We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Interesting legal issues are raised, I feel, by this story:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Call it spam rage: A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis.
In one of the first prosecutions of its kind in the state that made “road rage” famous, Charles Booher, 44, was arrested on Thursday and released on bail for making repeated threats to staff of a Canadian company between May and July.
Booher threatened to send a “package full of Anthrax spores” to the company, to “disable” an employee with a bullet and torture him with a power drill and ice pick; and to hunt down and castrate the employees unless they removed him from their e-mail list, prosecutors said.
He used return e-mail addresses including Satan@hell.org.
In a telephone interview with Reuters on Friday, Booher acknowledged that he had behaved badly but said his computer had been rendered almost unusable for about two months by a barrage of pop-up advertising and e-mail.
Here’s what happened: I go to their Web site and start complaining to them, would you please, please, please stop bothering me,” he said. “It just sort of escalated … and I sort of lost my cool at that point.
I believe that Charles Booher speaks for many of us. In some ways, it strikes me, this resembles the Tony Martin case. The complaint against Martin was that he has shot one of his burglar-tormenters in the back. But since this burglar had attacked him repeatedly and since his latest attack provided yet further evidence that, if he could, he would be back, it made sense to me for Martin to shoot him in the back in self defence, against his next attack.
Booher requested, then demanded, that his computer to be left alone. But alas, Booher was unaware that his replies merely proved that he and his email were real, so the bombardments immediately intensified. But given that Booher was unlikely ever to catch these miscreants, was it not reasonable for him to threaten complete ghastliness in the unlikely event that he did? Had he known with certainty who they were, such bloodcurdling threats as Booher’s would have been excessive. More mundane remedies would have been sufficient. However, for people who behave as Booher’s tormentors behaved, is there not a case for the reintroduction of something like hanging, drawing and quartering? Or maybe crucifixion?
I agree, probably a bit over the top. But Booher’s rather extreme reaction does serve to remind us all of just what a problem spam is now becoming for many people, and that if the free market does not spread around some answers to the problems of people like Booher, governments will be only to ready to use his plight to impose their own much more draconian arrangements, in the form of alleged cures that will almost certainly turn out worse than the disease, but whose worseness will only become obvious when it is all in place and impossible then to reverse.
I for one would love to have a comment string explaining how ‘anti-spam,’ software works, what principles it follows, how it avoids stopping good stuff while still stopping the bad, and so on. Maybe Booher’s problem has already been solved, and the only problem that remains is telling him and everyone like him what this solution is.
This is big. I mean it is really big. It is so big I had to take time from paid work to pass it along.
A small entrepreneurial company, Changing World Technologies, has just extended the Petroleum age to infinity. That’s right. We aren’t going to run out of oil. Ever. To top it off, we won’t be adding more carbon to the atmosphere – we will just be recycling the same carbon stocks over and over again. Even better: we can tell OPEC to go rotate because fuel imports will become a thing of the past.
Does this all seem like fantasy? It did to me when I first heard about it, but the more I read the more convinced I am. The technology takes any carbon based waste, and I do mean any carbon based waste and turns it into high quality oil, water and some minerals at 85% energy efficiency. 15% of the output supplies enough energy to run the process. It’s not hype and vu-graphs either. They’ve got a real pilot plant going up beside the Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri. Oil from turkey offal.
They estimate the US could supply all of it’s oil needs from recycling. It’s not a technology likely to get buried either. The large oil companies can phase into the new technology with hardly a dropped dividend.
It is also of interest for the ‘Small is Beautiful’ crowd and those of us in the Space settlement community. The technology scales both up and down. If you live in the middle of the Australian outback, you can chuck your shite and animal carcasses into the hopper on one end… and fill up the old diesel RV from the other fifteen minutes later.
Julian Simon is giggling in his grave.
Carthage, Missouri Commercial Plant at Butterball Turkey factory is operational.
Photo: Changing World Technologies
The economic, strategic, social and libertarian implications of this are huge. I’ve not the time to write down the mass of thoughts whirling around in my head right now, but I am certain I can depend on our literate readership to expand on the possibilities and write them up for me. See you in comments when I’ve some spare time!
One of our readers has pointed out this article about the current status of the venture. The first plant is online and others are now funded and in planning.
In contemplating where things stand regarding the threat of terror attacks on our homes from radical islamic groups, we have tended, perhaps understanderbly, to overlook sources of trouble closer to home. An article
in the wonderfully revamped website of the American Spectator, a conservative leaning journal, describes the aims and methods of extremist environmental groups. It makes for worrying reading.
Like their better-known terrorist brethren who hate America and its capitalist system, ELF undertakes actions it knows will have no direct consequence beneficial to its stated goals. It merely looks to inflict harm, hoping that will cow people into living in teepees and biking to work. ELF members are sustained by hate against infidels who don’t share their extremist religion, and are eager to commit violence against their “enemies.” So far that violence has been targeted against property, but as the more radical members come to realize that burning down a few houses and vandalizing SUVs aren’t accomplishing anything, and fueled by their demonizing rhetoric, violence against people is not far off.
There is no great surprise in this. Witness what happened to the staff working for the Huntingdon Life Sciences business. Witness the constant vandalism of genetically modified crops. If you are in the grip of an ideology that holds “nature” and its creatures as inviolable, and believe that all sentient creatures have “rights” then it is perhaps inevitable that some folk are going to resort to physical violence to get their way.
As Virginia Postrel noted on her blog some time ago (cannot find the exact article, I am afraid), we need to hear from mainstream green lobbies about how much they deplore violent acts. So far, I have heard diddely squat from any such group on this matter.
I do not believe I am being hysterical in suggesting that it is only a matter of time before quite a few folk are going to get killed by enviro-nuts. There is not much we ourselves can do apart from show vigilance. However, what we can and must do is to constantly challenge their ideology and continue to champion the achievements of reason, science and technology that have lifted us up from the swamps. These nutters would have us return whence we came.
Bernie Greene wonders just how scientific is the science behind the smoking debate?
Epidemiology began with a fellow called John Snow investigating to find the cause of a cholera epidemic in London in the 19th Century. He had the idea that it might be coming from contamination in a well. So he took a map showing the locations of wells and plotted the incidence of the disease on the map. Sure enough they were mostly in close proximity to one particular well. He had the well put out of service and there were no more new cases of cholera. That is a simple story of logic and surveying intelligently applied to test a theory.
It is very unfortunate that it was so simple to solve. He might then have left a better example for his followers.
What if he had found that the 166 1 total cholera cases were scattered all over the map pretty evenly but that they all had pink carnations on their coats? One hundred thousand people wore pink carnations and 99,874 did not get cholera.
What does he do now? Well if he were a tobacco investigator he would petition the government to do something about pink carnations. But let’s say he is a brighter boy.
He decides to go and interview the cholera cases in more depth. → Continue reading: Honest science or propaganda?
Plato’s Utopia has long served as a double-edged sword to any aspiring totalitarian. Many of the world’s greatest adventurers, explorers and thinkers have sought the fabled Lost City of Atlantis, coming up with many convoluted theories as to where and how it really existed. Now an expedition to the Strait of Gibraltar may solve one of the world’s greatest mysteries.
Next month, an expedition to hunt for its remains among submerged Gibraltarian islands will be unveiled at the Royal Geographical Society, London, by a renowned geologist, Prof Jacques Collina-Girard, and the leaders of the Titanic expeditions. Prof Collina-Girard believes that generations of Atlantis obsessives overlooked the most obvious location: Plato’s account suggests Atlantis lay before the Pillars of Hercules – today’s Strait of Gibraltar.
Plato said the island kingdom was larger than Libya and Asia put together. It was paradise: peaceful, cultured and unspoilt. A golden age continued for centuries, but eventually corruption got the better of its inhabitants and the gods punished them by submerging Atlantis.
In our fast-paced modern times, the EUropean utopia skipped the golden age to move directly to the corruption phase. If gods wish to retain any shred of their shattered credibility, a total submerging of all EU institutions would be well in place. And they’d better hurry, or they will have their work cut out by the European Directive on Submerging, Flooding and Destroying Continents that is soon to be approved by the EU Commission.
Directive 03/360BC/UTOPIA specifies that any destructive activities by the certified Deities, defined as protest to the political, social and cultural developments of Mortal Citizens (EU Directives 98/3740BC/NOAH and 99/2350BC/SOD&GOM), are to be closely monitored by the relevant agencies using the consolidated global experience and drawing on a long-term state-funded research of such occurrances. Or they could just apply retrospetive fines to penalise Mr Plato for unclear, inconsistent and misleading labelling of his products and services and insufficient specification of their location.
Natalie Solent links to news of this new discovery:
A team of researchers led by Dr. Daniel Kwok and Dr. Larry Kostiuk in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta has discovered a new way of generating electric power from flowing water.
When a liquid such as water is passed through a small channel, a physical phenomenon called charge separation occurs. The surface of the channel becomes ionically charged and opposite-charged ions in the liquid are attracted to it.
At the same time, like-charged ions are repelled from the surface. This results in a thin liquid layer with a net charge. This region, known as the Electric Double Layer (EDL), ranges from several nanometres to a few micrometres thick.
To harness this phenomenon, the research team constructed a microchannel with a diameter similar to the EDL itself and then forced the liquid through the channel. This resulted in only one type of ion in the EDL being transported downstream, creating a current and hence a voltage difference across the ends of the channel.
An external electric circuit was constructed by placing electrodes at the ends of the channel, and electrical energy was extracted from the device as current flowed between the electrodes.
I am impressed, I think. Or I will be as soon as I am convinced that this is not just wishful thinking in techno-babble.
I am not so impressed by the Calgary Sun’s reporting of the story. They regard the “response from the international community” as being more significant than the workings of the invention itself, which is to get it the wrong way around, I think. But after they have given us a few paragraphs about all the phone-calls and e-mails that have already flown around concerning this new gadget, they too get around to describing what it does…
With the help of two graduate students, the two professors were able to light a small bulb by simply squeezing a syringe of ordinary tap water through a glass “filter” with microscopic-sized holes they call microchannels.
They invented their “electrokinetic” water battery by harnessing the natural energy that is created on a very tiny scale when a flowing liquid meets a solid surface, creating an electrical charge. Water forced through a microchannel results in the movement of positive and negatives ions in such a way that one end becomes positive and the other negative.
…and how significant it might be:
The inventors are particularly excited by the fact the electricity is produced cleanly and involves no moving parts.
The discovery could in a matter of years lead to batteries for everyday items such as cellphones and calculators being powered by pressurized water.
The Green Movement will be appalled. How can they be expected to prevent all forms of technological progress and take humanity back to the Stone Age, if even Canadians are doing stuff like this?
More seriously, is this the technology that might finally make electric cars a serious proposition?
And: what kind of water is involved here? Does it get used up by the process? Will salt water suffice? Tap water? In fifty years time will the World Economy be yanked this way and that by WPEC?
Time for the Samizdata commentariat to do their stuff.
Glenn Reynolds pointed out an interesting discussion over at Heretical Ideas: are Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics moral?
I started off writing a comment of my own but it rapidly grew to the point at which it really ‘wanted’ to be a Samizdata article in its own right. I feel I have some standing to speak on this topic because I actually have the creds. In short, Dr. Herbert Simon, the father of AI, was my grad school mentor and I’ve worked for the CMU Robotics Institute as a member of the research staff.
→ Continue reading: I, Puma Arm
This looks really interesting, from one of the constantly excellent not-so-political pages of the New York Times:
Monkeys that can move a robot arm with thoughts alone have brought the merger of mind and machine one step closer.
In experiments at Duke University, implants in the monkeys’ brains picked up brain signals and sent them to a robotic arm, which carried out reaching and grasping movements on a computer screen driven only by the monkeys’ thoughts.
The achievement is a significant advance in the continuing effort to devise thought-controlled machines that could be a great benefit for people who are paralyzed, or have lost control over their physical movements.
As seems to be the usual practice nowadays, a technology fraught with general implications for mankind and his ever increasing power to manipulate his environment is first presented as a mere trick to enable cripples to do just a bit less badly. But okay, if that’s what it takes. And I suppose that this is where the first big money for this stuff has come from and the first money-making applications will be applied.
That trivial grumble aside, just think of it … Soon we’ll all be able to put on our Telekinesis 5.2 helmets and do the washing up while still at the office just by thinking about it. We will be able to live our entire lives without ever getting out of bed.
I gave up believing a long time ago that robots would ever be much use at telling themselves what to do other than in the case of totally repetitive tasks like car making. Any job requiring initiative, like pouring out a cup of tea, say, or flower arranging or doing a half decent blog posting, needs a human in charge. If, in the future, Metal Mickeys get to push vacuum cleaners around our houses this will be because real men (well maybe not Real Men but you know what I mean) are operating them in some House Cleaning Control Office nearby.
And now that day is nearer, because our ability to communicate our wishes to the Metal Mickeys just got better.
The Skeptical Environmentalist
Bjorn Lomborg
Cambridge University Press, 2001
This is not exactly a book of surprises for me, since I have read Julian Simon, Donald Bailey, et al., but apparently it has caused a stir and much hostility, which I can only assume is because all the other sources haven’t attained the same (desired) publicity. It is a big book – 352 pages plus 160 pages of notes etc., divided into six sections:
- The Litany – the media consensus that things are getting worse. Lomborg sets out to counter this in his section “Things Are Getting Better” and examines “Why Do We Hear So Much Bad News?”
- Human Welfare – population, life expectancy, food stocks, general prosperity, leading to the conclusion: unprecedented human prosperity.
- Can Human prosperity Continue? The “Are we living on borrowed time?” worry, is answered reassuringly in the sections following on food, forests, energy and raw materials, water.
- Pollution – air pollution (decreasing in the developed countries, correlated with increased prosperity), acid rain (a false scare), indoor air pollution (greater everywhere than outdoors, resulting in allergies and asthma), water pollution (exaggerated and decreasing), waste disposal (not a problem as far as enough space is concerned).
- Tomorrow’s Problems – exaggerated fears over chemicals and pesticides causing cancer etc., also over biodiversity loss and species extinction, the last from figures grabbed from the air, and a long section of global warming (pp. 258-324). This may be the section that has caused most trouble. Lomborg does not deny that “anthropogenic” additional carbon dioxide may have caused, be causing or will cause global warming but he does make clear the variation possible and the excessively alarmist nature of some of the forecasts. He also points out that money spent on reducing the earth’s temperature could be better spent and that the dislocation of the world economy would reduce the expanding prosperity that makes possible the necessary efficiency needed to bring about the desired results.
- The Real State of the World is a generally hopeful one, basically summarising the message of the rest of the book and including a section on GM foods. There is also a discussion of the costs of protection measures; thus the Environmental Protection Agency (in the US) spends $21.4 billion to save 592,000 life-years (though how this figure was attained isn’t clear to me). A Harvard study estimates that 1,230,000 life-years could be saved for the same money. This is a good source-book, with something interesting on every page. I find it pretty convincing.
Nowadays the gadgetry available even to quite non-rich people is advancing at a hectic rate, and the people in the shops selling these gadgets can’t keep up with it. The very thing that makes you want to go back to the shop to ask them how the hell it works is the exact same reason why they can’t help you. They can’t keep up with what’s in all their boxes any more than you can quickly work out what’s in your box. If the bloke in Dixon’s was smart enough to explain all the nuances of digital radio or Norton anti-virus software, he wouldn’t be working in Dixon’s, now would he?
So what do you do? Read the manual? Yes, but only as a last resort. The real trick with new technology is to watch what your friends are using, and if it works, get one of those yourself. That way, any new discoveries made by any of you about whatever it is can become common knowledge for the entire group of you. You can also share things like discs and data cards. This is how standards emerge in the free society. They aren’t imposed. People buy them, by buying what their friends also have. And people are being smart. Other things being equal, which they often are, get the same stuff as your mate down the road.
I mention this now because a user group may be starting to form in my little bit of the blogosphere, around one of the Canon range of digital cameras, the Canon PowerShot A70. → Continue reading: Buy the Canon PowerShot A70 and explain it to me – that’s what friends are for
About a year ago I posted this wondering how much data there was in a truck. Dai Davies, director of Dante, has answered my question (via the BBC)
Before now the highest data transfer speed was achieved by putting the tapes in a van and driving them to where they need to be analysed. Delivery vans can carry lots of tapes at the same time which means that Europe’s roads have a relatively high bandwidth.
You can send a few hundred megabytes per second through DHL
I am still waiting for an answer to how many trucks there are though.
This seems interesting, from the BBC on Monday:
China, South Korea and Japan are to boost joint research into a new computer operating system to rival Microsoft Windows.
The project, expected to be open-source software, was proposed by Japan and is intended to give a helping hand to Windows rivals, such as Linux.
The Japanese Government has already earmarked one billion yen (US$85.5m) for the project.
The Japanese Government, contrary to collectivist myth, has a record of earmarking billions to computer schemes which later prove to be embarrassing failures. Remember that “Fifth Generation” fiasco? And then, of a more private sector (but “cooperative”) nature, there was that amazing moment around twenty years ago now when every Japanese electronics conglomerate there was produced a near-identical version of the same doomed games console/Sinclair computer clone, only bigger and clunkier than the Sinclair. (Remember Sinclair? Oh dear, I’m showing my age.)
Even so, I’d be interested to hear what our more computer-literate commenters think of this. I suggest we try to avoid reprising the usual Linux (good, ridiculous) Microsoft (good, tyrannical) arguments. I’m keen to learn whether this particular announcement is likely to make any difference to anything.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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