Never mind the old tramp steamer in the background. Do mind the guy standing at the base of the fin.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Monday, June 17, 2013
X-56A: Breaking the Flutter Barrier
Brooks Goes to Guatemala
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Self Defense
My wife spotted the story in the paper this morning about the school teacher in San Diego who was fired because her ex-husband is some kind of whack job. I can understand everyone's position in this mess, well, except for Mr. Wacko. From the way the story is told in the paper he sounds like he is seriously obsessed with his ex-wife. Of course we haven't heard his side of story. If you believe in Hollywood-esque conspiracy theories, he could be the very ideal of the perfect gentlemen and it's his ex-wife who is the psychotic, scheming nutcase.
This really sounds like a case for a super-hero, someone who doesn't let little things like the law bother them. They will just step up and dispense the necessary justice. If the evil one simply vanished, there wouldn't be anything for reporters to write about, we wouldn't have a conundrum to puzzle over, and the legal profession wouldn't be tying itself in knots over who gets the blame. If anyone should get the blame it should be the partner who failed to shoot their attacker dead the first time it happened. Then it would have been a simple case of self defense, and they probably would have gotten eight years for manslaughter. But it would have been the end of that problem. We wouldn't still be worrying about this particular crazy 20 years later.
This really sounds like a case for a super-hero, someone who doesn't let little things like the law bother them. They will just step up and dispense the necessary justice. If the evil one simply vanished, there wouldn't be anything for reporters to write about, we wouldn't have a conundrum to puzzle over, and the legal profession wouldn't be tying itself in knots over who gets the blame. If anyone should get the blame it should be the partner who failed to shoot their attacker dead the first time it happened. Then it would have been a simple case of self defense, and they probably would have gotten eight years for manslaughter. But it would have been the end of that problem. We wouldn't still be worrying about this particular crazy 20 years later.
Games
Grow Valley
I like simple games, games that I can play using only a mouse, games that don't require using the keyboard, games that only take five or ten minutes to play. It might be that my hand-eye coordination is not all that good. I have never liked any of the first person shooter games, probably because I never got the hang of manipulating the controls well enough to kill all of the zombies, which means I get killed in the first 30 seconds. I did have a heck of a basketball hook shot back in the 6th grade. So there.
Mostly I play Spider Solitaire (two suits), 247 Mahjong, and an easy version of Sudoku. I always finish the Sudoku. The other two I win maybe one out of five. Of the three I like Spider Solitaire the best, but after playing nine thousand hands it gets kind of old.
Recently I came across a game called Blocks. It is a ridiculously simple game that can be the very devil to solve. There are something like 100 puzzles. Each puzzle takes between one and three moves to solve. Some of them are ridiculous easy. Others are insanely difficult. I still have not solved them all. What's even weirder is that even after I have solved some of them, if I go back and try them again, I can't remember how I did it. It's like a brand new puzzle all over again. Bonus: the background music sounds a whole lot like Enya, who I enjoy sometimes.
While out poking around I came across some new Grow puzzles. I played all there were a few years ago, but the author has been busy and produced some new ones. There are some small ones called Nano that are relatively easy to solve, and some more complex ones like Grow Valley that are more difficult. They are simplicity itself to play, just determine what order to pick the buttons at the bottom of the screen. With 3 buttons there are only 6 possibilities (3! = 3 Factorial = 3 x 2 x 1 = 6). With 7 buttons it's a little worse: 7! = 5,040. That wouldn't be so bad, except each selection starts an animation that runs for several seconds. Some of them are really long, so it could take a while to run through all the combinations.
The picture shows the best result I have gotten with Grow Valley so far. I keep a record of my selection order so I can reproduce it. I got similar results once before. I maxed out the score on 4 or 5 of the selections, but when I went back to try and reproduce it some neanderthal had made chicken scratches over it and the original order was no longer obvious. I probably spent an hour trying to figure out my previous best guess without any luck. Finally I gave up and tried a new tack from scratch and shortly thereafter arrived at this "solution".
I keep thinking that I should be able to devise a program to help me find the correct order, but so far I have not been able to come up with any kind of scheme. The general idea would be to record the order of your selections, and then enter the score that you ended up with for each one. The program would digest this and then offer up a new selection order. Problem is that I haven't been able to come up with any criteria for making a new selection that is amenable to being encoded in a computer program.
Elephant Ranch
Elephants are having a hard time these days. Every since the international ban on ivory eliminated all sources of legal ivory, the poachers and black-marketeers have been having a hay day. I'm thinking we need an elephant ranch, a place where elephants are protected from poachers. Of course being a ranch, they are going to come to a bad end, but all animals do eventually. Having a ranch might ensure the continuation of the species. I mean if your livelihood depends on having a constant supply of live elephants, you are going to make an effort to see that they do not go extinct. Likewise, if they are your property, you are not going to take kindly to anyone trying to make off with your elephant, dead or alive.
My kids have all graduated from college, they are looking for work and not having much luck. I'm thinking that maybe I should start some kind of business, and an elephant ranch might be just the thing. Of course there is going to be some god awful politicking involved, but that's something my kids with their liberal arts degrees should excel at. Treasure Island is pretty empty looking, and much closer than Africa. I wonder how elephants would do there? I wonder what Castro's Party would think about such an enterprise. They might really like it, give 'em an opportunity to irritate good ol' Uncle Sam, who is being a king size jerk to pretty much everyone.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Prism: concerns over government tyranny are legitimate
Seems there is a brain behind Kim Dotcom's playboy facade. This is the guy who was behind Megaupload that famously got busted by the US Government something over a year ago. Stolen entire from The Guardian.
The post 9/11 security narrative has eroded our privacy rights in favour of government control. Prism should be discontinued immediately
Kim Dotcom
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 June 2013 04.01 EDT
'Prism and its related practices should be discontinued immediately'.
Nobody would be shocked to hear me admit that I have a problem with authority. During most of my adult life, I have resisted the notion that the government always acts in the best interests of its citizens. Edward Snowden’s recent interview with the Guardian underscores the possibility that those like me – who see the state as a potential threat to basic civil rights and liberties – may have been right all along.
Snowden’s leak of classified US government information acquired during his work for the National Security Agency (NSA) confirms that the US government is gathering and archiving online data and metadata on a massive scale. The data is stored at NSA data centers, where zettabytes of cloud storage are available to authorities. Snowden’s revelations have again framed the debate over the balance between our privacy rights and our need for security.
Some proponents of Prism assert that it is an essential tool against terrorism. They claim that only data belonging to foreigners (that is, non-US residents) is retained, and that content is not reviewed as a matter of course, only algorithmically analysed for suspicious patterns. They point out that a search warrant is still required from a secret court set up under the US. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) may be spun up so that content – accumulated over years of daily internet spooling – may be extracted and analysed, laying bare a suspect’s entire virtual life.
Those safeguards have limited value. According to congressional reporting, the FISA court received 1,789 applications for authority to conduct electronic surveillance in 2012, but not one application was denied. We cannot debate whether the FISA court is a rubber stamp, because its proceedings are secret. Further, any assurance to US citizens that the NSA will not gather and archive their data is suspect. The “Five Eyes” alliance between the intelligence agencies of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK effectively permits those governments to circumvent the prohibition against gathering data on their own citizens by sharing information across the Five Eyes intelligence community. The UK for example can spy on Americans and make that information available to the US government on its massive spy cloud – one that the NSA operates and the Five Eyes share.
Prior to 9/11, the operative presumption in developed nations favoured privacy, but the security narrative has since reversed the presumption, eroding our privacy rights in favour of government control over our personal information. However, government is an instrument – sometimes a crude one – susceptible to abuse, as demonstrated by recent admissions that the US Internal Revenue Service has targeted specific groups based on ideology. When we empower the state, we empower those that hold sway over the state, and the state is subject to influence from a multitude of quarters.
I have personally been a victim of such abuses. The US government has indicted me, shut down my cloud storage company Megaupload and seized all of my assets because it claims I was complicit in copyright infringement by some of the people who used the Megaupload service. I have emphasised that I am being prosecuted not because the charges against me have some sound basis in US copyright law, but because the US justice department has been instrumentalised by certain private interests that have a financial stake in neutralising my business. That trend represents a danger not just to me, but to all of us.
Recent polls in the US suggest that the public is not much preoccupied with the fact that our data is being retained, so long as our own political party is in control of the government. That kind of fickle comfort is small-minded. The point we should derive from Snowden’s revelations – a point originally expressed in March 2013 by William Binney, a former senior NSA crypto-mathematician – is that the NSA’s Utah Data Center will amount to a “turnkey” system that, in the wrong hands, could transform the country into a totalitarian state virtually overnight. Every person who values personal freedom, human rights and the rule of law must recoil against such a possibility, regardless of their political preference. Others take a more cavalier approach, such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2009: “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”
We should heed warnings from Snowden because the prospect of an Orwellian society outweighs whatever security benefits we derive from Prism or Five Eyes. Viewed through the long lens of human history, concerns over government tyranny are always legitimate. It is those concerns that underpin the constitutions of most developed countries, and inform international principles of human rights and the rule of law. Prism and its related practices should be discontinued immediately, and the Utah Data Center should be leased to cloud storage companies with encryption capabilities.
The post 9/11 security narrative has eroded our privacy rights in favour of government control. Prism should be discontinued immediately
Kim Dotcom
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 June 2013 04.01 EDT
'Prism and its related practices should be discontinued immediately'.
Nobody would be shocked to hear me admit that I have a problem with authority. During most of my adult life, I have resisted the notion that the government always acts in the best interests of its citizens. Edward Snowden’s recent interview with the Guardian underscores the possibility that those like me – who see the state as a potential threat to basic civil rights and liberties – may have been right all along.
Snowden’s leak of classified US government information acquired during his work for the National Security Agency (NSA) confirms that the US government is gathering and archiving online data and metadata on a massive scale. The data is stored at NSA data centers, where zettabytes of cloud storage are available to authorities. Snowden’s revelations have again framed the debate over the balance between our privacy rights and our need for security.
Some proponents of Prism assert that it is an essential tool against terrorism. They claim that only data belonging to foreigners (that is, non-US residents) is retained, and that content is not reviewed as a matter of course, only algorithmically analysed for suspicious patterns. They point out that a search warrant is still required from a secret court set up under the US. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) may be spun up so that content – accumulated over years of daily internet spooling – may be extracted and analysed, laying bare a suspect’s entire virtual life.
Those safeguards have limited value. According to congressional reporting, the FISA court received 1,789 applications for authority to conduct electronic surveillance in 2012, but not one application was denied. We cannot debate whether the FISA court is a rubber stamp, because its proceedings are secret. Further, any assurance to US citizens that the NSA will not gather and archive their data is suspect. The “Five Eyes” alliance between the intelligence agencies of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK effectively permits those governments to circumvent the prohibition against gathering data on their own citizens by sharing information across the Five Eyes intelligence community. The UK for example can spy on Americans and make that information available to the US government on its massive spy cloud – one that the NSA operates and the Five Eyes share.
Prior to 9/11, the operative presumption in developed nations favoured privacy, but the security narrative has since reversed the presumption, eroding our privacy rights in favour of government control over our personal information. However, government is an instrument – sometimes a crude one – susceptible to abuse, as demonstrated by recent admissions that the US Internal Revenue Service has targeted specific groups based on ideology. When we empower the state, we empower those that hold sway over the state, and the state is subject to influence from a multitude of quarters.
I have personally been a victim of such abuses. The US government has indicted me, shut down my cloud storage company Megaupload and seized all of my assets because it claims I was complicit in copyright infringement by some of the people who used the Megaupload service. I have emphasised that I am being prosecuted not because the charges against me have some sound basis in US copyright law, but because the US justice department has been instrumentalised by certain private interests that have a financial stake in neutralising my business. That trend represents a danger not just to me, but to all of us.
Recent polls in the US suggest that the public is not much preoccupied with the fact that our data is being retained, so long as our own political party is in control of the government. That kind of fickle comfort is small-minded. The point we should derive from Snowden’s revelations – a point originally expressed in March 2013 by William Binney, a former senior NSA crypto-mathematician – is that the NSA’s Utah Data Center will amount to a “turnkey” system that, in the wrong hands, could transform the country into a totalitarian state virtually overnight. Every person who values personal freedom, human rights and the rule of law must recoil against such a possibility, regardless of their political preference. Others take a more cavalier approach, such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2009: “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”
We should heed warnings from Snowden because the prospect of an Orwellian society outweighs whatever security benefits we derive from Prism or Five Eyes. Viewed through the long lens of human history, concerns over government tyranny are always legitimate. It is those concerns that underpin the constitutions of most developed countries, and inform international principles of human rights and the rule of law. Prism and its related practices should be discontinued immediately, and the Utah Data Center should be leased to cloud storage companies with encryption capabilities.
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