| Saturday,
July 12, 2003
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
This is some more news on the state of the Airport
Avoidance Agency.
Remember when your mother told you to wear clean
underwear before traveling? It now takes on a whole new meaning. The
article below is from the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. The second article
gives no reference URL but does look like the government release.
http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/0703/11shoe.html
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22Transportation+
Security+Administration%22&start=50&hl=en&lr=&ie=
UTF-8&selm=sxlPa.14837%24BM.4879774%4
0newssrv26.news.prodigy.com&rnum=57
How to carry items that need to locked in checked
baggage.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22Transportation
+Security+Administration%22&start=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=
UTF-8&selm=QZpAa.99005%24cO3.6936318%
40bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net&rnum=104
I'm sorry, forget about the clean underwear, you
won't need it.
http://www.kfwb.com/news_national.asp?
displayOption=&contentGUID={F1E52726-93D1-
41D1-92C7-79F8B74062E4}&groupName=AP%20
Top%20National%20Headlines&siteGUID=
{3B62BF55-4A93-48E6-A45D-6A495DC423AD}
Patrick A. Hoage
"Those who would give up essential Liberty to
purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor
Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin 1755
Love those URL's. It takes about 3 minutes to chop
them so they'll fit the page. AAArrrggghhhh.
Hi Jerry, If you're interested in more info on the
P-51 history and especially the prototype (the NA-73X) we were discussing,
a good article can be found at http://nasaui.ited.uidaho.edu/nasaspark/safety/history/safetyindex.htm
Thanks, Dave Meader
I was interested in the blasted airplane only
because, long ago, someone mentioned it to me as an example of the kind of
things we used to do. Clearly he exaggerated the accomplishment, and I
probably embellished it myself. The fact remains that we used to be able
to do things fairly well and fairly quickly, which was all I intended to
illustrate.
And it is still true that we don't seem to be
able to do things very quickly now, and we don't seem to save money by
dragging out the approvals process and putting more inspections and review
boards in the path.
Now I think I'll go set fire to myself.
And it's Colorado's turn:
From the View Thursday, July 10, 2003: You
folks in Colorado have an off way of trying to make names for yourselves.
Glad I never visited. And never will." -
Larry Ross I like how the actions of one town in a
particular state supposedly reflect on the character of all the residents
of the state. But, that said, I can't resist firing back - Like we need
this kind of blather from the state that orchestrated the great OJ Simpson
Court-TV Spectacle... er, trial. Not to mention the other ten million ways
that California is a national spectacle! BTW, Larry, we're probably glad
you won't as well. I have not followed this case at all, I'm not a sports
fan at all, but I can remember being sure that OJ couldn't have done it -
he was a sports hero after all. I don't think the role-model argument
carries a whole lot of weight.
David Reed, Denver Colorado
Tell you what. We'll trade you one Judge Ito for
your Eagle County Sheriff and the right to send you a not yet named
politician if he is recalled...
But I think you have it wrong on the Simpson
case.
>> Russia possesses almost a
quadrillion cubic feet of gas, enough to meet U.S. needs -- and indeed the
needs of the entire world -- for several decades."<<
I seem to remember that we have reserves just off
the North Carolina coast that have been estimated in the multiple
quintillions of cubic feet of natural gas, along with enough petroleum to
make the entire reserves of the Persian Gulf look like a small puddle.
Of course, the environmentalist whackos will make it
hard to exploit those off-shore reserves, but I don't think we're running
out of petroleum and natural gas any time soon. I do agree that we should
conserve our reserves as feedstocks, and that we should be spending
whatever money is necessary to make real progress toward space-based
power. But in the interim I'm all in favor of sucking the Persian Gulf
dry.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com/thisweek.html
http://forums.ttgnet.com/ikonboard.cgi
Well, there are far more fossil fuels than we
know about, of course; exploration costs money, and we have a lot of
reserves already. But the "sustainable growth" people have a
point. They then throw it away because most of them aren't interested in
growth at all.
Russian Gas
Jerry,
One of your readers expressed concern about the
implications of Mr. Baker’s WSJ editorial on Russian natural gas.
However, the current drop in US gas production has more to do with access
and transportation than with a shortage of the basic resource. It is not
really analogous to the long-term decline of domestic crude oil
production.
The health of the gas pipeline industry is a big
factor. Even companies that were “clean” have been pummeled by the
implosion of energy trading and are now less able to invest large sums in
the pipelines needed to get gas from where it is produced to where it is
used. At the same time, much potential new gas production is on federal
land that is off-limits for environmental or purely political reasons, as
in offshore Florida. And that doesn’t even count the enormous gas
reserves in Alaska and northern Canada, which will require multi-billion
dollar investments to bring down.
Even if we can’t get our own act together and must
import gas from far off lands, there is a lot of it out there. Mr. Baker’s
figures on Russia were conservative. With 30% of the world’s known gas
reserves, it could supply 10% of our current needs for centuries, not
decades. That doesn’t mean we are in fat city, but it suggests that
finding alternatives to natural gas is not a priority; it could actually
be counterproductive.
Regards, Geoff Styles
====================================
Subject: Oldest known planet
Scientests using Hubble data have found a planet
with a mass about 2.5 times Jupiter, orbiting a white dwarf and a pulsar
in the Globular Cluster M4, in Scorpio. Various data show it to be roughly
13 billion years old, making it the oldest kown planet. The press release
is at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/2003/19/text
Joe Zeff.
Thanks!
I was reading in Newsweek when I ran across an
article about the recently formed Northern Command under Gen Ed Eberhart.
Intriguing reading, as I'd never heard of this Northcom before, and
apparently neither have very many in the US. Gen Eberhart is essentially
in charge of "military deployment against domestic terrorism",
your Posse Comitatus Act notwithstanding, though he's making great efforts
to reassure the groups he meets while organizing connections with local,
state and federal authorities. I get deja vu feelings from vaguely SF-ish
films when I read about the Cheyenne-Mountain-clone "situation
awareness center" in Colorado Springs, tied into Norad and goodnes
knows what else.
Bo Leuf
I know nothing about this, but I suspect I'll
find out.
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
To continue the story on the possible cracking of
touch-screen voting computers in the United States - http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm
- which was mentioned in Tuesday's mail.
You commented that you didn't think much of the
story, given that Scoop, the New Zealand paper publishing the story, got
the story that Congresswoman Katherine Harris had died in a plane crash,
wrong. You should know that Scoop published a retraction the following
morning, http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00070.htm
, along with a detailed explanation from the reporter http://www.tomflocco.com/retraction_of_rep.htm
it relied on. In addition, Scoop was not the only media source reporting
the death.
Getting back to the issue of the security and
accountability of the new touch-screen computerized voting systems, and
the allegations of fraud and security breaches during the 2000 election,
there was a follow-up story posted on July 10th - http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00078.htm
- which tells in detail how the Diebold touch-screen systems in Georgia,
contrary to every public statement made to date by Diebold, were massively
out of compliance with Georgia audit procedures, and in fact, were
accessible leading up to and throughout the election via an FTP site to
basically anyone who wanted to go there and muck with the source code.
Clearly, and I believe this is clear to anyone who
works with computers for a living, new systems with secret (un-auditable)
proprietary code is not a magic bullet which will eliminate hanging chads.
Instead it is jumping from the frying pan into the fire, substituting the
nightmare of paper ballots and human judgement, for invisible ones and
zeros on magnetic cards and hard drives, with no way of determining if
they were even cast properly in a bug-free manner, let along intentionally
tampered with.
I STRONGLY endorse - as do hundreds of leading
computer scientists and computer security experts - the resolution
elaborated on at http://www.verifiedvoting.org
, namely, "Computerized voting equipment is inherently subject to
programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering. It is
therefore crucial that voting equipment provide a voter-verifiable audit
trail, by which we mean a permanent record of each vote that can be
checked for accuracy by the voter before the vote is submitted, and is
difficult or impossible to alter after it has been checked. Many of the
electronic voting machines being purchased do not satisfy this
requirement. Voting machines should not be purchased or used unless they
provide a voter-verifiable audit trail; when such machines are already in
use, they should be replaced or modified to provide a voter-verifiable
audit trail. Providing a voter-verifiable audit trail should be one of the
essential requirements for certification of new voting systems."
In recommending people take the articles on Scoop
seriously, I am not endorsing conspiracy theories. The code from the
Diebold FTP site is there for the downloading to be evaluated. People can
check the work out for themselves. The code runs on Windows and MS Access
for Pete's sake. While there are conspiracy theories galore, I don't think
one must subscribe to "grassy knoll" voting booths in order to
take this issue seriously. I am not saying that Sen. Max Cleveland was
beaten in 2000 in Georgia by fraud, nor for that matter, am I not saying
it.
What I am saying is that the Diebold touch-screen
systems used in 2000 in Georgia, according to these articles and the
articles in Salon, were wide open. There also seems to be solid evidence,
as shown in Scoop's July 8th article mentioned at the start of this
letter, that the Diebold program itself is totally crackable, without
leaving any audit trail, such that someone with access to the system can
rig the vote to have any given candidate win with any vote total. This is
a very serious allegation, which deserves to be, and needs to be,
throughly investigated.
Come the 2004 elections, I don't want there to be
even a question of auditability and security with a system which the US
Congress is trying to get damn near every state in the country to buy. We
cannot afford even the possibility of systems which lack a paper audit
trail, and which can be cracked without detection due to design failures
and proprietary code.
Election fraud strikes at the heart of our freedoms,
and must not be tolerated again.
Respectfully,
Jesse Wendel Seattle
Well I wouldn't call it fraud, precisely. I had
no problem figuring out the Broward County ballot, and I am a bit afraid
of having people unable to figure it out being very influential.
Indeed, I am in favor of literacy tests, in
English, before anyone can vote. And I am not sure Mr. Heinlein's idea
that we ought to require an even more extensive examination into math and
science is so awful either.
Multiple choice: "the generally agreed
number of planets in the solar system is: (a) 3 (b)
6 (c) 9 (d) 120 (e) 256
And other such, in which there may be some
quibble about the exact answer, but there's no real disagreement that it's
not 6 or fewer, or 120 or more... Heck, I don't even mind if the
general form makes (c) the right answer much of the time. People unable to
figure even that out?
But that's for another discussion. See
below.
Hello.
A very common scam on the internet is the
"Nigerian 419 advance fee fraud". Some crook will send you an
e-mail promising millions of dollars in return for your help. Soon he will
need money for some form of fees to access the money. Typically some
thousands of dollars. Then there are more fees and then more fees. It
never stops. There never were "millions of dollars" to be had.
The whole point of the scam is to get people to send money to the crooks.
Never send money to people who have aproached you
about anything like the above. It is ALWAYS a scam.
Many many thousands of those e-mails are sent
everyday.
If you have not already had one sent to you you will
one day. Look out it's a scam Remember this warning.
Ira
Thank you.
Subject: SCO's latest tactic
SCO will demand reasonable licensing fees from all
commercial users of linux (2.4 kernel)
http://www.sys-con.com/linux/articlenews.cfm?id=917
Isn't this the same approach Al Capone and Frank
Nitty used with business owners back in the 20's? Probably has about the
same level of legitimacy.
John
-- John Harlow, President BravePoint
========================
Subject: We've found the Old Ones!
http://www.msnbc.com/news/674647.asp?0cl=cR
-------- Roland Dobbins
I am a worshipper of Cthulhu, and I lead a mad
horde...
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