Quotulatiousness

July 5, 2011

F-22 still grounded

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:53

What initially seemed like an urgent, but relatively trivial problem with the F-22 may involve more time out of service:

What appeared as a simple problem with the U.S. F-22 fighter, has kept 168 of them grounded for over two months, so far. It all began when it appeared that the F-22 fighter might be having a problem with its OBOG (OnBoard Oxygen Generating) system, causing pilots to get drowsy, or even black out, from lack of oxygen. There have been five reports of potential problems in this area lately. As a result, on May 3rd, all F-22s were grounded. But the U.S. Air Force is also checking the OBOGs in F-16, F-15E, A-10, F-35 and T-6 aircraft as well. The problem may just be with the F-22 OBOG, or a general problem with all air force OBOGs. The air force also believes the F-22 problem may not just involve the OBOG. As a result, the grounding is “indefinite” and will continue until the source of the breathing problem is found, and definitely fixed.

If it goes on too long, the air force may consider fitting some F-22s with the older air supplies, just so some of their newest combat aircraft will be available for combat. In the meantime, pilots and ground crews are using simulators and (for the ground crews) and maintenance exercises on the grounded aircraft (in addition to checking a growing list of aircraft components in support of the search for the breathing problem) to retain their skills. The 168 F-22s, costing over $200 million each, have become the most expensive hanger queens (aircraft that spend a lot of time sitting in a hanger getting repaired or worked on) ever.

July 4, 2011

Internet absolved of charges

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:58

Apparently the smear campaign against the internet — you know, the meme that we were all being turned into morons by video games, social networking sites, and Google — has no factual basis:

Has Google been making us stupid? Are young people nothing but mindless husks, helplessly addicted to Facebook? Is the very internet itself some sort of insidious virus, creeping through the fibre optics, rewiring our brains, deadening neurons, stunting IQs, stymieing human interaction?

You could be forgiven for worrying. You don’t have to go far to read a scare story about what the upsurge in digital life over the past 20 years has apparently done to our brains. Yet help is at hand.

A report released this morning (The impact of digital technologies on human well-being) claims that the internet has actually been the victim of some sort of vicious smear campaign. An analysis of current research by the Nominet Trust, a UK charity dedicated to increasing access to the internet, claims that we’ve really been worrying about nothing all along. Relax, get online and stop worrying, is about the gist of it.

British Green activist recants opposition to nuclear power

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Unlike Germany, which has announced it will be shutting down its nuclear power plants, Britain is considering a new generation of plants to provide an even greater share of their electricity needs. Even a few green activists are changing their tune:

Also, as much as Greens are enthusiastic about solar electricity, in cloudy countries such as ours it is extremely inefficient and expensive. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is one of the cheapest ways of producing electricity, and it is much safer than many environmentalists would have us believe.

The objection of environmentalists to nuclear power — fears about the dangers of nuclear waste and the cost of decommissioning it — are overblown, which explains why many people don’t like the Greens.

[. . .]

Solving many of the world’s most critical environmental challenges will, in some cases, involve doing the exact opposite of what most environmentalists want.

Rather than retreating into hair-shirt austerity, I believe that, just as technology got us into this mess, technology is vital to get us out of it.

That means embracing some things that will make a lot of Green believers choke on their organic muesli.

It has taken me a long time to reach this conclusion. I used to passionately oppose not only nuclear power but GM crops. I once even threw a pie in the face of a Danish scientist who dared to question the orthodox environmental line. So what changed?

Through research, I found that much of what I believed about environmental issues had little, if any, basis in science. Put simply, though my concerns were right, my solutions were wrong.

July 1, 2011

Guardian contributer learns not to confuse “sociopathy” with “social network”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:40

Kia Abdullah will think twice before letting her inner sociopath out on Twitter in future:

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, three young British men were killed in a bus crash in Thailand, just days after starting their gap year travels. A deeply tragic case — and one that will have left many British parents sick with worry. Annually about 100,000 young Brits take gap years.

But here’s a Twitter reaction from Kia Abdullah, a Guardian contributor:

Even if you think this sort of thing, sending it out immediately over Facebook or Twitter is just asking for a landslide of public abuse to land on your head. People who work in media have the least excuse for this kind of absent-minded faux pas, as they often pounce on celebrity or politician errors of exactly this sort.

June 28, 2011

Government attempts to censor and control the internet spawn opposition

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Loz Kaye makes the point that the recent ratcheting-up of freelance subversion of government and corporate web sites and online communities is a direct reaction to attempts to control the internet:

LulzSec wasn’t an isolated or unique phenomenon. People with passionate beliefs have been using new technological tools to effect change out of a sense of powerlessness. In the last year, I’ve watched 38 Degrees using the strength of association online to change government policy, WikiLeaks force transparency on those who’d rather run from it, even the amorphous mass that is Anonymous taking a stand on whatever issue they feel deserves their attention.

These tools are now themselves under attack. Lord Mandelson’s last gift to us, the Digital Economy Act, is just one of a raft of “three strikes laws” worldwide that threaten to cut off households from the web. Buried in the coalition’s Prevent strategy is the assertion that “internet filtering across the public estate is essential”. Nor is it solely a British issue; Nicolas Sarkozy called for global online governance at the eG8 in his attempt to civilise the “wild west” of the web.

We’re starting to see what this civilising process entails. Open Rights Group revealed that Ed Vaizey and lobbyists held a secret meeting discussing the future of web blocking powers. There was no public oversight and no one asked the net natives. Vaizey has relented a little via Twitter, consenting to open up the discussion — the Pirate Party and I welcome that invitation. It will take more, however, than getting a few NGOs around a table to ease the real sense of anger poisoning the online community.

We’re quickly coming up on a time when we’ll need to enshrine access to the internet (or equivalent data sources) as a formal constitutional right. If we don’t, we will always have this urge to control and to censor on the part of petty authoritarians and bureaucrats.

Sony has a long track record of ham-fisted customer relations

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me this link all about just how insanely bad MMORPG players can be in their chosen game environments. I found this entry particularly interesting, as it isn’t the gamers being dicks . . . it’s the company running the game:

You’re playing a game where you kill things. What do you do with a giant dragon that kills things, can only be woken by killing four smaller dragons first and is now trying to kill you? If you said “kill it” you just surprised the hell out of Sony who, to be fair, have never claimed they weren’t wearing human-skin suits while studying these Earth things called “game-ers.” Kerafyrm the Sleeper was EverQuest‘s dragon-equivalent of Sauron, if Sauron drove the Death Star to work. It had a hundred times as many hit points as any other boss, was immune to most damage, had two spammable instant-kill attacks because screw you and didn’t work right because it was online and programmed by Sony.

It forced the three top guilds to co-operate, which makes herding cats look easier than getting Bollywood extras to move in step. It was Sesame Street by way of Lord of the Rings, specifically the end of the third movie, since for over three hours, 180 players turned themselves into a Sisyphean Zerg horde. Resurrecting each other faster than the monster could kill them, they put in Herculean feats of teamwork that cruelly mocked the concept of “fun.” They fought like warrior poets, they fought like Scotsmen and eventually ground the boss down to 22 percent health — at which point Sony turned the whole thing off and acted like it was the players’ fault. So if you’re wondering how they can keep the PlayStation Network off for a week and act like that’s fine, it’s because they’ve been practicing.

They took their ball and went home, where their ball was a giant harbinger of doom and the focus of the entire game.

Showing less regard for their users than an Iron Maiden, they released a rubbish (and later disproven) excuse about how Kerafyrm’s programming had been distracted by an NPC — and you’ll notice how even their own excuse is based on their incompetence — before simply apologizing and resetting the entire event, telling players to try again. It was like Lucy tricking Charlie Brown if Lucy was making millions of dollars making Charlie Brown miss, and if it took three man-weeks to run up to the football.

June 27, 2011

Bodyhacking is closer than you may think

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:15

An occasional meme in science fiction stories is someone being able to control the actions of another using remote control. We may be closer to that, um, “vision” than we expect:

Now that pacemakers are to be loaded with firewalls and bionic-man body parts are appearing on production lines, the concept of body hacking has become a spooky possibility. Researchers in Japan have begun to try to teach people how to play instruments by remotely controlling their hands.

Developed by the University of Tokyo and Sony Computer Science Labs, the aptly named PossessedHand stimulates muscles that move our digits, New Scientist reports.

A belt with 28 electrode pads is strapped to the arm, sending signals to the joints between the three bones of each finger, with two for the thumb.

Stephen Gordon: The “broken window” fallacy of “green” jobs

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

It’s always nice to see a reference to Frédéric Bastiat in a modern day setting:

But it is possible to oversell the green jobs theme. Job creation should not be a goal of environmental policy, no more than it should be a policy goal in the fields of health or national security. If, instead of hiring people, we could use magic to stop disease, crime and environmental degradation, we would. Pointing to jobs ‘created’ to fix these problems is an error that Frédéric Bastiat identified in his ‘parable of the broken window’. Broken windows generate work for glaziers, but that doesn’t mean that breaking windows will increase national income.

An often-quoted statistic goes something like this: “wind energy produces 27 per cent more jobs per kilowatt hour than coal plants and 66 per cent more jobs than natural gas plants”. This could well be true, but it is hardly a strong argument in favour of the employment opportunities that would be generated by investing in wind energy: hiring more people to produce less energy is not a strategy for prosperity. Similar gains in employment could be obtained by outlawing mechanical excavators so that all digging must be done by hand. It may make sense to encourage the development of wind power, but increased employment is most emphatically not one of the reasons for doing so.

June 26, 2011

Skype’s PR problem over their sneaky options plan

Filed under: Economics, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:35

Over my career in the software industry, I’ve worked for several companies who provided a stock option plan as part of their employee compensation scheme. Exactly one of those companies’ programs ever provided me with any actual tangible benefit (the company was bought, and the options were bought back at market rate). It netted me a couple of thousand dollars. Options may have been a way to get rich in the early 1990s, but they’re pretty much a longshot lottery ticket now.

Skype has found a sneaky way of making that longshot chance even more unlikely to pay off:

Employees aren’t even able to keep the vested portion of their stock options. The vast majority of stock options granted to startups have a vesting period, typically four years, with chunks of those options becoming vested during that four year (or whatever) period. If options are vested you can exercise them, pay for the stock and own that stock. At least that’s the way things have been done over the decades.

Skype did things differently. With Skype stock options the company has the right to not only terminate unvested options, but also vested ones. And any vested options that you’ve exercised (meaning you paid cash for them) that were turned into actual shares could simply be bought back by the company at the price you paid, regardless of their current value.

Turning your potentially lucrative stock holdings (if the value was higher than your strike price) into a mandatory zero-interest savings account. Nice.

The fact that Skype adopted this plan in the first place isn’t in itself “evil.” But they’ve done two things wrong from what I can tell.

First it appears that employees had no idea what they were signing and they probably expected it would be a normal stock option type deal that everyone in Silicon Valley has done for decades. If Skype wasn’t crystal clear with them, and explained it in normal human language that they understood, then these employees were intentionally misled. Skype had an incentive to make things unclear, because employees would demand far more compensation if they had understood. The fact that employees are so surprised that this is happening suggests that they didn’t understand the agreement. This is what lawyers call fraud.

The second thing Skype did wrong was not to waive this clause with the looming acquisition. The company can deny all day long that they fired these employees for cause, not to save a few dollars on stock options. But the appearance is the exact opposite.

Product warnings

Filed under: Humour, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:46

Many weird and whacky warnings get attached to products as a result of product liability concerns, but some of them must be generated without legal prompting:

Warning #2: Booze Blues

Seen on a Terrestrial Digital outdoor antenna: “Do not attempt to install if drunk, pregnant, or both.”

Of course, if you’re drunk and pregnant, you probably have bigger problems.

Warning #3: Three-Dimensional Danger

Seen on a Samsung 3D TV disclaimer: “Pregnant women, the elderly, sufferers of serious medical conditions, those who are sleep deprived or under the influence of alcohol should avoid utilizing the unit’s 3D functionality.”

Man, those drunk moms-to-be just can’t catch a break!

Warning #4: Options, Options

Seen on a computer software package: “Optional modem required.”

The writer’s mandatory English language class, incidentally, was not completed.

June 25, 2011

QotD: The game marketing game

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

. . . here’s the long and short of it: A PR flack complaining about unfair representation of a videogame is like a mugger complaining about unsafe working conditions.

They say advertisers sell the sizzle, not the steak. Videogame companies regularly sell not the steak, not the sizzle, but a recording of the sizzle of aged Wagyū steak, the audio captured under ideal acoustic conditions and sweetened with frequencies proven to make people hungry. Then, often as not, they present you with a microwaved hamburger and a promise to remove the bugs — which in this metaphor are actual insects — just as soon as they can.

I don’t write many reviews these days, but as far as I’m concerned, eviscerating shitty games with snappy sarcasm is a public service. If 500 words of my resentment are more entertaining than 10 hours of your game, then you wrote a crappy game.

And let’s get this out of the way: Don’t come crying to me about the hard work of the developers and how they’re being abused by reviewers. You know what developers really hate? Working on crappy games. Nobody enjoys feeling like they’re being paid to tie ribbons on manure. You want happy developers? Let them make the best games they can and present them honestly.

So here’s the deal. I’m all for civility. In any future game reviews, I will completely do away with venom and mockery, but only if the ad agencies do away with exaggeration and hype. If you start lying, I start making vicious, spiteful fun of you.

Lore Sjöberg, “Alt Text: After Duke Nukem PR Fail, Terrible Games Are Fair Game”, Wired, 2011-06-24

June 23, 2011

Your social media reputation and your future employment prospects

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

Chris Greaves posted this link, which should be a warning to everyone to be (even more) careful about your online reputation:

Camille Cacnio, a part-time receptionist at a car dealership, was caught in a 3-second video clip, stealing clothing from a looted store during the Stanley Cup riots.

She was fired.

Professional mountain biker Alex Prochazka posed in front of a burning car, while wearing a T-shirt from his sponsor Oakley.

The sunglass company promptly dropped him.

Carpenter Connor Mcilvenna declared the riots “awesome” on his Facebook page, and posted several pro-riot status updates, such as “atta boy vancity!!! show em how we do it!!!” and “vancouver needed remodeling anyway….”

RiteTech Construction was listed as his employer on his Facebook profile, and the next morning, Mcilvenna was fired.

His boss said he was flooded with emails and didn’t want the company’s reputation linked to the man.

“I think this will be a turning point in how employers look at social media,” said Peter Eastwood, a partner at Borden Ladner Gervais in Vancouver. “This is an extremely powerful tool that has potentially enormous and immediate consequences for a business.”

This is something the early bloggers had to face, that what you post online (or what is posted about you) will be there forever. No rational employer is going to offer you a job in future without at the very least running a Google search on you, and there’s already a niche market for employers to explore (doing a deeper search on prospective employees). Background check and personal references? I’m starting to wonder why employers even bother going through the motions any more.

June 22, 2011

Carr: LulzSec versus the CIA

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Paul Carr is somewhat dismissive of the hacking exploits of the LulzSec group:

For the past few weeks, a hacker collective called LulzSec has been leading American and British authorities a merry dance. The group’s targets are seemingly random – Sony, the CIA, contestants of a reality TV show, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) – but their stated motive has remained constant: “we’re doing it for laughs”, or, to put it in internet parlance, “lulz”.

If one is to believe the media coverage – particularly here in the US‚ no one is safe from the ingenious hackers and their devilishly complex attacks. The truth is, there’s almost nothing ingenious about what LulzSec is doing: CIA and Soca were not “hacked” in any meaningful sense, rather their public websites were brought down by an avalanche of traffic — a so-called “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack. Given enough internet-enabled typewriters, a mentally subnormal monkey could launch a DDoS attack — except that mentally subnormal monkeys have better things to do with their time.

Even the genuine hacks are barely worthy of the word. Many large organisations use databases with known security holes that can easily be exploited by anyone who has recently completed the first year of a computer science degree: it’s no coincidence that so many of these hacker collectives appear towards the end of the academic year.

June 21, 2011

Chinese high speed trains to run slower than planned

Filed under: China, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

They’ll still qualify as high speed trains, but they’ll only travel at speeds up to 250kph instead of the 385kph they were designed to achieve. The problem is safety concerns:

The Chinese government has announced a significant lowering in the top speed its hallmark Beijing-to-Shanghai high-speed train will be allowed to run at when it opens later this month after a review of safety, shoddy workmanship and corruption.

The new service halving the 10-hour rail travel time between China’s political and business centres was meant to be the flagship project of a massive $400-billion program to give the country the most extensive bullet train network anywhere.

But the announcement last week by the Railway Ministry that trains on the new line will only be permitted to run at about 250 kilometres per hour instead of the projected 380 km/h has taken the bloom off the opening.

The restriction follows a review by officials stemming from the sacking in February of the railway minister, Liu Zhijun, and the deputy chief engineer of the department, Zhang Shuguang.

The concerns about safety are not at all unwarranted:

Contractors are said to have skimped on using expensive hardening agents when making the concrete for the rail bases. These ties are predicted to crumble within a few years. And there is said to have been a similar shortage of strengthening ingredients included in the concrete used to build bridges and their supporting columns.

A high speed train requires the right-of-way to be engineered to a much higher standard than ordinary passenger or freight rail lines. If too many corners have been cut in this construction, it would be insane to allow the trains to run at full speed until the entire line has been inspected, tested, and problems addressed. If there were even greater “economies” taken during construction, it might not be safe to run the trains at any speed.

And what’s a story like this without a bit of trash-talking from a rival high speed railway operator:

“The difference between China and Japan is that in Japan, if one passenger is injured or killed, the cost is prohibitively high,” he said. “It’s very serious. But China is a country where 10,000 passengers could die every year and no one would make a fuss.”

That’s a quote from the chairman of Central Japan Railway, which runs the Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen service.

A neologism? A crippling political setback? It’s both!

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

When you read the word “santorum”, what do you think of? A small minority of people apparently believe it refers to an obscure American politician:

The world’s Wikifiddlers are obsessed with santorum. Though they can’t agree on what that is.

For some, it’s a word. For others, it’s not: it’s the result of a campaign to create a word. The distinction — however subtle — has sparked weeks of controversy among the core contributors to Wikipedia, the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit”. If you find this hard to believe, you’ve never been to Wikiland — and you’ve never Googled “Rick Santorum”.

Famously, Rick Santorum — the former Pennsylvania Senator and a Republican candidate for president of the United States — has a Google problem. But he also has a Wikipedia problem. And the two go hand-in-hand.

If nothing else, the whole controversy has added another variant meaning to the term “to be savaged”.

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