Iranian Nukes and NATO; Climate Change

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Niven and Barnes were here all morning and we had a highly successful story conference, then an excellent lunch at Hugo’s on Riverside at Coldwater. If you live around here you will either like Hugo’s or find it weird; my wife and Niven love it, and I find it better than acceptable, but it does have an unusual cuisine.

We continue toward a nuclear Iran, but no one talks about it. By the time Presidential debates begin, it will truly be too late.

Is President Obama not aware of this? How can he not be? And if so, what is the goal?

And what will Israel do? Do they have truly survivable second strike capability? Since the only value is as deterrent, and a secret deterrent is unrealistic – probably useless – this seems unlikely. If the White House has a secret strategic purpose here, I cannot discern it; and Iran goes closer to possession of a nuke every day.

Meanwhile, Russia experiments. Estonia is a NATO member, meaning that the US nuclear umbrella is already in place. An attack on Estonia, up at the east end of the Baltic, is an attack on us. When Iran has the bomb and Russia is restraining the Revolutionary Guard, what is NATO to do if green men cross into Estonia?

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May 12th View

Thank Roland for me, please, for picking up that asteroid story.
I have bookmarked it as a perfect exemplar of the modern “Progressive.”
The supposedly intelligent and educated person that looks out of their Manhattan apartment window (or London flat, in this case) and thinks that the whole world is just like what they see.
Who thinks that the technology we have today has always existed – so, of course, the Black Death should have been easily controllable with streptomycin and pesticides.
Who believes that whatever his own little circle of friends tells him is, of course, the gospel truth (although not having anything to do with a purely imaginary God). So the Death must have been spread by something that caused a “mal aria” – not the onset of the Little Ice Age (with the accompanying bad weather and malnutrition from crop failures) that the AGW “scientists” have airbrushed out of the climate record.

Richard

The Theology of Climate Change.

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

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Roland Dobbins

The paragraph I have quoted was truly representative of the intellectual quality and honesty of what followed. ‘Climate change,’ say the authors, ‘is the largest global health threat of the 21st century and, despite limited empirical evidence, it is expected directly and indirectly to harm communities’ psychosocial well-being.’ This is not so much science as it is religion, in which the god worshipped is the bringer-bout of future catastrophe, a kind of Kali, whose destructiveness must be appeased by word, puja and sacrifice.

In Defense of Pamela Geller – WSJ

http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-defense-of-pamela-geller-1431386626

Robert

In Defense of Pamela Geller

A society that rejects the notion of a heckler’s veto cannot accept the idea of a murderer’s veto.

I note that Freeman Dyson has repeatedly said that we do not know enough to be Climate Change Believers. We simply have not the data.

Firefox 38 asks ‘would you like DRM with that?’ (ZD)

Summary:A year since Mozilla announced it was adopting digital rights management in Firefox to allow streaming from services such as Netflix, the first release with DRM enabled has appeared.

By Chris Duckett | May 13, 2015 — 06:26 GMT (23:26 PDT)

Firefox users now have a choice with the release of version 38 of the web browser: To have DRM, or not to have DRM.

With the latest release of Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox now arrives with Adobe’s Content Decryption Module (CDM) to allow playback of DRM content on services such as Netflix.

Mozilla senior vice president of business and legal affairs, Denelle Dixon-Thayer, said in a blog post that the CDM will be downloaded from Adobe shortly after installing or upgrading to Firefox 38, and will be activated the first time a user interacts with a site needing CRM.

“We don’t believe DRM is a desirable market solution, but it’s currently the only way to watch a sought-after segment of content,” Dixon-Thayer said.

Users will have the ability to disable or uninstall the CDM from within the browser, and for users that are determined to be without any DRM technology, Mozilla is also offering a version of Firefox without Adobe’s CDM.

“Because DRM is a ‘black-box’ technology that isn’t open source, we have designed a security sandbox that sits around the CDM,” Dixon-Thayer said. “We can’t be sure how other browsers have handled the ‘black-box’ issue but a sandbox provides a necessary layer of security.”

I have not given this sufficient thought

How a $9 computer could change the way we think about computing (WP)

By Dominic Basulto May 13 at 7:00 AM

For $9, you will soon be able to buy an insanely cheap computer the size of a credit card that runs Linux and comes with a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB storage, and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. While that’s enough computing power to surf the Web, play video games, check e-mail and use word processing software, the real potential is what DIY innovators, hackers and inventors will do with this cheap computing platform once they integrate it into other projects.

The world’s first $9 computer — known as C.H.I.P. — won’t be available for shipping until early 2016. For now, it’s still only a Kickstarter project with nearly a month to go – but the promise and potential of a crazy cheap computer is so alluring that the Oakland, Calif. company behind the project – Next Thing Co. – has already raised more than $925,000 from more than 18,000 backers in just a few days, easily blowing past the $50,000 they had hoped to raise via Kickstarter.

C.H.I.P. comes from the same innovation oeuvre as the $35 Raspberry Pi — a credit-card size computer that is cheap, portable, highly programmable and highly connectable. So if Raspberry Pi has managed to attract a worldwide user community at a price point of $35, you can just imagine what the lower-cost, more powerful C.H.I.P. might be able to do once it attracts a critical mass of users.

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