Monthly Archives: February 2015

Chaos Manor, Friday, February 27, 2015

The FCC seized control of the Internet yesterday. Many cheered.

John Fund gives the political right view in NRO but they don’t permit quotes.

A Libertarian view on Net Neutrality comes from Forbes. Recall that the Interstate Commerce Commission clung to its regulatory powers long after highways and airports made most of its work irrelevant. When it was abolished few noticed. Some regulation was needed in the days when railroads were the only means of fast transport, (see The Octopus as a fictional view) but it continued long after highways and airlines which it could not regulate changed the whole transport picture. Its meeting Room with thrones for the Commissioners (who were full time regulators) became a subject of scorn. David Friedman argues persuasively that it hindered competition.

The FCC no longer has Ma Bell, as many other communications organizations emerged, but now it claims the Internet as its own. Adam Smith said ““People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” They do this by having government make rules about entering their business…

The Forbes essay comes close to my own sentiments. It is months old.

= = = =

Am I The Only Techie Against Net Neutrality?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/05/14/am-i-the-only-techie-against-net-neutrality/

If you watch the news, it seems just about everyone is in favor of “Net Neutrality” legislation. Despite being a tech-addicted entrepreneur, I am not. No, I am not a paid shill for the cable industry. I am no fan of Comcast or any other ISP I’ve ever had the “pleasure” of dealing with. I’m skeptical of large corporations generally and dislike the fact that in this debate I appear to be on their side. While I have no problem with net neutrality as a principle or concept, I have serious concerns about Net Neutrality as legislation or public policy. And since a false dichotomy is being perpetuated by the media in regards to this matter, I feel an obligation to put forth a third point of view. In taking this stand, I realize I may be the only techie, if I can aspire to that label, opposed to Net Neutrality and that I open myself to accusations of killing the dreams of young entrepreneurs, wrecking free speech, and destroying the Internet. Nevertheless, here are three reasons I’m against Net Neutrality legislation.

I Want More Competition

Proponents of Net Neutrality say the telecoms have too much power. I agree. Everyone seems to agree that monopolies are bad and competition is good, and just like you, I would like to see more competition. But if monopolies are bad, why should we trust the U.S. government, the largest, most powerful monopoly in the world? We’re talking about the same organization that spent an amount equal to Facebook’s first six years of operating costs to build a health care website that doesn’t work, the same organization that can’t keep the country’s bridges from falling down, and the same organization that spends 320 times what private industry spends to send a rocket into space. Think of an industry that has major problems. Public schools? Health care? How about higher education, student loans, housing, banking, physical infrastructure, immigration, the space program, the military, the police, or the post office? What do all these industries and/or organizations have in common? They are all heavily regulated or controlled by the government. On the other hand we see that where deregulation has occurred, innovation has bloomed, such as with telephony services. Do you think we’d all be walking around with smartphones today if the government still ran the phone system?

The U.S. government has shown time after time that it is ineffective at managing much of anything. This is by design. The Founders intentionally created a government that was slow, inefficient, and plagued by gridlock, because they knew the greatest danger to individual freedom came from a government that could move quickly–too quickly for the people to react in time to protect themselves. If we value our freedom, we need government to be slow. But if government is slow, we shouldn’t rely on it to provide us with products and services we want in a timely manner at a high level of quality. The telecoms may be bad, but everything that makes them bad is what the government is by definition. Can we put “bad” and “worse” together and end up with “better”?

I don’t like how much power the telecoms have. But the reason they’re big and powerful isn’t because there is a lack of government regulation, but because of it. Government regulations are written by large corporate interests which collude with officials in government. The image of government being full of people on a mission to protect the little guy from predatory corporate behemoths is an illusion fostered by politicians and corporate interests alike. Many, if not most, government regulations are the product of crony capitalism designed to prevent small entrepreneurs from becoming real threats to large corporations. If Net Neutrality comes to pass how can we trust it will not be written in a way that will make it harder for new companies to offer Internet services? If anything, we’re likely to end up even more beholden to the large telecoms than before. Of course at this point the politicians will tell us if they hadn’t stepped in that things would be even worse.

If the telecoms are forced to compete in a truly free market, Comcast and Time Warner won’t exist 10 years from now. They’ll be replaced by options that give us better service at a lower price. Some of these new options may depend on being able to take advantage of the very freedom to charge more for certain types of Internet traffic that Net Neutrality seeks to eliminate. If we want to break up the large telecoms through increased competition we need to eliminate regulations that act as barriers to entry in the space, rather than create more of them.

I Want More Privacy

Free speech cannot exist without privacy, and the U.S. government has been shown to be unworthy of guarding the privacy of its citizens. Only the latest revelation of many, Glenn Greenwald’s new book No Place To Hide reveals that the U.S. government tampers with Internet routers during the manufacturing process to aid it’s spying programs. Is this the organization we trust to take even more control of the Internet? Should we believe that under Net Neutrality the government will trust the telecoms to police themselves? The government will need to verify, at a technical level, whether the telecoms are treating data as they should. Don’t be surprised if that means the government says it needs to be able to install its own hardware and software at critical points to monitor Internet traffic. Once installed, can we trust this government, or any government, to use that access in a benign manner?

While privacy and freedom of speech may not be foremost on your mind today because you like who is running the government right now, remember that government control tends to swing back and forth. How will you feel about the government having increased control of the Internet when Republicans own the House and Senate and Jeb Bush is elected President, all at the same time?

I Want More Freedom

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. – James Madison, The Federalist No. 51

Many of us see the U.S. government as a benevolent and all-knowing parent with the best interests of you and me, its children, at heart. I see the U.S. government as a dangerous tyrant, influenced by large corporate interests, seeking to control everyone and everything. Perhaps these diverging perspectives on the nature of the U.S. government are what account for a majority of the debate between proponents and opponents of Net Neutrality. If I believed the U.S. government was omniscient, had only good intentions, and that those intentions would never change, I would be in favor of Net Neutrality and more. But it wasn’t all that long ago that FDR was locking up U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps and Woodrow Wilson was outlawing political dissent. More recently we’ve seen the U.S. government fight unjust wars, topple elected democracies, and otherwise interfere in world affairs. We’ve seen the same government execute its own citizens in violation of Fifth Amendment rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. Simply put–I don’t trust the U.S. government. Nor do I trust any other government, even if “my team” wins the election. I see any increase in regulation, however well-intentioned, however beneficial to me today, as leading to less freedom for me and society in the long term. For this reason those who rose up against SOPA and PIPA a few years ago should be equally opposed to Net Neutrality.

What Instead?

Internet bandwidth is, at least currently, a finite resource and has to be allocated somehow. We can let politicians decide, or we can let you and me decide by leaving it up to the free market. If we choose politicians, we will see the Internet become another mismanaged public monopoly, subject to political whims and increased scrutiny from our friends at the NSA. If we leave it up to the free market we will, in time, receive more of what we want at a lower price. It may not be a perfect process, but it will be better than the alternative.

Free markets deal exceptionally well in the process of “creative destruction” economist Joseph Schumpeter championed as the mode by which society raises its standard of living. Although any progress is not without its impediments and free markets aren’t an instant panacea, even U2’s Bono embraced the fact entrepreneurial capitalism does more to eradicate poverty than foreign aid. Especially in the area of technology, government regulation has little, if any place. Governments cannot move fast enough to effectively regulate technology companies because by the time they move, the technology has changed and the debate is irrelevant. Does anyone remember the antitrust cases against Microsoft because of the Internet Explorer browser? The worse services provided by the large telecoms are, the more incentive there will be for entrepreneurs to create new technologies. Five years from now a new satellite technology may emerge that makes fiber obsolete, and we’ll all be getting wireless terabit downloads from space directly to our smartphones, anywhere in the world, for $5/month. Unrealistic? Just think what someone would have said in 1994 if you had tried to explain to them everything you can do today on an iPhone, and at what price.

Update 6 February, 2015: Today, it was revealed by FCC commissioner Ajit Pai that the proposed Net Neutrality plan the FCC is considering is 332 pages long. It will not be released to the public until after the FCC has voted. Pai claims this regulation will give “the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works.”

The one certainty is that it will be years in courts, and will enrich many law firms.

A year or two ago I read about a technique for using aluminum, wetted with a room-temp liquid metal, sitting in a tank of water. I forget which metal they used, other than it not being mercury.

Aluminum is unique in that it’s very unstable, instantly oxidizing, but, very *stable* because the oxide layer is incredibly durable. This is why it’s so difficult to solder.

By wetting it with the layer of liquid metal, it’s unable to form its oxide layer. Instead, the oxide is shed into the water, as it combines with the “O” from the H2O, liberating the H2, which can then be used to drive a fuel cell, or, an internal combustion engine.

Because the hydrogen is stored in water, which is on par with the stability of the aluminum block, the supply can be stopped by lifting the block out of the water, creating an on-demand hydrogen system, obviating entirely the question of storage. (When the aluminum block is fully converted to a pile of aluminum oxide, it can be quickly replaced

— “five minutes” not being an unreasonable guess — and the oxide returned to the “fuel refinery” to be reduced to metallic aluminum (with the oxygen byproduct utilized to help improve the efficiency of the process).

I wonder if Toyota is using something like this? If so (and even if not

so!) I have to wonder why they’re going the fuel cell route rather than simply piping it to one of their engines. If I were a betting man, my money would be on politics rather than technology. It’s hard to conceive of a hydrogen/fuel cell/electric motor system having higher efficiency than a hydrogen/engine system. (In either case, the “exhaust” would be the same: water.)

Anon

I remarked that efficient and reliable energy storage would change the world. I got this reply:

Yup. For some, a change for the better; for others, a change for the worse (I’d hate to be deeply vested in an oil refinery if cheap water-to-hydrogen becomes practical.)

As an aside, I have to wonder if those tales of “The inventor who created a pill that let him drive his car on water” were more of a practical joke than “invention.”

I can easily see some wag rigging his car with a pile of aluminum shavings, wetted with mercury, and placed in his empty fuel tank — a tank rigged so that the fuel line was at the *top* of the tank rather than the bottom. When the witnesses verified that the tank was “empty”

(no liquid), and that the water was indeed water, he would pour the water into the tank, and then, with great fanfare, drop his “invention”

into the tank (in reality, an aspirin), and then wait a few minutes, then start up his car and drive it, to the amazement of the spectators.

Assuming that any of the apocryphal tales are true, it was inevitable that nothing would come of them, since the premise — a Magic Tablet — was pure hokum.

I know of no reports of progress in making fuel out of water without putting in a great deal of energy, It makes for great science fantasy though. And really efficient batteries would do wonders. But my experience with hydrogen is that it really wants to be free.

NEO NEWS (02/26/15) ASTEROID POLITICS

NEO NEWS IS TWENTY YEARS OLD!

====================================

Pete Worden is leaving NASA at end of March. Readers of NEO News will remember that Pete has been a consistent supporter of NEA studies and planetary defense, in the Air Force where he rose to the rank of Brigadier General, in several policy related positions in Washington, and for the past nine years as Director of NASA Ames Research Center (and my boss).

In the early 1990s Pete invited several of us (including Gene Shoemaker) to visit Falcon Air Force Base and discuss the observations of bolides being made by surveillance satellites, and he organized one of the first meetings on planetary defense in Erice, Sicily. This meeting included astronomers who were calling for the Spaceguard Survey, Edward Teller and others from the nuclear establishment who favored experimenting with nuclear deflection, and a few representatives of the public including Lori Garver (later NASA Deputy Administrator) and Bob Parks (long-time writer of the weekly blog What’s New for the American Physical Society). Pete basically locked us all up for a week in a monastery until we agreed on a joint statement about the NEA impact hazard and planetary defense.

Back when II was active in politics, Then Col. Pete Worden was my (and General Graham’s) candidate to head a big X-project. We had some chance of success, but politics got in the way. Alas.

Henry Vanderbilt’s space conferences are among the best gatherings of this sort you can possibly attend. An announcement:

The announcement is that we (finally!) have a site nailed down for our next Space Access conference – Thursday April 30th through Saturday May 2nd, at the Radisson Hotel Phoenix North, three intensive days on the technology, business, and politics of radically cheaper space transportation.

Full conference info is at

http://space-access.org/updates/sa15info.html. (I’ll attach a copy

also.) We should have first-pass agenda details up in a week or so – as usual we’re putting this all together on a just-in-time basis, and the agenda will evolve (and improve) right up through the conference.

Henry Vanderbilt

SA’15 Conference Manager

I keep hoping I will be up to going.

Will robots reduce the demand for labor? I am perhaps skeptical. Consider that in the 1980’s Apple computers were assembled in highly automated factories in the United States – now they are assembled by hand in Asia by armies of workers jammed into shacks like battery hens using jewelers screwdrivers. Your clothes were sewed by hand, your fruits were picked by hand¦ If wages are down it’s not because of automation, but the population explosion and all that cheap third-world labor. I mean, if robots are making human labor obsolete, why are the rich in the United States so adamant that they simply must have immigration to expand the size of the labor force? Answer: it is supply and demand, not automation, that drives down wages.
Sure, there are processes like making nails or weaving simple textiles where machines are so efficient that no matter how cheap labor gets nobody will ever use human labor again. There are also some processes, like precision welding, where machines are simply more repeatable and precise. But for many other tasks, in Bangladesh you can get a human for 50 cents an hour, with no up-front capital costs, no maintenance costs, no retirement costs. Simple, cheap, disposable (plenty more where they came from). Whereas a machine could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars up front, maintenance contracts for industrial machines are not cheap, and you can’t just throw away that kind of capital investment if the need for the machine goes away.
Historically automation does not cause low wages – rather, because automation is so expensive, automation is a reaction to high wages. I mean, if automation caused wages to fall we would see more robots in poor countries, and that’s not the pattern, is it?
I think the big question ultimately will be capital costs. A robot could surely be made to pick strawberries faster than any human being. But how much is it going to cost? A million dollars? Or 5000? That I think is the issue, not the theoretical ability of a robot to do human work.

TG

I commented on this yesterday. I can only point to tasks that robots and AI do routinely that not long ago were considered peculiarly human. I would not bet heavily against the robots; and the Asian sweatshops won’t be there forever. How long before you can print a special purpose robot?

It’s still pledge week.  If you have never subscribed, this would be a good time to do it; and if you haven’t renewed in a while, right now’s a good tome to do that.

Government Food Cops Are Out to Lunch

Dietary guidelines look nothing like how people really eat. Maybe that’s why they don’t work.

By

Cheryl Achterberg

http://www.wsj.com/articles/cheryl-achterberg-government-food-cops-are-out-to-lunch-1424997724

The classic American sandwich is about to get a radical makeover. Forget about roast beef or cold cuts. Red meats and processed meats are out. A slice of cheese is permissible, provided it is low-fat and low-sodium. Skip the chips, even if they’re baked. Dinner needs an overhaul too: Less pizza, fewer cheeseburgers and casseroles, or change their recipes to make them healthier. At mealtime, water is the preferred beverage of choice—unless you are an adult, when moderate alcohol consumption is acceptable.

That, at least, is how the modern American family should eat, according to recommendations submitted this month to the federal government by 15 experts in nutrition and health—the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. Every five years the committee is formed to advise the government on how to update its Dietary Guidelines for Americans according to the latest “scientific” data. I sat on the committee in 2010.

To fulfill its task and complete its 571-page report, the committee “developed a conceptual model based on socio-ecological frameworks to guide its work.”

If government committees of experts will tell you what you ought to eat, why would you suppose experts in mental health will not tell what you ought to have available on the Internet?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2015/02/27/after-net-neutrality-vote-an-uncertain-future-for-the-internet/

After net neutrality vote, an uncertain future for the Internet (WP)

By Larry Downes February 27 at 8:00 AM

Thursday, during a rancorous meeting of the Federal Communications Commission, the agency voted 3-2 to impose public utility regulations on Internet access providers, resurrecting a 1934 law known as Title II.

According to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s comments at the meeting, this milestone decision, which undoes nearly 20 years of bipartisan “light touch” regulation for the Internet, was necessary to provide the agency with the authority it needed to pass enforceable Open Internet rules, or what is sometimes known as “net neutrality.”

Two previous efforts over the last decade were rejected by federal courts, who held that the FCC had failed to make the case that Congress had ever authorized the agency to police broadband, regardless of the agency’s best intentions.

So Wheeler decided to turn back the clock to a time when Congress had given the FCC broad power over an earlier communications technology — the monopoly phone company of the early 20th century.  Through a legal fiction the chairman referred to as “reclassification,” the Internet will be redefined as a telephone service. The agency can then regulate broadband using laws passed to oversee Ma Bell, treating it the way it does the old (and now nearly dead) copper phone network. Those laws, or some uncertain subset of them, will now apply to the Internet.

The Iron Law at work. It needs regulating. What must we do to make that happen?

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

The big buzz is about Net Neutrality. We are going to get it, and we’ll get it good and hard.

Progress today.  Saw my regular physician and he is happy with my progress.  Later Eric came over and we moved the Surface Docking Station downstairs. We also brought down a wireless router, and I now have secure and seamless Wi-Fi all over downstairs.

Now I can experiment with Cortana. I definitely have reliable fast Internet connections.

Taki’s obituary of Arnaud de Borchgrave.

<http://takimag.com/article/on_the_death_of_a_friend_taki/print>

Roland Dobbins

I only met de Borchgrave once, in Moscow in 1989. He was impressive, and very respected. We had lunch once, and I have never forgotten it. RIP  Taki knew him well.  There is also a good piece from a former subordinate in the current Weekly Standard. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/arnaud-de-borchgrave-1926-2015_859636.html

Update on robots and jobs

Oh, something else that hardly anyone seems to talk about. Moore’s law certainly does seem to keep reducing the price of computer power – but that law does not seem to apply to industrial machinery, which remains very expensive and is not getting significantly cheaper, I think. Honda may drop 50 million on a set of precision welding robots for an assembly line – but will a farmer do the same to pick strawberries on a 40 acre farm? So phone-based customer service may be at risk – but janitor? Carpenter? Plumber? Perhaps not so much.
It’s like that old saying, that the human body is a remarkably sophisticated device that can be easily constructed using only unskilled labor and tools and materials that you probably have lying around your house…

TG,

When I was growing up it was a given that no one would ever be able to invent a machine to pick cotton. You could harvest wheat, and even beans, but cotton picking took human labor and lots of it. It was one reason for share-cropping. Schools let out for Cotton Picking. Day workers left other jobs for the week or two needed to bring in the cotton crop.

Just as crucial was cotton chopping. That was in Spring and schools let out for Cotton Chopping for a week or so. It took even more skill. When cotton seeds – carefully preserved by the cotton gin which separated seeds from staple – were planted, generally you planted three to a hill. One or more sprouted. So did weeds. Chopping consisted of selecting the strongest cotton sprout and with a hoe carefully eliminating everything else on that hill. Cotton planting hills are about 24 inches apart. You used the hoe to break up the clods around the one cotton plant that you allow to survive. It’s hard work and requires judgment.

After cotton picking machines were developed cotton farming still required massive amounts of human labor in Spring for cotton chopping.

Now cotton farming is automated. Planters plant at precise intervals. Cotton chopping devices thin the hills and cutout weeds. Mechanical pickers pick the crop. This change pretty well eliminated share cropping. When I was growing up we plowed and planted using mules to pull the planter, part of that being done by hand; chopping was done by hand; and I earned my first rifle picking cotton. I wasn’t good at it, and I wasn’t skillful enough to chop cotton.

Now it’s all done by robots.

You’d be surprised want robots can do, particularly with a bit of human assistance.

I agree, there jobs that will be a long time resisting algorithms; but it used to be self evident that cotton chopping could never be done by machine.

Verizon had a clever response to today’s big net neutrality vote

The government just gave a big win to net neutrality advocates by voting to regulate broadband internet, also banning companies from paying for faster service that could prioritize their content.

Many of the big players, however, aren’t happy about it.

Verizon released the statement below, which calls the FCC’s decision “badly antiquated regulations.” To drive the point home, the company’s PR team published the statement in Morse code.

Verizon Wireless

The translated version also appears in a typeface that looks like it came from a typewriter.

Whether you agree with the decision or not, it’s a pretty clever move.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

An interesting response. Buzzfeed had this to say:

Net neutrality won. The internet is ours! We’ve taken it! Stolen it back from the people who, well, provide it to us at a pretty reasonable rate, truth be told. The entire library of human everything delivered right to your doorstep for a mere $20 to $50 or so a month, depending on how fast it is that you want that everything. Now that the FCC has voted to enshrine net neutrality, there is nothing left standing between you and the great unlimited gush of audio and video bits and packets slip-sliding right into your Sonos at democratically arrived-at speeds, unencumbered by fast or slow lanes. It means that your startup porn comes right to you with the same speed as your well-established, big business, legacy pornography. Let the binge-watching bonanza begin, this is America!

And yet, it still could serve as a political bludgeon. An example of the way President Obama overreaches. Something that divides Democrats and Republicans. In other words: politics as usual.

Bell Labs was for years the default advanced basic research department for the human race. It sort of went away when Judge Green broke up Ma Bell. This ZD article is about what happened next.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/bell-labs-unveils-its-vision-of-the-future-from-sdn-to-teleportation-with-3d-printing/

Bell Labs unveils its vision of the future, from SDN to teleportation with 3D printing (ZD)

Summary:The Israeli ‘franchise’ of the technology innovator is remaking networks – and where it leads is anyone’s guess, says CEO Danny Raz.

By David Shamah for Tel Aviv Tech | February 26, 2015 — 08:40 GMT (00:40 PST)

Nearly 70 years ago, Bell Labs staff created the transistor, a component that went on to change the world. Now, the company is looking to Bell Labs Israel, the latest ‘franchise’ of the venerable tech organization, for the next big thing.

One of the next technologies to change the world, according to Bell Labs Israel CEO Danny Raz, could be Star Trek-style teleportation. This futuristic transportation would be products rather than people, however; new networking protocols already under development, combined with 3D printing technology advances, could in the near future allow a product ‘beamed’ in one location to be printed out on a high-speed 3D printer on the other side of the world.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/only-40-percent-of-the-global-population-ever-connected-to-the-internet-report/

Only 40 percent of the global population has ever connected to the internet: report (ZD)

Summary:According the Facebook-led initiative Internet.org, there are expansive gaps in connectivity throughout developing parts of the world.

By Natalie Gagliordi for Between the Lines | February 25, 2015 — 20:43 GMT (12:43 PST)

Internet.org, the Facebook-led initiative to foster global internet connectivity, published a report this week that shines light on the expansive gaps in connectivity around developing parts of the world.

The report on global internet access found that only 40 percent of the world’s population has ever connected to the internet, and that only 37.9 percent of the global population uses the internet at least once a year.

Of course one might think that “only” 40% is a pretty large number.

http://variety.com/2015/biz/news/how-the-fccs-upcoming-vote-on-net-neutrality-could-impact-hollywood-1201440739/

Why the FCC’s Net Neutrality Vote Matters to Hollywood (Variety)

Ted Johnson Senior Editor @tedstew

John Oliver may have used his “Last Week Tonight” perch last June to explain net neutrality to the public, but the impact on showbiz won’t be clear even after the results of the FCC’s landmark Feb. 26 vote on the future of the Internet.

Confusing and involving lots of regulatory jargon, net neutrality has nevertheless drawn more than 4 million comments to the FCC, setting a new record. Actors including Mark Ruffalo and Evangeline Lilly and singers including Michael Stipe have weighed in. Chris Keyser, president of the Writers Guild of America West, called net neutrality “the issue of our time for the creative community.”

Those in favor of robust rules of the road have a myriad of concerns, but they share a common fear: that left unchecked, the Internet will morph into something resembling cable TV, including its expensive bundling structure. That’s why net neutrality advocates have sought rules that would prevent Internet service providers from blocking or throttling traffic, or selling faster access to subscribers.

While the goal of net neutrality may be the status quo — to keep the Internet the way it is — the FCC’s proposed tough regulatory approach could impact Hollywood in two key areas: the pathways consumers take to receive programming, and the price they pay for it.

There is considerably more, but the only agreement is that there will be lawsuits and members of the plaintiff bar will get richer. So will lawyers contracted by government to defend.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View from Chaos Manor, Wednesday, February 25, 2015

We have not seen it officially but Tom Wheeler and his FCC seem full bent to give us Obamanet, a fully regulated Internet. If we can be sure of one thing, it is that regulators regulate. They have to justify their high salaries and pensions. Don’t be surprised if in future you have to go through Google or Yahoo if you want to start a web page. I know that sounds absurd, but it’s an easy prediction. Why should you be able to take up public resources without permission from someone?

Net Neutrality is put forth as a battle between Big Corporations vs. Big Government. But Big Government is responsive to Big Lobbying and Big Contributions, and Big Corporation gets a Big Say in what Big Government does. Elementary economics will teach you that the one common goal of all firms is to restrict entry into their line of business; the easiest way is to get Big Government to impose Big Regulations which require compliance officers and cost money making the cost of startup much greater. Adam Smith wrote about that…

So we wait to see what the Obamanet will look like. You won’t see it at first. The lobbyists haven’t had their shot.

Obama’s Oil-by-Rail Boom

Activists get their jollies blocking pipeline construction, but the crude still flows through your neighborhood.

By

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Feb. 24, 2015 6:45 p.m. ET

646 COMMENTS

It’s better to be lucky than good. President Obama, who arrived promising to heal the planet and halt the rising seas, instead presided over a fossil-fuel renaissance in America. If you were unemployed and found a decent job in Obama’s economy, there’s a good chance it was a fracking job. If things are finally looking up for the middle class, cheap gas is a major contributor.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/holman-jenkins-obamas-oil-by-rail-boom-1424821559

The rest of this is worth reading. The Congress set a pipeline bill to the White House. President Obama vetoed it. That will not stop the oil: it will come by rail through your back yard. Have fun when an oil train derails.

During the week of Three Mile Island, coal train wrecks killed far more people than nuclear power ever has in the United States and Europe. That killed the nuclear power industry. Welcome to Obamarail.

Of course it’s still pledge week. if you haven’t subscribed, this is a great time to do it.  If you haven’t renewed in a while, this a great time to do that. I don’t ask for a lot, but I do have to get enough. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

Go on, do it now while you’re thinking about it.

What Clever Robots Mean for Jobs

Experts rethink belief that tech always lifts employment as machines take on skills once thought uniquely human

By

Timothy Aeppel

Feb. 24, 2015 10:30 p.m. ET

140 COMMENTS

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Economist Erik Brynjolfsson had long dismissed fears that automation would soon devour jobs that required the uniquely human skills of judgment and dexterity.

Many of his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a big chunk of tomorrow’s technology is conceived and built, have spent their careers trying to prove such machines are within reach.

When Google Inc. announced in 2010 that a specially equipped fleet of driverless Toyota Prius cars had safely traveled more than 1,000 miles of U.S. roads, Mr. Brynjolfsson realized he might be wrong.

* * *

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates , speaking in Washington last year, said automation threatens all manner of workers, from drivers to waiters to nurses. “I don’t think people have that in their mental model,” he said.

Robot employment

Gartner Inc., the technology research firm, has predicted a third of all jobs will be lost to automation within a decade. And within two decades, economists at Oxford University forecast nearly half of the current jobs will be performed with machine technology.

“When I was in grad school, you knew if you worried about technology, you were viewed as a dummy—because it always helps people,” MIT economist David Autor said. But rather than killing jobs indiscriminately, Mr. Autor’s research found automation commandeering such middle-class work as clerk and bookkeeper, while creating jobs at the high- and low-end of the market.

This is one reason the labor market has polarized and wages have stagnated over the past 15 years, Mr. Autor said. The concern among economists shouldn’t be machines soon replacing humans, he said: “The real problem I see with automation is that it’s contributed to growing inequality.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-clever-robots-mean-for-jobs-1424835002

There’s a lot more.

Moore’s Law is inexorable – at least as long as we are on the exponential part of the chip technology S – curve, and that will still be for a while. Every doubling doubles all of what went before. Within five years, I believe, nearly 50% of all jobs in the US can be done by a robot whose capital cost is about a year’s payments (including health care, unemployment insurance, and pension reserve payments) to the worker. The robot’s maintenance including human supervision will be no more than 10% of what the worker it replaces was costing. One worker will be able to supervise at least ten robots.

The schools, meanwhile, will continue to teach nothing that anyone would pay money to have done. Government will subsidize queer studies, voodoo social sciences, and various other studies programs, but taxpayers will be increasingly reluctant to pay for them. Of course they will be unhappy with economic inequality. They will insist on ending it, so they can continue to be paid to do voodoo – or paly Internet games.  Work is for idiots. Perhaps Moore’s Law will make it all possible.

That is the future I see coming. I can hope I am wrong.

Leo on Winbook and other matters

Definitely wouldn’t recommend the $59 Winbook for serious work. There’s so little free storage you can barely update it!

But the HP Stream – either tablet or notebook – are amazing devices for practically nothing.

As you know, Dragon relies on RAM and I’m guessing nothing that cheap will have sufficient RAM for reasonable performance. If it’s dictation you want get the new Dell XPS 13 with 8GB RAM. Now THAT’s an amazing machine – the best Windows laptop on the market and it starts at $800!

I think we have you booked soon – can’t wait!

All the best,

Leo-

Leo Laporte, Chief TWiT

<http://twit.tv/leo>

I appear to be booked for next Sunday TWIT, 3PM PST. I’ve got the Mac Book Pro set up to SKYPE.

Networks, signal and “Limited” access

> We have several because we have Ethernet-over-power-lines in several rooms. Modern portables are supposed to choose the best signal, and Precious chose the one with several bars that kooks to me like the best, but it was “limited”, meaning that it didn’t work at all.<
So, yes, the “several bars” is a measure of signal strength. But that’s not the whole story. There’s also whether or not the access point you’re speaking with knows how (or is willing) to let you talk to who you want to talk to.
For example, if you set up an access point, provide it with power, but then don’t connect it to the Internet, it might show up as having plenty of signal strength, but once you connect to it, you can’t get anywhere.
Alternately, perhaps the access point doesn’t want to permit you to go anywhere until you’ve clicked through some agreement page. (This is normal for things like public hotspots.) Until you’ve clicked through that agreement, the access point’s network won’t let you go anywhere interesting.
In both of these cases, it might let you go somewhere local (such as a page hosted by the AP itself, or perhaps somewhere on the local network), and Windows has no way of knowing if this is the case. So Windows just determines if it can get to the public Internet, and, if it can’t, it tells you “Well, shoot. We’re connected, but I can’t get anywhere I recognize. It’s…Limited.”

Michael Mol

Yes, I’ve done some more experimenting and I may have a reliable Wi-Fi for Precious; but I’ll be happier when we get the docking station and Ethernet connection. One less thing to worry about.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/02/25/meet-the-fast-charging-affordable-future-car-that-elon-musk-hates/

Meet the fast-charging, affordable ‘future’ car that Elon Musk hates (WP)

By Drew Harwell February 25 at 8:00 AM

Toyota this week officially rolled out what it’s betting will mark “a turning point” in automotive history — a sleek, affordable, eco-friendly “future” car that can drive for 300 miles, takes less than five minutes to charge and comes with three years of free fuel.

It’s everything haters of gas-guzzling car culture could love. And the biggest name in electric cars hates it.

Toyota’s Mirai (meaning “future” in Japanese) will be one of the first mass-market cars to run on hydrogen fuel cells, which convert compressed hydrogen gas to electricity, leaving water vapor as the only exhaust. As opposed to getting plugged in overnight, the sedan will need only about three minutes to get back to full charge, a huge boon for convincing the world’s drivers to convert to a cleaner ride.

But the green technology has found a surprisingly forceful critic in Elon Musk, the electric-car pioneer and founder of Tesla Motors, maker of battery-powered cars like the Model S. Musk has called hydrogen fuel cells “extremely silly” and “fool cells,” with his main critique being that hydrogen is too difficult to produce, store and turn efficiently to fuel, diverting attention from even better sources of clean energy.

“If you’re going to pick an energy source mechanism, hydrogen is an incredibly dumb one to pick,” Musk said last month in Detroit. “The best-case hydrogen fuel cell doesn’t win against the current-case batteries. It doesn’t make sense, and that will become apparent in the next few years.”

I used to be a hydrogen economy booster, but the damn stuff REALLY wants to escape; and it is VERY flammable. I wonder if it can be made safe at affordable prices. Hydrogen fuel cells are very efficient, but hydrogen is very volatile.

Elon Musk generally knows a lot about what he talks about; but Toyota is no slouch either.

Ain’t competition grand?

The most compelling MH370 story I’ve heard.

<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370-theory.html>

Roland Dobbins

Conspiracies sometimes work.  Most still believe Gary Powers was shot down, when he couldn’t have been. But they don’t work very often without someone talking.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View from Chaos Manor, Tuesday, February 24, 2015

I continue to rebuild my life as I move into the downstairs office. After all, I wrote three best sellers and the first years of the BYTE columns here, so we know I can work here, and old Zeke, who happened to be a Z-80 computer, was much larger what with his two 8” disk drives, and the big S-100 buss box, and a big monitor that despite its size displayed 24 lines of 64 characters, about what a page of manuscript had. So now I have AlienArtifact, a fairly modern Windows 7 system in a Thermaltake gaming chassis that gave it its name. It’s quiet, cool, and large enough to service a small village– Eric’s line not mine, alas. There’s also Precious, a Surface Pro 2 which will get a docking station but just now has only Wi-Fi; and therein lies a story of what I have been doing today.

All my work with Precious, the Surface, was done just before my stroke and that part of my memory is mostly gone; so I’m learning to use it all over again. Which is fine, but a bit frustrating. I’m old fashioned and still use ancient tools like mapping network disk drive names to local drive letters, That means you need a Network, but all the Ethernet cables are upstairs, and my Wi-Fi net has a few dark spots, one of them, of course, being in this part of the downstairs office. Precious logged herself on to the Net automatically . We have several because we have Ethernet-over-power-lines in several rooms. Modern portables are supposed to choose the best signal, and Precious chose the one with several bars that kooks to me like the best, but it was “limited”, meaning that it didn’t work at all. After putting up with that for several days I decided to muck about, and caused Precious to log on to one of the stations with fewer bars. Presto. But since she had been off line for days—weeks, actually—she spent the next hour or so updating herself. I expect we have a slower than usual Wi-Fi connection. But eventually she was up, and on-line, but she didn’t see many other machines, and all of them remain upstairs. She saw Bette, an older Windows 7 system built as a sweet spot machine – best performance at mid level price – several years ago. Works fine and damned useful because she was the main communications machine right up to my stroke, but she’s upstairs.

All this frantic activity is in aid of getting Dragon speech to text running, preferably on Precious. Well, Dragon makes its program for the Mac, and the MacBook Pro is working fine down here and is connected by cable to the Net. And the reason I can’t just use the cable from the MacBook on Precious is that I Skype with the Mac, so it couldn’t be permanent and I am trying to rebuild my life without kludges. So let’s see how the Mac works with my system.

If you do splat-k (command-k) on a Mac in the finder, you get a list of what machines it can see, It doesn’t update that list. I did command-k and got a list of all the systems the MacBook could see, and of course they were all upstairs. Fortunately Peter Glaskowsky was on line and pointed out that there is, in the little window, an option to browse. It’s small and hard for me to see, but it’s there, and behold! There was AlienArtifact. Attempting to connect got me an invitation to say with what user name and password. Both the Mac and AlienArtifact have the same password (which is not my Apple ID) but, as I discovered, Apple machines here have different user names. It didn’t see Precious, the Surface Pro, ay all.

So I mucked about with Precious. Eric Pobirs warned me that the default settings on Windows 8 and the alpha test version of 10 are not to be visible, and mucking about with those settings on the Surface Pro let her be visible; a few minutes later I could connect both to the Mac and to AlienArtifact and both are now visible on the internal net.

It’s not a complete happy ending. I like to set drive letter designations to networked drives; I’m used to it. When I tried to set Precious to see AlienArtifact’s D drive – where I keep all the data, C: being f fast solid state – I could set it all right, but it never showed in This Computer on the Surface Pro. I did it several times, make P: be AlienArtifact D:, and it always seemed to do it, but there was never any sign of it. Then just for the hell of it I used Norton Windows Commander – which is really a command line system – to log in to P:, and it promptly showed the D: Directory. And that’s where we are now.

I’ll end here for today and keep trying tomorrow. The goal is to get Dragon Naturally Speaking on a machine I can use to produce 1,000 word or more by talking them, and not spend all my time hunched over a keyboard clumsily hitting multiple keys and then correcting the sentence – and forgetting what I was going to say.

I tend to think in paragraphs, and if I can get an entire paragraph into script without numerous typos I may get back to productivity. Incidentally, the original Zeke had a VDM video board  board designed by Lee Felsenstein,

With any luck I’ll start on Dragon tomorrow. Wish me well.

Pledge week continues, which means I get to bug you about subscribing. This site is free to everyone, but if we don’t get enough subscriptions I can’t keep doing it. We conduct rational discussions on current issues, mostly high tech, plus we try to find items of wide interest to educated people. By educated I don’t necessarily exclude academics, but many of you didn’t go that route. After all, when I did the BYTE column, it was for users. Anyway, I bug you about subscribing when KUSC, the LA good music station, holds their pledge drive, but we don’t have advertising here, and usually I leave you alone.

I’m not after eating money, and if you can’t afford to be one of my patrons, I still want you as a reader; but do consider subscribing if you have not done so, and if you haven’t renewed in a while this would be a good time to do it. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

Thanks to those who already subscribed or renewed this week.

It’s not worth a war over Ukraine

It’s not worth a war over Ukraine http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BayouRenaissanceMan/~3/NkmC8FXq8mY/its-not-worth-war-over-ukraine.html

I’m getting sick and tired of neocons arguing that we need to arm Ukraine, and train its troops, and confront Russian nationalism/imperialism/whateverism.  They’re trying to play us for suckers.
Consider these realities.  First, Christopher Booker:

Over Ukraine, I cannot recall any issue in my lifetime when the leaders of the West have got it so hopelessly wrong. We are treated to babyish comparisons of President Putin to Hitler or Stalin; we are also told that this crisis has only been brought about by Russia’s “expansionism”. But there was only one real trigger for this crisis – the urge of the EU continually to advance its borders and to expand its own empire, right into the heartland of Russian national identity: a “Europe” stretching, as David Cameron once hubristically put it, “from the Atlantic to the Urals”.
The “expansionism” that was the trouble was not Putin’s desire to welcome the Russians of Crimea back into the country to which they had formerly belonged; or to assist the Russians of eastern Ukraine in their determination not to be dragged by the corrupt government in Kiev they despised into the EU and NATO. It was that of an organisation founded on the naive belief that it could somehow abolish nationalism, but which finally ran up against an ineradicable sense of nationalism that could not simply be streamrollered out of existence. We poked the bear and it responded accordingly.

Next, Chris Martenson lays it on the line.

As I’ve written previously, the West, especially the US, was instrumental in toppling the democratically elected president of Ukraine back in February 2014. US officials were caught on tape plotting the coup, and then immediately supported the hastily installed and extremist officials that now occupy the Kiev leadership positions.
In short, the crisis in Ukraine was not the result of Russia’s actions, but the West’s. Had the prior president, Yanukovych, not been overthrown, it’s highly unlikely that Ukraine would be embroiled in a nasty civil war. Relations between Russia and the West would be in far better repair.
Russia, quite predictably and understandably, became alarmed at the rise of fascism and Nazi-sympathetic powers on its border. Remember the repeated statements by Kiev officials recommending extermination of the Russian speakers who make up the majority living in eastern Ukraine? Were a parallel situation happening in Canada, for example, I would fully expect the US to be similarly and seriously interested and involved in the outcome.
The only people seemingly surprised by this predictable Russian reaction toward protecting its people and border interests are the neocons at the US State Department who instigated the conflict in the first place. In my experience, these are dangerous people principally because they seem to lack perspective and humility.

There’s more at the link.  It’s well worth reading.
I submit the following points.

1. The US has no vital strategic interest in Ukraine worth defending with the blood of our troops.
2. There is no possibility whatsoever of the USA sustaining a major expeditionary war so far from our bases, and so near to our potential enemy’s, and with such fragile lines of communication.
3. Russia is not Iraq or Afghanistan. We could destabilize the former with horse-riding Special Forces operators and bombing raids.  We could conquer the latter with lightning strikes and a ‘Thunder Run‘.  We cannot do likewise to the world’s second-largest military power.

All those urging active, armed US intervention in Ukraine are seeking to drag this country into a war we can’t win.  We allow them to do so at our mortal peril.
Peter

I don’t agree with all of that, but it’s well stated. Putin is a patriotic Russian politician. He wishes he had a Tsar. The West is right in defending Poland and the Baltic Republics, and Poland has chosen to be part of Europe. As to the Balkans, the United states has no clear interests, and Russian Pan-Slavic sentiments are as valid as European anti-Slav feelings. Europe is restoring the Empire; where its Capitol will be is unclear. And they need American muscle to encircle Russia; why we are involved in the territorial dispute of Europe is hard to fathom. The original purpose of NATO was the COLD WAR. Later it was to sit on Fritz for the mental ease of France. Why we needed alliances with small nations close to Russia for the security of the US has not been explained.

We are at war with the Caliphate. Should we not fight that war?

Climate science settled (again)

Just in case your many correspondents haven’t already sent you the info, here is a link to a new peer-reviewed paper that puts a few more nails in the various IPCC reports.

http://www.scibull.com:8080/EN/abstract/abstract509579.shtml

—

Chuck Kuhlman

Outgoing UN IPCC Chief reveals global warming ‘is my religion and my dharma’

IPCC Chair Pachauri forced out at UN climate panel after sexual harassment complaint

Pachauri’s resignation letter on religion: ‘For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.’

UN IPCC critic Journalist Donna Laframboise responds: ‘Yes, the IPCC – which we’re told to take seriously because it is a scientific body producing scientific reports – has, in fact, been led by an environmentalist on a mission. By someone for whom protecting the planet is a religious calling.’

Hello Jerry,

I ran across a link to this on Dr. Judith Curry’s blog:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/02/23/thoughts-from-leo-smith/

I think that it is worth reading.

Bob Ludwick

: The CELESTIAL Convergence: ICE AGE NOW: Global Cooling Continues – Hudson River Freezes Over In New York, 120 Miles Of 1.5 FEET OF THICK SNOW; Minnesota Records A “TEETH-CHATTERING” -41C Degrees!

The CELESTIAL Convergence: ICE AGE NOW: Global Cooling Continues – Hudson River Freezes Over In New York, 120 Miles Of 1.5 FEET OF THICK SNOW; Minnesota Records A “TEETH-CHATTERING” -41C Degrees!

http://thecelestialconvergence.blogspot.com/2015/02/ice-age-now-global-cooling-continues.html?m=1

Of particular interest, the Hudson River has frozen solidly enough in some places that George Washington’s cannons could be brought across again.

Charles Brumbelow

I understand that the Hudson froze over for perhaps the first time in 75 years, although it regularly did so in the early 1800’s. That’s Global Warming for you. Of course it’s getting warmer: but how much? But I would look for alternate sources on the conclusions. We know it’s getting warmer, but how much? And where does all this cold come from?

Was the Black Plague spread not by rats, but by giant gerbils?

<http://m.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31588671>

Roland Dobbins

So one more thing we knew for sure in school is open to doubt>\?

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.