At www.breitbart.com more people killed by clubs and hammers than rifles each year. AWR Hawkins
According to the FBI annual crime statistics, the number of murders committed annually with hammers and clubs far outnumbers the number of murders committed with a rifle.
The iPad is the premier tablet and it’s probably nearly the perfect size and weight for its form factor. That’s not to say that within the form factor there is no room for improvement. A screen that takes up most of the face should be a near term target, as should an auxiliary screen on the back face that provides bright light reading and low power / speed interactivity for those who don’t live indoors all the time. To support the iPad as a companion device, multi level security is a growing need.
Make the bezel the same on the iPad as minimal as possible (get rid of the push button) push the screen out to the edge, don’t change the shell size. This with continued pixel densification will put the screen on another level altogether. Make thumb and palm detection native and intelligent enough to enable me to rest my palm on the screen and write with a stylus as if the screen were regular paper.
Put an eInk reader panel on the back to enable the display of text and graphic art, this will enable high light low power reading applications and some other limited visual bandwidth applications such as phone etc. (This will be accomplished with a smart cover but it would be cool if it were integral with the iPad.)
The radio suite & battery life along with the camera, face time, GPS, and other built in sensors are probably good enough not to call for increases in size weight, but neither should they be decremented.
The iPad is far to big a part of many people’s eLives to leave to the pitiful protection it has today. We need multi level security, enable me to turn the iPad on as if there is no security for consuming web pages, playing games, and using certain apps. But for other functions use face recognition, symbolic coding other than a number pad, voice recognition, retina image recognition and even finger print recognition in combination to protect various levels of data in the unit.
Enable cyber security with one or more over watch processors that is not linked to the outside world for some level of checking to make sure that the tablet has not been compromised. A version of this ‘chip’ may be linked to a secure remote system (short-range) so businesses or organizations can disable certain functions of the iPad remotely to make sure that pictures, audio, or other data cannot be put into memory without authorization. This Big Brother functionality is a bit daunting but at least the over watch processor is probably going to be needed. The full BB may be an external attachment and not integral so one can shed it easily….
Eisenhower National Historic Site
Ike and the Generals
By Evan Thomas Published December 16, 2012FoxNews.com
I like Ike more every time I read about him, I seems to me that he may well be the most under rated president of the modern era. Many will say that he’s remembered for his glory in WWII and that this has covered up the fact that he was past it when it came time to be president and just yucked and golfed his way through eight years with no real threats. And yet its was this period in the 50’s that was probably the most risky insofar as the chances of nuclear war went, because of Soviet Military Weakness and US Military Arrogance. Evan Thomas’ argument is that Ike bluffed both sides into quiescence by essentially posing an all or nothing threat over everyone’s head.
Warning, my interpretation of what I’ve read in the above article and elsewhere: Why would he have had to hold something over the head of his own generals? Because they had developed their own power base (military industrial complex, remember) and were if not out of control, then out to control the narrative regarding the Red menace and the solution to said menace. Ike realized that he did not have enough direct control over his generals to stop an accidental or ‘accidental’ escalation from taking place. So he put forth a strategy of massive retaliation and pulled US forces back to positions where they were not in direct confrontation. He then supported the technology that would give the president the best and most immediate information about the enemies capabilities and to some extent intentions (spy planes, spy satellites, the NSA etc) so he and future presidents would have the tools to keep the generals flights of fancy (missile gap, bomber gap, etc) in check. He also started the process of professionalization of the nuclear triad that essentially created a grand strategy / strategic viewpoint that made it harder for high-octane hot heads like Le May etc to become threats to peace and human survival.
So obviously I dropped the ball on NaNoWriMo 2012, and I started out doing so well with all the best intentions. However with a daughter’s wedding and thanksgiving to survive and real work requiring attention so we can continue to pay the bills (not to mention a semi major home construction project gone a lot over schedule) I just ran out of the mental and chronological resources to ‘get-er-done’ as it were.
Catching the Watcher is not done-fore however I have continued to work on it though at a lot slower rate. Its now upwards of 40K words and (I think) roughly half done, hopefully I can wrap it up sometime in January.
So obviously I am not a ‘real’ blogger either … real life intervened and I heeded the call. Despite all my toys and channels of access I still could not find it in me to even put a few thoughts down, post a picture, etc. Maybe I should blame it on the new iPad with its beguilingly sharp yet tiny text and butter smooth reaction to my every touch, along with the strikingly fast LTE link and up-rated WiFi. But then again I can do all sorts of blogging from the iPad so it should really be an enabler of more doing not more slacking off.
I could blame it all on others or on my own failures as a person. But the fact is that life is impossible to regulate. There is only one me on this thread of time from past to future and a practical infinity of other threads are bustling against me at the wave front of now. To change frames, the water is flowing under my bridge and it will never come back. But its good to watch it slide past every once in a while and realize that in no possible world can I ever realistically aspire to perfection, let alone reach it, but in aspiring to do the best I can with the now I have, I at least make progress in a direction I get to call ‘right’ as in right for me and the world as I understand it.
Catching the Watcher:
I need to catch some time with the keyboard … I have the basic story line in my head, need to get it out. But too many distractions, like work, life, Thanksgiving, construction delays, daughters wedding … Yeehaa …
Onwards and upwards into the black!
So someone might ask what is the world like in the 2060’s and how do I know? To which I reply I obviously cannot know, look at what the smart futurists in 1960 thought the world would be like in the 21st century…for example 2001 (still the best(only) ‘hard’ sci fi movie ever.)
Turn the question around, what was the world like in 1960, transistor just invented, first men in space. But those who were adults in the think of it had grown up during an incredible step change in technology over twenty years and they expected it to continue.. Of course many of the technologies that had gone through that step change had pretty much peaked out (the 737 flew first time only a few years later, the B52 was in service.) But technology they thought was peaking (computers, radios, etc) were really only on the ramp towards immense changes. Then if you look twenty years on 1980 and twenty years on again 2000, you get some idea of the ramps of change in tech and society. You also get the randomization of events in the real world; tsunami’s, revolutions, wars, demagogues, political movements, etc.
What I try to do is pick the tech, economic social and political ramps looking at 10,15,20 year slices and wrap that all up and come up with a history that makes some sense of the background of the story I am telling. It’s not perfect and I do not expect any of my predictions to come true, but its fun and interesting to think about.
So Progress continues and today was a good one. Space battles always get the blood flowing. Anyway here are the stats for the day:
I am setting the story in the 2060’s after a half century of banal and horrific events. A smallish nuclear war, the collapse of the old Middle East and the rise of a new Caliphate, but that’s all (important) background to the story. I try to focus on characters, on the story of their lives as it interacts with great events and how those things interact with their environment, which in many ways is much more fantastical than any fantasy.
Ah sweet progress, not much yesterday (its rolled into today’s count.) I should have gotten more done today but I kept on hitting blocks and getting the urge to get up and go do something else. Hopefully I can get another good stint tomorrow and Sunday, fortunately for NaNoWriMo progress and very unfortunately for my real life the work I am having done on my house is taking longer than expected, this time the coating for the new cork flooring needs to harden for 72 hours before I can start moving furniture in so another damned weekend down the drain!
Cover art Draft:
This World and Others 