Yearly Archives: 2011

Why do I have a feeling that this is not the only TSA agent getting away with th…

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Google+ on by (updated 4828 days ago)

Why do I have a feeling that this is not the only TSA agent getting away with this?

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TSA Agent Caught With Passenger's iPad in His Pants; Allegedly Took $50,000 in Other Goods, Cops Say – Broward/Palm Beach News – The Daily Pulp
Update: TSA agent Nelson Santiago is not the first agency employee to be arrested on theft charges. ?While most Transportation…

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The shuttle Atlantis lifted off for the final time today heralding the final phase… 1

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Google+ on by (updated 4828 days ago)

The shuttle Atlantis lifted off for the final time today heralding the final phase of an era of manned US space flight that has spanned my lifetime so far. I was born while the Gemini program was still going on but my first really solid memory of space travel was the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1974. The era of sending Americans into space then took a pause while the Shuttles were prepared.

I was also a tech nerd and I can recall the images of the Enterprise lifting off from the back of a 747 and gliding back to earth and then watching Challenger blast off into space. By the time Challenger blew up, I was in college but actually working a co-op term at GM in St Catherines. I remember working in the office when someone came in and said that the shuttle had exploded and many of us engineers crowded into a conference room to watch the TV and find out what had happened in those pre-web, pre-Twitter days.

Eventually the shuttle program got back on track but for reasons having to do with too many cooks and only one vat of broth, it never did meet the expectations set for it. While it was clearly a triumph of engineering brute force that this kludged up system ever worked at all, the shuttle system never had any of the optimized design elegance that could have made a true success story. The amount of time and work required to turn around a shuttle and get it ready for flight again was simply insane for what was supposed to be a "space-plane"

Following the 2003 Columbia disintegration, the program probably should have been retired but with the ISS only partly finished, the shuttle was needed to get the job done. Now that the ISS is essentially complete, the orbiters will finally be laid to rest at various museums.

I only visited the Kennedy Space Center once, last November for the aborted STS-133 mission of Discovery and thus never got to see a lift off live. Fortunately I did get a tour of the orbiter preparation facility and the insanely huge vehicle assembly building where the shuttles and the Apollo craft before them came together.

While I remain a lover of science and technology, I agree that at this point in time we need to scale back manned space flight. The technology is simply not there for us to safely and affordably send humans beyond the moon and benefits of doing so remain dubious. Besides there is still far too much we don't yet understand about ourselves and the pale blue dot that we live on. We need to explore and understand our own oceans before we head to Mars and beyond. I'm glad we did what we did in space and continue to do on the ISS, but it's time for a new direction wherever that may lead us.

In album Kennedy Space Center Nov 2010 (101 photos)

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As America celebrates the anniversary of the birth of a nation, it's long past…

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Google+ on by (updated 4828 days ago)

As America celebrates the anniversary of the birth of a nation, it's long past time for a new constitutional amendment that would correct the fundamentally flawed premise that corporations should have the rights of persons. No legal entity should have those rights without also taking on the same responsibilities. A new movement is starting that would enshrine the idea that Humans not corporations are persons entitled to the rights such as participation in the political process.

It's time to put the people back in charge!

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"We the corporations" | Move to Amend
"We the corporations". On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the US Const…

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Rick Karr recently wrote a great piece for Engadget based on an investigation he…

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Google+ on by (updated 4828 days ago)

Rick Karr recently wrote a great piece for Engadget based on an investigation he did into broadband speeds and pricing in the US and Europe. To the surprise of no one here in America we pay too much here and get too many limits on our usage while AT&T, Verizon and Comcast fight competition at every turn. In the UK, customers often get as many as a dozen options with higher speeds and lower prices and providers are actually removing usage caps. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/networking/2011/03/10/bt-to-lift-limits-on-unlimited-broadband-40092098/

Here in the US we are getting tighter caps even as speeds creep up and we get access to new services like Netflix and Hulu streaming that threaten to put ever more users over their caps. It's even worse in the wireless field where Verizon is rolling out LTE at the same time it introduces the most expensive tiered pricing in the business.

Frankly the opposition that AT&T and Verizon have to increased competition should be all the reason that the FCC and FTC needs to deny the T-Mobile takeover. None of the big carriers should be allowed to buy out other companies until we start seeing some increased competition.

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Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government …
Rick Karr is a journalist and frequent contributor to The Engadget Show. If you've stayed with friends who live in European cities, you've prob.

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Ideas are not property

This entry was posted in copyright culture media and tagged copyright eg8 john perry barlow lawrence lessig nicolas sarkozy on by (updated 5017 days ago)

In the days before the G8 summit in France last week, French president Nicolas Sarkozy decided to invite influential people from the technology and content fields to discuss the role of the internet in society in a forum dubbed eG8.  Unfortunately what Sarkozy had in mind was less of an open discussion on modern communications and more of a rubber stamp on his intention to increase control over content and copyright.  Sarkozy has been a strong proponent of so-called “three strikes” rules that would ban people from using the net if they are accused of copyright infringement three times.

Note that was accused not convicted. Major media companies have shown no aversion over the past decade to accuse people of theft and infringement often in cases where the appearance of a piece of media was merely incidental such as a radio playing a song in the background of a video on youtube. Companies like Viacom have gone further by suing Youtube for serving up infringing material that in many cases has been posted by agents of Viacom itself for promotional purposes.

The major media companies clearly have no credibility in this game, nor does Sarkozy.

“Now that the Internet is an integral part of most people’s live, it would be contradictory to exclude governments from this huge forum,” said Sarkozy. “Nobody could nor should forget that these governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies. To forget this is to take the risk of democratic chaos and hence anarchy.”

Here Sarkozy couldn’t be more wrong.  Even in a democracy – or especially in a democracy – government is NOT the sole legitimate representative of the people. The people themselves in a modern country can be a far better representative of their own will than a government that is typically more beholden to huge corporate donors than to its own constituents. To imply otherwise indicates that control is far more important that freedom.  Freedom is messy and people like Sarkozy and the heads of big business need to learn to deal with that.

Thankfully not everyone on hand was simply a lacky for Sarkozy and the entrenched incumbents.  Among the luminaries participating in eG8 were the great prof. Lawrence Lessig and musician/writer/activist John Perry Barlow.  Lessig’s comments about the importance of taking a more hands-off approach to copyright and the internet are in the video at the top of this post.

Barlow was on panel with the French culture minister and the heads of 20th Century Fox, Universal Music France, Bertelsmann, and a French publisher.  Those other participants defended the need to protect the works they own, as opposed to created,  since none of them are actual creators of anything.  They are merely salespeople. After hearing everyone else speak Barlow summed up with the fundamental truth that IDEAS ARE NOT PROPERTY

I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call “intellectual property.” I don’t regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don’t have it, somebody else does.

Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost.

This is a concept that Lessig has also been expressing for many years and it’s one of the driving forces behind creative commons. Unlike tangible property, when someone else uses or expresses your idea, it doesn’t preclude you from using it yourself.  What makes it special is what you do with it.


Protecting the powerful at the expense of the masses

This entry was posted in america ministry of truth politics technology and tagged an informed public gags politics power the powerful transparency unions on by (updated 4490 days ago)

Over the past decade in particular but for some time before that there has been an increasing movement to protect the powerful in our society at the expense of the common people. This movement has accelerated dramatically in the past year at least in part because of the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case that essentially freed corporate interests to spend as much as they want on political campaigns while individuals remain shackled by campaign finance laws.

We can see the initial effects in places like Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan where newly elected republican governors and legislatures have moved rapidly to bring in legislation to strip public sector employees of collective bargaining rights and here in Michigan to dissolve local governments and school boards and replace them with private sector “emergency financial managers.”

However, the problem goes well beyond that into many other sectors of society. For example a company called Medical Justice that aims to protect doctors from frivolous malpractice suits sells them contracts that they can use with their patients. Doctors using these contracts force patients to sign them before providing treatment. These contracts are meant to provide a shield for the doctors from public reviews of their work. According to these “anti-defamation” contracts patients can either be prohibited from posting online reviews of their doctors or the doctors are given the right to edit or delete online postings from patients.

While bogus reviews from disgruntled employees or others with a grudge are always a potential problem, no such contract will do anything to stop it. Anyone can set up a blog or go on Facebook, Twitter or some other site and make negative comments. Doctors are ill-served by paying for such contracts and any patient presented with one should refuse to sign and go find another doctor.  If a doctor is truly providing bad service the public should know about it and the doctor should either improve or go out of business.  DoctoredReviews.com has an excellent response to this whole subject.

Another prime example of the powerful trying to gag the ordinary is pointed out by Seth Godin. In Iowa the legislature is moving forward with a law that would make it illegal to record activities at industrial farming operations without the owners consent. The reality is that many of these operations treat animals very poorly in the pursuit of higher profit margins. While there is nothing wrong in general with profit, the food produced by these farms is often of lower quality (taste and nutritional value) and more susceptible to contamination from pathogens like e-coli.

When public health is at risk, the idea of government banning anyone from showing what goes on these facilities is extremely troubling but unfortunately entirely consistent with politicians that have been funded by the wealthy and powerful.

Godin goes on to explain that public transparency is almost invariably better for business than gagging the public. Republicans like to go on and on about protecting free markets, but they really only care about one side of the equation.  A truly free market requires that both buyers and sellers be informed about the true value of a product and be aware the total supply and demand. Without this knowledge, one side can easily manipulate the other to their own benefit and that is never a good thing for the long-term health of a market or a society.

Regardless of whether the market is for medical services, chicken or labor, both sides of the supply demand equation must be educated and free to take their products/services or money elsewhere.