More Junkmail from Bob, #211
A Computerist
Part 1
The other day I got an email from my cousin-in-law Lynn about my Aunt Jeanette’s computer. It had a virus. (Jeanette is the one in the middle.)
Lynn is pretty good with computers, and had already done most of what I suggested. The rest of what I suggested didn’t do any good. Eventually, I gave up, thinking that I could probably fix it pretty easily if that happened on my computer.
Part 2
I was minding my own business on the internet the other day, which is not always the case. I looked at a web site, and it was some kind of strange site. I thought it might be a phishing site or something like that, and I decided to look around. I think those fake sites are interesting, if you can figure out how they work.
At one point, a dialog box popped up. I glanced at it, and just after I clicked the close “x”, I realized that that’s not the normal close “x” I see on my computer. I had actually clicked a command button.
A few minutes later, my firewall told me that a program named something like wjkm.tmp was trying to access the internet. I don’t use an antivirus program because they slow down my computer, so I pay attention to the firewall messages.
I went through the normal routine — kill the process, check the tasks running, delete all the files that were just updated, twirl the power cord of the computer to break loose any electron jams, etc. It was easy. Then I did an mrt scan (Microsoft’s scanner that comes with Windows,) and I updated Firefox to 3.5 so maybe it would keep me out of trouble next time.
A while later, I noticed that when I clicked a Google search result, it went to the wrong site. That caught my attention. There was one strange task running again, system.tmp from the temp folder. I killed it and deleted the file. I went through all the services and each one was legitimate. There was nothing new in the startup folder or in the startup area of the registry.
I ran mrt again. This time it found a virus. I checked the hard drive for new files, and noticed a folder in my Program Files directory called Windows Police. I knew that name. That’s the one that Jeanette had!
No problem. I downloaded 7 antivirus programs, even paying $39 for one (Norton), and scanned my computer with AVG, f-prot, Kaspersy, mbat, Norton, PCTools, and two others I don’t remember right now. I even did a couple of them in safe mode. Then, just for good luck, I checked all the strange locations on the hard drive and got rid of anything that looked funny.
This made absolutely no difference. My computer ran just fine, but some virus was intercepting about 1 in 6 search results and sending me to odd web sites with a bunch of choices to click on, apparently making some money off the clicks. This happened on Bing as well as Google. This happened on Internet Explorer and Firefox.
I scanned and scoured the computer for a few days. I was on the verge of calling Lynn and asking to borrow her hammer. But then I ran across a site called PCHelpForum.com. I knew it was unlikely anybody would tell me what was wrong. If all those antivirus programs couldn’t take care of it, I doubted they could. But I decided to ask anyway on the off chance that someone else had had this problem.
I started to post the situation, and I noticed a set of instructions. I was supposed to run a few programs which produce reports on my computer, its installed software, active tasks, files modified in the past 30 days, and a bunch of other stuff. So I did. The next day, someone on the forum replied that I should run Combofix. I didn’t remember that program from anywhere. How could it do any good?
But since they were taking an interest, I decided to run combofix and see what their next suggestion would be. When I ran Combofix, if said it detected a rootkit problem, and found a virus on atapi.sys. Then it fixed it. That fixed my whole problem!
I reported back to them, and checked out my computer for quite a little while. It was really back to normal. The funny thing is, if Combofix left me a “present,” how would I ever know?
One thing I did figure out — it was NOT so easy to fix Jeanette’s problem when it happened to me!
Phish Fry
Earlier this month the FBI arrested 53 people and charged a few dozen more with financial fraud. Since financial fraud isn’t very exciting, the AP and a few other news outlets decided to call it identity theft. But they didn’t steal anybody’s identity. Every single victim got to keep his or her own name.
The group was among the many that send out spam emails claiming to be from a bank, in this case, Bank of America or Wells Fargo. They referred people to the bank website for some fake reason, threatening to suspend their account if they didn’t reconfirm some information, or something like that. Here’s one I got the day before yesterday.
We are sorry to inform you that your Bank of America Online
Account has been suspended. A high number of failed login
attempts have been recorded on your online account. As a
security measure we had to temporarily suspend your account.
To restore your account we have attached a form to this email.
Please download the form and follow the instructions on your
screen.
NOTE: The form needs to be opened in a modern, javascript
enabled, browser (ex: Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3,
Opera 9).
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Sincerely, the Bank of America security team.
© Copyright 2009 Bank of America Financial Group. All rights
reserved.
It asks for this information:
- Name on card:
- Date of Birth:
- Social Security Number:
- Mother’s Maiden Name:
- Phone Number:
- Street Address:
- City:
- State:
- Zip Code:
- Card Number:
- Card Expiration Date:
- Card Verification Value (CVV):
The email is fake, of course. It is just used to collect things like account numbers, passwords, social security numbers, drivers license numbers, mothers maiden names, etc. Then the crooks transfer money our of a victims account into their own.
For quite a while, I was getting messages from eBay saying my account was suspended and I needed to click here to get it taken care of. Of course, I recognized this as a scam. I don’t use eBay very often anyway.
Then one day, I logged onto eBay. Those emails had been real! I owed them two dollars and some cents. So I paid and restored my credit rating, preventing the failure of several major banks.
How can you tell the difference between a scam email or a real one that says you need to take care of your account? It’s not very easy. One way is to look at the html source of the email, search for all the “http”s, and make sure the part of the URL before the last “.” is the company you want. In the case of the email above, it sent the data to http://suntunsmecher.com.
If you go to http://suntunsmecher.com, it looks like a fairly innocuous site, just one of those parking sites that has some search items to generate some Google click money after people arrive there by mistake.
But, if you add /w.php on to the end of that site, you get a fake Bank of America site. It looks real. If you actually try this, you might end up meeting some new friends of questionable character from Egypt, or even California. My guess is that site won’t stay up very long.
A safe way to go to a web site in an email is to type the address in yourself instead of clicking on the link in the web site.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/technology/internet/0…
I thought maybe the FBI closed down at least the Bank of America scams, but I just now got another one. They said I’d get $50 for answering a survey. At the end of the survey, it wanted my number and PIN for the account where I wanted the $50 to be deposited. Of course, I would never give them my information. I gave them my brother Jerry’s instead.
Backups? Who Needs Backups?
A year or two ago, Microsoft bought a company called Danger. They make the Sidekick, a T-Mobile competitor to the iPhone and Blackberry.
This note was issued a few days ago:”Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”
It’s hard to believe that T-Mobile or Danger or Microsoft wouldn’t keep a copy of their users’ data. But a few days later, Microsoft said that it could restore most, if not all, of the missing zeros and ones.
http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2009/10/so-thats-wh…
http://www.siliconvalley.com/search/ci_13568709
Terraced Barges
In Operation Viper, the Department of Homeland Security narrowly averted a plot by terrorists to take over barges on the Ohio River and use them to destroy civilization as we know it.
http://www.wlwt.com/news/21282269/detail.html
Fussing
The White House vs. Fox News vs. MSNBC. This is all about nothing, as near as I can tell, but someone made a pretty funny video about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdHzWMPLiow
Health Insurance Companies
I’ll avoid the health reform debate, since nobody believes anything said about it anyway. I do think that everybody in the U.S. should have access to health care, but I would prefer not to pay for it all myself. (Oops. I almost avoided it.)
Among the health care publicity campaigns, I noticed that the insurance business promoted some press articles reassuring us that they were not making too much money. “Health insurers posted a 2.2 percent profit margin last year, placing them 35th on the Fortune 500 list of top industries.”
That made me wonder, so I did a little checking. Cigna is a major health insurer. Cigna Boss Ed was paid a measly $7,790,000 last year. Of course, that’s less than one percent of his total compensation for the year by the time you add in $1,580,000,000 worth of stock options he exercised. Maybe those companies would make some money if they cut their executive compensation back to a couple million dollars a year.
GRB 090510
A few billion years ago, in a galaxy far, far away (7.3 billion light-years, or thereabouts), a couple of neutron starts smashed into each other. This caused a huge explosion, and wiped out everything in the neighborhood, and subatomic particles went flying. Among them weresome photons.
Meanwhile, NASA launched the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope in June 2008.
Some of the photons from the galaxy far, far away arrived last week. They didn’t make it to earth — they ended up at the Fermi space telescope. (A whole lot of other photons from that event did make it to earth, though, along with those from zillions of other events. They were generally absorbed by the outer atmosphere.)
One of the photons that hit the Fermi space telescope had a million times more energy than another, yet they arrived within a couple of seconds of each other after traveling 7.3 billion light years. This is important in the fields of physics, science fiction, and agronomy, because unless someone made a timing error, it wipes a significant portion of quantum gravity theories.
There’s a good chance I won’t ever understand all this, but it’s still pretty interesting.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/first_year.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/science/space/29light.html
Halloween
Halloween season is here! People in the U.S. spend more on Halloween than any other holiday except Christmas. 15 or 20 years ago, my eldest toddler Brian had a computer costume for Halloween.
I was appalled this year when I learned that these two guys had unabashedly stolen Brian’s idea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIjBqFMwM08
Actually, those are pretty good!
Global Terminology
Global Warming has been renamed Global Climate Change. This is because some people claim the earth is not warming, and because local weather patterns make most areas seem extra cool at least some of the year. People just don’t notice a 2 degree change in temperature. But the earth is, in fact, getting a little warmer.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/10/talk-of-glo…
I noticed a new term in the area of ecology this week — Carbon Pollution. I don’t like that term. It implies that I should stop breathing. In fact, the U.S. Government has decided that only those people who have exhaled CO2 during the tax year are required to pay income tax.
I won’t believe that people are really serious about reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide until they start building nuclear power plants. We can have essentially an unlimited supply of energy without polluting the atmosphere, even if you consider carbon dioxide a pollutant.
Europe has long surpassed the U.S. in nuclear power plant technology. For example, 90% of French electricity comes from nuclear power. France is the world’s largest exporter of electricity, and its electricity cost is among the lowest in Europe.
There are 64 power plants operating 104 reactors in the U.S. None are less than 10-years-old. 1 is less than 15-years-old. 99 of the 104 reactors are more than 20 years old.
| Nuclear Power Plant | Operating Since |
| Arkansas Nuclear One, AR | 1974, 1980 |
| Beaver Valley, PA | 1976, 1987 |
| Braidwood, IL | 1988, 1988 |
| Browns Ferry, AL | 1974, 1975, 1977 |
| Brunswick, NC | 1977, 1975 |
| Byron, IL | 1985, 1987 |
| Callaway, MO | 1984 |
| CalvertCliff, MD | 1975, 1977 |
| Catawba, SC | 1985, 1986 |
| Clinton, IL | 1987 |
| Columbia Generating Station, WA | 1984 |
| Comanche Peak, TX | 1990, 1993 |
| Cooper, NE | 1974 |
| Crystal River 3, FL | 1977 |
| Davis-Besse, OH | 1978 |
| Diablo Canyon, CA | 1985, 1986 |
| Donald C. Cook, MI | 1975, 1978 |
| Dresden, IL | 1970, 1971 |
| Duane Arnold, IA | 1975 |
| Enrico Fermi, MI | 1988 |
| Farley, AL | 1977, 1981 |
| Fitzpatrick, NY | 1975 |
| Fort Calhoun, NE | 1973 |
| Grand Gulf, MI | 1985 |
| H.B. Robinson, SC | 1971 |
| Hatch, GA | 1975, 1979 |
| Hope Creek, NJ | 1986 |
| Indian Point, NY | 1974, 1976 |
| Kewaunee, WI | 1974 |
| LaSalle County, IL | 1984, 1984 |
| Limerick, PA | 1986, 1990 |
| McGuire, NC | 1981, 1984 |
| Millstone, CT | 1975, 1986 |
| Monticello, MN | 1971 |
| Nile Mile Point, NY | 1969, 1988 |
| North Anna, VA | 1978, 1980 |
| Oconee, SC | 1973, 1974, 1974 |
| Oyster Creek, NJ | 1969 |
| Palisades, MI | 1971 |
| Palo Verde, AZ | 1986, 1986, 1988 |
| Peach Bottom, PA | 1974, 1974 |
| Perry, OH | 1987 |
| Pilgrim, MA | 1972 |
| Point Beach, WI | 1970, 1972 |
| Prairie Island, MN | 1973, 1974 |
| Quad Cities, IL | 1973, 1973 |
| R.E. Ginna, NY | 1970 |
| River Bend, LA | 1986 |
| Salem Creek, NJ | 1977, 1981 |
| San Onofre, CA | 1983, 1984 |
| Seabrook, NH | 1990 |
| Sequoyah, TN | 1981, 1982 |
| Shearon-Harris(Harris), NC | 1987 |
| South Texas, TX | 1988, 1989 |
| St Lucie, FL | 1976, 1983 |
| Surry, VA | 1972, 1973 |
| Susquehanna, PA | 1983, 1985 |
| Three Mile Island, PA | 1974 |
| Turkey Point, FL | 1972, 1973 |
| Vermont Yankee, VT | 1972 |
| Virgil C. Summer, SC | 1984 |
| Vogtle, GA | 1987, 1989 |
| Waterford, LA | 1985 |
| Watts Bar, TN | 1996 |
| Wolf Creek, KS | 1985 |
Some people think this is good, and we should stop building nuclear power plants until they are all closed down. Some people think this is bad, and we should build new nuclear power plants to add to and replace the old ones. Some attorneys think that the legal process for building a nuclear power plant is a real money maker. The attorneys are right.
France and Finland are both building EPR nuclear power plants. EPR, or European Pressure Reactor, is a new design of nuclear reactor, more efficient and safer than older designs. In the tradition of nuclear power plant development and construction, these plants are behind schedule and over budget.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor
Nuclear fusion power plants are probably the way to go, eventually. Fusion reactions produce a lot more energy than fission, and the fuel is a lot more readily available — water (with some extra neutrons.) Unfortunately, it is not easy to convert a hydrogen bomb into a controlled fusion reaction.
In 1983 some European countries built the Joint European Torus, a nuclear fusion reactor, in Culham, U.K.
In 1991, the Joint European Torus achieved the world’s first controlled release of fusion power (if you rule out the sun and Jupiter.) However, it will only produce 70% of the power input. That is, it takes 100 watts of power to produce 70 watts of power. This technique is commonly used in corn methanol production.
The ITER Tokamak is now under development in France. It is an experimental reactor that should be able to produce more fusion power than is required to operate the reactor.
http://www.iter.org/mach/Pages/Tokamak.aspx
ITER is an organization made up of quite a few countries, including China, European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States.
http://www.iter.org/SCI/Pages/BeyondITER.aspx
Swine Flu
The CDC says 1,000 people have died from the swine flu this year. This made headlines. The CDC also says an average of 36,171 people die per year from the flu (between 1993 and 2003.) This did not make headlines.
I tried to find out how much worse the flu is this year than last, but I haven’t found any unbiased statistics on it. I believe the flu is somewhat worse, but it’s not the catastrophe that it would seem by reading the news.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_dea…
It’s not easy to find out how many people die from the flu. If I am in the hospital with pneumonia, and then I catch the flu and die, was that from pneumonia or the flu? What if I had the flu first? What if I had the flu, went to the hospital, and died when the nurse whacked me in the head with a bedpan because I was racing a 4-year-old down the hallway on one foot? You can see that this is not a simple problem.
The solution? Wash your hands, don’t rub your eyes or pick your nose after you shake hands with someone, and hold your breath when someone sneezes at you. This also helps cut down on carbon emissions.
RIAA
The RIAA pays companies to hack into P2P users and networks so they can file lawsuits. The RIAA claims you owe them $80,000 every time you share a file on the internet. Of course, if you write them a check right now they’ll offer you a substantial discount. It sounds a little like extortion to me.
The RIAA used to use MediaSentry for their covert intelligence gathering, but MediaSentry was caught doing some illegal hacking. They were using false information to access computer systems.
Now the RIAA has hired DtecNet to do their spying, in addition to some public relations. However, DtecNet seems to be behind the power curve when it comes to P2P public relations. Some of their claims are comical.
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-anti-piracy-partner-cluele…
Wireless Security
About a year ago a guy named Erik and some people showed how to crack the WPA encryption on a wireless network.
http://www.itworld.com/security/57285/once-thought-safe…
Now some people named Finn, Olav, Martin, and Stig have shown how to do it better.
http://books.google.com/books?id=mSMsqoqufMoC&pg=PA…
Amazon Words
Amazon has just received a patent for this: They change some words in an online book to introduce spelling or grammatical errors. That way they can prove that the online book came from them when they sue an illegal copier.
I don’t like this for two reasons. First, it comes under my “stupid patent” criteria for being too simple and obvious to deserve a patent. Second, I don’t think it’s proper to introduce errors into a book for the sake of copy protection. But Amazon probably doesn’t care what I think.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/28/2236235/Amazon-P…
Nuclear Spaceship
The headline: “Russia Develops Spaceship with Nuclear Engine”
The original headline: “Russia develops design for spaceship with nuclear engine”
A slight difference, eh?
Here’s the original article:
http://en.rian.ru/science/20091028/156623290.html
The old Soviet nuclear spaceship program:
http://www.astronautix.com/articles/sovermal.htm
Open Source Voting
Sequoia Voting Systems published the source code of its voting machines. I think this is a good thing.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/sequoia/
Coincidentally, 5 days before, the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation released the source code for its prototype election system.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/open-source/
SSD
Solid state drives (SSD) are now available. They are pretty reliable (depending on who you ask) and are REALLY fast. An SSD costs more than a normal hard drive. A 160gb drive from Intel costs a little over $600 at newegg. The price used to be a couple hundred dollars less, but the demand seems higher than the supply at this moment.
I believe the supply problem has to do with the reliability. In addition to normal yield-type supply problems in new semiconductors, the SSDs have had a number of software snags.
For example, Intel released a new version of their firmware this week. People can upgrade the firmware on the drive to make it faster and more reliable. However, some people who upgraded found that the upgrade killed their drive. So Intel pulled their software update one day after they released it. Oops.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140021/Intel_pu…
There is a fairly long list of stories like this from Intel and the other SSD makers.
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/10/intels-bla…
If you’d like to know more about SSDs, check out these Anandtech articles. The first one is six months old, but it covers the fundamentals very well.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631
I had decided to wait until the SSDs are cheaper before I bought one. Then, my c: drive died. Completely. I cannot read a single byte from it. And, in case you are one of many who have heard my backup harassment in the past, I did have a current backup. I bought a new SSD and am now living happily ever after. It’s only 160gb, so I have a d: drive with the files I don’t need fast access to, which is most of my files.
Ares I-X
The NASA Ares I-X rocket is planned to carry people to the space station, after the retirement of the space shuttles. NASA launched one this week, a 150-mile test. The water vapor in the first photo is around the simulated crew capsule.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ares/fl…
Open Adobe
Adobe is pushing hard to get the U.S. government to accept .pdf and flash as the standard for the U.S. Open Government initiative. That is very ironic, and more than a little stupid.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/adobe-p…
Pictures of Today!
This photo shows the paths of NASA’s spacecraft over 50 years of space exploration.
The Crab Nebula:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091025.html
Two Indian photos from the early 1900’s, by Edward Curtis.
Mike and I were planning to have the boat hauled out of the water for bottom paint, and it was struck by lightning a few weeks before. So now we get to have the mast repaired.
The End
More Junkmail from Bob! #210
UV Andromeda
Here’s a good photo of the Andromeda galaxy taking in ultraviolet wavelengths. It’s pretty cool because you can put your most over the image to see it in visible light and compare the two.
This image was taken with the Swift satellite.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/main/index.html
Numerals
Headline: “Yahoo buying Maktoob.com to boost its Arabic numbers”
In all the years I’ve been using Yahoo, I don’t remember ever seeing them use Roman numerals.
Google Traffic
If you use Google Maps with your cell phone, you can click My Location and see your current location on the map. When you do this, Google’s computer knows your location and speed. It can then tally the results of cell phone Google Map users and figure out where traffic jams are even before they start.
If you happen to be staggering drunk, weaving down the middle of the expressway on foot with Google Map, please walk quickly down the highway so as not to skew the data.
http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2009/08/google-now-…
Border Laptop Search
I did some whining and complaining during the Bush administration about how Customs could search and seize your laptop when you come into the country, although not necessarily in that order. They didn’t need any suspicion of illegal activity. They can even require you to tell them your passwords. This would be a problem for me, because I frequently don’t know my passwords.
This has all changed under Obama. Now Customs can search and seize your laptop when you come into the country, and they don’t have to even suspect illegal activity. What’s the difference? Now, “steps will be taken to improve oversight and transparency and to make sure seized equipment is returned expeditiously.” I feel safe!
http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2009/08/critics-rev…
Viewing Molecular Structure
IBM has managed to see the internal structure of a molecule, using noncontact atomic force microscopy. I am not sure how it works, but it allows them to see through the electron cloud of a molecule into the underlying atoms in the interior. This is a step toward molecular computing, but mostly it’s pretty cool. I don’t think we’ll be able to buy processors on the molecular scale in this decade.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10319001-64.html
Computer Expertise
How to be a computer expert:
Chicago Trucks
I got a semi-threatening email the other day from a lawyer in Chicago, claiming I had a copyrighted article from a Chicago Newspaper on my web site. He was right, so I took down the article. Then I emailed him back and called him a whiner.
That made me wonder why a prestigious institution like the Chicago Sun Times would wait 5 years and then ask me to remove an article that is embarrassing to the local politicians. The article is about how the city pays trucks to come and sit and do nothing. I did a Google search for the article, looking for a non-copyrighted version. I found several. But they’re for different years!
In Chicago, people are paying for trucks to do nothing. The truck companies are friends and relatives of the powers that be. Then they get caught. Then they keep doing it! There are so may different scandals involving trucks in Chicago that I can’t even tell them apart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hired_Truck_Program
http://paulipema.blogspot.com/2008/10/chicago-city-sani…
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-06…
http://www.suntimes.com/news/hired/31593,cst-nws-hired2…
http://crimes.unanimocracy.com/chicago-crime/jimmie-aki…
If I didn’t know better, I might think there were some crooked politicians in Chicago.
Southern Politics
The guy who threw his shoes at President Bush was released from an Iraqi prison a couple of weeks ago. He spent 9 months in jail. When asked about his future, al-Zeidie said he had been invited to Columbia, SC to train the South Carolina Congressional delegation in the art of shoe tossing. As an employment perk, Governor Sanford has agreed to set up al-Zeidi with a young lady from Argentina.
Blackwater is Back
Blackwater Security was banned from doing business in Iraq. So they changed their name and got a lot of new government contracts. I’m not sure whether this is good, bad, or indifferent, but it is interesting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/us/21intel.html?_r=1…
Stupid Security Rules
Last month a Continental flight with 47 people on it ended up parked at the Rochester, Minnesota airport all night, 50 yards from the terminal. The plane was headed to Minneapolis, but had to divert to Rochester because of a thunderstorm. People were not allowed off the plane because there were no TSA agents at the airport.
The TSA later said the pilot could have let the passengers off. The TSA does not take blame in any situation — it’s a matter of national security.
I feel safe! This kind of thing wants me to go to an airport and take my shoes off.
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2009-08-21-stran…
Elsewhere in the TSA, some people who worked at the San Juan, Puerto Rico and Miami, Florida airports were arrested for smuggling cocaine. What’s odd about this? These people managed to transport tons of cocaine on U.S. airliners over the past 10 years without getting caught until now. That’s what I call security.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125302172957911923.html
Turkish YouTube
Last month in Turkey I clicked on a link to watch a video someone emailed me. Turkey has internet censorship!
Stupid Business Tricks
The other day I went to the site collarity.com, for some reason I don’t remember now. I do remember that it took one minute to load, which was kind of funny given the title of the page: “Optimized Audience Engagement.”
Comcast seems to excel in the field of stupid business tricks. Last time I sent out Junkmail, I noticed that all of them going to Comcast customers bounced, with a somewhat cryptic message. So I called them up and asked if I was blocked, my domain was blocked, my IP address, or the domain or IP address of my mail server. I was assured that there were no blocks.
I wandered around their web site for a bit, and found a place to check and see if you’ve been blocked from sending emails to their customers. I had been, because of “a pattern they detected.” They eventually unblocked me. There are two things wrong with this. First, their tech guy couldn’t even operate their web site. Second, they blocked an IP address for no good reason and did not have a meaningful bounce message.
You would think that the Wall Street Journal would know how to manage an emailing list, but they seem to have a bit of trouble. From time to time, wsj.com starts sending me their “Heard on the Street” emails, for no apparent reason. It’s not so bad, but the last time they did this (a couple of weeks ago) they sent out several emails every day. To unsubscribe, I had to have a password. But my password didn’t work, probably because I don’t have an online subscription any more. In fact, I don’t think I’m even supposed to be getting these emails without a subscription. After some searching, I finally found a link to get off the list. But I imagine I’ll once again be the privileged recipient of “Heard on the Street” in a few months.
I went to Reebok’s web site the other day and was greeted with a blank screen. I tried it on Firefox as well as IE. I tried it the next day with the same result. Nice! Today it works.
iTunes and Amazon have 30-second clips of their online music selections. These downloads typically cost about a dollar. I have listened to a 30-second clip and then bought the music. A lot of people have. I would not have bought it without the convenient preview. This is true for a lot of customers. These clips increase sales a LOT.
Now the recording industry wants to be paid for these 30-second clips, which amount to free advertisements for their music. The recording industry claims it is a public performance. How stupid can you get? If Amazon and iTunes have to pay for this, they’ll pull the 30-second clips, or at least charge the record companies for their heretofore free exposure. They’ll lose a lot more in lost sales than they ever make in 30-second clip royalties.
The recording industry expects Congress to pass a law for this. As Congress is typically in the dark about anything more technological than a hammer, I can see where this is liable to happen.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090917/0505016226.shtml
Scramjet
In December, the fastest jet in the world is scheduled to fly. The X51A will try for mach 6. But there won’t be anybody on board. This is good, because the X51A doesn’t have any wheels. It will just crashes into the Pacific when it’s finished. And the flight is only 5 minutes long. And it requires a B52 to get it up to altitude. And it takes a rocket engine to boost its speed to mach 4.5 before the scramjet takes over.
But this is still a pretty cool test of a scramjet engine. It means that we may have mach 6 airplanes in a few years, depending on the test results, and it means that the U.S. government does not have mach 6 airplanes today.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/44966
Another Rat?
I always assumed it was a little late in history to go into unexplored areas and discover dozens of new species of life. At least on earth. But a team lead by Steve, Gordon, and George has done just that. They took a trip to New Guinea, went into an extinct volcanic crater about 3 miles in diameter, and found about 40 new species. One of the new animals was a giant, furry rat. I suppose the rat didn’t think he was all that new, but he was new to Steve, Gordon, and George.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/07/disco…
A Genuine Advantage?
Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) is Microsoft’s scheme for copy protecting Windows. It came out a few years ago, and has undergone several upgrades and minor transformations. Early on in its lifetime, it was possible to keep it off your computer and keep it from “phoning home” to Microsoft. I’m not sure if that’s possible any more, if you want to update Windows. I gave up on it some time ago.
Some people are suing Microsoft over this, claiming that WGA is not a necessary security update, as Microsoft claims. It’s not the first lawsuit over WGA, it probably won’t be the last, and Microsoft will probably win.
http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/09/04/microsoft…
Acoustic Lasers
It’s hard for an airplane to communicate with a submarine. You have to use radio, which can be intercepted, and the submarine has to put an antenna on the surface one way or another. You can also use really low frequency radio, but that has other drawbacks. Now the navy is working on a method where a laser can hit the water can be transformed to sound as it pulses at the proper frequencies.
http://www.nrl.navy.mil/pressRelease.php?Y=2009&R=63-09r
Browsers
Which browser is better, Firefox, Chrome, or Opera? Here are some speed and memory tests. The word “compatibility” doesn’t appear in this review, though.
http://lifehacker.com/5352195/browser-speed-tests-chrom…
Life Magazine
Google has digitized Life Magazine from 1936 to 1972, for your viewing pleasure. I like it!
http://books.google.com/books?id=R1cEAAAAMBAJ&sourc…
Google Stats is kind of interesting, too:
http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/internetstats/
Wiretapping
A guy named Chi threw a fit at a car dealership in Massachusetts and refused to leave. He was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and trespassing. This is pretty severe, but he was apparently giving the police a hard time.
But Chi was also charged with unlawful wiretapping and possessing a device for wiretapping. He had an ordinary voice recorder in his pocket. That is ridiculous.
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/x1467270710/Poli…
Stupid Software Patent
Facebook was sued for “associating a piece of data with multiple categories.” This is in violation of what must be one of the most intuitively obvious patents ever issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Just to keep things interesting, Delaware District Court judge Leonard said Facebook had to let the suing company peruse the entire Facebook source code.
When asked about the strange ruling, Judge Leonard shouted, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” and muttered something unintelligible about putting Zuckerberg in the stocks. Or maybe I just made that up.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/09/facebook-still-r…
Data Communications
About 100 years ago in the 1970s, I took a data communications class at Oklahoma State. I remember a case of a bank in Alaska that was having trouble receiving some necessary data on a daily basis. At that time, it was really expensive to get a leased line of any bandwidth at all, and even then the lines to Alaska were not too reliable. The cheapest option for this company was to put a magnetic tape on an airliner every day instead of transmitting the data.
We’ve come a long way since then. Or have we? Three weeks ago a South African company proved it could send data faster by carrier pigeon than on wideband internet using the country’s leading ISP.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/090909/odds/odd_us_s…
Glenn Beck
Did Glenn Beck rape and murdered a young girl in 1990? Of course not. But he still doesn’t like people asking about it.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090908/0321546127.shtml
Warning: You might find a naughty word on this site:
http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/
Turing Tests
A Turing test is a test used to verify that someone is human and not a computer. The Turing test is more a concept than an actual test. Around 1950 Alan Turing questioned whether it was possible to determine whether a sufficiently sophisticated computer was human or machine. This has become today’s Turing Test.
Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Carnegie Mellon University applied for a trademark on the term, but they abandoned their application last year.
Captcha is the name for the form with the weird text you have to type in when you’re trying to convince a computer that you’re human. I had to put one on the Junkmail signup page because some bots were sending me random email addresses. I never did figure how a self-respecting bot could profit from such an irresponsible act.
I used reCaptcha, because it’s a pretty complex problem and I didn’t want to take the time to come up with an inferior version of my own. Also, reCaptcha is free.
reCaptcha is now owned by Google.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/179415.asp
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/09/google-boosts-b…
Alan Turing is considered a war hero for his work in breaking German Enigma codes during World War II. Later on in life he was charged with “gross indecency” because he was a homosexual. He took hormone treatments to avoid jail. Two years later in 1954 he committed suicide, eating an apple dipped in potassium cyanide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
A lot of people consider this bad behaviour by the British government, but up until recently the British government said little on the subject.
On June 23, 2009, Alan Turing’s 97th birthday, John Graham-Cumming posted this note on his blog, titled “Alan Turing deserves an apology from the British Government.”
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/alan-turing-deserves-ap…
The next day he put an online petition on the British government petitions page.
Over the next few weeks the petition gained in popularity, and after BBS online news wrote this story the petition had over 30,000 “signatures.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8226509.stm
On September 10, Gordon Brown released an apology by the British government for its “appalling” treatment of Alan Turing.
http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/09/how-alan-turing-finall…
Incidentally, John Graham-Cumming is not gay, and does not support a sexual agenda, gay or heterosexual. His blog is worth reading.
Computers can now beat humans in Chess most of the time. Three years ago, the program Deep Fritz beat the undisputed world champion Vladimir Kramnik. I don’t think there’s been a major computer vs. champion chess match since.
But can computers act human? Sometimes. There are some pretty surprising programs that imitate people in chat rooms, collecting information for spammers and other evildoers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatterbot
Errant IL-78
In July, a former Ukrainian IL-78 Tanker took off from Denison, Texas and stopped in Oshkosh to refuel on its way out of the country. They took off from Oshkosh for Keflavik, Iceland, but were diverted to Marquette, Michigan after being denied entry into Canadian airspace. All five of the crew didn’t have proper papers (expired visas, I think) and were detained for a few days and then deported to Ukraine.
The plane was seized in Marquette. There was court order in Texas that was supposed to prevent the plane from being moved until $62,000 is paid to Air 1 Flight Support in Denison for hangar rent, more than 1,500 gallons of jet fuel, preparations to start and move the aircraft, maintenance for reinstalling instruments, recharging batteries, and fixing a fence blown down by the jet’s exhaust.
Now the plane may be auctioned off. It is the only the only U.S.-registered Ilyushin IL-78.
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1460-full…
The plane was owned by Tactical Air Defense Services, a penny stock company with plans, real or not, to perform private aerial refueling of military aircraft. The company’s financials look really strange to me. They have a negative $1 million net worth, after $35 million paid-in capital, and they have 1.2 billion shares of stock outstanding. Total revenue for 2008 is zero. Total expenses for three months ending June 30, 2009 is $10,000. Total cash on June 30, 2009 is $17. Net property and equipment: $88,000.
There have been several press releases sent out by the company about the aircraft and their plans for it, but none of the plans have come to fruition. It makes me wonder who owns these companies, what their relationship is to one another, and what goings-on have there been on the penny stock market. It might all be innocent, but it is at a minimum unusual.
http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/displayfilinginfo.a…
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snaps…
http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=165513
U.S. Tankers:
Huge Bank Failure
This one is virtual, in an online game. But it’s big news to a lot of people.
http://www.massively.com/2009/08/26/eve-online-player-r…
About Israel
I took a trip to Israel not long ago, and that got me thinking about its history. I was pretty ignorant on the subject. So here’s a quick run-down. You can find a lot of details on Wikipedia if you want to learn more. I skipped up to the 1500’s to start.
I have intentionally omitted most of the things that people are arguing over. It’s not that these arguments are unimportant. It’s just that the people who shout the loudest are the ones who ignore the facts. They are not likely to be persuaded by my fine typewritten oratory or reasonable logic, let alone common sense.
25 years after Columbus discovered America, a guy from Turkey named Selim won a battle in Egypt. After lopping off the head of the last Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Selim and the Ottomans ended up with Palestine, Canaan, the Holy Land, and Israel, all of which happened to be the same place.
The Ottomans ruled Palestine for a few hundred years, except for invasions by Napoleon and the occasional Egyptian army. Finally, after World War I, the British took over Palestine. The Ottoman Empire became the Republic of Turkey under the leadership of Ataturk.
So who are the Palestinians? Normally, it would be anybody living in Palestine. But for whatever reason, Palestinians are now considered Arabs who live in Palestine or who used to live in Palestine or whose ancestors once lived in Palestine. I’m not sure who made up this definition, but it seems to be universally accepted. If the British had called the place Canaan, I suppose the people we call Palestinians would be referred to as Canaanites.
Who were the people living in Palestine? Before 1918 (and since Columbus) they were all Turks or Ottomans or something else. It’s hard to generalize about their ancestry, since there was a lot of mixing of people from Rome, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Persia, but the majority were probably Arabic.
In the 1800s, Jews lived in Palestine but were outnumbered by a large Arab majority. Since the 1890s, more Palestinian immigrants have been Jewish than Arab. By 1940, in present-day Israel there were close to as many (within 10 or 20%) Jews as there were Arabs. There was some fussing between the Jews and Arabs back then, especially in Jerusalem where there was a Jewish majority.
After World War II, the British didn’t want to manage Palestine any longer. The British and the UN decided to split Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas.
The Jews declared the independence of their new state of Israel. The state of Israel was recognized immediately by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and, ironically, Iran (along with several other countries).
Within a few days, armies from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon invaded Israel. The Arabs declared a United State of Palestine, claiming sovereignty over all of Palestine. Israel and the Arabs fought for a few months, and Israel won. The Arabs signed an armistice, but did not surrender and did not recognize the state of Israel. Israel kept a lot of the land it gained in the war.
In 1948, about 711,000 Arabs left Israel. I think most voluntarily fled the fighting and a small percentage were expelled, but people argue about this a lot.
Some people say that this is when the Jews stole Palestine. But in recent history there has never been a country Palestine any more than there has been a country Asia Minor or Mesopotamia. And there are now almost twice as many Arab Palestinians living in Israel as there were in 1947, even if you exclude the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Some people have the impression that the Jews went into Palestine in 1948 and kicked out all the people who lived there. That is clearly not the case. The Jews had been migrating to Israel for more than half a century, and there had already been some Jews in the area longer than there has been a Moslem or Christian religion.
Today there are 10,000,000 people who refer to themselves as Palestinians. 3.7 million live in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (which I am not including in “Israel” here). 1.3 million Palestinians, about 20% of Israel’s population, now live in Israel. The vast majority are Israeli citizens.
Eventually, there will be a peace agreement of some sort with the Palestinians and Israel. Unfortunately, the Palestinians currently in charge of the Gaza Strip are a bit on the violent side, and don’t seem too interested in peace with Israel unless they own it.
The Palestinians on the West Bank are little more moderate, but it’s still a pretty dangerous place for Israelis to wander around. A few years ago Israel evacuated its settlements in the Gaza Strip. Today Israel has about 187,000 people living in settlements in the West Bank, about 5-10% of the population there.
Israel foresaw the possibility of giving the West Bank to the Palestinians, and started building a border fence between the areas. This caused some problems for some Palestinians, for two reasons. One, the fence is inside the border by about a mile, on the Palestinian side. This doesn’t seem like much unless, maybe, you are farming a quarter section in that mile, in which case you have to do some traveling and border crossing to get to your land. The other problem is that the fence occasionally dips into the West Bank to include an Israeli settlement. This causes a problem for Palestinians who want or need to travel across the “dip.”
Israel’s position is that they wouldn’t need the fence if the Palestinians would stop shooting at them and blowing stuff up. The fence building has stopped for the moment, and it looks like the Israeli settlements have stopped settling for a while, at least after the 400-some houses that were recently authorized in advance of the peace talks.
None of these Israel-Palestinian problems is insurmountable, but there are a few rather intolerant religious types on both sides who are reluctant to give in to the other side, even a little bit. This makes for very slow negotiations. I could come up with a good, equitable solution to the situation, but the hard-liners on both sides would regard it as unacceptable.
Jerusalem is a place where Arabs and Jews live cheek by jowl, and many of them tend to be religious fundamentalists of limited tolerance. I won’t discuss it here because I don’t understand it.
Obligatory RIAA Rants
The RIAA agreed to file no more lawsuits against IP addresses, and then promptly filed more lawsuits.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/riaa-we…
The RIAA and MPAA have distributed some Communist-quality propaganda to schools to be used in the indoctrination of young consumers. I disagree with a lot of their material.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090917/1819256229.shtml
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/mpaa-te…
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/18/1338249/RIAAs-El…
More:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/big-con…
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090916/1829226214.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090903/0312496093.shtml
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125305510769813787.html
Pictures of Today!
Stormy Weather, west of Pryor this week.
This Week’sBugs
A few weeks ago we got to Turkey and take a ride on the Nautilus, the ship that the Institute for Exploration used for undersea archeology and exploration.
http://www.mysticaquarium.org/ife
It was really interesting and informative. Click here for photos:
We took the long way home.
Photos from Turkey:
Photos fromIsrael:
Photos from Cyprus:
Photos from France:
Photos from Ireland:
And finally, a whole bunch of steam locomotives at Camlik, Turkey, in case you’re interested:
More Junkmail from Bob, #209
Unmanned-Air-Vehicles
Boeing has an unmanned helicopter called the A160T. The autonomous unmanned helicopter has a 2,500 payload capacity, flies 140 knots up to 20,000 feet. It has completed an 18.7 hour flight without refueling. it is 35 feet long with a 36-foot diameter rotor. It has a turbine engine, and the rotor rpm is adjustable in flight using some kind of transmission.
Boeing is also marketing the Austrian Schiebel Camcopter S-100, a smaller unmanned helicopter. It is a little over 10 feet long, has an 11-foot rotor, and can carry 50 kg of payload. It has an endurance of 6 hours. It is primarily used for surveillance
The UAE has ordered 40 Camcopters. The French and Pakistani navies have tested the Camcopter. The German navy has ordered 6 Camcopters.
The Israeli Heron TP has a 54-foot wingspan and a 1200 hp turbine engine. This one is being used for counter drug operations in El Salvador.
Turkey is supposed to be having some problems with their Herons.
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=deta…
"You’re either with us or you’re against us."
I recently read a book where a couple had had a big fight, but neither could remember what it was about. It made me wonder why we’re fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t attack the U.S., did they? There were only a couple of dozen suicidal idiots who flew planes into buildings 8 years ago, and most of them were from countries other than Iraq or Afghanistan. The planners were hosts of the Afghanistan government, but I think that government and most of the planners are long gone.
Speaking of international diplomacy, why can’t I vacation in Cuba? Cuba is happy to have me visit. The U.S. government won’t let me go. Cuba has not been an imminent threat to U.S. since 1962 when they had Soviet missiles. That’s when the embargo started. I admit that the Cuban government may not be very nice when it comes to human rights and freedom of speech, but it’s much better than, say, Myanmar, where I’m free to visit. Cuba may be Communist, but so is China, a major trading partner of the U.S.A.
Maybe it’s time to reconsider the cold-war trade embargo. We might want to even remember why we’re fighting a couple of wars and decide whether it’s worth it. The fact that there are people in Iraq and Afghanistan willing to fight back does not justify a war. Heck, there are probably some people in Canada or even North Dakota willing to fight back if the U.S. invaded them. Of course, those are both too cold for an invasion.
Solvay
The fifth Solvay Conference in Brussels, 1927, had some pretty interesting attendees, including Einstein, Bohr, Curie, and Heisenberg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference
Border Patrol Corruption
Some people say U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has a corruption problem. It seems pretty small at the moment, but with billions of dollars in drug and illegal immigration at stake, I can see where there is potential for bigger problems.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/10/national/main…
It’s not nearly as bad as in Mexico or Colombia, but U.S. judges and prosecutors are beginning to be threatened by drug traffickers.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/20092…
Homeland Security might be better off concentrating on something besides terrorism. I think am much more likely to be killed by a lightning strike or an errant Homeland Security Officer than a bona fide terrorist.
Get Sequenced!
For the low, low price of $68,000 (or so), you, too, can get your genome sequenced. I’m not sure what good this will do, other than making some interesting wallpaper in the living room, but it’s pretty cool. I’ll consider it when the price drops to $6.80.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/genome.ebay/index.html
Peer Reviews
Need favorable results published it a peer-review journal for your new pharmaceutical? Forget all that science stuff. Just start your own journal like Merck did!
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-pee…
Even More Circular, Dude
A few Junkmails ago (December 2002, to be exact) I mentioned that a guy named Kanada at the University of Tokyo led a team to calculate Pi to 1,240,000,000,000 digits.
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/98912_pi07.shtml
At the University of Tsukuba in Japan, a team lead by Takahashi has calculated a little over twice that many digits of Pi. They used a 648-computer cluster with a processing speed of 95.4 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFlops) to calculate 2,576,980,377,524 digits of Pi in 73 hours and 36 minutes. By comparison, Kanada’s computer took 600 hours.
Each of the 648 computer nodes uses four AMD Opteron 8350 Barcelona CPUs. There is a similar supercomputer system at the University of Tokyo with 952 nodes and one at Kyoto University with 416 nodes.
http://www.open-supercomputer.org/html/research2.html
Here is some info on the U. of Tokyo system (You might need to read Hongul for some of the links):
I have a text file from 1999 that lists 23 million prime numbers. That was pretty impressive to me at the time, and that was 20 years after college. Now it’s easy to write a program to calculate 50 million primes in less than a minute. The execution time is less than a minute, that is, not the programming time. The programming time wasn’t very many minutes, though. Computers are getting fast!
One thing that is surprised me is that the 23 million prime numbers in the 1999 list match the first 23 million generated by my program, 10 years later. Funny how that worked out.
Ethanol
It is dumb to require ethanol in gasoline. It might, however, cut down on alcoholism if we add gasoline to ethanol.
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/may2009/b…
Secret Wires
The CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and other stellar organizations do a lot of communicating. Sometimes they do it secretly. Sometimes their secret communicating is done over secret fiber optic cables. There is nothing wrong with secret fiber optic cables, except that backhoe operators don’t know where not to dig.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/blackline/
Small Nuclear Power
I am sure you remember that about six years ago Imentioned in Junkmail that Toshiba was planning a small nuclear power plant in Galena, Alaska, home of the flies.
They are still planning, although it looks like it will be about 2013 instead of 2010 when it happens. To hedge their bets, Toshiba is also planning to install some small 50-megawatt nuclear plants in Canada. They are about 20 times smaller in generating capacity than the GRDA Chouteau power plant.
http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/northern_…
WiFi Allergy
Are you allergic to wireless networks? If so, I’d recommend a placebo twice a day. There’s just not enough power for WiFi to affect people physically.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/07/there-is-no…
747 Supertanker
I mentioned 5 years ago in Junkmail that Evergreen Aviation had developed a 747 tanker for use in fire fighting. It was supposed to be available the following year.
Apparently the FAA certification went a little slower than expected — the Evergreen Supertanker was certified this year. They hope to use it next week in Alaska on a 450+ square mile file, a free demo.
Evergreen said the state of California has contracted to use the plane next year. Evergreen may not realize how much money California doesn’t have.
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1426-full…
Tracking
You can track airplanes on IFR flight plans here:
You can track ships and large boats with AIS here:
http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/
Cyxymu
Earlier this month, the web sites Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal went down for a few hours, due to a denial of service (DoS) attack. It turned out that this attack was targeted toward one account on each system, but that didn’t matter. It brought down the whole systems.
Georgy Jakhaia is a 34-year-old economics professor living in Tbilisi, Georgia, the capital of the former Soviet republic. He was the target of the DoS attack. He is a refugee from Sukhumi, the capital of "breakaway region" of Georgia (Abkhazia) near the Black Sea. I’m not sure whether he’s teaching now, but he blogs quite a bit. He uses the online name Cyxymu, which is kind of like Sukhumi in Cyrillic or Georgian or Sanskrit.
I understand he’s a little critical of Russia, particularly after their invasion of Georgia last year. Some people in Russia are not overly accepting of Cyxymu’s constructive criticism, so they’ve been hacking and DoS-ing his web sites.
The latest DoS attack seems to have backfired on the Russian hackers. Cyxymu has gotten a LOT more traffic and publicity than he ever would have otherwise.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_w…
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_34/b4…
Cyxymu’s blog:
http://www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/29542/b5f1ff2ebdb92dab…
CIA Prisons
Here is a good article on the secret CIA prisons. But if they’re secret, how does the whole world know about them?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/13foggo.html?_r…
Obama ordered the secret prisons closed in January.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28788175/
But the guards were working until April? Now replaced by CIA officers? It turns out that the prisons have "no new prisoners," and the CIA "retains the authority to hold and interrogate prisoners for short periods."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/world/10detain.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30144129/
"The CIA has used secret ‘black site’ prisons around the world to question terror suspects, usually plucking them from one country and moving them to another where U.S. agents operated a prison. A senior White House source said the CIA will be allowed to continue these ‘renditions’ but not to countries that torture and not to its own prisons."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20…
"The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the ‘alternative interrogation methods’ that their captors used to get them to talk." (in 2006.)
Irony
If Burning Man is all about no rules, anarchy, and the like, why does the fine print on the tickets say if any third party displays or disseminates your photos or videos in a manner that the Burning Man Organization doesn’t like, those photos or videos become the property of the BMO. In other words, they intend to use RIAA tactics to keep unfavorable photos off the internet. Seems like Corporate America to me.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/08/13/1214244/EFF-Say…
Speaking of non-conformists, why do so many "non-conformists" dress alike? Is it an anarchist uniform?
It seems to me that people who are most concerned about overpopulation and feeding the masses tend to be against genetically modified crops, pesticides, fertilizer, and other things that increase crop and livestock yields. Weird, huh?
Why do people in favor of abortion tend to be against capital punishment, and vice versa? That seems like a flip-flop to me. One group wants me dead before I’m born, and the others want to hang me afterwards.
In Malaysia they use corporal punishment. A 32-year-old lady was sentenced to caning (a whipping with a cane, six "lashes") for drinking a beer in a hotel. Muslims are not allowed to drink alcohol in Malaysia.
Her father agreed with the sentence, but was concerned that they wanted her to spend a week in prison and be caned there. He prefers a public caning. In this case the criminal is to keep her clothes on, and, being a lady, she is allowed to sit down during the punishment.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid…
Elsewhere in Malaysia, a very small jet prototype crashed and killed the pilot, who was the managing director of the aircraft company Jetpod.
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1444-full…
Transparent Government
The government is fulfilling their promise for transparency in stimulus spending. They just awarded an $18 million contract to Smartronix for a web site that allows people to track billions in stimulus spending. $18,000,000 seems a little steep for a web site. I would probably have done it for a couple million, maybe even less.
So, why not check out the details of this contract? I believe we would run into a condition known as "heavily redacted." A fair part of the contract has been blacked out so we can’t see what the $18 million is being spent on! Those redactions are clearly opaque.
http://documents.propublica.org/recovery-gov-contract-d…
http://www.propublica.org/ion/stimulus/item/stimulus-tr…
KPMG is involved in this, so I figure this is all Amy’s fault (Mike’s eldest toddler.)
Stack Overflow
The term "Stack Overflow" seems oddly familiar to me, for some reason.
The StackOverflow.com is a site where you can ask all kinds of programming questions. People who answer the questions get points, and people who ask decent questions get points. You can also search a quarter million or so questions already asked and answered. It’s a pretty useful resource. They’ve been up and running for more than a year.
In Search of Stupidity
It never ceases to amaze me that supposedly well-run businesses do so many stupid things. I have been meaning to keep a log of this, but I am usually irate or away from a computer when I run across a stupid business trick (a pencil and paper are out of the question, naturally). But here a few gems I can recall.
The other night I was making a car reservation with Hertz, when their web site went down. This is a major no-no for a company like Hertz, but that alone does not qualify as a stupid business trick. I got an error message displaying a couple hundred lines of error stack (hertz.htm). That’s a minor security no-no, but still doesn’t qualify as a stupid business trick. The really stupid part was the next error message that said their web site was broken (in nicer words) and that I should call them to make my reservation. I should "click here" for the phone number, which, of course, didn’t work because the web site was down.
I used to be a loyal customer of McDonalds because I could get good iced tea there consistently all over the country, except for New England in the winter. McDonalds decided it was too much trouble to brew iced tea, so they started selling Nestea "out-of-the-fountain" tea that was compatible with their Coke machine. To me, the fountain Nestea tastes something like a cross between old car tires and nitrogen dioxide. It got me off of McDonalds real quick. I even heard their employees talking about how bad the tea is. McDonalds successfully turned a competitive advantage into a reason for at least some customers to go elsewhere, in the name of employee efficiency. In their defense, McDonalds now offers good tea again.
There are a lot of web site design problems on the internet. It seems that the larger the company, the more likely the site has functionality problems. I’ll try to start logging the more ridiculous.
A lot of times, you see decisions make by large companies (and small) that are obviously knee-jerk reactions to management ego threats. For example, NBC refused to re-up iTune’s contract, cutting off a substantial part of their business. About a year afterward, they decided that it was not so smart, and that customers would not, in fact, search high and low for NBC content. Now NBC is back on iTunes. My GE stock is still down, though.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080909/1509392216.shtml
Electronic Arts, the game company, excels at ignoring the customer’s point of view. They regularly come out with some copy protection (called Digital Rights Management in social circles) that is so cumbersome that it kills an otherwise successful product. A good example is the game Spore, from last year, now with over 2000 1-star ratings on Amazon mainly because of the DRM.
http://www.amazon.com/review/product/B000FKBCX4/ref=p…
A few years ago, Sony messed up their CD copy protection so badly that it spurred lawsuits by the state of Texas and various class action lawsuits. This blunder even has its own Wikipedia entry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_CD_copy_protectio…
But then, Texas and East Texas in particular are famous for their creative judicial system. Who else would stop Microsoft from selling Word just for the heck of it?
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/court-giv…
Diet Coke is currently my soft drink of choice. Diet Coke got very popular, so Coke capitalized on this by coming out with various flavors of Diet Coke, such as Vanilla, Cherry, etc. Some retailers will buy the same amount of each flavor, filling the shelf space previously used by regular Diet Coke. The problem is, there’s only 1/5 the amount of regular Diet Coke at some stores. When the regular flavor runs out, those alert enough (a category that does not generally include me) will opt for Diet Pepsi, while the rest of us get suckered into buying Goose Liver flavored Diet Coke or some other swill.
This is a little It’s like 26" bicycle tubes. At Walmart, they are a rare find. Whoever buys bike tubes at Walmart seems to buy the same number of 8 or 10 different sized tubes. Most non-road bikes sold at Walmart (and elsewhere) have tires 26" x ~2" with schrader valves. Unfortunately, only about 10 percent of Walmart’s bike tubes fit the bill, and they sell out rather quickly. So Walmart is likely to have bicycle tubes for every bicycle tire except those on your mountain bike.
AT&T is a big company that is prone to doing stupid things. Last Spring they came out with some laptops that had wireless internet connections builtin, for the ATT Cell network. The terms of service prohibited their customers from viewing videos on YouTube and sharing P2P files. Who cares about customers?
http://hothardware.com/News/ATT-Changes-TOS-to-Limit-Mo…
A few days later, after an internet storm of complaints, they reversed the policy.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/03/atandt-retracts-new-…
United Airlines has a weak online reservation, for a number of reasons. They also require me to know my password in order to remove myself from their email list. This is considered very bad manners.
Pictures of Today
 Mount Saint Helens and the world’s newest glacier. 5/8/2009 6:17:38 PM Altitude 10,373 ft (3,162 m) -map-… |
 Coast Guard Helicopter 5/20/2009 11:27:03 AM |
 Seals on a the bulb of the freighter "Overseas New York" 5/20/2009 6:36:51 PM -map-… |
 Grand Cayman, about 80 feet down. 7/13/2009 3:44:33 PM |
 Sundown, Caribbean. 7/14/2009 7:18:54 PM -map-… |
 Two big groupers, Dry Tortugas 7/16/2009 9:38:37 AM -map-… |
 7/16/2009 11:38:07 AM -map-… |
 A turtle in the Everglades 7/21/2009 1:30:16 PM Altitude 64 ft (20 m) -map-… |
 A bird in the Everglades 7/21/2009 2:00:54 PM Altitude 59 ft (18 m) -map-… |
 A Wyoming Butterfly 8/5/2009 4:09:49 PM Altitude 8,246 ft (2,513 m) -map-… |
 Green River Valley, Wyoming 8/6/2009 11:50:57 AM Altitude 8,386 ft (2,556 m) -map-… |
 Tourist Creek. It was a little rocky. 8/6/2009 3:59:11 PM Altitude 9,646 ft (2,940 m) -map-… |
 The Gold Mine, Colorado 8/16/2009 11:22:48 AM Altitude 12,965 ft (3,952 m) -map-… |
 The way up the mountain. 8/16/2009 12:17:17 PM Altitude 13,717 ft (4,181 m) -map-… |
 Me, near Red Mountain, Colorado |
 Family Reunion, Triathlon Start 8/01/2009 1:59 PM |
For a bunch of recent pictures, go to:
http://xpda.com/minnow09 — Sailing from Washington State to Florida
http://xpda.com/gannett/gannett-iii — Gannett Peak, WY, III
http://xpda.com/co25 — Some Colorado Photos
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
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