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"steps towards a police state"???

Excuse me... to me it looks like the UK (and members of FiveEyes) have actually been *sprinting* towards a police state and some are already well within sight of the finish line.

Have you ever noticed that when we (the great unwashed) break a law it is called an "illegal" act -- but when the state breaks the law it's simply called "unlawful"?

"Illegal" acts are inevitably subject to huge censure (fines, imprisonment, etc) -- whilst "unlawful" acts are simply dismissed as "gosh, we got caught, we'll try to cover up better next time" and nobody even gets their wrist slapped.

What's more, "the great unwashed" in many countries (such as New Zealand) are now so busy simply trying to house, feed and clothe their kids that they're almost completely unaware of what's going on -- which leaves the state free to embark on petty vendettas and repeated "unlawful" acts without having to worry about being held to account.

There were multiple failures all around which caused this death. If any one of those failures had not happened then the pedestrian would likely still be alive today.

I've summed it up here in a column which was written almost 24 hours ago so it's nice to see that others have come to similar conclusions.

Well I did sound the alarm bells about this back in 2002

The danger of the low-cost cruise missile

Hello... anyone home???

I blogged about a similar proposal earlier in the week but I suggest that they go even further.

They should also come up with two content pools -- one (the premium pool) containing YouTube channel partners who meet a much tighter criteria -- such as 10 million views and 100K subs -- and another that contains all the others. These "premium" content creators would be vetted for the nature of their content (ie: ad-friendly) and offered to the J&J, Verizon, UK Government advertisers who are presently not advertising because of the hate/racist/extremist vids their ads were appearing against.

If they properly vetted these premium channels then they could offer big-dollar advertisers placements which they know would not be on offensive content -- and attract a premium ad-rate at the same time.

I recall back when the YT Channel Partner program kicked off, earnings were good for content creators because the entire ad-revenue pie was divided amongst a much smaller number of content creators. Viewers also got a much better experience because we didn't have every man and his dog monetizing 30 second "cute cat" videos with a 30 second unskippable preroll. Advertisers also got a good deal because their ads were only being placed on channels that had proven their worth and the quality of their content by having been chosen for the program.

Once they opened the doors so that everyone could monentize, the existing channel partners saw a huge drop in earnings. Now, with the big-dollar advertisers fleeing in droves, they're probably going to see yet another drop. This is further aggravated by the bugs in YT's new system for automatically detecting and demonetizing potentially "unfriendly" vids. Lots of YT's biggest channels have had significant numbers of their vids automatically demonetized by this lame system -- so are seeing an even greater drop in revenue as a result.

Unfortunately it's YT's greed that has created the current situation so I doubt they'll wind the clock back enough to solve it.

Some time ago I gave some thought to the apparent anomalies and strangeness of the quantum world.

Here's what I came up with as a theory It's all about time

Comments would be welcomed from all the (real and wannabe) quantum physicists out there.

I got hit by this last week and blogged about it, griping that surely a company with the resources of Yahoo should be able to fix such a critical flaw faster than seems to be the case.

It would appear that Yahoo is happy to announce "fixexd" while the hackers simply exploit yet another hole in the company's shaky cloud.

Tragic.

Would Google be so lax in sorting out what is clearly a very critical issue that is affecting a large (and rapidly growing) number of users?

I'm in the same boat -- didn't vote because I felt that none of them were worthy of my endorsement.

Choosing the "least bad" is not the same as choosing "the best".

I really can't believe we're still using a political system designed hundreds of years before the internet was invented -- when, thanks to modern technology, we could create a system that introduced the checks and balances essential to real democracy.

Never one to criticize without offering a better solution, I came up with this political system which I call Recoverable Proxy.

It ensures that the people can always have the last word -- but only when necessary. On a day-to-day basis, the political system remains unchanged, except for the fact that the people can stop a wayward government (ie: most of them) from usurping their right to democracy.

I'd imagine they are MUCH cheaper than current-generation cruise missiles to manufacture.

Cruise missiles carry a jet engine. A Tomahawk costs $600,000 for one round. While these have much lower speed and performance, you could pay for whole wings of them for that kind of money. Because they are aircraft, and not just missiles, you can have them loiter near the target, exploiting their much smaller radar cross section and thermal emissions for an almost immediate strike. You could have a whole range of yields and payloads lofted simultaneously. And you can return them to base for refuelling, so you only pay for the fuel and the drones you actually put into "terminal mode". And at the same time they can gather intel.

There was a guy in New Zealand who estimated that you could make a cruise missile for around $5,000 ; now there are entire online communities devoted to manufacturing UAVs and an industry to support them. The planting of anti-air missiles on the rooftops of London to "protect" the Olympic games was almost a laughing stock here in the office ; these missiles could do nothing about a "flying cluster bomb" composed of small-payload semi-autonomous UAVs.

Here are my experiences with YouTube and content owners attempts to defraud me of my own original content. I posted this a week ago:

The US recording industry is stealing from ME!

This seems to be a big (and getting much bigger) problem with YouTube as it tries to suck-up to the big content owners in a way that is starting to seriously impact other original content creators.

I'm posting this from the future -- it's already 2012 in this part of the world (woohoo!)

I wrote my first column for 2012 today and in it I speculate that SOPA, if it's passed into law, might just be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

While governments all over the world seek to control, regulate, restrict and constrain the internet so as to protect their own power to impose ideologies on those who elect them to power, I have a feeling that SOPA could be just one step too far and might act as a catalyst for the kind of uprising they are trying to suppress.

2012 could be a watershed year and the byte may finally become more powerful than the bullet -- or the ballot.

Read it if you're interested. 2012, the year of the cyber-rebel?

As outlined here, only the completely stupid will be caught by this law.

More important should be a closer look at the raison d'etre for originally creating copyright laws and how that's been corrupted by the movie studios and recording labels with their fat lobbying wallets.

As described in the linked article, it's time copyright protection was scaled back to recognize that if the rights-owner refuses to sell their product to a particular market then there can be no losses associated with its unauthorized distribution. To allow rights-owners to prosecute people for copying that which they would otherwise be happy to pay for but aren't allowed to is a license to extort!

Here in New Zealand, any consignment which would attract a GST tax of less than NZ$50 is not taxed because collection costs would exceed the $50 to be collected.

However, when GST was recently increased from 12.5% to 15%, they also added an extra fee so that if your package does attract $50 or more of GST, you're also hit with about (from memory) another $28 or so as a "biosecurity fee" or something similar.

How on earth they deduce that only goods that have $50 or more of GST payable might represent a threat to our biosecurity I have no idea -- this is simply a cash-grab.

Of course with teh Chinese issuing fake (grossly undervalued) invoices left, right and center, there's no easy way for Customs to apply these taxes at the border so most stuff comes in tax-free, regardless of its value.

I have had friends who've imported $1,000 RC model aircraft that are 30% of full size. These arrive in *huge* boxes and include the 55cc engine. It has to be obvious that this stuff is worth *far* more than the $125 declared on the box - but it comes through without any GST being demanded.

When I wrote a column about this very subject last year it was suggested that the government simply add GST to all overseas credit-card transactions. Of course even that won't work -- because it would mean that those on holiday overseas would be paying tax on goods and services that came nowhere near our country's borders and would thus be patently unfair.

No easy way to solve this issue so let's just ditch the concept of duties and sales-taxes so everyone can enjoy the global shopping that is now available via the internet.

Here's my privacy policy.

(to save you clicking the link)...
"The Aardvark Privacy Policy

To put it bluntly -- any information you submit through this site
is held in total confidence unless otherwise stated.

Aardvark has built a strong reputation for protecting the information submitted
and collected. I have a total anti-spam, anti UCE policy -- never, never, never
will your email address be made available to any third party without your
expressed permission and never, never, never will I send you unsolicited
email.

That's it ... plain and simple -- Your secrets are safe with me!

What's more -- Aardvark doesn't routinely collect information from its
users. Apart from the Google Ads, this site is a cookie-free zone --
I probably know nothing at all about you anyway!

Here's a whole bunch of stuff about Google's cookie and privacy policy that
You might find interesting and which I'm supposed to include in this
privacy statement as part of my position as an AdSense user

If you've got a problem or a query about this then contact me, you can even do it
anonymously but in that case don't expect a reply (how could I?). "

It's short, to the point and covers all the bases, doesn't it?

What's so hard about coming up with a concise, no-nonsense privacy policy?

Then, the squad deploying this expensive weapon may be destroyed by a couple of ($5,000-$10,000) LCCMs!

http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/cruise.shtml

Its practical to spend up to $20,000 to destroy two $35,000 weapons ($70,000) and the trained squad using them.

What's needed is a change of political system. Simply swapping "The Fire Party" for "The Frying-pan Party" at regular intervals does nothing for the quality of government.

Now that we're in the 21st century, we have the technology we need to implement a far more finely graduated democracy than the one we currently have.

In my country (New Zealand) we run a version of the Westminster system but it's still basically a representative democracy (so they say).

What I've proposed is an alteration to that system called Recoverable Proxy.

It still operates on a representative basis where you have an elected member to do your bidding in the halls of government. However, makes it very clear that those representatives are effectively exercising your proxy when they vote on bills before the parliament/Senate/whatever. Recoverable Proxy operates by allowing *you*, the voter, to recover your proxy if and when you choose to, so that the public may effectively veto the excesses of their government when/if it becomes necessary.

99% of the time, the existing government structure and operation will continue as normal (this isn't a government by referendum like the Swiss system). The only time you'll see any significant percentage of the population recovering their proxy and exercising it themselves is when an issue of great public debate is before the house.

What do you think?

Is it time to reinvent the system rather than simply have a couple of dullards play musical chairs every 4 years?

Our (NZ) Mad Scientists are quite Busy in rather fascinating ways thanks.

Which in no way contradicts your experience based statement, which I interpret as: "you really do need lots of advanced hi-tech to build an accurate, advanced, effective killing machine"

http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/cruise.shtml
http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/

This is years old and I have no idea how his story ended.
Last I read, the New Zealand version of the IRS had dropped on his head like a ton of bricks...
But since he's updated his site this year, I guess he's 'back'.

But their XT Network (as promoted by Richard Hammond) will be much cheaper -- right?

If it's so good, why are they using spam to promote it?

Mobile services in New Zealand remain a rip-off run by a duopoly.

I tell you what you do -- you replace an ancient and grossly outdated political system with one that takes advantage of today's technology to provide the checks and balances needed to keep government honest:

Recoverable Proxy.

You can't change the politicians so you've got to change the system under which they operate.

For some reason, none of the sitting politicians seem particularly keen on a system where the voters can say "no you won't" and use their veto to kill lame legislation before it's even enacted.

As an experiment, I deliberately posted a video to my YT channel with copyrighted music in the audio track (just happened to be a WMG artist).

Sure enough, I got a message telling me that the audio had bee muted -- no surprise there and I'm not "outraged" or upset.

As the second part of this experiment, I tried to get a legal license to use the offending track in that video.

You can read about my frustration and ultimate failure in that endeavor in a column I wrote called Why does the music industry want you to "steal"?.

It seems that WMG are more interested than cutting off their nose to spite their face than they are in actually leveraging YT for profit.

Likewise, I would have thought that Google's "smart guys" would have already twigged to the revenues they could make by putting a "one-click licensing" button on the "Upload" screen. If I could license a commercial track for (say) $5 I'd spring for it, and I suspect many others would too.

what the hell are you talking about ?

oh, maybe this

He lost his shirt because he's a great inventor but a lousy businessman, and his attempts to monetize his invention bankrupted him. He's still active sometimes on pulsejet discussion boards, but every time he posts a hundred people reply with "WHERE ARE MY {plans, parts, whatever} THAT I PAID YOU FOR THREE YEARS AGO AND YOU NEVER SENT?" replies, which is sad, because he designed and built some great stuff.
His website is here.

There are still *lots* of people making pulsejets of various sorts.
A lot of them are valveless because they're easy to make (no, y'know, valves.) But they don't really have a lot of thrust.
There's a crazy guy in New Zealand who has been making them for a while: his webpages have directions for how to make your own. He's made small jets that are somewhere between a classic pulsejet and a pulse detonation engine. (In the former, the burn is subsonic, in the latter supersonic. He's doing weird things with multiple small interlinked combustion chambers, as best I can tell, to make very high-frequency pulsejets with better efficiency.)
You can buy plans for making pulsejets. I've seen some as small as a car's sparkplug, and others that are basically recreations of a german argus, several meters long and half a meter in diameter, built by some crazy Burning Man-associated artists in San Francisco. (There's an amazing youtube video of one of these things running. You can see stuff 50 meters away getting blown over by the exhaust wash.)
The thing about pulsejets is that they're an efficient way to convert fuel into noise, with a slight side-effect of thrust. The ones I've built, which are really small compared to an Argus, are mind-numbingly loud. Even with earplugs and earmuffs, they're still loud.
But if that's the whole idea, well, then they're fun to play with.

They are nothing like a piston engine
http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/pde.shtml
http://www.seas.ucla.edu/combustion/projects/pulsed_detonation_wave.html

I've been trying hard to get the mainstream media to alert the public to the growing number of fuel-saver scams that are appearing on the Net since gas prices started skyrocketing - but they seem totally disinterested.

In fact a local TV channel here ran a piece last week effectively endorsing those lame HHO systems that anyone with half a brain knows is just bad science.

So I've set up a few webpages to try and educate the great unwashed as to the nature of these scams.

The Great "run your car on water" scam

and

More fuel saver scams

Unlike the scammers, I've used some *real* science and pretty simple math to prove that these scams do not, can not and will not work.

The cruel irony (for the scammers) is that the Google-ads which appear on those pages are invariably hawking HHO systems. They help subsidize the cost of the pages that expose their scams.

I love it!

But seriously, I find it really hard to believe that so many otherwise sane people get hooked up with these lame scams.

I've been trying hard to get the mainstream media to alert the public to the growing number of fuel-saver scams that are appearing on the Net since gas prices started skyrocketing - but they seem totally disinterested.

In fact a local TV channel here ran a piece last week effectively endorsing those lame HHO systems that anyone with half a brain knows is just bad science.

So I've set up a few webpages to try and educate the great unwashed as to the nature of these scams.

The Great "run your car on water" scam

and

More fuel saver scams

Unlike the scammers, I've used some *real* science and pretty simple math to prove that these scams do not, can not and will not work.

The cruel irony (for the scammers) is that the Google-ads which appear on those pages are invariably hawking HHO systems. They help subsidize the cost of the pages that expose their scams.

I love it!

But seriously, I find it really hard to believe that so many otherwise sane people get hooked up with these lame scams.

How about Bruce Simpson's '$5000 Cruise Missile' project http://aardvark.co.nz/

Bruce Simpson got in trouble ages ago for building a rocket that adaptively kept a cart level. After someone in the US government was quoted as describing his activities as "unhelpful", the New Zealand government stepped in with some financial crap to close down his hobby.

Whatever happened to Thermoacoustics?

Pulse Jet engines?

rockets are pretty poor at starting an object from a standstill, which is why motorbikes can easily beat this thing even though they are several times heavier. I thought up an allegory after reading a description of how a wider, slower flow helps low speed acceleration rather than an intense high powered flow - think of the difference between getting pushed (wider surface area) to getting stabbed (lower surface area which cuts straight through without much resistance). The rocket is better when the object is actually moving.

"Let me make it quite clear that a pulsejet is not the ideal means of powering a flying platform -- the effective conversion of thrust to horsepower at low speeds with a pulsejet is abysmal. What's needed to create a hovering/flying platform is a wide column of fairly slow moving air -- pulsejets create a very narrow column of extremely fast-moving air." "You can think of this as being like a car stuck in top gear -- very efficient when you're moving fast but not at all good for moving at low speeds or pulling away from a standing start" http://aardvark.co.nz/pjet/xplatform.shtml

I know that that article refers to vertical rather than horizontal thrust, but I think the same applies - if that rocket was being used to spin a turbine connected to some gears you could probably get a lot better acceleration from standstill..

The issue really isn't terrorists, it's stores of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons delivered via missile/rocket/guided shell. Using GPS makes it far, far easier to make precision weapons that will accomplish the goal with far fewer delivery vehicles and smaller warheads.

If you're off by a few feet with one of these weapons, it's no big deal. But if you're off by a quarter mile, you've just wasted a very very expensive/scarce piece of technology (which you probably were *REALLY* counting on, considering the scenarios these weapons are used in). Being off a quarter mile when you're firing something into an orbital ballistic arc isn't all that improbable either, unless you've got extremely precise target locations and the vehicle can precisely make corrections in-flight.

A very large part of the nuclear megatonnage gap between the US and the USSR in the 80's wasn't so much that the US was getting out-produced, but that the US didn't have to build as many warheads to be effective. With it's technology, the US could very precisely put an ICBM re-entry vehicle wherever they wanted, using a smaller warhead (allowing for more warheads in the rocket, fewer rockets, less overall cost, etc) while the Soviets had to use larger warheads, more rockets, more cost, to accomplish it's military missions.

Galileo will make it cheaper for other nations to make NBC weapons deliverable to remote targets, possibly encouraging their development. This makes the American military very unhappy, especially since they're not doing so hot (for various reasons) on the ballistic missile defense front.

I guess it's possible that a terrorist could cobble together a home-made buzz-bomb cruise missile and use GPS to guide it, but from a military standpoint terrorists are just very minor annoyances. Industrial nations with cost effective NBC delivery systems are dire threats.

So the whole 'terrorists' cry, like you're saying, doesn't make a whole lot of sense in a global sense. It's not like the accuracy of GPS now isn't something a terrorist could use and nobody is going to know to manipulate the funcion of a single terrorist-employed GPS unit before it does it's work. This is just something US officials can use to sway Western opinion while clouding the real, and politically distasteful, issues.

Completely false, and I would recommend that you handle hydrogen some time or read guidelines for handling it. Hydrogen is an extremely flammable substance, partly because it mixes with air so readily. Gasoline explosions are incredibly hard to get to occur at STP; it takes an incredibly fine mist and well balanced ratio; otherwise, you just get a conflagration. With gasoline, the risk is that the fuel doesn't dissipate and burns for long periods of time with great intensity. With hydrogen (and propane for that matter), the fuel dissipates relatively rapidly**, but while it is dissipating is far more likely to explode. Hydrogen's explosive properties are what make it the prime fuel used in Deflagration to Detonation Transition-based engines ("Pulse Detonation"). The injection system is also much easier, as it doesn't need to mist it.

** The rate depends on the size of the leak. Pinhole hydrogen leaks can spontaneously ignite, and burn for a long time. Also, propane can be trapped in bowl-shaped areas, while hydrogen gets trapped under overhangs and inside buildings.

For the past 10 years I've written a daily internet colum (aardvark.co.nz) and have strongly resisted the temptation to load it up with advertising.

Instead of obtrusive ads I've gone the sponsorship route, something which I realise few sites can do but, if it can be done, is great for both publisher, sponsor (they get exclusivity) and readers alike.

My visitors aren't blasted with skyscrapers, Flash or even banners - just a little sponsor's spot-ad. Fortunately for me, quite a few of my regulars visit the sponsor's website by clicking on their spot, so we all win.

I wonder if more small bloggers and publishers might not look more closely at sponsorship as an option to the more common "load the page up with as many ads as will fit" option?

It's not just science fiction, Chrysler consumer-tested a turbine car in the 60's http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/chrysler.shtml/ and BRM had turbine engined racecar as well http://www.cardatabase.net/static/Rover/BRM_Turbin e_Roadster.php/.

I totally agree, TDIs are quite efficient.

Another thing we haven't seen quite yet is the turbine hybrid vehicle. We've had turbine powered vehicles in the past, but rather than gearing-down the turbine, I believe that you should be able to gain power from the rotating part in the turbine -- just by itself. I would assume that the unit would maintain it's rotation, and fuel/air ratios. I think capacitors come more into play than just batteries, as other electric-only cars have had.

Granted, I am not an engineer, but I've been inspired by things like this.

Here's something I published nearly three years ago and it's every bit as relevant today.

There's no way for the RIAA to track this source of free music and video either.

Been done (kinda).

When it comes to spammers and their email harvesting software, why not fight fire with fire?

Set up your own payback page then check your server logs and smile every time those on that page get added to another spammer's list :-)

The results have been less than rosey. One famous example is the Thai Finance Minister who was trapped in his BMW after WinCE crashed and immobilized the vehicle - doors, locks, windows, AC, everything.

There were several other reasons why the jet engine will never be put in a rice burner

It's already been done. What, you missed the Jet powered MR-2 on eBay? I saw that sucker listed a few years back. As I recall it went for some amazingly low price - a few grand, about the normal blue book value of the car.

http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/ http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/images/lh200aa.jpg

http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/ http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/images/lh200aa.jpg

Heh, couldn't help but google a bit:

This here don't look safe, but kinda fun anyway.

---------------

I've been aggregating news headlines and links on the Net for longer than I care to remember (I'm in my tenth year) and I can tell you that this is nothing new.

Way back in 1998 I had a battle with The Nando Times when I was running 7am.com which was one of the most successful aggregators of all time.

Nando said "pay us $100 per month for the right to link or we'll sue"

I said "bring it on"

They said "um, err, well okay we won't" and then attributed their back-down to the fact that I was in New Zealand and they were in the USA so such a legal battle would be too hard to wage.

The reality was that I formed an informal group of other online publishers and aggregators who simply stood up to these ridiculous tactics. Seeing they were outnumbered and copping a heap of flack in the media, they gave up their ill-conceived efforts.

When I asked the head of Nando.Net why they were averse to me effectively extending their reach and delivering huge numbers of eager-eyes to their ad-laden pages I was told that their ad revenues weren't enough to cover the cost of serving up those pages so more traffic meant more cost.

Someone ought to have taught those guys how to run an online publishing business!

I've also had similar battles with other publishers such as Television New Zealand here in NZ who simlarly threatened me with all manner of dire consequences if I didn't stop linking to them.

Once again I invited them to do their worst and they backed down.

At one stage I was involved in (and winning) so many battles over the issue of hypertext linking and the intellectual property rights associated with such things that I regularly was invited to talk to the legal profession (some of my stuff even scoring a mention in the US Bar Association's Journal) and other online publishers.

I should point out that at all times I linked ethically -- this meant no framing, full attributions and only ever using the headline and sometimes the first line of the article.

One thing *all* publishers should do is publish a linking policy on their website so as to let other sites know what they consider to be fair and reasonable. I do this on my Aardvark daily internet commentary and I also continue to aggregate headlines (including some from eWeek when they're running something worth a mention). The funny thing is that these days, nobody tries to pick a fight with me :-)

But, if Ziff Davis/eWeek are thinking about doing so, I once again say "Bring it on! And let the good times roll (again :-)

I've been aggregating news headlines and links on the Net for longer than I care to remember (I'm in my tenth year) and I can tell you that this is nothing new.

Way back in 1998 I had a battle with The Nando Times when I was running 7am.com which was one of the most successful aggregators of all time.

Nando said "pay us $100 per month for the right to link or we'll sue"

I said "bring it on"

They said "um, err, well okay we won't" and then attributed their back-down to the fact that I was in New Zealand and they were in the USA so such a legal battle would be too hard to wage.

The reality was that I formed an informal group of other online publishers and aggregators who simply stood up to these ridiculous tactics. Seeing they were outnumbered and copping a heap of flack in the media, they gave up their ill-conceived efforts.

When I asked the head of Nando.Net why they were averse to me effectively extending their reach and delivering huge numbers of eager-eyes to their ad-laden pages I was told that their ad revenues weren't enough to cover the cost of serving up those pages so more traffic meant more cost.

Someone ought to have taught those guys how to run an online publishing business!

I've also had similar battles with other publishers such as Television New Zealand here in NZ who simlarly threatened me with all manner of dire consequences if I didn't stop linking to them.

Once again I invited them to do their worst and they backed down.

At one stage I was involved in (and winning) so many battles over the issue of hypertext linking and the intellectual property rights associated with such things that I regularly was invited to talk to the legal profession (some of my stuff even scoring a mention in the US Bar Association's Journal) and other online publishers.

I should point out that at all times I linked ethically -- this meant no framing, full attributions and only ever using the headline and sometimes the first line of the article.

One thing *all* publishers should do is publish a linking policy on their website so as to let other sites know what they consider to be fair and reasonable. I do this on my Aardvark daily internet commentary and I also continue to aggregate headlines (including some from eWeek when they're running something worth a mention). The funny thing is that these days, nobody tries to pick a fight with me :-)

But, if Ziff Davis/eWeek are thinking about doing so, I once again say "Bring it on! And let the good times roll (again :-)

It would appear that New Zealand's recording industry would rather have customers breaking the law with their blessing than to have the law changed to allow format-shifting.

Remember, here in New Zealand we're not allowed to copy our music or video disks for any reason -- there isn't even a personal fair-use provision in our copyright law.

Check out the interview with the head of NZ's recording industry body RIANZ (who also just happens to be the head of Sony NZ) and listen to him sanctioning lawbreaking but defending the laws he advocates breaking.

It's a masterpiece of hypocrisy

If you're 50 years old, then you're old enough that you should have known better than to pull a stunt like this in the first place

Well excuse me for trying to bring a quite real threat to the public's attention.

I initially attempted to do this with this article but, although I received some feedback, it clearly wasn't reaching a large audience.

That article also produced a lot of people who claimed it couldn't be done and that I was full of hot air -- so the only way to prove my case and to properly inform the public of this threat was to go ahead and do what I said any terror group could do.

You call it a "stunt", I call it proving my case.

Read into this; now that you've pissed off the USA, which is providing a big chunk of your nation's security

But why are they pissed off?

Before I started the project I emailed the FBI and DARAP to tell them what I was planning and why. I also invited them to make any comments they might have and offered them full access to the results of my work.

What did I get in return -- an automated reply from the FBI thanking me for my email and nothing at all from DARPA.

Based on that response, it's pretty natural to think that those organizations in the US charged with the security of the nation didn't have a problem with my project. Surely they'd be smart enough to simply say "we'd really rather you didn't do this" -- but no such response was forthcoming.

Then, when the project serves its goal of raising public awareness, they get all snotty -- is that my fault?

Perhaps they're simply embarrassed now that it's clear they have no answer to such a threat -- which was the entire point of my argument. The only weapon against an LCCM is public awareness.

I hate to say this, but it sounds as if you really did this to yourself

Maybe I did -- but I'm not completely stupid and I have leared lessons from this:

1. Do not take a patriotic stance and contact the Secret Service when information possibly from a sponsor of terror comes into your possession.

2. Do not actively cooperate with the secret service and help them to obtain more information.

3. If the government gives you clearance to sell technology with a military application to a nation deemed to be a sponsor of terror, do not question this -- simply go ahead with the transanction.

4. Do not put the interests of your country (overseas investment, new jobs, export earnings, a valuable foothold in an explosive new industry) ahead of your own. Think only of your own bank balance in all transactions.

5. Do not turn down offers of money from the government as they will not thank you or even consider that by not accepting that money you are in effect in credit to that amount.

6. Do not trust the government to act ethically, moraly or even legally when they wish to achieve some end.

7. Do not work your ass off and sell your house to pay a tax debt while being fooled into believing that regular and reliable servicing such a debt to the point where it is almost completely repaid will stop the taxman from bankrupting you for no apparent reason.

Unfortunately I feel very sad that these are the lessons I have learned.

Sure, I'm not without fault -- I should have filed my returns and paid all my tax right on time.

But the overal lesson here is that it's pointless trying to remedy such a transgression -- if you ever find yourself behind in your taxes (and you've got a missile in your garage) simply sell all your assets, take a really good holiday then come back and file for bankruptcy.

I've been following Bruce's story for a while, and I just wish I could afford to have him build me something. I don't have an (big, evil) S.U.V., but I'd love to have a missile on my car. Perhaps a jet-powered motorcycle...

Anyway, if you're like me and you can drop a few dollars without ever missing it, here's the donations page:

http://aardvark.co.nz/pjet/donations.shtml

I don't know where you live, but in NZ a semi-tech news site has put up a Hall of Shame, to which you can submit URLs of sites that lose some level of functionality if you don't use IE.

Uhh, the methanol itself wont compress as a liquid, but who cares? Throw some gas in there, compress it, and turn the can upside down to spray it in.

Not quite as simple as it might seem...

Firstly, given that fuel cells are *extremely* sensitive to impurities you have to make sure that the gas you're using won't actually disolve in methanol (as CO2 does in water for instance) and that, should some gas actually enter the cell, it won't cause any harm.

Since most inert gases (argon, zenon, neon, etc) only liquefy at extremely high pressures and/or low temperatures, you're going to either need a larger gas reservoir with which to pressurise the fuel capsule or rely on significantly higher pressures -- which then pose regulation and safety issues.

I take it you dont do any of even the simplest problemsolving/engineering

No, of course not. You can see that by visiting my websites at:

aardvark.co.nz/pjet

and
interestingprojects.com

(BFG)