Category: Technology

More good stuff on the open frontiers – 9/16

Amazing technology today and the technology that is long gone. Also, a decision soon on private sector spaceship.

Technology

9/13 – Carpe Diem – Video of the day: Awesome machines – Very cool machines automating complex stuff:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c30_1409278220

I like the chicken picker-upper and the huge tree-cutting stuff.

9/11 – Heaven666 – These are the Things Your Kids Will Never Understand – Gotta’ check out the article for the visuals. A few I like:

Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 9/16”

More good stuff on surveillance – 9/15

Haven’t mentioned any good stuff on our surveillance society for a few months. Here’s a few articles of interest:

Downside of technology (cross-posted from previous post

because it has significance on the surveillance society we are in)

9/6 – The Economist – The two towers – Junk science is putting innocent people in jail – Cell phone calls don’t necessarily go to the nearest tower.

Continue reading “More good stuff on surveillance – 9/15”

Can you live with mission critical applications disappearing for a week?

Consider your vulnerabilities to a software vendor disappearing overnight.

I changed RSS readers for a third time this week. They keep shutting down on me.

As an active blogger, reading a lot of blogs and news sources is mission critical. Well, I suppose I choose to make it mission critical – it’s a big deal for me.

Substitute your mission critical applications for my reliance on RSS feed and you can think through an assessment of how vulnerable you are to vendors just going away.

(Cross-posted from my other blog, Nonprofit update.)

On Monday Bloglines disappeared. That has been my RSS feed for quite a while. Might be a server problem. Maybe a software upgrade that failed. Down lines somewhere. I can live with that for a little bit.

Continue reading “Can you live with mission critical applications disappearing for a week?”

More good stuff on the open frontiers – 9/11

Vinyl LPs going strong, Rams vs. Drones is lopsided game, downside of cell phone tracking.

Surge of US energy production and a collapse in Venezuela.

Just like the wild west in the late 1800s, the frontiers of private space exploration, energy and technology are wide open. A few articles to stretch your brain.

A decidedly low-tech countermeasure to surveillance drones:

9/2 – The Dish – Sheep Solved Drone Debate – From Buddhanz1. A ram is not amused with an intruding drone and takes it out. Is equally unamused by owner of said drone trying to make an escape with the recovered drone:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfLCb4ewDDc&feature=player_embedded]

Technology

 

8/27 – TVGConsulting – The History of Business Technology – Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 9/11”

More good stuff on the open frontiers – 8/26

Just like the wild west in the late 1800s, the frontiers of private space exploration, energy and technology are wide open. Here are a few of the articles that stretched my understanding of this amazing world we live in. A brief comment on each.

Space

8/21 – Wall Street Journal – Mining Asteroids and Exploiting the New Space Economy – Dr. K. Dean Larson – Asteroids contain water, titanium, iron, platinum, and lots of other resources needed to build things and sustain life in space. What’s the big deal?

Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 8/26”

Astounding progress everywhere in everything over last 50 years – No better time to be alive than today.

As a break from the dreary news headlines, consider the progress made over the last 50 years in a variety of areas.

Matt Ridley offers a lot of Reasons to be cheerful.

Here is an overview:

Compared with any time in the past half century, the world as a whole is today wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, safer, more peaceful and more equal.

Continue reading “Astounding progress everywhere in everything over last 50 years – No better time to be alive than today.”

More good stuff on the open frontiers – 8/15

Just like the wild west in the late 1800s, the frontiers of publishing, technology, and energy are wide open. Here’s a few of the articles that stretched my understanding of this amazing world we live in. Just a brief comment on each.

Downside of technology

Yes, there is a downside.

7/30 – Yahoo – Drone Carrying contraband crashes at SC prison – Drone carrying cell phones, marijuana, synthetic marijuana (huh? what is that?), and tobacco crashed outside the fence of a prison. Article mentions a successful effort to get contraband inside a Georgia prison last year.

Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 8/15”

A way forward for a better energy future without slice-and-dicers or wing-toasters

If you have read more than, oh, say 5 consecutive posts on this blog, you know that technology in place today for solar and wind power ranks poorly on any scale of value I can think of. Whether I look at the cost of energy, level of environmental damage, devastation to wildlife in general, loss of protected species in particular, general disruption, exorbitant costs, visual pollution, noise pollution, corruption caused by crony capitalism, or damage to cultural artifacts, it is obvious to me that slice-and-dicers and wing-toasters are lousy sources of energy.

What is a better way forward? For the near term, abundant oil and natural gas.

Longer term? I don’t know.

Nobody knows.

And that is the point.

Continue reading “A way forward for a better energy future without slice-and-dicers or wing-toasters”

Drone pilots and more background on drones

Article in the Economist discusses the pressures on drone pilots – Drone pilots:  Dilbert at war. Article in WSJ gives more background on the range of drones in operation today. First up, the Economist article.

There are serious pressures from being in a war zone for an 8 or 10 hour shift then going home to have dinner with your family in your own home/apartment. You can’t get a brew at the on-base club and decompress with the other crews who also have nothing else to do except hang out with you. Classification levels and operational security requirements mean you can’t discuss anything outside a secure area.

Continue reading “Drone pilots and more background on drones”

More good stuff on surveillance – 6/28

Here is my thirteenth list of good stuff on our surveillance society that I’d like talk about but only have time to recommend with a paragraph.

6/6 – Wired – Some Governments Have Backdoor Access to Listen in on Calls, Vodafone says– Continue reading “More good stuff on surveillance – 6/28”

Accident rates for military drones

The Washington Post has started a major investigative series on drones. First article describes losses in the military. Check out When Drones Fall From the Sky published June 20.

Looks to me like the implied conclusion the authors want you to reach is that drones are insufficiently reliable and unsafe for operation in U.S. airspace.

Several reasons for high loss rate come to mind. Institutional learning curve for brand new technology. Intentionally nonredundancy for an unmanned weapon system moved into use during combat. Not as much safety margins are designed in for unmanned systems in combat zone. Tradeoff of redundancy for reduced cost, increased range, and higher weapon payload.

Some great research from the article:

Continue reading “Accident rates for military drones”

More good stuff on the open frontiers – 6/25

I read the news and see wide open frontiers in the worlds of publishing, technology, space, and energy. In terms of opportunities and growth, this reminds me of the wild west and homesteading days in the late 1800s.

Here’s a few of the articles that stretched my understanding of this amazing world we live in.

Perpetual Malthusian foolishness

4/25 – Wall Street Journal – The World’s Resources Aren’t Running Out – Ecologists worry that the world’s resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again – There are constant shouts of fright that we will run out of some resource in a decade or two. Maybe the day after tomorrow. Such predictions are as foolish as they are wrong. Matt Ridley points out that innovation, human creativity in other words, blasts through those limits over and over and over again.

Here is part of the blindness: Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 6/25”

Here is an illustration of the damage caused by our government from the spying scandal: We can see the loopholes in corporate denials.

Those who have paid attention to the massive spying effort of the feds have learned how to parse corporate denials. Comments like We have never knowingly participated in program ‘AbuseOurCustomersTrust’, could mean one of three things:

  • The company didn’t know they were participating because they got bugged or hacked, so they really didn’t know until they read it in the newspaper like you did, or
  • The company knows the actual program was TellTheFedsEverythingYourCustomersEverSaid, therefore they really and truly didn’t participate in a completely different program called AbuseOurCustomersTrust, or
  • The company has no idea what name was used for the program for which they were a fully aware participant.

All of which means the company was telling the technical truth while fully cooperating with the specified program and saying they didn’t.

Shall we apply this parsing ability to a denial from the UPS about shipping packages to the NSA for hacking?

Background

Continue reading “Here is an illustration of the damage caused by our government from the spying scandal: We can see the loopholes in corporate denials.”

Don’t complain about disappearing mom-and-pop record stores as you download an MP3 of your favorite song

Keep an eye out for the idea of creative destruction. That’s the idea that a new way of doing business will replace the old way and consumers reap huge benefits.

Many people bemoan Wal-Mart destroying lots of small shops. I understand the damage since that phenomenon affected friends of mine.

Before Wal-Mart, the large chain grocery stores wiped out lots of small neighborhood markets.

Don’t forget what happened in the music industry.

John Bredehoft, writing at tymshft, reminds us What goes around comes around – the record industry.

Continue reading “Don’t complain about disappearing mom-and-pop record stores as you download an MP3 of your favorite song”

More good stuff on the open frontiers – 6/6

Just like the wild west and homesteading days in the late 1800s, the frontiers of publishing, technology and space are wide open. Here’s a few of the articles that stretched my understanding of this amazing world we live in.

Publishing

6/5 – Daily Beast – Amazon is NOT the Vladimir Putin of the Publishing World – Until now, I’ve not tried to sort out the spat between Amazon and Hachette. Who is Hachette, I hear you ask? They are one of the big publishing house. They are not an issue in my life because they would never, ever talk to a little bitty author with sub-microscopic level of sales like me.

The visible part of the dispute is Amazon posting a higher price on Hachette books, allegedly removing the ‘you can order weeks in advance’ button, shipping slower than arrive-first-thing-tomorrow-morning, and suggesting someone else on the ‘net may have a better price.

Article above explains Hachette wants you and me to pay more and Amazon wants you and me to pay less. What Amazon is doing as a negotiating strategy is offering books at the terms, availability, and prices Hachette wants.

The horrible, cruel, cut-throatedness of Amazon is amusingly described: Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 6/6”