Swiping at a criminal regime

As the brilliant article by Glenn Greenwald explains, there is a vast difference between the actions of Edward Snowden and the U.S. government.  Snowden has revealed on-going criminal activity by the U.S. government that has shielded itself from legal prosecution by passing unconstitutional laws allowing such activity.  Snowden knew this and decided it was such a terrible wrong that he had to expose it to the public, knowing that the penalty for doing so would be severe.  As others have noted, Snowden's leaked documents are hardly revelations to other governments, journalists, or people who pay attention to the news.  But for most people it was news, shocking news, to learn that everything they tell others digitally also gets told to the NSA. 

The "enemy" they're seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists. It's the American people.

The Terrorists already knew, and have long known, that the US government is doing everything possible to surveil their telephonic and internet communications. The Chinese have long known, and have repeatedly said, that the US is hacking into both their governmental and civilian systems (just as the Chinese are doing to the US). The Russians have long known that the US and UK try to intercept the conversations of their leaders just as the Russians do to the US and the UK.

They haven't learned anything from these disclosures that they didn't already well know. The people who have learned things they didn't already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.

Things about old cars you probably didn't know

Freedom for many people still means being able to get in your car and go wherever you want.  The automobile has vastly contributed to American freedom for this reason alone, providing people a means of "getting there" quickly, at least compared to previous modes of transportation.

It's not surprising to find the Left at war with cars.  As Jon Gabriel writes,

Since Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off the Detroit assembly line, the car has represented the individual and freedom. Finally, the city dweller could chart his own direction outside of a subway or trolley car and the farmer could explore beyond the reach of his horse and buggy. 

But in the Age of Obama, the individual is less important than the group. Hence the push for light rail, high-speed rail, unrealistic mileage standards and emission mandates, rising energy prices, and even the state-ordered destruction of perfectly good automobiles. In the Long March toward the bright progressive future, even transportation needs to be collectivized.

Those who appreciate the automobile's role in American freedom might enjoy this trip down memory lane.  You can find more at JDJournal.

Q: Who opened the first drive-in gas station?

A: Gulf opened up the first station in Pittsburgh in 1913.

Q: What city was the first to use parking meters?

A: Oklahoma City, on July 16, 1935.

Q: Where was the first drive-in restaurant?

A: Royce Hailey’s Pig Stand opened in Dallas in 1921.

Q: True or False?

The 1953 Corvette came in white, red and black.

A: False.

The 1953 ‘Vetted’ were available in one color, Polo White.

Q: What was Ford’s answer to the Chevy Corvette, and other legal street racers of the 1960′s?

A: Carroll Shelby’s Mustang GT350.

Q: What was the first car fitted with a replaceable cartridge oil filter?

A: The 1924 Chrysler.

Q: What was the first car to be offered with a “perpetual guarantee”?

A: The 1904 Acme, from Reading, PA. Perpetuity was disturbing in this case, as Acme closed down in 1911.

Q: What American luxury automaker began by making cages for birds and squirrels?

A: The George N. Pierce Co. Of Buffalo, who made the Pierce Arrow, also made iceboxes.

Q: What car first referred to itself as a convertible?

A: The 1904 Thomas Flyer, which had a removable hard top.

Q: What car was the first to have it’s radio antenna embedded in the windshield?

A: The 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix.

Q: What car used the first successful series-production hydraulic valve lifters?

A: The 1930 Cadillac 452, the first production V16

Q: Where was the World’s first three-color traffic lights installed?

A: Detroit, Michigan in 1919. Two years later they experimented with synchronized lights.

Q: What type of car had the distinction of being GM’s 100 millionth car built in the U.S. ?

A: March 16, 1966 saw an Olds Tornado roll out of Lansing, Michigan with that honor.

Q: Where was the first drive-in movie theater opened, and when?

A: Camden, NJ in 1933

Q: What autos were the first to use a standardized production key-start system?

A: The 1949 Chryslers

Q: What did the Olds designation 4-4-2 stand for?

A: 4 barrel carburetor, 4 speed transmission, and dual exhaust.

Q: What U.S. Production car has the quickest 0-60 mph time?

A: The 1962 Chevrolet Impala SS 409. Did it in 4.0 seconds.

Are Tablets the New Teachers?

Meet Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child, who believes that “If [children] can learn to read, then they can read to learn.”  He bases this claim on experiments run with first grade age children in two remote Ethiopian villages.

One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

There are about 100 million kids worldwide who don't go to school.  Tablets plus some adult encouragement may be the way they can learn.  

Technology at a wedding

One of my daughters was married last September (coincidentally on Ludwig von Mises' birthday).  The groom's mother lives in Bulgaria and couldn't attend in person, but an iPhone and Skype brought her to the ceremony nonetheless.

How to unravel governments

Silent Circle is a family of applications that can transmit encrypted data between mobile devices.  Right now the apps are only available for iPhone and iPad, but support for other mobile devices is in the works.  From Slate's Ryan Gallagher:

The encryption is peer to peer, which means that Silent Circle doesn’t centrally hold a key that can be used to decrypt people’s messages or phone calls. Each phone generates a unique key every time a call is made, then deletes it straight after the call finishes. When sending text messages or images, there is even a “burn” function, which allows you to set a time limit on anything you send to another Silent Circle user—a bit like how “this tape will self destruct” goes down in Mission: Impossible, but without the smoke or fire. [Oct. 16, 2012]

In a Feb. 4, 2013 article Gallagher says

Until now, sending encrypted documents has been frustratingly difficult for anyone who isn’t a sophisticated technology user, requiring knowledge of how to use and install various kinds of specialist software. What Silent Circle has done is to remove these hurdles, essentially democratizing encryption. It’s a game-changer that will almost certainly make life easier and safer for journalists, dissidents, diplomats, and companies trying to evade state surveillance or corporate espionage.

Love msg from Israeli paratrooper

Thanks to Facebook this is becoming a big movement.  Imagine, Israelis and Iranians actually liking one another.  Of course, it's done in defiance of their respective governments.  Best viewed in full screen.  Please share.  NOTE: For some reason this won't run under Safari.  If you're a Mac user, view it with Firefox or something other than Safari.

GDP Has Built-in Bias

And the bias doesn't favor the market.  Government pumps money into the economy by way of inflation, taxes, or borrowing, and GDP grows.  Should we conclude then that government spending helps the economy?

Veronique de Rugy writes in the June, 2011 issue of Reason:

When the federal government pumps trillions of dollars into the economy, it looks as if GDP is growing. When government cuts spending—even cuts within the most inefficient programs—aggregate GDP shrinks.  

But that’s misleading. If Washington spends $1 a year on a bureaucrat’s salary, for example, GDP numbers will register growth of exactly $1, whether or not the employee has produced any value for that money. By contrast, if a firm pays an engineer $1, that $1 only shows up in the GDP if the engineer produces $1 worth of stuff to sell. This distinction biases GDP numbers—and the policies based on them—toward ever-increasing government spending.

The Heroic Bradley Manning

A case can be made that to be a patriotic American in today's world is to defend the U.S. Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. If that's true, what can be said about Bradley Manning? After allegedly releasing a video to Wikileaks that showed U.S. troops murdering unarmed foreigners, including two small children, Manning was held incommunicado illegally for 900 days by the U.S. government. Do most Americans care? No. Does the lapdog media protest? Of course not.

Paul Craig Roberts writes:

On November 29 Bradley Manning testified in federal court about his illegal confinement and torture by the U.S. government.  Manning's testimony was not covered by the US media.  The New York Times, in Chris Floyd's words, "contented itself with a brief bit of wire copy from AP, tucked away on page 3."

In contrast, the British Guardian covered Manning's testimony in detail in two stories 68 paragraphs long.

Given that most Americans regard the American military as the unflagging and courageous defenders of our "liberties," about our only possible salvation is the financial collapse of the government. When the day comes when it can no longer borrow money to pay the interest on money previously borrowed, a more humane society could emerge.

For more information about Manning's case, see www.bradleymanning.org.

Stop Googling and Duck!

There's a new kid on the search engine block: DuckDuckGo.com. 

Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo doesn't track you. 

The proprietor of the search engine is Gabriel Weinberg, who is 33. A few years ago, when Weinberg told his wife about his new business idea — pitting him against more established outfits such as Google and Bing — he admits that she briefly thought he was nuts.

“She was like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Weinberg said. “She thought the idea was crazy.”

Her theory was hard to dispute. A start-up taking on Google in search is much like a raft taking on a cruise ship as a vacation option. But Weinberg is not delusional. With money lining his pockets from selling a start-up for $10 million, Weinberg bet there was a place in the market for a product capitalizing on users’ emerging annoyances with Google — its search results gamed by marketers; its pages cluttered with ads; every query tracked, logged and personalized to the point of creepiness.

 Read the full article here.

On being proactive

When Hurricane Sandy arrived yesterday, the sugary-drink mayor of New York could not keep the NYU hospital from being evacuated because of a lack of power.

Goldman Sachs, the world's leading crony capitalist institution, did keep its lights on throughout the night, along with a few other firms.

From The Inquisitr:

This image [above] did the rounds on Twitter last night, where it triggered a cynical and occasionally angry reaction; at least one Twitter user compared the illuminated Goldman Sachs building to the plight of the New York University Langone Medical Center, which was forced to evacuate 200 patients due to a power outage caused by Sandy.

Goldman quickly moved into damage limitation mode, with spokesman David Wells telling Daily Intel on Tuesday that many other buildings in the same neighborhood had stayed lit:

“We weren’t the only building with light, but we do have a generator. We’re not drawing power from the grid.”

 And as we read on Daily Political,

In recent years, continuity of business plans have emerged for large firms, and now, they are being put into action ahead of what meteorologists have dubbed ‘Frankenstorm’. One such action is from The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS), which has dispersed offices across the globe so that in the event of an emergency, the business can maintain close to normal operations. Telecommuting and alternate work sites work for a variety of functions, though front office jobs continue to require secure lines of communication and proper infrastructure. For this, global offices come in handy.

 

Happy Birthday, Fortran!

Freedom has meaning beyond the political or economic interpretation.  In programming, it sometimes refers to release from the drudgery of architecture-specific code. 

A Wired article reminds us that on October 15, 1956 a small team of software engineers at IBM led by John Backus published the first Fortran manual.  As the manual states,

Higher-level languages like Fortran revolutionized computing, making it possible to do in hours or days what took weeks or months to accomplish using only the native language of the hardware.

My first programming job was writing Fortran programs for data reduction of transonic wind tunnel tests.  The target computer was an IBM 1800, sometimes referred to as a mini-computer.  Before the 1800 and before Fortran two sharp programmers in the wind tunnel facility coded on a Burroughs Datatron using that machine's language.  Once the switch to Fortran and the 1800 were made, productivity rose astronomically.