Monthly Archives: January 2012

Skynet it’s not yet, but one has to wonder…

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Police Drone...
Skynet’s distant ancestor

The fact of the matter is that this, like so many other things, is coming.  I used to laugh at some ‘SciFi-ish’ cartoons for their depiction of flying drone/droid/robo cops, but then I’ve never been any better at predicting the future than most other engineers, we always dive way too deep into the details far too quickly unless we have something keeping our head out of the water long enough to figure out if we are in the ocean, sea, lake, pond, swamp or whirlpool. 

But there is the issue of privacy and the increasing ability of ‘the system’ to keep track of citizens 24/7/365.  Save a few puppies and a kid or so and we’re all for giving up a little bit of something for increased safety.  But at what cost, and have ‘we’ ever considered that we may be being manipulated?…..Anyway….

This post by Babbage at the Economist covers the ground pretty thoroughly, at least for the near term.  I think the killer app here is the comment about replacing choppers which cost a couple of million up to operate along with expensive maintenance and aircrew tails. Smaller police forces will be able to have an air contingent and big forces will have a lot of these things (hopefully replacing most if not all the choppers, which are IMO a waste of taxpayer money.)
 
UAV’s , particularly like the one in the picture have a lot of advantages they :
  • can fly in a wider weather window than crewed craft.
  • are harder to see and hear
  • can land and sit/monitor for long periods
  • could operate 24 hours with rotating crews or units
  • can travel ‘as the crow flies’ instead of around buildings, fences, traffic etc
That’s in the near term, 2-3 years, what about the middle Future (4-7 years)?:
  • Wide area surveillance from solar powered (maybe a SolarSaurs?) high altitude platforms.
  • Add ‘Gorgon’s Stare’ technology, constant surveilance with roll back capability.
  • UAV’s the size of a bird it could follow a perp under cover.
  • UAV’s that can launch a smaller pursuit drone with a TAZER ?…a bit like this
  • What about a humingbird UAV?

And as you add those capabilities my libertarian hackles go up more and more.  None of the above should be given by a free citizenry to a gov’t that is actively growing and actively misusing its powers or taking advantage of congressional stupidity.

…Maybe I’d be happier if…..I had the right to pot one of the little puckers if it was over my property without my permission?  Hey it would create a new market, for home ultra short range anti aircraft systems!  Maybe these guys would have a head start?

The old New VW bug, a VW through and through

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I’ve owned more VW’s than any other make of vehicle and I have always enjoyed them. I bought a bright yellow new Beetle as a commuter car in 1999, a safe but fun vehicle with some class. And it remains all of those things. It has been abused one way and another and its stayed good looking, solid feeling and fun to drive.
It now looks like I am about to replace the third battery which is supposedly good though I find it odd since its the only vehicle I’ve ever had to replace a battery more than once. I’ve had the fuel gauge stick once and strand me on the road….out of gas and absolutely clueless as to why the car had stopped running. The passenger side window motor blew in the middle of a Commute around Boston in the middle of a Noreaster once, which was bloody interesting….

Which brings me to my only beef really, they are expensive to have work done on and they are almost impossible to work on yourself these days.  The old New Beetle, is, was, a Rabbit (sorry a Golf) with a swoopy outline, making it hard to work on. I’ve had to replace the headlamps and that’s expensive since you have to take it in to the dealer, there is no what to get at them without removing something  important.  So the shape compounds the problem with upkeep cost.

But on the whole I have no regrets and I notice a lot of ‘bugs’ around these days.  They maintain their ‘fun’ a lot longer than other cars and they really are good commuter cars and a fun but safe first cars for the kids (having a certain panzerlike ruggedness.)

 

Snipers Rule the Modern Battlfield

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SR 25 Stoner Sniper Rifle
SR 25 Stoner Sniper Rifle

On the Strategy Page, I read another of their excellent pieces recently, oddly enough called Snipers Rule:

Currently, about ten percent of American infantry are trained and equipped as snipers. Commanders have found that filling the battlefield with two man (spotter and shooter) sniper teams not only provides more intelligence, but also a lot of precision firepower. Snipers are better at finding the enemy, and killing them with a minimum of noise and fuss. New rifle sights (both day and night types) have made all infantry capable of accurate, single shot, fire. With the emphasis on keeping civilian casualties down, and the tendency of the enemy to use civilians as human shields, lots of snipers, or infantrymen who can take an accurate shot at typical battle ranges (under 100 meters), are the best way to win without killing a lot of civilians.

New sniper equipment has made a big difference. During the last decade the U.S. Army has issued several new sniper rifles. The M110 SASS (Semi-Automatic Sniper System) was delivered to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan four years ago. This weapon is not a big technological breakthrough. It is based on the older AR-10 rifle. The U.S. Navy had already been buying a similar weapon, the SR25 since the early 1990s. The SR25 was also known as the Mk11 Sniper Rifle System (SRS). These new semi-automatic sniper rifles are 7.62mm weapons based on the M-16 design elements. The basis for the M-16 was the AR-15, and a 7.62mm version of that weapon was called the AR-10. About half the parts in the SR25 are interchangeable with those in the M-16.

 Read the whole thing if you are interested in modern warfare and the American way of war.  One should put this in context of smart bombs and drone assassins, the fact is that it takes very few modern US warriors to take down a lot of bad guys, without the massive ‘collateral damage’ that our fires centric way of war used to mean (not that any of the others were better, we were just more worried about it.)

Realizing that this going to put me in the ‘gun nut’ category I always get a grin out of the fact tha the iconic US rifle of the Vietnam war and ever since, the M16, was designed in the stoner decade by a guy called Stoner.  It’s also so interesting that the M16 had a horrid reputation and yet has remained the basis of our main fire arm ever since.  In the early days they were prone to jam and some of the early units (If I remember correctly built by Mattel…yes THAT Mattel) were for crap, but with time, training it has shown itself to be the best compromise available for a long time. 

And it’s that word compromise, that used to be an US an American strength.  We and our tools were rarely the very best, at least for argument’s sake, but they almost always had good combinations of attributes available at the right price in the right amounts at the right time, they were compromises, we were good at making very good compromises.  In some ways I fear for a country that has lost its ability to understand that perfection or pure solutions are impossible and that a good compromise is always a better solution anyway because it trades off many factors and allows many to say they had a part in it, even if they also say: “…jeeze why the XXXX team  make THAT decision???”

Eyecandy

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20120111-230942.jpg

A Wide Field Image of the Galactic Center

Image Credit & Copyright: Ivan Eder

Explanation: From Sagittarius to Scorpius, the central Milky Way is a truly beautiful part of planet Earth’s night sky. The gorgeous region is captured in this wide field image spanning about 30 degrees. The impressive cosmic vista, taken in 2010, shows off intricate dust lanes, bright nebulae, and star clusters scattered through our galaxy’s rich central starfields. Starting on the left, look for the Lagoon and Trifid nebulae, the Cat’s Paw, while on the right lies the Pipe dark nebula, and the colorful clouds of Rho Ophiuchi and Antares (right). The actual center of our Galaxy lies about 26,000 light years away and can be found here.

Creative destruction in it’s meme’s

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20120110-232657.jpg Steve Jobs, our Guttenburg, RIP

VodkaPundit, via Instapundit, has a very good point to bear in mind in this the season of CES(RIP?)

When jobs came back to Apple he brought a self operational version of Creative Destruction, the dynamic heart of real capitalism we saw at work in the late eighties to early oughts, the idea that products, product lines even companies do not, should not, live forever but be overtaken by better solutions.

The iPhones 5 years old, it seems reasonable to think there is something next and no reason for it not to be targeted at eventually gobbling the iPhone as we know it.

What set of features would you build into a new personal product that might change the world?

A Couple of Positives| Down with Ethanol! | Up with Capitalism!!!

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Corn...worst source of ethanol ever

Corn...worst source of ethanol ever

So the Atlantic says that the Tea Party has ended the ethanol subsidy.  As if! The only thing that has ended is the Tax Credit, the rules about the % of ethanol in gas are still there and probably more important overall.  The basic problem of ethanol being a terrible source of ethanol is not solved.  Apparently we have started shipping some ethanol overseas, I’d like to know how that happened, I suspect other subsidies. 

One problem with subsidy systems like that set up for Ethanol is that they become terrifically difficult to remove.  An entrenched special interest is created and they have a lot more pull than is generated by the general by very dispersed understanding that it’s a waste of money, the guys who know it’s a waste aren’t losing enough individually to make it worth while fighting the long war to overturn the subsidy.  So to a degree the Tea Party may have done good, concentrating the anti vote enough to do something, hopefully they can move on to other subsidies.

<<<Nuf Said on That Topic>>>

A link to Blomberg from the Atlantic lead to this article A Crisis of Leadership, Not a Crisis of Capitalism by Clive Crook :

With the world’s rich economies struggling and the leaders of the European Union intent on making things worse, the gravity of the economic crisis still confronting the West is hard to exaggerate. Nonetheless, it can be done.

According to what I read, we face not just the worst recession since the 1930s, but a challenge to the West’s entire economic order. The Great Recession exposes the poverty of orthodox economics. It constitutes an ideological crisis. It shows that capitalism itself is “fundamentally” flawed. If all this were true, I’d be a lot more worried about the coming year than I am — which is saying something.

A new year’s corrective is in order. Reports of the death of capitalism are greatly exaggerated.

What’s surprising is just how wrong those reports have been. Perhaps, as I write, the revolutionaries are organizing in secret, but I see no signs of a popular uprising.

Oh for crying out loud!!!!!

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This is just ludicrous…..Afghan Commission: US Abuses Detainees

Pakistan, Afghanistan, stupidstan…..we brought some of this on our own heads in the post 9/11 days(daze.). However this is just foreign thugs/frenemies using the Media as a tool to bludgeon our diplomats (who often seem to care more about their Euro, etc peers opinions than the principles they are supposed to support.)

KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan investigative commission accused the American military Saturday of abusing detainees at its main prison in the country, saying anyone held without evidence should be freed and backing President Hamid Karzai’s demand that the U.S. turn over all prisoners to Afghan custody.
The demands put the U.S. and the Afghan governments on a collision course as negotiations continue for a Strategic Partnership Document with America that will determine the U.S. role in Afghanistan after 2014, when most foreign troops are due to withdraw. By pushing the detainees issue now, Karzai may be is seeking to bolster his hand in the negotiations

My mods in the above quote….read the article it’s pretty clear this is blackmail/extortion, and we need to remember this like kidnapping is an ‘honored’ tradition in this part of the world.

The Instant Mall of the Future….an interesting idea

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London’s new Containerized Mall

This  article A Walk Through London’s Boxpark, the Temporary Mall That’s Probably Coming Soon to a City Near You in the The Atlantic magazines Cities section talks about Boxpark, a containerized mall in london.  The structure are modified shipping containers with added insulation and fittings to make them into stores.  The whole thing was assembled on an empty lot in a few days and will be removed when construction starts on the building that’s going to go there permanently, in 5 years.  This is the next phase of the pop up store phenomenon, a pop up mall and there no longer needs to be an empty storefront available.  Also this would work to experiment with new store concepts, new locations, and even just to ‘freshen up’ or ‘change up’ a stale section of real estate. 

Also a dig for the Atlantic, which can be cranky liberal but is generally pretty even-handed and has some very good articles.  Their web page is pretty darn good and the Cities section has some fascinating off the beaten track articles.