Patent news

28 Jul 2010 at 13:06

Peter Risdon

Crime, Islamism, WTF?, war

No Comments

Someone called Mark S. Price has filed a patent (pdf) application in the USA for an anti-suicide bomber device. Here’s the suggested warning notice:

WARNING
DETONATION OF EXPOSIVE IS GREATLY DISCOURAGED
PORCINE CONTENTS- PORK
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the frangible glass amulet
affixed to this Shield contains a significant quantity of pig’s blood in a
liquid state. It has been treated with preservative and anticoagulant
additives. Further, this Shield is imbued with pig bone. Detonation of
an explosive charge within close proximity of this Shield is greatly
discouraged. Such explosive event is likely to cause the catastrophic
failure of the containment properties of the glass amulet and this Shield,
resulting in the indiscriminate disbursal of porcine derivatives over a vast
area of the immediate surroundings.

Via

Darwin Award

27 Jul 2010 at 15:14

Peter Risdon

computers, war

No Comments

This time on a national scale (pdf).

Abstract—We’re about to acquire a significant new cyber-vulnerability. The world’s energy utilities are starting to install hundreds of millions of ‘smart meters’ which contain a remote off switch. Its main purpose is to ensure that customers who default on their payments can be switched remotely to a prepay tariff; secondary purposes include supporting interruptible tariffs and implementing rolling power cuts at times of supply shortage.

The off switch creates information security problems of a kind, and on a scale, that the energy companies have not had to face before. From the viewpoint of a cyber attacker – whether a hostile government agency, a terrorist organisation or even a militant environmental group – the ideal attack on a target country is to interrupt its citizens’ electricity supply. This is the cyber equivalent of a nuclear strike; when electricity stops, then pretty soon everything else does too. Until now, the only plausible ways to do that involved attacks on critical generation, transmission and distribution assets, which are increasingly well defended.

Smart meters change the game. The combination of commands that will cause meters to interrupt the supply, of applets and software upgrades that run in the meters, and of cryptographic keys that are used to authenticate these commands and software changes, create a new strategic vulnerability, which we discuss in this paper.

Don’t overlook that bit about “secondary purposes include supporting interruptible tariffs and implementing rolling power cuts at times of supply shortage.” This is where Green energy policies are leading us. They’re even installing the meters to be prepared.

Tomlinson and police misconduct

23 Jul 2010 at 18:26

Peter Risdon

Crime

1 Comment

I don’t share the outrage at the decision not to prosecute the police officer who killed Ian Tomlinson. Henry Porter says:

The public needs to see justice done. Instead the DPP’s decision sends a message that the police are immune from prosecution

The police didn’t need the DPP to send that message. They already knew. I’m not outraged because I’ve seen this sort of thing before. I’m weary. I’m almost surprised the case got as far as the DPP. Here’s why, let me tell you a story.

In 1995 I was asked to help a woman who owned a pub in London. There had been a fight in the pub, a group of men attacked the manager with pool cues and he fought back with a Samurai sword, cutting one of them quite badly. The man who was cut was the son of a police officer.

When the police arrived, they found no sword. They were furious and searched the place. In a safe, they found a large amount of cash.

A few days later a heavy from South London came into the pub and asked to speak to the woman. I know this; I was standing with her at the bar when he entered. They went off to one side and chatted, then she came back and he left. “I can’t believe what just happened,” she said. But she wouldn’t say why, just asked us to wait with her.

A bit later a very well-dressed man came in and the same thing happened again. This time when she came back she did say what the problem was. The man was an intermediary, acting on behalf of the police officer running the fight/sword case. He had found the money in the safe. If she gave him £20,000 he would screw the case up. If not, he’d charge the manager with affray, a serious offence with a maximum sentence of, I think, seven years.

I arranged for a subsequent conversation she had with the intermediary to be tape recorded secretly. I still have a copy of the tape. On it, she can be heard asking how she could know the guy was connected with the officer. Hey, the man said, we’ve been doing this for years. He then, incredibly, reeled off a list of graft, bribes they had taken for one thing or another, all round the East End of London.

Yeah, but how do I really know, she asked. A couple of days later, the man came back with a copy of the charge sheet from the police station. Only an officer involved in the case could have got that, he said. Yes, but how do I really know, she asked.

The man said that at a particular time in a particular restaurant, he would be having coffee with the police officer. He suggested she be there at a different table, to see them together. What actually happened was that I walked in, took a few flash photos of them, handed the camera to someone else outside, then went back in and asked for a quiet word with the officer.

We had tape, videos and now photos. I explained this. And I explained that we had no intention of using them against him, but that his demand for cash had to go away. I made it clear we didn’t even want him to drop or screw up the case against the bar manager, just drop the demand for money. He agreed.

Then the dapper intermediary was arrested for something unrelated and, for some reason, he blurted all this out to the police. I had a knock on my door, and opened it to find a Detective Chief Superintendent and a Detective Inspector from CIB2, the internal corruption unit of the Metropolitan Police. Heavy guns.

I was interviewed twice in Tintagel House, their headquarters in Vauxhall. They interviewed the woman and the manager. They investigated the case fully, knew about the tapes, the videos and the photographs.

What do you think happened?

The detective took early retirement on full pension.

Bonobo intelligence

23 Jul 2010 at 12:15

Peter Risdon

Just interesting, evolution

No Comments

From TED. Our ancestors must have been very like these creatures. I hadn’t realised how well they can understand full spoken sentences. They have also learned to write in a symbolic script. There is surely a moral duty for us to leave their habitat alone and allow them to develop unhindered. And medical experimentation on such creatures is unconscionable.

UPDATE: An afterthought. It’s occurred to me that rather than being the only species on his planet to develop an advanced intelligence, we are merely the first to do so. These might seem equivalent but the former is generally taken to mean we’re the only species capable of developing like this, that there’s a category difference between us and other species (often this is a religious view but it’s not exclusively so), and that’s what I’m contradicting.

There’s a measure of a developed species, perhaps, that concerns not its own ascent to intelligence, but whether or not it permits any other species to develop to an advanced stage. I wouldn’t bet that we’ll pass that particular test.

Aftercare

23 Jul 2010 at 11:08

Peter Risdon

Crime

2 Comments

I’m not surprised that Jon Venables’s brain has got a bit mis-wired. Imprisoned at 10 years of age, to spend puberty and adolescence separated from the opposite sex, and with the knowledge and memory of his murder of a very small child forever in his consciousness.

Maybe he should have stayed behind bars for the rest of his life. But if someone with this history is released, he’s going to need a hell of a lot of aftercare. I wonder whether he had it?

UPDATE: Formertory linked, in the comments, to this article by Brian Masters. It’s very much worth reading.

Caption competition

23 Jul 2010 at 10:58

Peter Risdon

out of my depth

No Comments

Over at ChinaSMACK.

The image to caption?

Ah yes. The image.

Um…

Well, here’s a preview:

I’m not sure what the girl on the right’s expression is supposed to denote, but she needs to be careful with that cigarette.

Kafkatrapping

23 Jul 2010 at 09:39

Peter Risdon

Politics

No Comments

Interesting read from esr:

One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts.

Yuppies, juppies, guppies and Thatcher

22 Jul 2010 at 18:30

Peter Risdon

Blame Thatcher, Derangement Syndromes, self-refuting arguments

2 Comments

I keep seeing examples of Thatcher Derangement Syndrome, they’re so common that it’s hardly worth linking to make the point. Here’s one from Clive Aslet that I saw on Tim’s blog:

It is partly the rise of selfish individualism, at the expense of the shared values of restraint. The Sixties had something to do with it; shared values seemed part of the stuffiness and conformism that young people found so repressive. (Reader, with my then shoulder-length hair, I was one of them.) Then came Thatcherism, which, for different reasons, had the effect of exulting the individual over society. To the yuppie, litter was something for other people to pick up.

It’s an interesting example, for me, because it’s self-refuting, in that it contains the correct answer while asserting the wrong one.

Although in the UK we associate it with Thatcher and the 1980s, the word Yuppie was an American coinage. The origin of the word is pertinent:

The term gained currency in the United States in 1983 when syndicated newspaper columnist Bob Greene published a story about a business networking group founded in 1982 by the former radical leader Jerry Rubin, formerly of the Youth International Party (whose members were called yippies); Greene said he had heard people at the networking group (which met at Studio 54 to soft classical music) joke that Rubin had “gone from being a yippie to being a yuppie”.

Those 1960s radicals keep cropping up, don’t they? Aslet says the ’60s had something to do with 1980s “selfishness”, Greene noticed that a radical ’60s leader had become an arch Yuppie.

In the USA, the syndrome was so well known and remarked on that later in the decade, in 1987, a film called Wall Street was made, exploring this phenomenon.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Juppie was coined for Japanese Yuppies. Buppie for black Yuppies, Guppie, for gay or green ones. The term cropped up everywhere, France had les Yuppies, Germany… all round the world. By the mid 1980s, Yuppies were everywhere.

So, here’s the proposition that Thatcher Derangement Advocates require us to accept. She came to power in 1979. Within five years, she had influenced the entire world and driven it to selfishness. Such was her power that this happened in the USA even before it did in the country she lived in.

This is complete drivel, fatuousness in a propeller hat, riding a unicycle in circles while making high pitched noises. Yet somehow it has become received wisdom, such that Mr Aslett could refer to it even while putting his finger on the real cause of the changes noticed in the 1980s.

We’re looking for a cause for this changed behaviour (though it was nothing like as clear a change as is made out), a cause that was world-wide. A cause that started to have its effect around 1980. Around the time that people born in 1960 were entering the workplace. Around the time that people who were teens in the 1960s were entering the most powerful time in their working lives.

Yup. It was the 1960s counter culture coming to adulthood. It’s as simple as that. The people causing the changes so lamented by Guardian writers were… the people who have become Guardian writers. If you doubt that for a moment, read this 2007 conversation between Piers Morgan and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.

As Mick Jagger put it, “We piss anywhere, man”. Others drop litter.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a child of the 1960s and the Stones were my band. But they were not caused by the woman who came to power 15 years after they became famous.

Ode to Newport

22 Jul 2010 at 15:11

Peter Risdon

Humour, Music

No Comments

Thanks, Kate.

Feel the power

22 Jul 2010 at 09:44

Peter Risdon

WibbleWatch, religion

No Comments

Presumably, Druids will now feel the power of the wooden henge that has been discovered adjacent to Stonehenge, though until now such power has been unnoticed. It’s a bit like the way newly discovered planets became important to astrology, in a way they somehow hadn’t been before.

← Older Entries