| Wednesday,
September 30, 2009 "Just following
orders."
http://www.tribstar.com/local/local_story_246225916.html
You can be prosecuted for buying cold medicine. The
government knows what's best.
http://www.mlive.com/news/
grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/09/
mother_in_middleville_ordered.html and apparently, you can't have
kids stop by to wait for the bus unless you're a "Licensed day care
provider." Wait, weren't we told last week it's illegal to let your kids
walk to school unescorted?
Mike Williamson
I bought Sudafed the other day, and had to give
my driver's license over to be scanned. I didn't have any problems voting
without doing that.
I am still looking for which Article of Amendment
gives Congress this authority, or indeed the authority to outlaw any drug
whatever. We know they can't outlaw liquor, because they had to get the
Eighteenth Amendment passed in order to implement the Volstead Act and
implement Prohibition, and that Amendment was repealed. I once asked
Speaker Gingrich which Article let them outlaw marijuana (federal
prohibition; no one doubts that the States have that power). He couldn't
tell me, but "It's all different now."
It's that "It's all different now" that bothers
me. The courts have amended the Constitution without bothering to go
through the amendment process. This needs to be undone: and that will take
a lot of concerted action to turn the rascals out.
=============
Net Neutrality and Skype
From Mike Johns’ email –
but like AOL in the WSJ article, so far as I know,
Skype isn't contributing to the cost of building network infrastructure.
Doesn’t Skype pay their provider for bandwidth? Don’t
the Skype users pay their providers for bandwidth? Is not some of that
allocated by the provider to support infrastructure? I think comments like
the above are red herrings – they sound so profound and reasonable, but
belie the obvious – we are paying. When I go to Best Buy to purchase a set
of speakers, I’m not charged an extra fee to help them build new buildings,
nor is Polk Audio asked to pony up dollars to Best Buy for the same reason.
r/"Juice"
(not of course, speaking on behalf of the government,
just as a private citizen)
RONALD W. HAMANN, JR., Capt, USAF
Which I pointed out about four years ago when
this first began to get discussed. The question here is how much I pay as
a user, and who else has to pay. Google doesn't want to pay for its use of
bandwidth; it says the users have already paid. Once again, I can analyze
a specific rule, but the concept "net neutrality" means so many things to
so many people that discussion of the "concept" is useless.
==
one more technical input on net neutraility
Jerry,
Like you, I think fewer regulations are better. On the technical side, I
think there may be some misunderstanding.
All cable modems are cable of high bandwidth. The older ones, pre- DOCSIS
3.0, could use an entire cable channel for bandwidth. This worked out to
about 24MBS/sec (bits). Think of it as a cable based, old style Ethernet,
and you will get the idea.
In the early days of @home, they all did use this much. Pretty quickly,
the cable operators figured out this would not work. Cable Labs, the
industry (non-government!) standards facility, came up with the DOCSIS
certificate. Every cable modem downloads one of these at startup or on
command from the cable headend. The certificate tells the modem how fast to
run, and of course, this is based on what you are paying to the cable
company. In the beginning, this was pretty easy to defeat. It involved a
TFTP server, a linux box, and a free ware utility that generated DOCSIS
certificates. Of course, the cable companies caught on, and required all
cable modems to receive a firmware update that limited the TFTP of the
DOCSIS certificate to the CATV (the coax) port. Now, the certificate can
still be spoofed, but it requires a great deal more equipment and
considerably more technical knowledge. The headends now have meters as well.
Effectively, cable modem now run at subscribed speeds - no bandwidth
hogging.
DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems have arrived on the scene, and can operate over
more than one cable channel at once, and deliver bandwidth in excess of
100MBS/sec. If you want to pay for it, you can have it. The bay area
currently offers 50MBS/down 10MBS/up and is going higher over the next year
or so. All of those analog TV channels went away...
My point here, is that there are no bandwidth hogs, only congestion, if
the cable companies allow it by oversubscribing.
Like you, I believe the free market can handle this. Do note, that most
cable companies are monopolies in a given city. There is the very big and
expensive issue of who owns the cable plant. Recall, that the FCC decided
when cell phone service was authorized, to setup at least 2 competing
companies in every area and expanded this when other bands were opened up.
The result was at least 4 or 5 choices for most people in most areas. We do
not currently have that in the cable TV world. From a technical point of
view, cable modems are still the fastest service out there for reasonable
dollars. Wireless may very well be a practical substitute and allow
significant competition, however, it has not happened yet. The few that have
tried have gone out of business pretty quickly.
Phil
As you say, wireless has the technical capability
to settle this with competition. The city monopolies on cable TV have been
the greatest source of problems -- well, that and latency from satellite
connections so satellites aren't really competitive with cable in solving
the last 100 feet problem -- and that's caused by regulation, government,
lobbying, and the rest of it.
I lived nicely with wireless back when wireless
Internet capability was an option (before the wireless company went out of
business and never came back). Wireless is coming again, and the only
arguments for monopolies there are political.
We have the technology. Adding permanent
bureaucracies and regulators will tend to freeze matters -- as the cable
monopolies have tended to freeze matters. What we need is to be careful
not to build permanent regulatory agencies which will stay around long
after there is no need for them. Recall the Interstate Commerce
Commission.
============
A New Debate?
How does the Federal Government Negatively Impact
Our Lives?
Jerry,
It might be interesting and worthwhile to start a
discussion of how the Federal Government negatively impacts our lives. Many
of the things that our government does have rather dramatic unintended
consequences that affect our Freedoms, Pocket Books and Health.
I would like to nominate Sugar Import Quotas as one of
the worst offenders so far as unintended consequences are concerned.
The obvious purpose of these quotas is to "protect"
the domestic sugar industry and it does do that, but at what cost?
The most apparent cost is higher Sugar prices. OK,
maybe protecting the Domestic Sugar Industry is worth higher sugar prices.
What other effects do these higher prices have?
More jobs have probably been lost in the candy
industry than have been saved in the sugar industry. Some of these jobs may
have been regained by the increase in demand for High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS),
but additional costs are caused by the production and use of HFCS.
Doing a Google search on HFCS vs Sugar yields many
articles pointing out the potential health hazards associated with the
ingestion of HFCS instead of sugar.
Production of HFCS also appears to require more energy
than the production of sugar. This is particularly true when looking at the
full cycle costs starting at the crop field and including fertilizer and
insecticide.
One logical conclusion is that the ending of sugar
import quotas would be a good first step in reducing energy usage and
improving the over all health of Americans.
Lets tell our Congress Critters to start battling the
"Health Care and Energy Crises" in an easy and budget neutral way.
End the Sugar Import Quotas!
Bob Holmes
Is government the solution or the problem?
Clearly both. Let the debate begin. Do understand that as Metternich
noted, Das Buros steht immer; they never (or almost never) go away even
when the need for them vanishes, and they not only cease to be useful but
become a pure hindrance. Some of the marketing boards of the Depression
era AAA remain to this day and set prices at artificial levels.
Let the debates begin.
================
NS 2727: Free will not an illusion after
all
http://www.newscientist.com/
article/mg20327274.400-
free-will-not-an-illusion-after-all.html
et seq. * 23 September 2009 by Anil
Ananthaswamy
CHAMPIONS of free will take heart. A
landmark 1980s experiment that purported to show free will doesn't exist
is being challenged.
In 1983, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet
asked volunteers wearing scalp electrodes to flex a finger or wrist.
When they did, the movements were preceded by a dip in the signals being
recorded, called the "readiness potential". Libet interpreted this RP as
the brain preparing for movement.
Crucially, the RP came a few tenths of a
second before the volunteers said they had decided to move. Libet
concluded that unconscious neural processes determine our actions before
we are ever aware of making a decision (Brain, vol 106, p 623).
Since then, others have quoted the
experiment as evidence that free will is an illusion--a conclusion that
was always controversial, particularly as there is no proof the RP
represents a decision to move.
Long sceptical of Libet's interpretation,
Jeff Miller and Judy Trevena of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New
Zealand, attempted to tease apart what prompts the RP using a similar
experiment, with a key twist.
They also used scalp electrodes, but
instead of letting their volunteers decide when to move, Miller and
Trevena asked them to wait for an audio tone before deciding whether to
tap a key. If Libet's interpretation were correct, Miller reasoned, the
RP should be greater after the tone when a person chose to tap the key.
While there was an RP before volunteers
made their decision to move, the signal was the same whether or not they
elected to tap. Miller concludes that the RP may merely be a sign that
the brain is paying attention and does not indicate that a decision has
been made (Consciousness and Cognition, DOI:
10.1016/j.concog.2009.08.006).
Miller and Trevena also failed to find
evidence of subconscious decision-making in a second experiment. This
time they asked volunteers to press a key after the tone, but to decide
on the spot whether to use their left or right hand. As movement in the
right limbs is related to the brain signals in the left hemisphere and
vice versa, they reasoned that if an unconscious process is driving this
decision, where it occurs in the brain should depend on which hand is
chosen. But they found no such correlation.
Marcel Brass of Ghent University in Belgium
says it is wrong to use Miller and Trevena's results to reinterpret
Libet's experiment, in which volunteers were not prompted to make a
decision. The audio tone "changes the paradigm", so the two can't be
compared, he says. What's more, in 2008, he and his colleagues detected
patterns in brain activity that predicted better than chance whether or
not a subject would press a key, before they were aware of making a
decision (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.2112).
But Frank Durgin, a psychologist at
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, says that Brass's results do "seem
to undermine Libet's preferred interpretation", though they don't
contradict it outright.
=============
Let's not overlook that
China's "One Child" policy has unintentionally had the effect of being the
largest program of eugenics in human history, while, with 50% of births in
America being paid for by Medicaid and the mother+child going directly
onto the supplemental-to-Food-Stamps Women/Infants/Children (WIC) feeding
program for poor women, the United States has to be in the middle of the
biggest program of *dis*genics in human history.
The specific "Writing on the Wall" that will be the
most potent is the phrase "Demographics Are Destiny".
J
Of course no one can say that in public. Racism
is the least of the terms to be applied. We all know what we can't say and
who we can't say it about.
===========
'Black inner-city boys particularly have to wrestle
with the question of whether it is O.K. to be smart.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/27Boarding-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all
-- Roland Dobbins
=============
Unbelievable. Please publicize this outrage. (Below
is a clip from Ed Koch's newsletter. Presumably he refers to the New York
Times as his source.)
I agree with Mr. Koch, but he doesn't go far nearly
enough. ACORN SHOULD BE INVESTIGATED BY AN INDEPENDENT COMMISSION. Given
ACORN's deep ties to the Obama Administration, this is a HUGE scandal. I
think this is much larger than Clinton's Blue Dress or Nixon's Watergate.
***
http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/
reid-blocks-acorn-probe-61438132.html
EDITORIAL: Reid blocks ACORN probe
Tracking abuse by political allies could be
'distracting'
ACORN -- the Association of Community Organizations
for Reform Now -- is stinking up Washington.
And this is far more significant than if a
suspiciously large number of operatives for a purely "private" outfit had
been found systematically bending and breaking the law, because ACORN
receives and spends taxpayer money -- lots of it -- and had carried the
imprimatur of official partnerships with the IRS, the Census Bureau ...
the kind of "cred" that in the political world comes only from "who you
know."
John D. Trudel
ACORN and Obama certainly were a community
organizing team. Nixon should have been aware of what his "plumbers" were
doing, and Obama should have been aware of at least the general temper of
his ACORN community organizing allies were doing.
=============
The iPhone And The Lost Cause
Is what they really want Microsoft Origami with Skype
and a fuel cell?
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htecm/articles/20090930.aspx
September 30, 2009: American infantry
officers who have fought in Iraq have become tech-heads, courtesy of all
the electronic gear combat troops now carry. Officers often have laptops
with them in combat, to display maps, overhead UAV video, satellite photos
and all manner of data needed for them to fight smarter and more
effectively. The troops use night-vision gear, electronic rifle sights and
much more. Some get to handle portable radars that can see through walls
and binoculars that have laser range finders and electronic links to
artillery units. Many of the troops have cell phones. Smart phones, like
the iPhone, are popular. The iPhone can use thousands of programs, and
some of these are very useful for military personnel. Officers see how
useful the iPhone could be with software designed for military purposes. A
military version of the iPhone, able to operate on a closed military
network, would be a big help in the combat zone. But these officers also
know that the military procurement system, which often takes more than a
decade to get new gear into the hands of the troops, could never deliver a
military iPhone. This has made a lot of senior officers angry.
The troops also want combat ready cell
phones. In the last decade, a generation has come of age that expects to
carry around a phone, and stay connected 24/7. Their elders have also
picked up on this convenience, to the point where the U.S. Army is
actively trying to figure out how to make this happen. But the procurement
bureaucracy, with an endless list of ways to delay such progress, stand in
the way.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, where widespread
cell phone service followed in the wake of the American invasions, many
U.S. troops have bought local cell phone service, and use these phones
when on combat operations. But the troops want more out of their phones
than just instant communications. Like many business users, military
personnel see the many potential uses of "smart phones." These are cell
phones with personal computer like power, and capabilities. About ten
percent of the cell phones being shipped this year are smart phones (the
iPhone and Blackberry are two of the more popular models). Smart phones
are particularly popular with businesses, where most of them are used.
About a third of business users let their smart phone replace their laptop
at least some of the time. But many business users are pushing for smart
phones powerful enough to replace their laptops a lot more often.
This is where the troops want to go. Laptops
have become increasingly common on the battlefield in the past decade. But
laptops, even lightweight (under five pounds) ruggedized ones are bulky
and heavy compared to a smart phone. Not the kind of stuff troops like to
haul around. As a practical matter, it's only company commanders and a few
others (like air and artillery controllers) who use laptops under fire.
But platoon leaders (and platoon sergeants) could use a smart phone with
laptop capabilities. So could squad leaders, and anyone who has to drive a
truck (armored vehicles already come equipped with lots of computers).
The combination of network access and laptop
quality software make a military smart phone a very useful gadget. Add in
the GPS, and you have something every soldier would want. What the army is
looking for is a smart phone that can work off battlefield wi-fi and have
sufficient encryption and ruggedness to survive enemy efforts, and general
rough use, to shut it down. The army now has several decades of experience
using seemingly "delicate" electronics on the battlefield. There's no fear
about this anymore, especially since some troops are using cell phones in
combat (although you're not supposed to).
For commanders, a military smart phone (MSP
for short) has numerous advantages. First, there's the convenience of
having most of your unit data literally at your finger tips. Status of
troops, ammo, equipment and the inevitable todo list, as well as maps and
plans for future, or past, operations. Smart phones also push data onto a
phone, to keep databases and schedules updated. Commanders love that sort
of thing, as it saves them the hassle of checking on updates. And updates
are a lot easier to collect with everyone connected. Senior NCOs can much
more easily poll troops by texting them to get current status of things
like ammo, sleep, food or health. Commanders like to stay on top of these
items.
The army is in a hurry to get this working,
because commercial smart phones are getting smarter and cheaper, and a lot
more troops are getting them. Moreover, new smart phone models come out
each year, and the MSP would be more effective if it could keep up with
that development cycle.
While troops like stuff like personal radio
sets (which came of age in Iraq), they also know that cell phones can do
the same thing, and more. So the MSP would simply plug into the helmet
headset. The army also has to deal with troops demand for iPod features
(the most widespread "handheld computer"). The MSP would also be able to
take stills and videos, and the troops like to carry favorite vids with
them. Combining business and pleasure is not encouraged in the military,
but the MSP will be a very personal piece of gear. It might even be able
to use civilian cell networks as well, meaning that every troop will be
issued one.
The effort to deliver a useful MSP is seen as
a lost cause. But the demand is strong, and growing. Something surprising
might happen. Then again, maybe not. But when some other nation comes up
with an MSP, that might provide the incentive, now lacking, for the
procurement bureaucracy.
=============
Jerry: Good coverage and explanation of the Yamal
scandal. This is science?
The Royal Society's motto from the enlightenment era
is Nullius in verba <http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=1020>
. "On nobody's authority" or colloquially, "take nobody's word for it". In
2007, the Society's then president suggested this be changed to "respect the
facts".
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/
2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/>
Chris C
================
Keister bombs
I've been expecting this for some time. It likely
means the end of air travel, at least as far as I'm concerned. Already I can
envision watching the TSA employee slipping on the latex gloves. Frankly,
I'd rather walk.
Gregory Cochran
http://www.smartbrief.com/news/
aaae/storyDetails.jsp?issueid=2FDBE328-
F587-4A56-87BA-DA1BED3E29D6©id
=1CDC4CA5-A04A-43B6-9859-
A6929585132D
Trojan bombers" pose latest challenge to airport
security
AAAE Security SmartBrief | 09/29/2009
Experts say the recent suicide bombing in Saudi
Arabia by an al-Qaida operative who hid an improvised explosive device in
his rectum highlights a "nightmare scenario" for airport security. Al-Qaida
has promised an Internet primer on the technique, which has long been
favored by drug mules but is new to terrorists. What can authorities do to
detect such "Trojan bombers"? "Absolutely nothing other than to require
people to strip naked at the airport," says aviation security consultant
Chris Yates. CBS News (09/28)
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