Fair Tax

Is the Fair Tax Fair ? Heck, what is the Fair Tax? In short it is a plan to dismantle the current tax system. No more yearly individual tax returns. The current tax code would be wiped. Blank slate. In its place a simple system (to listen to its proponents) with only a national sales tax and a universal stipend system to deal with the issues of survival costs (which most agree we shouldn't tax).

In its place we would get A 30% sales tax. Before the Fair tax advocates scream and shout at me that it is 23% let me finish. The sales tax under the fair tax would be 30%. But it would be equivalent to a 23% income tax. IE a 30% income tax and a 30% sales tax are not equal values. Here is why.

Income Tax:
You make 100 dollars. The income tax rate is 30%. You receive $70 to spend.

Fair Tax:
You make 100 dollars you receive $100 to spend but whatever you purchase has a %30 sales tax added to it. So If I buy something that costs 100 dollars it will cost $130 with tax. But what can I buy for $100 with tax included? Well If a 30% income tax and a 30% sales tax are equal then if I buy something that costs $70 it should cost $100 with tax. Well $70 * .3 taxrate = $21 in tax. $70 + $21 = $91. So as you can see a 30% sales tax and a 30% income tax are not equal.

Essentially a 30% sales tax is equal to a 23% income tax. A 30% income tax is equivalent to about a 43% sales tax.

So what's the Catch? Quite simple and quite appropriate considering this sites title. TANSTAAFL. The pundits and proponents and detractors can yak all they like but in the end this plan is pitched as revenue nuetral. That means that in the end the difference is nil for the average Joe. So don't think for a second that Fair Tax will reduce how much you pay in taxes. However if implemented as presented currently it will change how much the average joe HAS to spend in Taxes. If you spend nothing you pay no taxes. Spend it all you will fork out just as much in taxes as you did before. That is nice in the short run but in the long run you still pay just as much taxes. The only way you don't is if you don't EVER spend it. However this still favors saving which is nice. By saving I reduce my tax burden which in turn increases how much I can save. But its just a bigger number because the money wasn't already taxed. Not because it will buy more. Remember, just because the amount of money you receive might be higher dosn't mean you can actually buy more stuff with it. But the freedom to delay when that burden lands on you is nice make no mistake. IF the system is revenue neutral or resulting in a lighter burden for you.

We are long overdue for some serious Tax reform. The current code has become ludicrously convaluted. It is the moral equivalent of 50 years of rube Goldberg contraptions all combined to make one useless edifice which no one can understand. Whole livelihoods are made out of understanding small sections of the code well enough to teach people how to pay less in taxes. This system seems like a good candidate to at least get us back to a simple system that anyone can understand.

What are the catches ? Well numero uno is that revenue neutral or not this system does not account immediately for savings. So its revenue neutral IF and only IF you spend every dime you make (from the perspective of Uncle Sam)... or if the rate is effectively higher to account for the fact that you do not spend everything. So if you save alot then a move to this system will effectively lower your tax burden. But for people that have to spend essentially everything.. Say a family of 5 with a marginal income, it is going to make no difference at best and potentially hurt more at worst. In any event those that have to spend all that they make will have the highest percentages of their income go to taxes.

Numero 2 is the issue of necessities. The Fair Tax plan currently calls for a stipend based on poverty rate to be issued monthly to account for poverty spending. For example If the poverty rate is 12,000 a year you would get a check from the government each month for 300 dollars to offset any taxes paid on necessity level spendind, or in other words 3600 a year to account for taxes paid for the first $12,000 of income spent. The assumption of poverty level is that you would have to spend that much just to survive at the poverty level and that no one given the option would spend less.

The other option is to pick and choose what sale items are taxed. This is a very difficult thing to do as who gets to decide what is a necessity product, or necessity level of product (Ford vrs a Rolls Royce etc...) and what isn't? The idea of the stipend is to just give a blanket pass on the poverty income amount and let the individual decide what is a necessity and what isn't.

The idea of the stipend is similar to the idea of the graduated tax bracket in the current income tax system. IE your first X amount of income is not taxed, from X - Y is taxed at such and such rate, y - z at such and such rate etc etc... This way they just do it monthly up front rather than doing it at the end of the year. Its really just a question of where you account for it. Not anything new. Big difference of course being you don't get a big bite taken out of your check each week/month and then a tax refund at the end of the year to settle the score. Which is... dare I say it? Much more Fair. However I do think it is a bit of a red herring. Sounds cool to get money each month. But in the end you really are not getting any more buying power. The only reason to do it that way is to allow individuals to make their own decisions about what constitutes necessity purchases. I like that. So long as moral pundits don't start trying to dictate what are and are not viable spending habits for poverty level folks it might even work. The second that stipend starts smelling like food stamps is the second I say it is a stupid idea.

There is one major bonus here. One which is rightfully trumpeted by the proponents of this system. This should effectively tax the consumption of rich people. Corporate expense shennanigens will be at an end. However, I don't think it is quite the cure all to Tax evasion by the wealthy that some would have you believe. For one, Rich people do spend more than the average Joe. But they also Save more. The Percentage of someone's income that ultimately goes to taxes is going to be determined by how much of that income is spent. So someone that makes 2 million and spends 1 million will essentially have a tax rate half that of the fair tax rate. But that afore mentioned family of 5 with a marginal income will have a a tax rate roughly equal to the fair tax rate (23% or 30% however you care to look at it) because they have to spend all of their money to get buy... Stipend or no stipend.

Overall I like the concept but I do worry about the potential pitfalls of implementation. Politics is the art of compromise. Implementing this system has very very little room for compromise. You can't ease it in else you risk keeping to much of the old combined with the new which just makes it worse and not better. Sweeping change like this can happen. But such a fundamental change to our nations tax income is not going to happen without some problems in terms of program funding. That danger is highest with a complete swap which is why I suspect if it ever makes it out of committee and passes into law their will be some kind of phase in period during which the risk will be high for the system turning from a revenue neutral move to a European style VAT system where effective tax burdens skyrocket in a very short period of time. On the other hand I could cross my fingers and hope for a move the other direction... One which strangles absurd government programs in their sleep and we come out on the otherside having leaned out or government, with lower taxes and a system that can do more with less. Yeah Yeah... very optimistic.

Evolution Vs Intelligent Design

There is a quote I love from Einstein.

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

The issue of the recent court case in Pennsylvania I think is a pretty clear case of Religion being blind without science. However, the recent article about the science achievements of 2005 being the additional work done in support of evolution is a great example of how Science is lame without religion. Why is this?

First off let me be perfectly clear. I am in the camp of evolution. The evidence that life changes over time is pretty damn overwhelming. The evidence that all life currently in existence on earth shares common ancestry is equally overwhelming. Hence somehow we started from one thing and became what we are today. However, while evolutionists do a great deal to try and explain the mechanism's of this change, as yet ALL proof of it is speculation and extrapolation. Including all the work listed as the greatest scientific achievement of 2005. There is no directly observed evidence of evolution. There is an awful lot of indirect evidence obviously. Genetic similarities, Shared DNA sequences and a host of other insanely technical issues surrounding the inner workings of genetics. Yet there does not exist in the annals of science one single case of observed evolution of one species into another. Nothing so similar as a chimp into a man, and certainly nothing on the scale of say single cell organism's becoming complex living organism's.

The Creationist folk have faith in the almighty. The scientist faith in the scientific process and peer review. There is no doubt in my mind which is more 'factual'. Yet both require elements of faith. Direct evidence has shown we share common ancestors. Yet we have never seen any new species born. Thus all theories regarding how the change occurs is speculation. No matter how educated it is, that means it is a guess. Evolution is a very logical, very well supported guess. Belief that it is correct without direct observation is almost by definition 'Faith'.

In the end this whole fiasco is an issue of philosophy. Even if we have Evolution hammered out to the nth degree. It still does nothing to answer the age old question of 'why'. If life is just the random mutation of inanimate material into animate life which eventually becomes us then what is the damn point? This is the very lameness of which Einstein is reffering too. The end game of science is depressing in the extreme. There is no reason. Just existence of a collection of cells that perform a number of biological activities observed down to the minutest level the combination of which we call life.

Frankly if my choices are that of belief in an immortal soul with a benevolent ghost that has imparted upon me the gift of free will, Or belief that I am just some statistical fluke of the random interactions of atoms/quarks/sub-quarks/muons etc... etc.... Well, I have no doubt which one is more attractive.

Now. The title is Evolution vrs Intelligent design and yet up above I said Creationists as if it were interchangeable. Let me take the time to say that equating Creationists to Intelligent Design is a rather faulty assumption if you ask me. True there are many Creationists that have latched onto the basic argument of ID with which to champion the teaching of Christian Creationisim in America. The Court Case recently in Pennsylvania was an excellent example of this. But do not lump in the central concept of ID to simply be a smoke an mirrors concept with which to make creationism pallatable in a scientific society. The central concept being that of irreducible complexity.

When giving examples of evolution and taking something like say the neck of a Girraffe it is easy to work out how this might of occurred due to Evolutionary principles selecting for survival of animals with longer necks. But how does this work for say an Eye ? There are many parts of an eye that require other parts... all very highly specific and integrated to provide the marvel that is an eyeball. If it developed as a vestifle appendage with little utility then the concept of selection for survival breaks down. If it was a central advantage of survival how then did the creature survive in the midst of development when much of it would have been useless? The argument of ID adherrents is essentially that in some cases you encounter irreducible complexity and they say that the only way for such a development to occur is through an intelligent choice. They do not even really try and answer where that choice comes from. Christian Creationists supply 'God' with all of the dogmatic trappings that come along with it. Many in ID simply use God as a catch all phrase for some as yet unknown factor which influences the course of evolution. Often people assume that belief in ID precludes a belief in evolution. Like most stereotypes, this one is false with a hint of truth at its core.

It isn't that ID means you can't belive in evolution. It is just that ID is for those who don't think evolution can hold the entire answer.

If you want to really think about it then instead of delving into this issue by studying the highly charged issue of man being descendent from lower primate life (chimps/gorrillas etc...) take a look at the transition of inanimate material into animate life. IE the formation of first life. Evolution has natural selection, mutation, etc with which to support its basic thesis of how life has come to be. Yet those arguments founder just as hard on the issue of first life as do Christian Fundamentalists encountering things like shared DNA sequences and the fact that all life on earth has far more in common at a genetic level than it has different.

What good is it to an eternal mineral to become a life? What advantage to survival? Questions such as these sound equally silly as fervent statements that the earth is only 6000 years old because the bible says so the evidence be damned. The issue of first life is another area where it has never been directly observed. Some guys took some basic elements of life, stuck them in a tank, zapped it with electricity and wound up with some basic amino acids or amino acid components or some such (the begining of the building blocks of life in other words) and yet they still have not seen inanimate things come to life. The fervent belief of scientists creationists alike is in that of immaculate conception. One in the virgin birth, The other in life from unlife. Strictly limited to observation, life begets life. how then do you get life from something which is not alive ? In other words the age old question of which came first. The Chicken or the Blasted EGG.

Those that argue in favor of ID, Evolution, Creationism etc are no different from all arguments through time used to explain life. Science is better at reporting truth about how life works, yet it runs aground just as hard on its ignorance as religion when the issue of first life arises. In fact it probably does so more dangerously because just as those before who placed their faith in religion, they think they have the means to find the answer. And it is a futile argument that scientists have more proovable/demonstrable knowledge of the mysteries of life than the priests/witchdoctors/philosophers of old. But in the end it is an argument that probably cannot ever be solved no matter how well we understand the process of life.

If for example we genetically manipulate ourselves or another animal into an incompatible new species designed intentionally by us which breeds true. What then? To do so would in and of itself proove that intelligent design is possible because we would be capable of it. You could then use the basic principle that generally speaking if something happens once it can and will happen again, and argue that it could have happened before. If we do accomplish this feat then who is to say that we were the 'first' to achieve intelligent design of life? Ok so lets say at that point Intelligent design comes to hold the upper hand over evolution in the issue of why change occurs. Does it then answer the question of first life? Most people are scared of genetics for the simple reason that we can indeed become inteligent designers of life. But their fear resides not in our intelligence, but in our ignorance. That we would not be intelligent enough to actually design in a worthwhile manner. That any such design would run amok and cause endless unforeseen problems. This is a fear shared by creationists, ID, and evolutionists alike. What I find ironic in that is that you then turn around and evolutionists say while we arn't smart enough to do it intentionally, it happens quite easily by accident given a long enough time scale.

In the end I like it all as always. To settle down with one is to ignore what the others have to offer. It is quite possible to pick and choose the good stuff from each. Afterall This is how new ideas evolve ;-)

Double Standard

Ok I am just a little steamed about this one. 25 year old teacher does the horizontal mambo with a 14 year old student. If this were a Male Teacher and Female student they would put the guy under the jail and throw away the key damn near. But in this case it is a woman and if it were not for a single judge balking at the current plea bargain she would get house arrest only. Obviously this hasn't happend just yet. But such a plea bargain would have been laughed out of court if the teacher had been a guy instead of a very attractive woman.

Now I more than understand that society places different values on protecting young women vrs young men. The problem is that the law does not claim to make any such distinction between gender for sexual offense. Obstensibly treatment is equal. But if you just listen to the late night show jokes it is easy to see that the cases are viewed as anything but equal. Jokes about older guys having sex with underaged girls are scathing and condeming. Jokes about the same break in age with reversed genders are congratulatory to the underaged boy. At worst they suggest the older woman is less than picky in choosing her sexual partners (call her a slut). Where the men are caled sick/demented perverts you often hear jokes from guys of "Well where was this teacher when I was in school".

Perhaps such double standards are an unavoidable part of life. But a law is ultimately about an ideal. As such if it proclaims equal justice then the best effort needs to be made to dispense equal justice. If this leads to unfair rulings then perhaps, just perhaps, this means that the law is flawed and must be re-evaluated. And no where is this more apparent than the laws surrounding sex in the United States.

Star Wars Galaxies re-invention

Wired is running a story about a recent shake up in a major online world. Now I would like to spend some time to document what I know of it... and its a surprsing amount now that I think of it.

First off. The game "Starwars Galaxies" was never released if you ask me. Those that remember the old Dev Boards days preceeding the launch know what I am talking about. This kind of defection due to a massive core game design change happend once before... it happend even before the game was released. The rift began about 6 months before the initial release date when all of a sudden space combat dropped out and was designated as the first expansion. At that time the nature of core game mechanics for interaction changed and suddenly the dreaded EQ "treadmill" re-apeared in the core mechanics design.

There were enough pieces remaining that the defection of contributers to the board community wasn't quite as bad as what I am hearing about regarding the current mass exodus of players. But after that change many people who posted page after page of thoughtfull comentary on the comming game design implications were no longer present. What had drawn them there was gone and what had been put in its place drew a new and different crowd. I survived that change on the boards, hoping against hope that more of the initial design would survive than did. It didn't take long after logging in to the inital world to realize the game we had all be talking about for more than two years up to that point had not been made. In its place was a pale image of the possibilities we had been promised and despite the fact it was a pretty good game the results left a bad taste in my mouth I couldn't shake. The elements that remained were not enough to salvage the world, and the rough hack job that had removed the other elements had left a very rough game world that faced a great deal of growing pains early on to hide the gaping wounds in the play mechanics. A lot of the assumed interaction was broken. The civil war participation was transformed into an end game kind of reward for people who dedicated a long time seeking the skill advancement dings. Player control of territory almost didn't exist.And in game dynamic content was thin on the ground. The imagination sand box had turned into another graphic candy defined jungle gym. It was a far more elaborate play system than had come before. But I could see enough to understand they had changed the basic idea of a player run world into a static theme world. And with that realization I logged out to rarely return.

NGE is simply the logical end of that shift that occured in the months before the initial launch date. They killed the individuality of proffesions, killed decay (which drove the crafting game) and finally made Jedi open to all which fits in with Sony's idea that the game must cater to the individual and not the overall idea of a sustainable online community. Its a terrible shame if you ask me. Truly new things are rare... and inital Galaxies was going to be New. Alas it never was allowed to be what the creators wanted it to be. To me and many of the early dev board denziens the game was Still born and placed on life support. NGE simply marks the final death of the game that could have been. I am sorry to hear it go. But in a sense I am relieved. It always pained me to talk to peple playing in the game, constantly hearing reminders about how close we came to receiving a true online world in which to play 'Starwars' rather than a controlled theme park experience. It was like seeing a great college athlete suffer a career ending injury on the eve of turning pro and then running across them every now and then and being constantly reminded of what could have been. But NGE isn't an injury. It marks the final death of the intial vision of Lucasarts lead designer Ralph "Ultima Online" Koster aka Holocron.

May it rest in Peace.

If by chance any of the old Dev boarders happen across this I was known there by the somewhat less than origianl nick of Anakin_Darklighter.

Junk Food Advertising and Obese Kids

Here is a story about a study suggesting kids not be subjected to junk food ads. Personally I'd like to find a way to just not have anyone subjected to ads period. But no matter how nobel the motivations in this case I just don't trust it. Parents certainly need to start making better decisions about their kids health. And frankly the parents themselves need to be better educated about food choices. But we do not need regulations saying what can and cannot be advertised just because it isn't 'healthly'. This started with the restrictions on tobbacco and alchohol and it is now moving on. Who makes these decisions ? What constitutes healthy, what not ? Will it be illegal for a kid to buy a candy bar next ? Yes that is extreme and you are meant to laugh at it. But if you are restricting advertising "for the sake of the kids" then what is next ? This is not the start of the slippery slope. We are very much on it. The precedence for any restriction of this type (specifically limiting a type of advertising due to influence on kids) is rooted in the Joe Camel ruling which forced Camel to stop using the iconic cartoon camel in their ads due to wide spread brand recognition among kids (Joe was as identifiable as Mickey Mouse for most kids).

This is not a good sign if you ask me. Are the ads bad and for unhealthy food? Yes. Do they claim to be anything other than junk food ? No. Nothing wrong here. They are advertising a product that is legal to sell and they are advertising to children to whom it is legal to sell too. If it isn't legal to aim an ad at the kids then is it so far fetched to think someone might not want to make it illegal to sell/provide the item as well ?

In the end the responsibility for obese kids goes to Parents. And the parents need better health educations as well because the obesity problem is most certainly not just a problem for kids. The problem isn't junk food. Its our nature. We eat. And we like to eat things that taste good. Junk food by its nature will ALWAYS taste better than healthier alternatives. Regulating advertising is not going to stop the problem. It is going to add uneeded nanny state regulations.

NIMF video game industry report card.

Well NIMF has once again released it yearly report card on the gaming industry. This marks a full decade of crying about kids playing violent video games with dire warnings about increases in agressive behavior among kids that kill pixels.

There are some good things in this report. They do reffernce more than one research project. However it there is still only one significant study that has been done and it has long since been questioned. Far from the universal scientific condemnation touted in their report card. However they at least do admit the flaws of the various studies refferenced. Yet even so they then proceed to draw very serious conclusions from them. This is not a good way to make an arguement. Point out all your evidence is flawed with regards to actually measuring the impacts caused by violent games and ONLY violent games then say your conclusions about that impact are good anyway. I could quote the relevant material but you would do best to read it all in context through the link above.

What puzzles me most is that in none of their discussions did they mention ANY attempt to deal with the issue of whether or not video game Cause violence. Or attraction to video games is a function of a violent nature. IE is it a symptom or is it a cause. Also there are no hard number beyond things like percentages of kids that own/play video games and the number of kids involved inthe studies. What were the precentage increases ? The margins of error ? When correlation was found were we talking a 90% increase ? Or a 5% with a 2% margian of error ?

Another thing in particular that bugged me was their use of desensitation through exposure. It is talked about like it is a horrible condeming fact. And yet desensitation to stimulus (ANY stimulus) through exposure is a universal response. How would this be damning ? If you took a control group and exposed them to no violent games for a given length of time and then exposed them to REAL violence and measured their sensitivity vrs a group that played violent games and then was exposed the REAL violence. If the game group showed a marked desensitized reaction to actual violence I might start paying a bit more attention.

In the end I think limiting what games kids can and cannot play is not the domain of government and society at large. If violent games where half as important in developing a childs behavior as these groups like to claim we would have a wave of youth violence across the nation that was out of this world as they have gone through greate lengths to proove just how pervasive the practive of young kids playing games with graphic violence is. Instead we have lower incidence of youth violence. Less juvenile deliquents as a percentage of the population. Almost entirely across the board the US is LESS measurably violent today than it was 10 years ago when these report cards started. By the logic used in most of this report card I could then claim that there should be more playing of violent video games.... not less.

Relative Rant

Todays relativity Rant is about the Twins Paradox.

(Updated 3/1/2014, added illustrations and corrected some typos. Updated example years to match illustrations)

If we placed a living organism in a box ... one could arrange that the organism, after any arbitrary lengthy flight, could be returned to its original spot in a scarcely altered condition, while corresponding organisms which had remained in their original positions had already long since given way to new generations. For the moving organism the lengthy time of the journey was a mere instant, provided the motion took place with approximately the speed of light. (in Resnick and Halliday, 1992)

-Einstien

In short one twin gets in a ship and travels at the speed of light returning to find his twin left behind older due to time dilation during the trip. For the sake of simplicity we will say that acceleration and deceleration from light speed took 1 day each and that the trip covered 1 light year, so essentially 365 days. From the perspective of the twin that made the trip the journey would take two days, or the time at which he was not at light speed where time stopped. For the other twin it would be a year before his twin returned. Thus the Twins parradox.

My problem is that from the perspective of the twin making the trip he covered 1 light year in only 2 days. This means according to the standard equation of S = D/T he covered one light year at a speed faster than light. At least according to his clock and earths perspective. He physically covered the distance it takes light to cover in 365.25 days, but from his perspective it only took two days time... or roughly 182 times the speed of light. The equations of relativity explain this fine from one perspective or the other. What they do not do well is mix the perspectives. For example here we have the Distance covered from Earth's point of view, or Relative Frame of Refference (RFR), and time from the space ships RFR.

So from earths RFR. He traveled at the speed of light and took a little over a year to make the trip. From the Ships RFR, to make a long story short, distance between the points he traveled shortend so that D/T works out to the speed of light. My question then boils down to something practical. What did the traveling twin take to eat ? Did he take meals for 365 days of travel ? Or did he take meals for 2 days of travel. If he needs 365 days worth then he becomes a human version of Schrödinger's cat if he only takes enough for 2.

This problem is worse if you don't bother with accelration. Because for something travelling at the speed of light any S = D/T solution would be S = D/0. Division by zero. Infinity. Infinite speed. Thus according to relativity Distance must also go to 0 else speed exceeds that of light. So while you cannot exceed the speed of light, you can get anywhere in no time at all if you can reach that speed. At least according to relativity. And there is much experimentation to back this up. For example, GPS sats work on the principles of time dilation. But no matter how it is explained to me I still cannot get over the question of what you would take with you to eat on a voyage at the speed of light to the nearest star.

For the time being I think the twins parradox is not real. I think if you could travel at the speed of light and you traveled for one year you would return a year older and still be of an age with your twin. Here is my reasoning.

Take two earths, call them alpha and beta. Lets place them one light year apart. Light leaving one earth reaches the other one year later and vice versa. So lets say each receives TV signals from the other. It is presently the year 2014 on each of our identical earths. Yet due to the set limit of the speed of light each would receive signals from the other that are a year old. Thus TV signals received at either end would be from the year 2013.

Now lets take Two space ships, Two pairs of twins, Two TV sets and Two TIVO's split evenly among the two planets. One of the twins from the two pairs leaves their respecitve planet the same day on a ship traveling at the speed of light. Lets follow ship one.

Ship one launches from alpha in the year 2014 with a TV set watching the signals recieved from the second earth 1 ly distant. He accelerates to the speed of light. He is now encountering the TV signals from beta at twice the speed of light. IE they are comming towards alpha at the speed of light and he is headed to beta at the speed of light. Thus by the time he reaches beta he will see two years of programming and land there in 2015. If he then tuned into TV from his origin planet he would see programming from 2014 showing his launch. He then gets back into his ship and goes back. Again he sees two years of programming and lands back home on alpha in 2016 where he is greeted by his twin, and if he tuned back into the other earth he would see programming from 2015 showing his departure.

Ship two has the exact same experience only in reverse.

Now if they actually sat there and watched their TV sets I think it would be hard to argue they did not spend two years traveling. IE they left in 2014, and returned in 2016. I think time dilation is an artifact of observation of something at high speed. IE the clock is ticking by at the same rate on the ship itself, but you simply can't observe it to tick at the same rate. GPS works on the basis of that observation. So breaking the twins parradox according to my reasoning does not break GPS. If you like try and consider how communications with the ships in transit would work. While the signals comming from the destination planet would be encountered at twice the usual speed (including, just for S&G's, a timming pulse) , no signals could be encountered from the planet being traveled away from cause they could not overtake the ship (provided it was traveling at the speed of light).

However when you start to consider the ships communications things get very interesting indeed. Think of it in terms of observation. The ship leaves in 2014. Lands on Beta in 2015. But you can't observe the landing at Beta till 2016 at Alpha. So it would seem accordingly that once the ship went to light speed it would dissapear. In 2015 you would start to see it leaving earth and watch it progress over the course of the year till it landed on Beta in 2016 (observed 2015 from Beta). As you were observing the landing at beta in 2015 the ship would then arrive back at alpha in 2016. Then you would observe the ship leaving Beta and watch its progress back to Alpha and complete your observations in 2017 even though the ship arrived in 2016.

As you can see the observation of the ship is very out of whack with the ships actual location. The actual location is how GPS works thus you must adjust for it as relativity dictates. What relativity does is allow for the prediction of observance of things traveling at high relatively different velocities. However I hold that is as far as it goes. Time does not dilate. Else traveling at the speed of light is traveling at infinte speed and from your perspective you would pass through all points of the universe simultaneously... and that as far as a beam of light is concerned the universe has no deminsion... IE it is still just a point.

Google, Adsense, it makes sense

I have put up the Adsense code and found that adjusted for inflation, my two cents are actually worth 31 cents !!!. Hey its more money than I had before I put it up and that is always a good thing.

If you blog or run a website and have wondered about adsense then you should take the time to try it out. The setup can be as unobtrusive, or in your face, as you want it to be. If you understand enough HTML to mess with your own website you have no excuse for not putting an adsense snipet in there somewhere. If you are using Blogger, like I am, the template tinkering is actually pretty easy. Once it is in place it is very easy to set up your account information with adsense and have any money made deposited direct to your bank account.

I would like to see a bit more flexibility in ad sizing as that is the thing I found most difficult to balance with my layout. However, that would have been far less of an issue if I wasn't relying on the blogger template.

The potential power of this system for distributing ad money to individuals is exciting. Think of it this way. There are billions spent each year on getting ads in front of people. However the money for getting those ads seen is funnled into a few places like TV stations, or newspaper owners. The advent of the web has de-centralized information dispersal and it is only a matter of time till ad revenue starts splintering out accordingly. So instead of the ad money trickling down from say a newpaper to an individual reporter, this allows money to be funneld directly from the ad creator to the content producer that is going to move the ad in front of someone. Like a popular columnist, a highly rated sitcom etc... Only instead of nielson ratings that are based on a select few it is now disperesed on a per click (succesfull end to advertisement) based on the proximity to the person that drew the attention in the first place. In short a very democratic system. With the targeting (ads placed near relavent content) ad servers to the millions of content providers on the web there is no lag. No waiting for nielson ratings, it is a constant shuffle of where people are and the money follows along with them. And hey, it just might let me make some money on the side as I rant about what I want to rant about.

So really you ought to give it a whirl if you are in the habit of creating content online. I may have even created a new tagline... Google Adsense, it makes sense.

GM slashing its workforce

Well History has a way of repeating itself and here we are. Once again the US auto industry is in serious doo doo. GM is about to slash some 30,000 jobs and 12 plants from its lists in an effort to dump 7 billion in operation costs.

Immortality

Here is some more news on the ainti-aging front. In short some Eggheads successfully knocked out a couple of genes in several batches of yeast cells. Instead of living one week they lived 6 weeks. So if it worked just as well for people then an average 72 years would turn into a 432 year life span. Of course the question is going to be if you can do it after birth. They tried knocking them out in mice but birth development was deffective without their presence. However it would be very interesting to see if they could x out the genes via a retro virus in a mature adult mouse and see if it had a similar effect. Then do the same to a mouse near the end of its life and see if it restores some vitality. Further trials with Mice (they also have the two genes) are planned and will take much longer as mice already live a couple years. So don't get your hopes up just yet for a shot from the fountain of youth..

If you have never tried to think out the implications of super longevity then you should. There are some serious rumbles comming from the the guys in lab coats that essentially translates to it is going to happen. Even the pessimistic think people being born now have a good chance of seeing 120 - 150 year life spans with a far more vigorus old age than typical now. The optimistic ones think such an improoved life span will see them through to more breakthroughs and thus keep them ahead of death, perhaps indeffinatly. The implications of that are simply mind boggling.

Holy Orwell's Ghost Batman....

The UK is looking to seriously upgrade its traffic camera system. How much ? Well right now sporadically placed cameras are used to catch speeders and CCTV cameras are used to track general traffic. What they want to do is get a camera every 1/4 mile or so on the road that has the ability to recognize license plate numbers and store there activity... IE which cameras they are seen on. And store the record for two years. Nominally it is to crack down on the use of uninsured/untaxed cars, it will almost certainly be used to monitor speeding offenses as well along with the more nebulous idea of denying the use of the roads to criminals.

Can this system do some good things ? Yes I suppose so. However all the talk here is of ways to collect more money for the government. Lets see... expensive system, it generates money, more expensive system, generate even more money. This is a bad cycle. Traffic monitoring needs to be more about providing a benifit to the tax payers. Not a burden of ever increasing and often arbitrary infraction penalties. I would feel better about the implementation of this tech if they were talking about how such omnicient monitoring tied to individual vehicle information, situation and road conditions could be combined with a car communication system to create an interactive and adaptable traffic safety system. IE two way communications with the cars so that it can warn drivers of unsafe conditions, overspeed, tailgating etc... BEFORE hitting them up for money because they strayed 6 mph over an arbitraty speed limit instead of just 5. You could have enough information to be able to say that someone driving 100 on a deserted motorway is not being unsafe when someone weaving through rush hour traffic at 40 is being unsafe. How about since the system is automatic, reducing the burden on sending notices why not use it to issue warnings to uninsured/untaxed vehicles giving people a fair chance to recitfy the situation before penalizing them.

Just in general, traffic fines are not supposed to be a relied upon revenue. No budget should EVER be allocated on the basis of collection of penalties due to law infringement. It is a direct conflict of interests. If you are allowed to earmark and rely on money you make from such sources it provides a vested interest in seeing that those infractions occur. For example setting an arbitrary speed limit that has the impossible task of defining what is a safe speed of operation for all vehicles, in all conditions. I for one think that all penalties should be returned to the public at large, or at least subtracted from the tax requirements. There should be NO incentive for the government to collect penalties from infractions.

The record of vehicle location information over 2 years is frankly scary as hell. There are serious abuses available there if you keep its access limited and serious abuses available if it is open. I just am not sure I could be convinced the good outweighs the bad. On the one hand the system could potentialy obsolete car theifs in one fail swoop. On the other if access to the data is restricted you will have little or no recourse in the event of a false positive or worse yet out right fradulent charges generated by those who control it. Its the old who watches the watchers issue.

Great Quote

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Ellen Goodman

H2N-GEN Car Gadget

This is an interesting gadget that has popped up on alot of radars. Just read about it in this month's popular science edition and have seen several web links other than the engadget review. In short this is a rather odd gar gadget claim. The basic idea is that the gizmo takes electricity and splits some distilled water via electrolysis and the resulting gasses (hydrogen and oxygen) are pumped into the intake and added to the regular combustion process. At that point the inventor claims 10-40% increase in fuel efficiency.

I have seen a lot of people saying that this thing can't work for a number of very good reasons but I am not so sure they are right. So lets deal with them.

First the article lists an increase from 35% engine efficiency to 97%. It is widely known that internal combustion engines are around 35% efficient. What most people don't understand is that this is not due to combustion efficiency. IE the fuel is completely burned. Modern fuel injection and spark systems attain the practical maximum efficiency of burning fuel. The loss of efficiency is in the loss of heat and internal workings of the engine... IE conversion of power to rotational energy and radiating lots and lots and lots of heat. In otherwords the car liberates virtualy all of the energy in the gas, something like 95% in a modern fuel injected engine. However, it only manages to harness 35% of it. This means that there is deffinate room for improovement but if it is realized then you have to be wasting less of the energy that is released in the process of combustion. In other words, you have to be losing less energy as heat. So any increase in fuel efficiency that is not an over unity scam has to result in less waste heat.

Now the idea that burning the hydrogen would add net power is ludicrous. But if you pause for a moment and consider the use of nitrous or water injection in combustion engines then it is possible to see how this might actually work. Injecting relatively small amounts of nitrous or water into the combustion cycle can net 100-300% increases in engine power output from the same amount of burned fuel. Using hydrogen in the same manner could allow you to net your fuel efficiency gain. IE essentially your taking the energy of the hydrogen to create higher compression ratios in the combustion cycle of the engine. When you do this to gain extremely high power for brief periods of time it is fairly destructive to the engine. IE it isn't designed for the increased power. However if you used this ability to create normal levels of power from less fuel then you could realize the claims of the inventor.

You could do the same thing via higher compressions with the pistons, however you hit a problem with detonation after about 10:1 and to realize higher compression ratio's you have to use much higher octane fuels. The added cost of the fuel normally negates any gains beyond ratios of 9 or 10:1. Injecting nitrous or water gets around this problem as this is alternative way of retarding detonation than by directly increasing the octane of the fuel. They are not viable as long term power generation because with nitrous you just shift you fuel costs.. IE the gas is used more efficiently but you only get it by expending nitrous which isn't cheap. Water injection has issues with durability of the engine if memory serves. So my guess is this process works in a similar fashion. Any power derived from combusting hydrogen derived from electrolysis from electricity generated by the engine being used has to be a power losing process. But if that power is used to create higher compression similar to nitrous or water injection than it can serve as a lever to getting more out of the gasoline combustion process and we already established there is more available there and that injection process can be used to get at it.

So here is the basic idea. Lets say the hydrogen generation process eats up 5hp of energy. According to those pesky laws of thermodynamics any direct combustion derived from that process could not net more than 5hp worth of energy. Practical conversion efficiency maxes out in the 90% range. Lets say you can net 4hp of combustion energy from 5hp of electrolysis. If that the re-introduction of that 4hp via hydrogen and oxygen to the combustion cycle serves the same purpose as nitrous or water injection systems then the result would be a 100-300% increase in the engine power output from burning gasoline. IE you are creating a more efficient converstion of the combustion of the gasoline into mechanical power by upping compression not adding power via hydrogen combustion. The combustion is used to up the compression ratio of the engine which in turn leads to higher efficiency in turning the combustion of gas into mechanical energy.

Now also acording to those laws of thermodynamics you cannot get more power out of your gas than it contains. Currently engines get about 35% of the stored energy in gas turned into mechanical energy turning the wheels. The rest is lost in conversion from one form of the energy to another. Most of the drive train is in the high efficiency conversion range... like 90%+ and the real energy loss in gas engines turns out to be heat. So if you are now getting 70% of that energy turned into mechanical energy you have to be either more efficient in the drive train or losing less heat. The drive train hasn't changed so to net 100% increase (35% upped to 70%) you would have to have a corresponding drop in the running tempreture of the engine as it would be losing less energy by radiating it off as heat.

So if this guy isn't a crank then the process would be something like this. You take a 100hp engine that gets say 10mpg at max output. You install this system and immediately you take a 5hp hit. You use the 5hp to generate hydrogen turning this into a 95hp engine getting worse fuel economy if you don't use the result of that process. However IF the hydrogen/oxygen from the electrolysis injected into the combustion cycle has a similar effect to adding nitrous leading to a ~100% increase in power output due to higher compression rates then 95 available hp turns into 190 available hp. You then cut the fuel injected into the cycle in half so now your getting 95hp burning 50% of what generated 100hp before. So at a perfect converstion ratio you are now about 44% more effiecient at turning gas into mechanical energy which is possible. Now instead of 10mpg you would be getting around 14mpg which is at the higher end of his claims. If this is what is happening then the waste heat being radiated would have to decrease by a similar amount so the engine would run cooler. According the the original artical exhaust temps were drasticly reduced. If this is true then the guy may be on to something.

Some may wonder why they don't just do this via nitrous or water injection. The problem is that your fuel costs don't go down with nitrous as you have to replace it like you do gas and it isn't cheap. Water injection to increase efficiency has been tried many times and failed for many practical reasons... namely added complexity. High temperature water is very very corrosive. While this process would still generate some water (hydrogen combustion forms water) you would be forming less. IE this system would up combustion by the result of combusting hydrogen in oxygen... water injection does it by injecting enough water to up the compression due to the fact that water does not compress. If the amounts are similar then this system will encounter similar durability issues when this is used for long durations rather than for short term power boosts.

Solar Power

Just ran across a story about solar power that may be the perfect example of the problems with solar power for majority use.

Many espouse the virtues of solar power but few deal openly with its dirty secrets. Namely cost of putting a system together and the length of time it takes for the system to 'pay for itself'. The name of this site is the axiom at work here. TANSTAAFL. And while the idea of solar power being a free lunch is prevalent it just is not true at this point. Lets start with some basic numbers.

1) The average power usage for a home today is ~15 kilowatt hours (kw-hr for short) per day
2) The average energy of the sun is ~1kw per square meter. Thus an hour of full sunlight nets 1kw-hr per square meter of surface exposed to sunlight.
3) The average conversion efficiency of readily available solar panels ~15%. So on average 1 square meter of solar panels nets (1000*.15) or about 150 watts per square meter. So it takes about 7 panels (6.7) to develop 1kw of energy.
4) The average cost per watt for solar panels is ~$4. So 1kw worth of production costs $4000.
5) The average length of peak sunlight per day is ~6 hours a day. So to achieve 15kw/hr of energy production per day you need 15/6 or 2.5 of those 1kw arrays. 2.5 * 6.7 = 16.75. That is the size of your array in square meters at 15% conversion efficiency needed to provide the average power consumption for an average house on an average sunny day. 16.75 * 150 = 2,512.5 and that is 2512.5 watts of power during peak production. As I just mentioned a watt of solar panel power production costs about $4 a watt so that means the cost of that array is roughly 2,512.5 * 4 or 10,050 dollars for just the solar collectors to power the average home.

At this point solar pundits are fast to point out that this is a one time cost. IE solar panel lifespans are measured in decades so yes you pay $10k now but you never pay again for the power they produce. The assured life span of most panels produced is 20 years. Ironically the time it is expected for such panels to pay for themselves in terms of the energy they produce is also 20 years (refer to the linked story for just one example).

Is this true ? Well yes depending on a variety of factors. The most important of course being the cost of grid generated energy. Right now the national average sits at around 10 cents per kw-hr. At an average production rate of 6 hours a day a 1kw solar array will generate 60 cents worth of energy a day over the course of a year (the 6 hours accounts for cloudy days and long summer days in most areas). So 365 days in the year times *6 hours of sunlight on average *.10 cents of electricity produced per hour = a grand total of $219 of electricity produced per year by a 1kw solar array. At $4 a watt that is a 4000 dollar array so the expected time for the array to pay for itself is 4000/219 = 18.26. Call it 18 years and 3 months.

This is, to put it mildly, a rather large pill for most people to swallow. Essentially it means swapping monthly costs for a large up front cost. Even so if you are thinking on a long enough term this still seems relatively appealing. After all many panels made in the 70's as this technology really began to emerge for the first time are still kicking along just fine so it isn't unreasonable to expect your array to last long enough that you will indeed be better off than if you just stayed on the grid. After those 18 years and 3 months you are still producing energy and the system has paid for itself. Well not quite. If it were as simple as buying just the panels this might be the case. However, you also have to mount them properly. You have to wire them up to the house electrical system which will require an inverter to turn the power generated by the array into a useable form, ie 110-220 AC or some flavor of DC based on your appliance choices . If you want a stand alone system you also will have to have a battery bank for storing the energy generated during the day for use at night.

Frankly a true standalone system at current grid costs will never be a cost effective solution at average consumption levels barring a serious breakthrough in battery technology or a serious drop in replacement cost. Even if you are going for the hybrid setup like those in the article you still have to deal with the cost of installation, wiring and inverter which for all intents and purposes makes the pay back term 20 years if not more... especially if you also have a battery bank to contend with as both of those examples did. And that is if NO extra costs are incurred during that length of time... highly highly unlikely. At the least you will replace the inverter and batteries at least once. Not to consider other non cost issues like maintenance. Yes there are some additional costs to grid connections but by and by they are very small baring a need for major re-wiring. By comparison it is probably possible to entirely re-wire a house for the cost of a good inverter or even a minimal battery bank, either of which can easily run a couple thousand bucks or more. Finally to really build an independent system you will almost certainly still have to have a gas/diesel/propane etc powered generator to use during the worst periods of no sunlight. A battery backup system to provide this level of independence is just not very realistic... at least not without a major change in the way people consume energy. That is an option for the rabid fringe... but is never going to appeal to the average Joe if they have a choice.

Now I just used a lot of weasel words that proponents will jump all over so lets deal with them. First average use can be reduced significantly with the use of more efficient appliances and better insulation in construction of a home. True. But Energy efficient appliances cost more money. Significantly more money than their energy guzzling counterparts. In fact at current energy costs the extra cost is almost never justified in light of the expected life span of the appliance. If you don't believe me find the cost of your electricity on your bill then go to the home depot and compare power consumption rates on those yellow tags between cheaper units and the uber energy efficient ones and figure out how long it would take the most costly appliance to pay for the difference in energy savings alone. Just to give you an idea the difference in refrigerators if often more than $100 but the difference in yearly energy consumption is rarely more than 100 kw-hr per year. At 10 cents than means 10 years for the appliance to pay for just the cost difference over the other model much less the length of time it would take to justify buying a new model over one you already own in the first place.

Can appliances last that long ? Certainly. Can that kind of purchase affect the overall cost of a solar system if you design the whole house around that idea ? Defiantly. IE if you fill the house with these more costly appliances you can save a significant amount on the array because it won't have to be so big. But if you are not careful you generally just wind up shifting the cost around to different columns. Not to mention completely outfitting your house with new appliances generally only happens when buying a new home.... which is about the only time the extra cost has any chance of being justified.

Don't get me wrong. I am actually a big fan of solar power. However I think those promoting home solar power systems are for the most part pretty shady characters feeding off the eco paranoia that many hold towards our current energy system. When they start being up front about the fact solar is in fact often far more expensive than grid power then I will lend them more credence. The people in this story did this because they like the technology and felt it was personally worth it to install their systems. There is much to be said for energy independence and for reducing the need we have for hydrocarbon fuel usage. But TANSTAAFL. Solar panels have to be produced, batteries have to be disposed of or recycled properly. The process of both is not nearly as green as most people think and those that do understand it tend to simply pass it off as the lesser of two evils. The thing that concerns me about that line of thought is that really... we don't understand the effects of our current energy system on the environment much less one that is only theorized about. In general I think the eco conscious will become a lot smarter when they accept that energy production and consumption on the scale of the human race is ALWAYS going to be something to contend with no matter how we do it.

For example go take the US average yearly energy consumption and apply that to the 15% efficiency rate and 6 hour average of sunlight per day and figure out just how big the array would have to be to supply that power. How much space would we have to cover with solar panels? It is a frightening number I assure you... but please find it for yourself. Now consider if there might not be any potential impacts from intercepting that much sunlight and changing the rates of reflection and absorption on such a scale.... we already know that there are impacts due to such things. Just ask any meteorologist about the urban heating effect.

Now there are some things that could change all this. Size requirements will go down if efficiency increases. I think 25-35% is what is needed. At 50% it will flat out take off especially if the cost of production remains more linked to size than to power production... that is to say if as the efficiency goes up the effective cost per watt of production goes down. Just as a practical matter in terms of making this a smart financial decision the cost per watt has got to go down, or the cost per kw-hr has to go up. The point at which it will attract the common persons interest in my opinion is when it not only costs as much as a car... but can pay for itself over a grid connection in a similar amount of time to most car loans... IE 6 years or less.

The Speaker starts Blogging

Now this is interesting. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is Blogging. If he keeps this up it will be very interesting to see if other members follow his lead. I think it is high time that we start getting less filtered information from our elected leaders. For once I would like to see officials that are not slaves to polls with a forum to speak their mind unfiltered by the media.

I-tunes in Australia

Today a big deal is being made of the fact that apple is finally going live with itunes in the land down under. Me ? I point to this as a prime case in point of how idiotic most of the uses of the internet are at this point in time. The idea that itunes should be limited geographicly is absurd. The power of the internet is that it works essentially at the speed of light and anyone connected can access any part of it from any place. Thus there should have been no question of who could use itunes before... they just needed a computer and a sufficient connection to download the content.

For physical items I can somewhat understand not having international shipping support; However, in this case the shipping system is the internet. So what gives? The old way of thinking about distribution of physical content simply does not pertain to the internet. It does not and cannot adhere to geographical boundaries and trying to do so is the moral equivalent of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

This is the same issue as is facing Google in its attempt to digitise books. That process is LONG overdue. We have had the capacity to place every book published in acessible digital text for about a decade now.. and we have had the ability to capture older titles via OCR for almost as long. The only reason it hasn't been done is this mode of thinking that the net has to function by the same rules as physical media. Trying to enforce copyright in the digital domain in the same way as it is treated for physical media is like herding cats or catching lighting in a bottle. It AINT GOING TO HAPPEN. Trying to do so is like a 300 pound woman trying on a spandex dress... some things just don't go together.

Google

Time for some random thoughts about Google and what they might be up to long term that could justify a 200 dollar stock price.

I for one am holding out hope that Google will turn out to be the M$ slayer. Well that's not really true. I would be surprised if M$ ever really dies.... But then no one thought IBM would be so far out of the PC OS business in the early 80's either. How could Google do this ? Well they are definitely taking strides to interconnecting people in ways that are probably long over due. They are making formally hard things easy... like blogging for example. And no writing a blog was never very hard for someone technically adept, but Blogger makes it as easy as a web e-mail system and yet allows for a great deal of customization if you so desire. It is a great example of Google's philosophy. Make things possible and stay out of the users way, and give it away to bring them in the door so that you can put context sensitive ads around them.

Many people have theorized that a Google OS may be in the offing and I for one happen to agree. I think before long you are going to see a Google Portal application that at least at first will be built around a browser concept on steroids. It will be a glue architecture for connecting all of Google's offerings into a single coherent package. Ultimately it will further blur the line between local and network storage and begin unifying the internet as a persistent environment. I think that ultimately they are going to have to get into the provider game and they are going to do the same thing they always have. Give it away and provide such a good service it attracts enough people to make money on unobtrusive ads.

How could they do this? Well They are buying a great deal of dark fiber which has tremendous data capacity. A true Network OS with standard programs running as web applications is going to take a pretty good pipe to the users... what better way to provide it than being able to determine the pipe people use? My off hand guess would be fiber running to last mile wireless nodes... and I mean wireless on a massive scale. Fiber lines can run at Terabytes per second rates and that can provide fat pipes to a lot of people. If you could make a line of sight (similar to radio or cell phones) fiber linked wireless system you could probably blanket most metro areas pretty damn easily. Yes it would cost a lot of money but that is something Google can leverage right now. On the plus side Fiber is highly under used and thus very cheap right now. Moving massive amounts of data around is their specialty and if they provided a usable universal wireless broad band access for free they could fricken guarantee people will buy the needed quantities of client hardware to tie into the system.

To put it another way. Google has the money to buy the fiber. They have the money to buy/develop the wireless equipment. If they are going to do this it would be fairly easy to talk a hardware manufacturer to build the needed client cards based on the fact they were providing it. If it works then in the end they make money for the hardware providers to provide people with the ability to connect to their system. They make money by having people on the system the same way they make money by people going through their search sight. In a sense it is the same thing they do now just on a larger scale. And it would drive more data through their systems for indexing which just makes their core function that much more capable.

If on top of this it will almost have to require you to access it via portal software... or better yet a portal OS that is a purpose built front end that leverage the power of the local system and provide access to the powerful network back end. This way you could wind up with some seriously cheap systems in a hurry... E-machines that work. Your machine would be a login on a portal system away. Similar to the way Google Mail is available wherever you go and have a net connection. Imagine if your desktop was the same way... including access to materials stored on your home machine like it was local ? Your backup capacity would be the industrial level provided by Google in addition to any private means you wished to take on your own. And that would in general be far more than most people do now. This wouldn't take away using the system like you do now necesarrily... but if done right it would just make it obsolete. It also would provide the means to impement needed security patches.... ie it would be similar to going from a 'confederate' system of networking to a 'federal' one.

Sound far fetched? Well Google is already working on the personal storage level that would be needed. 2.5 gb per gmail account and climbing. More and more uses for that storage space are coming online courtesy of blogger and picture sharing with Hello. The conversion to digital formats of library contents. How far fetched is a web service Open Office suite ? One with a constantly updating set of grammar rules culled from all users, one which automatically links to quoted texts or contextually similar information ?. Thin client front ends to a set back end. IE windows faces version and hardware compatibility nightmares. What if they had the barest requirements for access on the front end and had control of the programs provided on the back end ? The result should be far more stable IF you could rely on the connection. IE my system doesn't do the number crunching... all it provides is input and a place to output. In other words putting to practical use the concept of 'The network is the computer'. On top of this they have a SETI style CPU cycle system which could be put to use sharing capacity among the systems hooked to the network.

To make an idea like this work they are going to need pipes similar to sustained HD data transfer rates. That means a 10mbs up/down pipe at the least preferably with some burst capacity up around 100mbs. Then all you have to do is keep network latency under 10ms and viola... you don't even notice most of the data you are accessing isn't local. The performance would be very comparable to a local system. Wireless tech is already at 54mbs. Cell phone systems in Japan are already there. The fiber capacity is already available here. All that remains is an OS, and putting the system together. I give it 5 years max at which time either we will already not be able to recognize computing when compared to today... or well on the way. Google is the trailblazer cause they are the only ones with the balls to provide the access for free and know that if they get the herd to go through them they can make money in the process. So long as they can make it make money it will happen. I don't see this happening as a pay for access. At least not on that fast a time scale. If you make it negligible cost (50-100 dollar access card) to access it the adoption will be all but instantaneous by the people that matter. Once the pendulum swings that will be all she wrote for anyone that isn't riding the wave. At least that is what I think now. Perhaps next week will bring some new news.

New Porno Police

Well the FBI has a new priority task group. Their job ? To crack down on porn. Kiddie porn you say? Oh no. They are after the more questionable practices that take place between consenting adults. BDSM for example and other more riske sexual acts. Things which are unquestionably repugnant to a large number of people. The litmus test being applied for this Task group is cracking down on so called Obscene materials is one which has been employed before with a not so stellar track record. For example once upon a time perfectly 'normal' sexual acts pictured between interacial couples was considered obscene for one particularly poignant example. This is not a doctrine with a good history. It is one that has often been the rallying call of moral pundits up on their high horse trying to reign in all the "rampant indecency" that so offends them.

The idea here is to apply the so called community standard that recieved its strongest test in the case of the People vrs Larry Flynt. If there is no redeeming value then it is declared obscene and thus is declared off limits/ illegal etc... The thing is if people are buying it then you might just have to consider that they find value in it. Essentially that is what wound up being determined in the case againt Hustler Magazine owner Larry Flynt. In otherwords they decided that there was no accounting for some peoples taste.

America's schizo relationship with porn is nothing new. What people say in the light of day and then do in the privacy of their own home have long since parted ways. Porn is a multibillion dollar industry which last year made more money than all professional sports franchises combined. That is, as a society, we spend more on purient pursuits than we do on sports. And not a small portion of this money is spent seeking out the new 'obscene' targets of this task group.

In deffense of this effort a new conservative writer by the name of Benjamin Shapiro has tossed in this diatrab .

I loved this particular bit right here.

Plainly it is not governmental inefficiency these agents are worried about. They find the anti-pornography crowd disturbing because they believe that policing pornography violates fundamental rights. This has become the dominant view in our society: As long as what I do doesn't harm you personally, I have a right to do it. It's a silly view and a view rejected by law enforcement policies all over the country. Were we to truly recognize such a philosophy, we would have to legalize prostitution, drugs and suicide – as well as the murder of homeless drifters with no family or friends. After all, if someone kills a homeless drifter, how does that affect anyone else? Consent should make no difference here – that's an imposition of your values. Just because a murderer offends your moral sensibilities doesn't give you an excuse to impose your subjective values on a society


We would have to legalize prostitution, drugs, suicide as well as the murder of homeless drifters without family ????? Hold on their a minute Mr. Shapiro, that is what they call a classic slippery slope argument. Not to mention Killing someone is clearly violating their rights so it dosn't even fit the discription you are trying to slip it in as. So no one here is suggesting that we should ok the killing of homeless drifters... or genocide due to moral relativity as he later goes on to indicate are possible results of this dangerous idea that if something dosn't hurt others it should be allowed. If you don't believe me go read it yourself, thats why I put the link up there.

While I would like to say that this absurd line of argument whereby Mr. Shapiro exits stage left from rational thought largely invalidates his enitre discourse I am left unable to. He starts out well enough with the issues of such things as Drugs, Prostitution and Suicide. All excellent fringe freedom issues.

There are plenty of issues surrounding the Porn industry that could be tackled by such a task force. But deciding whether or not depictions of certain sexual acts between consenting adults should be allowed is not one of them. That is for the people to decide for themselves and as the courts found in the case against Larry Flynt... there just is no accounting for some peoples taste. Instead there are plenty of very legitimate issues for the task force to focus on. Such as the hiring of underaged performers. Drugs used for the express purpose of lowering inhibitions IE like rupinal in date rape scenarios and any number of other issues of the underbelly of a very seedy industry. Issues which need not require the FBI to get involved in deciding what it is ok for consenting adults to do to each other on film for the entertainment of others.

NASA exploration architecture

You know. I could talk all day and night about the new exploration initative. But I think I will leave it at this.

We are proposing a 12 year time line at the earliest to land on the moon.

In 1960 Kennedy proposed we would do it by the end of the decade and we made it in 69.

In otherwords... we made it faster when we didn't know it could be done than we are proposing to do it now that we not only know it can be done but still retain all the knowledge that got us their last time.

In otherwords... It is being proposed it will take 3 years longer in the day of the supercomputer than it did in the day of the slide rule.

That only gets more ridiculose when you consider they did it faster with slide rules when they were not sure they could do it than they are proposing to do it with computers and current manufacturing and hindsight of the last 30 years of space flight.

What makes it worse ? Its not like we are even proposing a completely different more capable mission. If you look at the newly released mission configuration for the lunar landing it looks more than suspiciously similar to the old Apollo configuration. It IS the Apollo configuration. And the only difference this time will be incremental not revolutionary... ie more capable computers, slightly more refined rocketry and perhaps better materials. Marginal improvements at best.

The only major difference ? The Shuttle stack vrs the Saturn stack. AND WE ALREADY HAVE THE ROCKETS. the 9 years of Apollo included the design of the rocketry stack from the ground up, design building and testing of the engines used which were providing capabilities that had NEVER existed before. They are currently propsing to use off the self rocketry in a new configuration only. And still saying it will take longer than it did when they built the whole thing from scratch. They are not proposing some new capacity. In fact the proposed system will still fall short in many respects of the Saturn V stack. So... existing tech with known capacity and performance vrs entirely new designs with unknown performance parameters untill said testing was completed.... and they did the ground up faster than what they are proposing when utilizing known systems.

Furthermore. What are we doing differently ? We have done our flags and footprints mission. At least tell me we have a solid goal of what we will accomplish this time above and beyond what was done in the 60's, 70's that will require this longer program development and deployment time ? I have yet to hear it. A dark side telescope? A permanent or at least long duration outpost ? Landing in a more challenging and geologically interesting location? Atempted gathering and refining of Lunar resources for a future self sufficient outpost? Please god don't tell me we are not just going to copycat ourselves from 40 years ago. That would REALLY be pathetic. Like a 50 year old in a mid life crisis trying to recapture their youth. I firmly believe Apollo was worth every dime. But to reproduce it for no other reason that to reproduce it is not worth one lousy half a penny in my humble opinion.

Now I can understand arguments of... but this program is not going to be funded the same way. Thats fine. But it SHOULDN'T be. My god if we had to spend 1% of the national budget for a decade to recreate something we did 40 years ago before the advent of the personal computer with technology we largely have already developed I would be really concerned. I know NASA has gotten bad at managing money but that bad ? Yes yes yes I know that Shuttle and ISS suck up most of the NASA budget at present and that the NASA budget is tiny to begin with. I know that until the shuttle dies around 2010 there just won't be any of an already limited budget to throw at space exploration... so in that sence, this is a proposed 8 year timeline with some preliminary spitballing and the initial crew capsule design done in the mean time.

So in 2010 we will have the crew capsule. We will have the Rockets. And it will still take 8 years to put them together to launch to the moon? Someone want to explain that one to me again ? We built the rockets and capsule etc from scratch in 9 before and the delivery of the technology was the largest problem in terms of how long it took. Your telling me that when space exploration becomes the 500 pound gorilla in the budget and we already have most of the technological ground work laid it will still take us 8 years to repeat a feat we did in ten years, 4 decades ago, building from scratch ?

Your joking right?

Some suggestions.

1) Get NASA to paying for delivered goods. Cost Plus Contracting is a blight on any endeavor and has yet to deliver on any promise other than to super inflate any cost of any program which is run on such an asinine concept.

2) Let whoever can deliver the goods get the money. Private industry is supposed to take risks. Hang out a few hundred million or a Billion or two and someone will make the effort to build the tech you need on speculation they will succeed in providing it. Stop providing life support for the military industrial complex by assuring they are the only ones that can compete for NASA money and bank rolling them before they even deliver one practical item. Rutan's Scaled composite built Space ship one and the White Knight mother ship in less than 5 years for less than 20 million dollars for a 1o million dollar prize. What could they have done in 5 years with a billion dollar prize and a clear goal similar to the ansari X prize? Perhaps its time to go with people that deliver results instead of cost overuns and scandles.... or at least with those who will profit ONLY if they actually DELIVER the goods.

New Dinosaur

Well now we have an interesting new discovery of a gigantic flying dinosaur. Previously Petrosaurs were highly disputed as flying animals because of the difficulty of the physiology of flight as we understand it today. However the overwhelming fossile evidence that indicated not just that the animal flew but flew easily has largely confounded experts in modern bird physiology.

To make a long discussion short the issue is material strength and metabolisim. Bird wings are extrodinarily fragile constructs. Anyone that has ever held a flight bird in their hand knows just how in substantial they are and how easy it is to break them. Now imagine such a structure that stretched some 8-9 meters to a side and then flap it hard enough to lift the weight of a bird with a 18 meter wing span. Experts were puzzled before by earlier examples of the capable flyers that petroasaurs evidently were and they have all be considerably smaller than this monster that they just found. The argument in short is that bones can not be both strong enough and light enough for what would be needed to support a bird flapping such large wings. And when you start with that problem to begin with it dosn't get any easier as you add strength.. because to do that you need stronger bones which means heavier bones which mean more force must be generated.

I have no doubt that in the years to come there will be some argument about the flying ability of this new find very similar in vein to the old petrosarus debate. But the evidence in support here seems to be of a similar nature so the question is more HOW did it fly than that it did or did not. and it truly is a puzzle. If you have never encountered the size issue debate of dinosaurs from the understanding of modern biology it is a fascinating discussion. Moden biologists have major problems with the giant sizes of some dinosaurs. Discussions about the sauropod neck are endless as are discussions about the athletic capacity of T-Rex. All evidence seems to point to animals that were highly active, but modern biologists often insist it is impossible. That the shear size presents problems.

For example if you take the largest herbivore and largest carnivore of today. The Elephant and the Bear respectively. Both are fairly lethargic. The bear in fact is actually omnivourous and in fact derrives much of its diet from non meat sources. The elephant bears the distinction of being the only mammal that cannot jump. Taking what we know of modern elephant physiology modern biologist simply have no answer for how a T-Rex, which was larger than an elephant, Could not only carry all of its weight on Two legs, but actually perform the highly agile manouevers needed for a carnivore to catch its prey. This difficulty is the single largest reason why early on most people assumed dinosaurs were lumbering extremely slow beasts that simply lived in slow motion. That they were cold blooded and that the reason T-Rex could be a carnivore was that it could be that slow and still catch food. Then the evidence began mounting strongly in favor of warm blooded creaters with high metabolisims that had activity rates much more in common with that of birds than chilled reptiles. IE they were fast and quick AND huge. This is still a thorny subject to modern biologists because to their eyes it is completely impossible that this combination could ever exist.

The problem of the strength of the petrasuarus wings is the same for T-Rex's legs and the Sauropods Neck. Muscles couldn't be strong enough, Bone couldn't be strong enough and even if either were the shear amount of energy that would have to be processed to put them to use would have had them needing to eat non-stop for 30 hours a day (IE not enough time to do anything else and still not enough time). All in all its is a fascinating discussion at the edge of science where what we know about the past and what we know about the present clash.

Gay Marriage

Well the California State legislature became the first to pass a bill allowing same sex marriage today.

Well better late than never. Its nice that we are finally catching up to our supposed roots of a country founded on the concept of freedom and tolerance. It has amazed me to no end the uproar caused over two people wanting to have their union officially recognised. I mean its not like same sex couples are going to change. It is not like this suddenly legitimizes them. They were already legitimate. If you think not then you have never known personally two people of the same gender that were bound in their love for one another. This is simply a long overdue recognition of the fact that some people form pair bonds with the same sex. And that as we recognize those pair bonds between a man and woman we should give no less recognition to those that form it man to man or woman to woman. I hope that all 50 states soon follow.

What are those against this afriad of? That there will be no marriages between man and woman if we make it acceptable to be married to someone of the same sex? Please. That it is a Sin? Hell it never even says out and out in the bible that sex between people of the same gender is evil. It says it was a practice of the people of Soddam and Gomorrah and that they were evil people. Not that this was what made them evil. Be nice if some actually read the good book rather than spouting off nonsense about it. What about love your neighbor ? Hmmmmm ? Judging not lest ye be Judged ? If the act of homosexuality is abhorrent to God then God will take care of those errant ways in good time. Feel free to make it known you do not approve as you have every right to your opinion on the matter. But no one has a right to say who it is right for another to Love. And who it is wrong to Love. And it certainly is not the Governments Job to say what bonds of love shall be recognized and which shall not. The governemnt is to provide equality for all walks and persuasions inso much as it does not interfere with the rights of others. The desire of two consenting adults to form a partnership has no bearing on any other persons rights, and as such should not be denied any rights accorded other such partnerships.

Churches have every right to NOT accept this. They have every right to refuse to perform a ceremony joining two people of the same sex in Holy Matrimony. Just as others have every right TO accept it and to perform such ceremonies. It is not the governemnts right however. Nor is it the right of the majority to decide that the minority cannot enjoy the same freedoms. How many times must we travel down this road before we realize there is more to democracy than the popular will of the people? We elect representatives and leaders not just to do what we want them to. But for them to make the decisions in the best intrest of all. Whether or not they are popular decisions.

I hate to think what my Beloved South would be today if we merely allowed the popular opinion of those in power to rule the day. Democracy allows us to escape the tyranny of the many as well as that of the few. Making choices of morality for others is something that should always be avoided. Lay down the rules of wrong and right. But do not mistake your morality as the last judgement on what is right and wrong. Do not think to save people from themselves as just perhaps all they want is to be saved from your judgements. Just as you have the right to disagree with them so to they have the right to disagree with you. And it is that Freedom which is so precious. And so worth dying for that countless lives have been lost and untold gallons of blood spilt to provide for this country.

For once my hat is off to California. They done right.

Katrina

This is our Tsunami ???? What crack rock are people smoking saying that? The Tsunami in dec 2004 killed more than 200,000 people. Damn near 300,000. If Katrina breaks 10,000 dead it will be a surprise. It is a tragedy enough by itself but DO NOT try and put it in the same class of something that killed a cool Quarter of a million people. Have some perspective here folks. And lord knows the US economy is in far better shape to deal with such damage than the severely depressed south east Asian economies.

Also part of the magnitude of the death toll is directly tied to the fact many people CHOSE not to go in addition to those that could not go. For those that chose to stay when a cat 5 hurricane threatened the coast they lived on or near I have little sympathy. They played Russian Roulette and I have as much sympathy for them as someone stupid enough to spin the cylinders of a partialy loaded revolver and then pull the trigger to find out if they will shoot themselves.

For those that had no choice but to stay help is comming. It can't happen over night. Several hundred miles of coast and one major city are completely devestated and the worst case scenario of the levies being breeched in New Orleans happend. For those comparing speed of response to something like 9-11 have a sanity check on the comparitive magnitudes of devestation. One downtown district in the middle of the most highly technologically advanced coasts in the world that suffered no other damage vrs 100's of miles of wiped out coast line in the poorest areas of the US. Katrina left 1,000's of square miles spanning THREE states in utter dissarray and an ENTIRE MAJOR CITY under water with 10's of thousands, perhaps more than a hundred thousand, stranded imobile poor that were in bad shape BEFORE the storm hit. You think it might take a bit of time to organize how to deal with this... hell just to make a dent in it ?

To the people spreading FUD about the speed of the response ??? STFU !!!!. Good lord. The largest calamity this nation has seen on its soil since Andrew hit the Carolina Coast is just 4 days in the past and all the relief that can be mustered is headed that way. Power Trucks in the thousands headed that way without delay to the detriment of other communities ability to recover from less severe damage as the storm moved inland. The National Guard has been bringing itself to bear. 10 billion dollars in reliefe has passed about as fast as an unplanned bill can. 11,000 people have been moved to just ONE location 350 miles away. Sit down and figure out the logistics of that without power, water, gas stations in Jefferson Parish and only limited access to the interior of the city. Much less the thousands of others that have been pulled to saftey in other locations. Thailand WISHES they could have mustered the response that has been delivered to the areas devestated by Katrina. Hell they wish they could have mustered HALF of it. And it is just going to get bigger and bigger.

Damn. I know we live in a society that demmands immediate results but some things just plain take time. What could be done quickly has been done quickly, piece meal evacuation where equipment could be brought to bear and YES IT WASN'T ENOUGH. It was what was quickly available. Mustering and organizing the man power to effectively deal with this problem looks to have taken 4 days.

What might have been done better? Call up of National guard probably should have begun before the storm even landed. Soon as it hit sustained Cat 5 status and we knew it was going to make landfall they should have been mobilized and preperations made for where to send the reliefe. Oh wait.... THEY DID THAT. In accordance with past events. This one got bigger. And the response is scalling up accordingly. but if you wonder what the guard is doing just go check out their website. Perhaps the initial call up could have been bigger... but hell that thing was nothing till not much more than 48 hours before it hit. Can you imagine if it had developed into a cat 5 in the atlantic, Hit Miami THEN corssed into the Gulf and picked momentum back up the way it did? We may have had to define a new category beyond catastrophic and just called it the appocalypse.

Where should some blame land that it has YET to? How about the local and state government of Louisiana? The vulnerability of New Orleans to a direct hit by any significant Hurricane was far from unknown. The problem of dealing with the cities poor and essentially imobile population was recognized long ago as a major complication compounding factor to how ugly such an event would be. Yet when the evacuation became mandatory there was no allowance for evacuating those that had not the means to evacuate themselves. No busses already running moving people out of the path of the storm. Just a last ditch opening of the superdome for some of them to ride it out.... Nope instead of taking preventative measures with the immobile population the city rolled the dice on the deffenses they had built and they failed. They have done this for YEARS, hell DECADES. This is nothing new. What is new is that this time around the storm hit and the Levee failed. Thats the thing about odds and an infinate timeline. Sooner or later the event WILL happen. I see an awfull lot of similarity in this event and the discussion regarding asteroids colliding with earth. We know they have hit in the past, we know they will hit in the future. Yet we pay it no real mind assuring ourselves that before it hits we will come up with adequate deffense measures. Somehow I doubt many will take such a lesson from it... but I am strange.

New Orleans will Rise Again. Though I do somewhat question the wisdom of re-building a city that is well below sea level. But people do not always do logical things and the city has huge sentimental value. Hopefully we will take lessons from this and the next time it happens. Somehow I doubt it. If its deffenses are not built according to what we know can happen then they need to accept the risk or certainly plan better for what to do in the event that they know something is about to happen for which they have no deffense.

Gas Prices

Human nature is a bitch you know. We take a hit to our supply chain and instead of perhaps laying off the gas, using the car less and easing the demand on the supply of gas to the stations we all rush like lemmings to the station and cause a panic. We took a hit to a 1/4 of our production. No word yet on how long that will last and the only other news we have for sure is that the reserves are going to be opened and fuel environmental requirements eased to speed production else where. All in all not a panic level of problem. But now we sucked out what little margin there was in the system to ease the transition to a lower supply market by rushing out to the stores en masse.

STUPID STUPID STUPID. This is a time to use LESS gas not MORE and that is exactly what happend with every one going and filling there tanks at once. And those f*****g money grubbing bastards that raised the pump prices so fast it scared everyone to death to begin with need to be held to account for this to some degree. We went from 2.40 to 3.00 a gallon here and it obviously has not seen its peak. If everyone had seen prices remaining more or less stable they likely wouldn't have paniced but no, they had to try and capitalize on the situation and the fact that oil entering the processing cycle NOW and that won't come to market for MONTHS just shot up on the stock market all because they can. Damn this is getting old. Oil has increased just over 20% per barrel over the last year before Katrina and yet pump prices rose more than 30%. Someone please explain that to me? What is the deffinition of price gouging again? Isn't that not allowed? Now it shot up a 1/6th a barrel and the prices jumped more than a 1/5th. This can't keep going like this.

On the other hand if gas prices more or less stabalize above 3$ a gallon it is going to do some interesting things to the alternative fuel markets in the US. For one thing pure Bio-Diesel just became more profitable. Somehow I doubt there will be much bio mass rotting in silos come the end of this year. Ethonol may take off like a bat out of hell as well since it can be put pretty much strait into existing engines with extremely minor modifications. Additionally this just made the Canada Tar field extraction process that much more profitable, and they have a supply of that crap to rival the middle east reserves of sweet crude.... just have to get production ramped up.

This is going to be a shock... its going to hurt. But perhaps having this shock come this way, via Natural disasster BEFORE we really just started sucking the supply dry will work to our favor. Afterall America has always worked best under the gun, always come up with more faster than any nation before it when it had to. For a long time now we havn't had to come up with anything. Europe just adjusted to insanely high oil prices. Americans won't. Hell with the distances and low population densities we have to deal with we just CAN'T.