Monthly Archives: April 2015

Chaos Manor View Tuesday, April 07, 2015

It is 1600 and on schedule Time Warner is extremely slow and often halted. This happens regularly. Fortunately it will fix itself in an hour or so, or at least it has done so daily so far. I have posted a large and diversified mailbag today; you will find it below.

Obama and the ‘Inevitable Critics’

We are dealing with a case of Mutually Assured Obfuscation.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/bret-stephens-obama-and-the-inevitable-critics-1428361609?mod=rss_opinion_main

ENLARGE

A satellite image of Iran’s Fordo uranium-enrichment facility in 2013. Photo: DigitalGlobe/Institute for Science and International Security

By

Bret Stephens

April 6, 2015 7:06 p.m. ET

1184 COMMENTS

‘So when you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question: Do you really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented, backed by the world’s major powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East?”

That was Barack Obama on Thursday, defending his Iran diplomacy while treating its opponents to the kind of glib contempt that is the mark of the progressive mind. Since I’m one of those inevitable critics, let me answer his question.

Yes, it’s worse. Much worse.

Yes, because what the president calls “this verifiable deal” fails the first test of verification—mutual agreement and clarity as to what, exactly, is in it.

Brett Stephens concludes that the deal proposed by Obama will lead to an Iran with usable weapons in quantity; and therefore preventative war is preferable. He continues:

But let’s accept the president’s premise. Should the current deal hold, Iran will be able to develop all the nuclear infrastructure it wants by the time my youngest child is in college. And it will do so not over Washington’s objections, but with our blessing.

Maybe by then the Iranian regime will have changed for the better. More likely not. Their economy will have revived thanks to the end of sanctions. Their geopolitical position will be stronger thanks to the internal convulsions of some of their neighbors. And they will have a nuclear infrastructure capable of producing many bombs on short notice—too short for the U.S. to do anything about it. The same will likely be true of Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

So let me rephrase the president’s question: Is targeted military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities—with all the unforeseen consequences that might entail—a better option than a grimly foreseeable future of a nuclear Iran, threatening its neighbors, and a proliferated Middle East, threatening the world?

I know my answer. What’s yours?

It is a grim question, and we may be sure that no one likely to become President of the United States will begin a new war in the Middle East. The answer of the United States has been given: Iran will have the bomb, and, as Stephens says, with our assistance in shoring up the Iranian economy. Iran has repeatedly stated that these are end times, and the mission of their nation is the extirpation of Israel.

The Israelis are well aware of all this.

There is also this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/iran-positions-itself-to-be-a-tech-leader-in-turbulent-middle-east/2015/04/06/e52ad4ea-d948-11e4-8103-fa84725dbf9d_story.html?hpid=z1

Tech investments show an Iran eager to end isolation (WP)

By Craig Timberg April 6 at 12:31 PM

As world powers have been working to curb Iran’s nuclear program, the Islamic Republic has been bolstering its ambitions in cyberspace, positioning itself as a potential technological leader in a turbulent and strategically crucial region.

Iran in recent years has inaugurated a new, high-capacity data link to Europe, introduced 3G and 4G cellular service to millions of customers and become a major buyer in a bustling new marketplace for IP addresses — the fundamental building blocks of the online world.

Western experts watching these development see little evidence that these steps are intended to bolster Iran’s already formidable cyberwar capabilities. Instead they see a nation making investments in civilian technology that could help Iran build a more modern, open economy, especially if a tentative nuclear deal struck last week yields a permanent accord and an easing of international sanctions.

Despite deep-seated wariness of Iran, some observers see these technological developments as a sign — along with the nuclear talks themselves — that President Hassan Rouhani is eager to normalize Iran’s relations with the outside world after years of combative isolation.

Iranian companies over the past 15 months have bought more than 1 million IP addresses, said Dyn, a New Hampshire-based Internet performance analysis company. At roughly $10 per address, this represents a substantial investment in making it easier for Iranians to get online.

I have long said that the best weapons against Iran are smart phones and tablet computers: the West’s panzer divisions among the weapons of cultural mass destruction. I am not really being whimsical when I say we ought to drop cell phones from airplanes in Iran while simultaneously using technology to let them be used.

Patent case could shift power balance in tech industry   ft

Richard Waters in San Francisco 

A US appeals court is set to hear a landmark patent case on Wednesday that could change the way royalty rates are set for commonly used intellectual property in the tech industry.

The case, pitting Microsoft against Google, has already involved a lower court in setting patent rates for the first time, in a move that critics warn will upend the balance of power between leading tech companies.

Microsoft brought the case in 2010 against Motorola Mobility, the handset maker later acquired by Google. The search company sold Motorola’s operating business to Lenovo last year but kept its patents and has now taken the case to the court of appeals.

The dispute centres on so-called standard-essential patents, which cover technology that is included in industry-wide technology standards. Since others have to use the technology if they want their own products to meet an industry standard, the companies that submit their patents for approval by standards bodies are required to license them out on “reasonable and non-discriminatory”, or RAND, terms.

Microsoft sued Motorola after the handset maker asked for 2.25 per cent of the final product price for use of several of its patents that are included in standards for WiFi and video compression technology. Microsoft said the demand would have cost it $4bn a year. Judge James Robart, in a federal court in Seattle, laid out a different method for calculating the royalties that would instead cost Microsoft less than $2m a year.

If upheld, Judge Robart’s approach could tilt the balance of power in negotiations away from companies that own large portfolios of commonly used patents and instead favour those — like Microsoft or Apple — whose businesses are based more on implementing technology standards in their products.

“It’s going to be very significant indeed. Nobody quite understands what the term [RAND] means,” said Alexander Poterack, chief executive of General Patent Corp, a US intellectual property firm.

In its appeal brought in Motorola’s name, Google has argued that the judge was wrong to take up Microsoft’s complaint in the first place, since the Motorola royalty demand was only the opening shot in a negotiation that should have been left to run its course. The court could have ruled on Microsoft’s breach of contract complaint without getting involved in the thorny issue of rate-setting, it claims.

“The litigation set bad policy by encouraging parties to run to court rather than negotiate”

– David Balto, a former FTC chief of competition policy

“The litigation set bad policy by encouraging parties to run to court rather than negotiate,” said David Balto, a former chief of competition policy at the Federal Trade Commission.

Some in the tech industry also argue that, if the ruling stands, companies will not be as willing to allow their technology to be included in industry standards, since it would rob them of much of their negotiating leverage.

The calculation method that Judge Robarts came up with “would conceivably apply to lower the reasonable royalty available to every single [standard-essential patent]”, the American Intellectual Property Law Association wrote in an amicus brief to the court.

Companies who have joined the opposition to the ruling include Qualcomm, many of whose patents cover mobile communications technologies that have been adopted in industry standards. The calculation method is a “one-sided directive that advances only implementers’ interests in obtaining licences at the lowest possible cost,” it said in a court filing supporting Motorola’s position.

Ultra-fast charging aluminum battery offers safe alternative to conventional batteries

Stanford scientists have invented a flexible, high-performance aluminum battery that charges in about 1 minute. Credit: Mark Shwartz, Precourt Institute for Energy, Stanford University

Stanford University scientists have invented the first high-performance aluminum battery that’s fast-charging, long-lasting and inexpensive. Researchers say the new technology offers a safe alternative to many commercial batteries in wide use today.

“We have developed a rechargeable aluminum battery that may replace existing storage devices, such as alkaline batteries, which are bad for the environment, and lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames,” said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. “Our new battery won’t catch fire, even if you drill through it.”

Dai and his colleagues describe their novel aluminum-ion battery in “An ultrafast rechargeable aluminum-ion battery,” in the April 6 advance online edition of the journal Nature.

Cheap and safe energy storage makes irregular power sources like solar panels and windmills much more usable; and of course electric cars and trucks much more economic.

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

Chaos Manor View Monday, April 06, 2015

I have been very busy. Of course last week was Easter week, with family obligations; and next week is Writers of the Future, and just after that the taxes are due. And for better or worse I am still in a walker, although there are faint indications that by the end of Summer I will only need a cane. Wish me well.

Meanwhile there will be a new release of the first two (of ten) volumes of There Will Be War; I have found a publisher willing to do all the paperwork and pay the contributors, which was important because I can’t undertake that burden. Look for them in a couple of months. We’re getting them ready, and I am writing a Preface to the 2015 release.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2015/04/04/weisman-internet-of-things-cyber-security/70742000/

Are you safe in the Internet of Things? (USA Today)

Steve Weisman, for USA TODAY 9:02 a.m. EDT April 4, 2015

The Internet of Things, the popular name for the technology by which devices are connected and controlled over the Internet, is big, and it is only getting bigger. The presently estimated number of Internet of Things devices of 4.9 billion devices is expected to rise to 25 billion by 2020. IBM has recognized the opportunities present in the Internet of Things and earlier this week announced it is investing $3 billion in a new business unit that will focus entirely on developing products and services for the Internet of Things.

What kinds of things make up the Internet of Things? Products include cars, refrigerators, coffee makers, televisions, microwave ovens, fitness bands, thermostats, smartwatches, webcams, copy machines, medical devices and even some sex toys.

So where are you vulnerable? A better question might be where are you not vulnerable?

A study last year by HP Security Research concluded that 70% of the most commonly used Internet of Things devices had serious security flaws with 90% of the devices using unencrypted network service and 70% vulnerable through weak passwords.

A recent report issued by the Government Accountability Office found that the computers that make up the National Air Traffic Control System are vulnerable to hacking. The GAO issued 17 recommendations and 168 specific actions to address security weaknesses in security controls including — what should have been obvious — the need to encrypt sensitive data. The threat here, as noted by New York Sen. Charles Schumer, is that “sophisticated terrorists could even steer planes into one another. The threat of a cybercriminal taking over this system makes your stomach sink.”

Now your house can be hacked…

My short squib on Freedom vs. Diversity generated less hate mail than I expected, and some thoughtful comments.

White only

When I hear of business owners being able to put up signs like “White Only” I get the feeling this was something distasteful from our history.
Something (I read) that took a fair amount blood & sweat to get rid of.
Are “White Only” signs a symbol of freedom or something else?
R

It depends: if you are required by law to display that sign it is clearly no sign of freedom, just as a sign that said Blacks Only could be either a sign of freedom or an imposition of the state. Freedom of association is a freedom; where public facilities are involved clearly there is a right of the public to enjoy them.

Enforcement of such restrictions is worth debating, but you didn’t ask that question. In practice, no one sues to join a Blacks Only club…

Discrimination or slavery?

You said, “[N]o one questions the source of this right, not to marry, but to require a particular baker to sell them a cake.”
I couldn’t agree with you more on your statements on this ridiculous notion that business owners and even private citizens can be forced to comply with the moral judgements of those in authority or those who happen to be screaming the loudest at the time. There is, however, the notion that publically owned corporations should exist for the public good and this would require them to abide by the strictures of non-discrimination. This makes sense to me since these corporations truly are just an extension of the public and its needs; though a very good argument could be made that this is not true since only the stock holders truly own the company. Privately held corporations and private businesses, not so much. My personal belief is no public corporation should be allowed to exceed 10,000 employees just as no single government program should exceed this size, but that is another chat entirely. What we are seeing here is clearly the progressive notion that no person is truly private and that all businesses have some public component to them. That this allows government to pretty much do anything it pleases is quite evident in the behavior and statements of our current president.
Your above statement, however, ignores a very large elephant in the room. None of the bakers, florists, pizza vendors, etc. that I have read about have a problem selling to anyone. Walk into their shop and order a cake, a cut of flowers, or a pizza and then walk out with them, not a problem even if it is quite obvious that you are gay. Where they object is they are being asked to cater a wedding or a party and the theme is a gay theme. This is where the problem lies. They are being forced to perform labor that violates their religious beliefs by giving tacit approval to something they believe is forbidden. It is truly no different than forcing a Jewish deli to cater a pig roast for a Hawaiian luau or an atheist book store to hold a bible study class. It is blatant and obvious slavery. One class of citizens – homosexuals – hold legal authority over all others and can force them to perform labors even when those labors are abhorrent to them. Rather than being something that perhaps violates a non-discrimination requirement in public service, this seems to me to clearly violate the 1st, 13th, and 14th Amendments by forcing one group to work for another group.
As always, thanks for all you do,
Braxton Cook

I am not concerned with their reasons; but when a baker is faced with jail because she will not make a wedding cake for a gay marriage, that is tyranny. As to publicly owned corporations that i9s a matter of discussion: but the stock holders bought the stock of their own free will, and if enough of them object to a corporate policy, they own the company do they not?

In response to your posting on anti-discrimination laws, I see three separate issues. First, the historical reasons for racial Civil Rights action, second the justification for Federal involvement, third the current gay rights issues.

Discrimination

The reason that the federal Civil Rights Act was needed was to dismantle systematic oppression of black Americans (specifically Southern black Americans) by white Americans (again, specifically Southern white Americans). This went far beyond state government action. If one restaurant won’t serve you or employ you, that’s one thing. If all of them won’t, that’s quite another. In the context of the Cold War, this was providing a massive propaganda advantage to the Soviets. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
This is why Brown v. Board of Education was unanimous. Yes, that was dealing with government equality, but the concerns were similar.
The question of where in the constitution laws applying to private parties are authorized has two answers: One, they aren’t in the text itself. Two, there was a mini-revolution during the Franklin Roosevelt administration that greatly expanded the scope of the commerce clause, and under that the commerce clause gives the federal government the authority to do this. I know you don’t consider that legitimate, but it did happen and is unlikely to change any time soon (though the dissent in the Obamacare case did seem to nibble at the farthest excesses of that interpretive regime, though that was of course a dissent).
On the subject of gay rights, there is no federal law against discrimination either in employment or in service. The cases one hears about are under either state or local law. Ironically, Indiana has no anti-discrimination laws regarding homosexual orientation so the whole hubbub was about overly broad (according to detractors) exceptions to a non-existent law. Though I suppose it might interfere with some local ordinances (which when Colorado did it in the 1990s, caused Justice Kennedy to become quite irate).

Two points: I do not question the need for or the constitutionality of the laws ensuring the right to vote no matter what race; I will debate the wisdom of some of their provisions, but not their intent. It is regarding private property and businesses I have concerns.

Either it is a free country or it is not.

The matter of Federal threats and gay rights is another discussion. Where state legislatures have acted is one matter; where fresh new rights were found in old documents is another.

Americans with Disabilities Act is Federal, and exceeds constitutional powers. It seeks to give disabled people equality with others; this is impossible, and why can it be imposed on those unwilling? It leads to absurdities, but it is wrong at bottom.

As you say, Brown dealt with public resources. It also was an abject failure in providing good shools to all races.

Jerry,
Fox News is reporting on the idea to modify passenger jets to be remotely piloted in case some pilot, or terrorist, decides to fly the plane into the ground or a building. This idea was put forward shortly after 9/11 as well. I thoroughly criticized the idea then and I wish to do so now, though Fox is not allowing comments on the report. I thought I would reach out through your blog.
Allowing passenger jets to be remotely piloted is the most terrifying proposal I have ever heard. Right now, if a nefarious person wishes to crash a plane on purpose, that person must first board the plane and then violently take control of it. Remote piloting changes that equation completely.
With remote piloting in place, a terrorist organization merely needs to break the security of the system. It can then hijack every single passenger plane in the air and fly them all into buildings from the comfort of home. No personal presence on the plane is needed.
No one should fool themselves that a system for remote piloting a plane can be secured against intrusion. After all, the proper authorities have to have access. If ANYONE has access, it is only a matter of time till EVERYONE has access.
The answer to the problem of hijacking, either by a terrorist or by a distraught pilot, is not a remote piloting system, but a fairly simple change to the autopilot software of the aircraft. Reprogram the autopilot to always monitor the trajectory of the aircraft. If it sees that the plane is on a course to strike an object, be it a mountain or a building, the autopilot can takeover the aircraft and place it on a safe course while radioing the specifics of the incident to ground controllers. The autopilot intervention should not be surmountable by turning off the autopilot.

Kevin

I would not think this idea will go far, for the same reason that we rejected mid-boost course correction on ICBM’s; it’s a single point failure mechanism and a target for every enemy. You do not dare assume you can make it secure.

Dr. Pournelle,
In re IBM and the weather channel teaming up, you wrote:
“And perhaps we will have some data, not subject to climate Believer vs., Denier selection. “
I hope you were being facetious — for the last couple years, TWC had been firmly in the camp of the anthropogenic climate change evangelists. While I don’t know if IBM has a policy on climate change, considering the state of their business they would be foolish to stand on any “denier” principles.
-d

If they pay for it, they may do as they please, surely. The market will teach them.

Why PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel thinks American democracy is dead (WP)

By Brian Fung April 1 at 12:27 PM

Democracy in America is dead, according to  Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.

No, not in the anthropological, Alexander-de-Toqueville sense. The PayPal co-founder means it literally.

“It’s not clear we’re living in anything resembling a democracy,” he told a crowd Tuesday at George Mason University. “We’re living in a republic that’s modified by a judicial system, that’s been largely superseded by these agencies that drive the decision-making.”

“Calling our society a democracy is very misleading,” Thiel went on. “We’re not a republic; we’re not a constitutional republic. We live in a state that’s dominated by these technocratic agencies.”

For even the typically colorful Thiel, this is a surprisingly blunt critique of the American political system. It fits into a much larger brand of Washington skepticism that’s become characteristic of Silicon Valley in recent years. And while much of it may ring true to the casual observer, it also draws its own critics.

Thiel says that organizations like the Federal Reserve have been allowed to roam too far. Calling government agencies “deeply sclerotic and deeply nonfunctioning,” Thiel pointed to the Energy Department’s failed investments in Solyndra as a case study in bureaucratic mismanagement and executive overreach.

“You could use ninth grade geometry to show this was never going to be commercially viable,” he scoffed in reference to Solyndra’s round solar panels, which he argued weren’t as efficient as conventional solar collectors.

There is more, and worth reading.

Google patents robots with personalities in first step towards the singularity

Google has been awarded a patent for the ‘methods and systems for robot personality development’, a glimpse at a future where robots react based on data they mine from us and hopefully don’t unite and march on city hall.

The company outlines a process by which personalities could be downloaded from the cloud to “provide states or moods representing transitory conditions of happiness, fear, surprise, perplexion, thoughtfulness, derision and so forth. “

Its futuristic vision seems to be not of a personalised robot for each human but a set of personality traits that can be transferred between different robots.

“The personality and state may be shared with other robots so as to clone this robot within another device or devices,” it said in the patent.

Meet George Jetson…

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

Chaos Manor View Thursday, April 02, 2015

I don’t do April Fool stories or jokes anyway, so it’s no great loss that yesterday was devoured by locusts. Actually, I took a preliminary cut at taxes, and found that all’s well: I seem to estimated my quarterly payments just about right. I’ll finish over the weekend, but it appears that it will be a wash this year.

Discrimination vs. Freedom

Discrimination lawsuits have been in the news lately, and I find them appalling, probably because I am not politically correct. The Constitution says Public Service should be available to all, and lawsuits to enforce it are in order, but I have never understood why I have a duty to serve you in my privately owned place of business. If I want only red-haired male customers, why should I not have the right to do so? Why have you a right to force me to sell you goods and services? I have the same view on employment. If I want only Korean employees, why should I not be allowed that? Perhaps it would be a bad idea, economically, but what gives you the right to send armed men to force me to hire you? Again I am not discussing public employment or services; I mean private businesses.

A free country would not be concerned with these matters. If a business wants only women employees in a free country, that should not be a matter for government concern. We might deplore it – or we might not if this is a women’s lingerie store – but it is not a matter of interest to the legislature. If a bar wants only to serve blonde customers, that too should not be a matter for government concern. And if that bar wants only black bartenders to serve those blonde customers, we are likely to think this an odd business model, but why is it otherwise of interest? Where did anyone get a right to employment or service in that establishment?

Well, perhaps prudence? The place might spawn riots in protest? But surely the rioters, not the weird employment and customer rules are the threat to the peace?

Of course this is saying that private business owners have a right to discriminate, to be prejudiced, in their choices of employees and customers; and we don’t permit that, because that is racist or sexist or some such: and of course it can be racist rather than merely weird or unconventional – but that is a consequence of freedom.

I would have thought people are free to associate with whom they wish, sell their property to whom they wish, employ whom they wish, so long as they do so in their private lives, not as public officials. The courts log ago ruled that discriminatory restrictive covenants in real estate deeds were contrary to public policy and would not be enforced. That is fair and proper. But whence comes the obligation to sell your house to anyone: registered sex offender, single parent, handicapped person, public drunk, notorious Lothario, blue-eyed blonde, Irishman, Polack, Gypsy, cross-eyed person—and to send armed public lawmen to enforce your obligation to sell to them?

But, you say, it is unfair to discriminate! You can’t refuse to rent to someone because she is Jewish, or Black! The law lets me send lawyers to harass you, reduce you to poverty as the enrich themselves and me, and I shall do so. You can’t be racist! Anti-Semite!

Now you might be able to infer some kind of residual sovereignty in the States that allows them to do this simply because kings, dukes, and lords once could do such things; but surely it is not in the Constitution to allow the Federal government to do it? No rational interpretation of the Reconstruction amendments gives that power to the general government, and it’s really difficult to find it in the States.

Yes: discrimination hurts. Those who are discriminated against dislike it. But those who want to discriminate and are not allowed to dislike that, also. But, you say, they are bigots and deserve castigation, and I am free to castigate them. I will leave the rest of this paragraph as an exercise to the reader.

Now, at one time a majority of the States had religions by law Established, and from the tenets of that religion one might infer condemnation of bigotry and praise and that those who are free of it are “better” than those who discriminate or want to; but Established Churches are long gone, as are privileged religious principles such as the Ten Commandments. And now we threaten bakers with jail for declining to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding. And no one questions the source of this right, not to marry, but to require a particular baker to sell them a cake.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/04/01/internet-searches-are-convincing-us-were-smarter-than-we-really-are/

Internet searches are convincing us we’re smarter than we really are (WP)

By Lenny Bernstein April 1 at 9:27 AM

Is Google creating the next generation of office blowhards? A clever psychological study by Yale University researchers suggests the answer is yes.

It seems that as we look things up on the Web, we become convinced that the information remains in our brains. It doesn’t. But we behave as if it does, and we’re not shy about claiming that it’s there.

“This huge database is leading people to believe this information is in their heads, when in fact it’s not,” Matthew Fisher, the Yale graduate psychology student who led the study, said.

Is that a bad thing? Merely an annoyance? Or no harm at all? It depends on whom you ask. Fisher’s paper, published online Tuesday in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, concludes that by “erroneously situating external knowledge within their own heads, people may unwittingly exaggerate how much intellectual work they can do in situations where they are truly on their own.”

But Clive Thompson, author of the book “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better,” wasn’t so sure. “I’m not quite as concerned about it as they seem to be at the end of the article,” he said after reading the study. “The truth is that we’re not that often truly on our own.”

I recall when I was in school the Brothers were more concerned that we knew how to find out things than they were with memorization of facts. We were required to memorize and recite poetry including rather log epics, but that involved poise and public presentations as well as memory exercises. Rote memory of the addition and multiplication tables, and of a reference base of history, is important; but how much beyond that is a subject for debate.

‘The failure of models to reproduce this hemisphere synchronicity raises interesting implications regarding the fidelity of climate model-derived sensitivity to CO2.’

<http://judithcurry.com/2015/03/10/the-albedo-of-earth/>

Roland Dobbins

‘If this Stevens/Lewis result holds up, it is the death blow to global

warming hysteria.’

<http://www.cato.org/blog/you-ought-have-look-climate-sensitivity-environmental-worries-are-trending-downward>

<http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00656.1>

<http://climateaudit.org/2015/03/19/the-implications-for-climate-sensitivity-of-bjorn-stevens-new-aerosol-forcing-paper/>

Roland Dobbins

I doubt that anything will cause global warming hysteria to go away, but thoughtful people surely will question the ability of the existing models to predict much of anything. Now, I find, we have changed the instrumentation used to measure atmospheric temperatures from satellites. We have mad the instruments smaller, presumably without compromising reliability and accuracy – but it turns out that this change increases the error bar for differential comparisons of measurements taken with the old instruments to those taken with the new. The old ones are gone, so you can’t take simultaneous readings of the same point in the atmosphere with both the old and new instruments. This isn’t really serious. The new are better in every way, and the inaccuracies in comparison are not larger than two degrees Kelvin – but when you proclaim that 2014 is the hottest year on record by a whole 0.02 Kelvin and you know that comparison of new to old readings from the most accurate source that we have are subject to a 1.00 Kelvin error bar, the absurdity is transparent.

They have done a great deal of work refining the climate models, but they really have no better predictions than Arrhenius had in 1900. The Earth is warming and has been since 1800. CO2 levels are rising and will have an effect. The Earth was warmer in Viking Times than it is now, and very probably was warmer in Roman and Bronze Age times than it is now. CO2 levels are rising but how much that contributes to warming trends is not known; we do know it affects plant growth, plant growth affects albedo, albedo affects climate. We now may discuss numbers.

IBM to Invest $3 Billion in Sensor-Data Unit

ENLARGE

The Weather Channel crunches 700,000 forecasts a second and already sells such data to customers. Photo: Mike Spencer/Wilmington Star-News/Associated Press

By

Don Clark

March 31, 2015 12:01 a.m. ET

International Business Machines Corp. plans to invest $3 billion over four years on a new business helping customers gather and analyze the flood of data from sensor-equipped devices and smartphones.

And perhaps we will have some data, not subject to climate Believer vs., Denier selection.

Suiting Up for the Moon

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150401.html

Ed

Hyundai pushes for commercial self-driving cars by 2020

Dr. Pournelle,

No thanks. I’ll keep my dumb car. The more gadgets there are, the more things to go wrong. I’m terrified that someone will upload a virus into all these “smart cars” and cause a traffic collision that the Almighty couldn’t untangle.

Let’s stay with dumb cars, even if some of them are driven by dumb people.  There’s a limit to the damage this can cause.

Terrier1

And yet statistics show fewer accidents with robot than human drivers. Admittedly there are not much data. But there are models, and we trust climate models do we not?

Amazon Wants to Be Your Home Services Middleman (WSJ)

• (journal)

• By
• Greg Bensinger

Amazon.com AMZN +0.70% is extending nationwide an offering that connects shoppers with local service providers, including Dish satellite-television service, Pep Boys auto-parts stores and handyman marketplace TaskRabbit.

The initiative, known as “Home Services,” is Amazon’s latest effort aimed at ensuring the e-commerce giant’s customers never have a reason to leave its site.

Amazon has been testing the service, which helps connect customers with professionals like electricians and yoga instructors, since the fall in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.

Use a ‘Fake’ Location to Get Cheaper Plane Tickets (Time)

I can’t explain airline pricing but I do know some plane tickets can be cheaper depending on where you buy them or, even better, where you appear to buy them from. This is all about leveraging foreign currencies and points-of-sale to your advantage.

For reasons I never quite understood, every time I tried to book a domestic flight in another country, the prices were always exorbitant. But, say, once I was in Bangkok, that same flight that was once $300 would fall to $30 almost inexplicably. This phenomenon is because a ticket’s point-of-sale—the place where a retail transaction is completed—can affect the price of any flight with an international component.

Most people don’t know there is a simple trick for “changing” this to get a cheaper flight on an airline’s website; it’s how I managed to pay $371 for a flight from New York to Colombia instead of $500+. Though it can be used for normal international flights, it often works best when you’re buying domestic flights in another country. (Point in case: A Chilean friend once told me Easter Island flights were much cheaper to buy in Santiago instead of abroad.)

macs vs. pc’s: the eternal question

Ah yes, the eternal question of Macs vs. PCs. It’s kind of like the Sunni/Shia divide in Islam, but with less bloodshed (but no less argument!)
Granted I think the world is becoming more OS agnostic. I run browsers, MS Word, and Matlab, and that’s it. So the OS doesn’t really matter. (If only Google Chrome ran Matlab¦).
Sure windows gives you more hardware choice. Granted. But one major difference: macs don’t come with ‘crapware’, windows pcs do. Sure, you can buy ‘signature’ windows machines direct from MS (!!!! why can’t I buy these direct from Dell or whatever! I’d pay $50 for a cleaner optimized system no hesitation). But given how valuable my time is, I like the idea that when I start a mac it comes already tuned to top performance – a windows machine, not so much. That $1500 mac laptop is almost free when I have used it steadily for a lot of my work for 6 years¦ If I am going to rely on a tool for a large part of my professional life I just want it to WORK, and paying a little more is not such a big deal.
That said, I still use DOS 6.2 in my lab (an amazingly good RTOS if you disable the clock interrupts! DOS is good. DOS is eternal. Praise be to DOS. You can’t do real time stuff with OSX or Windows or a raspberry pi…). Also the other day I resurrected an old windows 2000 machine because I had some high-performance openGL code on it – and was surprised at how good it was! It zipped along like a greyhound, and compiled C programs in a flash. It was so responsive! Sure, it can’t run modern apps, but progress is not always an unmixed blessing…
I remember once in one of your novels the good guys used machines with the OS burned in ROM with no possible firmware updates to avoid the possibility of corruption… Would that I could find such a rock-solid OS today… I don’t want dancing marshmallows, I just want my machine to do it’s job and not hassle me.

TG

I have about the same sentiments. When I was more active in journalism I had no choice but to keep up with both.  But now I do not have to, and I am more tempted simply to go to Mac; but the Surface tempts me.  Mostly I want to see competition…

Poverty rates near record levels in Bay Area despite hot economy (MN)

By George Avalos

gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com

POSTED:   04/01/2015 03:19:19 PM PDT

SAN JOSE — Despite being a nationwide leader in job growth, the Bay Area suffers from a poverty rate that still hovers near historic highs, with more than 800,000 people in the region living below the poverty line, a report released on Wednesday shows.

About 11.3 percent of Bay Area residents are living at or below the poverty level, according to the report, “Poverty in the Bay Area,” that was released by the Joint Venture Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies. The data reflects levels reached in 2013, the most recent year for which these statistics are available.

“Despite being one of the world’s wealthiest regions, there were 829,547 people living in poverty in the Bay Area in 2013,” the report stated. The study used federal poverty thresholds that ranged from annual income of $11,490 for a one-person household to $23,550 for a family of four.

“The Bay Area has a fast-growing frontier economy that is the starting point for much of the technology created nationwide,” said Jon Haveman, a San Rafael-based economist who prepared the report for Joint Venture Silicon Valley.

That has created some dislocation between those who are riding the innovation-fueled surge of job creation and wage growth, and those who don’t have the skills to keep up. And all of this is happening in a region with runaway housing and rental prices.

“The Bay Area does have something of a have and have-not economy,” Haveman said.

Despite the double-digit poverty levels in the Bay Area, the nine-county region is doing well when compared with trends in California, which has a 16.8 percent poverty rate, and the United States, at 15.8 percent.

San Francisco had the highest poverty level in the Bay Area in 2013 at 13.8 percent, the study found. Alameda County’s poverty rate was 12.9 percent, Contra Costa County was 10.8 percent and Santa Clara County was 10.5 percent. The lowest rate in the nine-county region was San Mateo County at 7.8 percent.

The poverty figures in the Bay Area are below the record level of 12 percent, an ominous benchmark that was reached in 2009 during the Great Recession. Yet the current levels are well above the historic average for Bay Area poverty of 9 percent.

Of course poverty in the US is upper class income in about half the countries of the world…

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