perfidy

Attend! The Ministry has made crucial and important changes to the blogroll! After a long and painful probationary period involving extensive background checks, lifestyle polygraphs and a couple anal probes, Ted of Rocket Jones has been summarily promoted to the exalted status of "Crony." This act of generosity and selflessness on the part of the Ministry unfortunately has led to other, unintended acts of generosity and selflessness.

The #12 slot of the Ministry's top five list was now open. After extensive deliberations, the Ministry select committee for blog roll changes (promotions and executions sub-committee) determined that Rand Sindberg's Transterrestrial Musings should be elevated to that honorable position despite having a name reminiscent of a Futurama character. His meaty space technology goodness (and offers of sexual favors to committee members) proved to be decisive in the committee's choice.

This however, left yet another open slot, this time in the Ministry Legion of Merit. Rather than reward the obsequious pleadings of the millions of blogs who have petitioned us for recognition, the Committee has deigned to recognize a very new blog. Albion's Seedling is a group blog founded in the last month by Jim Bennett, author of the notorious geo-political tome The Anglosphere Challenge.

Thank you for your Cooperation
This Message from the Ministry of Minor Perfidy

A plethora, a cornicopia, a myriad of links about the wonderful things waiting for us to catch up to them in the future, all in one easy to digest post here at the carnival of tomorrow.

My favorites:

A quick summary of nanotech basics.

Apollo 18!

and...

Rand Sindberg describes NASA's new Lunar plan as Apollo 2.0

In an article for Wired News, Bruce Schneier writes of the challenges the Supreme Court will face in the future as a result of our swiftly advancing technology.

Recent advances in technology have already had profound privacy implications, and there's every reason to believe that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future. Roberts is 50 years old. If confirmed, he could be chief justice for the next 30 years. That's a lot of future.

Here are some examples. Advances in genetic mapping continue, and someday it will be easy, cheap and detailed -- and will be able to be performed without the subject's knowledge. What privacy protections do people have for their genetic map, given that they leave copies of their genome in every dead skin cell that they leave behind? What protections do people have against government actions based on this data? Against private actions?

Should a customer's genetics be considered when granting a mortgage, or determining its interest rate?

Surveillance is another area where technological advances will raise new constitutional questions. I've written about wholesale surveillance, the ability of the government to collect data on everyone and then search that data looking for certain people. We're already seeing this kind of surveillance by automatic license plate readers and aerial photographs.

In the future, this will become more personal. New technologies will be able to peer through walls, under clothing, beneath skin, perhaps even into the activity of the brain. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) rhetorically asked Roberts: "Can microscopic tags be implanted in a person's body to track his every movement.... Can brain scans be used to determine whether a person is inclined toward criminal or violent behavior?" What should be the limits on what the police can do without a warrant?

These issues will be coming to the court in less than a decade. Even more outlandish issues will follow quickly on their heels. In the not to distant future, computers will attain the raw computational power of the human brain. If we create a machine intelligence is it a citizen, and subject to the same rights as you and I, or is it merely subject to copyright law? Neuroscientists and programmers are working to reverse engineer the brain. If you scan your brain, is it you, or are you you? What rights does a simulated animal have - we are working on that right now. If you unplug a simulation of a cat, can the SPCA come after you?

Beyond the world of artificial intelligence, steroid use will seem on a level with steam engines compared to advanced genetic engineering. If you reengineer your nervous system and musculature for greater strength and speed and hti 200 home runs, do you get an asterisk next to your name in the record books?

And what happens when advanced materials technology arrives? Even short of actual, full-on replicating assembler nanotechnology, it is not hard to imagine that home fabricators could become as common as home laser printers. Will the free hardware movement be distributing open source specifications for material goods? What happens when all property becomes intellectual property, and you can have any physical good with merely the software specifications and a pile of dirt? If the cost of materials becomes functionally zero - as it already is for text, software and media - intellectual property disputes will determine the nature of our entire economy.

Further, specifications for weapons and explosives distributed over the internet could allow miscreants to "print" guns, bombs or whatever right from their home fabricator.

Computer and information technology shows no sign in slowing down, in fact even the rate of increase is increasing. With computer power doubling in just over a year, every year, how long before ubiquitous monitoring, in real time, is possible? Can you outwit a million supercomputers with sophisticated and self-learning pattern matching software? Probably not.

These are only a few of the issues that will be before us in the next two decades. The pace of change is accelerating, and the world of ten years from now will be more strange than the world of a hundred years ago. It's going to be a wild ride.

This came out Monday, so excuse my tardiness. A lot of people have linked to it, but if I can't be redundant here, where can I be? Christopher Hitchens is without doubt my favorite liberal. He is also the only well known liberal that I have ever personally met. He is much shorter in person. He had this to say about the recent demonstration in Washington:

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women's struggle"? Don't make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

Some of the leading figures in this "movement," such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what's going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation—these thugs were cloned by the American empire for God's sake—would lead to instant condemnation. But if you thought that, gentle reader, you would be wrong.)

This is not to say that there can't be meaningful criticisms of the war, or of the way it is being conducted. But that is not what these people are about. I saw a car Saturday - likely on his way down to the big fashion meet - with an upside down flag hanging from the antenna. I am a peaceful man, but I wanted to run that asshole off the road, and then beat him senseless with a baseball bat. Far to many of these sub-morons simply do not understand, well, anything. About what America is, or what the terrorists are, or about what liberty might actually mean, or what many have sacrificed to preserve and extend it. And how they expect to convince others with their asinine slogans and offensive theatrics is completely beyond my comprehension.

These folks think that Google is not living up to its corporate motto: "Don't be evil." Here, they explain the evils of gmail. I don't think they'll find a large audience given the near reverence most people feel for Google. I can see that some of what they say is cause for at the very least theoretical concern. But the utility of gmail is simply to amazing for me to want to give it up.

Just one aspect of google's mail interface was enough to sell me - the way it aranges emails by conversation. The fact that I don't have to delete emails, and the ease with which I can sort them is enough to make me a satisfied user. And the spam filtering is the best I've ever seen. All my email accounts now direct their output at on gmail account, where I can archive and search all of my email. Unless we start hearing stories of abuse, I think I'll just be reckless and keep using Big Brother Google's email, map, search and news features.

On another computer security issue, this bit on samizdata is fascinating. The comments have a lot of info about computer security that is worth reading.

Widescale use of computers is really still in its infancy. Privacy, security and fraud issues are only going to get more complex, dangerous, and opaque as time goes on.

Be aware that there is a new, and fairly clever identity theft scam being perpetrated on the unwary. The security officer here at work (I'm a contractor for a tendril of the Department of Justice anemone) sent everyone this email:

In this scam, the scammer calls the residence or office number of the victim and identifies themselves as an officer or employee of the local court of jurisdiction. The scammer announces to the victim, that he/she has failed to report for jury duty, and that a bench warrant was issued against them for their arrest. The victim's reaction is one of shock and surprise which places them at an immediate disadvantage, and much more susceptible to the scam. The victim will rightly deny knowledge of any such claim; that no jury duty notification was ever received.

The scammer shifts into high gear, reassuring the victim of the possibility this is all "just a misunderstanding" or "some sort of clerical error" that can be straightened out on the phone. All they need to do is "verify" their information with a few simple questions. Any reluctance on the victim's part and the scammer will threaten that the failure to provide the information will result in an immediate execution of the arrest warrant. The scammer obtains names, social security numbers, dates of birth, and will solicit credit card or bank account numbers claiming these will be used by their credit bureau to "verify" the victim's identity. Family members who receive these calls are especially vulnerable to coercion. Threats against the victim's career, should he/she be arrested and now have a criminal record, are frightening and persuasive.

Employees and their adult family members must be made aware of this threat to their personal information and identities. Legitimate court employees will never call to solicit information, and would send any official notification by standard mail delivery. Any person receiving such calls should record the scammer's phone number (if Caller ID is available) and immediately report the contact to law enforcement officials.

I believe that most of our readership is fairly savvy, techwise, and not exactly prone to being duped by this sort of thing. Nevertheless, forewarned is forearmed.

Bloomberg, along with everyone else, informs us that "House Majority Leader DeLay Indicted for Conspiracy". Elsewhere, "Republican leadership in disarray after DeLay indictment"

"He's the one person they can't replace," Steny Hoyer, a senior Democrat in the House, said earlier this year of Mr DeLay.

I'm forced to point out that this is a perfect example of everything that's wrong in Washington, and by extension, with our entire political system. Tom Delay was indicted first, foremost, and solely for leading the charge to make the US Congress' delegation from Texas match the political makeup in the state. In essence, he played a crucial role in gerrymandering the gerrymandering of several earlier generations of gerrymandering. And when you're egging Dean Wormer's house, well, you're going to break a few eggs.

Tom Delay being subjected to prosecution in this case is wrong. You see, what Tom Delay should instead have been indicted for the inanity inherent in his assertion that the budget's just about as tight as it needs to be, and there's no fat left to cut. And he should be convicted for believing it, as I'm sure he does. Moron.

Steny Hoyer, quoted in the story up top is right - the Republicans are going to have one heck of a time replacing "The Hammer". I don't know that there is an inexhaustible supply of folks in the Republican delegation with the hubris and stupidity to say and believe the things that Delay has.

If Hoyer's correct, he'll be quite hard to replace, and that's an altogether good thing.

Or so I thought:

It is late in the OSU-Michigan game on an overcast day. Michigan has the ball on the OSU 3, with 2 seconds left, and down 14-10. There is time for one more play.

Lloyd Carr calls timeout. As the team is coming to the sideline, Lloyd looks to the heavens and says, "God - I've been a good man. A churchgoing man. I've tried to do what's right and I've never asked you for anything. But, this is a big game and if I could get a little guidance, I would be forever grateful".

The clouds part, sun shines on Lloyd and he hears a voice bellow "I Right 39 Pitch Trap".

Lloyd can't believe it! God himself gave him the play! It'll work for sure. The team comes to the sideline and Lloyd excitedly gives them the play. The timeout ends and the teams come back on the field. Lloyd can barely contain his excitement - he's going to win.

Play resumes and the ball is snapped. The Michigan QB pitches to the back. For a split second, there's a hole - which is quickly filled by AJ Hawk, who tackles the Michigan back short of the goal line.

Time expires and Ohio State players storm the field to celebrate. Lloyd is in shock - he can't believe the play didn't work. Lloyd looks to the heavens and cries, "God - why did you call THAT play?"

God looks down, shrugs, turns to his right and says, "Woody - why did we call that play?"

It may be a lame, pollyannaesque effort on my part to see some good in this; but there is a part of me that actually feels hopeful after reading this:

The space shuttle and International Space Station — nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades — were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

Well, duh. Space advocates have been saying that for decades. Three of them, in fact.

Some other choice bits:

Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth.

"It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path," Griffin said.

Only now is the nation's space program getting back on track, Griffin said. He announced last week that NASA aims to send astronauts back to the moon in 2018 in a spacecraft that would look like the Apollo capsule.

Joe Rothenberg, head of NASA's manned space programs from 1995 to 2001, defended the programs for providing lessons about how to operate in space. But he conceded that "in hindsight, there may have been other ways."

So, NASA admits that we're hitting the big red reset button and going back to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1975. It's a do-over. Never mind the fourteen deaths and $150 billion we wasted on the shuttle, and the $100 billion wasted on a nearly useless ISS.

There were several major problems with NASA development programs over the last three misguided decades. First, doctrinaire approaches to design problems. Pick a solution and make it fit, regardless of other considerations. A procrustean space program. Second, an unwillingness to use traditional design methodologies. The design/test/build/repeat cycle is almost entirely absent from NASA programs, except for a few aeronautical research projects. Build early and build often is how you figure out how to do things. Repeatedly spending millions to billions on empty paper designs that are never built is job security for government drones.

Change these things, and even the decision to go with the Shuttle could have been redeemed. The basic architecture of the Shuttle system is more or less sound. Certainly not much less sound than other launch vehicles. Large rockets do have a tendency to explode. But where was the experimentation? We never tested other configurations or cargo versions of the base shuttle stack. We never lofted the fuel tanks into orbit to see if they could be used as habitats We never added hardware to the system, incrementally modifying the orbiter - let alone experimented with new orbiters that could be used with variants of the shuttle stack. We never tinkered. Nothing was done. We simply kept using the same configuration until it blew up. Then we kept using it until it blew up again. Then we started using it again. What's that definition of mental illness? Doing the same thing over and and over but expecting different results?

The tragedy of the death of the Apollo program is that those clever rocket scientists who got us to the moon had thousands of clever ideas for what to do with the hardware we'd developed. Skylab was just one of them, and that got into orbit more by inertia than will. But we scrapped all that, and went with the shuttle. There have been many ideas for what could be done with shuttle hardware, but none have been pursued. And now we are on the verge of scrapping this system without even having a follow on just like we did in the late seventies.

Given that the people at NASA are actually rocket scientists, this behavior is hard to explain.

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed."

"OH NO!" the President exclaims. "That's terrible!"

His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.

Finally, the President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"

[wik] This joke was told to me by a two-time Bush-voting Republican, which makes it all right. I'm no anti-Dentite!

[alsø wik] C'mon. That's funny! Brazillion!