Tag: Technology

Why Gun Control is Impossible

Advocates of gun control like to believe access to firearms will become more difficult if the government restricts legal access. Perhaps this was true at one time but guns are, mechanically, simple devices and the equipment to manufacture them is becoming more affordable every day. Behold, the first (to my knowledge and the knowledge of the creator) firearm manufactures on a 3D printer:

As 3D printer technology becomes more affordable gun control will become more pointless. The obvious solution to this problem, according to gun control advocates, would be to place tight restrictions on 3D printers. Fortunately such controls would be equally pointless because there are already people working on do it yourself 3D printers. One the genie is out of the bottle it cannot be put back in.

I Guess I’ll Never Be Allowed to Fly British Airways

It appears as though I’ll never be allowed to fly British Airways:

In an airline industry first, British Airways’ Know Me program uses Google images to ID its best customers even before they set foot in the airport. The airline has equipped its customer service agents and senior cabin crew with iPads so they can easily tap into and share information about customers, including their preferences, flight history and yes, photos.

While British Airways says the program, which launched earlier this month, helps “put a face to the name,” it’s got some people asking whether the airline is going the extra mile or just acting downright creepy.

If they Google me they’ll find this site and if they read this site they’ll known I’m an anarchist and a gun owner, neither of which are generally viewed in a positive light by airline services. Oh well, I wasn’t planning on flying British Airways anytime soon.

Facebook is Spying on You and Water is Wet

In news that is sure to shock nobody some information has come to light about Facebook’s method for spying on its users:

Facebook has added sleuthing to its array of data-mining capabilities, scanning your posts and chats for criminal activity. If the social-networking giant detects suspicious behavior, it flags the content and determines if further steps, such as informing the police, are required.

[…]

Facebook’s software focuses on conversations between members who have a loose relationship on the social network. For example, if two users aren’t friends, only recently became friends, have no mutual friends, interact with each other very little, have a significant age difference, and/or are located far from each other, the tool pays particular attention.

The scanning program looks for certain phrases found in previously obtained chat records from criminals, including sexual predators (because of the Reuters story, we know of at least one alleged child predator who is being brought before the courts as a direct result of Facebook’s chat scanning)

For the sake of public relations Facebook made sure to pull an “It’s for the children!” move when they let people in on their little monitoring mechanism. The story talks about an instance where a man in his early 30s tried to pick up a 13 year-old girl. See, it’s good that Facebook spys on its users, they’re protecting the children!

Anybody who is surprised by this news obviously hasn’t been paying attention to Facebook’s business model. Facebook’s customers aren’t their users, it’s their advertisers. Advertisers pay Facebook money because Facebook’s users voluntarily give up a great deal of personal information that can be used to better target ads. As their business model involves mining personal data from users so the monitoring tools are already in place. It’s trivial to include certain phrases indicating criminal behavior in their data mining system.

The golden rule of the Internet is that you shouldn’t use third-party services to do anything illegal. Whether you’re selling drugs or plotting to overthrow the Republic of Elbonia do it with encrypted communication methods that aren’t controlled by third-parties. You should probably give only information you’re comfortable with the whole world knowing to third-party services as well.

The Proper Method of Producing Renewable Energy

There are numerous heated debates regarding which method of energy production from renewable sources is the best one. The debate usually involved hydroelectric dams, wind turbines, and solar panels. What many people in this debate don’t see is that none of them are the best solution, the best solution is not to rely on any single source of energy. While people debate over the best method of renewable energy production some smart individuals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) actually thought about the problem correctly:

Researchers at MIT have taken a significant step toward battery-free monitoring systems — which could ultimately be used in biomedical devices, environmental sensors in remote locations and gauges in hard-to-reach spots, among other applications.

Previous work from the lab of MIT professor Anantha Chandrakasan has focused on the development of computer and wireless-communication chips that can operate at extremely low power levels, and on a variety of devices that can harness power from natural light, heat and vibrations in the environment. The latest development, carried out with doctoral student Saurav Bandyopadhyay, is a chip that could harness all three of these ambient power sources at once, optimizing power delivery.

Relying on any single source is tempting fate by creating a single point of failure whereas using multiple sources grants a great deal of redundancy. Why rely on just solar panels or just wind turbines when you can use both? After all, solar panels only work when there’s enough sunlight while wind turbines only work when there’s enough wind. Hydroelectric dams work continuously (unless there is a major drought) but the locations where they can be built are very limited.

Let’s learn a lesson from the guys at MIT and stop thinking about a single best solution (this goes for things besides renewable energy production by the way).

Consumers Punished by Intellectual Property Again

Are you looking to by a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1? Too bad, sales of the device have been banned in the United States because of a patent dispute between Apple and Samsung:

A court has banned sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in the US while it decides on the firm’s patent dispute with Apple.

Apple has claimed that Samsung infringed its design patent and copied the look of its popular device, the iPad.

The Samsung tablet is considered by most analysts as the biggest rival to Apple’s iPad.

The ban does not apply to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 II, the tablet’s new edition.

This is yet another example of consumers losing because of the patent system. While Apple attempts to extort money from Samsung over a non-scarce resource consumers are unable to purchase Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1. Somebody could probably make a little money (not much mind you, the Tab 10.1 is getting up there in age now) by doing some agorism and selling Tab 10.1s in a “black” market.

The FCC Just Became Obsolete

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates the use of electromagnetic spectrum in the United States. One of the reasons there are so few cell phone service providers in this country is because one must first get a license for spectrum use from the FCC who sell off blocks in auctions, auctions that now end up in the billions of dollars. With spectrum costs so high it’s not surprising that new players don’t enter the market. The FCC claims this regulation is necessary because the alternative would be constant interference as wireless providers used spectrum that another company was using. While this argument isn’t true for various reasons it’s also now technologically irrelevant:

American and Israeli researchers have used twisted, vortex beams to transmit data at 2.5 terabits per second. As far as we can discern, this is the fastest wireless network ever created — by some margin. This technique is likely to be used in the next few years to vastly increase the throughput of both wireless and fiber-optic networks.

These twisted signals use orbital angular momentum (OAM) to cram much more data into a single stream. In current state-of-the-art transmission protocols (WiFi, LTE, COFDM), we only modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) of radio waves, not the OAM. If you picture the Earth, SAM is our planet spinning on its axis, while OAM is our movement around the Sun. Basically, the breakthrough here is that researchers have created a wireless network protocol that uses both OAM and SAM.

[…]

According to Thide, OAM should allow us to twist together an “infinite number” of conventional transmission protocols without using any more spectrum. In theory, we should be able to take 10 (or 100 or 1000 or…) WiFi or LTE signals and twist them into a single beam, increasing throughput by 10 (or 100 or 1000 or…) times.

Humans have a propensity to find more efficient methods of utilizing scarce resources. That is why regulations that attempt to ration scarce resources are entirely unnecessary and even, in the case of subsidized resources, encourage consumption as current rates using current technology. This story is another demonstration of humans overcoming a limitation without needing to resort to legislative control.

Human ingenuity: 1, government control: 0.

I Love the Free Market

The free market works on competition. Established producers must continue to innovate in some way to keep themselves relevant while new producers must innovate in order to convince consumers to buy their products instead of the products being produced by the established producers. Personal electronics are one of the freer markets in the world, which is why we enjoy every improving cheaper products:

Just look at all those drives under a dollar per gig. The higher-capacity models offer the best value in virtually every family. Although the 40-64GB variants don’t look quite so good on this scale, they have asking prices under 100 bucks.

Solid State Drives (SSD) are becoming cheaper while their capacities are increasing. We can now get more for less than what we had to pay a few short years ago and the trend will continue. This news pleases me because the only reason I haven’t gone to SSDs is the price to capacity ration, I want more capacity and it’s simply too expensive for me to get what I want with an SSD. A year or two from now SSDs will likely have the capacity I’m looking for at a price I’m willing to pay and then I will jump on board.

I just wish all markets were as free as personal electronics.

Green Jobs

When the state said it was investing in green jobs they must have meant drone pilots:

Phantom Eye’s innovative and environmentally responsible liquid-hydrogen propulsion system will allow the aircraft to stay on station for up to four days while providing persistent monitoring over large areas at a ceiling of up to 65,000 feet, creating only water as a byproduct. The demonstrator, with its 150-foot wingspan, is capable of carrying a 450-pound payload.

At least the state will be more environmentally friendly while the’re spying on the citizenry and bombing people overseas.

Score One for Private Enterprise

They said it couldn’t be done, they said we needed the state in order to achieve space flight, they were wrong:

Dragon has been built by the California firm SpaceX and is carrying half a tonne of food and other stores for the ISS astronauts.

It is the first time a private sector company has attempted to deliver freight to the station.

The high-flying laboratory’s Canadarm2 is being controlled by US spaceman Don Petit.

He grabbed the capsule at 13:56 GMT (14:56 BST). “Houston, looks like we got us a Dragon by the tail,” he radioed to Nasa mission Control in Texas.

To all of you who claimed this couldn’t be done please feel free to shut your mouth next time you get the idea that the state is the only entity that can accomplish something. Heck, if it wasn’t for the state we may have been on Mars already.

Appreciating Human Achievement

Humans are awesome. I know this goes against the misanthropes who view humanity as some kind of plague that should be destroyed for the sake of Mother Gaia but I’m not a misanthrope. In fact let me state the following: fuck misanthropes. If you do any research into the achievements of humanity you can only walk away awed. I feel the best way to truly gain an understanding of humanity is to research the mundane things we take for granted today. My love of wristwatches has lead me to lightly study horology, the art and science of measuring time. Measuring time is something people take for granted today as every DVD player, cell phone, computer, microwave, car, and GPS unit has a build in way of measuring time (usually referred to as a clock). Heck most of these devices don’t even have to be set anymore, instead they automatically sync with various atomic clocks built around the world. This hasn’t always been the case though, measuring the passage of time used to be quite a feat.

I’ve started reading Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300-1800. The first chapter talks about the scientific achievements of Galileo Galilei (I hope to Odin that everybody knows who Galileo is and that my link to his Wikipedia page is entirely pointless). During the last 1500s and early 1600s Galileo was studying motion. In order to study motion he needed a way to measure the passage of time, unfortunately accurate clocks didn’t exist at that time. What’s a man to do? In the case of Galileo he used two methods: measuring the passage of time by the beating of his heart and by using a song with a repeating beat. Most scientists today would call such methodology unscientific but they have the benefit of highly accurate clocks that measure the passage of time based on the transition frequency of atoms. It’s easy to claim something is unscientific when you’ve enjoyed 400 years of scientific advancement.

Time brings up the though of hours, minutes, and seconds for most people. If you study horology you learn quickly learn that those measures of time, like all measures of time, are arbitrary. Why does one second need to take, well, one second? It doesn’t. The primary thing you need when measuring the passage of time is repetitiveness. Beats in songs are repetitive and thus can be used to measure the passage of time in a useful manner. Your heart rate, although far less accurate as it’s susceptible to variances based on bodily conditions, can also be used to measure the passage of time. Speaking of accuracy, it’s another thing that’s subjective. In the case of Galileo’s experiments the accurate of song beats was plenty for what the needed to do. On the other hand computers need to measure time in the span of microseconds so using the beats of songs, with the possible exception of extremely fast metal, isn’t going to cut it. To get around this we developed other methods of measuring time including the back and forth oscillation of a spring-loaded wheel, vibration of a quartz crystal that is subjective to a minor electrical current, and the aforementioned transition frequency of an atom.

The amount of ingenuity involve in telling time is phenomenal. Studying things we take for granted today really helps you appreciate what humans are capable of and what we have overcome in a short time in this universe. In roughly two million years we’ve gone from barely being able to harness fire to harnessing the power of nuclear energy. We’ve gone from a species whose only transportation was our two feet to landing on the moon. Humanity is awesome and you really need to look at the history of achievements we find entirely mundane today to appreciate that fact. Instead of trying to surpress human ability we need to let is flourish. We need to appreciate what our species can accomplish.