Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2012

Britain’s government websites under attack

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

Perhaps I’m just cynical, but I had expected that any government website would need to be “hardened” against attack. The British government’s many official websites have indeed been undergoing attacks for quite some time:

The British Ministry of Defense has admitted, for the first time, that it is under heavy attack by hackers. It was also revealed that some of these attacks had succeeded. The good news is that the military is becoming more aggressive and imaginative in dealing with Cyber War defense. China was not directly accused of being behind any of these attacks, but it was mentioned that there are now discussions underway with the Chinese on the matter. All this is an old problem.

Last year, Britain went public to report a higher number of Internet based attacks. The report noted that the emphasis was now on economic assets. This included technology and business plans. For example, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was under heavy cyber-attack for several months, apparently in an effort to obtain secret details of government plans and techniques for supporting British exports. Government Internet security officials were making all this public to encourage British firms to increase their Internet security.

All this was nothing new. Two years ago Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, went public with numerous charges of Chinese Internet based espionage. MI5 accused China of using both agents and hacker software, to obtain secrets from specific companies and government organizations. This approach had Chinese personnel approaching specific British businessmen at trade shows, and offering gifts, like a thumb drive loaded with hidden hacker software that will load itself on to the victim’s PC and seek out valuable information. Internet based attacks, traced back to China, continue to send real looking email that has an attachment containing another of those stealthy hacker programs that seek out secrets, or even quietly take over the user’s PC. Three years ago, MI-5 sent alerts to major corporations warning them of similar attacks and advising increased security of their data.

May 7, 2012

Royal Flying Corps, 100 years on

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

April 13th was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), which was merged with the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) to become the Royal Air Force in 1918. BBC Magazine has an interesting article about the early days:

In most accounts of WWI, mention of the Royal Flying Corps goes hand-in-hand with stories of the fighter aces, men like Albert Ball and James McCudden, who downed dozens of enemy planes.

The romance of gladiatorial combat in the air — initially firing revolvers at one another from the cockpit, and then shooting machine guns through the propellers of the aircraft — makes their adventures against such legendary foes as the Red Baron some of the most stirring tales of the Great War.

But as a division of the British Army, the main role of the Royal Flying Corps, with its hundreds of pilots and thousands of ground crew, was very different.

It was the eyes of the army.

For the first time in history, it was possible not only to get a detailed view of the enemy lines from above, but to see what was going on behind those lines — the trench systems, the support routes, the railways and road vehicles that manoeuvred troops and weaponry into position.

The real heroes of the war in the air were the pilots and observers who flew in all conditions to maintain British air superiority, and to keep the ground troops aware of everything that the enemy was doing.

During the First World War, Canada hosted a training unit for British aircrew, the Royal Flying Corps Canada (Wikipedia link), from 1917 onwards. It operated the following air stations in southern Ontario:

  • Camp Borden 1917–1918
  • Armour Heights Field 1917–1918 (pilot training, School of Special Flying to train instructors)
  • Leaside Aerodrome 1917–1918 (Artillery Cooperation School)
  • Long Branch Aerodrome 1917–1918
  • Curtiss School of Aviation (flying-boat station with temporary wooden hangar on the beach at Hanlan’s Point on Toronto Island 1915–1918; main school, airstrip and metal hangar facilities at Long Branch)
  • Deseronto Airfield, Deseronto 1917–1918 (pilot training)
  • Camp Mohawk (now Tyendinaga Mohawk Airport) and Camp Rathburn — located at the Tyendinaga Indian Reserve near Belleville 1917–1918 (pilot training)
  • Hamilton (Armament School) 1917–1918
  • Beamsville Camp (Aerial fighting)

List sourced from the Wikipedia page on the RFC.

[Lt Col (later Brig Gen) Cuthbert] Hoare made several agreements with U.S. Brig Gen George O. Squier (US Army Signal Corps) and the US Aircraft Production Board. Squier had overall responsibility for the US Army’s air service, which was short of flight instructors. The RFC released five experienced American pilots to the US Army, where they became squadron commanders. The US Air Board acquiesced in the British opening a recruiting office in New York City, ostensibly to recruit British citizens, but in fact also soliciting US citizens, of whom about 300 were successfully signed up. The RFC would also train many US Army flight personnel: 400 pilots; 2,000 ground-crew members; and 20 equipment officers. These Americans would then collect aircraft and equipment from the UK, before coming under RFC control in France. Ten American squadrons would train in Canada during the summer of 1917, while RFC squadrons were allowed to train during the winter in Fort Worth, Texas.

During the last two years of the war 3135 pilots and 137 observers trained in Canada and Texas for both the RFC and the new Royal Air Force (RAF). Of these trainees, 2,624 went to Europe for operational duty.

May 6, 2012

Technology is not the panacea

Filed under: Education, Health, India, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:06

I’m generally very pro-technology, but the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort always struck me as putting the technology cart in front of the educational (and cultural) horse. A report at The Economist has examples of technological fixes that haven’t actually “fixed” the problems they were intended to solve:

The American charity has an ambitious mission — transform the quality of education in the developing world by giving every poor student a laptop. Targeting a $100 laptop, OLPC succeeded in creating a usable computer at a very low price point (the actual number was closer to $200). Unfortunately most of the attention in the project was focused on the technology and not enough on its efficacy. In the first rigorous evaluation of the programme, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) found little evidence that the laptops influenced educational outcomes. The study, conducted in Peru four years after the programme was launched, found no improvement in math or language. While the computers did lead to some gains in cognitive skills, the authors concluded that access to a laptop didn’t improve attendance. Neither did it motivate students to spend more time on their homework.

There is similarly disappointing news on cooking stoves. The World Health Organization estimates that indoor pollution from primitive cooking fires contributes to 2m deaths annually. One solution is to use clean cooking stoves. At a cost of $12.50, these stoves are an inexpensive way to reduce respiratory ailments and improve air quality. The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC), a public-private initiative, is making a big push for 100m homes in the developing world to switch to clean stoves by 2020. But a new NBER paper by Rema Hanna from Harvard University and Esther Duflo and Michael Greenstone from MIT, questions the long-term health or environmental benefits from this programme. The authors evaluated a clean-stove programme in eastern India, covering 15,000 households over five years. Their study found that after the initial year, enthusiasm for the stoves waned and households didn’t make the necessary investments to maintain them. As a result, the programme had very little effect on respiratory health or air pollution.

Both these projects highlight some common misconceptions in using technology for development. For one, solving intractable social problems requires fundamental changes in the target population. It also needs a supportive institutional framework to reinforce the right behaviour. Technology can complement this process, but it is no substitute for the human element. In Peru, simply adding laptops to the classroom, without investing in teachers who were proficient in computer-aided education, meant that the academic impact was limited. The IDB paper rightly points out that in poor countries where wages are low, development money may be better spent on labor-intensive education interventions than on expensive tools.

May 4, 2012

Printed electronics: from gimmick to gizmo

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:45

Bill Ray looks at some companies working in the printed electronics field:

“Printed electronics” is one of those terms one sees being bandied about without really knowing what it means or why it’s important. The premise of using printing techniques to create electrical circuits isn’t hard to comprehend, but not everyone agrees on what comprises a “printing technique” or why you might want to use one, so El Reg chatted to three companies at the forefront of the field.

According to these firms, the new printing technique is going to change the literal fabric upon which the electronics industry rests. That’s important as it’s not the electronics which change as a result of the printing process, but rather the material on which those electronics rest. So instead of being etched on silicon the circuits can be laid onto steel, plastic, or even paper, and it’s that change of substrate which links all the various techniques and makes printed electronics so exciting.

[. . .]

This is in contrast to Silicon Valley’s Kovio, which steps away from standard printing equipment but still uses ink-jet techniques to lay down working RFID chips onto a flexible steel substrate.

The mechanism is the same as a desktop ink-jet, only instead of ink the jets squirt out ca conductor into wires as little as eight microns thick, making up chips which will run up to 40MHz or so. But Kovio can print a lot of them very cheaply and hopes to get the Near Field Communications (NFC) standard extended to include its vision of printed RF barcodes, powered by induction from the reading device and able to respond with a standardised serial number.

[. . .]

Such a step is taken by PragmatIC, another Cambridge-based company and one we’ve mentioned before thanks to their light-up beer bottles and induction-powered screens. PragmatIC doesn’t so much print electronics as imprint them, creating a sandwich of materials and then, using a pre-cut die, press down and carve out the shape required.

That might be taking the concept a long way from printing, though PragmatIC reckons it takes printing back to its roots. Imprinting is also the process used to stamp out CDs and Blu-Ray disks, and so is known to work within very strict tolerances. PragmatIC reckons it can get down to 100nm objects placed with 10nm accuracy, leading to transistors around a square-micron in size which (PragmatIC claims) is comparable to silicon technologies.

That means chips can be made cheaper, but more importantly they can be laid onto any surface (there’s no baking in the PragmatIC process) so electronics can be dropped onto the back of polypropylene labels to create the flashing beer bottle or similar, assuming one can find a battery to power it and an LED to light up.

May 1, 2012

The Onion: Every Potential 2040 President Already Unelectable Due To Facebook

Filed under: Government, Humour, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

April 30, 2012

Twitter’s “Red Guard” of flag-spam abusers

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Some nasty tricks being played by some Twitter users, abusing the report feature that is supposed to help cut down on spam posts to attempt to shut down opinions they find offensive:

Shortly after their video “If I Wanted America to Fail” went viral, Free Market America found themselves kicked off Twitter, a popular social media resource that allows users to post very short messages. After a few hours of confusion, their account was reinstated.

This past Sunday, the Twitter account of Chris Loesch, husband of conservative pundit Dana Loesch, was abruptly shut down. After a massive outcry, and the creation of a Twitter topic called “#FreeChrisLoesch” that swiftly became one of the hottest “hash tags” on the network, Chris’ account was reactivated… for a couple of hours. By Monday morning, he was gone again, after his account was restored and removed several more times.

What did Free Market America and Chris Loesch do to warrant suspension? After all, people like Spike Lee and Roseanne Barr flagrantly, openly, defiantly violated Twitter’s terms of service, and put human lives in jeopardy, by distributing personal information about George Zimmerman, the shooter in the Trayvon Martin case. Their accounts have not been suspended. What violation of Loesch’s compares to using Twitter to target someone for assault by an angry mob — and, for that matter, sending the mob to the wrong address?

These suspensions were apparently the work of “flag spammers,” digital brown shirt gangs that make coordinated attacks to silence conservative voices by abusing Twitter’s spam flagging feature. Al Gore coined the term “digital brown shirts” to describe the online squadrons supposedly unleashed to “harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.” Of course, he was talking about President Bush, and there weren’t any actual “digital brown shirts” at the time, but this is precisely the sort of behavior he was describing.

The F-35, the “supersonic albatross”?

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Foreign Policy has a feature up called “The Jet That Ate the Pentagon” by Winslow Wheeler:

The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, billed by its advocates as the next — by their count the fifth — generation of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat aircraft. Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. It’s no secret, however, that the program — the most expensive in American history — is a calamity.

[. . .]

How bad is it? A review of the F-35’s cost, schedule, and performance — three essential measures of any Pentagon program — shows the problems are fundamental and still growing.

First, with regard to cost — a particularly important factor in what politicians keep saying is an austere defense budget environment — the F-35 is simply unaffordable. Although the plane was originally billed as a low-cost solution, major cost increases have plagued the program throughout the last decade. Last year, Pentagon leadership told Congress the acquisition price had increased another 16 percent, from $328.3 billion to $379.4 billion for the 2,457 aircraft to be bought. Not to worry, however — they pledged to finally reverse the growth.

The result? This February, the price increased another 4 percent to $395.7 billion and then even further in April. Don’t expect the cost overruns to end there: The test program is only 20 percent complete, the Government Accountability Office has reported, and the toughest tests are yet to come. Overall, the program’s cost has grown 75 percent from its original 2001 estimate of $226.5 billion — and that was for a larger buy of 2,866 aircraft.

At those prices, there are few allies who will be able to afford them — Canada clearly not among them.

April 28, 2012

The eternal problem of “sea blindness”

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:34

Unlike armies which used to be raised at the drop of a hat (relatively speaking), navies have always been slower to grow at times of need. To build an army in the pre-nuclear age, you called up all your young men, gave them the absolute minimum of training and there’s your army. It might not be particularly capable, but an army it was. You could call up as many men as you liked for your navy, but without the ships and a significantly larger proportion of trained officers and petty officers, you don’t have a navy.

Navies take time to build, and in peacetime few nations are willing to support the kind of naval establishment they may need in wartime. Sir Humphrey at the Thin Pinstriped Line discusses this age-long phenomenon of “sea blindness”:

The first question that comes to mind is ‘what is Sea Blindness’? Arguably it simply means that the public, and by extension Governments of nations do not understand the maritime domain, and do not understand the case for the maritime domain – not just from a military, but also from a wider sector perspective. Personally this author dislikes this term, as it implies a state of permanence towards the public view of the sea. The phrase implies that there is no cure to the notion that the public will never understand the maritime case, and that instead it is the role of senior leaders in the maritime community to act as guides or aids to a public which will never understand the importance of maritime power.

The next question is surely, has the public ever not been sea blind? Arguably since time immemorial the public have been unwilling to support the long term interests of the maritime case – one can only look back through history at the maritime wars fought by the UK, and other nations, and see cases of weak defences needing bolstering at a desperate hour. Conversely, the major combat indicator of a potential threat has often come through the augmenting or enhancing of fleets in other nations. It is rare through history to find examples of nations maintaining powerful fleets in a state of permanent existence – rather it is the case that great fleets are maintained only for the duration of a crisis and thereafter disposed of. Simply look to the case of the Royal Navy after the Napoleonic Wars, where the manpower was disposed of and ships returned to the Reserve. It seems fair to argue that the public have no interest in funding a great fleet when there is no threat – the demands on their pockets are simply too great to bear.

[. . .]

More broadly, this author would argue that ‘Sea Blindness’ when it comes to understanding the maritime domain is not a new condition – people have historically not understood the dependency that humanity has on the sea. In reality, although the UK is an island, very few people relatively speaking actively involve themselves in maritime matters. Outside of the small fishing / trading community, or those who work in the maritime support sector, it is probably fair to argue that most people simply don’t have the professional links to see the sea for what it is – an essential gateway to prosperity and survival. But then again, one could make the argument that few people really investigate or seek to understand the many different networks, links or dependencies that nations have on all manner of objects, trade and supplies. It’s likely that few people in the UK knew that the IT industry was reliant on factories in Thailand to make hard drives until the floods damaged production and prices soared. Similarly the automobile industry is struggling after a fire in a factory in Germany shut down production of resin, reducing the ability to make cars globally. The reality is that we live in an interdependent world on many fronts, but it is so complicated, and so networked that it is almost too difficult to follow.

April 20, 2012

Building High Speed Rail won’t do much to cut carbon dioxide emissions

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:11

Brad Plumer at the Washington Post on the latest straw that high speed rail enthusiasts have been grabbing to justify their expensive toys:

… Brown’s administration has proposed using money raised by California’s new climate law. Under the state’s cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, power plants and factories will have to buy permits to pollute. Brown has suggested diverting this money into high-speed rail. But there are two problems here. For one, this might be illegal, as the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office concluded on Tuesday. But second — and more broadly — high-speed rail turns out not to be the most effective use of money that’s meant to combat global warming.

Paul Druce at Reason & Rail offered up a few numbers on this topic last year. The California High Speed Rail Authority claims that by 2030, if the train ran entirely on renewable energy, then it would reduce the state’s carbon emissions by about 5.4 million metric tons a year. If you ignore all the energy used to build the system, that means the rail network would reduce California’s emissions at a cost of $12,506 per metric ton of carbon dioxide.

That’s a pricey way to cut carbon. To put this in perspective, research has suggested that you could plant 100 million acres of trees and reforest the United States for a cost of about $21 to $91 per ton of carbon dioxide. Alternatively, a study by Dan Kammen of UC Berkeley found that it would cost somewhere between $59 and $87 per ton of carbon dioxide to phase out coal power in the Western United States and replace it with solar, wind and geothermal. If reducing greenhouse gases is your goal, then there are much more cost-effective ways to do it than building a bullet train.

April 19, 2012

“Ontario is on track to have the highest electricity prices … in North America”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

Scott Stinson explains why Ontario consumers are facing huge price hikes for electricity over the next 18 months:

It’s no secret that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals have placed a huge bet on growing a green-energy sector by subsidizing the production of renewable energy. Although energy bills have been steadily rising since the party took power in 2003 — the average cost of a kilowatt of electricity was more than 30% higher last year than it was five years ago — the Liberals have somewhat masked this fact by handing a 10% rebate back to consumers with the euphemistically named Clean Energy Benefit, which also happens to utterly contradict the conservation incentive that should be part of a switch to a greener grid.

Electricity costs, though, are set to spike.

“Ontario’s power system is fuelled by consumers to the tune of about $16-billion a year,” says Tom Adams, an energy consultant who has written extensively on electricity and environmental issues. “That number is headed for $23-billion or $24-billion soon, by 2016,” he says in an interview.

[. . .]

Mr. Adams notes that when the Green Energy Act, with its guarantees of above-market rates for wind and solar electricity known as feed-in-tariffs (FIT), was introduced in 2009, the Liberals said electricity costs would only be impacted by about 1% annually. We now know that rates for consumers are rising by 9% a year. “The government says about half of that is due to Green Energy, but if they were being honest it would be more than that,” Mr. Adams says.

The coming increases, meanwhile, which can partly be attributed to locked-in contracts for renewable energy, are also a result of a host of other factors, from new generation capacity being introduced to phase-out costs of existing facilities to new transmission capacity being added to the energy grid.

April 17, 2012

SpaceX Dragon cleared for April 30 flight to ISS

Filed under: Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Brid-Aine Parnell updates the status of the SpaceX Dragon re-supply flight to the International Space Station at the end of the month:

The cargoship test flight, assuming it goes off without a hitch, will mark the first time a commercially made spacecraft has ever blasted off to visit the ISS.

NASA and SpaceX officials met yesterday in Houston for the Flight Readiness Review, a typical part of pre-launch prep at the agency, and confirmed that the Dragon and its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket were on track for the end of this month.

“Everything looks good heading to the April 30 launch date,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, in a canned statement.

The Dragon is due to blast off from Cape Canaveral at 12.22 EDT (16.22 GMT) carrying 1,200 pounds of cargo.

Because this is a test flight, the cargo isn’t critical stuff for the astronauts, but NASA and SpaceX are still hoping to see the ship fly close enough to the station for its robotic arm to grab it and berth it, which is the tricky bit.

April 16, 2012

“This sort of investment pays for itself ten-fold over a very short period of time”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

You see? This is what’s wrong with private enterprise, especially in California. Those wimps aren’t willing to invest in something that will “pay for itself” ten times over in a “very short period of time”. That’s why all the greatest economic advances have come from over-aged students, business council speechifiers, bureaucrats, and career apparatchiks!

If you believe calling your opponents names is a sign that you have lost the argument, then this new high-speed rail commercial from the California Alliance for Jobs — in which unexpectedly macho proponents of the $41 billion, $110 billion, $98.5 billion, $68.4 billion high-speed rail project deride skeptics as “wimps” — is pretty much the end of the line […]

What reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of the high-speed rail project is not the insults but that what is supposed to be a rousing propaganda piece comes off like an orientation video for new hires at a failing company.

The video’s cast includes hacks respected citizens from Operating Engineers Local 3, including Alliance for Jobs Executive Director Jim Earp, along with leaders from what’s usually referred to as the “business community” whose skill sets cluster around serving on business councils rather than doing any actual business. There’s also a career apparatchik and the founder of the “I Will Ride” Student Coalition, who is apparently a UC Merced senior but looks at least a decade too old.

[. . .]

Again, why not just claim the Fresno-Bakersfield line will end up carrying 38 million people, the entire population of California, every day? It would be no less accurate than the current claims, which have been made with no data on ticket costs, no comparative studies of existing bullet-train ridership, or anything else that can reasonably pass for due diligence.

Oh, and nobody actually knows where the bullet train will go to or from. (Past, present and possibly future candidates include Corcoran, Borden, Fresno, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and some guy named Dave’s rec room.) You wouldn’t build a patio with the amount of planning that’s gone into the high-speed rail project.

To put the headline into a bit of perspective, note that only one high speed rail line in the world is profitable. This is an old hobby horse of mine and I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.

Update: And to answer the question about why parts of Europe, Japan, and China have high speed rail systems and neither Canada nor the United States do, here’s a brief overview I wrote last year:

The best place to build a high speed rail system for the US would be the Boston-New York-Washington corridor (aka “Bosnywash”, for the assumed urban agglomeration that would occur as the cities reach toward one another). It has the necessary population density to potentially turn an HSR system into a practical, possibly even profitable, part of the transportation solution. The problem is that without an enormous eminent domain land-grab to cheat every land-owner of the fair value of their property, it just can’t be done. Buying enough contiguous sections of land to connect these cities would be so expensive that scrapping and replacing the entire navy every year would be a bargain in comparison.

The American railway system is built around freight: passenger traffic is a tiny sliver of the whole picture. Ordinary passenger trains cause traffic and scheduling difficulties because they travel at higher speeds, but require more frequent stops than freight trains, and their schedules have to be adjusted to passenger needs (passenger traffic peaks early to mid-morning and early to mid-evening). The frequency of passenger trains can “crowd out” the freight traffic the railway actually earns money on.

Most railway companies prefer to avoid having the complications of carrying passengers at all — that’s why Amtrak (and VIA Rail in Canada) was set up in the first place, to take the burden of money-losing passenger services off the shoulders of deeply indebted railways. Even after the new entity lopped off huge numbers of passenger trains from its schedule, it couldn’t turn a profit on the scaled-down services it was offering.

Ordinary passenger trains can, at a stretch, share rail with freight traffic, but high speed trains cannot. At higher speeds, the actual construction of the track has to change to deal with the physical problem of safely guiding the fast passenger trains along the rail. Signalling must also change to suit the far-higher speeds — and the matching far-longer safe braking distances. High speed rail lines cannot be interrupted with grade crossings, for the safety of passengers and bystanders, so additional bridges and tunnels must be built to avoid bringing road vehicles and pedestrians too close to the trains.

In other words, a high speed railway line is far from being just a faster version of what we already have: it would have to be built separately, to much higher standards of construction.

Getting back to the California HSR line; it goes from A to B on this map:

Okay, you think, at least Fresno will get some snazzy slick rail service . . . except this section will be built but not operated until further connecting sections are built . . . at a later date. Maybe. It will be the track, including elevated sections through Fresno, and the physical right-of-way, but no electrical system to power the trains; but that’s fine, because the budget doesn’t include any actual trains.

India’s long, twisting path to nuclear submarine capabilities

Filed under: India, Military, Russia, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

India would like to run their own nuclear-powered submarines, but it’s taken longer for them to achieve that than they’d hoped:

On April 4th the new Russian Akula II SSN (nuclear attack submarine) Nerpa, that was supposed to be delivered to India (which is leasing it) two years ago, was finally turned over. It’s worse than it sounds. Three years ago, during sea trials there was an equipment failure on Nerpa that killed 20 sailors and shipyard workers. This delayed sea trials for many months and the Russians found more items that needed attention. These additional inspections and repairs continued until quite recently.

[. . .]

Indian money enabled Russia to complete construction on at least two Akulas that were less than half finished at the end of the Cold War. This was another aftereffect of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Several major shipbuilding projects were basically put on hold (which still cost a lot of money) in the hopes that something would turn up. In this case, it was Indians with lots of cash. But money could not overcome the construction problems and poor design decisions the Russians made. The single Akula II India was leasing was delayed again and again. The 8,100 ton Akula II has a crew of 73. The one leased by India has eight 533mm (21 inch) torpedo tubes and 40 torpedoes.

Meanwhile, in 2009, India launched its first nuclear submarine, the INS Arihant (Destroyer of Enemies). This came after over a decade of planning and construction. What was not revealed at the times was that the Arihant was launched without its nuclear reactor, which was not installed until 2011. Arihant is supposed to be ready for service later this year.

April 15, 2012

Virginia county considering creating first virtual public high school

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

In many ways, it’s a tribute to the resilience and determination of the educational establishment that it’s taken this long for a school district to even consider offering completely online classes:

Fairfax County schools could become the first in the Washington region to create a virtual public high school that would allow students to take all their classes from a computer at home.

No sports teams. No pep rallies. No lockers, no hall passes. Instead, assignments delivered on-screen and after-school clubs that meet online.

It’s a reimagination of the American high school experience. And it’s a nod to the power of the school choice movement, which has given rise to the widespread expectation that parents should have a menu of options to customize their children’s education.

Of course, it might not just be simple willingness to allow more choice on the part of the school district … there might be other pressures being applied:

Dozens of younger students have left Fairfax schools for the public Virginia Virtual Academy, the first statewide full-time virtual program. Open to any Virginia student in kindergarten through eighth grade, it is run by a Herndon firm — K12 Inc., the nation’s largest operator of public virtual schools — and enrolls nearly 500 students.

April 14, 2012

Colombia tries to butter up Obama with “quickie” SOPA rules

Filed under: Americas, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

Colombia buckles under intense US lobbying to introduce SOPA-like copyright rules in time for President Obama’s visit:

President Obama is heading to Colombia this weekend for a summit, and we’d been hearing stories that US officials had been putting tremendous pressure on Colombian officials to pass new, ridiculously draconian copyright laws ahead of that visit. So that’s exactly what the Colombian government did — using an “emergency procedure” to rush through a bad bill that is quite extreme.

Earlier this year, Colombia tried to pass basically the same bill, which was called LesLleras, after Interior Minister German Vargas Lleras (who proposed it). That bill was so extreme that it resulted in SOPA-like protests, following significant concerns raised by the public as well as copyright and free speech experts. So, this time around, the government just claimed it was an emergency and rushed the bill through, despite all of its problems. They seemed to think that the public wouldn’t notice — but they’re wrong.

As is typical of idiotic trade agreements pushed via the USTR — who only seems to listen to Hollywood on these issues — the copyright bill includes all sorts of draconian enforcement techniques and expansions of existing copyright law, and removal of free speech rights. But what it does not include are any exceptions to copyright law — the very important tools that even the US Supreme Court admits are the “safety valves” that stop copyright law from being abusive, oppressive and contrary to freedom of speech

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