Here is an interview of SpaceDev CEO Jim Benson. O’Brien spoke with him about the eBay satellite auction I mentioned yesterday.
SpaceDev also supplies the hybrid rocket motor for Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne.
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I received an email from Dave Winer who is fighting a battle for an Internet free from interference from Big Media pointing to a post on Harvard Law School blog*. Here is the message:
Although I could not give a flying f*** about political campaigns and presidential elections, I am very much concerned about the Internet remaining free from political intereference. Dave Winer is correct in drawing attention to this pointing out how the symbiotic relationship between politicians and the media can spell danger for Internet as we know it today. Quite apart from the argument about the impact of pundit blogs on political discourse in the traditional media, Internet is undeniably changing balance of power in many areas in ways mostly unpalatable to politicians and the established media. *There is a disclaimer that points out that he is speaking for himself and not on behalf of Harvard Law School or the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society. November 17th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I shall miss the fuss in London on Thursday because of a prior engagement in Brussels, but I will spare a thought for the demonstration of collectivists versus the protectionist. Mr Bush is in the unlikely position of being a villain during this visit to London because he is defending tariffs on steel imports, and I can hardly praise a man for making the European Commission appear like the good guys! Some of his opponents will actually be protesting against protectionism on the grounds that opening trade is the best hope for greater prosperity worldwide, with the handy by-product of reducing the number of layabout juveniles dreaming of doing something spectacular and violent: they are too busy doing MBAs or training to become plastic surgeons. I could even support the demonstration if there were a chance that the message would be received in Washington DC that protectionism is an abomination and a great source of warfare (I believe it even triggered the US Civil War, and in that respect the wrong side won). As for the occupation of Iraq: I continue to despair at the difficulty that anglosphere writers have in comprehending the humiliation of occupation. Admittedly this is for the best of reasons: Washington DC was last under foreign armed occupation in 1812, London in 1066. The dislike of foreign occupation is neither entirely rational nor without ambivalence. Of course the occupying troops in Iraq overthrew a dictator who committed atrocities against his neigbouring countries, his own people, even his own family. British soldiers may know that when their predecessors first patrolled the streets of Belfast in 1969 (I don’t remember the precise date, I was about 4 years old at the time), the Catholic inhabitants cheered them, offered them cups of tea, etc. The welcome did not last. If the purpose of allied occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is as cynical as attracting potential Islamic fundamentalist terrorists to those countries and fight them (and kill many of them) away from Western cities, it could be a good plan. There is a certain logic to persuading the extremists to make their way to Jalalabad and Tikrit and face professional troops instead of Manhattan or the City of London and kill civilians. If I thought the ‘War on Terrorism’ were being fought so capably I would be far more confident. But I do not, and I am not. So let ‘the indefensible pursue the inedible’: I went on the Countryside marches in support of the right of hunters to chase foxes. I shall be in the Grande Place enjoying my Trappist beer with mussels and frites whilst following the sport on the streets of London. Tally Ho! November 17th, 2003 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
Are you having trouble deciding what to get that friend who has simply everything? Why not buy them a satellite! Jim Benson’s SpaceDev is a commercial space company which has managed to earn money with creative marketing of space goods and services. November 17th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
George Will, of all people, plants a couple of barbs in the leviathan in this column.
The segue into campaign finance reform is well done:
Speaking of fish, as in barrels, shooting in, the punchline is of course the hypocrisy of candidates bleating against the exercise of free speech and free association, via campaign contributions, of their opponents, while doing exactly what they decry.
The fact that political speech, the very adamantine core of the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and association, is very highly regulated, with the blessing (to date) of the Supreme Court, is perhaps the single most damning indictment of the utility of written Constitutions as a protector of individual rights. November 17th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Secretary Rumsfeld Media Availability En Route to Tokyo:
November 17th, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Elon Musk of PayPal fame will be unveiling his spacecraft in Washington DC next month:
His new company, SpaceX, is planning a first launch of their re-usable launch vehicle some time early in the new year. Elon is just one of the new breed of technology billionaires who have realized NASA is a waste of space. They have come to the not so new conclusion that: “If you want anything done right, you had better do it yourself”. Swift Enterprises are alive and well and living in America. November 17th, 2003 | Comments are closed
Do not listen to the lies of those who would describe the protesters as hypocritical apologists for mass murdering fascism. Being caring, sharing people, the smiling protestors who will be marching through London to protest the visit of George Bush to Britain, will be decrying the state of unemployment in Iraq (Bush strangely seems to get no credit at all for his protectionist, anti-globalisation economic policies). The brutal, uncaring British and American capitalists now in occupation of that hapless country have, with malice of forethought, simply thrown previously industrious workers on the scrap heap of life without the slightest concern for their well being. Hundred of highly skilled ‘information retrieval’ experts that were happily at work debriefing people in every city, town and village in Iraq are now reduced to pouring through the ‘help wanted’ add in the Guardian as they look for alternative uses for their skills with pliers, blowtorches and electricity. The management and workers in the chemical industry of that once proud nation, the people who gained world fame from the use of their products in Halabja, are almost to a man reduced to flipping burgers and slicing donner kebabs or working in Syria. Is there no end to the iniquities of global capitalism? And so it is hardly surprising that the people who will be baying for Bush’s downfall were conspicuously absent on the streets in March of 1988, when Iraqi industry was humming along rather nicely producing useful products, not to feed the evil capitalist Bushist machine, but for local use in Iraq by local Iraqi people, and who could possibly object to that? 
Mother and child sleeping well thanks to better science! I mean, it must all be true, Michael Moore said so! November 17th, 2003 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
Long time readers may have noticed that I vanish from time to time. A week or two here; three months there and with rarely an explanation. Perhaps I owe you one and in particular to those who have been tossing the occasional virtual egg because I’ve not updated a certain graph. I make my living as a freelance consultant, mostly on Linux based systems with which I have worked for nearly a decade. I do security checking, networking, administration, systems programming in whatever language people want. I sometimes do user applications. I design, purchase, and build racks of servers from components for special projects. I write system documentation and specifications. I do engineering design and analysis for complex systems and products. I take on pretty much anything ‘high end’ that has enough money and a long enough time line to soak up the learning curve. I rarely do the same thing twice. When times are really bad, I have been known to pull out the Martin guitar and ring the local bar-owners and booking agents. Sometimes, like this last spring, I spend months on the road. Other times, like the last two weeks, I telework. In either case “Have Laptop, Will Travel” is an appropriate motto for me. Perhaps a few of you know the original version of that line… but I’m not allowed to have one of those in the UK! When work comes I have bills paid and my head down; when there are bad times… tuna and spaghetti do become boring. The other side of that tuppence is that I have loads of time to blog when I have no money; and barely time to read what others have written on my own blog when I’ve a contract on. The last two weeks I’ve had a job on. The booking came quite in the nick of time, but I’ll not go into the gory details of life on the edge. Consequently I’ve not been much heard from lately, and for the last week not at all. What I do for a living is a very stark example of why borders are dead. These last two weeks I have been part of a subcontractor crew on a JP Morgan business conference in Boston. We did live webcasts of the financial reports of CEO’s and CFO’s of a large number of JP Morgan ‘associated’ companies – Google’s CEO was among them – to fulfill SEC public disclosure requirements. I sat here in my flat in Newtonabbey, on the outskirts of Belfast and worked with a team in the US. On the days of the setup and run, the crew was spread out over three locations in Manhattan, the hotel in Boston… and my flat in Northern Ireland. Physical location has little meaning when you meet and work in cyberspace. Borders are a joke: they have been erased by the scouring terrabytes of global connectivity. I can be and work anywhere I want on this planet, any time I wish and noone can stop or question me. True… no one in advanced societies is trying at present but even if they did they would have a very low chance of success. An attempt to control such international working would be an economic disaster in any case. If some State tried and succeeded the result would be a brain drain of massive proportions: “Would the last computer scientist over the border please turn off the data pipe?” That is the deadly threat people like me hold over the State. I have distributed employment. I live where I like, not where I must. I am mobile. Screw with ‘me’ and you lose ‘me’. I use scare quotes because I am just one data point, one representative of a rapidly growing class of people whose day to day life is in cyberspace. We are the future and we are killing the entire concept on which the State is based. November 16th, 2003 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are a wealth of compelling and passionate arguments both for and against capital punishment and I do not intend to go into them now. I would rather comment on the state of British politics in the light of what I regard as a rather surprising development:
I must admit that this came as something of a shock to me. From what little I know of Mr Davis I gather that he is a man possessed of definite principles but (in common with the rest of his Conservative colleagues) has been too timid to give voice to them. This is quite revolutionary really. For the last decade at least, the Conservatives have been on the run. Having lost every scrap of moral legitimacy to their opponents on the left (even before they were booted out of office in 1997) British Tories lost whatever ability they had to influence the national discourse. In fact, so beleaguered and timid did they become, that no senior Tory could stick his or her head over the parapet of national life without getting promptly chased back into their hidey-holes by a contemptuous and excoriating press. It would have been sufficiently comment-worthy had Mr Davis merely made some squeaky, semi-apologetic noises about taxes and regulations. But this? This is a bombshell. Capital punishment was abolished in Britain in 1965 and while there was some serious campaigning for its re-introduction for many years afterwards, the issue has since lapsed into total disrepute. For the last decade at least, calls for restoration of the death penalty have been considered ‘beyond the pale’ – a hobbyhorse for neanderthals and wierdos but not the kind of thing that proper, grownup people discussed in proper, grown-up circles. By puncturing this taboo, Mr Davis is not just launching an attack, he is going straight for the meta-contextual jugular and I get the feeling that the predictable eruption of spluttering outrage will not make him back down an inch. He must surely have realised what impact his statement would have and he still felt sufficient confidence to utter it publicly and utter it now. This was not a policy statement. Not yet anyway. It was a shot across the bows of the Guardian-reading classes. It will not be the last. The Conservatives have got their nerve back. November 16th, 2003 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Times reports that the Tories are to drop their opposition to Big Blunkett’s plans to limit trial by jury. As a result the discredited Criminal “Justice” Bill is expected to pass through both Houses next week. The reason given for this change of heart is that new Tory leader Michael Howard apparently sees “liberal” policies as electorally damaging. Any hope that the Tories might be the party to stand up for civil liberties seems to have disappeared Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe November 16th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the midst of a vast, arid desert of small-minded envy and zero-sum culture, there emerges a little oasis of cool, clear refreshing sanity:
Seems that the penny (or the Franc) has dropped in one small corner of one small country. They have realised that penalising success is a pretty good way of guaranteeing failure.
And they are right. [My thanks to Stephen Pollard for the link.] November 16th, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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