Category Archives: Technology

Luxury toys

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I got an email from Babeland this evening. They have some toys they are pushing as gift ideas:

Spoil someone rotten with the look, feel, and total body indulgence of our top-of-the-line sex toys. These opulent items combine the latest technologies, premium craftmanship, and deluxe materials to create toys that are as decadent as they are delightful.

They have some interesting stuff available including programable (“as easy as sorting your music on iTunes”), 24K gold, stainless steel, and chrome toys. I will include just the paragraph titles to avoid pushing this blog too much past the PG-13 rating.

  • For the Connoisseur
  • For the Technophile
  • For the Fashionista
  • For the Adventurer
  • For the Minimalist
  • For the Sensualist
  • For the Bootie Queen
  • For the Realist (her)
  • For the Insatiable
  • For the Sophisticate
  • For the Aesthete

I couldn’t find any gPod’s there however.

Get a gPod for your iPod

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Apple doesn’t like it but a small Japanese company has a innovative new product that is designed to be attached to your iPod–for women only:

Ichiro Kameda, the president of a tiny, two-man company in Osaka, is currently embroiled in a bitter battle with computer maker Apple.

“Putting it simply, the fight is all over what I call our beat generator. There’s a small device with three different, sound-activated motors. It’s a revolutionary invention. You can plug it in to iPods or mobile phones. It can also be programmed to operate only for certain voices,” Kameda says, referring to his company’s product.

Kameda’s commercial pride and joy is actually a women’s sex aid worn inside her most intimate orifices and buzzing her with good vibrations when set off by sound.

Though the Japanese Patent Agency gave him the right to use the devise (sic) in August last year, and the trademark he chose for the product was approved two months later, he still hasn’t been able to sell. The problem? He called the product the gPod, presumably after the G-Spot and jii, the Japanese word for masturbation. Kameda has since found out his choice of product name was like, well, taking a bite out of a rotten apple.

I wonder if Phil has some appropriate tunage…

Mac killed my inner child

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I don’t have more than a few minutes of experience on a Mac so I basically keep my mouth shut on the Mac versus PC war. I give you the following only for the humor value. It’s not because I have any data to support anything negative said about the Mac.

Video: Mac attack

Video: PC vs Mac

Video: An Apple Gamer

Some TSA numbers

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So… just how good do you think those security checks at the TSA checkpoints are? How poor of a job would they have to do before you would say, “We need to figure something else out. This just isn’t working.”? Suppose they let 10% of the knives and explosives through. Or may be 25%. Surely if 50% of the people could get guns and explosive through you would say they should be fired, right? Well… the real numbers are:

Federal authorities have launched an investigation to determine who leaked test results showing security screeners missed 90 percent of the explosives and guns agents attempted to sneak past checkpoints this month at Newark Liberty International Airport.

The probe was launched by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration after The Star-Ledger, citing information from federal security officials, reported Thursday that screeners failed 20 of 22 covert tests and also violated standard operating procedures at the busy hub.

Don’t you just love it? The government agency gets caught not doing the job they said private enterprise was too incompetent to handle what is their response? Why it’s, “You weren’t supposed to know that! Who told you?” They are going prosecute whoever it was that let us know they are playing Keystone Cops to the extent they succeed only 10% of the time. Just like Christopher Soghoian said, it’s “security theater”.

It’s time to consider alternatives to airplane security.

Quote of the day–Jim Harper

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The powers that be took a good run at deep-sixing this report. There’s such a strongly held consensus among industry and DHS that RFID is the way to go that getting people off of that and getting them to examine the technology is very hard to do.

Jim Harper
Cato Institute fellow
October 30, 2006
From Feds Leapfrog RFID Privacy Study

Those of You With AKs Will Understand

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Proof of concept installation.  Yes, its an AK (AK-74 semiauto, but it could be any AK– The principles are all the same).  Video – Less than 1MB.

OK, cite me for the gratuitous grin.

The Pill for men

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I remember when “The Pill”, as it is called, came out in the 60’s. It changed a lot of things. I doubt the male version will have as big of effect but it’s still interesting:

Men concerned about contraception may soon be able to use the male equivalent of the Pill, without the potential side-effects of a drug based on altering the balance of sex hormones.

Scientists have developed a chemical contraceptive that temporarily blocks the development of sperm but does not interfere with testosterone levels.

Trials on laboratory animals have shown that the contraceptive effect is reversible and that there are no apparent long-term side-effects. Human trials of the new male contraceptive could begin within the next few years.

The biggest change I predict will be the child support issues that arise when the man thinks his female sex partner is using some sort of birth control when in fact she was careless or even deliberately not using something. The man now has a means to protect himself from unwanted pregnancies of that sort while still preserving his options for a child at a later date.

Choosing the right metric

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One of my “hot buttons” is when people choose the wrong measurement for optimization.

I did that with Boomershoot 2005 when I tweaked the explosive mixture such that I got good results with a rim-fire .22. It turned out that the typical center-fire bullets had great difficulty detonating them.

This metric problem was one of my points in this post.

I heard of one software company that gave raises out based on the number of lines of code produced by the software developers. This adversely affected the designs, implementations, and even style of the code produced.

Another well known anti-virus software company paid bonuses for quickly finding solutions to new computer viruses. One enterprising employee became well known for finding figuring them out. Of course he didn’t tell management that he had created these same viruses and released them into the wild.

Gun control advocates rejoice and claim they were right when deaths and injuries due to bullet wounds decrease after a restriction on firearms is passed into law. They do that even if violent crime, injuries, and deaths increase. They ignore that many of those deaths and injuries are justifiable or even praiseworthy shootings that stopped criminal attacks.

Another one is that windmill manufactures work toward greater efficiency. In most cases this is the wrong measurement. The only case that this is important is if land space or wind is in short supply. If you have lots of land that can host windmills then the correct metric is cost per kilowatt-hour over the lifetime of the windmill.

Some of the first mass produced solar cells were for use in spacecraft. Area and weight were at a premium and hence efficiency was one of the proper metrics to use in the design. That is not true for the side of the shed I used for mixing and storing explosives over a quarter mile from the nearest usable power line. I have lots of area and I don’t care if it takes ten times as much area as the more efficient but twice as expensive solar cells to generate the same power. This is now being realized by the manufactures.

Examine every metric carefully. Think about the unintended consequences. Think about what is really important to the target audience. It can make a huge difference.

Beltway snipers

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The Beltway Snipers have been of more than casual interest to me for numerous reasons. Even before we knew who they were or their motives it was source of concern because of the damage it did to our right to keep and bear arms. I was also asked by a program manager when I worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory if I had any ideas on how to catch them. The labs were getting asked by law enforcement for help. I didn’t really have anything other than what was already known. I don’t really think short of creating a surveillance society of both video and audio sensors that new technology can offer much help in catching criminals of this nature. But that’s getting off my main impetus for this post.

Michelle Malkin points out one of the criminals has confessed to another murder in Arizona.

It’s amazing to me how much these criminal got away with before being caught. And then they only got caught after they started leaving notes for the police!

It appears that because their motives are not obvious from the crimes it was extremely difficult to find suspects to examine for evidence. Scary stuff.

Sign up for your implants

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This article from the U.K. sounds absolutely glowing about implants to give you a unique I.D. so you can “Speed through the checkout with just a wave of your arm”. But when you actually look at the number of people actually willing do submit to such a thing things look a little different:

The idea is already catching on with today’s iPod generation. According to research released today by the Institute for Grocery Distribution (IGD), a retail think-tank, almost one in ten teenagers and one in twenty adults are willing to have a microchip implanted to pay shop bills and help to prevent card or identity fraud and muggings.

In other words, only 10% of teenagers and only 5% of adults would be willing to have a microchip implanted in their bodies. That’s too many but it’s low enough that it’s not likely to be mandated by the government any time soon.

I wonder how many milliseconds of thought were put into the claim that such a thing would help prevent muggings. Plan on having a hunk of your arm cut out when you get mugged for your money. And they will have access to your entire bank account instead of just the cash in your wallet. If your credit card is stolen there are relatively small limits on the amount you are liable for so that isn’t a very big deal.

And these concerns completely ignore the little issue of the ID being remotely read and tied to things like your religion, race, national origin, or sexual preference (I see you are a Jew and it looks like there is a homosexual hiding behind the bookcase). ID implants fail my Jews In The Attic Test.

As I have said before, I’ll accept an ID implant when the people giving the implants accept my implants for themselves. My implants are a little larger than theirs. Mine weigh about 200 grains and will be moving at least Mach 2.0 (assuming I’m within 500 yards which isn’t really a requirement) when they contact the skin.

Bondage or freedom

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Recently I had a discussion with someone that was resigned to us losing our freedom. I only weakly protested because I don’t think well on my feet. I need time, sometimes lots of time, to formulate my thoughts and to make my case. My strength is in my attention to detail and in my ability to focus on problems for long periods of time. I play a good game of chess but not a first person shooter computer game. Boomershoot for example is a particularly subtle, long term, and yet I believe effective blow against the freedom haters (see also Why Boomershoot).

He claimed Jefferson was right to say, “God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.” He said that it was too late to save our freedom. Our chance for freedom today was lost without a successful revolution 150 years ago. And he invoked this as an argument:

The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.

Never mind that it might actually be an urban myth that Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee wrote this (see also this). It could be true or false regardless of who wrote it. And even if were true when it was claimed to be written in the late 1700’s things have changed a bit since then. In the last 200 plus years the most amazing changes in human history have occurred. What is the effect of those changes? How does it affect our fight for freedom?

These questions affect us all. Do we resign ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren to a life of bondage? Is the best we can do just keep our head down so the “tiger eats us last”?

I don’t have definitive answers to those questions but I have some pretty good hints. Please consider these changes from the time when the above was supposedly written:

  • Long range individual owned and deployed weapons
  • Incredibly cheap and rapid transportation
  • Incredibly cheap, rapid, and secure communications

In the long range weapons category I don’t just mean extending the range of a rifle from a couple hundred yards to a thousand or more. And I don’t mean mortars that can extend that range out to well over a mile. With cell phones and/or the Internet people can now give commands to a weapon from anywhere on the planet to any other place on the planet. We can even deploy “smarts” into weapon systems that can take out a tyrant and/or his minions weeks, months, or even years after being put in place and the weapon owner is long gone or even dead.

There are many who would claim these items help the tyrant as much or more than the freedom advocate but I disagree. China, Russia, or even Canada with its oppressive gun control and socialist health care isn’t any bastion of freedom but each of those governments heavily censored communication to protect the oppressors. And in each case communication recently succeeded despite efforts to suppress them and brought about reforms. As a friend said, Computers and the Internet are a far bigger problem for the government than they are for the individual. Just look at the vigorousness of the response by the Islamic extremists to our “corruption” of their society by our communication. Or the impact talk radio has had on U.S. politics. They, the freedom haters, hate it so because it is so powerful. Open communication is the ultimate enabler of freedom in a war against tyrants and communication has never been so cheap or secure as it is right now.

The rapid and cheap transportation allows the freedom advocate to attend a pro-freedom march on Pennsylvania Avenue, or take action against jack booted thugs near Waco or Ruby Ridge on a Saturday afternoon and never miss an hour of work from his or her job in Seattle or Miami. And the communication makes it possible for them to know about the event and coordinate with others in real time rather than days or weeks after it was over and far too late to participate in a meaningful manner.

My conclusion, for all it’s lack of decisiveness, is that should we have the ambition and the courage to utilize the tools available to us we have it within our power to prevent the loss of more of our freedom and even regain many of the freedoms we have lost. I think the real question is, do you have the ambition and the courage to make a difference? Or are you going to give up?

Quote of the day–Whitfield Diffie

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If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything.

Whitfield Diffie
[Words of wisdom for freedom advocates from a self admitted lefist who perhaps gave us one of the strongest keys (pun intended) to protecting and advancing freedom in all it’s forms.–Joe] 

Rapid evolution

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My blog evolved from a Crawly Amphibian to a Flappy Bird in just two days and in the process pegged out the inbound link-o-meter:

Actually most of this rapid evolution was due to some sort of bug in the TLB ecosystem. I’ve had 50 some odd inbound links for quite some time but they weren’t showing up right. After the Gun Blogger Rendezvous everyone started linking to everyone else and the dam sort of burst on my inbound links.

The rise in the number of viewers late last month is probably due to all the links Say Uncle has been sending my way recently.

Quote of the day–Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

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A firing rate of 15 to 20 percent among soldiers is like having a literacy rate of 15 to 20 percent among proofreaders.  Once those in authority realized the existence and magnitude of the problem, it was only a matter of time until they solved it.

And thus, since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare — psychological warfare conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one’s own troops.  Propaganda and various other crude forms of psychological enabling have always been present in warfare, but in the second half of this century psychology has had an impact as great as that of technology on the modern battlefield.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
From On Killing — The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill In War and Society
Page 251

DNA remedy ‘beats hay fever’

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I have problems with hay fever. Yeah, that was a big issue when I lived on the farm. Especially when my family’s religious beliefs (Christian Scientist) strongly discouraged the use of medicines. Some of my kids inherited the problem but Sudafed (years ago) and now Claritin give us the relief we need to be functional in most situations.

Now there is a new solution on the horizon:

Scientists claim six injections of a new vaccine offers years of relief to sufferers of the allergy  
 
A NEW DNA-based allergy vaccine can offer long-lasting relief to hay fever sufferers after just six injections, American scientists have claimed.

Patients receiving the experimental vaccine showed an average 60 per cent reduction in typical allergy symptoms, such as sneezing, runny nose, watering eyes and itching for at least two years, compared with those receiving a placebo.  
 
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore, Maryland, believe that a six-injection treatment with the new vaccine, known as AIC, could offer a significant improvement over traditional allergen immunotherapy, which can require several years of weekly or bi-weekly injections.

AIC contains a short piece of DNA known as an “immunostimulatory sequence” that can modify immune system reactions and reduce the typical symptoms of ragweed allergy, more commonly known as hay fever.

The experimental therapy also holds the promise of one day eliminating the need for traditional allergy medicines such as nasal steroids and antihistamines.

Cinderella story

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As I obliquely reported the other day my cell phone turned into a pumpkin at midnight on Saturday. It wasn’t until lunch time yesterday that I was finally able to get it fixed. It’s quite the Cinderella now. Very pretty and nice. I’d like to say more but there are those pesky NDAs…

Quote of the day–Ry Jones

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DOS probably got your dog pregnant and left the milk out a couple times in college. Perhaps Windows 3.11 never paid you back for that $100 it was totally going to spend to get his car fixed but you later found out he spent on whiskey and hookers. Exchange server – I heard what it did, it was in all the papers.

Ry Jones

I understand you hate Microsoft
October 1, 2006
[Read the post. How apropos. As I told Barb this morning, “My phone turned into a pumpkin at midnight.”–Joe]

Barrett sales propaganda

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Actually it is a Discovery Channel piece that I was pointed to by the anti gun bigot at “Freedom State Alliance”. This time I actually mostly agree with him when he says:

This shocking video might be the best demonstration of the lethality and power of the .50-caliber sniper rifle – YOU SIMPLY MUST WATCH IT.

Drop the words “shocking” and “YOU SIMPLY MUST” and we’ve come to agreement.

There is some false/misleading information in the video however. Bolt action rifles don’t take 15 to 20 seconds to cycle. And the AK round is seldom referred to as “308”.

Quad-core processors

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When the Intel 386 came out tech pundits joked about the computers could then wait faster for the next keystroke while running your word processing program. But Bill Gates told the world that no matter how fast the computers were that Microsoft would be able to write software that would bring them to their knees. He wasn’t joking but I’m pretty sure it didn’t come out quite like he intended it.

The 386 ran at something like 15 to 25 MHz and required a separate math co-processor in order to compute the sum of two floating point numbers in anything less than dozens of clock cycles. Trig functions, square roots, or logarithms were hundreds of clock cycles without the co-processor.

Now Intel has announced quad-core processors with more cores on the way:

Intel will deliver the company’s first quad-core processors for high-performance PCs and servers in November, getting the jump on rival AMD in providing the next generation of chips designed to deliver the power needed to handle high-definition video, cutting-edge games, and math-intensive number-crunching.

…

Intel officials already have indicated that chips with dozens of cores might be possible by the end of this decade. The company hinted that, 10 years down the line, chips with hundreds of cores might be possible.

Mark Margevicius, a research director at Gartner, said that the move from single- to dual-core processors broke the barrier to such developments. “We’re now in a multicore world,” he said in a recent interview. “There’s no looking back.”

One of these quad-core processors can do more hard core (pardon the pun) math computing in a second than my first 386 could in five hours. Now I just have to write applications than can put that processing power to useful work.

Shaped charges

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When I casually think of an explosion I think of a rapidly expanding sphere of gases. It turns out this is rarely the case. An explosion propagates from the point of detonation along a (typically expanding) “front”. Because the pressure at the front is much greater than both ahead and behind it the gases produced, which are behind the front, expand in a direction away from the front. This video from Ry demonstrates that. The exploding targets are 7″ x 7″ x 1.375″. The gases expand into the axis parallel to the 1.375″ dimension. Until this video we did not realize this.

Whatever shape of the explosive and whereever the point(s) of detonation are affects the directions of the explosion. This is used to great effect in the Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) which can, with a rather small amount of explosives, penetrate over 30 inches of renenforced concrete, or a foot of steel.