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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Rand Simberg is at the Return To The Moon Conference this weekend and is providing live blogging of the talks by key speakers. Frank Seitzen’s talk is of particular interest to those with a commercial space bent:
Taking questions now. Jeff Krukin: “Is there any sense that all of this could be made irrelevant by things happening in the private sector”?
Answer: “Yes, O’Keefe has met with Musk, and O’Keefe is very skeptical about the ability of the conventional space industry to do things affordably. Was particularly disturbed by cost estimates for OSP. Has been reaching out to the smaller players.”
“Estimate cost of getting to the Moon by 2020 is 64 billion dollars. They found nine billion for a down payment by 2009, but they won’t be able to afford it all without much lower costs from the private sector (and that doesn’t mean traditional contractors).”
I have known the disarticulated skeleton of this story for some time but this is the first I have seen it put together and with flesh on the bones.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Black Swan paperback, 687 pages
This is one of the best books of scientific popularisation I have ever read. Bryson brings the skills of a hugely successful and confident travel writer to bear on the Entire History of Science, no less, and does so in a way that chalks up another huge success for him.
Being an established writer of best sellers, Bryson was confident enough of his own ability, and of the support of his publisher, to be able to spend some serious time getting to grips with his mighty subject, knowing that whatever he finally came up with would be read. Yet, he also brings to it the humility of the seasoned travel writer, who knows that he cannot possibly say everything about Science, any more than he could have said everything about America or Europe or Australia, and who concentrates instead of saying as much as he can, as entertainingly and engagingly as possible.
Tone of voice is a lot of the reason Bryson’s books are so successful. His politics are vaguely leftish to middle of the road (like those of most of his readers, in other words), and his number one aim is not to change the world, simply to explore it and to describe what he has found. He doesn’t badger you every other page with what he thinks you ought to do about it all. Nor does he have big personal scientific axes to grind. He does have his own opinions about various things, but these are secondary to his principle aim which is to learn, and to continue to make an honest living by passing on what he has learned. → Continue reading: Bill Bryson journeys through science
Britain has been rocked this past week by shocking and totally unexpected revelations that have ripped apart the fabric of our national complacency and destablised our settled worldviews.
Prior to this week, it was an unquestioned given that the British National Party was an organisation that was fully committed, both in principle and practice, to multiculturalism and ethnic diversity.
But this article of faith has now been torn to shreds, thanks to the efforts of brave, crusading BBC reporter who went undercover to join the BNP and discovered (brace yourselves, please) that some BNP members are racist!!!!
The evidence he collected includes one BNP member, Steve Barkham, confessing to a violent assault on an Asian man, and a prospective election candidate admitting to a campaign of pushing dog excrement through the front door of an Asian takeaway.
I can hardly believe my own eyes and ears but I have to accept the terrible truth. We must be grateful to the BBC without whom we would all still be wallowing in ignorance and delusion. → Continue reading: You can take that to the bank
As a general rule, I am not a huge fan of Microsoft. I am not tremendously keen on their software from a design or reliability point of view, and I find their business practices at times to be a bit dubious.
However, yesterday they won 3.95 million dollars in damages from a spammer in Washington DC, who sent out huge numbers of e-mail messages that claimed to come from Microsoft in order to encourage people to download a toolbar that then downloaded all manner of nasty spyware and advertising.
Microsoft have won a total of $54m in recent judgements in their campaign against spammers. Generally the judgements have not been against the practice of spam per se but against the deceptive practices of the spammers (ie the spams have been full of lies).
Might I wish Bill and the boys continued success in this campaign.
And now the important news of the summer: a record crop is expected of grapes in the Champagne region [French link]. The absence of frost last Winter and mild weather in Spring is a hopeful sign for a good vintage, although quantity and quality do not necessarily follow. Over the coming weeks vines will be pruned of some of the grape bunches to ensure a greater concentration of sugar and acidity.
So the next time some tree-hugging Greens moan about penguin habitats, they can console themselves with a nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot.
“Minister rejects Bush reliance on abstinence, and backs use of generic drugs”
If I did not know this was about treating AIDS in the Third World, this would be very funny. Spotted in Salon.com.
I suddenly find myself writing more and more about the Middle East.
Kidnappers demand less corruption.
Only in Palestine…
Wired has more on the government’s controversial plan to screen passengers before they board a plane. The Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System II (CAPPS II) is dead – but it may return in a new form with a new name.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge bluntly told a reporter Wednesday that CAPPS II was effectively “dead” and jokingly pretended to put a stake in its heart. His comment went far beyond Tuesday’s statement to members of Congress by the Transportation Security Administration’s acting chief, Adm. David Stone, who said the program’s main components were being “reshaped”.
For its part, the American Conservative Union warned that it would oppose any successor program that is not fundamentally different from CAPPS II. ACU spokesman Ian Walter said:
Renaming a program does not satisfy the civil liberties concerns of conservatives so long as that program turns law-abiding commercial airline passengers into terrorism suspects. Civil liberties-minded conservatives will never support it.
Any new program will likely not be deployed anytime soon, as the TSA will likely need to reissue a Privacy Act notice detailing how the system will work, collect comments on the notice, issue new rules or a secret order to force airlines to provide passenger data to the system and have it certified by the GAO (General Accountability Office).
ComputerWorld reports that a U.S. law enforcing privacy rules for radio frequency identification (RFID) isn’t needed because companies experimenting with the technology are committed to protecting privacy, two such corporations told a U.S. House subcommittee yesterday.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. continues to move forward with plans for case- and pallet-level tagging of products with RFID chips. But most item-level tagging, where individual products are identified with RFID chips, is about 10 years away, Linda Dillman, executive vice president and CIO of Wal-Mart, told the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection.
Privacy advocates told the committee that legislation is needed to protect consumers from potential uses of RFID. Three privacy advocates testifying yesterday offered few current examples of privacy concerns caused by RFID, but as the range of RFID scanning grows beyond the current 10 to 20 feet, RFID could allow corporations and governments to track people’s movements and purchases.
There is a tax strike in Lebanon against government levies on mobile phone charges.
This is pure supply-side economics coming from Zuheir Berro, the president of Consumers Lebanon:
Berro also refuted allegations that the government needed to charge high fees to insure more income. “This is a random policy which will get us nowhere,” he said. We still have a very high capacity for subscriptions and if they lower the fees, then subscriptions will multiply,” he added.
Lebanon has a 24 percent level of subscribers, compared to over 80 percent in industrialized countries, according to Berro.
The high subscription and communication fees, according to the group, are hindering the country’s development and investments.
Meanwhile British MPs are demanding extra local taxes, in addition to the existing local property and business taxes because it is the key to ‘democracy’.
By now of course, all right (read ‘left’) thinking people are fully conversant with the theory that the Moon landings were faked by the US government in a warehouse decorated with papier-mache and pieces of screwed-up tinfoil somewhere in the Nevada desert. This elaborate hoax was perpetrated as an underhand PR attack on the Soviets, who would never have indulged in any such below-the-belt behaviour, being too busy with stuff like this (hat tip: The Bleat).
I don’t know this for sure, but I am guessing that probably most of America’s nukes were fake as well, and possibly even some of their presidents. We already know that Star Wars was fraudulent (the strategic defense initiative, not the popular sci-fi movie series, which was, of course, entirely true to life) and it has been suggested in the past that Ronald Reagan himself was actually a puppet from ‘Spitting Image’. Although I suspect that particular theory may have arisen from some confusion about the difference between real life and what one sees on television. Clearly human evolution still has work to do.
Anyway, for those of you who have not seen this already (not new itself, but possibly new to others than just me) irrefutable proof of the faking of the moon-landings can be found right here. Those of British origin will particularly appreciate these pictures. Essential viewing for all human beings who still have brains.
(hat tip: Chicago Boyz)
I have a confession to make.
In May 1990, I contested a local election as a Conservative candidate for Fortune Green Ward in the London Borough of Camden. Had I won, I would have been a Borough councillor representing about 4,500 electors as a Conservative politician.
It seems a Folkestone, Kent Conservative councillor also has some confessions to make.
He said his convictions included death by dangerous driving, indecent assault, drugs possession, carrying a weapon and forgery.
Richdale, an unemployed chef, confessed to using cannabis and amphetamines to control his alcoholic cravings, saying: “I am an alcoholic and I always will be but I haven’t had a drink for 11 years.”
He admitted having sex with a girl of 14 and said: “She told me she was 15 but she was 14. She stayed at mine (home) and I woke up to find her having sex with me.
“But I am not a sex case and I am not motivated by lust. I wish everyone was like me.”
Now I should point out that the lawful age of consent in England is 16, not 15 or 14. The language used by Councillor Robert Richdale in an interview to his local newspaper does not suggest the calibre of candidate that I would vote for. I also find the last two sentences of the quote completely at odds with any sense of personal responsibility. It never had occured to me before now that the closure of the Conservative Party’s youth sections over the past 15 years might be a good idea, as a way of preventing child abuse.
So next time a Conservative complains about the ‘loony’ ideas of libertarians I will not be thinking, perhaps we go a bit too far. The more I see them, the more I like my denunciation of “an unelectable shambles comprised largely of cretins, petty crooks, pompous buffoons and in-bred yahoos. I will take no lessons in morality or “coherent political philosophy” from a Tory.
And that is before I look at the deplorable results in the by-elections tonight, where the Conservatives have made no headway whatsoever against Labour in the Midlands. The Conservatives cannot get one fifth of the vote in a Birmingham constitutency and cannot remotely challenge in Leicester, a city where three out of four MPs were Conservative during the 1980s.
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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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