View 769 Wednesday, April 03, 2013

North Korea Declares Nuclear War: News after the commercial break.

KFI Radio just announced that North Korea’s fearless leader has declared that North Korea will use nuclear weapons to defend itself. He had already declared the armistice that ended the Korean War to be void. Legally, then, the United States is in a state of Nuclear War with North Korea.

No one seems to be paying much attention. If there is any mobilization of North Korean troops, it is not visible to satellites nor any other surveillance system. South Korea continues with its military exercises, but has not called up the reserves and does not seem to be evacuating cities.

Official DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, AKA North Korea) announcements say that war will be soon.

"The moment of explosion is approaching fast. No one can say a war will break out in Korea or not and whether it will break out today or tomorrow," North Korea’s state news agency KCNA declared in its latest broadside. "The responsibility for this grave situation entirely rests with the U.S. administration and military warmongers keen to encroach upon the DPRK’s sovereignty and bring down its dignified social system with brigandish logic."

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/03/world/asia/koreas-tensions/index.html

No one seem to be taking any of this very seriously. Since DPRK has 13,000 artillery pieces positioned at the border about 35 miles from Seoul perhaps someone should. Most of them are dug into caves and well constructed bunkers, and presumably there is already prepositioned ammunition for a considerable first bombardment. They could certainly get off a first strike without much interference from US or South Korean forces. Seoul could be bombarded in minutes after fire mission orders.

How effective that bombardment would be isn’t as apparent as it might be. Cities are harder targets than most imagine; it takes a lot to flatten a city, and while North Korea has rockets that can reach Seoul, most of the artillery – and all that ammunition – would have to be moved several miles to be in effective range of the city itself.

Still, much of Seoul’s infrastructure could be knocked out within hours, and North Korea’s army is much larger than all the military forces in South Korea. If this is reminiscent of the time when the Inman Gun moved into Seoul three days after war was declared in 1950. The US 24^th Infantry division was no match for the Korean forces, nor was Task Force Smith which MacArthur hastily assembled and threw into Korea to halt the North’s advance. The US finally set up a perimeter way down in the South. This held until MacArthur landed Marines at Inchon. After that North Korea collapsed, and US forces ranged far into North Korea until stopped by Chinese intervention. Years of stalemate war along static lines followed until the war was stopped by an armistice. There has never been a peace treaty.

North Korea has also announced that it will reopen its plutonium generating reactors. They have apparently run out of plutonium, and they aren’t refining U-235 fast enough. Centrifuging Uranium hexafluoride is difficult technology, and probably more difficult if your centrifuges keep getting attacked by hackers. Saddam Hussein tried this once, but the Israelis put paid to that joke. South Korea doesn’t have all the capabilities that Israel has, but they have enough if it comes to that.

The conventional wisdom is that any attack on North Korea would result in the destruction of the city of Seoul. That of course assumes that an attack on North Korea spares their artillery. Now I don’t know how to knock out 13,000 guns in a short time, but I do know how to kill 50,000 gunners. It requires neutron weapons, but then we are now in a declared nuclear war. For more, my late friend Sam Cohen explains: http://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Neutron-Inventor-Speaks/dp/0688016464

Of course the United States is not going to use neutron weapons in a first strike on North Korea, nor is the US going to engage in nuclear saber rattling. We are supposed to wink and shrug and then offer to negotiate and pay the North Koreans some money for their promise not to do these things, then stand by and negotiate again when they begin running their plutonium reactors and spin their centrifuges. It is Kabuki theater,k much like TSA security, and everyone knows that North Korea is only posturing in order to get some goodies. There is no possibility that they are serious. They are crazy but they can’t be that crazy. It’s not like they ever did anything like declare war on the US and then fight for years…

We can look for interesting times over there.

http://www.businessinsider.com/map-of-the-day-how-north-korea-could-destroy-seoul-in-two-hours-2010-5?op=1

Danegeld

As I understand the Byzantines, they did not pay off the "Danes" to go away. They paid them to fight other "Danes." The enemy of mine enemy is a good way to get your enemy pre-occupied with someone else.

Mike

Aetius at Chalons prevented his Gothic allies from utterly destroying the Huns, because the Huns had proved useful in the past…  Of course competent empire encourages enemies to fight each other. After the fall of the Shah that was the job of Baathist Iraq…

And of course China has understood the use of proxies and silver bullets since Sun Tzu.

View 769 Tuesday, April 02, 2013

The weekend was eaten by locusts, and yesterday by the biggest locust of all, getting my taxes done. I’m still at them, too.

And I am still doing silly things so you don’t have to.

Keyboard Dilemmas

For years I hung on to my old Ortek keyboard in large part because it had programmable hot keys, and I could program one key for my name, another for my full address, and others for common messages. I liked that feature enough that I stuck with the Ortek on this “main” machine even though the key layout was square and linear, while everywhere else I have gone over to Microsoft “Comfort Curve” keyboards. Comfort Curve layout must remind my fingers of the Selectric I did my books on before the computer revolution. Or something. But eventually the Ortek died. All the characters wore off the keys so that I was typing on a blank keyboard, and while my fingers know where all the keys are, my mind and eyes don’t.

When the Ortek died I had several Thermaltake keyboards. They are beautiful, and the feel is pretty good, but I can’t type as fast on them as I can on the Comfort Curve. I am really a sloppy typist. I learned on mechanical typewriters, and even when I switched over to electrics and then IBM Selectrics (which were wonderful) I could go on being sloppy because you have to hit a key reasonably hard in order to make it make an impression on the paper. If you hit two keys at once either nothing happens, or the one you hit first works and the other doesn’t, or something like that – anyway my most common typing error is the insertion of extraneous letters into words. For some reason I don’t make that error much on the Comfort Curve keyboards. I do a lot on these Thermaltake beauties. They have a great feel and for those who can use them there’s a certain elegance to them, but I fear they do slow me down a bit.

Thermaltake has software to let you do all kinds of programmable hot key tricks – they are after all primarily a high end games machine outfit – and it would be no great trick to program their “T” keys to do just about all the stuff I was doing with my Ortek, so I have used this Thermaltake for a couple of months to see if my fingers would get used to it, but they don’t, not really. As for example in that last sentence I had to correct njot to not. I suppose I could painstakingly enter in the most common of those mistakes into autocorrect, but I am not sure I have that (mmuch) (miuch) much patience; better, I think, to just go to a Comfort Curve. Which brings me to the question: is there a simple way to program simple phrases into Outlook or Word and tie them to, say, alt-F6 or something like that? You‘d think I’d know, and I may have at one time, but I got so used to doing everything I need that sort of thing for on the old Ortek that I didn’t keep up.

One of the big advantages I’ve had in my life is that I can, at need, tool up to learn almost anything, my favorite example being that I once understood Pendulous Inertial Guidance Systems, and in fact knew more about them than almost anyone because as editor of a USAF technology survey I had the necessary clearances and access and need to know. Of course once I got the report written I promptly forgot the whole mess. I subscribe to the Sherlock Holmes theory of brain storage capacity. The point being that I could tool up and learn all about modern keyboards and macros and programmable hot keys, and perhaps I’ll have to, but perhaps I’ll get some good suggestions with this inquiry? One way or another I’m going to have to change to a keyboard standard, and the Microsoft Comfort Curve keyboards seem to be physically about the best for touch and feel for my sloppy habits. Now I just need some timesaving software.

Conferencing Software Lessons

I’ve been doing TWIT and interview shows with Leo Laporte (http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/90, http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/95) and apparently some of the science fiction fans of Tony Smith’s StarShipSofa web seminar http://www.starshipsofa.com/ asked him to talk Niven and me into doing a show with him. Niven is at present pushing a book he did with Greg Benford, so Greg got sucked in also. Anyway it’s scheduled for April 21 which is comfortably after taxes and other demands, and next thing I knew we had all agreed. So this morning Tony Smith asked if we could test his hookup.

Leo Laporte uses Skype for his conference shows. This is nearly automatic. I fooled about with webcams and my PC system, but I soon found the easy way to do those shows was to turn on Skype on my Mac Book Pro and put on a Plantronics headset. With Mac everything is very simple or else it’s impossible, and this time it proved to be very simple. It’s simple for Leo, too: he uses a different computer for each guest phone call and mixes the signals in a godawful expensive box that no one else can afford, all this in a magnificent new studio. It’s lovely and simple for the participants, but then he’s a professional with paying advertisers.

Tony Smith uses Citrix GoToMeeting software. So this morning I got the link to the conference in an email. The email comes in on my PC. I don’t get email on the Mac Book Pro. No need to. Of course that machine is networked with the PC I go email on, but I didn’t go to that trouble. I just printed the link and pasted it into the paper log book I still keep, and typed that into Safari on the Mac Book Pro. There was a certain amount of trundling, but shortly after I was connected to Northeast England, somewhere just north of Newcastle. I could see Tony fine. I could hear everything although at first the GoToMeeting software thought that it should use the Mac speaker and built in microphone, and it wasn’t at all obvious how to change that to the Plantronic headset, but eventually that was all right.

What wasn’t all right was the video. There wasn’t any video. There wasn’t any little video icon. There was not, in fact, any clue to indicate that Citrix had ever heard of video except that Tony’s picture came in fine and there was a screen full of stuff which I presume was his desktop screen. We looked about for half an hour with no results. Tony was concerned that I am still using Mac OS 10.6.8 and I ought to be using 10.8. I’ll do that after tax time: I intend to update all my Mac stuff including getting the best I can out of my iPhone, but other things have been more pressing lately. Eventually I got an on line Citrix tech in a chat box. He assured me it ought to work just fine with 10.6 and above, checked the conference number and pronounced Tony’s software up to date and fine, and suggested I get technical support for my Mac Book Pro which was clearly defective. Since I use it on Skype I was pretty sure that wasn’t the problem. So much for Citrix on-line tech support.

For grins I then turned the iMac loose on Tony’s conference, so now I was logged into it twice, with two not quite simultaneous voice inputs, one from the Plantronics headset connected to the Pro, and the other the iMac’s microphone. I also heard everything sort of twice. Pretty confusing. Of course there was no video from either one of them. About then they brought Niven in for a test, and he doesn’t have a headset, which produced another set of echoes. However, his PC with a USB external videocam showed perfectly good video of Larry and his study. We decided to solve the sound problem – Larry would get a good headset, and let Eric install it and be sure that with the headset on Larry’s PC’s speaker won’t be on. One problem solved and Larry went off line.

So did I. A few minutes later Tony was back in email with his own expert, Lior Saar: there was a remedy, perhaps; could we try it?

So once again I connected the Mac Book Pro to Tony’s GoToMeeting conference (I think it’s actually Webinar rather than GoTo Meeting even though the address handle is gotomeeting). This took a bit longer. The trick was that Tony has to tell his machine that I am the presenter. He did that. The software told me that I was a presenter and anything on my desktop would now be visible to the world. I said all right to that, and LO! my control panel options changed. Citrix had heard of webcams after all! Did I want to use mine? Gosh yes, I replied, and my face and background appeared instantly. Now we could hear Tony’s friend Lior in as part of the conference, but he was on a Mac, and Citrix by default doesn’t believe that Macs have a camera. Comes now the acid test, designate Lior as a presenter and see if that makes me vanish.

It didn’t. Lior appeared. Now we had three of us on screen, and all appeared to be well. The secret, apparently, is that by default Citrix software searches PC’s for a camera and uses it if it finds one; but it assumes that Macs don’t have one until the webinar organizer tells the software that this Mac guy will be a presenter, at which point the software actually looks to see if there’s a camera. If so, (and after all, all Macs have a videocam) all is well, and it apparently remembers that for the rest of the session.

Earlier today they had tested this setup with Greg Benford. He too has a Mac. And they never got him on video. Greg didn’t have the time to fool around until he got his phiz on the webinar and who can blame him, but I make no doubt it will work now. I will say in favor of Citrix that once it is working the video is very good, I think a bit better than I get with Leo using Skype. So next April 21 head to StarShipSofa http://www.starshipsofa.com/ and watch the three of us blather.

I expect I’ll repeat a lot of this in an upcoming Chaos Manor Reviews which I hope to revive after taxes. And while it was very simple for me to use my Mac on this, it turned out not so simple for Tony using his Citrix software.

Technically South and North Korea are in a state of war, and since North Korea has denounced the armistice that ended the Korean War, they are also in a state of war with the United States. This gives the President expanded war powers

Of course at the beginning of World War II the Japanese government required the Kingdom of Siam otherwise known as Thailand to declare war on the United States. We ignored it. One State official told me the document was deliberately lost. Since we had never officially received it we never ended that war, and remained on friendly terms; we treated Thailand as a neutral throughout the war.

Doubtless it is a bit more complex in this situation. Legally we are at war. That may or may not have a practical effect.

Or perhaps China will intervene? Of course the last time they did, it was by surprise one night at the Chosen Reservoir. China did not want a US ally on their border. They still don’t. The problem is that bringing North Korea into the modern world will require work and investment on the order of the task of bringing East Germany up to date except that East Germany wasn’t nearly as bad off as North Korea is. The only people who can and want to help North Korea are the South Koreans, but as US allies they aren’t acceptable to China. Japan could do it and would profit from the effort but Japan isn’t acceptable to either half of Korea as a permanent presence on the peninsula.

We wanted Russia in the war against Japan. They came into the war five days before Japan surrendered. We have been paying for that ever since. So have the Japanese.

I have once again collected a number of web sites as open tabs in Firefox.  I intended to comment on these but I am running out of time and I have a lot of tabs. Here in no particular order are some places I found interesting.

http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/07/sea-levels-higher-during-medieval-warming-period-research-shows-current-sea-level-rise-began-by-1750.html  Yet one more observation on global warming. My view remains this: we know that the Earth has been both warmer and colder than it is now, in historical times, prehistorical  times, and through geological history. We know that civilizations formed when the sea was a lot lower than it is now – the Persian Gulf was marshes not 100 meters of water. We know that the whole world was warmer in Viking times.  And no model we have can take the initial conditions of, say, 1800 and run out to show what happened since.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/evidence-suggests-biblical-great-flood-noahs-time-happened/story?id=17884533#.UVoDxVfp9ts This is different from my daughter’s geographic film on Diving Into Noah’s Flood.  (Well, Jeffrey Rose is the Geographic’s star, but Jenny was the scientist of the show.)

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/03/is-kaiser-permanente-a-failing-model-for-us-healthcare/  Informative but not very conclusive. I don’t think Kaiser can be cloned, and I suspect that trying to make it dramatically larger will destroy some of its effectiveness. From my view it is working ver well, and it ain’t broke and don’t need fixing.

http://www.writing.uci.edu/news.html  Niven and I will be down there Thursday 4 April.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/03/01/boeing-phantom-eye-completes-2nd-flight/?intcmp=features#ixzz2MJ0IfnOW

http://imgur.com/a/dlEAa?gallery  Yuk.

View 768 Friday, March 29, 2013

GOOD FRIDAY

Today’s LA Times has a story that has me going over my mobile phone bills.

FCC needs to stop ‘cramming’ on cellphones

The agency took steps against third-party charges on landline bills, but cellphone users still get hit by unauthorized charges — and phone providers get a cut.

David Lazarus

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20130329,0,2277464.column?page=1

Wen Chao received a text message on her iPhone the other day from something called Ringtunecloud.com. It offered mobile content, such as ring tones, for $9.99 a month.

Chao, 43, ignored it.

About an hour and a half later, she received a more ambiguous text: "You play the peacemaker for others when two friends go to war. Suggest a new activity to the parties involved, and you will get peace."

Figuring it might have been from a friend, Chao clicked it open and — what do you know? — it, too, was from Ringtunecloud.com.

So she did exactly what wireless companies advise customers to do. She called her provider, Verizon Wireless, and asked that Ringtunecloud.com be blocked from sending any more texts to her phone.

The Verizon rep agreed to do this, but informed Chao that a $9.99 monthly service charge already had been applied to her account — just because she had clicked on the text.

Phone companies are being asked why this is possible. Shouldn’t subscribers be required to opt in rather than opt out of paying fees for added services? Particularly if they never heard of the service and never wanted it? AT&T answered :

"Making it more difficult for a customer to purchase and consume third-party content not only risks cutting off customers from innovative products and from the convenience of their portable devices, it also potentially subjects a burgeoning industry of entrepreneurs and job creators to financial distress," AT&T said in its own comments to the FCC.

Verizon told the FCC that it would be too much of a hassle for people to have to lift the block any time they actually wanted a third-party service.

"This additional step would be inconvenient for customers and could deter them from participating in the mobile marketplace," the company said.

Of course the phone companies are getting a cut of the action, although they have declined to say how much of the fee they add on to the subscriber’s bill is paid to the “service provider” (which might be a subsidiary of the phone company itself) and how much the phone company retains as a fee for collecting it.

The FCC is conducting hearings on this matter with a view to creating regulations. My first inclination in cases like this is to leave it to the states, but that’s not possible here since the FCC has co-opted that domain. The FCC is holding hearings on the matter. I tend to agree with the conclusion Lazarus ends with:

Let the FCC know how you feel. Its email address is fccinfo@fcc.gov. And if you’re going to be in Washington, the FTC will hold a conference on wireless cramming May 8.

I also suggest you look at your mobile phone bill. Perhaps you don’t really care if you subject a burgeoning industry of entrepreneurs and job creators to financial distress, and would want to end paying for some service you don’t know you signed up for.

The United States sent B2 bombers from Whiteman AFB in Missouri to South Korea to bomb a target on an island off shore . As part of the demonstration of capability, the usually invisible B2 flew quite visibly over South Korea.

This came after a spate of threats from North Korea to put paid to American aggression. North Korea has long threatened to withdraw from the truce that ended the Korean War along with its non-aggression pact with South Korea. The NK fearless leader has now formally done so. In theory both South Korea and the United States are at war with North Korea, at least as I read the NK announcements.

Under the circumstances, sending the B2 flight falls under the definition of saber rattling. So, of course, do most of the North and South Korean actions. In the nasty old Imperial days this sort of thing might lead to a duel between officers chosen to represent their regiments, or some other symbolic resolution, but we don’t seem to have evolved anything to replace silly symbolic customs we got rid of. Perhaps we will have to have a battle, a la the Lion and the Unicorn, but it’s difficult to see how the town would survive when the Lion chases the unicorn all around the town. There might be neither plum cake nor drums.

North Korea held another war rally a few minutes ago.

I don’t know what will happen here. I do know it is insanity to stand by and take the first blow if an armed conflict is inevitable. The first rounds in an artillery duel – and classic air supremacy actions are very similar to artillery duels – are often decisive. It is unlikely that Israel would have been victorious in the 6 Day War if they had waited for a joint Jordanian-Syrian air and artillery strike before taking action. One you have taken out the other side’s forward air fields you have a great advantage in an air war. It can even be decisive. The same applies to artillery duels – if you can isolate the battle areas so that troops in them cannot be resupplied, you often win.

All that is historical observation. I am surely glad that I am not within range of North Korean artillery.

Sources in South Korea tell me that South Koran think tanks are already planning on how they can rebuild North Korea after NK starts the war and a SK-US alliance wins it.

On the other hand, a number of major SK corporations have quietly moved their headquarters out of Seoul to the south well out of range of the massed NK artillery along the border. The question becomes which side is most vulnerable to the mass destruction of war? War is a contest of will. Whose is strongest? And you might want to read Stefan Possony’s essay on surprise in war. It is a chapter in The Strategy of Technology.

Some problems solve themselves. There has been a mild spate of stories about armed police being asked to leave coffee shops and restaurants – at least one a Denny’s – because the establishment has a no-gun policy. I suggest that the simplest solution is to require that any such gun-free establishment be required to warn everyone, including the police, that this establishment doesn’t want them. A large sign saying “THIS IS A GUN FREE ZONE. POLICE NOT WELCOME INSIDE” would solve the problem. Potential armed robbers would of course obey the sign, so there would be no need of police, who could improve their own health and safety by ignoring any calls for succor from inside the shop. The problem, if it is a problem, would soon go away without expenditure of public resources.

And a serious warning from a long time reader/contributor:

Jerry,

Subj: Don’t become too dependent on the Internet. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21954636

Global internet slows after ‘biggest attack in history’

If/when the poop hits the rotary air circular you can count in this sort of thing being "normal". How many of you DEPEND on "Internet Banking" to pay your bills? Banks won’t have any better connectivity than anyone else. Cell phone? Same situation, just different "details". "Bundled" phone service? That uses the Internet. Now let’s add an EMP air burst over Iowa. You might have Internet (highly doubtful since "servers" are computers), but no home computer… and your car probably won’t run either.

By coincidence in the same batch of email was an invitation to participate on a seminar of science fiction writers on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence: is it the greatest threat to humanity (including asteroid strike)? I have to think about this question. Suppose all the AI in place now were to vanish?  Now imagine in one hundred years.