Category Archives: View

Thursday, February 26, 2015

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

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

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

Taki’s obituary of Arnaud de Borchgrave.

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

Roland Dobbins

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

Update on robots and jobs

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

TG,

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

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

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

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

Now it’s all done by robots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Verizon Wireless

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

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

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

An interesting response. Buzzfeed had this to say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ted Johnson Senior Editor @tedstew

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

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

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

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

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

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

View from Chaos Manor, Wednesday, February 25, 2015

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

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

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

Obama’s Oil-by-Rail Boom

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

By

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

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

646 COMMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Clever Robots Mean for Jobs

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

By

Timothy Aeppel

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

140 COMMENTS

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

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

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

* * *

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

Robot employment

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

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

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

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

There’s a lot more.

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

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

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

Leo on Winbook and other matters

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

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

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

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

All the best,

Leo-

Leo Laporte, Chief TWiT

<http://twit.tv/leo>

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

Networks, signal and “Limited” access

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

Michael Mol

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

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

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

By Drew Harwell February 25 at 8:00 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ain’t competition grand?

The most compelling MH370 story I’ve heard.

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

Roland Dobbins

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

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

View from Chaos Manor, Tuesday, February 24, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to those who already subscribed or renewed this week.

It’s not worth a war over Ukraine

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

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

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

Next, Chris Martenson lays it on the line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate science settled (again)

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

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

—

Chuck Kuhlman

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

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

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

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

Hello Jerry,

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

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

I think that it is worth reading.

Bob Ludwick

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

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

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

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

Charles Brumbelow

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

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

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

Roland Dobbins

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

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

View from Chaos Manor, Monday, February 23, 2015

It’s chilly out. I’m still trying to get things regularized in here as I adjust to being downstairs in my old office. Now it’s lunch time, possibly a bit more later. I think I mat need a new and more powerful Wi-Fi router/broadcaster. The present one is seen by the Surface Pro but the signal isn’t strong enough.  At Kaiser the Wi-Fi worked well enough, so it isn’t the Surface. Apparently my downstairs office has just enough walls between me and the upstairs router. Anyway we have to do something.

From Internet to Obamanet

BlackBerry and AT&T are already making moves that could exploit new ‘utility’ regulations.

By

L. Gordon Crovitz

Critics of President Obama’s “net neutrality” plan call it ObamaCare for the Internet.

That’s unfair to ObamaCare.

Both ObamaCare and “Obamanet” submit huge industries to complex regulations. Their supporters say the new rules had to be passed before anyone could read them. But at least ObamaCare claimed it would solve long-standing problems. Obamanet promises to fix an Internet that isn’t broken.

The permissionless Internet, which allows anyone to introduce a website, app or device without government review, ends this week. On Thursday the three Democrats among the five commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission will vote to regulate the Internet under rules written for monopoly utilities.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/l-gordon-crovitz-from-internet-to-obamanet-1424644324

We have yet to see how the new rules will apply under the Executive Order placing the Internet under the FCC, but experience has shown that if regulators can charge a fee without going to Congress to raise taxes, they will do so. Welcome to Net Neutrality otherwise known as Obamanet.

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

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

And that’s enough on that.

The new WinBook is a very cheap full computer and is recommended at the price, but we hope many buyers will bug Microsoft about the new Office 365 that comes with it.

My new laptop from Microsoft has a year trial of Office 365. It has one glaring loss of function: you can’t get to Autocorrect from a right click. You have to put the button on the Ribbon. Then when you hit a word you don’t like, you double-click it to select the word, Control-C to copy it, then open Autocorrect on the Ribbon, then Control-V to paste it, then type the word you want it to be. All so cumbersome. That missing feature alone will be enough to send me to OpenOffice when my subscription expires.

Ed

Of course it isn’t just WinBook, but all computers with Windows that come with Office 365 that have this problem. Office 2010 does not have the problem, and you own it without further payment. Renting software puts you at the mercy of the publisher; of course you sort of are because of the need for support. I like some of the Office 365 concept but the improvements over Office 2010 weren’t.

When Medical Devices Spread Superbugs

By THE EDITORIAL BOARDFEB. 23, 2015    nyt

Germs that are resistant to antibiotics are cropping up with alarming frequency at American hospitals. A lethal “superbug” known as CRE infected seven patients at the Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center and killed two of them. The germs were apparently transmitted on inadequately sterilized medical scopes.

When I briefly apprenticed at a medical lab (I was still in high school – things were simpler then) we were taught to be careful about sterility: which in those days meant Phenol – carbolic acid, which was thought to be the ultimate. It’s not used much now, probably because it is toxic as hell — if you got possible exposure to bio hazards you reached for the carbolic; we kept it in carboys – but then you used lots of soap and water to get the carbolic off. I hear that UCLA is sterilizing their bio probes with a gas process that is very toxic.

IBM’s Watson morphs into big business (USA Today)

Tom Walsh, Detroit Free Press 11:24 p.m. EST February 22, 2015

DETROIT — IBM Watson initially won fame as the artificially intelligent computer system that won $1 million for whipping former Jeopardy! champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the televised game show in 2011.

Since then, under the leadership of 1984 University of Michigan graduate Mike Rhodin, Watson has morphed into a muscular big business with lots of tentacles and more than 2,000 employees.

Earlier this month in Ann Arbor, I interviewed Rhodin, the New York-based senior vice president of IBM Watson who was in town to speak with two groups of University of Michigan business students and budding entrepreneurs.

Rhodin smiled when I asked the sci-fi question he hears often: When will machines turn on humans and take over the world?

“I haven’t seen any technology that could lead to that outcome,” he said.

Perhaps we won’t reach the singularity so soon?  Of course AI expert systems have been with us since the 70’s, and many are better than Old Sam at such tasks as determining the “staple” of cotton, sex of baby chickens, and wear on railroad wheels as the train goes by. That sort of AI is vastly improved in the last decades, and now is moving strongly into health care – and short order cooking.  Few repetitive jobs are safe, and many “expert” jobs are being automated; after all, if one AI knows how to do something, then nearly all can know it without having experience learning. One thing computers do well is transfer knowledge. 

I am forever looking for odd creatures I can morph into even odder alien life forms,  Here is one;

http://marinelife.about.com/od/invertebrates/tp/Facts-About-Nudibranchs.htm which is pretty odd…

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