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.

View from Chaos Manor, Sunday, February 22, 2015

I’m going to get Dragon Naturally Speaking going on the Surface Pro 2, but first I have to get better Wi-Fi down here. Everything was sort of optimized for upstairs, but I can’t even go up there alone, much less work there. First thing is to get the Pro docking station downstairs, so I have reliable Internet connections for the Surface Pro; then get the Wi-Fi router down here so there’s good Wi-Fi here even when the Surface is not in the docking station.

Obviously I’m moving most my operations into the old office where I wrote most my older books and columns, I can climb the stairs but I can’t carry anything. I could get a second walker and leave it up there so I could get around, but it would be dangerous to work alone up there; I have to change my work habits. So it goes.

We did bring the AT&T MicroCell http://www.att.com/att/microcell/ downstairs, connected it by Ethernet to my internal net and thus to the Internet, put it in a window so it sees the sky, and turned it on. All the lights began to blink but one by one they went solid – but you need faith, The whole process took half an hour or more. Eventually they all came on and my iPhone 4g had a full five bars, or rather the dots they have replaced the bars with in one or another OS update. It works splendidly.

The 4g is getting old and would be replaced by now if I had not had the stroke: I need someone to take me to the Apple Store in Fashion Square and I haven’t arranged that yet.

However there is now no great hurry: one reason for replacing it was out of power by evening, and I thought that meant the battery was going: I bought the 4g when they first came out, and never bothered to upgrade. Now, though with five bars, it is at 85% or more power at night, and clearly the battery is fine. I remarked on this to my stalwart advisors, and they gently pointed out that I ought to have expected it.

The flailing search for signal is a big battery eater. Alex and I run into it a lot on Location Connect jobs, which is why getting on AP set up in the NOC before any of the wire runs have been made is useful, assuming our outside world connection is there. T-Mobile among the big carriers pioneered support for calling over Wi-Fi, so I find it especially helpful. All of the carriers have indicated plans to support this in the next year or so.

    When your carrier does offer that the microcell shouldn’t be needed any longer if the Wi-Fi coverage throughout the (used? infested? inhabited?) parts of the house is up to snuff.

Eric (Eric Pobirs, one of my advisors )

Yes, that’s one great thing about being in a strong signal area. The phone doesn’t keep chatting with the base stations, looking for a stronger signal. If you aren’t using it for Internet data very much, you can also extend the battery life by turning off 3G or 4G. Just something to keep in mind for future use.

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And on reflection that is hardly surprising. Given the fold in the hills that we live in it is not surprising that the unbooted signal is weak, but it is better upstairs, and I never used the 4g over in this part of the downstairs office – a few yards away there was plenty of signal, provided by the MicroCell, although I suspect the MicroCell, having run without fault or attention for years, might have needed a reset; indeed that was the original plan but I hadn’t made it clear to Alex, so when the lights kept blinking after five minutes he thought it was defective and brought it downstairs. But all it needed was time.

Next problem: in digging around for info I discover that to get the iPhone 6 working with the MicroCell I must log on to the AT&T account that the MicroCell is on. Alas I set that up years ago and I have not the foggiest notion of user name and password. That will be in and old log, and they are all upstairs. I may go up and look if Eric or Alex comes over, but more likely I’ll call AT&T tech support – of course I have low expectations of that, since AT&T has forgotten other things about my accounts. We’ll see. I guess I get wireless bills and one of those must have a clue. I’ll work on that next week.

I will get to work on Dragon – I think of it as the Abominable Autoscribe after Walter Miller’s abbot in Canticle For Leibowitz – soon. Eric thinks it can easily be done.

Dragon Naturally speaking will probably work with Windows 10 Preview that is on the Surface now. Eventually, you’ll want to compare it with what Cortana provides for free. They’ve demonstrated dictating an email message using Cortana but I don’t know if that is in the current build.

    Assuming my brain isn’t lodged sideways in my skull tomorrow like it was today, I can come by tomorrow afternoon and get the dock set up. The dock will also drive a monitor in addition to the Surface’s display, so one of the remaining big monitors upstairs could be used, once the layout is worked out to avoid turning the area into something that looks like the Batcave, although that has a certain appeal.

Eric

If you are not familiar with Canticle it is an apocalypse novel and I can recommend it to you; it doesn’t hold up as well now that the Cold War is over, but we seem headed that way again as we ignore the Caliphate. Fortunately ISIS considers Iran heretics – apostates, actually – because they are Sunni and Iran is Shiite; but ISIS has other paths to nuclear weapons, and or government dithers. If you have not seen Peggy Noonan’s latest column http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-administration-adrift-on-denial-1424392150 I recommend it.

Leo Laporte is recommending the low cost Winbook a very good buy, and it might be even better for a dictation machine than the Surface; smaller. And it is said to have good battery life, and well under a hundred bucks. I’m thinking about that.

Which brings us to Pledge Week. This site operates on the Public Radio plan: it is free to all, but it cannot survive without subscribers. It is Pledge Week at KUSC, the LA Good Music station, which means Pledge Week at Chaos Manor. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html will tell you all about how to subscribe. Obviously I do not ask for monthly donations as KUSC does.

If you have not subscribed and you like rational discussion on many topics, this would be a splendid time to subscribe; it doesn’t take long, Do say if it is a new subscription. If you do subscribe but haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a good time to do so.

Note that Pledge Week is essentially the only time I nag you about subscriptions; I hate it as much as you do.

Re: The Man Who Destroyed America’s Ego

Jerry,

This is a long read but well worth it. It’s about the work of psychologist Roy Baumeister, primarily his work on self-esteem and narcissism.

The Man Who Destroyed America’s Ego

“Everybody who said it cited somebody else, so I’d look up the previous source, and they’d also cited somebody else. That’s when I realized there was no evidence for it.”

https://medium.com/matter/the-man-who-destroyed-americas-ego-94d214257b5

Regards,

George

It is indeed long, and many will not find it worth the time investment; the whole notion of psychotherapy has changed since I was in graduate school. But those interested in the subject will learn something for it.

Air Power

The 8th Air Force did not relieve Bastogne; Patton’s 3rd Army did.

I suppose it is pointless to mention that the weather at that time made air operations impossible

Brice

Once the the weather cleared air power was effective. Patton famously prayed for good weather. Col. Bagley, on his staff, was in the church at the time. Bagley was in the same analysis group at Boeing that I was, and we worked together in the TFX design team. But it is true that Patton had worked his miracle before the weather cleared.

Further on warfare, etc.

Of course we all want to win as cheaply in terms of casualties and costs to the taxpayers.
We seem to forget the repeated lessons that applying overwhelming force ASAP is the “cheapest” and quickest solution. Sad.
But what is really tragic is “losing the peace” and abandoning allies.

Michael J Schuerger Sr

MacArthur’s message used to be memorized bt every West Point cadet and was part of the mess hall conversations; “there is no substitute for victory”

http://www.west-point.org/academy/malo-wa/inspirations/buglenotes.html

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