to aid ailing banks. If I wanted to create a new bank, I bet they’d require me to be more solvent than GMAC, and I probably wouldn’t even get any bailout money.
- Chrysler and General Motors harangued the politicians enough to get billions in government money. Does this mean that every mismanaged company is entitled to billions from the government? Upperspace, for one, would settle for a thousand times less and accept mere millions. And I can mismanage with the best of them!
- Even the unregulated hedge funds, where you’re required to be a “sophisticated investor” and able to withstand losses before you’re allowed to invest, are getting access to $200,000,000,000 in federal bailout money….
- I like Bush’s attitude. In the midst of all this obfuscation, he politely demanded in a speech… that “nations must make our financial markets more transparent.”
- More than a thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. has been paid to bail out financial institutions in 2008. That’s more than twenty times NASA’s budget… and over five times the budget of the U.S. Department of Education.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/business/09magic.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/sub…
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-11-06-lobb…
Numbers
How big is a billion dollars? If you take a billion dollar bills and place them end-to-end along the equator, they will circle the earth 3.89 times. It will take light a little over half a second to go that far. 350 billion dollars would get you to the moon and back half a dozen times, if you lay the bills end-to-end. You could go a lot more times than that if you spent them on space travel.
How big is a billionth of a second, or a nanosecond? A 3 gigahertz computer has three clock cycles every billionth of a second. Light will travel a little less than 4 inches in one of those clock cycles. That makes the physical layout of the motherboard pretty important.
Your brain may be pretty fast, but its synapses take a few milliseconds to fire. A millisecond is equal to a million nanoseconds. Your brain makes up for the slower speed with parallel operations, with billions of neurons operating at once. No wonder I get confused.
I regularly read and hear incorrect rates of growth, so I would like to set the record straight. A constant is no growth. A constant rate of growth is linear growth, because its graph makes a straight line. It is something like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, etc., where each value of x is multiplied by some constant, in this case, 2.
Geometric growth is where each value of x raised to the power of a constant, something like 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100, in this case 2. Geometric growth gets pretty big pretty fast. Geometric growth is the one that is frequently and incorrectly called exponential growth.
Exponential growth is when the exponent of a constant changes, kind of like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc. It moves a lot faster than geometric growth, for similar x.
Here’s another way to look at it. If you were given a penny on January 1st, 2 cents on the second, 3 on the third, 4 on the fourth, and so forth until the end of the month, you would have $4.96 at the end of the month.
If you were given a penny on January 1st, 4 cents on the second, 9 cents on the third, 16 cents on the fourth, and so on to the end of the month (x2), you would have $104.16 at the end of the month.
If you were given a 2 cents on January 1st, 4 cents on the second, 8 cents on the third, 16 cents on the fourth, 32 cents on the fifth, and so on to the end of the month (2x), you would have $42,949,673 at the end of the month, assuming you didn’t give it away to wayward financial executives.
If you kept going to the end of February, the sum of the linear series would give you $17.70, geometric $702.10, and the exponential would give you $11,529,215,046,068,500.00 or so. (Standard double precision won’t give me the last 4 digits and I’m too lazy to use my brain.)
Just think — if we could double a penny every day for two months, we could pay off the national debt, balance the budget, and make everybody on earth a millionaire. But if everybody on earth was a millionaire, a dollar would not be worth much.
Now, do you think anybody could get this point across to a Supreme Court Justice?
New York Times, November 13, 2008
He is correct that the area would increase more than 100-fold (121, to be precise), but the relationship between radius length and surface area is geometric (proportional to x2), not exponential.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/washington/13scotus.html
Web Numbers
There are now at least 186,727,854 web sites in the world. If I look at them all in one year, I’ll have to read really fast — I’ll have to cover 7 sites per second. That doesn’t include time for sleeping, eating, or anything else.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html
ThePlanet.com put up over a million web sites last month. A lot of them were in the .pl domain, for Poland. Many of those were redirected to a fake pornography site, which actually sent people to the malware site extramovz.com.
Here’s my guess: Some spammer or other creative internet craftsman managed to get a few hundred thousand domain names from the Polish domain registrar. This person or group automatically built a bunch of web sites and pointed them toward a malware site. Then they spammed a few million potential suckers with links to the fake pornography site. At the malware site, visitors are enticed to click on a button and install some software, maybe claiming to be Adobe Reader or something like that. In fact, the software will enroll their computer, free of charge and probably free of the visitor’s knowledge, into a botnet.
Google, Yahoo, and MySpace were the top three web sites in December. 997,445 places down from the top we find http://xpda.com. The other 185 million sites must not have a lot of traffic.
Of visitors to http://xpda.com:
* 84 percent speak English, or at least their computer is set up for English.
* 38 percent come from outside the U.S.
* 54 percent use Internet Explorer, 36 percent Firefox, 5 percent Safari.
* 89 percent use Windows, 8 percent Safari, and 2 percent Linux.
* 4 percent have screen resolution of 800×600, 34 percent 1024×768, and 1-2 percent of the rest have a screen resolution of less than 1024×768.
* 3 percent use dialup to connect (remember modems?). Others use something faster.
Google’s bots visit a lot of web sites. While they’re there, they check to see if they notice any malware. If so, they publish it. You can check out a suspect site here, just replace xpda.com on the end with the site you want to know about:
http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/dia…
Supercomputing
Who operates the world’s largest and faster supercomputer? I’m not sure, but I would certainly place Google in the running. Their “computer” is really many thousand computers working together, so you could argue that it’s not a single supercomputer. But they must consume as many CPU cycles and use as much storage for their related applications as any company or organization.
It’s really impressive if you consider the amount of data they process. And they don’t just do simple indexing. They do a lot of statistical analysis of web sites and user habits, as well as a bunch of other applications. And they do it successfully — Google is an internet company that makes a lot of money!
Google does a lot of advanced research in searching and computing in general. I would not be surprised if, in several years, Google is the company that offers a useable voice interface for computer input. That is the major drawback of iPod-sized computers now. The tiny keyboards are either not tiny enough, or they’re too tiny to use. A more efficient method of input is needed.
Google is also doing work on search semantics, so you can ask somewhat arbitrary questions and get something better than keyword and synonym searches. For example, I might ask, “Who were the first generals to fight a major battle in the U.S. Civil War?” If the search engine could recognize more meaning than just keywords when it scans a site, it could answer more “general” questions like this.
One requirement is for the software to be self-learning. It’s not feasible for a person or team to sit down and train a search engine on the content of 185 million web sites, or even 997,445. The software would have to improve itself based on successful and unsuccessful search results, seen by user clicks, number of results, etc.
In unrelated Google news, Google has finally started charging web site owners for indexing. If you pay them, they’ll index your site faster. This is a major policy change — allowing people to purchase better search performance. It could end up killing off personal web sites if it goes very far.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10096117-2.html
NTSB Reports
The NTSB has improved their aviation accident web site. Searches are faster, they have downloadable data, standard forms, and more information than before.
http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/query.asp
One report shows that Michael Connell, Republican media consultant and chief IT consultant for Karl Rove, blew an ILS approach and died as a result. There was no conspiracy to kill him — he managed on his own.
http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/GenPDF.asp?id=CEN09FA099&rpt=p
Weird Al Bleeps
Last Junkmail I mentioned some annoying bleeping of “Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA.” It turns out that Weird Al did that intentionally after being ordered to censor it a couple of years ago by MTV. He made the bleeps as obvious as possible to highlight MTV’s stupidity.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081102/1953322706.shtml
I Feel Safe!
The Transportation Security Administration has a good thing going at airports. They have persuaded people to use locks on their luggage that are TSA Approved. This means the TSA employees have keys to your bags, and they seem to be using them.
According to Lara Uselding, spokeswoman for the TSA, more than 460 TSA officers have been fired for theft since May, 2003, about 100 per year. Ellen Howe, another TSA spokeswoman, said the agency has fired 465 officers for theft since the spring of 2003, “a minuscule fraction of the work force.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20081107-2016-…
In fairness, the TSA is headed in the right direction. Either that or they don’t honor claims for missing items as much as they used to. In 2005, the TSA spent $3,000,000 in claims for missing items and damaged bags. In the first eleven months of 2008 they held it down to under $1,000,000. But that is still a lot of thievery, especially for a miniscule fraction of the workforce. Don’t they know thievery is supposed to be the job of Congress?
Jacksonville:
http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/2007/12/tsa-screener-bagga…
Miami:
http://www.justnews.com/news/16275949/detail.html
Tampa:
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2008/mar/31/312237/me-3-tia…
Los Angeles:
http://blog.roberthelfend.com/public/item/baggage-handl…
Newark:
http://jonathanturley.org/2008/10/14/tsa-employee-arres…
Milwaukee:
http://www.gadling.com/2006/10/20/tsa-thief-red-handed-…
New York:
http://discardedlies.com/entry/?10332_widespread_tsa_th…
Seattle:
http://www.atlargely.com/2007/07/department-of-h.html
Washington:
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=25&sid=1566121
Boston: (accusation)
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/01/03/co…
Baton Rouge, Denver, Philadelphia, Fort Lauderdale:
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2003/07/10-screener…
Airports are not the only place TSA employees are arrested for theft:
http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/cisco_router_theft.shtm
TSA air marshals are determined not to let the baggage screeners get all the loot. That could be a little scary, since air marshals ride on airplanes and carry guns.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-11-12-air-…
On the ironic side, in 2003 the TSA spent $461,745 on an awards banquet to congratulate itself, and then spent another $1,400,000 in cash bonuses for 88 senior managers. Maybe TSA and the Treasury Secretary share the same supervision.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JZS/is_23_20/ai…
When Obama takes over we won’t have to worry about the Treasury Secretary any more. His nominee for the job, Tim, used to run a stock exchange, just like Bernie Madoff….
Tim’s record is spotless, if you ignore $42,000 or so in taxes he forgot to pay. When asked about his illegal immigrant housekeeper, Tim responded, “I thought that was OK. That’s what they all do at Homeland Security.”
The Department of Homeland Security boss Michael took some harassment for paying “undocumented workers” to clean his house. I guess he should have used his own e-Verify system that Homeland Security advertises on National Public Radio. Instead, he fined the cleaning company $22,880 for sending him illegal aliens. Maybe he’s planning another banquet.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20…
Lorraine, the Homeland Security Port Director in Boston, also had some minor glitches with her Brazilian housekeeper’s paperwork.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/12/05/us.border.superviso…
http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2009/01/13/nannyg…
Today’s Stupid Patent
Halliburton submitted an application to patent “patent trolling.” A patent troll is a company that buys patents for the purpose of suing people and forcing them to pay license fees. The patent probably won’t be awarded — someone probably did it as a joke. But you never know with the US Patent and Trademark Office…
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/11/junk-patents.html
In November, Google was awarded a patent to search multiple databases at once, such as a web, news, and image database. I sure don’t find anything novel, nontrivial, or non-obvious about this one. At least Google is not prone to sue over patent infringement.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20081105/0156512741.shtml
XKCD
XKCD is a funny comic! This one reminded me of me, carrying on about the RIAA and MPAA in Junkmail.
I wonder who would ever want a 4-letter domain name that starts with X and doesn’t spell anything.
Express Scripts
Keep your database secure. Or not. Express Scripts is a company that contracts with about 160 companies to provide millions of employees with prescription medicine by mail. In October they got an extortion email with personal information on about 75 people, promising to expose their entire database if the extortionists were not paid a lot of money. This was unusual in that extortion emails ordinarily come from the RIAA.
Express Scripts handled it properly, in my opinion. They refused to pay, went to the FBI, and announced it all publicly. They are also offering a million dollar reward to catch the extorters.
http://www.esisupports.com/the-facts/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081107/0125292766.shtml
Google is facing an extortion attempt, too. A company in Russia claims to hold the patent on displaying ads related to the content of a web page, and wants $3 billion from Google.
http://profy.com/2008/11/06/russian-company-to-sue-goog…
AVG Windows Improvement
AVG is a good, free antivirus program, and very popular. On November 9, AVG came out with a new version, which is important in the antivirus business.
However, the November 9 version identified a critical Windows component as a virus and killed it. Oddly, some customers complained when their computers wouldn’t run any more. But how would you contact AVG for a solution without a computer? And would you suspect a hardware failure or your antivirus program as the cause?
This is a note from their web site. “In case you are not able to run your Windows XP operating system after AVG 8.0 virus definition update, it may be caused by a false positive on a specific “user32.dll” system file. The file was moved to the AVG Virus Vault and deleted. Therefore it is not possible to start Windows. Please follow the steps below to rectify this situation:”
I’ll bet that never happens again at AVG!
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/10/2319209
Ocean Cooling
Here is a good article about ocean temperatures and sea level. It is, understandably, a very complex problem. People for and against global warming grab tend to grab snippets from various studies to support their politics. The Bush administration tends to push science funding and publications to support their politics. This article is clear, unbiased, and provides a good example of how one set of data does not answer all the questions in a complex system such as planetary climate or an MMRPG.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/
Escape from Tibet
An interesting (and a little scary) story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/7715401.stm
Bombing Thule
In January 1968, a few months before the USS Scorpion sank, an airplane crashed in the bay off Thule, Greenland. This plane was big — a B52. It had some atomic bombs, now referred to as nuclear weapons. Three of its four bombs were recovered. Three out of four is not bad, right?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7720049.stm
Nigeria Rules
Did you ever wonder why people keep sending those Nigerian-type scam emails, wanting help in getting a few million dollars out of the country? Who would ever fall for that, anyway? Janella from Oregon. She paid them $400,000.
http://www.katu.com/news/34292654.html
FCC and Nascar
The Federal Communications Commission spent $355,000 to sponsor a Nascar driver named David. That’s certainly good use of my tax dollars. He crashed, too. I suppose it could have been worse. They might have given the money to financial executives, or even lawyers.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/11/10/fccs-nascar-ca…
Creative Living
Some people just live interesting lives. A 42-year-old guy named Donald was arrested for driving down the street on a riding lawnmower under the influence of marijuana with a 49-year-old guy on the hood of the mower.
Donald was driving the lawn mower because he lost his driver’s license for failure to pay child support. He was ticketed for aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, driving an unregistered and uninspected motor vehicle, and not using headlights, among other things. The guy on the hood of the lawn mower got a ticket for not wearing a seat belt. Donald was taking the lawn mower to a pub where he planned to sell it for $200.
http://www.poststar.com/articles/2008/11/16/news/local/…
Online Calculus
Have you forgotten how to integrate an equation? Or, like me, maybe you never learned it very well in the first place? No worries! Use Mathematica’s online integrator:
http://integrals.wolfram.com/index.jsp?expr=sin(x^2)
Time Travel
I heard on CNN: “CNN projects that Ted Stevens lost the election on his birthday.”
That’s a Star Trek thing, being able to project into the past.
Air Traffic
24 hours of air traffic across the world. This is a cool video (20 meg):
Last-Accessed Timestamp
If you right-click on a file under Windows Explorer and then select properties, toward the bottom of the General tab you’ll see three date and times, Created, Modified, and Accessed. Every time you open a file, even if it’s only to read it, Windows stores the time and date of the access. You can turn off this “feature” in the registry.
To do this, run RegEdit and change the value of NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate to 1 under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem. Odd things can happen on your computer if you muck up the registry, so you might want to set a system restore point first.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc758569.aspx
Wikimedia
You can get (or put) publicly available photos and images on Wikimedia Commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IMG_1302.JPG
If you need to add an image to a Wikipedia article, you can upload it to Wikimedia Commons and access it from there.
The German Government uploaded about 100,000 historical photos over the past month or two that are pretty interesting.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bundesarchiv
The captions are naturally in German, but you can use Google to translate if you can’t decipher them:
http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en
You can use Google to translate to and from about 35 languages. The translations are not perfect, but they are usually understandable.
Rocket Men
I generally don’t put YouTube videos in Junkmail, but the world’s fastest sailboat rates it. It only goes one direction and won’t handle waves very well, but the Vestas Sailrocket averaged 47.4 knots over a 500 meter course. It even flies (about 4:00 into the video).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfJK5ycx_hg
Spaced Out
Raven Ridge, Colorado, last month from the International Space Station:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36504
They fly around the earth going really fast. How do they keep bugs off their windows?
Pennsylvania Mountains from Space, Landsat, 2001:
hires…
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36054
Breckenridge, Colorado last October from the Space Station:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36269
Mount St. Helens
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36298
.Net
I have finally bowed to the inevitable and the improbable, and started using Microsoft’s .Net 2008. I was happy with the 10-year-old VB6, but compatibility problems kept creeping up around me.
As you would expect, .net has some advantages and disadvantages. The help system is very weak, which is a problem for someone new to the system like me. A lot of the links in the .net Help go nowhere. That seems like extremely poor quality control to me. Looking for help on many topics, I get a helpful message like this:
But I can contribute to make it a better product. It makes me feel special. There is a Send Feedback button on the help screens I can use to let the people at DevDocs@Microsoft.com know their links are dead. One afternoon I started clicking the “Send Feedback” button every time I got a dead link in the Help system, and forwarded the link to Microsoft. I got this reply for each one:
I suppose that explains all their dead links.
AUSV
Harbor Wing Technologies has built an “Autonomous Unmanned Surface Vessel, for reconnaissance and surveillance by the U.S. government. The prototype is a 30-foot catamaran with a hard airfoil sail. The production model will be a 50-foot trimaran. It can sail at all points of the wind. I’ll have to figure out how to do that someday.
http://harborwingtech.com/HWT-X-3-Production-Design.htm
The movie:
http://harborwingtech.com/products_demo.htm
New Virus
Last Junkmail I mentioned finding some odd files on one of my computers. I sent them in to some virus companies. A couple months later I got this response from Symantec: ”The sample file you sent contains a new virus version of mydoom.j. Please clean your system with the attached signature.”
I guess I was supposed to let it run rampant for a couple of months.
Pictures of Today!
A helicopter at the cone of Shishaldin, Volcano, Alaska, by Pathfinder Aviation:
http://www.avo.alaska.edu/image.php?id=16031
Shishaldin Volcano this summer, by me:
Name this creature:
An Indecisive Tree (Laura Tapp took this):
The Moon:
Some Clouds:
A bunch of relatives (and a few strays) at Mom & Dad’s for Christmas.
Google Data Center, Oklahoma
Chicken Farm, Oklahoma
A Tree:
Some Wires:
Bob’s Junkmail, #204
Running the Numbers
How big is a number? I like this:
http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php
Electoral College
It’s presidential election time! That means it’s time for my quadrennial discourse on the electoral collage. As you are well aware from 4th grade Constitutional Law class, each state sends representatives to the electoral college, which actually votes for the President. A state gets one member of the electoral college for each representative in the House and for each Senator.
The U.S. uses this system for two reasons. First, in the late 1700’s, it wasn’t technically feasible to have a national popular election. Second, including Senators in the calculation mitigated the advantage the populous states, such as Virginia, had over the sparsely populated states, such as Georgia.
Today it is technically feasible to have a national election, or at least it was before the advent of electronic voting machines. However, it is important that votes cast in states such as Oklahoma and Alaska count more than those cast in California and New York, because people in Oklahoma and Alaska are much more important; hence the relevancy of the electoral college in 2008.
Vaccines
After his flu shot in 2007, a Canada man named Richard was paralyzed for five months with Guillain-Barré syndrome.
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/10/22/bc-fku-shot-p…
But one person in Canada who had serious side-effects does not make the flu vaccine dangerous, considering that Canada distributes 10,000,000 vaccinations across the country. It’s unfortunate that Richard got sick, but there were also thousands of lives saved from the Canadian flu vaccinations.
This year about 36,000 people in the U.S. will die from the flu, a higher death toll than AIDS.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/keyfacts.htm
Measles is a good example of a successful vaccination program. Measles has been almost eliminated in the Americas. However, there are still more then 30 million cases per year worldwide, resulting in more than 600,000 deaths annually. (This does not include Rubella, or the German Measles.)
There are, on average, 44 cases of measles in the U.S. per year resulting in no deaths. But in the first 7 months of this year, there were 131 cases of measles reported in the United States. 122 of these were children who had not been vaccinated (or whose vaccination status was unknown). There were 15 hospitalizations and no deaths.
The moral of the story? Take your shots!
Pakistan:
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp……
Sometimes ignorance prevails over vaccine:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7612996.stm
Tuberculosis on the border:
http://www.elpasotimes.com/newupdated/ci_10795170
Truth in Politics?
Who’s telling the truth? Here’s a good web site I’ve mentioned before. It’s got lies by Obama, McCain, and most other politicians. The topics are pretty well researched.
Here’s one of my favorites. It’s just like The Appeal by John Grisham:
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/court_fight_in_…
This article is a little dated, but discusses the persistent lying of several politicians. Mark Twain and Will Rogers might consider that redundant.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20…
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-ed_pitts_1021…
Auto Tracking
Guess what? You don’t have to worry about the government tracking your turnpike pass any more. (Actually, you probably weren’t worrying about that to begin with, but it could become very important should you decide to embark on a life of crime.)
The government will be able to track cars without the EZPass or Pike Pass or SunPass before long. Instead, they can use the traffic cameras at intersections, toll gates, tunnels, etc. "To gain public acceptance, the surveillance program is being initially sold as an aid for police looking to solve Amber Alert cases and locate stolen cars."
I think that would be a really interesting programming project. I expect it will be a few years before it actually works, but it will be coming soon to a country near you — Australia, Canada, U.K., U.S., and eventually continental Europe.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/25/2537.asp
Border Security
Last Junkmail I mentioned that Homeland Security, according to their own rules, can browse and copy hard drives your laptop when you cross the border into the U.S., without a warrant, probable cause, or even an exhibition of defiance.
It should come as no surprise, then, that they’ve expanded their own authority to copying paper. They can now copy any of your personal documents and papers you carry when you enter the U.S. "Probably cause" and all that other legal stuff in the Constitution is not necessary.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080923/1512552350.shtml
According to the ACLU, Homeland Security has broadened the border zone to about 100 miles for purposes of searches and seizures without probably cause. This happens to include about two thirds of the U.S. population. I think the ACLU is exaggerating a bit, as they are prone to do, but I also think some people at Homeland Security are trying to acquire all the powers they can before Bush leaves office.
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/37293res20081022.html
Ego Portraits
There is a portrait of Donald Rumsfeld going up in the Pentagon soon, at the low, low price of $46,790. There have been at least 30 portrait contracts recently for such governmental luminaries as the heads of the Commerce Department, EPA, Energy Department, and Transportation Department.
Instead of taking a digital photo and blowing it up, they choose to spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire a painter, or rather, a portrait artist. Heck, they could even use PhotoShop to add brush strokes to the digital image. I’ll even give them a head start. Here is a high-res photo of Donald Rumsfeld:
Here’s Melvin Laird:
Are all these portraits traditional? It’s true that George Washington sat for a portrait, but there were no color cameras at the time, and the Transportation Secretary is hardly the President of the United States. But what’s a million dollars spent on bureaucrat portraits when the U.S. budget deficit might very well be less than a trillion dollars and the economic forecasts are so promising?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20…
Bird Brains
A couple years ago, research reports showed that sooty shearwaters, a.k.a. mutton birds, wander around from New Zealand to Japan, Siberia, Alaska and western North America, occasionally western South America, and back to the New Zealand area. They’ve been tracked 39,000 miles in 200 days. I think this is because they are horrible navigators and get lost a lot.
The bar-tailed godwit (not to be confused with the barfly nitwit) heard about this research and went out to one-up the sooty shearwater.
They normally migrate in flocks to coastal western Europe, Africa, South Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Here are some satellite tracks of the godwits between New Zealand and China.
On August 29, 2007, a female godwit took off from Alaska and flew nonstop to New Zealand, covering 7,189 miles. To prove her record flight, she carried a satellite transmitter with her so she would not be accused of hitching a ride on an errant sailboat.
It’s a fact. New Zealand birds go farther.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/22/wildl…
Meltdown
These "financial experts" explained the coming credit market meltdown, but they were a year early so nobody listened.
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/187.html
Presidential Makeup
McCain and Palin have been criticized for spending a few thousand dollars on makeup artists.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2008/10/httpwww…
I’m not sure whether Obama and Biden spend that much on makeup, but maybe Biden should. He’s a lot uglier than Palin.
In 1960, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy had a televised debate. Nixon didn’t wear makeup, Kennedy did. Nixon’s advisor said that "Nixon’s pasty skin tone — the result of a two-week hospital stay following a serious knee injury — and his perpetual 5 o’clock shadow would have benefited from a little makeup, especially when he was pictured alongside a tanned, fit-looking JFK."
They had three more debates. Kennedy barely won the election. The debates probably made the difference. They were the last presidential debates on TV for 16 years.
What if Nixon had worn makeup and won the election? How would the Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam turned out?
Open Government
Some people complain that the government uses "national security" as a reason to keep unflattering information secret. Of course, the government would never abuse its authority to polish its image. It would only block information for purposes of national security. Or possibly in an election year.
The Bank of New York Mellon was awarded a contract for accounting "and other infrastructure services" for the government’s acquisition of mortgage-backed securities. How much was the bank paid for its fine services? Good question! That information was blacked out in the public disclosure of the contract on the Treasury Department’s web site.
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/reports/custodianco…
Why would a government agency hide the amount of money it pays to a public company in a public transaction? It’s so enemy governments won’t know how much to pay their banks when their economy is on the brink. It has nothing to do with hiding an unreasonably large payment from the public.
http://www.propublica.org/article/why-are-docs-from-the…
Enceladus
Enceladus one of Saturn’s 52 named moons. It’s about 15% the size of Earth’s moon. It orbits Saturn every 1.4 days. The fast orbit is because it’s closer to Saturn and because Saturn is a lot more massive than Earth. Take a look at their relative sizes:
The Cassini spacecraft is supposed to make a flyby of Enceladus on Halloween. It’s been orbiting Saturn for over for years now. Here are some of the Enceladus photos Cassini’s taken so far:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/enceladus_up_c…
Flash Memory
You can now get a 16 gigabyte SD card for cameras, etc for around $40 from places like http://zipzoomfly.com and http://newegg.com. That’s equivalent to about 21 CDs or 3.4 DVDs. Flash memory is still 25-30 times more expensive per megabyte than DVD-ROM, but it’s a lot more convenient and can be reused.
Solid state drives using flash memory have been getting closer in price-performance to traditional hard drives, but they are not quite there yet.
MPAA Handbags
If the motion picture industry (MPAA) sold handbags, what would the market be like?
http://bagbunch.com/if-the-mpaa-did-handbags/
Icelandic Terrorists
Over the past few years, the Icelandic currency, the krona, has gone up in value. A lot of people and companies in Iceland capitalized on this by borrowing euros instead of krona. The higher the krona went, the less they owned on their loans (in krona).
But then, as is prone to happen, the bubble burst. The value of the Krona started down. It took more krona to make the loan payments, resulting in load defaults. The more defaults there were, the farther down in value the krona went.
Problems last April:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/abba0f5e-06dd-11dd-b41e-00007…
Finally, the country essentially went bankrupt.
The U.K. decided that Iceland government should pay off private debts to U.K. companies. When Iceland declined, the U.K. declared Iceland to be a terrorist state and froze all Icelandic assets in the U.K. It sounds like the U.K. has been learning from the U.S. how flexible those antiterrorism laws can be.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economic…
The value of the Krona decreased 70% before trading in the currency dried up. Iceland had to nationalize their banks. Iceland is now supposed to get a $2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Tuesday, trading in the krona resumed at 240 krona to the euro. A year ago the euro was worth 90 krona.
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSLS310402…
The IMF loans money to countries that need it for poverty or underlying financial problems. 185 countries are members of the IMF, contributing various amounts. The U.S. funds 17% of the IMF, Japan and Germany 6% each, France and the U.K 5% apiece.
http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/memdir/members.htm
Ukraine could be next in line, with a $15 billion loan in the works.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/29/europe/30ukraine.php
Surtsey
Just south of Iceland on the island of Surtsey there is absolutely no financial instability. This is because there are no people. In fact, before 1963 there was no Surtsey Island. The island was formed during an undersea volcanic eruption in 1963. It continued to erupt off and on through 1967.
In its first 35 years, about half the original square mile area of Surtsey was eroded by wind and waves. I suppose it will be washed back into the ocean if there are no more eruptions.
Surtsey makes a nice laboratory for studying the natural migration of plants and animals. There are about 30 established species of plants on Surtsey today, and 14 bird species. There are 490 plant species found on Iceland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surtsey
http://features.csmonitor.com/backstory/2008/10/24/icel…
McDonalds
Economic news lately is generally bad, but McDonalds posted higher profits in the third quarter. I helped.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/mcdonalds……
Comics
I think this is really funny.
http://www.explosm.net/comics/1441/
Happy Birthday
Microsoft Word is 25 years old. My copy is 12 years old. I refuse to upgrade.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/152585/microsoft_word….
Dangerous Twitter
There was a U.S. Army report out this week (or maybe just a draft report) detailing how terrorists can use cell phones, Skype and other VoIP, and Twitter. The news articles about this imply that the government will be shutting down these dangerous tools of terrorism if we don’t do something quick.
But that’s not really the case. You can read the report and see that it’s just meant to inform the military readers what mobile communications are available and how they can be used by terrorists. It is not a campaign against Twitter.
I suspect there are a lot of tactic-developing officers in the Army who have never used Skype or Twitter. It seems like a good idea to educate them on communications tools available to the general public.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/messaging/…
Here’s a copy of the report. Don’t read it unless you are officially interested, because it’s labeled "for official use only."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081026/1937482643.shtml
Joe the Star
Joe the Plumber is supposed to be the "normal American guy." Someone thought he might be too normal and accessed Joe’s driver’s license or vehicle records in state government databases, shortly after he came into the spotlight in the Republican presidential campaign. I suppose other records were checked on, too, but that didn’t make the news.
Democrats were almost certainly the ones checking up on Joe’s past. The Republicans didn’t even bother to check up on their own vice presidential candidate. This raises a question or two about Democrat personal privacy policies.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/26/2044228
It may seem that the Republicans and the Democrats are about the same. That’s not true. There are some big differences in the platforms of the two parties. It’s just that nobody can figure out what they are.
Here is my guide to the presidential platforms, covering the important issues.
| Recommendation | Democrat Position |
Republican Position |
| End the RIAA’s Extortion Campaign | The Recording Industry donates a lot of money. | The Recording Industry donates a lot of money. |
| Repeal the DMCA | What’s DMCA? | What’s DMCA? |
| Reduce the Department of Homeland Security by about 87.2% | Terrorists are almost everywhere. We’ll keep you safe. | Terrorists are everywhere. We’ll keep you safe. |
| Increase Science Research | Only science that makes us feel good. | Only science that makes us look good. |
| Fiscal Responsibility | Tax and spend. Budget deficits can be ignored. | Spend and don’t tax. Budget deficits can be ignored. |
| Stop Spam | What’s Spam? | What’s Email? |
| Stop Torture | It’s not torture. | What base at Guantanamo? |
| Get Rid of the Patriot Act | You need us to keep you safe. | You need us to keep you safe. |
| Surveillance and Wiretapping | We’re against it. | According to our transcript of their meeting, the Democrats are really for it. |
Secure Flight
Homeland Security’s "Secure Flight" program is coming to an airport near you! This program lets the government check up on you even before you get to the airport, although you still won’t know if you’re banned from the flight until it’s too late.
Now, in order to board a flight, you’ll have to provide your birth date along with your name so Homeland Security can figure out whether you’re one of 18,000 or so people on their "no-fly" and "selectee" lists. This is good policy because terrorists never use a false birth date or name when they plan to blow up a plane.
No word on whether I’ll be able to keep my shoes on.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20081023/0034082623.shtml
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081026-dhs-secur…
Turkish Internet
When the Turkish government finds offensive material on the internet, they block it from the entire country. In the past Turkey has blocked YouTube, Slide, WordPress.com, and Google Groups.
Some bloggers were posting links to unauthorized streams of Turkish soccer matches. So Turkey blocked all the blogs on blogspot.com. They weren’t showing the soccer matches — they were only posting links to the matches.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081027/0314322649.shtml
http://www.basbasbas.com/blog/2008/10/24/turkey-bans-bl…
If you’re in Turkey, the blocks are pretty easy to get around. You can just go through one of these sites:
MTV Brilliance
MTV has 16,000 or so music videos online now, free to watch. There are some ads you might have to ignore at the beginning of a video, but it’s still pretty good.
One song on MTV’s site is pretty funny — Weird Al Yankovic’s "Don’t Download This Song," which came out in 2006. The song lyrics include "Like Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA." MTV, in their brilliance, bleeped out the names of these four programs, with loud, irritating, beeps.
Three things are wrong with this.
- If they just muted out the words instead of replacing them with loud beeps, people wouldn’t notice.
- Morpheus, Grokster, and KaZaA can no longer be used to download pirated music.
- The act of bleeping them out brought more publicity to these applications they ever would have achieved on their own.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20081030/0358562688.shtml
Here’s an unmolested copy of the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz-grdpKVqg
The Bank of San Seriffe
Donald Knuth has launched the Bank of San Seriffe, single-handedly solving the international credit crisis.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/10/31/knuth-launches-…
Sinowal.a
Here’s an interesting article about a trojan that’s been around for two or three years collecting credentials on half a million bank and credit card accounts. It’s a pretty well-written trojan that gets around the majority of virus scanners.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/10/vi…]
Microsoft details (click the Analysis tab):
http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/Entry.aspx?nam…
The people behind this trojan have apparently figured out that it could be profitable for a trojan to lie in wait than use a botnet member as a spam sender.
One of my computers locked up the other day, so I checked it out to see if there were any odd programs running. I did see one service that I didn’t recognize, but it was running on svchost.exe, part of Windows. Several Windows services use that exe file.
Then I noticed that the unfamiliar service was running on svchost.exe in the system32\inetsrv folder. That’s the wrong place. I did some virus scans, but nothing was found. I updated Windows, ran an MRT scan, and nothing was found. When I looked around, found seven files that seemed out of place.
I renamed them and let it go for a while. The firewall had blocked them from the internet, but at least one (inetsrv\svchost) had tried to access the internet. I wasn’t too worried because I don’t have anything important on that computer.
I went to the web site http://www.virustotal.com/ to scan these files using different virus scanners. Virustotal is a pretty good web site if you need to check on a particular file. They also make the submitted files available to the antivirus companies.
I was surprised because only a few virus scanners recognize these files as malware. Sophos and Trend Micro recognized all but a couple. Symantec, AVG, and F-Prot only flagged one of the files, and McAfee missed them all. One of the files was not recognized by any of the scanners, but it was created at the same time and date as the other files (4:20 am). These were all in the system32 folder. The link is the result of the VirusTotal scan.
ndisget.scr (8 of 36) (sophos, trend micro)
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/1e5af276a7fb4b8704…
ndisnc.scr (26 of 36) (all but mcafee and microsoft)
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/b279bdd69094f81949…
reg.exe (5 of 36) (trend micro)
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/7f4b12668053ef0a40…
srv.exe (2 of 33) (trend micro)
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/9689ba5a808ca5c9b3…
wmiprvse.exe (3 of 33)
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/fc65117e9d73764ef3…
inetsrv\iisdump.dll (0 of 36)
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/9b2a1a0ead7c8d5b83…
inetsrv\svchost.exe (8 of 36) (sophos, trend micro)
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/39d63ed694a75dc478…
These were probably installed sometime over an open port on my computer. I’ll blame Microsoft. I’m not sure what the intended use was — probably a botnet for spamming, or maybe phishing. But the firewall prevented that, and the logs showed it was blocked.
Drug Testing
In Aberdeen, Scotland they test you for drugs before they let you into a pub. They swab your hands to see if there are traces of illegal drugs, using a machine called the Itemiser. If you test positive, you don’t get into the pub and you’re liable to be searched for drugs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/…
They’re also using the Itemiser in other parts of the U.K.
http://www.crp-news.com/htm/n20080516.758748.htm
This is similar to the machines they use to check for traces of explosives at airports.
Digg Physics
Digg.com is a news link site. People submit links to news and other items, then everybody votes them up (digg) or down (bury). The most popular articles are viewed a lot. It’s a pretty popular site, ranked 271 in U.S. web site popularity, followed closely by xpda.com at 1,321,294.
Here are the 100 most popular sites in the U.S.:
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?cc=US&ts_mod…
At the bottom of the http://digg.com main page is a comment that’s not normally displayed in a browser. You can see this using View, Page Source (Firefox); or View, Source (Internet Explorer):
Who knows what those numbers and letters mean? Tommy does!
http://www.hyperevo.com/new%20site/index.php?subaction=…
2.01355321270u is the atomic mass of Deuterium. We’ll call that D. 137.03599911 is the inverse of the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant, the measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force that governs how electrically charged elementary particles (e.g., electron, muon) and light (photons) interact. We’ll call this inverse I. 6.6742×10-11m3kg-1s-2 is Newton’s gravitational constant. We’ll call it G. It appears in the comment twice.
So we end up with D I G G. Pretty cool!
Nepal
Mike and I (along with 13 others) took a hike in the Himalayas last month.
Here are some photos and a slightly rambling commentary:
Pictures of Today!
A pet in the garage:
I have ladybugs on my ceiling!
The ladybugs are outside, too. Maybe they’re eating aphids or fleas.
Baffin Island, October 2, 2008:
hires…
The Himalayas, from the International Space Station:
Here’s an 80-mile mosaic of the Himalayan front:
hires
The End!
Kathmandu
We made it to Nepal! We’ve spent the last two nights in Kathmandu, the capital. There are about 3 or 3.5 million people here. Most of them spend the day on the streets honking horns. I have not rented a car here, but I considered it so I could enjoy the creative driving. We did some touring today. Tomorrow morning at 4:30 we meet for breakfast, then we’re off to the airport at 5:00. We fly to Lukla and start walking toward Everest. We won’t climb Everest, but we’ll spend a few days hiking from 9,200′ to 18,000′ feet elevation.
Now is the a Hindu festival that included some animal sacrificing, such as goats, sheep, chicken, etc. I haven’t attended the ceremony, but there are a lot of goats around awaiting the fun and games.
At Kathmandu they understand the concept of car pooling. I have seen several times a van go by, smaller than the smallest minivan in the U.S., containing at least 25 people. They generally leave the door open so some people can overflow a bit.
The infrastructure in Nepal is not the best. There are few roads, no railroads, two highways, and lots of traffic. The electricity goes off fairly often. In fact, it’s off now but I found an internet cafe with a generator. Communications seem pretty good. There is internet service all over Kathmandu, and my cell phone even works here. I’m not sure what we’ll find in the Everest region, though.
Leo Le Bon is celebrating his 40th anniversary trip here. He organized his first trek here in 1967. Maybe that’s 41 years. I found out that it was not only his first trek, but THE first trek in Nepal other than Everest climbing expeditions. There were no hotels here in Kathmandu at the time. They flew to the mountains in an old military DC3. Now, with the start of the trekking season, there are groups leaving daily on scheduled flights.
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