| SOPA is horrific |
[Dec. 19th, 2011|03:26 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  distressed | ] |
The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act is truly horrific. Please sign the petition shown here:
http://wh.gov/DfY |
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| The problem of overpriced electric vehicle charging equipment |
[Oct. 19th, 2011|02:20 am] |
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/automobiles/nissan-leafs-true-believers-wont-leave-well-enough-alone.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
This is an excellent article but it omits the root cause of the problem: the authors of the National Electrical Code (NEC). They placed all sorts of unique "safety" requirements on EVSE (Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) that were never placed on extension cords -- which is all these EVSE things really are. For example, they require that the cord not be energized until it's connected to the EV, and they prohibit the use of 240V dryer or range outlets for charging EVs even though they've been used safely for decades for RV hookups.
Gasoline pumps seem far more dangerous than extension cords. But they're not required to sense the presence of a car before letting gas flow. Nothing but common sense keeps you from squeezing the handle and spraying the gas on the ground.
The use of 240V vs 120V isn't a safety issue because, in North America, a "240V" circuit is really just two 120V circuits. It's only 240V between the two live pins, which you are very unlikely to touch at the same time. Nearly all shocks occur when a grounded person touches a hot conductor. The voltage to ground from each conductor of a 240V circuit is only 120V. Whatever shock hazard there might be is completely mitigated by ground fault interrupters (GFIs), which have been required on nearly all kitchen, bathroom, garage, basement and outdoor circuits for years.
The SAE J1772 standard for EVSE does have some features that are actually useful, such as telling the car how much current it can draw. And it interrupts the power flow before you actually remove the connector from the vehicle so it won't break under load and arc at the connector contacts. But these features currently come at a high price; even the portable EVSEs, which also implement J1772, cost much more than they should but at least Nissan bundles them with the car.
The article is right that the permanent EVSE units -- which are much more expensive than the portable units -- are way overdesigned. The WiFi connection does provide some minimal user remote control as an obvious afterthought (it's rather poorly designed) but the NYT article doesn't mention the real reason it's there. It's so Ecotality, the company that got that huge grant from the feds to install these things, can collect detailed usage data. The collection of this data is part of the user contract, so it's obviously valuable to them. But they don't compensate you in any way for this invasion of your privacy; the only way to avoid it is to pay full retail for a unit and forego the federal subsidy. Seems to me that either the federal government drove a poor bargain, or somebody there is in bed with Ecotality. Or both. Wouldn't be the first time.
Fortunately, the data collection is only to continue for another year or so. After that I fully intend to block this data from reaching their servers and to show everyone else how to block it too. |
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| Steve Jobs |
[Oct. 6th, 2011|03:54 pm] |
I never met the man, but I still feel his passing as a lost symbol of our generation. Back in the 1970s I was building homebrew computers just as Jobs, Wozniak and many others were. All of us could see the enormous potential in those primitive machines. We all had vague notions that someday they'd be everywhere and ordinary people would use them. But Jobs knew how to make that actually happen.
I think future generations of kids will read about Steve Jobs in the same way that we read about Thomas Edison when we were kids. Larger than life, idealized, given credit not only for what he personally did but for some things that should rightly go to the people who worked for him -- but nonetheless somebody who really did completely change the world for the better with technology and who will become a symbol of that for many generations. |
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| Who we honor and recognize in this country |
[Jul. 28th, 2011|07:46 pm] |
Kimberly and I recently drove to Las Vegas for The Amazing Meeting 9 sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation. We've long been fans and supporters of Randi and occasional readers of magazines like the Skeptical Inquirer, but this was our first TAM.
We left a day early to see Hoover Dam, something I've always wanted to see close up. The site really requires an essay of its own to do it justice, but the subject of this essay is the name of the brand new bypass bridge just opened across the Colorado River immediately south of the dam:
The Mike O'Callaghan - Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge
Mike O'Callagan was a former Nevada governor who died in 2004. And in the unlikely event you don't know who Pat Tillman was, go look him up on Wikipedia.
So of all those whom have passed away that we could have honored by putting their names on that bridge, those two were apparently the most important, accomplished and deserving.
During session breaks at TAM, the video screens carried the pictures and brief bios of major scientific figures who died in the past year. One name caught my eye: Frank Fenner, 1914-2010.
Who the hell was Frank Fenner?
Fenner led the team that eradicated smallpox. Since prehistoric times, that horrible disease had been a major scourge of the human race. The suffering it once caused is simply indescribable. It killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone, far more than all the wars of that bloody century combined. Even the deadliest war in history, World War II, killed only about 70 million people.
Smallpox infected another 700 million people during the last century. They survived, scarred and disfigured for life.
Fenner and his team stopped all that. The last natural case of smallpox was in 1977. A year later, the virus got out of a lab in Birmingham, UK, infected two people and killed one of them. In over 30 years there hasn't been a single case of smallpox anywhere in the world. It's gone for good (we hope).
Yet hardly anybody (in the US, at least) even knows Fenner's name. We certainly didn't put his name on any major new bridges. Football players are far more important people. |
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| The tea party vs Sharia Law |
[Jul. 9th, 2011|05:18 pm] |
I've been hearing, with increasing bafflement and amusement, about yet another crusade by Christian fundamentalists who identify with the so-called American Tea Party. This time their bogeyman is the application of Sharia (Islamic) Law by American courts.
They seem honestly terrified that American judges are about to summarily junk centuries of American statutory and common law and turn the United States into an Islamic Caliphate (theocracy) like Iran, Afghanistan and other basket-case nations.
The irony here is utterly delicious. Throughout our history, and especially in the past three decades, many fundamentalist American Christians have tirelessly swung their pickaxes against the wall of separation between church and state. The very same wall that protects them from, among other things, Sharia Law.
I'm reminded of the old Loony Tunes cartoons: Yosemite Sam (or the Coyote) stands on the end of a tree branch (or cliff), saw in hand, facing Bugs Bunny (or the Roadrunner). He furiously begins sawing, not thinking too clearly about what will happen if he succeeds. The best part was always the look on the face of Yosemite Sam or the Coyote the moment he realizes what he's done. That gag never got old.
If you're a night owl like me, you've probably surfed those obscure public-access cable TV channels in the middle of the night out of sheer boredom. And you've probably seen a nut job named David Barton ranting tirelessly about how the Founding Fathers were all devout evangelical Christians who actually meant the United States to be a "Christian" nation. When I first saw him around 1980, he seemed far outside the US mainstream.
Surely he had to be an aberration. The rest of us remembered our high school history classes: long before it settled the American colonies, Europe had suffered from constant religious persecution and even open warfare. Some of the most celebrated settlers came here specifically to escape it. (As Garrison Keillor explained it, his Pilgrim ancestors came to America in search of greater religious restrictions than were available in England at the time.)
We learned that the founders of the young United States -- most famously, Thomas Jefferson -- were determined not to let that happen here. They believed that government and religion both did better by leaving the other alone. By the 1970s, even many devoutly religious people seemed to accept this wisdom.
The latest attack on what had seemed like such a no-brainer began with Ronald Reagan's presidency and the rise of the Religious Right. David Barton had been joined by Jerry Falwell and other preacher/politicians, and their extreme views were increasingly expressed by prominent politicians.
Even creationism had become fashionable again. Creationism! Hadn't we settled that way back in the 1920s with the Scopes trial? Fortunately, the Supreme Court still soundly defeated every attempt to sneak it back into the public school science classroom.
Then 9/11 happened. For a brief moment I actually thought some good might ultimately come out of this horrible nightmare. Maybe it would grab the fundamentalists here by the shoulders and shake them into realizing just where extreme religious fundamentalism can lead. Maybe they'd see the folly of trying to use the power of the state to further their personal religious views and realize that the 'wall' they hated protected even them.
Well, my optimism sure didn't last long. It's not that al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorists were religious zealots, it's that they were Muslims!
So the fundies fight on, still pretending that the Constitution doesn't really mean what it plainly says. Now they will have to live in the hell that they've created for themselves. I only hope that this hell remains entirely within their own minds. |
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| Nuclear power in Germany -- cooler heads will ultimately prevail |
[Jun. 1st, 2011|12:58 am] |
So Germany has announced that they're going to abandon nuclear power.
Chancellor Angela Merkel is a physical scientist (physics and chemistry) so she almost certainly knows better. This can only be political posturing. But if she's serious, I'm sure that cooler heads will ultimately prevail before Germany does anything irreversible.
By shutting down some of their reactors Germany has already managed to turn a national surplus of electricity into a deficit. How do they make it up? Mainly by imports from France, which generates about 80% of its electricity with nuclear reactors!
This is far higher than any other country. In most other Western countries (e.g., Germany, Japan and the US) nuclear power typically supplies about a quarter of their electricity. Because nuclear plants produce electricity at a lower marginal cost than just about anything else, they are generally run 24/7 at full power, i.e., in baseload mode. But the French have so much nuclear capacity that they have to shut some reactors down on weekends due to insufficient demand, and some of their reactors have to load-follow during weekdays.
So the Germans won't reduce their dependence on nuclear power. They'll just shift it to the French, who will be more than happy to fire up their idle reactors and charge full market price for electricity that will cost them almost nothing to produce. I bet they're cheering right now.
With the increasingly bad news from the climate researchers about the effects of dumping 9 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every year, not to mention the obvious effects of a coal-burning power plant on its local environment, writing off the only CO2-free method of generating electricity proven to work on a large scale is just plain nuts. Reason has to overcome hysteria or we're all in big trouble.
I like solar and wind power as much as anyone. I have PV panels on my roof. I admire Germany for the amount of wind and solar generation they've brought online in recent years. But they're nowhere near displacing all their fossil generation yet so it would be absolutely foolish from both an economic and an environmental standpoint to turn off their nuclear plants only to shift that generation to fossil plants. Once they've maxed out France's surplus nuclear power, that is.
Once every fossil fuel plant on the western European grid has been displaced with renewable generation THEN it will be time to consider shutting down the nukes. Even under the most optimistic scenarios that day won't come for a very long time.
Some people fall for the fallacy of thinking that unless we can supply all of our electricity with some proposed method, it's no good. We have always produced our electricity from a variety of sources; it's just too important to our way of life to put all our eggs in a single basket. Scratch that -- with 7 billion of us on the planet, a number that shows no sign of slowing down, energy is now vital for human survival. It's not an either/or thing; we need solar AND wind AND hydro AND nuclear AND geothermal AND anything and everything that can make electricity without making net CO2 or depleting a seriously limited natural resources. We don't have the luxury of doing anything else. |
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| Writer's Block: Super Bowl XLV |
[Feb. 6th, 2011|08:14 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Home | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  apathetic | ] |
I can't understand what can motivate someone to pay a scalper thousands of dollars for a ticket and fly across the country to attend in person. That misses out on the only part of the superbowl that's worth watching: the ads.
Football itself bores me. I'll occasionally watch at a friend's party, or I'll turn it on at home just to watch the ads. Fedex used to have the best, but when they stopped advertising a few years ago I stopped watching. I guess they've started up again, but I tuned in too late to see any of theirs this year. I'm sure they'll be all over the net. |
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| Defcon: overhyped, overpriced, and poorly run |
[Aug. 1st, 2010|12:34 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  disappointed | ] |
It's now Sunday in Las Vegas. For most of the weekend I've had a terrible head cold, probably picked up on the plane ride here.
My pre-cold opinion of my first DEFCON hasn't changed much. Seeing a talk is a major effort involving lots of walking and waiting in long lines as crowds brush by. Wandering between talks at random is simply out of the question. The few I've actually managed to see have been uniformly disappointing with the singular exception of the EFF panel.
EFF's attorneys rock! I can see that my donations have been well spent. If you're not already a member of EFF, join. If you are a member, consider an extra donation. Read their newsletter and try to attend their meetings.
While each of the speakers had a few interesting things to say, a few (mainly those who live on the edge between the "white hat" and "black hat" worlds) do like to brag. While they try to hide it, their knowledge can be pretty spotty. I've noticed this ever since I first encountered my first Internet crackers, on Bellcore's brand-new Internet connection way back in 1986.
I had high hopes for one talk yesterday afternoon on downloading media streams from websites such as Youtube and Myspace. I've always found it extremely annoying that these sites lack an official "download" button. Everyone knows that this is just chickenshit - it's ultimately impossible to stop the owner of a personal computer from modifying its behavior, e.g., to record a media file for later use.
This practice certainly doesn't stop commercial pirates; they have the resources to overcome any such annoyance. But it does stop the average user from making perfectly reasonable "fair use" of a media file, such as pulling it down to your laptop so you can watch it later during a long plane ride.
Typically these sites do nothing more than bury the actual URL of the media file in a big, obfuscated block of Javacode. But there may be other mechanisms, such as ad-hoc transfer protocols. So I expected the speaker to list examples of those protocols, describe their properties and how they might be invoked outside of a web browser.
Nope. This talk focused on one specific streaming protocol and one specific open-source Windows command that can be used to record it to a file. Since I hadn't heard of this command, its name was the sole useful piece of information I gleaned from the entire talk. But it continued for the rest of an hour with a videotape of the speaker (shown twice!) pedantically typing commands to the DOS shell to show its use.
Thanks, but I already do know how to use the DOS shell.
I expected at least some mention of the several Firefox plugins that simply create the missing "download" buttons on, e.g., the Youtube web page. Nope.
I've had the most fun hanging around with some friends from back home. I didn't have to come to Las Vegas to do that.
I noticed that the talks were professionally videotaped, so I thought maybe they'd sell a DVD collection that I could browse to see what I might have missed. And indeed I can! And for the low, LOW price of only $2999!
No decimal point is missing in that dollar amount.
Maybe I tried it too late, but my take is that DEFCON is over-hyped, over-priced and poorly run. Unless major changes are made next year (such as moving into a vastly larger and less crowded hotel, and feeding video from at least the bigger meeting rooms to the hotel rooms or at the least to some overflow rooms) I just don't see much point in going back next year. |
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| My first DEFCON |
[Jul. 30th, 2010|03:49 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  angry | ] |
I'm posting this from DEFCON in Las Vegas. It's my first; I'd been hearing about it from a friend for the past few years and she finally talked me into it.
I think this will probably also be my last. Since I'd heard that the talks vary wildly in quality, my original inclination was to wander from talk to talk. Nope. The crowds are simply too great. There are five huge rooms for presentations, yet they're nearly all packed, with lines of people waiting to get in that snake into the main hotel hallways. The fire marshals are busy.
And it's only Friday.
There are other nice little user friendly touches. The session and event guidebook is about the size of a CD booklet, printed in tiny light blue font on a dark blue background that's almost impossible to read. (No, it's not just my eyes - my friend who's 16 years younger can't read it either.) The abstracts are in random order without an index.
A CD-ROM was handed out at registration. That would have been a perfect place to put a copy of the agenda. Nope.
DEFCON doesn't sell advance registration. You just show up, stand in a VERY long line, pay $140 (cash only!) and take your chances. If they had advance registration like every sane conference, then the number could be limited to the facility capacity and the organizers would know in advance how many were coming. If it sold out, they might even be able to expand or switch to a larger facility.
And given a choice between coming to an overcrowded event and not being able to come at all because of a sellout, frankly I'd much prefer the latter. At least I'd know that if I did get registered, I could attend without worrying that I'll spend the weekend like a sardine.
It's not that there aren't some interesting talks and events happening here; there are plenty. It's just that the crowds ruin it. |
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| Why are we still using credit cards? |
[Dec. 22nd, 2009|05:56 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | annoyed | ] |
It seems to me a scandal that at the end of 2009 our protocols for financial transactions STILL require me to give every vendor everything he needs to impersonate me to someone else. I.e., this thing called a "credit card number". And my name, card expiration date and CVN.
Whatever happened to the revolutionary idea of proving ownership of a secret without revealing it? I.e., why are we still not using public key cryptography? The patents expired years ago, so they're not an excuse.
I can't see why we don't all have a crypto dongle, essentially a smart card chip in a USB stick. When you buy something online, you plug it into your computer and it signs the transaction. To protect those who leave it plugged in all the time, it should have a button that you press to confirm each transaction. Point of sale devices could also have USB sockets for these things.
Yes, there's still the possibility that the computer into which you plug your dongle might be running malware. But at least the damage would be compartmented. You might be tricked into a transaction or two, but the compromised computer would be unable to steal your credentials and impersonate you to someone else. That would be a huge improvement.
Every time I read yet another news story about 40 million credit card numbers being stolen from a vendor's database, I get angry. Why is this even still possible? |
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