| Wednesday,
August 17, 2005 Subject: Brazilian gunned
down in London was not running from police
Jerry
You wrote "Arming police who are not usually armed is
often not a good idea; at least not without considerably more training than
these seem to have. An NYPD officer who shot a man five times at close range
while he was restrained by other officers would be in a heap of trouble."
British police who carry arms are trained to do so and
are usually armed. But my understanding, based on what has been reported
previously in the news, is that these police officers are usually only
brought into play to deal with specific situations usually after an unarmed
officer has identified a need for them to be there. So I suspect that -
Don't send British armed police on surveillance - might be closer to the
truth.
I decided to reserve judgement until we knew more. I
honestly expected that when the CCTV footage was released it was going to
match witness statements, or at least be close enough to allow me to
understand how the police could have made this mistake.
But the news today has more than confirmed my worst
fears. From thisislondon "Early accounts of the shooting described him
vaulting over the barriers to the tube station, running to a Tube train and
tripping over before being shot. A document from the investigation into the
death, obtained by ITV News, said that CCTV footage from the day tells a
different story. It captured Mr de Menezes entering the station at a normal
walking pace, even collecting a free Metro newspaper, and slowly descending
on an escalator."
And not only did they shoot an innocent man who was
doing nothing suspicious, but they didn't reveal the truth immediately. In
the words of the BBC report "Metropolitan Police did little, if anything, to
disabuse the media of the notion Mr de Menezes was wearing a bulky jacket;
had vaulted the ticket barrier at Stockwell; and had failed to obey a
shouted instruction from officers to stop".
The emergency services', including the police's,
handling of the events of 7/7 boosted confidence in their ability to deal
with terrorist activities, but now my opinion of London's police is at an
all time low.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/PA_NEWA10001041124213637A00?source=PA%20Feed&ct=5
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4159412.stm
Best wishes
Paul Dove
I find the truth of the situation nearly
unbelievable. Surely there will be a Parliamentary Inquiry? Or perhaps the
Queen could take a hand in looking into what was done in her name?
And see below.
==================
Subject: Strange impacts
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2
Fnews%2F2002%2F05%2F12%2Fwnugg12.xml
The first was on the morning of October 22.
Seismometers in Turkey and Bolivia recorded a violent event in Antarctica
that packed the punch of several thousand tons of TNT. The disturbance then
ripped through Earth on a route that ended with it exiting through the floor
of the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka just 26 seconds later - implying a speed
of 900,000 mph.
The second event took place on November 24, when
sensors in Australia and Bolivia picked up an explosion starting in the
Pacific south of the Pitcairn Islands and travelling through Earth to appear
in Antarctica 19 seconds later.
According to the scientists, both events are
consistent with an impact with strangelets at cosmic speeds. In a report
about to be submitted to the Seismological Society of America, the team of
geologists and physicists concludes: "The only explanation for such events
of which we are aware is passage through the earth of ton-sized
strange-quark nuggets."
Professor Eugene Herrin, a member of the team, said
that two strangelets just one-tenth the breadth of a hair would account for
the observations. "These things are extremely dense and travel at 40 times
the speed of sound straight through the Earth - they'd hardly slow down as
they went through."
Charles Butler
==================
Subject: Worse than freon
Jerry
In your "climate and Global Warming page, one of your
readers remarked about the banning of R12 and R22. I can go him one better.
When I worked with high power pulsed magnetrons and
klystrons, the high power waveguides were often pressurized with "freon" to
prevent arcing. When freon was outlawed, they typically converted to Sulpher
Hexaflouride.
Not only is SF6 much worse to the lungs if you inhale
it, but it's contribution to the greenhouse effect is calculated at 24900
times that of CO2.
This is a perfect example of the law of unintended
consequences. That and the example that science is so compartmentalized and
specialized that ozone hole scientists evidently doesn't know beans about
greenhouse effects.
Go figure
-- Frank R Borger
Senior System Engineer
Radioactive Cats have 18 Half -lives
Freon was outlawed just after the Du Pont
patent on it expired. By a curious coincidence.
But we were born free.
=================
Subject: FYI....
I don't know about this, Dr. Pournelle, but my BS
sensors are tingling....
http://www.earthcalm.com/index.html
Even more amazing, if that's the word, is this eBay
listing offering the same item at an apparent $50.00 premium over the OEM's
price:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?
ViewItem&item=5606765397&sspagename=ADME:L:RTQ:US:1
Wonder how many folks don't believe there is a Supreme
Being (aka God, Creator), but do believe in miraculous powers for chunks of
metal and rock?
Charles Brumbelow
==================
Subject: Stampede in Virginia to buy used iBooks
Heaven help me, I know it's probably the wrong
response, but when I read this:
Va. Laptop Sale Turns Into a Stampede
Associated Press RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- A rush to
purchase $50 used laptops turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with
people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and
nearly driven over. One woman went so far as to wet herself rather than
surrender her place in line. "This is total, total chaos," said Latoya
Jones, 19, who lost one of her flip-flops in the ordeal and later limped
around on the sizzling blacktop with one foot bare.
An estimated 5,500 people turned out at the Richmond
International Raceway in hopes of getting their hands on one of the
4-year-old Apple iBooks. The Henrico County school system was selling 1,000
of the computers to county residents. New iBooks cost between $999 and
$1,299....
...Jesse Sandler said he was one of the people pushing
forward, using a folding chair he had brought with him to beat back people
who tried to cut in front of him.
"I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder
and I went, 'Bam,'" the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the
screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on the keyboard at a testing
station.
"They were getting in front of me and I was there a
lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just," he said.
© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
...my first thought was of the old Saturday Night Live
skit about Apple. It ended with the tagline (original spelling intact):
"McIntosh Jr.: The Power To Crush The Other Kids." Here's a link for those
in a nostalgic mood:
http://pulsar.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/graphics/movies/powertocrush.mov
Regards,
Tim Elliott
Roberta read me this from the morning
paper at breakfast. Who were these people? No Virginians I ever met acted
that way. A bunch of foreigners? Aliens? Liberal democrats trying to assert
the rights of the poor?
============
Subject: Unintended consequences
This UK government-funded study shows speed cameras
actually increased accidents 31-55% on freeways. Oops. They hid the results
from the public for 18 months.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/06/602.asp
Richard Diamond
================
Subject: Of course, nobody's been
fired, much less charged.
Of course, nobody's been fired, much less charged.
http://www.itv.com/news/index_1677571.html
--- Roland Dobbins
Which I find astonishing. I guess I had
more faith in the Mother of Parliaments
Subject: Police "shoot to kill" story continues to
unravel
It's beginning to look like an incredible screw-up...
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1738517,00.html>
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4157892.stm>
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1550565,00.html>
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1550669,00.html>
-- Harry Erwin, PhD "Those who would give up essential
Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor
Safety." (Benjamin Franklin, 1755)
---------========
Subject: Re: This will make you
proud
http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/THISWILLMAKEYOUPROUD.HTML
Copy and Paste. It will make you proud!!!
"GOD BLESS AMERICA"
Anne
===========
On the Copyright Front:
Dear Jerry:
Here is a link to the first two entries on The Fight
For Copyright blog. Hopefully people will find them of interest. Thanks for
your help and support on this.
Regards,
Francis Hamit
http://thefightforcopyright.forwriters.org/index.php?year=2005&month=8
<http://thefightforcopyright.forwriters.org/index.php?year=2005&month=8>
================
The demise of Department 1127.
http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=9846/ur0508l/ur0508l.html
- Roland Dobbins
Judge Green the human race thanks you so
much...
==================
Fair warning, the
following is long and rather far out...
Subject: intelligent dinosaurs
Jerrry, the recent discussion of the Chicxulub crater
reminded me of one of my pet musings.
Consider the dinosaur Troodon, which doesn't seem to
get a lot of press. It is widely regarded as the most intelligent dinosaur,
based upon the brain case size vs. body size. It had opposable thumbs,
certainly both a rarity and a matter of note. And it was around five feet
tall, roughly human sized.
Now, scientists will tell us that, based on the brain
case size, Troodon was no more intelligent than a modern bird; but, when
prodded, they will admit that there is large variation in that guide. It is
a general, rough, rule of thumb; nothing more than that. Indeed, it is
widely noted that humans use very little of their brain in conducting their
day to day affairs; and there are actually cases on record - accident
victims and such - who have lost large portions of their brain, and gone on
to live normal lives.
And I have sometimes wondered: could Troodon have been
as intelligent as a human?
Wild speculation takes us even further: could Troodon
have been civilised? Large cities? Perhaps even significant technological
achievement?
Possibly even space flight?
Oh come now, you say. If Troodon achieved all of this,
where are the artifacts? The tools, the buildings, the roads... the rocket
launching pads? Could a civilisation so advanced be wiped so cleanly from
the planet?
Jerry, I suspect it could. We have trouble identifying
artifacts as little as seven to twelve thousand years old; and when we find
them, they are usually in such an advanced state of erosion that it's
sometimes difficult to determine if they're a purpose-built tool, or just an
interesting geological anomaly. Troodon disappeared from the planet sixty
five million years ago; that's six thousand, five hundred times further back
than our archeological record goes, if you'll accept a ten thousand year
figure as 'roughly' as far back as we can trace civilised man. I think
that's ample time for even the most sophisticated structures to have
collapsed into dust.
So: on the basis of brain case size alone, we cannot
eliminate Troodon as being intelligent, civilised, and space faring. And
regarding artifacts, "the absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence";
there's been enough geological activity, and opportunity for erosion, over
the last 65 million years to wipe the slate pretty clean.
Now, let me take you one step further: the lunar maria.
The 'seas' of the moon: where Armstrong and Aldrin
(and others) planted a flag. Jerry, call up a picture of the lunar seas.
You'll notice that, although they are irregular in overall shape, the edges
of the seas are composed of circular arcs; overlapping circles, if you will.
Exactly the kind of arcs you'd get if you dropped an
awful lot of bombs.
(Oh, stop coughing. Need some water? No? Fine. Hang
on: it gets wilder yet.)
Now, the lunar seas are all on one side of the moon:
the side that faces Earth (there's one exception to this, which I'll get to
in a moment). Science has no good explanation for the formation of the lunar
seas, and indeed the whole matter has been rather ignored by science, partly
due to a lack of good data and partly because there are many interesting
things to work on that have better data attached to them. So, we just don't
know how the seas formed, or why they're only on the side that faces Earth.
We don't even have any coherent theories.
But there's one interesting data point: the soil
samples that were returned from the lunar seas showed elevated levels of
Titanium; similar soil samples from the lunar highlands didn't show that.
Where did the Titanium come from, and why is it only found in the lunar
seas? Again, we simply don't know.
But, we can speculate.
Imagine a space faring, Earth based civilisation that
chose to explore and colonise the moon. Imagine large structures, possibly
covering many square miles. For ease of communication, you'd put your
settlements on the side facing Earth; that way, you could always get a radio
signal to some point on Earth, and from there it could be routed to any
terrestrial location required.
You'd use as much local lunar material as you could to
build your cities. But you'd need some structural beams to start with; and
you obviously wouldn't use steel girders, due to the cost of lifting them to
the moon. You probably would have wanted to use glass fibre reinforced
plastics, had you known of them; but the oil fields which jump started our
plastics industry, hadn't formed sixty five million years ago. There was no
naturally occurring oil, hence the invention of plastics never took place.
So what would you use? Well, you'd want the strongest material possible for
a given weight; and one good choice would be Titanium.
The same Titanium that Armstrong and Aldrin brought
back to Earth in the soil samples, sixty five million years later.
Oh, yes - the singular lunar sea on the far side of
the moon. If we look at the location, it is pretty much the ideal location
to place a deep space radio telescope; you have the entire bulk of the moon
shielding you from stray electromagnetic interference from both the Earth
and the lunar colonies on the Moon.
So, let's take it from the top.
Troodon achieves intelligence, civilisation, cities
and space flight. Troodon colonises the Moon, and a sizable lunar colony
develops. Most of the colony is on the near side, but one small outpost - a
deep space research facility - is deliberately placed on the far side.
Eventually, the colonies decide to separate from Earth rule, as colonies are
wont to do. War breaks out, and the Earth based Troodon government decides
to annihilate the entire lunar civilisation with the troodon equivalent of
thermonuclear carpet bombing. But the lunar colonies have barely enough time
to launch their doomsday weapon: a large meteor, which strikes Earth in a
location that - sixty five million years later - will be known as Chicxulub...
And so ends intelligent life on Earth, for sixty five
million years.
Ah, but is any of this true? Possibly; but we don't
know. And we won't know, until we go back to the Moon in earnest and in
numbers, and carry out a decent ground based exploration. The communication
relay towers and cables that would lead from the research lab on the far
side to the main civilisation on the near side, should still be there. There
may be other artifacts as well. We won't know until we go look; and that's
what we need to do.
Go back to the Moon, and look.
Regards,
Charles Worton
Long ago Niven and I were paid to develop
a story rationale and bible for a renewal of the awful series "V" in which
humans and sauroform aliens have fertile offspring, and other such. We came
up with a notion: the dinosaurs were here, left the planet to explore the
universe, and they are coming back to reclaim the Earth from the pet monkeys
they left in charge. The original wave of invaders was so incompetent
because, well, that ws the kids who rushed ahead. Now the adults are coming.
==============
And from those who want to make the
universe safe for robots:
From: Robot-Bastard Subject: Re: "We can't do that
now!"
Phil Tharp's message is shot through by a whingey
tone. "Forty years ago we flew at Mach 3 and walked on the moon, and where
have we gone since then?" Well, where we've gone is to make desktop
computers that can simulate universes at any level of detail, as
realistically as you please. Telephones that can call to anywhere on the
planet, _from_ anywhere on the planet, and yet they are so simple that
barely-literate toddler can use them. Disease is so rare that the
pharmaceutical industry has been reduced to cosmetics and recreation. The
car in my driveway is more fuel-efficient and cleaner than the cars of the
sixties, and yet it's more powerful. Manned combat aircraft will, within a
decade, be a thing of the past. Space is so crowded that current programs
must take care to avoid debris and are admonished not to create more of it,
and competition for orbital slots is fierce.
Sure, if you focus on the area of manned space flight,
there has been little technological advancement. But the fact of the matter
is that we found better things to spend the money on, and we always had many
of those things. If someone managed to resurrect the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics and John F. Kennedy, then perhaps we could create
another Space Program. But that combination of nationalism, paranoia, and
idolatry is unlikely to be repeated. "So many things that we did so long
ago, and we can't do them now!" Yes; but so many things that we _did_ do
since, and _couldn't_ do _then_!
Yes, someone is going to point at my examples and
smugly claim that they were derived from space-program technology. Perhaps;
but there is no reason that these things would _only_ have evolved from a
space program. Ballistic-missile targeting and intercontinental interceptor
networks had as much to do with computer development as the space program.
Indeed, one could make a strong case that the push for man-rated rockets
_slowed_ the development of space technology. Other than
consumable-recycling systems, no significant developments in fifty years of
space operations have come about solely as a result of manned spaceflight.
Would I like to spend a week (or even a weekend) on an
orbital platform? Sure! But I realized a long time ago that I was never
going to get the chance to fly in space. You'd be amazed at how quickly
one's ardor for manned spaceflight dies. Space is unique in many useful
ways, but at the end of the day it is just another place to put things. It's
no more a Final Frontier than the bottom of the ocean; a place that's
difficult to get to and hard to live in. If there is something useful to be
done there, and only men can do it, then men will be sent. There is not.
Mike Powers
You pay to send the robots. If people
can't go, I find there are plenty of things worth doing here. Not that
planetary probes are worthless.
Also send your robot to fix Hubble, and
tell Pete Conrad how useless he was on Skylab.
=============
Antipodes effects
You are running a discussion about what happens
directly opposite a giant meteor impact.
An article I read a long time ago was from a sixties
issue of Analog magazine called "Mercury's Missing Divot". Part of the
article tried to associate Mercury's "Weird Terrrain" area with interference
effects when the surface waves met after passing around the planet.
I don't know whether I first encountered the "Vernshot"
hypothesis at your site or if this is new to you. After a mantle hotspot
runs one of the giant volcanic outpourings for a while (such as the Deccan
Traps or the Siberia equivalent) and subsides, you are left with a
multi-mile-deep hole in the earth. Some people claim that the collapse of
this hole could happen in such a way to launch a big chunk of semi-molten
rock into space. Such an orbit would obviously impact the earth on its
return, though not precisely at the antipodes. I do not know enough about
high-pressure rock physics to judge the hypothesis.
I think that the generally accepted timing places the
Deccan Traps BEFORE Chicxulub.
-- Greg Goss
No data. I don't know enough either so I
don't speculate. Glad someone will since it gives something for idle
daydreams. One of these days one of our experts will chime in. I am
convinced that my readership collectively knows everything with considerable
confidence...
==================
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view375.html#Wednesday
<snip>
I know people probably are very grateful for
your Windows worm/virus/ malware warnings but I'm really getting to the
point, when I see a headline like today's on CNN Online "WORM HITS WINDOWS
2000", of asking that the implicit footnote (that is: "Macs unaffected") be
made explicit. Maybe OS X will get cracked some day and I'll be laughing out
of the other side of my mouth, but really: if you want a secure, reliable,
attractive OS get (and use) an Apple!
All the best,
Tim Loeb
</snip>
He forgot to add:
- Arrogant and almost non-existant after-market
customer support.
- Software (what there is of it) that costs 5 times what it is worth.
- Third party hardware (what there is of it) that costs 10 times what it is
worth.
- A user community mindset that condemns everything that is not Apple as
inferior.
- A requirement of 2 college degrees and 10 years experience to make any
changes to default settings.
- Sun Solaris is also secure, reliable, and attractive, but who wants it at
home?
- Why write viruses, or other software for that matter, for only 5% of the
computers?
Wintel machines are junk, but they are junk that gets
the job done for a price most people want to pay. Yes, I can do wonderful
art compositions on a Mac - if I were an artist with a degree in computer
science, that is. Yes, I can make beautiful music files on a Mac - if I were
a musician who has also worked as a computer software engineer, that is.
I can buy artistically designed rulers for $3000 that
are virtually unbreakable, but they don't draw a straight line much better
than the $2 ruler I just bought at Wal-Mart - cracks and all.
Braxton S. Cook
Let's you and him fight.
>> For now, at least. It is not inevitable.
Linux has been hit (not as hard as Microsoft, but hit). Apple will not be
safe forever. Alas. <<
Someone reading that might believe you mean that Linux
is nearly as vulnerable as Windows, which isn't the case by several orders
of magnitude. Can you name even one person running Linux who has ever been
victimized by a virus? I can't. Sure, there have been a (very) few Linux
worms, but they've infected essentially no systems and had zero impact.
Compare that with Blaster or Code Red or Slammer or Zotob.
Apple OS X, which your statement seems to imply is
less likely to be exploited than Linux, in fact has had more and more
serious vulnerabilities than Linux, although still so few relative to
Windows that it's not worth considering.
The fact remains that Linux and OS X are, for all
intents and purposes, not vulnerable to the types of exploits that occur
every day on Windows systems. It has nothing to do with the relative
popularity of the operating systems, as Windows fanboys would have you
believe. If that were true, markets where Linux has a significant or
majority presence would have many Linux exploits. Instead, Microsoft is
always the target, regardless of how small a percentage of Microsoft systems
exist in a particular segment.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com
Let's you and them fight.
But while we are at it, it remains true
that not one properly updated Windows system has been hit with an infection
not requiring cooperation by the machine's operator.
Keep your systems up to date, do not try
to get rich overnight by participating in schemes that are too good to be
true, do not open unexpected email attachments even from people you think
you know -- but then I have said all this before.
TOP
CURRENT
VIEW Wednesday
|
Subject:
NASA says "it's too hard" 
