Chaos Manor View Monday, March 30, 2015

Eric has got a publishable manuscript of Another Step Farther Out, a compendium of Galaxy, InfoWorld, New Destinies, scientific magazines, and other places where I published in the old days. You’d think it ought to be dull, but it isn’t, and I’m working on because I got a lot of it right—we just haven’t done some of that stuff yet. The difference is that when I wrote it we couldn’t quite do it yet; now we can, we just don’t,

One column shows the confusion of climate scientists, divided into “We’re warming!” and “The Ice is coming back!” groups. No Believers and Deniers. Just science. Nut that was before all that money went into building the Warming consensus…

I’ll have to write some comments one where I got it wrong, but the horror is that I got a lot right, and we still aren’t doing it.

I’m still experimenting with the Surface, and I still have to update a lot of the Apple equipment; stand by; but Another Step is still important, more than I thought, so it gets moved up a few notches. I’m also moving 2020 Visions up a bit in importance. That’s a lot to do, and I don’t work as fast as I used to, but we keep going, thanks to Eric and Peter and Rick and Brian and Alex and Dan and my other hard working advisors. And the readers: I still say I have the most interesting mail of anyone I know.

From Another Step Farther Out:

THE STUDY SYNDROME

Lincoln, Nebraska doesn’t sound like much of a place for changing human destiny, even though it is said to have the highest “quality of life” in the U.S. It’s a nice little city with a good convention center, where, this spring, a very important event took place.

A five day formal report by the Department of Energy and NASA on the Solar Power Satellite (SSPS) concept. That should have changed the world.

In the late seventies, Stefan Possony and I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. We tried, successfully I think, to show that there are very good reasons to believe the human race will be around for 100 billion years.

Roll that number around on your tongue a bit. One hundred billion years. That is our future. Compared to it, our past is minuscule, vanishing, a tiny drop in the bucket. We are so very young and so much lies ahead of us, our only certain doom is the end of the universe-and who knows, after a hundred billion years, perhaps we will know how to prevent that too. It may be as a species we have no inevitable doom; certainly 100 billion years is, for those of us her and now, close enough to eternity.

But to realize anything like the potential, we must outlive our planet. We must outlive our sun. Eventually we will outlive our galaxy.

None of this is impossible. We can today conceive of interstellar ships, although it will be some time before we can build them; meanwhile, the first step is within our grasp right now. We can, if we will, make our home not Only One Earth, but in the solar system at large. In this generation, in this decade, we could put a settlement on the moon. Not a base, or an outpost; but a settlement, a colony; a home. We know how to do this now, with today’s technology, for about what we spend on cosmetics, less than we spend on tobacco.

It is an idea whose time has come; and SSPS gives us another reason to start.

Voices: A peek into the future of tech (USA Today)

Rick Jervis, USA TODAY 9:05 a.m. EDT March 29, 2015

MIAMI — Anyone interested in what the dot.com future may hold would have done well by strolling through the second floor of the InterContinental Hotel here recently.

There, mingling between the Disney World display and the CNN en Español booth, they would have found an intriguing mix of media titans, marketing gurus, start-up entrepreneurs and YouTube careerists — all part of and aimed at the country’s burgeoning Latino population.

They were there as part of Hispanicize 2015, an annual gathering of the nation’s top Latino media execs, journalists and new-media entrepreneurs for a week of workshops, networking and parties. I was invited to the conference to speak on a panel on race and media.

A few days prior, I had covered the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin. It was interesting traveling from SXSW, one of the premier tech gatherings in the country but one still struggling to be more diverse, to a similar, albeit smaller, gathering of techies flush with diversity. Hispanicize, in fact, is often referred to as the “Latino SXSW.”

In Austin, panel discussions explored the myriad reasons Silicon Valley firms — especially at the managerial level — aren’t more black, brown and female. In Miami, those very diverse faces that have eluded the upper echelons of Yahoo and Facebook shared ideas and unfurled their cyber strategies.

Hispanics make up just 4% of managerial positions at Yahoo and even fewer at Facebook and Google. That number drops even further for African Americans. Black and Hispanic professionals — such as lawyers, accountants and computer scientists — make up 5% of all professionals at Facebook, Google and Yahoo but 13% of similar professionals nationwide.

Meanwhile, Latinos are the nation’s largest minority, numbering 53 million in the USA, and its fastest growing. By 2060, they’re expected to make up one-third of the total population, with more than $1 trillion in spending power.

Attendees at Hispanicize didn’t seem overly concerned with those disparate stats. They appeared less anxious about climbing corporate ladders at Silicon Valley and more focused on starting their own empires.

Hispanicize is the brainchild of Manny Ruiz, whom I knew from our days working at the campus newspaper at Miami-Dade Community College two decades ago. Ruiz left journalism to start a Hispanic-focused public relations firm, sold that and used the proceeds to launch Hispanicize. The gathering has grown from 260 attendees at its inaugural event five years ago to more than 2,000 today.

“We’re in a new era where there’s so much opportunity for everyone,” Ruiz told me. “You don’t have to be in Silicon Valley anymore to succeed.”

It was a mantra repeated throughout the conference. Entrepreneurs shared stores of how they’ve cobbled careers out of blogs and YouTube channels with names like Rocking Mama and Crafty Chica, drawing hundreds of thousands of loyal online followers and the attention of major brands willing to pay handsomely for that coveted audience. There was very little talk of trying to break into Google.

Alejandra Ayala, 29, started her fashion/beauty blog and YouTube channel, known as Chulavision, two years ago. She began in English, with just 1,200 subscribers. But when Ayala, who’s Mexican-American, started posting videos in Spanish, her channel quickly swelled to 123,000 subscribers. Her YouTube channel has since captured 5 million views.

Ayala said she doesn’t know how far she’ll take her project. But the fact that brands are reaching out to her tells her something about the direction of online enterprises.

“Slowly, they’re starting to notice us,” Ayala said about both her loyal following and corporations willing to pay for a few seconds of their time. “They’re starting to realize the impact we can have.”

Asked about the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley, Ayala smiled.

“If someone doesn’t want to give it to us,” she said, “we’re going to find a way to get it.”

An interesting attitude…

Windows 10 Or OS X: Can Hardware Make The Difference? (Forbes)

The Surface Pro 3 is a design you won’t get from Apple.

Would you switch from Mac to Windows to get access to “better” hardware?

I resolved that dilemma long ago by becoming, more or less, operating system agnostic.

There is one stubborn, undeniable fact in favor of being agnostic: One side offers more choice. That would be Windows, of course. And that means that there are sometimes better hardware options. And with Windows 10 on the horizon, that becomes even more enticing.

Lots of businesses are already agnostic, i.e., either Macs or PCs are allowed.  Though that doesn’t necessarily favor Windows PCs (BYOD — Bring Your Own Device — policies are trending to non-Windows platforms), I’ve been moving in the other direction.

Barring job-specific platform requirements, the experience on Macs and PCs is increasingly the same for me.  Particularly, if you spend much of your time inside Google’s GOOGL+0.2% Chrome browser, which I do.

(And the virus or malware argument against Windows isn’t that convincing anymore after both my MacBook and a friend’s recently got slammed with nasty malware.)

Let’s look briefly at laptops: On the Mac side, you’ve essentially got the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and the new 2-pound MacBook. Good choices but limited. While on Windows it’s almost limitless, if you throw in third-tier suppliers and the white box crowd.

But that’s stating a well-known fact, which is not my point.  What I’m getting at are unique products from top-tier suppliers that, because of the design, pull you off the Mac and over to Windows.

There’s a good bit to discuss in that.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326149&print=yes

How Will Deep Learning Change SoCs? (EE Times)

Junko Yoshida

3/30/2015 00:00 AM EDT

MADISON, Wis. – Deep Learning is already changing the way computers see, hear and identify objects in the real world.

However, the bigger — and perhaps more pertinent — issues for the semiconductor industry are: Will “deep learning” ever migrate into smartphones, wearable devices, or the tiny computer vision SoCs used in highly automated cars? Has anybody come up with SoC architecture optimized for neural networks? If so, what does it look like?

“There is no question that deep learning is a game-changer,” said Jeff Bier, a founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance. In computer vision, for example, deep learning is very powerful. “The caveat is that it’s still an empirical field. People are trying different things,” he said.

There’s ample evidence to support chip vendors’ growing enthusiasm for deep learning, and more specifically, convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNN are widely used models for image and video recognition.

Earlier this month, Qualcomm introduced its “Zeroth platform,” a cognitive-capable platform that’s said to “mimic the brain.” It will be used for future mobile chips, including its forthcoming Snapdragon 820, according to Qualcomm.

Cognivue is another company vocal about deep learning. The company claims that its new embedded vision SoC architecture, called Opus, will take advantage of deep learning advancements to increase detection rates dramatically. Cognivue is collaborating with the University of Ottawa.

If presentations at Nvidia’s recent GPU Technology Conference (GTC) were any indication, you get the picture that Nvidia is banking on the all aspects of deep learning in which GPU holds the key.

China’s Baidu, a giant in search technology, has been training deep neural network models to recognize general classes of objects at data centers. It plans to move such models into embedded systems.

Zeroing in on this topic during a recent interview with EE Times, Ren Wu, a distinguished scientist at Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning, said, “Consider the dramatic increase of smartphones’ processing power. Super intelligent models—extracted from the deep learning at data centers – can be running inside our handset.”  A handset so equipped can run models in place without having to send and retrieve data from the cloud. Wu, however, added, “The biggest challenge is if we can do it at very low power.

AI to Deep learning

One thing is clear. Gone are the frustration and disillusion over artificial intelligence (AI) that marked the late 1980’s and early ‘90’s. In the new “big data” era, larger sets of massive data and powerful computing have combined to train neural networks to distinguish objects. Deep learning is now considered a new field moving toward AI.

There’s a lot more, worth your attention. AI is coming; as Minsky says, when you get it, they say, well that wasn’t Artificial Intelligence at all…

http://www.zdnet.com/article/new-3d-nand-flash-memory-from-intel-micron-could-result-in-10-terabyte-ssds/

New 3D NAND flash memory from Intel, Micron could result in 10-terabyte SSDs (ZD)

Summary:The two companies claim their new technology offers up to three times the density of other 3D NAND competitors, with full production ramping up later this year.

By Sean Portnoy for Laptops & Desktops | March 30, 2015 — 13:07 GMT (06:07 PDT)

NAND flash memory isn’t the type of technology that might get your heart racing, but breakthroughs in making solid-state storage denser means more storage can be squeezed into ever-smaller spaces. While Samsung has been the company most associated with making 3D NAND technology the latest trend in flash memory, longtime partners Intel and Micron have just announced the results of their collaboration that could yield equally impressive results.

As the term suggests, 3D NAND adds a new dimension to producing flash modules. By stacking cells vertically, density is improved, which allows for more capacity in the same dimensions. Intel and Micron have further refined this process by using a floating gate cell for the first time in 3D NAND production.

Moore’s Law isn’t dead yet…

Researchers Claim 44x Power Cuts (EE Times)

New on/off transceivers reduce power 80%

R. Colin Johnson

3/30/2015 00:01 AM EDT

PORTLAND, Ore.– Researchers sponsored by the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC, Research Triangle Park, N.C.) claim they have extended Moore’s Law by finding a way to cut serial link power by as much as 80 percent. The innovation at the University of Illinois (Urbana) is a new on/off transceiver to be used on chips, between chips, between boards and between servers at data centers.

The team estimates the technique can reduce power up to whopping 44 times for communications, extending Moore’s Law by increasing computational capacity without increasing power. “While this technique isn’t designed to push processors to go faster, it does, in the context of a datacenter, allow for power saved in the link budget to be used elsewhere,” David Yeh, SRC director of Integrated Circuits and Systems Sciences told EETimes.

Today on-chip serial links consume about 20 percent of a microprocessor’s power and about seven percent of the total power budget of a data center. By using transceivers that only consume power when being used, a vast amount can be saved from their standby consumption.

The reason the links are always on today is to maximize speed. The new architecture reduces their power-up time enough to make it worth turning them off when not it use. The team estimates that data centers alone would save $870 million per year by switching to their transceiver architecture.

Surface Pro 3 and Hyper-V

Dear Dr Pournelle,

I have been following your Surface Pro 3 observations with interest, as my Precious arrived last September. It’s the Core i7 model with the 512GB SSD. At the moment I am running Windows 8.1. I love it to bits but I have some observations that may be relevant to the ongoing discussion about waking up from sleep:

I installed Visual Studio 2013 on my Surface Pro 3 and it promptly switched on Hyper-V for Windows Mobile app development. Hyper-V is fantastic on a decently fast desktop PC but it really messes things up on an SP3. Mine really really did not like waking up from sleep and there were many incidents of having to hold the power button and reboot. Eventually I switched off Hyper-V again as I really didn’t need it.

WiFi does my head in. My home network uses an Apple AirPort and a Linksys WRT54GL as access points. The SP3 is unable to reconnect to them from sleep without some encouragement or sitting back and waiting for a few minutes. Newer access points or routers seem fine though, including a NetGear AirCard 762S that I use for 4G internet access on the go. It works a treat for everything I can throw at it, including live video streaming using UStream.

Finally, for those of you who haven’t bought one yet, go for one of the base models. The one I have is super fast but it runs hot and battery life is compromised. On the plus side, it easily replaces a full desktop PC, unless you are a gamer. I use mine for development work, which includes running Android emulators and Ubuntu VMs, all without performance problems.

Best wishes,

Simon Woodworth BSc MSc PhD.

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

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, March 19, 2015

Despite all the US experts with their predictions of the end of Netanyahu, he won and will form a new government with even more personal power; and he did so by rejecting the two-state solutions, land for peace, that the West, and particularly President Obama has always counted on.

Netanyahu has no reason to consult the US about Iran policy now: whether it know it or not, the Obama regime is depending on good relations with Iran, trust and good will, and it seems unlikely that this will put any hamper on Iranian acquisition of nuclear capability. They will have a bomb no more than two years from when they decide to get one. What they do with it is unpredictable, although Obama predicts that they will do no worse than North Korea, see that they are impoverishing themselves, and turn into nice guys over a long period of time.

What Netanyahu predicts they will do is another story. The stakes are much higher for him. The men making the decisions in Iran are not reasonable in what they say. Some say that End Times are coming, when Jews will hide and the very rocks will cry out, ‘O Muslim there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’ After all, the Koran says that will happen, and the Supreme Leadership of Iran – and the Commander in Chief of the Praetorian Republican Guard – are Ayatollahs who have won their positions through scholarship of the Koran and their strict monotheism. They say they believe in the Koran. Obama says ‘not really.’ What Netanyahu, who controls the IDF Air Power believes they believe, and how much he is willing to risk Tel Aviv on the strength of his convictions; we also do not know is the IDF thinks it can end Iranian nuclear capability, and whether, absent US deep penetrators, it can be done without Israeli nuclear weapons I do not know. Nor, really, does Netanyahu. What he is sure of is that he does not have the 99% backing of the US that he once could count on.

The Internet – Time Warner Cable – slows or stops each afternoon around 4 lately.  DNS errors even trying to reach Google. Probably net neutrality as about then some downloads his night’s worth of porn.

I have LASFS tonight. I may have more at 1100.

: March 17th View

Belated Happy St. Pat’s day – hope you were able to celebrate with the appropriate beverage…
I have the feeling that I may be sticking something into a meat grinder, here – but I have a bit of a problem with “A law requiring white roofs everywhere in the US would make significant climate changes…”
A bit of Google-fu and a touch of key-punching to get a feel of what the difference just might be – and I come up with, at the very highest possible value, a 0.05% change in reflectivity. That is just taking the median size of single-family detached homes (2005 HUD), times the total number of housing units (total, not just SFDH), divided by total US acreage.
Obviously, missing the following:
1) Number of housing units that have nowhere near the 1,764 ft^2 “roofprint.” Live in a three story apartment building, and you probably don’t have that much footage – and only a third of the roofprint is yours.
2) Non-residential roofs. Some places that is significant, others it is not; I am making an assumption that the way over-stated figure for residential more than accounts for this.
3) Roofs that are already white – look at an aerial view of my city (Tucson) and dark roofs are few and far between. Eyeballing, I would say less than 1% of all roofs here are something other than white (or at least a light tan, depending on the recency of significant rain). Most other cities in the Southwest look much the same, except those that went crazy with tiles…
4) Roofs that are seasonally white, when they have just about the same reflectivity as anywhere else in their area.
5) The fact that the difference is not between 100% reflectivity for a (clean) white roof and 100% absorption for a “dark” roof (which vary widely from asphalt black to a very light color like many Spanish tile roofs). I really wouldn’t even know where to start with determining this factor; claims of the companies selling the coatings are, of course, the most optimistic possible.
6) And, of course, that a chunk of US total acreage is water (although much of that is seasonally white also).
The upshot is that I just do not see where the difference would be noticeable on a macro scale. Yes, it could be significant in a UHI where the change in reflectivity would be much greater – but get ten or twenty miles away from urbania and I think there would be essentially zero change in the climate.

Richard Skinner

I have not done the math myself but I have seen enough to offer a wager, that painting all the roofs white in the US would affect the temperature more than all our anti CO2 measures.

Jerry,
Your reply to my post concerning the heating of the environment misses something very important: even roof-top solar increases heat in the environment. Much of the solar energy that reaches the Earth’s surface is reflected back to space as visible light. It is the portion of that energy that is absorbed by the surface of the Earth that heats the environment, because much of that energy is released as infrared radiation, not visible radiation. Our atmosphere is largely transparent to visible radiation, so the reflected portion leaves the environment without a net increase in temperature. The absorbed portion, re-emitted as infrared, finds the atmosphere largely opaque and is reflected back to the surface, leading to a net heating of the environment.
Any solar radiation employed in energy production, weather collected on the ground using roof-top solar or in space by an SSPS would be dissipated into the atmosphere as infrared radiation and would therefore contribute to a net heating of the environment. All energy consumption ends with heat dissipation. Even intercepting a portion of the solar radiation that would ordinarily hit the Earth anyway would not alter this, but it would reduce the amount of visible light reaching the Earth. Do this on a significant scale and it would reduce crop yields, oxygen production, and CO2 cycling, which would not be good.
There is no “free lunch.” There is no way to make ANY energy production system have zero environmental impact. The system that comes closest is geothermal that taps into heat already being released into the environment, such as is used in Iceland. Second closest is mined geothermal, where wells are bored to heat water. All of the heat recovered would have entered the environment anyway, but not at the rate caused by the mining, thus leading to a net increase in environmental heating.
When I say we are smarter than that, I am saying that we can foresee such impacts and be honest about them. We can calculate their magnitude and possible impacts on the environment. We can then attempt to mitigate them before they are a problem, not wring our hands and shout at each other ineffectually as is happening now.

Kevin L Keegan

And perhaps this, but I am still willing to wager a good dinner for 6 that painting the roofs white will have more effect on the temperature than our current efforts.  It is also easier to undo.

Drone pilot exodus 

Jerry,

With respects to Col Couv, the AF leadership is “at a loss to explain” the RPA pilot exodus because they’re the ones causing it, and it has nothing at all to do with “real pilots” being disgruntled at driving a drone around. Rather, it has to do with a loss of trust and respect bottom to top in the USAF pilot force. The AF leadership sends drone pilots to be “deployed in place” flying continuous combat ops 6 days a week (12 hr shifts around the clock) for 3-5 years straight, then the leadership refuses to adjust the promotion system to account for the fact that almost every one of these officer and enlisted crew members has little to put on their promotion recommendation forms beyond “flew classified combat ops”. It took 15 years after the start of RPA ops before we had a “drone pilot” come back to be a squadron or wing commander out at Creech AFB, not for lack of good officers, but because for 15 years those good officers were passed over for promotion and command in favor of officers who had down time to pad their promotion recommendation forms and do something, anything, other than continuous combat ops.

We had a guy who was a squadron commander as a Major get passed over for Lt Col. That NEVER happens, but it did to a drone pilot. Any wonder why he quit? It wasn’t because he couldn’t fly real airplanes anymore.

To hammer home the point that USAF leadership is completely out of touch with what is going on in the trenches among RPA crews, they took a long look at the high suicide and mental illness rate among RPA crews and decided that the way to fix it was through a “resiliency training” program. Sounds great, but in practice what it means is that on what should otherwise be a weekend day off with family and away from our job of hunting and killing people every single duty day for 5 years (what do people think armed ISR means?), we have to spend that day doing a social activity with others from our squadron. Taking away my family time is supposed to somehow make me more resilient? What they need to do is acknowledge that these are no kidding deployed combat billets and relieve the crews from the garrison nonsense additional duties and training requirements, and let us get on with the job without pestering us with nonsense. And come up with a scheduled training, garrison, or leave rotation, to give people some real down-time like every other combat unit in the history of forever. We are finally starting to see signs of improvement in the performance reports and promotion rates now that we have a couple of commanders who have flown RPAs before assuming command, but for crying out loud show us a little support and take some of the garrison admin nonsense off our backs while we’re flying combat ops. Bagram air base in Afghanistan has better support facilities than the bare-base facilities at Creech AFB. Questions about support functions are universally answered with “there are no further services facility upgrades planned for Creech AFB”.

We just got word a month ago that almost everyone at Creech is getting their tours of duty extended from the usual 3 years to 5 or more years, with nowhere to go after an RPA instructor or non-flying staff job except back into the grinder doing the same thing. That is a dead end career path no matter how you look at it or where the pilot came from.

A recent survey of RPA pilot experience asked a series of questions regarding various topics including things like “how many combat actions have you actively participated in that directly resulted in the death of enemy combatants”, and “how many engagements have you witnessed or participated in that resulted in the death of enemy combatants”. I had to laugh when the top answer was only “50+”. I witnessed, enabled, directly supported, or directly participated in more than that in less than 6 months, watching the carnage up close through the best zoom lenses money can buy. 5 years of that plus actually deploying overseas for 4-6 months every 2 years in addition to the combat ops shift work without any down time, and we’re demeaned by the likes of Col Couv for being selfish and quitting because we throw tantrums due to not being in the cockpit? Flag officers get compensated in many different ways for accepting that sort of duty tempo and responsibilities, but we’re talking about E3-E7 and O1-O5 here. The ops tempo situation hasn’t changed but the AF has halted the “use or lose” leave extension program. That means we have a lot of people, myself included, who will lose leave at the end of this fiscal year due to carrying too many days of leave built up since we can’t actually take it due to ops tempo. Thanks again AF leadership.

That’s why there is an exodus. There is one more thing, regarding it being unnecessary to be a “pilot” to operate RPAs…

The Army has been experimenting for a couple of years now with non-pilots flying their drones around, through the use of improved automation. The last time I was watching they were still routinely crashing quite a few due to errors in simple pilot skills (like flying a perfectly good drone into a mountaintop). There is no way the USAF will accept that sort of casual loss due to lack of training. The RPA business is far too important (and the current crop of unmanned aircraft too difficult to fly) to leave it to those without the proper rigorous training. The Army seems to be ok with letting kids drive around expensive M-1 Abrams tanks knowing that they’ll occasionally flip one upside down into a ditch, so maybe its no wonder there is a huge service-specific cultural divide in opinion on how to approach such things.

Come on out for a tour of the simulators and see how hard it is to fly these things. Then you’ll be able to imagine a 2Lt with less than 200 hours experience being asked to perform the on-scene commander role for combat search and rescue without the benefit of the normal recurring 6-12 month home-station training periods a “real aircraft” squadron tasked for CSAR support (such as the A-10) gets. The MQ-9 does ISR, CAS, SCAR, CSAR support, direct fire support to anyone with a high enough tasking priority, and air interdiction, with no training cycle built into the program. Except for a select few instructors and crews, its just continuous combat ops after initial mission qualification training with any advanced skills and upgrades picked up on the job. Nobody has to do that but us and we’ve been doing it for more than a decade now with no change even remotely considered in the long term planning process. Last year we had enough enlisted sensor operators that we could have initiated a plan to rotate crews out for advanced training, to improve the long term quality and health of our enlisted RPA crew members. Instead, the USAF involuntarily separated the “extra” airmen who had the bad luck of having nothing but combat ops on their performance reports. Hence exodus.

There is no mystery here, just what feels like either callous neglect or malicious mis-management of the personal welfare and careers of the crews who fly the USAF’s most in-demand platform. Anyone who quits has a far better future ahead of them regardless of what they did before they started flying RPAs, and the sooner they quit the better their opportunities and family situation especially if they want to transfer to the USAF Reserves to continue serving.

Serving fighter pilot turned drone pilot

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, March 17, 2015

St. Patrick’s Day

Netanyahu is claiming victory in the Israeli election. At the last moment he rejected the two-state policy favored by the US State Dept., and this promises interesting times. Many years ago I advised the Israelis to claim what they wanted, build a wall around it, and give the rest to the Palestinians. They did that, with their Security walls, and abandoned Gaza, taking with them reluctant settlers. The result was rockets and tunnels, and an Israeli incursion into what would have been Palestinian sovereign territory, with many Arab casualties. Since then I have had no advice to offer. I wish them well, but the situation is grave. I use the word advisedly.

FCC Open Internet Ruling: A First Reaction

By Alex Pournelle

 

The FCC finally released its “Net Neutrality” rules, a good three weeks after the vote. The ruling is over 300 pages, including commentaries and dissenting opinions (About which more later). There will be longer, more knowledgeable and in-depth commentary on the entire ruling; consider this my first take.

Officially titled “In the Matter of Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet, GN Docket No. 14-28”, the online version is here, download here. Unfortunately, a first read suggests it’s the full employment act for communications lawyers, a great opportunity for lobbying, lawfare and rent-seeking by large corporations, looking to gain unfair advantage—the very groups to be regulated.

In general, the FCC regulates best when it regulates least, and when a thousand ideas can elbow their way into the marketplace, then succeed or fail on their own merits. Let’s illustrate how.

AWS-3 and CMRS: (Mostly) Good Examples of Federal Regulation

The run-up to the FCC’s “Net Neutrality” ruling completely overshadowed Auction 97. Better known as the Advanced Wireless Spectrum 3 (AWS-3) auction, this was the biggest offering of radio spectrum in over a decade, with 31 bidders obtaining 1,611 licenses. AWS-3 was a big deal, and a good example of how government can work well, and not so well.

The Commercial Spectrum Enhancement Act (CSEA) mandated the study and (seven years later) reuse/shared use of various radio bands, particularly for cellular-type services. Marketwatchers thought final proceeds from AWS-3 would be in the low billions, but final receipts hit almost $45 billion, for radio frequencies around 1700 MHz, formerly the sole domain of Federal agencies. Timing was good; wireless data usage was already exploding and projected to rise quickly.

The friction, regulatory burden and overhead of government compliance for AWS-3 has been quite low, by design. And it looks like these licenses will be put into use just as fast as the legal difficulties and spectrum-sharing (Some Feds will continue to be co-users) can be worked out. Cell sites will have more capacity to connect calls, surfers, texters and video uploaders.

Commercial Mobile Radio Service (“CMRS”) is the regulatory classification for mobile telephone services, consolidating PCS, cellular and most of SMR. This light touch also let innovation fly: CMRS licensees can (and have) implemented CDMA, straight GSM, WiMAX and LTE, as technologies improved and the market responded. It would have been very difficult or impossible for the FCC to respond to each signaling standard in depth, but fortunately it didn’t have to.

Not every product succeeded: Qualcomm thought they could broadcast television to handsets as a separate product (MediaFLO), discovered they could not, then sold the spectrum to AT&T, who now uses it as straight cellular spectrum. Qualcomm didn’t give up; it’s pushing LTE-Broadcast to, well, broadcast video to dozens or hundreds of simultaneous viewers, this time within the LTE standard, with help, and with live demos.

Market Forces, Market Innovation

None of these innovations could have happened (or not as quickly) with a much stricter, permissions-based governmental approval cycle, instead of the lassez faire regime for CMRS. Adam Smith’s invisible hand works on the Internet, and it works in RF re-use. (Arguably, it hasn’t worked in terrestrial radio, a discussion for another day.)

LTE-Broadcast did need approval, not by the FCC but the 3GPP. The 3GPP sets standards for LTE communications (currently in Release 13). But the 3GPP isn’t a governmental group; it “unites seven telecommunications standard development organizations”, developing worldwide standards without direct governmental involvement. Approval is less political and certainly more market-savvy than the bad, old, per-market RF technology approvals of the PTT era, or pre-Judge Greene AT&T. The sort-of open-market, engineering-centric approach of the various 3GPP working groups have served the public—both US and global—well.

And that’s the lesson: More freedom, particularly fewer governmental regulations, have allowed a rapid advance in communications standards, capital investment in cellular infrastructure, and the battle between Android and iPhone. This let-the-nerds-loose approach set the stage for such astounding improvements as Artemis’s claimed 35X more efficient pCell cellular demonstration, Alcatel’s lightRadio, and SpiderCloud Wireless, just to name three.

Government Rules, Corporate Shenanigans

On the other side: Government regulation. During AWS-3, bidder DISH Network used tiny subsidiaries to obtain small business discounts for their bids, a clever bit of regulatory jujitsu that did not go unnoticed by their competitors.

That bit of rent-seeking illustrates the bigger problem: Corporations, especially in markets with large sums of money at stake, will use every tool they have to gain unfair advantage. They’d much prefer spending a few million on lobbying to a few billion on competition, which is not good for consumers. The more opportunities in the law, the more they will. There are many in this ruling, especially compared to the truly light regulation under CMRS.

That’s the key issue with the FCC “Open Internet” ruling: If a camel is a horse designed by committee, the FCC Trojan Camelid clearly is nosing open the tent flap. The FCC forbore certain regulations on the Internet, but claims the power to regulate as they see fit under Title II. Many commentators have, incorrectly, said “over 700 rules [under Title II] aren’t going to be applied.” That’s incomplete and inaccurate. The current commissioners cannot bind future ones; what’s to say future commissioners—or the bureaucracy—will stop forebearing?

I’m not the only one to say this—there have been many and many a counter-argument made. FCC Commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly voted against the proposal for good reasons. Pai’s legal objections are summarized here; his policy objections here. Verizon released a “Throwback Thursday” response in Morse code, and another one from a vintage 1930s typewriter, in protest to using old law in this brave new world. There has even been buyer’s remorse (Sort of) from Netflix. Frontier Communications (Who’s buying Verizon’s wireline services in three states) says it’s happy with the reclassification, but that was before the regulations were published. It’s also unsurprising, coming from a company used to (Or maybe counting on) Title II regulation for wireline services. Remember, AT&T was perfectly happy with the regulatory climate before divestiture; it took a big sledgehammer to crack open actual telecom competition.

The Big Show Continues

This is just the first inning. There will be lawsuits, stays, further arguments and court cases. In a future article, I’ll dig deeper into what I see as the fundamental flaws in this ruling (including some I don’t see others discussing). I’ll discuss the “Bright line” rules against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization. I’ll suggest better remedies (Spoiler: Competition) and two Modest Proposals for improving the current Internet. I also welcome your thoughts.

Alex Pournelle works daily to arrange Internet access and utility to major shows, sporting events, etc.

We will continue the discussion, and Alex will continue his essay.

: Is our Climate Self Regulating?

Jerry,

I can think of a valid reason for being worried about what might happen if the Earth gets too warm and it has nothing to do with rising Oceans, melting Polar Ice or other Warmest visions of catastrophe.

What if the Earth’s Climate is self regulating, but with a primitive thermostat that can only control temperature within a band of plus or minus 50 degrees F.

When average temperatures rise above a certain point there is more evaporation from the Oceans creating more cloud cover. This in turn creates more precipitation. Some of this precipitation falls as snow. Snow cover, being white, reflects more solar energy reducing temperatures creating larger areas of snow cover. If this happens to coincide with a Solar Minimum, After a few years, we have the start of the next Ice Age.

Since this has been going on for several million years it might be prudent to look at sources of warming that are not connected to Human activities. We do know that Solar output is variable and that there are many outlets for the heat if the Earth’s molten core both above and below sea level.

What to do? If Earth’s Climate is set up to stop warming by starting an Ice Age and the mechanisms of the warming are beyond our control, perhaps we should be looking at ways to stop an Ice Age. For starters, how about spreading Carbon Black on the snow fields to allow the absorption of Solar Energy rather than reflecting it.

Bob Holmes

Since we are here, it is clear that Earth’s climate is to some extent self-regulating: human activities cannot have had much to do with it until recently. Slash and burn peoples don’t have that much effect on forest fires. It is also evident that at least for the past half million years or so, the trend has been to the cold side, with the present period being Interglacial. It’s a long Interglacial Period, but it seems that the “Normal” state of the Earth is ice well into what we call the Temperate Zones, at least in the Northern Hemisphere where much of the land is.

Obviously we have the technology to affect this greatly. A law requiring white roofs everywhere in the US would make significant climate changes – with unpredictable results, of course. The models aren’t that good, and must satisfy a number of political restraints if they are to retain their funding.

SSPS And No Pollution

Jerry,
There is always pollution. For the SSPS the pollution is heat. The heat comes from the transmitted power lost to the atmosphere, that which is lost in distribution, and from the dissipation of the remaining energy upon its use. In the end, every single extra watt of power collected and transmitted to the Earth will end up as heat in the environment.
I will admit that this is a far cleaner pollutant than CO2, mercury, uranium, sulphur, nitrous oxide, etc. that we currently pump into the environment in pursuit of energy, but it is a pollutant none-the-less.
Looking at 2013, the U.S. alone consumed 35.9 quadrillion BTU of energy. Per capita, that comes to 143.6 million BTU. Spread that over 7.5 billion people and we get 1.074 quintillion BTU. Those 7.5 billion people actually used 550 quadrillion BTU in 2013, so having them all use as much energy as the average American raises world consumption by a factor of 1.958, which is spitting distance to a doubling. So that is twice as much heat trapped in the environment every year, which is, by definition, global warming.
The question is, how much global warming? It may well be negligible and most likely is right now. SSPS would be a huge step in the right direction for world energy production. I bring up the pollution issue because, ultimately, there will be a limit to how much heat we can add to the planet without fundamentally changing the environment. If we do not think about this, then we will be as remiss as every prior generation who gave no thought to the impact of the wastes they produced. We will be as myopic as all prior generations who looked at the world as being infinite in extent and therefor infinitely capable of dissipating our wastes.
We are smarter than that.

: Kevin L Keegan

SSPS can intercept heat that would come to the Earth anyway; no additional heat regardless of the efficiency of the operation. It can also gather energy from sunlight that would otherwise not come to Earth, if the concern is cooling. Yes; this takes time and planning. So does carbon tax.

Energy and Environment

California could power itself three to five times over with solar

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/17/california-could-power-itself-three-to-five-times-over-with-solar/

By Puneet Kollipara March 17 at 9:00 AM

Workers install solar panels on a rooftop at a home in Palmetto Bay, Fla. California could supply enough solar power on or near developed infrastructure to meet the state’s power needs up to five times over, new research suggests. (Kerry Sheridan/AFP/Getty Images)

Deserts and remote fields are popular spots for building vast arrays of solar panels, which generate dramatically more energy than individual homeowner rooftop installations. These areas are rich in sunlight while offering plenty of clear, flat land to work with. But what if we didn’t always have to go all the way out to these remote and potentially ecologically fragile areas? What if we could simply drive down the street and make use of the buildings and lands in areas we’ve already developed?

A new study suggests that such a strategy could work in a state like California, which is working aggressively to boost its renewable energy use. And it could provide a lot of power. There’s enough space suitable for solar power on or near land that humans occupy in the state to power three to five of today’s Californias, researchers report in Nature Climate Change today.

California is a clean energy trailblazer on a number of fronts. It’s a part of a carbon emissions trading program with other Pacific states, and has also set a goal of supplying one-third of its electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind by 2020, and cutting its carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2050.

Of course, no energy source is perfect, and solar is no exception. Not only does it work only at certain times of the day, but it also requires a lot of open, flat land to generate solar power at the scale of power plants. As a result, a lot of solar power projects are undertaken in deserts and other remote areas where open land is plentiful.

But some of these lands could host delicate ecosystems that might become more difficult for creatures to live in if they’re covered with solar panels. Also, these sites can be far from where power is actually needed; in these cases, miles of transmission lines have to be built to deliver that electricity to consumers.

So to reduce these problems, it might behoove us to take as much advantage of open spaces in developed areas as we can, whether on roofs or on the ground. Rebecca Hernandez and Christopher Field at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science decided to see how feasible that would be in California, given the state’s aggressive push for clean energy.

[The best idea in a long time: Covering parking lots with solar panels]

They focused their attention on the two main forms of solar power generation: photovoltaic cells, which generate electricity by absorbing sunlight directly, and concentrating solar power (CSP), which involves using arrays of mirrors to focus sunlight into one area where it can be converted into electricity (though these projects require more area to operate than the smallest photovoltaic projects do).

The researchers assessed California’s land to see how suitable it would be for solar power projects of either type, whether on scales suitable for powering individual homes and businesses or for powering entire communities. The most “compatible” places, they said, found in just around 8.1 percent of the state’s land, would be in areas that humans have modified or developed in some way, and it would have enough open and mostly-flat space to work with. These places might include not just the rooftops of homes, businesses, warehouses and other buildings, but also parking lots, farmland, grassy fields and golf courses.

California has 10,535 square miles (roughly the size of Massachusetts) and 2,422 square miles (roughly the size of Delaware) of this “compatible” land for photovoltaics and CSP systems, respectively, the researchers found. On these compatible lands, photovoltaics could provide about 14,600 terawatt-hours (or 1 billion kilowatt-hours) a year in power, and CSP systems could provide about 6,000 terawatt-hours a year. Compare that with California’s total energy use across all sectors, from residential to commercial to transportation and industrial, in 2011: 2,231 terawatt-hours.

All in all, depending on what combination of photovoltaics and CSP systems you choose to use on these lands, the resulting amount of energy would fall somewhere roughly between three and five times what California used in 2011. And that’s all before we’ve even discussed other places that aren’t ideally compatible but could still potentially host solar projects, such as federally protected lands.

That’s not to say that we can go all-in on solar power or abandon desert projects outright. People won’t want to cover every last parking lot or rooftop with a CSP system or solar panel, and other factors such as the availability of transmission lines serve as another limiting factor.

But the findings do drive home one point that’s often lost in the discussion over solar power: To get it, you don’t have to go to the desert or to that far-away, fragile ecosystem. You may just have to drive down the street.

For places like Southern and Mid California, where the sun shines most of the time and much of the power is used for daytime cooling, direct solar is a reasonable way to get power. It doesn’t kill birds, we have experience with its operation, and it’s fairly low maintenance—indeed much of the maintenance can be put off on residents and not State employees. Of course the Sun doesn’t shine at night, and is low in the sky for hours, but power demand is lower at those times. You need power storage and generation to get through winter, and rainy seasons, but that’s doable most places. Of course California unions have a say in all this.

For New England and the rest of the nation it’s not so clear. Much better storage is needed than we have at present; but there are signs that this is happening so that we may yet see Manhattan covered with solar cells…

Wonder battery announcement

Dr. Pournelle,
Being something of a skeptic [perhaps bordering on a cynic] it was with a jaundiced eye that I read the full article — In Battery Revolution, a Clean Leap Forward — in your 3.16.15 View.
The article in the WSJ was remarkably free of detail. I suspect the author, Christopher Mims, was regurgitating a press release, judging from the breathless style of writing. Readers might best refer to the comments after the article in the WSJ, for a better appreciation of the battery claims.
I would welcome battery technology that could drive a five-passenger car 300 miles, pulling a boat at 70 mph, and recharge in five minutes, but I won’t see it in my lifetime. The energy density of the Dyson investment would give me pause. We’ve already got Li-ion batteries spontaneously combusting.
Pete Nofel

Yes; but we also have evidence that Dyson is more than a dreamer. We watch, some with more confidence than others. I agree, energy densities matter, and safety is a great concern.

New Li-On Battery Lasts Twice as Long—and, Backed By Dyson, Could Sell

Rarely a week passes without the report of a new battery technology, but most appear destined to remain within the lab for years. Now, though, a start-up called Sakti3 has a li-on battery that lasts twice as long as most—and $15 million of support from Dyson to make it a reality.

Sakti3’s new batteries make use of a variety of new materials and processing techniques to increase their capacity, Technology Review reports. Perhaps chief amongst them is the fact that it embraces solid-state battery technology—meaning that the flammable liquid electrolyte that causes battery fires is swapped out for a solid material. In turn, that allows the company to use new high-energy storage materials that only work in a solid-state set-up. Those changes provides twice the energy density compared to normal li-on batteries.

The technology—the exact details of which remain under wraps—is compelling enough to have drawn the interest of James Dyson, who has now invested $15 million into Sakti3 to give its final push from prototype to market. Perhaps it’s the design philosophy of the company that appealed to the engineer: Sakti3 prepares its prototypes on standard manufacturing equipment instead of custom lab kit, in order to make it as easy as possible to make them commercializable in the future. Whatever the reason, Dyson claims said that “Sakti3 has achieved leaps in performance which current battery technology simply can’t.”

Of course, taking the technology from its existing prototype to market won’t necessarily be easy, even with Dyson’s support—but the partnership makes it far more likely. Perhaps your next vacuum cleaner will be powered by Sakti3. [Technology Review]

‘The only explanation they can conjure for the policy’s continued existence is bureaucratic: Maintaining the one-child regime now employs so many officials – in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps more – that China hasn’t been willing to put them out of work.’

<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the-ghost-children-in-the-wake-of-chinas-one-child-policy-a-generation-is-lost/article23454402/?fb_ref=Default>

Roland Dobbins

Das Buros steht immer.

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

Chaos Manor View, Monday, March 16, 2015

I continue to recover, but I still don’t type fast. There is much technology news.

SPS and moon colonies

To quote you, Jerry: “But out of the first Space Solar Power Satellite we get a Moon Colony built on weekend and third shifts.”
It’s more fundamental than that. It’s probably impossible to make SPS pay, if all the materials have to be lofted from Earth – and, in any case, the sheer number of launches required might do horrible things to the upper atmosphere in general and the ozone layer in particular.
So the materials have to come from somewhere in space; the Moon is an obvious source, but asteroids work too. And to get those materials there have to be at least a small number of people there, at least with today’s technology. Which means a colony.
In other words, the building of a colony somewhere beyond Earth’s atmosphere is an integral part of the process for development of SPS – at least at any worthwhile scale. Most definitely not an afterthought.
By the way, one might argue that the process of mining the resources (and assembling the SPS’s) could be done by robots. The trouble is that doing this by telepresence from Earth, with a three-second lag, probably isn’t practical. And this means that doing the job with robots requires high-grade, possibly “strong” AKA sapient AI.
Of course, doing it that way would absolutely require a wait, of completely unknown duration. Strong AI is a problem we have barely even started on.
One doesn’t have to have watched all the movies about robots going amok, to imagine the possible problems that could be caused by having sapient robots in space and not being able to go ourselves. Does anyone really want Berserkers in charge of our power supply?

Ian Campbell

You raise interesting points. Fortunately they were examined closely already. The studies are old, but they are quite valid; and your point about requiring man in space lest we give the upper hand to robots and artificial intelligence is very much something to contemplate.

First, regarding pollution from the required launches, it is strictly necessary to launch polluting rockets from Earth for the first power satellite. After that the power will flow to Earth and can be used to generate hydrogen and oxygen from water; burn the hydrogen and the only pollutant is water.

The energy is large but small in comparison to events like hurricanes and volcanoes. To get 8 million tons to orbit with an Orion type ship (as calculated by Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor) would take about 1080 bombs in the 10 kiloton yield range. That’s more than enough mass to build a city, and far more than solar power satellites need. For comparison, hurricanes have on average something like 8,000 megatons – 8000 one megaton bombs – worth of energy. Obviously they do not release all that energy in an event lasting a minute or so, but neither do rockets. Once the first Space Solar Power Satellite (SSPS) is operating, we do not need any fossil fuels at all to make rocket fuel. Even if – especially if – the CO2 greenhouse effect, the Carbon threat – manmade global warming is exactly true, SSPS does not change the atmospheric percentage of Carbon. If the global warming alarmists were self consistent they should, I think, be all for SSPS.

A long time ago I participated in a NASA study on using robots to colonize space. It took place under the administration of the University of Santa Clara at a resort on Monterrey Bay, and had many prominent people. My roommate at the resort was Marvin Minsky. We concluded that it was not possible to close the loop – yet. I did propose a Lunar Colony – it wasn’t entirely artificial, but it could be self replicating. The Administrator was not amused. I gave a fuller account of the conference in a column, but I may have lost it.

SSPS has the potential of generating enough renewable energy to run the Earth with everyone having as much power as Americans and Europeans do, with no pollution.

THE LIGHTSHIP
The full earth stands at our left hands
and the pale moon on the right.
All fire and steel, our Catherine wheel
rolls through the endless night.
The sun may burn at full astern,
as the power cells drink deep;
both day and night are in our sight
from waking unto sleep.
[Refrain]

And we spin long light from the glory of the sun,
yes, we spin long light from the glory of the sun,
and the light gems glow on the earth below,
in the bright web spun from the glory of the sun.
The powers run from the brazen sun,
through the web of heaven’s height
to the opal world, like a clouded pearl
strung on a thread of light.
And we pace our turn from bow to stern
through the elfin summer field,
where the power cells like flower bells
drink all the sun can yield.

And we spin long light from the glory of the sun,
yes, we spin long light from the glory of the sun,
and the light gems glow on the earth below,
in the bright web spun from the glory of the sun.

The well paced blips of the factory ships
slide past our orbit’s brink
like a swarm of bees in the girder trees,
come to our flowers to drink.
And the earth is clean as a springtime dream,
no factory smokes appear,
for they’ve left the land to the gardener’s hand,
and they all are circling here.

And we spin long light from the glory of the sun,
yes, we spin long light from the glory of the sun,
and the light gems glow on the earth below,
in the bright web spun from the glory of the sun.

http://lyrics.wikia.com/Julia_Ecklar:The_Light-Ship

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFufOGZBwFM Old but glorious.

And listen to her sing of the cost of space: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/memorial.mp3 ; http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/phoenix.mp3

And if you are my age, prepare to cry.

A Police Gadget Tracks Phones? Shhh! It’s Secret    nyt

By MATT RICHTELMARCH 15, 2015

A powerful new surveillance tool being adopted by police departments across the country comes with an unusual requirement: To buy it, law enforcement officials must sign a nondisclosure agreement preventing them from saying almost anything about the technology.

Any disclosure about the technology, which tracks cellphones and is often called StingRay, could allow criminals and terrorists to circumvent it, the F.B.I. has said in an affidavit. But the tool is adopted in such secrecy that communities are not always sure what they are buying or whether the technology could raise serious privacy concerns.

The confidentiality has elevated the stakes in a longstanding debate about the public disclosure of government practices versus law enforcement’s desire to keep its methods confidential. While companies routinely require nondisclosure agreements for technical products, legal experts say these agreements raise questions and are unusual given the privacy and even constitutional issues at stake.

“It might be a totally legitimate business interest, or maybe they’re trying to keep people from realizing there are bigger privacy problems,” said Orin S. Kerr, a privacy law expert at George Washington University. “What’s the secret that they’re trying to hide?”

The issue led to a public dispute three weeks ago in Silicon Valley, where a sheriff asked county officials to spend $502,000 on the technology. The Santa Clara County sheriff, Laurie Smith, said the technology allowed for locating cellphones — belonging to, say, terrorists or a missing person. But when asked for details, she offered no technical specifications and acknowledged she had not seen a product demonstration.

Buying the technology, she said, required the signing of a nondisclosure agreement.

“So, just to be clear,” Joe Simitian, a county supervisor, said, “we are being asked to spend $500,000 of taxpayers’ money and $42,000 a year thereafter for a product for the name brand which we are not sure of, a product we have not seen, a demonstration we don’t have, and we have a nondisclosure requirement as a precondition. You want us to vote and spend money,” he continued, but “you can’t tell us more about it.”

The technology goes by various names, including StingRay, KingFish or, generically, cell site simulator. It is a rectangular device, small enough to fit into a suitcase, that intercepts a cellphone signal by acting like a cellphone tower.

The technology can also capture texts, calls, emails and other data, and prosecutors have received court approval to use it for such purposes.

: A Police Gadget Tracks Phones? Shhh! It’s Secret (NY Times)

And, of course, there is no way for terrorists to steal such a device and reverse engineer it…

B

None at all…

This isn’t ‘scanning’ or ‘tracking’ cell phones. It’s a cell tower that all phones in the area connect to (because it’s positioned to have a stronger signal than the real cell towers) and as such, all phones in the area go to it and it sees all the calls, texts, and Internet traffic from phones, tablets, etc. in it’s range.

At that point, the people operating the device need to throw away the data, not gather it.

David Lang

Obamanet’s Regulatory Farrago

Asked what the Internet ‘general conduct rule’ means, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said, ‘We don’t really know.

By

L. Gordon Crovitz

March 15, 2015 6:11 p.m. ET

129 COMMENTS

The Federal Communications Commission last week finally revealed the specifics of its plan to micromanage the Internet as a monopoly utility. In his dissent, Republican commissioner Ajit Pai explained the agency’s rejection of the open Internet after 20 years of bipartisan support:

“Why is the FCC turning its back on Internet freedom? Is it because we now have evidence that the Internet is not open? No. Is it because we have discovered some problem with our prior interpretation of the law? No. We are flip-flopping for one reason and one reason alone. President Obama told us to do so.”

Last year when the FCC invited comments about possible regulatory changes, only two paragraphs of an 85-page document mentioned the possibility of subjecting the Internet to Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. “To be clear, the deficiencies in the notice were not the product of incompetence,” Mr. Pai wrote. “Rather, they reflect the fact that the agency was headed in a different direction until political pressure was applied.”

Shortly after Mr. Obama demanded in November that the FCC treat the Internet as a utility, the commission’s Democratic majority stopped work on their less extreme plan and scurried to adopt the Obamanet approach, which the FCC had always opposed.

This explains why an independent agency could issue such a vague and slapdash 400-page order. For starters, the order lacks evidence of why the Internet, the greatest source of innovation in modern times, must now submit to rules written for the monopoly telephone system. The order doesn’t include basic market and economic analysis that courts demand to justify new regulations, especially when an agency reverses its own precedents.

Obamanet rejects the Internet’s key operating principle of permissionless innovation. Under the new rules, entrepreneurs must seek regulatory approval before launching new products and services—or beg for forgiveness afterward.

The order submits broadband providers to the Ma Bell “just and reasonable” test for utility pricing and practices. It sets a price of $0 for what they can charge bandwidth hogs like Netflix and YouTube. “Net neutrality” supporters wanted to break up the cable-telecom broadband duopoly. Instead the order suppresses new broadband competitors like Google Fiber by submitting them to requirements written for monopolists.

Besides broadband, the order covers virtually every activity on the Internet under a new “general conduct rule.” Asked at a press conference what this means, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler replied: “We don’t really know. We don’t know where things will go next. We have created a playing field where there are known rules, and the FCC will sit there as a referee and will throw the flag.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/gordon-crovits-obamanets-regulatory-farrago-1426457509

We will continue to discuss net neutrality and the new rules as the week goes on. They have given themselves the power that we license our web sites.  Next the Fairness Doctrine?

In Battery Revolution, a Clean Leap Forward

Vacuum maker Dyson is investing in Sakti3’s energy technology

By

Christopher Mims

March 15, 2015 7:23 p.m. ET

34 COMMENTS

Revolutions often have humble beginnings. And so it is that the world’s most sophisticated battery technology—one with double the capacity of the best cells currently available—will make its debut in a vacuum cleaner. That is, if everything goes according to plan.

Dyson, the maker of vacuum cleaners (and, lately, robots) is investing $15 million in Sakti3, a Michigan-based battery company whose investors include Khosla Ventures and General Motors. Led by former University of Michigan engineering professor Ann Marie Sastry, the seven-year-old Sakti3 has created a pilot assembly line for batteries unlike any before them.

Of course, many have tried and failed to revolutionize battery technology before, limiting the progress of mobile devices.

Since their invention, batteries have been filled with a liquid electrolyte. But Sakti3’s batteries are solid. And they are produced in a manner alien to battery technologists, but familiar to anyone who must make microchips or flat-panel displays. It’s a process called thin-film deposition, and it’s mostly been used for things that were, well, thin. That this process is so well understood, and the equipment for it so readily available, could be crucial to Sakti3’s success.

When and if production of these batteries reaches industrial scale—new battery technology is notoriously hard to bring to market—they have the potential to become even more ubiquitous than conventional rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which are already in things as diverse as cellphones and electric cars.

I asked founder James Dyson whether the stake his company is taking in Sakti3, which gets him an undisclosed portion of the battery maker, could someday be worth more than all of Dyson. He said yes. But he also seemed uninterested in the question, or in exploring the mind-boggling possibility that he might someday profit from a company that could sell millions of batteries a year to car makers.

Mr. Dyson, who is known for being passionate about the smallest details of his products, was more interested in talking about what he plans to do with the batteries, which will appear in Dyson products before they are sold to any other manufacturer. Within the next two years, he says, Dyson will launch 100 products in four categories that are new for the company.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-battery-revolution-a-clean-leap-forward-1426461806

As I have said, cheap, efficient power storage will change the world. This a serious effort to make it economical.

Global Warming Could Hit Rates Unseen in 1,000 Years

We are standing on the edge of a new world where warming is poised to accelerate at rates unseen for at least 1,000 years.

That’s the main finding of a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change, which looked at the rate of temperature change over 40-year periods. The new research also shows that the Arctic, North America and Europe will be the first regions to transition to a new climate, underscoring the urgent need for adaptation planning.

“Essentially the world is entering a new regime where what is normal is going to continue to change and it’s changing at a rate than natural processes might not be able to keep up with,” Steven Smith, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said.

Historical records show temperatures have typically fluctuate up or down by about 0.2°F per decade over the past 1,000 years. But trends over the past 40 years have been decidedly up, with warming approaching 0.4°F per decade. That’s still within historical bounds of the past — but just barely.

By 2020, warming rates should eclipse historical bounds of the past 1,000 years — and likely at least 2,000 years — and keep rising. If greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trend, the rate of warming will reach 0.7°F per decade and stay that high until at least 2100.

Global rates of temperature change in high and declining
greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Credit:Smith et al., 2015
Click here to enlarge

The northern hemisphere will be the first region to experience historically unprecedented warming. The Arctic, which is already the fastest warming part of the planet, will see temperatures rise 1.1°F per decade by 2040. North America and Europe will see slightly lower, though equally unprecedented, warming.

“With those high rates of change, there’s not going to be anything close to equilibrium,” Smith said, underscoring the profound potential impacts on both the natural world and society.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-warming-could-hit-rates-unseen-in-1-000-years/

I do point out that the Viking Warm period was over a thousand years ago. We have been through this before. They do not bother to tell you.

NASA Quietly Tests Engine That Uses No Fuel And Violates The Laws Of Physics

http://higherperspective.com/2015/03/nasa-engine.html

• NASA has successfully tested a new space drive that doesn’t use a propellant and shouldn’t work, at least according to the laws of physics, according to a story that broke in Wired.UK. The drive, called the Cannae Drive, worked in the NASA directed test, defying physics.

The Cannae Drive is based on the work of Roger Shawyer, a British scientist, who conceived what’s called the EMDrive. It works by bouncing microwaves in an enclosed chamber, thus creating thrust. Shawyer was never able to get anyone interested in his device, despite numerous demonstrations. His critics simply rejected the device entirely, pointing out that it violates the conservation of motion.

The Chinese quietly tested their own version of the EMDrive at up to 72 grams of thrust, which is enough to be a satellite thruster. This device has not yet been reported on in too many places and few believed it to be possible.

The Cannae Drive seems to have been developed independently of the EMDrive, though it works just about the same way. In the NASA Test, they demonstrated that on Cannae drive was able tp produce a thrust of less than one thousandth of the Chinese version. But it demonstrated definitively that it worked.

NASA explains:

“Test results indicate that the RF resonant cavity thruster design, which is unique as an electric propulsion device, is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.”

That’s all just a fancy way of saying that we’re not completely sure. Wired speculated that the process involves pushing against a cloud of particles and anti-particles that are constantly popping in and out of empty space. And that’s about the point where this humble writer is lost.

The big question is: can these drives be scaled up and used in space travel? Maybe. More research will be needed.

I merely report; but I do note that if Petr Beckmann is right, and there is an aether formed by the gravitational fields in the local area, something of this sort is possible; or I think so. Of course with General Relativity there can be no aether.

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