Monthly Archives: April 2015

Chaos Manor View Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Niven and Barnes were over for a story conference, and we went to lunch at Ahi Sushi. Excellent lunch. Our Avalon novel is coming along nicely, and it’s time for me to do some of the work.

Thursday, April 23, 2015 : did a lot of reading and catching up, neglecting this place. I don’t much feel inspired by the news. There is an inevitability to what’s happening in the Middle East. And the European Union has filed a lawsuit against Gazprom for trade discrimination or some such.

Meanwhile, the first two volumes of There Will Be War, my anthology series, is about to be released. The essays are dated, being written in the days when the Cold War was a serious threat. The first two volumes will be available as an eBook in a week or so – final proofing is being done now – and a hardbound print edition of the first two volumes in a short time.

I’m one of the proof readers. I have been amazed at how well most of the stories – it is more fiction than essays, after all – have held up. And the essays on principles of strategy are after all, only dated in their examples, not truth. They are as valid as they ever were.

And I’m working on 2020 Visions.  We’ll have that available in a couple of weeks.

Lie Detectors?

Iran’s intentions could be clarified if the Supreme Leader and/or other prominent government officials had to take lie detector tests

Seriously?   I mean, isn’t the fact that “lie detectors” are as useful as ‘e-meters’, and a voodoo priest has better accuracy common knowledge?

Isn’t this why a fundamental rule of intelligence analysis is “Capabilities, not Intent”?

But considering that Iran has been less than 2 years from breakout for the past 30 years, there clearly *hasn’t* been any intent.

Best regards,

Mike Lieman

Well. that’s not strictly true.  Polygraphs – true polygraph, not the trick kits – with face and hand temperature and accurate measurements of breath and heart rate can give very good evidence of stress no matter how good the subject is concealing it. Inducing stress, and interpreting what it means.  My first job at the University of Washington was as a tech assistant to Dr. Albert Ax, who pretty well founded modern polygraphs. We did extensive studies on veterans at the VA hospital, and Al’s paper on the physiological differentiation of fear and anger was a classic.

Our equipment was primitive – vacuum tubes, 6L6’s not transistors, noise filters, very primitive – but we got results.  Again, interpreting those results is a skill, and takes experience to learn.  Things have got much better since the days of Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) using Wheatstone bridge circuits.

The same is true of Voice Stress Analysis equipment, which I not has gone off the radar, but still exists and I would assume makes use of modern computing power. Whether anyone at State knows of them or pays any attention to them is another story. I wouldn’t know.

Obviously diplomats will develop considerable self control if they stay in service – just as poker players had better if they are to stay in the game  — but very few can conceal all signs of stress from well designed equipment.  I would presume the Agency if no one else is aware of this.

The Internet of things doesn’t — and shouldn’t — exist

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2910610/internet-of-things/the-internet-of-things-doesnt-exist.html?phint=newt%3Dinfoworld_mobile_rpt&phint=idg_eid%3D41987714d7814e9694722378ebd74a82#tk.IFWNLE_nlt_mobilehdwr_2015-04-22

An open, fully connected environment is impossible and dangerous, which is why IoT is really a collection of separate networks

InfoWorld | Apr 21, 2015

A highly connected world where devices of all sorts intelligently use sensor data to be more efficient, adjust to changing conditions, prevent or at least flag problems, and optimize performance of themselves, workflows, and even personal health — that is the vision of the Internet of things.

Mobile security: iOS vs. Android vs. BlackBerry vs. Windows Phone

Google’s Android for Work promises serious security, but how does it stack up against Apple’s iOS and

Read Now

It’s a great vision, but despite all the hype in the last year, it does not — and may never — exist.

An intriguing subject of thought.  Yet I can imagine my car calling to warn me that I’m spending too much and will get him repossessed…

EU investigation of Google

the article you quoted talks about Google ‘seizing control of the opensource ecosystem’ from the manufacturers.
It conveniently ignores how those same manufacturers have been leaving customers in a lurch by locking down phones so they can’t be upgraded without the manufacturers assistance (and then not releasing any updates), loading down the phones with unremovable bloatware, etc.
I’m not saying that Google is entirely in the right, but the article was rather biased

David Lang

I posted it because it was interesting, not because I agreed with it. I often do that when I have not thought through a news article. It gets me comments from people like you who have given it some thought.

Intel Compute Stick now available: $149 for Windows version, $110 for Linux (ZD)

Summary:After debuting its PC-on-a-HDMI-adapter at CES, the chip giant is readying it for shipment — and has already delivered the first wave of units to tech reviewers.

By Sean Portnoy for Laptops & Desktops | April 23, 2015 — 05:10 GMT (22:10 PDT)

The concept of a “PC stick” — a processor and RAM embedded into a gum-pack-sized device that can connect to your HDTV via an HDMI connection — is nothing new, but when a company like Intel embraces the concept, a lot more people start paying attention.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2015-intel-introduces-compute-stick-with-atom-quad-core-cpu/

A Blueprint for Your Digital Afterlife

Re/code

We all know that we’re going to die someday. But what happens to our digital life after we’re gone?

A few months ago, a friend’s mother suddenly passed away. Her iPhone 5s was password protected, but no one knew the code. She had recently visited my friend and his family and used the iPhone to take several pictures with family members. Sadly, these are some of the last photos my friend has of his mother, but they’re all stuck on her iPhone.

Since then, my friend has been working with Apple to try to gain access to the photos. As the representative of his mother’s estate, he thought the process would be straightforward, but it is proving to be anything but.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2015/04/23/the-coming-problem-of-our-iphones-being-more-intelligent-than-us/

The coming problem of our iPhones being more intelligent than us (WP)

By Vivek Wadhwa April 23 at 8:05 AM

Ray Kurzweil made a startling prediction in 1999 that appears to be coming true: that by 2023 a $1,000 laptop would have the computing power and storage capacity of a human brain.  He also predicted that Moore’s Law, which postulates that the processing capability of a computer doubles every 18 months, would apply for 60 years — until 2025 — giving way then to new paradigms of technological change.

Kurzweil, a renowned futurist and the director of engineering at Google, now says that the hardware needed to emulate the human brain may be ready even sooner than he predicted — in around 2020 — using technologies such as graphics processing units (GPUs), which are ideal for brain-software algorithms. He predicts that the complete brain software will take a little longer: until about 2029.

The implications of all this are mind-boggling.  Within seven years — about when the iPhone 11 is likely to be released — the smartphones in our pockets will be as computationally intelligent as we are. It doesn’t stop there, though.  These devices will continue to advance, exponentially, until they exceed the combined intelligence of the human race. Already, our computers have a big advantage over us: they are connected via the Internet and share information with each other billions of times faster than we can. It is hard to even imagine what becomes possible with these advances and what the implications are.

Doubts are understandable about the longevity of Moore’s Law and the practicability of these advances. There are limits, after all, to how much transistors can be shrunk: nothing can be smaller than an atom.  Even short of this physical limit, there will be many other technological hurdles. Intel acknowledges these limits but suggests that Moore’s Law can keep going for another five to 10 years.  So the silicon-based computer chips in our laptops will likely sputter their way to match the power of a human brain.

Kurzweil says Moore’s Law isn’t the be-all and end-all of computing and that the advances will continue regardless of what Intel can do with silicon. Moore’s Law itself was just one of five paradigms in computing: electromechanical, relay, vacuum tube, discrete transistor, and integrated circuits. In his (1999) “Law of Accelerating Returns,” Kurzweil explains that technology has been advancing exponentially since the advent of evolution on Earth and that computing power has been rising exponentially: from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, via the machines that cracked the Nazi enigma code, the CBS vacuum-tube computer, the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, and more recently the integrated-circuit-based personal computer.

He goes on to describe S-curves, which Possony and I described in some detail in Strategy of Technology in 1969. Of course computing technology increases, but you can only compute what you have some understanding of; although data mining may be a counter example.  We have discovered some laws by accident. Statistical dragnets can be useful.  They can also be deceiving.

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

Chaos Manor View Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Just back from the dentist.

News is a bit slow. It is inevitable that Iran will have its first nuclear weapon, possibly days from when the 2016 elected President takes office. They could have several now, but I assume they will keep the implied bargain that they do not openly have one on Obama’s watch.

At some point there should be discussion on strategies when Iran has the bomb. There is also the question of Israeli strategy now until the 2016 election, and what they need to do after that election. It should be interesting days until January 2017.

On the “found” nuclear weapon:

Re: Lost Nuclear Bomb Corrected Link + Comment

Jerry,

I just read the linked article from your Saturday, April 18th View about the recovery of the long lost nuclear bomb. Several years ago I saw a one hour TV show about that loss (standard warnings apply!! :-p ). Allegedly the Air Force insisted that the bomb was empty – no warhead, certainly no nuclear warhead. While I did not accept that as 100% certain to be true, it was part of the justification given for why the search was eventually stopped. Now I wonder was that misinformation, or is the current report simply presented in a way more dramatic than accurate?

Regards,

George

RE: Long lost nuclear warhead found…

As a former Air Force Officer I’ve always followed AF news with interest and so when I saw the link in your April 18 posting to a article about the ‘lost’ H-Bomb from 1958 having been found, I wondered how it could have not made bigger news at the time (Feb 15) and how I couldn’t have seen it. A little Google searching turned up no hits to this ‘news’, and putting in the name of the putative divers revealed only the original article and one on – guess where – Snopes – and another fake-tracer and one other site that had also been taken in. I realize that Snopes is not one of your favorite websites, but I don’t think they can have any agenda here.

http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/warhead.asp

—

Cecil Rose, LASFS Ootie

You will note that I made very little comment on the story; that is because I did know of other instances when USAAF and later USAF laid an egg, and recovery was a big deal; I wondered if there could be an instance in which the search was quietly abandoned, and privately I was astonished that if it had happened I did not know about it. I suspected that if such an incident occurred, I’d have long since known.

Of course the fissionables would long since have deteriorated, the Tritium decayed to impotence, and other deterioration would have made the find less worth while; still the very design mechanics of the fusion weapon – the US does not deploy fission weapons, and I doubt that this was that old – would be valuable to some including possibly Iran. The story had no Air Commandos or Air Security Police in it, so clearly USAF did not care about this “lost bomb”, which itself was suspicious to anyone thinking about it.

I simply do not rely on Snopes for anything.

Later yesterday I got

It appears that the lost nuclear weapon has not been found after all. Apparently the World News Daily Report is a satire site like The Onion. According to:
http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/disclaimer/
“WNDR assumes however all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle.”

Which pretty well settles it.

Re: Lost Nuclear Bomb Corrected Link

BTW, the link in View had extra fluff at the beginning (I got the article by pasting the article name into Google). The correct link is

http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/georgia-amateur-divers-find-long-lost-nuclear-warhead/

Plain text of link:

http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/georgia-amateur-divers-find-long-lost-nuclear-warhead/

The link from view looked for (plain text):

http://https/%20http/worldnewsdailyreport.com/georgia-amateur-divers-find-long-lost-nuclear-warhead/

Which obviously gave an error. And that brings up a point. Many of us occasionally send you links. In my own case I most often use Gmail’s browser interface writing in HTML to allow minor markup (boldface and whatnot). Links are typically added with control-k which gives a pop-up that allows for filling in a URL and optionally different text to display. This is how the first link above (the one not noted as plain text) is presented here.

Is that how you want to receive links? Or do you prefer that links simply be pasted as plain text? Even if plain text links are sent to you, whatever interface you use to read them might mark (or display) them as links anyway, I suppose.

Regards,

George

I prefer plaintext links which I can copy. The link given worked for me.

I suppose this was inevitable.

Robot arrested for buying drugs

Dear Jerry –

Recently a Swiss robot was arrested for buying ecstacy on the darknet.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102604472?__source=xfinity|mod&par=xfinity

Ah well, it had to happen eventually.

Some entities will do anything for Art.

Regards,

Jim Martin

Google’s Biggest European Headache Isn’t Search. It’s Android.

Google

A week into Google’s dramatic skirmish with the European Union, search has drawn most of the attention. But it’s the other case from Brussels that may have Google more worried.

The EU Competition Commission launched its investigation into Android last week in a move that could expose gaping blind spots in the tech giant’s ability to churn out innovation and profits. The EU is looking at three of its practices — pushing exclusive pre-installations of its apps and services on devices, bundling them, and blocking modified versions of the software. The case is structured similarly to its earlier charges against Microsoft, which was subjected to $1.5 billion in fines for bundling its browser.

Next to the search case, the commission’s new probe could have more teeth.

“The Android case is less advanced but, in a way, it’s a more conventional theory of what the Commission can do,” said Paul Lugard, a partner with Baker Botts who specializes in antitrust law. “I would not be very happy, if I were with Google, to hear that the Android case is going to accelerate.”

Google was not blindsided. The EU began its probe months ago, according to executives familiar with Google. One source said Google considered a potential regulatory threat as early as 2007, when it created the Open Handset Alliance, setting the wheels in motion for Android’s explosive growth.

But the probe comes at an awkward time. Despite Android’s dominant market share, the operating system has yet to bolster Google’s bottom line. In February, the company said Google Play paid developers $7 billion in the prior 12 months, about $3 billion shy of Apple’s far smaller market. Overall profits in Android hardware are suffering, too.

Related

Google’s response has been to tighten its grip, restricting how hardware partners use Android in an attempt to seize more control over its open source product. If the EU were to net a concession from Google in its probe, it’s likely to be on bundling — Google’s requirement that its apps are available in a package on smartphones and tablets — one former employee said. “It’s what the OEMs complain the most about,” this person said.

On this front, some of Google’s rivals could help make its case to the EU. In its response to the probe, Google pointed to Amazon’s customized Android system and the bundling deals Samsung has with Facebook and Microsoft. Google could also point to Cyanogen, the well-funded Android startup who recently inked a partnership with Microsoft, as evidence of vibrant competition.

Google declined to comment further on the investigation.

Regardless of how the probe unfolds, its existence alone could hinder two pillars of Google’s plans for Android. First, there’s its future beyond phones:  Android is increasingly steering into cars, TVs, wearables and other connected devices. For now, that expansion is even more restrictive than it is on handheld devices, with Google curtailing any potential customization of its software. It’s a tactic that the EU Commission, which is particularly concerned with market dominators bleeding into other industries, would not view favorably.

And then there’s Android’s future in emerging markets. There, Google is aggressively trying to develop a more uniform version of Android and halt its fragmentation. It’s even pondering a side entry into China, according to the Wall Street Journal. The probe could derail that, as Chinese officials watch European developments closely. “Any plans that Google has to go into China are going to be hurt by this EU investigation,” said the former employee.

Finally, there’s the chance that the EU’s probe can spark a similar suit here.

The FTC closed an Android case two years ago. But that does not preclude a rehashing, said Matt Reilly, counsel for FairSearch, an advocacy group backed by Microsoft, and a former assistant director for the FTC Bureau of Competition. “It could be an exciting, high-profile case,” he said. One that the agency’s lawyers may jump to take. “That’s what I liked working on at the FTC,” he added.

If the FTC does not pursue Android, other agencies might. Multiple people close to the companies involved in the EU cases against Google said they are pitching similar complaints to the Attorneys General and the Department of Justice.

Google’s best hope may be time. Evolution in the mobile industry is fast. When the EU case on search began in 2010, Facebook’s first Android app was five months old. Symbian was the world’s largest mobile operating system. Android had just pushed to fourth place, with 9.6% per Gartner, after passing Microsoft Windows.

By the time the EU investigation into Android takes shape, Android may look very different than it does today.

: Promise,

Yearly reminder: unless you’re over 60, you weren’t promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.

— Kyle Marquis

Just how hackable is your plane? (WP)

By Andrea Peterson April 20 at 3:17 PM

Chris Roberts knows a lot about hacking planes. But not because he’s trying to make them fall out of the sky. In fact, his job as a security researcher is to figure out how bad guys could hack computer systems so that companies can fix them.

But a tweet joking about “playing” with a plane’s on-board communications systems made while Roberts was on a United Airlines flight last week landed him in hot water: The FBI  questioned him for several hours after he landed and confiscated his laptop and hard drives. And then, over the weekend, he was blocked from boarding another United flight while on the way to speak at a security conference.

Roberts was able to book a last-minute flight on another airline. But his research raises bigger questions: Just how hackable are the planes millions of travelers rely on to get around the world? The answer, it turns out, is up for debate.

Planes are increasingly designed to give passengers more access to digital systems, mostly for entertainment purposes via in-flight Wi-Fi. But this connectivity may have a dark side: Last week, the Government Accountability Office released a report saying that security researchers have warned that this trend leaves planes less secure by providing a “direct link” between an aircraft and the outside world that could be leveraged by hackers.

Keeping flight-related and entertainment systems separate can be one way to limit an attacker’s access, but not all planes seem to be designed with that in mind. In 2008, the FAA expressed concern that the Boeing 787 Dreamliner combined some of that digital infrastructure — saying that the design “may result in security vulnerabilities.”

Modern planes use digital defenses called firewalls to protect cockpit systems against intrusions from someone connecting through other parts of the aircraft, like in-flight entertainment systems, the report said. Some cybersecurity experts worry that isn’t enough, arguing that “because firewalls are software components, they could be hacked like any other software and circumvented,” according to the report. But some critics of the report say it may have overstated the risks.

Boeing and competitor Airbus defended the security of their systems in statements to CNN in response to the GAO report. “Multiple security measures and flight deck operating procedures help ensure safe and secure airplane operations,” Boeing said.

But over the years, many researchers have warned about potential problems — including Roberts, the founder of One World Labs, who has given several talks about airplane cybersecurity.

Brad “RenderMan” Haines, a researcher who has investigated potential vulnerabilities in aircraft tracking systems, said limited access to avionic systems can make it hard to do comprehensive audits. “A lot of our research we can only take so far because we don’t want to cause problems — but all of the evidence seems to point to there being issues that remain unresolved.”

Haines said he would love to be proved wrong, but airlines and aircraft manufacturers seem uncomfortable with independent researchers reviewing their systems — possibly allowing political fears to trump providing the best security possible. “We’re trying to be part of the solution, and being ignored for it,” he said.

In an interview with CNN after being detained by the FBI, Roberts said he personally tested theories about how much visibility into avionic systems he had from the passenger cabin — pulling out his laptop and connecting it to a box underneath his seat 15 to 20 times on actual flights — and was able to view sensitive data from the flight systems. These statements, combined with the tweet, seems to have set off alarm bells at United.

“Given Mr. Roberts’ claims regarding manipulating aircraft systems, we’ve decided it’s in the best interest of our customers and crew members that he not be allowed to fly United,” United spokesperson Rahsaan Johnson told The Post over the weekend.  “However, we are confident our flight control systems could not be accessed through techniques he described.”

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Roberts’s situation, but in a recent interview with the Security Ledger, the researcher said the agency’s Denver office asked him to back off his aviation research in recent months.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents Roberts, called United’s decision to ban the researcher “both disappointing and confusing.”

“Security researchers are allies, not opponents, and their work makes us all more safe, not less,” said EFF staff attorney Nate Cardozo. “We fear that United’s actions here will cause a real chilling effect, and that researchers will be less likely to help United improve their security in the future based on its over reaction to Mr. Roberts’s statements.” Roberts, Cardozo said, was still willing to work with United and the rest of the airline industry to improve their security.

Haines, at least, said he is feeling that chill — but expects to continue his research. After all, he has a vested interest in making planes safer: He frequently flies to present at conferences.

You are warned.

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

Chaos Manor View Saturday, April 18, 2015

In the early days of my old BYTE column, when the important systems were Apple ][ and CPM on an S-100 Bus system, and everything was experimental and flakey, my column was called The User’s Column. In those days, if you wanted to get computers to do anything useful you spent part of your time poking around, trying this and that until it worked. I developed some rules, one of which became known as Pournelle’s Law. It said 90% of the time the problem was a cable. Actually the first formulation was “you’ll find by and large that it’s a cable.” I just had another confirming instance.

I’ve been feeling a bit down all week, probably the a milder form of the same cold that caused Larry Niven to miss his weekly story conference with me and Steve Barnes – which reminds me that I have to go over Steve’s new text, but that’s not today’s story. So I’m down, and not very productive, and the back room TV, a 50” LGT that’s just fine for us, started blinking and stuttering. We called Time Warner.

First thing: if you are going to call the cable company, try to do it at a time other than Prime Time. That’s when everyone calls. Second, if there’s any way you can do it, do it with a phone that works in the same room as you keep the television. Alas, in Chaos Manor that doesn’t work so well. The back room where we watch TV doesn’t get telephone reception on the new cordless system, and the old wired system connects, not to a landline, but to an ancient TIE system that has pretty well stopped working. It’s a real pain to get physical wiring back there, and we just haven’t got around to it. My cell phone gets a boost from an AT&T MicroCell, so I have communications on that, but Time Warner knows of us on the old land line number, which was on the TIE system and when that died away was replaced by a net of Panasonic cordless phones which work splendidly – except of course in the back room.

I was planning to do something about all this, but came The Stroke, and I haven’t got a round tuit, and neither have my son Alex or my associate Eric Pobirs. And of course this happened when they were at NBA which I wanted to go to and will, I hope, make next year, when with luck I’ll only need a cane, not a walker and wheel chair. At least that’s how I project the progress I have mad with physical therapy.

Eventually we got through to Time Warner. They tried remote reset of our set top box, and for a few moments I thought it helped, but then things got worse. Another call, and they tried again, and so did I – the Big Red Button reset. Turn off the power switch on the surge protector/extension box that powers both the TV and the set top box.

That did no good. Worse, although we didn’t know it at the time since neither of us was using computer, one of the Time Warner attempts at remote resetting scrambled the cable modem. Next morning Roberta’s computer wasn’t connected to the Internet, and on looking at my system I had no email since the night before. Call Time Warner again, this time at mid day. They were surprisingly easy to get, but I had used my cell phone, and it took a while for them to figure out who I was. They informed me that a technician was coming Saturday morning, did I want to change that? No! Please no! This was not TV related at all. I gave the phone to Roberta because long phone calls are tiring, and they decided that they need to reset the cable modem. And that, of course, is a big deal because the cable modem is upstairs where they don’t let me go without more physical assistance than Roberta can provide.

So Roberta had to go upstairs with my cell phone, find the cable modem in the little room were I keep servers and tools and spare parts and monsters, know what it was she was looking at, find the right power switch – anyway, the Time Warner lady talked her through it, and as I watched my system the lights began blinking, and all the stacked up mail poured in and all was well. Didn’t help the TV of course.

So Saturday morning the technician, a nice young man named Vincent, came within the hour they’d said he’d be there. By that time I was convinced that it was the set top box. The small TV in the front bedroom works fine, the Internet works fine, it’s clearly the set top box…

Vincent did what I would have done, except the TV is too close to the unused fireplace to get behind it with the wheelchair, and I am too unsteady to work standing in the walker without holding on: he fiddled with the cables connecting the set top box to the LG TV. And of course that did it. A lot of the splutter went away. Next move was to unplug all the cables, clean the contacts, plug them in: Voila!

You’ll find by and large, the trouble is a cable.

new laser weapon

What are the chances of Lockheed Martin’s new 30kw laser (or similar) being used to recharge batteries or capacitors on airborne drones?

jon spencer

Interesting to speculate on. I don’t know. And then there’s this:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/military/tactical-laser-weapon-module-can-laserify-almost-anything

Tactical Laser Weapon Module Can Laserify Almost Anything

The thing in this picture isn’t a photon torpedo. But, it’s close. It’s a photon cannon, currently under development by General Atomics. Small, versatile, and completely self-contained, it turns anything onto which you stick it into a powerful laser weapon. And at just two cubic meters in volume, you should have no trouble mounting it on the roof rack of your Volvo.

General Atomics’ Tactical Laser Weapon Module is one of those pieces of futuristic technology that can show up out of nowhere at a military expo (in this case, the Navy’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition) and just sit there, attracting plenty of attention while also being almost entirely classified.

What we were able to find out about this thing is that it’s a laser weapon with output energies (that’s output, not total power in the system) ranging from 75 kilowatts all the way up to 300 kilowatts. To put that in perspective, about a year ago we wrote about how Lockheed was using a portable fiber laser to shoot down rockets at a range of 1.5 kilometers using just 10 kilowatts of power. Suffice it to say, 300 kilowatts is rather a lot. The weight of the system is dependent on its output power and the number of shots you want, but General Atomics engineers say that they’ve gotten it down to just 4 kilograms per kilowatt.

The module in the picture above represents almost the entirety of an operational laser weapons system. You’ll have to wire it up to your own controller, but otherwise, all it needs to finish it off is a beam director—basically, a glorified steerable telescope that can intercept the laser beam as it comes out of that hole on the front of the module and then point it at what you want it to torch. You don’t even need to connect the module to an outside power source; it’s packed with enough lithium-ion batteries to give you some number of shots (although, as with almost every question we asked, General Atomics won’t give us specific numbers, because it’s, well, classified).

General Atomics did go so far as to suggest that this laser would be great as an add-on to the AC-130 gunship or V-22 Osprey. Since it’s so small, though, it would also fit onto UAVs like the Predator C. It could even be carried by ground vehicles like the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, which means that I bet my Volvo could handle it as well. Take that, traffic jams.

Too true

Mutually Assured Destruction in 21st century – the Ramirez take:

http://news.investors.com/photopopup.aspx?id=748432

{o.o}

Herman Kahn pointed that out a long time ago. The rationality of being irrational.

Long lost nuclear warhead found…

http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/georgia-amateur-divers-find-long-lost-nuclear-warhead/

Wonder what that might have been “worth” on the black market? Not counting the lives of the finders/sellers, which would have probably been forfeit after the bomb was located by the buyer.

Charles Brumbelow

In the old days, the Company would buy fissionables no questions asked, no ID wanted; but again a long time ago. And of course fissionables deteriorate.

Red’s latest ‘Weapon’ is an 8K full-frame camera

Red launched the first mainstream 4K camera when 1080p seemed like overkill, and now that this whole 4K thing might work out, it’s got an 8K RAW model. The Weapon ‘Vista Vision’ features a mind-boggling 8,192 x 4,320, 35-megapixel sensor that can do up to 75 fps, widescreen 8K. The chip is also 40.96 x 21.6mm or Vista Vision-sized, considerably larger than the full-frame sensor on a camera like the Nikon D810. Video can be recorded in RAW and scaled-down ProRes formats simultaneously, just as with the company’s 6K Weapon models.

So, how much does it cost to be on par with Peter Jackson and James Cameron? A helluva lot. If we’re reading the (rather confusing) pricing correctly, you’ll need to order the company’s 6K Weapon Woven CF “brain,” or bare camera for a cool $49,500, then add another $10,000 for the 8K sensor upgrade. That makes $59,500 by our counting, plus whatever your accessories, storage and lenses cost. The upgrade price is only good until the end of NAB on April 16th, after which time it’ll be $20,000. If you already own a Red Scarlet or Epic camera, you can get credits in various amounts towards the Weapon models.

Other specs are still unknown, as is the exact shipping date. Red actually launched its 6K Weapon camera just a few months ago, and it’s still not shipping. We’re not sure who exactly needs 8K, since there aren’t a lot of TVs out there in that format — but it might look great blown up to IMAX size. Red said the sensor would arrive by the end of the year.

clarifying Iran’s intentions

Iran’s intentions could be clarified if the Supreme Leader and/or other prominent government officials had to take lie detector tests which would ask if the government had any intention to create nuclear weapons. Lie detection methods will inevitably improve as technology advances, and the results of the lie detection tests could help determine subsequent policy toward Iran.

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride – which is to say a false premise implies the universe class. Of course we have voice stress analyzers – you don’t hear much about them anymore – but I doubt they have been normalized for Farsi, and diplomats and agents can be trained. You won’t get the Mullahs to agree to a polygraph.

Length of copyright,

Jerry

I note that Boss Flynn’s autobiography [You’re The Boss] was published in 1947. He died August 18, 1953. Under the old copyright limit, the book would long have been in the public domain. Under Victor Hugo’s copyright scheme, it would have been PD from August 18, 2003. Now we have to wait until August 18, 2023 for it to go PD. I hope I’m alive to see it. Maybe I’ll get to read it then.

Which brings another question: is the length of copyright a form of censorship of old books, not yet in PD?

Ed

An interesting question. Of course it’s unlikely that anyone would enforce copyright on that book, but also unlikely there’s enough in publishing it to cover the work involved. Pity. It’s worth reading.

Copyright is egregiously too long. When I get to be Emperor I’ll make it life plus fifty at most.

1600 Slowdown and Net Neutrality

Jerry,
Your 1600 slowdown has nothing to do with net neutrality and everything to do with how internet service is provided over cable systems. Years ago, my network manager used to complain about an evening slowdown, as did my operations manager, both of whom got their internet service over the Comcast cable network.
The issue is fairly simple. Internet service over cable is a shared bandwidth service. Depending upon network topology, the cable company may only have a few hundred megabits per second of bandwidth to spread around to dozens of users. As more users access the internet at the same time, the smaller the share of bandwidth each user can have. Because of this, the cable company will only promise you an average data rate, not an absolute data rate like you would get on a dedicated copper or fiber connection.
1600 sounds like a typical time of day for your neighbors to start coming home from school and work. The first thing that they will do is jump onto the web and download lots of media. You, who work from home all day, have the benefit of a largely idle cable network until the evening hours, giving you most of the bandwidth available on your edge of the system for most of the day. You get to see that bandwidth eroded away by you neighbors every evening.
Cable companies are touting a new breakthrough in technology that should expand the available bandwidth of their existing copper coax network and allow them to offer 1GBS service to their customers, which should help, but this will still just be average bandwidth, not absolute bandwidth.

Kevin

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

Chaos Manor View Thursday, April 16, 2015

I have a great many projects so this will be short.

Dr. Pournelle,
While my preference is for caffeine, here is more on electrical brain stimulation:
http://news.unchealthcare.org/news/2015/april/scientists-use-brain-stimulation-to-boost-creativity-set-stage-to-potentially-treat-depression
While I’ve just completed a successful round of physical therapy that included Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation to my shoulder, I will probably avoid applying any current above my shoulders. Sticking with espresso, for now.
Also, I wouldn’t take your fat man/little boy confusion too seriously, I once attended a speech by a Manhattan project physicist at Sandia who verbally made the same mix-up, twice within 20 minutes. You are in good company.
-d

Thanks

‘Bout time

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htweap/articles/20150416.aspx#startofcomments

(also, Some of the comments are asinine).

David Couvillon
Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; 
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; 
Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; 
Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; 
Chef de Hot Dog Excellance;  Avoider of Yard Work

Time indeed.

SDI and X Projects

This was sent some time ago and lost in the swim:

Subj: The Pentagon’s $10-billion bet gone bad – Los Angeles Times

http://graphics.latimes.com/missile-defense/

You may blame the costs on me. With General Graham. We persuaded Reagan’s people to start working on Strategic Defense. As it developed we had different plans on the course of the research, and DC/X was one result. But after its success they left x-projects and went to the so-called X-33 which was not an X project at all; it was – well I won’t say it. But X projects fly at the limit of known technology, resulting in expanding the envelope of what we know how to do. X-33 had experimental projects and Lockheed spent $Billions and never few anything. I don’t see why their design could ever have worked.

Airborne Laser actually flew and we learned things; there can be operational uses, but airborne boost phase intercept was never any concept accepted by me, nor, so far as I know, by General Graham. Space based is another story. The airborne laser research would have relevant to that.

Much of the urgency was lost as the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War; and Bush had fired all the Reagan people in the White House; we had no real influence except through Quayle. It was enough to get DC/X, and that should have led to SSX, but we were not sufficiently skilled at lobbying; DC/X was followed by the non X project called X-33.

For what was spent we could have had several X-projects, but there is not much profit in real X-projects. There is prestige and we learn new technologies, but not many spend millions on lobbying for them.

“[6] This combination of increasing power and shrinking size has improved the performance of nearly every sphere of human endeavor: Unable to execute Javascript.”
Undoubtedly just a problem with the copy/paste, but it exhibits perfectly what is the real question for me. All of this computing “power” – will it be any better, though, than the “weak” human brains that program it?
My own experience is that I am vastly more productive with modern hardware – I achieve far more compiler errors and wrong results in a single day than when I started in this profession…

R

An interesting observation.

Q&A: Carver Mead

Photo: Caltech

Caltech professor Carver Mead performed some of the earliest work aimed at determining just how small transistors could ultimately get. A colleague of Gordon Moore, he’s widely credited with popularizing the phrase “Moore’s Law.” The two met around 1960. In anticipation of the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law, he spoke with IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Rachel Courtland about the anniversary, his work with Moore, and what the future holds.

Rachel Courtland: Do you remember the first time you met Gordon Moore?

Carver Mead: Yes I do, and it’s a great story. I was a brand new assistant professor at Caltech, just in my first year, and I was in my office working away on the results of some experiment I had done. This guy waltzed into my office and said, “Hi, I’m Gordon Moore from Fairchild.” [Laughs] Well, I had never heard of Gordon Moore, but I knew about Fairchild.

We shook hands, and he said he was on campus to recruit some engineers, and would I like some transistors to teach my lab course? And I said, “Oh, that would be absolutely great.” So he reached into the top of his briefcase, [and] the first thing he did was pull out a sock or a dirty shirt or something…. I was looking at him a little surprised. He turned around with this little grin on his face and said, “I travel light.”

Then he reached in [his briefcase] and pulled out one of those big manila envelopes that you put 8½-by-11 sheets in, and it was bulging. And he said, “Here. These are 2N697s.” Well, a 2N697. I knew what it was. It was not a particularly great thing, but it was nice. Then he reached in and pulled out another manila envelope that was bulging just as much, and he said, “And these are 2N706s.” And the 2N706 was a neat little transistor. It was used for logic and so forth, and [it was] really great.

I had never seen so many transistors. I was completely blown away. In those days, none of us had much budget for things like that for teaching. We were working with really cheap transistors that were about a dollar apiece in the stockroom. For a student to shell out that for [a device] that might burn out on the first experiment was not easy. Having some transistors that the students could work with without having to break their budget was a great thing.

We chatted for a while, and I told him what I was doing, and he said, “Why don’t you come up to Fairchild and give a seminar on that?” At the end of the [seminar], Gordon asked me if I’d like to consult with them. So I started my weekly consulting trip.

I would see Gordon every week. He’s an early riser and so am I, so I would get up early and go in around 7. Gordon would be there, so we would have our chat before anyone else showed up.

R.C.: I’d imagine that Moore’s 1965 paper, the one that kicked off the idea that became Moore’s Law, didn’t come out of a vacuum.

C.M.: Oh no, not at all. He gave me copies of his plot [showing the number of components increasing with time] long before it appeared in print. I was puzzling over them, and I was working on the physics of what was inside the transistor. I was also working on a thing called electron tunneling. It’s a quantum mechanical effect that allows electrons to go through thin insulating regions even though they’re not supposed to be able to do that.

I had been working on that, and one day Gordon, who had been thinking about how many transistors can go on a chip, said to me, “Oh, this electron tunneling you’re working on…doesn’t that limit how small a transistor you can make?” And I said, “It certainly will.” And he said, “Well, how small is that?”

We [Mead and then graduate student Bruce Hoeneisen] concluded that you could make—without doing anything but making the transistors smaller and lowering the voltages—transistors as small as 150 nanometers, which was about two orders of magnitude [smaller] than anybody had ever thought. [Work on the possibility of scaling transistors to much smaller sizes was first presented in 1968, Mead says, and a paper pinning down the numbers followed in 1972.] That was the beginning of people taking seriously the fact that the limit of how far you could go was a very long ways away.

R.C.: Moore’s Law isn’t really a law, at least not in the way we describe physical laws. How do you describe it to people?

C.M.: I always had to—especially in the early days—explain that this is not a law of physics. This is a law [of] the way that humans are. In order for anything to evolve like our semiconductor technology has evolved, it takes an enormous amount of creative effort by a large number of smart people. They have to believe that effort is going to result in a successful thing or they won’t put the effort in. That belief that it’s possible to do this thing is what causes the thing to happen.

The Moore’s Law thing is really about people’s belief in the future and their willingness to put energy into causing that thing to come about. It’s a marvelous statement about humanity.

R.C.: It seems like Moore’s Law is a mix of things. It wasn’t just about belief—physics also had to comply.

C.M.: That was, of course, [why it] was important to figure out in the physics where it was going to give out and why it was going to give out. What was really surprising, I think to all of us, was that we had so much running room with just silicon—that it didn’t take any materials or techniques that we weren’t using already. All we had to do was get better at making them smaller.

R.C.: Was there something special about silicon?

C.M.: Silicon has a particularly stable crystal structure. Actually more important for the early days, silicon has as its native oxide one of the most ideal insulators known. Silicon isn’t a particularly good semiconductor. There are better ones, like gallium arsenide. But it has this property of having its native oxide being a very, very stable insulator, which likewise doesn’t come apart when you put electric fields on it. That combination was really what made silicon the magic material. By now, we’re making electron devices out of all kinds of semiconducting materials. But in terms of the really complex ones that have to be really small and hang together, silicon’s still a really important, central part of our war chest.

R.C.: What happens when Moore’s Law comes to an end?

C.M.: The thing we don’t want to do is to have the 50th anniversary [of Moore’s Law] surrounded with some sort of pessimism that it’s coming to an end. The fact that the blind scaling of transistors to smaller sizes is not going to last forever doesn’t mean that the phenomenon of building more complex and more functional electronic systems is coming to an end.

There are a huge number of very smart people who are pushing the limits all the time. There’s a movement [for example] to integrate optical and electronic components on the same chip. It’s called silicon photonics. And it’s just taking off.

My experience has been whenever you think you’re out of gas on a learning curve, there’s a breakthrough, but the breakthrough never comes from where you’re thinking. It’s never clear until it’s already happened what’s going to be the next really exciting thing. But there always is one.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

I agree with the cyclicity, but scoff at the ‘dark matter’ bit.

<http://theconversation.com/how-can-dark-matter-cause-chaos-on-earth-every-30-million-years-38075>

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Roland Dobbins

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