We are willingly being spied on

Read 'em and weep:

"How Your Phone Betrays Democracy"

A trove of location data with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans obtained by Times Opinion helps to illustrate the risks that such comprehensive monitoring poses to the right of Americans to assemble and participate in a healthy democracy.
 

Within minutes, with no special training and a little bit of Google searching, Times Opinion was able to single out and identify individuals at public demonstrations large and small from coast to coast.

By tracking specific devices, we followed demonstrators from the 2017 Women’s March back to their homes. We were able to identify individuals at the 2017 Inauguration Day Black Bloc protests. It was easy to follow them to their workplaces. In some instances — for example, a February clash between antifascists and far-right supporters of Milo Yiannopolous in Berkeley, Calif. — it took little effort to identify the homes of protesters and then their family members.

Of course, there are people who do this full time - and they sell our identities and location data to anyone who will pay.

Now even the FBI is warning about your smart TV's security

“Beyond the risk that your TV manufacturer and app developers may be listening and watching you, that television can also be a gateway for hackers to come into your home. A bad cyber actor may not be able to access your locked-down computer directly, but it is possible that your unsecured TV can give him or her an easy way in the backdoor through your router,” wrote the FBI.

The FBI warned that hackers can take control of your unsecured smart TV and in worst cases, take control of the camera and microphone to watch and listen in. ...

 The FBI recommends placing black tape over an unused smart TV camera, keeping your smart TV up-to-date with the latest patches and fixes, and to read the privacy policy to better understand what your smart TV is capable of.

At least use a different router for all connected devices than the one to your computers and tablets and phones.

Pentagon warns US military not to use home DNA testing kits

Companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry allow people to get a breakdown of their genetic makeup and geographic heritage, from providing a saliva sample. Ancestry boasts some 15 million users, while 23andMe says it has 10 million.

But a department of defence memo, obtained by Yahoo News, warned that the kits could put members of the military at risk.

“Exposing sensitive genetic information to outside parties poses personal and operational risks to Service members,” wrote Joseph D. Kernan, the undersecretary of defence for intelligence, and James N. Stewart, the assistant secretary of defence for manpower. ...
 
“There is increased concern in the scientific community that outside parties are exploiting the use of genetic data for questionable purposes, including mass surveillance and the ability to track individuals without their authorization or awareness.”

The memo reflects a wider concern about biometrics like DNA, fingerprints and facial recognition.

The DNA-testing companies are extremely inaccurate in their testing anyway. I remember reading of a journal that sent samples from several individuals to three different home-DNA testing companies and got back very different reports on each person. Then there was the example of the Dahm identical triplets whose samples also varied significantly. As Science News reports, "Results can vary widely depending on which company you use."

And when you sign the forms to send the sample back in, almost all of them include paragraphs by which you assign permanently and completely all rights to your DNA use for medical or commercial purposes to the company. That's right, when you send off your saliva sample, you are literally transferring ownership of your own DNA to the company.

Ban on cell phone use while driving - just a cash cow?

Last July 1, a law went into effect here in Tennessee that makes it illegal for anyone driving a car to hold a cellular phone in his or her hand. Reports the Knoxville News Sentinel,

The Tennessee law banning hand-held cell phones went into effect July 1. Drivers can eat, drink, converse, sing, look at roadside sights, talk to their kids in the back seat, and it’s all perfectly legal. Pick up a cell phone, however, and you’re a distracted-driving lawbreaker. Law enforcement and first responders, however, are exempt from the safety measure that the legislature and governor determined is required for Tennessee drivers.

The Sentinel is not a fan of the law, mainly because such bans, in effect in some other states for many years, have not once been shown to affect the accident rate at all. They cite a number of such studies.

But it does roll cash into county and state coffers.

At $50 per ticket, the Tennessee Highway Patrol’s cell phone ban enforcement netted, it would appear, a minimum of $21,200 for the 424 tickets the THP wrote in July, Knox News reported. Tickets increase up to $200 depending on the situation.

And yet . . .

Yes, the ban here in Tennessee is really just another way to tax people. OTOH, the worst accident scene I ever got called by the sheriff's dept. to go work was directly caused by a young woman driving on a two-lane state highway in Franklin, Tenn. It was before smart phones were invented. She was trying to punch a number into her cell phone and wandered into the other lane. An oncoming 18-wheeler swerved to miss her, bounced back onto the road and went head on into a Chevy pickup behind the woman's car.

The impact was so violent that it completely separated the truck's body from its frame, knocking the truck body 20 or more feet away from the frame assembly, which was solely occupied by the driver, married only three weeks, on his way home from work. He had been ripped into three separate pieces. The 18-wheeler's driver was injured.

The woman phone caller was wholly uninjured but when I spoke with her she was not very coherent. She was still holding the phone in her hand, up next to her head, though of course there was no call connected, and basically just walking in a small circle at the rear of her car.

A highway patrol trooper told me that in his 26 years in the THP, this was the most violent accident he had seen. After seeing the truck driver's remains, I could see why. Before the medical examiner's team went to retrieve the remains, I held a time of prayer and Holy Communion for them (I always took my Communion kit responding to sheriff's department calls).

So I cannot argue with Tennessee's law.

What instead of Google?

An excellent guide:

The complete list of alternatives to all Google products

Electric cars pollute more than diesel

So says the University of Cologne as reported by The Brussels Times, Belgium: "Electric vehicles emit more CO2 than diesel ones, German study shows."

Electrics' killer? Life-cycle pollution, compared to diesel cars - what it takes industrially to obtain the raw materials and turn them into finished, operating vehicles, operate them during their life span, and dispose of them when the reach the end. And the core of the problem is batteries.

When CO2 emissions linked to the production of batteries and the German energy mix – in which coal still plays an important role – are taken into consideration, electric vehicles emit 11% to 28% more than their diesel counterparts, according to the study, presented on Wednesday at the Ifo Institute in Munich.

Mining and processing the lithium, cobalt and manganese used for batteries consume a great deal of energy. A Tesla Model 3 battery, for example, represents between 11 and 15 tonnes of CO2. Given a lifetime of 10 years and an annual travel distance of 15,000 kilometres, this translates into 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometre, scientists Christoph Buchal, Hans-Dieter Karl and Hans-Werner Sinn noted in their study.

The CO2 given off to produce the electricity that powers such vehicles also needs to be factored in, they say.

When all these factors are considered, each Tesla emits 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometre, which is more than a comparable diesel vehicle produced by the German company Mercedes, for example.

The German researchers, therefore, take issue with the fact that European officials view electric vehicles as zero-emission ones. They note further that the EU target of 59 grams of CO2 per km by 2030 corresponds to a “technically unrealistic” consumption of 2.2 litres of diesel or 2.6 litres of gas per 100 kms.

These new limits pressure German and other European car manufacturers into switching massively to electric vehicles whereas, the researchers feel, it would have been preferable to opt for methane engines, “whose emissions are one-third less than those of diesel motors.”

ZeroHedge explains:

A battery pack for a Tesla Model 3 pollutes the climate with 11 to 15 tonnes of CO2. Each battery pack has a lifespan of approximately ten years and total mileage of 94,000, would mean 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometer (116 to 156 grams of CO2 per mile), Buchal said. Add to this the CO2 emissions of the electricity from powerplants that power such vehicles, and the actual Tesla emissions could be between 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometer (249 and 289 grams of CO2 per mile).

An electric car such as a Tesla is not powered by electricity. It is powered by coal; the electricity is just a means of transfer.

The same problem, btw, exists in the nearly-mythical hydrogen-powered car. The hydrogen has to come from somewhere. Atoms of H It do not exist in nature unbound to other elements. And you always use more energy to obtain free hydrogen than you get from oxidizing it. Guess where that energy comes from?

I covered hydrogen's problems years ago in, "Buy a Honda, kill a polar bear."

Here is a good video that explains hydrogen's potential advantages but very present difficulties very well.


And then there's this:   GAO: "Biofuels Don't Lower Gas Price or Emissions" But biofuels give so much political mileage that this report will disappear without a sound.

Digital heroin addiction worsening

I have used, though did not invent, the term "digital heroin" to refer to people's addiction the glowing-screen devices, especially smart phone and tablets, and especially by children. A mostly-complete page of my posts is here.

Comes now further, abject confirmation. From the Daily Mail, "Generation of child web addicts: Youngsters are becoming so obsessed with the internet they spend more time on YouTube than with friends as parents struggle to keep control of their online usage."

Children have become such screen addicts they are abandoning their friends and hobbies, a major report warns today.

Researchers found under-fives spend an hour and 16 minutes a day online. Their screen time rises to four hours and 16 minutes when gaming and television are included.

Youngsters aged 12 to 15 average nearly three hours a day on the web – plus two more hours watching TV. The study said YouTube was ‘a near permanent feature’ of many young lives, and seven in ten of those aged 12 to 15 took smartphones to bed.

It concluded: ‘Children were watching people on YouTube pursuing hobbies that they did not do themselves or had recently given up offline.’

A growing number of parents admitted to researchers that they had lost control of their children’s online habits.

Next is a report on Nashville's local Fox affiliate, "Study: Increased screen time in young children associated with developmental delays."

A new study from psychologists and doctors in Canada found increased screen time in young children can cause issues with children reaching developmental milestones.

Researchers studied 2,441 mothers and children with higher levels of screen time for children aged 24 and 36-months-old. Researchers then examined developmental milestone test results in the same children at 36 and 60-months-old.

The study found on average, 24-month-old children were watching 17 hours of television per week, 36-month-olds watched 25 hours per week, and 36-month-olds watched 11 hours per week. The totals reflect findings children on average in the U.S. watch to 2 hours and 19 minutes of screen time each day.

For each age group, children with increased screen times showed poorer performances on developmental testing when they reached the next age group. Developmental evaluations included communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, and personal-social skills.

The totals are well above the recommended 1 hour per day of screen time watching high-quality programs. Researchers say about one quarter of children are not developmentally ready for school entry and the trend parallels an increase in screen time use by children.

Parents are using glowing screens as a sedative to pacify their children I have seen this in public too many times to count. But people, these thing are literally addictive, and when children (a) learn they will be given a screen to stop pitching a fit, and (b) they cannot help pitching the fit anyway because they literally are suffering from withdrawal symptoms, then the parent-child-screen interface becomes a self-reinforcing do loop.

My kids escaped this, fortunately. Our youngest was 14 when the first smart phone came out and none of them got a smart phone until they were in college (if then). But I have, no kidding, seen infants who cannot even walk yet with their very own smart phones - and now you can buy those phones especially built for small kids (more accurately, for parents of small kids who visually identify those phones with toys, as the makers intend them to do).

Yes, this is sadly real - just click here.

What is the tie-in to these kids' futures? Well, consider that researchers both in the US and Europe have discovered that IQ scores are getting lower, and the younger one is, the greater likelihood his/her IQ is lower than a generation before. And while glowing screens do not seem to explain all the fall, they are absolutely part of it.

Falling IQ scores may explain why politics has turned so nasty

Western IQ scores are falling. Is it computers or something else?

Parents, take this seriously!

Honor-Shame dynamics enter the STEMs

I have posted before of how the Left's social dynamic, its basic way of relationships with other persons, is one of honor-shame. Honor-shame is the basic dynamic that human beings evolved with and is still found in Arab and other cultures around the world. 

The Middle East Quarterly explains the essence of the honor/shame culture:

[I[n traditional Arab society ... a distinction is made between two kinds of honor: sharaf and ‘ird. Sharaf relates to the honor of a social unit, such as the Arab tribe or family, as well as individuals, and it can fluctuate up or down. A failure by an individual to follow what is defined as adequate moral conduct weakens the social status of the family or tribal unit. On the other hand, the family's sharaf may be increased by model behavior such as hospitality, generosity, courage in battle, etc. In sum, sharaf translates roughly as the Western concept of "dignity."

Honor, then, is what is granted by the community, by the social units of society. Likewise, shame or disgrace is also so given. The psychologist who used the nom de blog of Dr. Sanity explained in Shame, the Arab Psyche, and Islam, that in Arab cultures, the principal concern over conduct is not that which is guilty or innocent, but that which brings honor or shame.

[W]hat other people believe has a far more powerful impact on behavior than even what the individual believes. [T]he desire to preserve honor and avoid shame to the exclusion of all else is one of the primary foundations of the culture. This desire has the side-effect of giving the individual carte blanche to engage in wrong-doing as long as no-one knows about it, or knows he is involved

In contrast, she says, the West has a Guilt/Innocence culture. "The guilt culture is typically and primarily concerned with truth, justice, and the preservation of individual rights."

Now we come to this, which I present as another exhibit in my premise: "Profs say female STEM grades don’t reflect ‘perceived effort’."

Four professors from Otterbein University argue in a recent academic journal article that "grading practices" may be at least partly responsible for the lack of women in STEM fields.

Based on surveys of 828 STEM students, the professors conclude that female students believe they work harder than their male classmates for similar grades, indicating that "women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

 [The] Otterbein University professors suggest that women may be averse to STEM fields because they feel they work harder than male students without earning higher grades.

After conducting a study of 828 students in STEM classes, the professors discovered that while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades, which “indicates that women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

"Science educators could redistribute grades more akin to non-STEM disciplines to increase STEM retention."    Tweet This

"This, in turn, returns us to questions of grading practices,” the professors write. “Does a course grade primarily reward conceptual understanding and problem-solving ability, or does it primarily reward hard work, reflected in course attendance, submission of assignments on time, etc., or some mixture of the two?”

Let's consider this sentence fragment: "... while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades... "

This is literally a Marxist view, the labor theory of value. The women worked harder, so they should get better grades. That the women may not have worked better seems not to have crossed their minds.

In my college days, my friends were envious that I rarely typed (as in, with a typewriter; I am a fossil) a draft of my term papers. I just sat down, banged the keys for awhile, and voila! A term paper came forth, for which my usual grade was an A. My buddies, meanwhile, would labor over draft after draft before going final, and maybe they got an A and maybe they didn't.

I was simply a better writer than they were; it just came naturally to me. But I could labor hours over math assignments and still not finish them, while my friends had long finished theirs and were out dancing with the cheerleaders. However, the professors apparently think that effort counts more than results, even in engineering, and for term papers I should have received only a C or so, and my friends an A because they worked harder than I did, and the reverse for math, right?

Labor is in itself valueless. Example: I hire a local young man to cut my grass and edge the walks and driveway. It's his business. He arrives with a large riding mower and knocks out my half-acre of green in probably not more than 15 minutes, maybe 20; I have never timed him. Now, I could buy a lawn mower, although not one as expensive as his, and I could cut my own grass. But it would take me much longer and require more effort from me than it does from him.

But would my yard be better maintained or look nicer just because I worked harder at it than he did?

But that is not even the real point of the professors' study. The real key point is this: "women felt they put more effort" than the men. How would they know? They can't know. The whole thing is not really about what actually happened, it's about how they felt about what happened. This is foolish, of course, and indicates another step down the road of what I have maintained for many years: led by the Left, America is adopting an honor-shame social ordering and dynamic.

Think of it this way -- these women students feel shamed by their perception of their inferior academic performance. The answer is not to work harder or smarter. It is to recover their honor. And that means that grading must be preferentially curved to do that:

Citing research by Kevin Rask, now a professor at Colorado College, they propose that “science educators could redistribute grades more akin to non-STEM disciplines to increase STEM retention.” 

Yeah, the bridge you will be driving across the chasm a 10 years from now will have been designed by an engineer who was literally given a pass in order to keep her "motivated." Good luck with that.

Update: As someone commented elsewhere, "Grades should reflect knowledge and ability, not effort. I don't want my brake system designed by somebody who's degree is basically a participation trophy."

This is why you can't ban guns

I did not say you should not ban guns. I did not say you must not ban guns. No, this is why you cannot ban guns: it is impossible.

3D printing has been used to manufacture a stainless steel bridge 41 feet long and 18 feet wide. Such technology has already been used to print firearms, and as the technology improves the firearms will become higher quality and have greater capability.

Want to accelerate the process? Just try to ban guns and see what happens. Here's the bridge.



And here is an actual 3d-printed gun:



As I said, "can't."

Where is everybody? They're dead.

Fermi's Paradox was first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. It goes like this: The universe is many billions of years old. Fermi calculated that an alien species smart enough to become spacefarers could reach any point in our galaxy in five million years. But we we have no scientific evidence that aliens beings have been here.

So, Fermi asked, where is everybody?

Many answers have been proposed by serious, highly-credentialed scientists - more than 50 different answers, as I recall. I have written a lot about the paradox.

Now, Astronomy.com offers this: The aliens are silent because they are extinct:

Latest theory: This will never hear anything.

Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, said astrobiologists from the Australian National University (ANU).

In research aiming to understand how life might develop, scientists realized new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.

“The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” said Aditya Chopra from ANU.

“Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive.”

“Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable.”

About four billion years ago, Earth, Venus, and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox.

Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilize the rapidly changing environment, said Charley Lineweaver from ANU.

“Life on Earth probably played a leading role in stabilizing the planet’s climate,” he said.

Then there is recent study, published in the prestigious journal Science, that life is simply impossible in probably 90 percent of galaxies in the universe because of intense gamma radiation. And ordinary solar and cosmic radiation would have stopped life here on Earth without the Earth's magnetic fields shielding the planet, but planetary magnetic fields apparently are very uncommon; they have not been detected on any other planet anywhere. (See here.)

Update: The Atlantic writes of World War 2 bomber crews who learned not to up-armor planes where they had been struck by flak or enemy fire. After all, those hits were survivable.

Don’t protect the planes where they were taking the most damage, Wald said. Armor the planes where there were no bullet holes at all.

“You put armor where there are no holes, because the planes that got shot there didn’t return to the home base,” says Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. “They crashed.”

The article goes on to explain "observer selection effect," where we are able to observe something only because we survived the causes. We look at our own world and see life in enormous variety, flourishing everywhere, even in rocks and immense pressures of the deep sea and hot springs of near-boiling temperatures.

And we easily conclude, "Life is everywhere on our planet, so it must be everywhere out there." This powers the SETI programs, in fact, and is so pervasive it even has a name: the Principle of Mediocrity, which means simply that earth and its biosphere are unexceptional. The earth and its life are merely average in the universe - average, which is what "mediocre" means. But it is just as likely - probably more so - that our conclusions spring the the observer selection effect: we conclude that what we see is normal.

What see are 100-mile-wide "bullet" holes on our planet, and hey, we're still here. All is well and this is cosmically normal. But there's a problem.

After all, there are 100-mile impact craters on our planet’s surface from the past billion years, but no 600-mile craters. But of course, there couldn’t be scars this big. On worlds where such craters exist, there is no one around afterward to ponder them. In a strange way, truly gigantic craters don’t appear on the planet’s surface because we’re here to look for them. Just as the wounds of the returning planes could reflect only the merely survivable, so too for our entire planet’s history. It could be that we’ve been shielded from these existential threats by our very existence. ...

 “Maybe the universe is super dangerous and Earth-like planets are destroyed at a very high rate,” Sandberg says. “But if the universe is big enough, then when observers do show up on some very, very rare planets, they’ll look at the record of meteor impacts and disasters and say, ‘The universe looks pretty safe!’ But the problem is, of course, that their existence depends on them being very, very lucky. They’re actually living in an unsafe universe and next Tuesday they might get a very nasty surprise.”

If this is true, it might explain why our radio telescopes have reported only a stark silence from our cosmic neighborhood. 

"Stark silence." Where is everybody? They're dead.

Perhaps we’re truly extreme oddballs, held aloft by a near-impossible history—one free from deadly migrating gas giants and solar-system chaos, but also filled with freakishly favorable accidents, like a cataclysmic impact early in our history that created a strange, gigantic moon that stabilized our orbit and allowed complex life to flourish. As the solar system continued to shake out, we somehow ended up with just the right amount of water to lubricate plate tectonics, keeping the climate habitable over hundreds of millions of years and preventing a Venus-style planetary resurfacing catastrophe, but not so much water that we wound up on a lifeless water world.

So far, empirical evidence supports the conclusion that we are alone.

Quote of the day

People like to feel good about themselves, which is to say that they like to read things about the stupidity and wickedness of people they dislike. They don't like to hear about their own shortcomings.

David P. Goldman, in the comments section of his own article, The Triumph of Inequality.

The great divide is not between black and white, or male and female. We are turning into two races: Eloi who play video games and Morlocks who program them. The July 3 New York Times reported, "By 2015, American men 31 to 55 were working about 163 fewer hours a year than that same age group did in 2000. Men 21 to 30 were working 203 fewer hours a year...video games have been responsible for reducing the amount of work that young men do by 15 to 30 hours over the course of a year. Between 2004 and 2015, young men’s leisure time grew by 2.3 hours a week. A majority of that increase — 60 percent — was spent playing video games."

Read the whole thing.

Cable TV competitors and Theodore Levitt

This feels a little like déjà vu. The country’s top cable and satellite TV providers just wrapped up another quarter of record subscriber declines as customers flee traditional pay-television distributors in favor of streaming and on-demand services, according to a research note from MoffettNathanson. Combined declines for the second quarter of 2017 came close to a million subscribers, the firm estimates, with Dish Network, DirectTV, and AT&T hit especially hard. As bad as it was, the customer exodus was not as bad as some analysts had predicted, prompting analyst Craig Moffett to ask the question, “Is ‘not as worse’ even a thing?”

“[Y]es, things are getting worse,” Moffett wrote. “But at least in Q2 they got worse more slowly. Less worse. Or, not as worse. Or, well, you get the idea.”

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because three months ago, the industry had just logged its worst quarter in history, losing an estimated 762,000 pay-TV subscribers. This time around, that number has jumped to 941,000 subscribers. Even Comcast, which had been bucking the trend over the last few quarters, ended Q2 with a net loss of 34,000 pay-TV customers. [Link]

The pace will continue downward because cable companies are not keeping up with their competitors, except for maybe DirectTV, which a few months ago launched a streaming-only service called DirectTV Now, which streams live shows. 

My wife and I moved to a new-construction house two months ago. It took forever for our address to validate and propagate through databases, especially Comcast's. They connected us only two weeks ago, insisting until then that our house didn't exist. We had been using DirectTV Now to fill the gap, watching it on TV using an Amazon Fire stick with our smart phones' wifi hotspot turned on. (Thank goodness for unlimited data plans.) When I was finally able to get Comcast to agree I existed, I became so disgusted at the continual TV upselling the customer agent was doing, and the endless fees and additions, that finally I said bluntly, I want internet only and if I can't get that then AT&T will take my call, too. Of course, AT&T does the same thing. DirectTV Now and Hulu Live are two of the main competitors to connected cable service. Of course, DirectTV is itself a connected cable satellite service, but the Now service is internet only. Hulu has been around a long time and has just this year got into the act of offering live TV.

Both DTVN and Hulu Live stream a number of live channels but none are local stations. The services' channel selections are mostly redundant. I tried both of them and finally decided to keep Hulu, but that decision was based more on Hulu's promises to expand than its present offerings. Neither of them require any of their own hardware, just a Roku or Fire Stick or the like - see their sites for details.
DirectTV Now's main advantage is that it works on more devices (Hulu does not yet offer a Roku app) and you can watch it on the web, which you cannot do with Hulu Live. Both work on smart phones and tablets. However, you can watch all the rest of Hulu's stuff on the web, a device or on your TV. DirectTV Now has a very limited on-demand selection. DirectTV Now also loads much slower that Hulu Live and often it did not load at all on our TVs using either our Amazon Fire Stick or our Roku 3. Also DTVN skipped and stuttered or paused a lot. One of the main decision points for me was that Hulu offers live major-league baseball games, which are absolutely not available on DirectTV Now, and I assume DTVN is similarly restricted for other sports. As I said, local channels? Fuggedaboudit on both services. We bought over-the-air HD antennas for local-channel broadcasts. I finally decided to keep Hulu Live and cancel DirectTV Now, even though the inability to watch Hulu's service on my computer is a major, major disadvantage for me. But that I can watch MLB games live is a huge advantage. Huku promises that PC viewing and Roku viewing are both coming, hopefully soon. I expect that both services will expand offerings and devices in the coming weeks or months.

Another big deal for both services is that there is no contract. They are both month-to-month. There is also YouTube Live, which seems really good and offers a one-month trial period, but its market is limited to large metro areas, so far.

There are other such services. My advice is to do a lot of research and take full advantage of trial periods.

At our prior home we had Xfinity's X1 service, which I really liked. But after so many weeks in a row of not watching TV at all, or watching very little, my wife and I both got used to two things:

• TV not being as big a deal as we used to think it was, and
• Not paying major bank to Comcast every month to rent many dozens of channels that we never watch.

There are channels on Hulu we don't watch, too, but not at near the cost. And we already had a Fire Stick and a Roku, but Comcast piles on fees every month: $10 per DVR/box, $10 for HD channels, $7 or so for sports, additional fees for local channels.

That said, Comcast does have an amazing streaming service that is really outstanding - but not by itself. You must have some level of their traditional cable TV service first. Bummer. Honestly, if they offered a streaming-only service, they would be king of the hill. I'd buy it for sure.

Maybe it is time for Comcast to ask themselves that crucial question, What Business Are You Really In? 

Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt, back in 1960, captured one of the major challenges most companies face today. His now classic article Marketing Myopia begins this way:  

Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others which are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.  

That failure is caused by what Levitt called “marketing myopia” which he defines exactly as you would expect.  It’s what occurs when company leaders define their mission too narrowly; it’s a form of business nearsightedness or shortsightedness. Levitt offered what are now a few classic examples.

Industry	Myopic Purpose	The Broader Purpose
Railroads	Train Travel	Transportation
Hollywood	Movies	Entertainment
Oil Companies	Petroleum	Energy

On the flip side, he cites companies such as DuPont, and Kaiser and Reynolds that have thrived for centuries by remaining thoroughly customer focused and that evolved—in terms of the products and services they offered—as the needs of their customers did.

What a concept.

Care to go for a walk?

Put these bridges on your bucket list: "Mind your step: World's scariest bridges"

Your printer is spying on you

Thinking of printing out a ransom note? An anonymous threat to commit a crime? An unsigned note to your boss explaining why you hate his guts?

Yes, and you're even going to use latex gloves to handle the paper - no fingerprints! Think no one could ever track you down from that anonymous, fingerprint-free paper that you handled so carefully you didn't even breathe in its direction?

Well, think again. The FBI will be waiting for you when you get home because printers add secret tracking dots.

Hat tip: American Digest

Skynet is already here and it's not on our side

Why Nothing Works Anymore - Technology has its own purposes.

“No… it’s a magic potty,” my daughter used to lament, age 3 or so, before refusing to use a public restroom stall with an automatic-flush toilet. As a small person, she was accustomed to the infrared sensor detecting erratic motion at the top of her head and violently flushing beneath her. Better, in her mind, just to delay relief than to subject herself to the magic potty’s dark dealings. 

It’s hardly just a problem for small people. What adult hasn’t suffered the pneumatic public toilet’s whirlwind underneath them? Or again when attempting to exit the stall? So many ordinary objects and experiences have become technologized—made dependent on computers, sensors, and other apparatuses meant to improve them—that they have also ceased to work in their usual manner. It’s common to think of such defects as matters of bad design. That’s true, in part. But technology is also more precarious than it once was. Unstable, and unpredictable. At least from the perspective of human users. From the vantage point of technology, if it can be said to have a vantage point, it's evolving separately from human use.

Boldface added. And now, Customer Service Chatbots Are About to Become Frighteningly Realistic

I refer you back to my post about robot priests offering blessings to people. Quite apart from the theological questions it raises, the first model is very primitive and looks like something out of a Robbie and the Robot series or a bad 1950s space opera. But,

What will BlessU2 be like in 30 years when it is fully integrated with Artificial Intelligence and you can actually have an intelligent conversation with it that would seem indistinguishable from one with a real person? And ponder about a robot consecrating and serving Holy Communion.

I am not saying it will happen, but, well, consider this:  Neuroscience will give us what we’ve sought for decades: computers that think like we do.

I am reminded of what Winston Churchill said in 1938,

Science bestowed immense new powers on man, and, at the same time, created conditions which were largely beyond his comprehension.

He also said later, "Scientists should be on tap, not on top." True that.

"EMP Commission Chair Warns on North Korean EMP"

I posted in April of the implications of a massive electricity outage in San Francisco, suing it as a springboard to discuss the stunning seriousness of how massively lethal a deliberate, coordinated attack on the nation's power grids could be.

And that included a low-orbit detonation of an atomic weapon designed to emit increased, intense electromagnetic radiation, known as Electromagnetic Pulse, or EMP.

 In one instant, power grids across most of the country could be rendered useless. Some estimates of deaths caused, not by the atomic blast but by the years-long effects of sudden reversion to a 18th-century way of life, are in the many millions.

Comes now John R. Moore, much more conversant on this topic than I, pointing put that the United States' EMP Commission Chair Warns on North Korean EMP. There is, 

... a new piece on the topic -- “North Korea Nuclear EMP Attack: An Existential Threat.” The author is the former head of the congressional EMP Commission and is a foremost expert on EMP. This article adds to the PJ Media report by confirming that the yield of nuclear weapons already tested by North Korea is sufficient to be devastating. It refutes the prior article:

Thus, even if North Korea only has primitive, low-yield nuclear weapons, and if other states or terrorists acquire one or a few such weapons as well as the capability to detonate them at an altitude of 30 kilometers or higher over the United States. … the EMP Commission warned over a decade ago in its 2004 Report, “the damage level could be sufficient to be catastrophic to the Nation, and our current vulnerability invites attack."

Read the whole thing. As John concludes, "[T]he threat is real. It could happen at any time. We are not ready."

How ISIS does digital

Edited

Messaging app Telegram centrepiece of IS social media strategy

BTW, the BBC news app is one of the best news feeds you can find.

Dear Mr. Trump: "Decide in haste, repent in leisure"

My confidence in Donald Trump as a potential president during the election race was never very high. But after he took office and made many truly stellar appointments it ramped up. Now my confidence in him as a president is losing altitude like a leaking zeppelin. Here is one reason that is by itself disturbing enough, but what it reveals as his modus operandi is even more upsetting.

Trump May Have Just Derailed A Crucial Part Of America's Future Aircraft Carrier Fleet

USS Gerald Ford, the most advanced aircraft carrier in the world, to be commissioned into service this year.

The problem is summarized thus:

Until now, aircraft carriers have launched aircraft off the deck using steam-driven catapults. These are very complex systems; this video offers a very simplified explanation.



While the steam system is a proven system, it is complicated and too slow between launches for the increasing tempo of present-day flight operations in actual combat operations. The manpower and maintenance requirements are very high.

Current steam catapults use about 615 kg/ 1,350 pounds of steam for each aircraft launch, which is usually delivered by piping it from the nuclear reactor. Now add the required hydraulics and oils, the water required to brake the catapult, and associated pumps, motors, and control systems. The result is a large, heavy, maintenance-intensive system that operates without feedback control; and its sudden shocks shorten airframe lifespans for carrier-based aircraft.

That ain't all. GlobalSecurity.org reports,

The steam catapult is also approaching its operational limit with the present complement of naval aircraft. The inexorable trend towards heavier, faster aircraft will soon result in launch energy requirements that exceed the capability of the steam catapult. 

Ford uses an electromagnetic system, called EMALS - Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System. Jump ahead in this video to 2.30 to get to the explanation of the EMALS:



Because the EMALS is computerized, its programming for each plane's launch is vastly simpler and much quicker. In steam, the launch crew has to manually look up the pressure settings for every aircraft and its load, based in information sent them by crewmen who prepared the plane for flight. A fully-laden F/A-18, for example, requires more steam pressure than an unladen one because the additional fuel and weapons stores are very heavy.

As time goes on, digitized systems using EMALS will be able to electronically glean catapult energy settings directly from the aircraft itself, very accurately and extremely quickly. Time between launches will be dramatically reduced and also because their is no steam recuperation time needed by EMALS. As soon as the shuttle, which propels the aircraft, returns, the EMALS is pretty much ready to go.

Enter Donald Trump.

You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology]. I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power."

You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.

It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said–and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be–"Sir, we’re staying with digital.”

I said no you’re not. You going to [expletive] steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.

Upon being queried, the Navy Department declined to comment. As the linked article points out, if money is Trump's worry here, just imagine the outlay to rip out EMALS from Ford and replace it with a steam system, which Ford's internals are not built to host, as well as the outlays to convert Ford's sister ships, including the new Enterprise, as they proceed under construction. It will require setting the service-entry dates of this entire class of ships back years.

That's bad enough. But what is more disturbing, IMO, is the finger-snap way the president says he took the decision: one short conversation with an unnamed naval member, and he instantly decides on this course.

I sure hope some adults can explain certain facts of life to him.

Update: Popular Mechanics wrote about this two days ago and says , "While the President may be Commander in Chief, and the Navy has not done a good job managing the Ford program, micromanaging complex engineering programs is a bad idea. The President needs to make the Navy fix its own problem instead of handing it a new one."

Is anybody out there? Doesn't seem so.

More Evidence That Aliens Aren’t Trying to Communicate With Us

So either advanced alien civilizations don’t behave in this way (e.g. they hide their presence or engage in other activities), or they don’t exist. It’s also possible that technological civilizations are exceptionally rare in the galaxy (both in time and space), greatly limiting the ability of the researchers to detect a signal. As the authors of the new study admit, “We may begin to wonder if arguments along the lines of the so-called Fermi paradox have some merit.” Indeed, the eerie silence of space is getting louder with each new attempt to detect alien intelligence.

Fermi's Paradox is named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who in the 1950's mathematically showed that once a species achieves space flight, it should cover the whole galaxy in only five million years. Since the galaxy is many billions of years old, Fermi asked, "Where is everybody?" Various answers have been proposed but none generally accepted.

But this, seriously, is one of them, just not expressed so cartoonishly.

Most depressing headline I've seen so far this year

Link.

The 21st century isn't turning out like I had hoped.

Extreme model rocketry

In which they build and launch a 1/10-scale Saturn V, the rocket that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. This model is quite large enough to carry a passenger, though it would take a redesign, of course. Very impressive work!

The 21st century isn't turning out like I hoped

To make us all safer, robocars will sometimes have to kill. More accurately, they will have to electronically decide who will live and who won't. And the "won't" may turn out to be the guy or gal who bought it.

Maybe car makers will have to bring on philosophers to discuss Utilitarianism and help them find a way to program it in.

If they'd ever get off their duffs and give me the flying car I was promised 60 years ago, we'd not have to face this mess.