The revelations of privacy violation by the U.S. Government keeps going on. The latest is news that the NSA has a huge database recording the "envelopes" of most telephone calls made in the U.S. This is following the wiretapping scandal from last year, and I see a lot of hubbub in the news.
NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls USA Today, May 11, 2006
Anger grows over NSA surveillance report C|NET News, May 11, 2006
Green Car Congress has a story about a new catamaran (dual-hulled sailboat): Hybrid Electric Catamaran
The real cost of a bag of salad: You pay 99p. Africa pays 50 litres of fresh water goes into the real cost of cheap groceries shipped from halfway around the world. More and more every product, from groceries on upward, is shipped around a global free market. The high lord muckety mucks who make all the decisions seem to think free trade is the solution to all economic problems. But what of other problems it creates?
Okay, did Luann here get the idea? At tvturnoff.org they're suggesting we can "take control of technology" so that technology doesn't control us. They suggest doing this by excising TV from our life for a week.
I grew up watching television, just like all the kids around me. It was the 60's, and the shift from black and white to color television was just beginning. Yes, there were color televisions available, but they were more expensive so we didn't get one until pretty late in the 60's. And, yes, the installation of the color TV involved a lot of guys fiddling with technology and it might have coincided with the Super Bowl.
Basically any thing with a circuit board needs to be treated as hazardous waste. Yet, often they aren't. e.g. "There's a lot of stuff in a circuit board that you really don't want to ingest. Lead, mercury, cadmium and beryllium all have been shown to have harmful effects on humans." And that's not to mention the plastics in the case, etc.
There's a growing wave of what they call "teledildonics", which is a $20 word for remote control sex toys. These are gizmos that "manipulate the genitals" under computer control, providing sexual experiences mediated by computer software running over the Internet.
It's a truism that any new technology is often first used to facilitate sexual encounters. So here we go.
I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.
Okay, that's possibly the most alarmist title I could have chosen. But this is what the government is moving to doing.
What's a UAV? Unmanned Air Vehicle, a.k.a. Drone. They are being used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan against "the terrorists". There's pointers to various articles at the end of this. This has been a long time coming, and it clearly fits into the general government strategy to install broad surveillance.
My first thought is -- the C|NET and AOPA articles (linked below) are only looking at regulatory issues. One example is a tiny surveillance aircraft, that weighs all of 14 pounds, and was used to buzz a couple biker rallies in North Carolina. A point in one of the articles is that an airplane hitting a bird causes a lot of damage to the aircraft (and kills the bird), so what would this thing, at 14 lbs weighing much more than the typical bird, do to an aircraft? These things don't carry transponders, so how are pilots going to detect them and avoid running into them? They are unmanned, and so won't have an in-built ability to avoid other aircraft.
In the State of the Union speech, GW Bush mentioned Ethanol as a resource "we" should develop. There's been a big scramble towards Ethanol since. Ethanol has some interesting characteristics, in that it's a liquid fuel that's very compatible with gasoline. Unlike biodiesel, ethanol can be readily burned in a gasoline engine and, in fact, ethanol is widely used today in the U.S. Just watch for a sticker on the pump saying "This gasoline may contain ethanol".
