Here are a couple of letters (postal+email) I have written to Senator Inhofe and Halliburton Corporate. They express my sense of urgency. I invite everyone to review them and comment. Flames are welcome too. Whopee! I have a 'foe' now! Movin' on up.
And if your own process of discovery also leads you to some conclusion that is best expressed by getting the word out -- please do so. Whether you are not a thorium advocate, please consider the underlying issue, the necessity for an urgent PUSH to develop energy independence.
Kinda sorta. Their existence has been inferred by experimental results.
Here is a nicely written neutrino primer for humans that answers your detection question. If you already know everything about the subject, visit the Wiki neutrino page to learn what you already know, revel in the obviousness of it all and have a good chuckle at the expense of folks like me who find it to be very jargony.
I first learned of neutrinos while doing web research on Neapolitan ice cream. This amazing ice cream has three flavors, and it appears that neutrinos also have three flavors. This cannot be a coincidence. Since any unified theory which does not include ice cream must be incomplete, I see this as evidence that we are close to solving some great puzzle.
If you are at a cocktail party and overhear particle physicists in a discussion of the "Solar Neutrino Problem", step right up and say that it was Mean Mr. Sun who ate all the chocolate, leaving us to detect only the yucky vanilla and strawberry -- he even left the spoon in the freezer! You will be greeted with smiles and knowing glances, and they might even invite you on the road to tour with them. Particle physicists are always surrounded by groupies and hot women.
Good chemical debunk, this is a physically (laughably) impractical as well.
The sewer network for our city of 23,000 with some heavy industry, generates around two miliion gallons of flow a day. There are ~1100 manholes, but thirty main branches where one would definitely want $ensors, that would narrow it down to several hundred houses. Flow takes from 15 minutes to 10 hours to travel down these branches. In this hostile environment of liquid and floating and suspended solid it is difficult to keep even mechanical flow monitors operational (we don't bother), the thought of a sensor that requires immersion and direct contact cracks me up. The thought that these subterranean sensors need 24x7 radio links makes me hoot 'n holler.
Okay... (wiping eyes)... so branch number five sounds an alarm. What do you do now?? You need to systematically place MORE sensors at all upstream branch points and wait for another positive. Then finally after several of these iterations you are down to one city block and have to stick a sensor on a camera in the upstream manhole and roll it slowly down the line until you hit a positive again. Then try to figure out which house the tap is for, it's not always obvious and we often need to pour dye to be sure.
So the perps would need to be really cooperative and pour lots of it out at regular intervals for days to assist this tracing process as city workers slowly and visibly converge on their neighborhood.
BUT HOLD ON. If some really clever roboticist could make an autonomous sewer walking spider that could crawl through 6 inch pipes (with roots and other obstructions) and maintain radio contact, which is a real bitch down there, then we'd have the beginnings of something.
Sometimes it takes an infinite amount of money and time to implement a Clever Idea. But it's worth the wait.
"Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named... but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot. [...] This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health but as proof of his/her strength. Look for it. Study it. Friday, it is too late to save this culture... this worldwide culture, not just the freak show here in California. Therefore we must now prepare the monasteries for the coming Dark Age. Electronic records are too fragile; we must again have books, of stable inks and resistant paper. But that may not be enough. The reservoir for the next renaissance may have to come from beyond the sky." ~Robert A. Heinlein, from the novel Friday
If the NSA tunes their TEMPEST receiver towards you and the signal resolves into a TEMPEST game, would they chuckle at the irony?
Thinking about that statement just made my brain pop. The statement is even funner than it seems! Due to the lack of horizontal and vertical trace with synchronizing blanking intervals, the Real Tempest would have probably thwarted a standard Van Eck Phreaky NSA TEMPEST device.
You could say Real Tempest used a form of visual encryption.
It's a fresh angle of looking at it, a matter of a pinion, this "What's our vector, Victor?" versus raster, frigid polar coordinates failing to pinpoint warm Cartesian wells, the difference between Playfair and elliptic curves kind of thingie.
Real Trinitron Pixels of red, green and blue writ by slap-happy vector beams that danced and played 'round the screen to actually draw the thing just as you would. Using angles 'n stuff.
Pac Mans and other computer mens and wimmins make the poor beams trace out this dreary left to right up and down on but mostly offey and horizonta-blinkey thing where the beam travels a mile and a half just to say "GAME OVER" in the middle.
In a Real Tempest the beams do not travel a thousand miles. They draw what needs to be drawn and draw it again. Until the machine explodes, because it is dangerous and has high voltage inside.
Pixels on a Real Tempest are tiny little holes from which you may gaze directly into electrons, not some I'm a little crystal short and stout, turn me over and the oh-so-safe light can't get out, kind of thingie.
When you play Real Tempest real particle beams are slapping electrons through those pixel-hoies right in your face. Ten thousand volts is yearning to scream in direct arc through you and your sweaty sneakers to ground. It restrained only by prickly glass. It is whispering, "Go ahead... piss on my anode cup. I dare ya! You know you want to."
It is difficult to communicate to younger readers the level of excitement and danger we experienced as we were growing up.
REAL Tempest fits entirely memory locations 0x9000-FFFF, its lines are ONE pixel wide (but it's a BIG one!) and it does not have whiny buzzy switching power supply. It has a large throbbing step-down transformer and a whopping thirty-two thousand microfarad capacitor in the power supply. It has a flyback transformer feeding a CRT that bristles with actual electricity terror death.
Real Tempest machines go out with a real BANG.
What is shown is some Fisher Price low voltage plastic computing device, obviously meant for children, whose level completion screen is full of whoopy flashes and dancing bears distracting artifacts and eye candy as in, deer-meets-headlights.
The Real Tempest, when a level is complete it launches you into the middle and flies you through the tunnel, this was the COOLEST damned thing we ever saw when we first sawed it, and gets back down to business. No goofy crap.
If the NSA tunes their TEMPEST receiver towards you and the signal resolves into a TEMPEST game, would they chuckle at the irony? If a bear shits in the woods and laughs because shit got on his 'bear' hands would he laugh hysterically and change brands of toiley paper?
NOT 'man in the middle', and no direct compromise of the Google Frontend Server (GFE) is being described here. MUSCULAR is passive taps on presently unencrypted private links between the companies' global data centers. In theory these would be sited on the borders of the United States or (safely) within foreign space.
This cooperation between the Brits and the Gits is ESCHELON in action. Your tax (and drug) dollars at work. I see that the latest Snowden revelation identifies an interception point that is magically distant from Kansas. All the better to take our minds off what NSA is doing in Kansas.
Frankly (and sadly) I do not believe that NSA has ever sited any of their communications taps to avoid gathering domestic traffic. I believe full disclosure would reveal this.
Okay, maybe during the Cold War -- but If there ever were any NSA folk who'd be aghast at the idea of vacuuming their neighbors' telephone calls and private emails, where desk analysts can issue flags that key ancillary targets automatically derived from social networks and phone logs... including their own sons and daughters... those people are not objecting now. They are are gone to grave or recently retired in comfortable surroundings, watching these goings-on with growing discomfort and distaste.
Or long retired. I may have met some of them in the islands as a kid, grim and reserved with little to say about current events. I really wish they would speak up now while there is still time. Especially the ones who witnessed first-hand how the KGB ran Eastern Europe, how Chairman Mao 'purified' China, how Hitler first captured Germany with promises to lead them out of inflationary ruin.
To do these things right it would be a great help to have good intel on all your citizens. Do they realize how incredibly stupid this all is?
Under massive domestic surveillance EVERYONE in the entire country is subject to direct blackmail. NO ONE IS EXEMPT. This is because everyone has a loved one, child, friend relative that has actionable events in their past. This means they get to choose who leads the country by eliminating all opposition. Scandals will just keep coming to light. For more on that see my post about blackmail and 'duress'
Under massive surveillance EVERY ONE of the classic and hallowed checks and balances which keep our Republic together and human traditions that civilization on track is subject to TOTAL CORRUPTION and outright NULLIFICATION.
No human judge is exempt, no jury safe from side-channel tampering. With private communications intercepts it is possible to select or disqualify jurors based on a pretty complete profile of their views. No more Twelve Angry Men.
Under massive surveillance every possible terrorist scenario that hurts us is avoided. Give thanks and praise. But more chillingly, every scenario could benefit the intelligence community will inevitably become a reality, if not in your time then your children's. All they need to do is contact people, ignore people and prepare to capitalize on the event. No more 'acts of God' or tragedies that galvanize honest people into surprising yet dignified ways to some surprising yet triumphant end.
History becomes a script written by the most ruthless and least inhibited who happen have access to the secrets. We see seeds of this in our own time.
Under total surveillance financial markets are relegated to sideshows for the programmed accumulation of wealth (and targeted ruin). By forming an alliance with entities that emit High Frequency Trades, a shadow government can maintain a presence that is unlikely to be detectable or discernible, and in any case, when manipulation begins real humans will react predictably, helplessly.
There is a reason we have evolved so quickly as a species. Not just intelligence, but applied freedom to think, act,
"The NSA has gone far beyond the intent of the Patriot Act, particularly in the accumulation and storage of metadata," Sensenbrenner said. "Had Congress known that the Patriot Act had been used to collect metadata, the bill would have never been passed."
This gentleman is either insufficiently clued -- or is acting on advice given by someone he trusts, someone who is insisting that the word metadata must be used in all Congressional inquiry.
It's a straw man, this metadata sharing agreement. NSA probably decided early on that the voluntary data-sharing plan is doomed. So they will pressure Congress to fixate on that, and they will advise them to choose their words carefully, so as not to speak of (or legislate against) interception and taps on the backbone network. If you ask Clapper whether he's tapping the Internet backbone you will get an answer about metadata.
These senators on the Intelligence Committee have probably been briefed that, if someone shakes and taps their watch and asks what time it is, they should reply "It's time to speak of metadata sharing agreements. And ONLY that.
This is item number 5 on my timeline of diversion, and we are proceeding as planned.
We must try to get our representatives to ask NSA direct questions about large scale domestic traffic gathering -- if we can.
That they are STILL trying to hide something BIG? Years in the telecom and ISP business, NSA-watching since the Internet went global and way before. I am one of those people who might have become a spook, though I am glad I did not. From its all-to-brief brief mention in David Kahn's The Codebreakers [1967] which I carried around as a kid like some overstuffed bible, my interest was piqued by James Bamford's Puzzle Palace [1982] which introduced the world to the topic of the 'piggyback slurp' and laid out directly NSA's intentions to tap the world. The whole world -- Charter be damned -- from the start.
A few anecdotes from good friends in the telecommunications trade who alluded to special cordoned-off spaces within AT&T's Magens Point cable terminus in St. Thomas US Virgin Islands, drunken conversation in bars with reminders not to speak of such things... a rather suspicious 'underwater landslide' fiber outage between St. Thomas and Puerto Rico c.1995, which I suspected at the time might involve a submarine because a telco friend noticed that after all his voice circuits were back there was an eyebrow-raising 'unusually long period' before the data circuits came up, even though they were physically interspersed and not supposed to be broken out at the carrier level... circumstantial stuff, sure. Pure speculation is as fascinating as the real thing.
Since then, revelations about Room 614A and Hepting vs. AT&T, the little mouse who could have roared all the way to the Supreme Court, had they not declined to hear the case.
I'm not talking about individual stakeouts or FISA warrants or occasional 'oopsies' of a few domestic intercepts. I'm discussing large scale Tier 1 total interception of data with selective routing and forwarding of target traffic onto side channels via 'dark' or leased fiber on a scale that is approaching 'total'. This includes voice too: terrestrially trunked cell calls and landline (there is practically no difference these days, it's all turkeyfart compressed).
Which is why I posted here back in June my theory that PRISM slides were made as part of a limited hang-out. I came to this conclusion because I found the allegation that Internet service providers named grant direct back-doors to NSA to be preposterous (and still do, too much risk of exposure by now). The purpose of the hang-out was for Google and company to discredit the allegations honesty to relegate it to 'hoax' status... and provide a topic that diverts attention away from the total-tap-slurp operation.
Steve Gibson of Gibson Research has come up with another theory that I find interesting, it may fit Occam's Razor better than my own. He presented it recently in Security Now #408: The State of Surveillance, audio and full transcript available. GOOD STUFF. His angle is that "direct access to their servers" means all unencrypted SMTP-mail and HTTP from tap points directly upstream. It is all about fiber and taps. Taps are about splitting light... and that is what prisms do.
If you have a good traffic tap and encrypted intercepts, add a bit of coercion for the providers to divulge their private SSL keys and they can replay the past SSL sessions they have gathered.
The government may get a warrant for the contents of one safe-deposit box, but they don't have the right to a warrant for the combination to the bank's vault.
Right you are! I believe they already have many contents of the vault already in their possession as spooled encrypted intercepts. Obtaining the keys would allow them to retroactively replay sessions. I raised an alarm about the possibility of "compelled" SSL private key sharing back in June, with a Congressional testimony wish list::
NSA needs to be summoned to Congress to disclose the nature and extent of their domestic communications backbone piggyback-slurp operation: its collection points, its storage capabilities and the number of personnel who are aware of and have access to this raw data source. And whether SOME of those personnel are foreign nationals recruited for the task to reduce their exposure and liability. (Greetz Israel.)
NSA needs to be summoned to Congress to disclose any SSL private key sharing agreements, an intimidation tactic that goes like this, "We're either going to move in here with secret directives, equipment and gag orders... OR you will share all your private keys on a regular basis," which gives them access even to emails that never left their networks, they can read it as you drop it off and pick it up.
Two months later, LavaBit falls. How many others did not, just handed over the keys?
Coal burning power plants emit most of the mercury in this country. Using a CFL actually reduces the total mercury released into the environment because, in spite of containing a whopping 4mg of Hg, the electricity saved reduces Hg emissions by more than 4mg.
I'm with you on the accuracy of those whole-planet-averaged figures in the link... but on the face of it they are comparing mercury dispersed by emissions over a wide area to a 4mg DOLLOP of mercury deposited in a landfill within the space of a few cubic inches. A substance with an EPA limit of 2 parts per billion in 'safe' drinking water.
That's like saying, we have found a way to offset 1000 statistically possible deaths of children that could (and on average, do happen) by placing 1000 land mines at playgrounds at random, per year. Comparing a poison slightly everywhere thing with a bunch of poison sure-things.
I'm sort of leaning in the let our power plants more safely distribute mercury over a wide area while we read by incandescent light and come up with better ideas for power generation, kind of direction.
Recording another passenger some distance away, on a moving train, with a mobile phone microphone? You wouldn't make much out.
Of course you're right. That leaves the other 999 reasons Twitter is TSOTD.
Perhaps rolling the phone into a magazine or newspaper and pointing it in the general direction of the target might help. Most have gain control that would bring up the level to compensate for reduced noise.
Or if there is an empty seat near the target, write a note that says "Do you mind if I sit here? The guy next to me smells bad and I don't want to hurt his feelings." The person you show it too will probably glance around then nod quietly and you can successfully relocate without drawing attention.
Jimmy the atmospheric sensor to make the train's oxygen masks all drop at once. Then grab the subject's mask and tie your phone to it, letting it dangle in front of him. I'd try this first.
1. pick some good thing that once was rare, metered, unaffordable 2. something that has become common, unmetered and affordable 3. something that is not owned or directly under government control 4. claim that some people somewhere are 'abusing' their 'privileges' 5. cite financial losses based on hypothetical behavior, as compared to hypothetical profits 6. if the blue party is in power, fool the red party into promoting and defending it, the majority blues will oppose it because it is a 'red' thing without knowing or caring why. Or vice versa. 7. find Hollywood celebrities to talk about conserving it, write moral conservation memes into soap opera dialog 8. bring the Terrorists into it. Somehow. Anyhow. Equate unregulated (competitive) business with terrorism. 9. pass sweeping 'reform' legislation by voice vote while most of Congress is in recess 10. Congratulations! You have now made life suck a little more. But your children will only resent you a little bit because things aren't a whole lot worse.
A Rare Earth Element revival in the United States could help to bring industry and real manufacturing back to our shores. It goes right along with the promise of Thorium to satisfy all grid and process heat requirements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8
Here Stephen Boyd tells us what "rare earth elements" are, and why they are vital to modern technology: He is incredibly hyper and excited about them, as you should be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J16IpITWBQ8
While everyone is talking about China 'Western industry through its aggressive focus on manufacturing and 'low wages'... there is ANOTHER way China has become almost a 'sole source' of modern technology: it has negotiated exclusive manufacturing contracts based on its willingness to mine rare earths, yet not export them without a penalty... this has caused production of electronics and magnet-oriented devices (think batteries, wind turbines) to be relocated to China. Meanwhile the United States, once the world's largest producer of these has mostly ceased -- in part because a slightly radioactive by-product, Thorium, presently has no market and is (unfairly IMO) lumped in with hazardous. More background and some ideas for using the Thorium here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MauEg9vqh9k
ON URANIUM
Love it or hate it, if you're in North America ~30% of your electricity comes from it. The worst uranium mining nightmares arose from a Cold War appetite for nuclear weapons and a government that abused its authority and brand of secrecy to sideline health and environmental consequences... not the smaller level of mining necessary to keep nuclear power reactors going.
I very much doubt that LED lights produce output in the 90 - 110 MHz band. Switching supplies are generally 0.1-2 MHz. But hey, call the FCC. They don't mess around when it comes to interfering devices.
It's not your 'traditional' switching supply such as the ones that revolutionized electronics. The modular PC switching supply is inside a Faraday cage and has toroidal chokes so (almost) nothing but pure DC escapes the cage.
LED light systems tend to use HF pulsed current to drive the bulbs, and whether it's the bulb fixture or the pulsed power supply is actually in a separate control box with a long radiating (improperly shielded or grounded) wire connecting to the bulbs, I don't know. But the results are just as described here with noisy spectra shown here around 100Mhz.
Yeah, too bad I work for the city and there is a bread and butter conflict of interest.
Why? Because Dr. Who is an Incredibly Analog Man
on
Computers and Doctor Who
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Everything he does is by the seat of his pants. To do seat of the pants things you need to grasp handles that are connected to levers which control valves and apertures that gloop glop into gloping chambers. Every button is a Frankenstein switch that tosses a relay accross the room, and for every relay there is an Override Lever.
You need steam driven technology to propel your contrivances, with beefy pistons, moving fluids and rotating coils. You need planetary gears and axles and rocket assisted rotation (NOTE: replace rockets after each use). You need self destruct device timers with real gears so you can save yourself with a piece of chewing gum.
If you have a computer companion on board you cannot stoop so low as to conduit everything, make yourself into a helpless git by relying on digital to analog circuits to (hopefully) permit you to ask the computer to fly what is actually YOUR own goddamned ship.
Your computer must consist of a hybrid electro-mechanical system that is mobile and pot-bellied, that loco-motes where it is needed and drives multiple robotic arms (with Mickey Mouse gloves) to grasp aforesaid mechanical controls just as you would. In case of a virus or malfunction you can then just kick the stupid thing out of the way and take control of your own destiny, rather than whimper and die like some horrid little clam trapped inside a malfunctioning shell.
Every control system on your ship must be able to operate with a kick, or be disabled by kicking harder.
There must be lots of blinking lights, but they must be operated by relays and stepper contacts.
And if your computer plays chess, it is because there is an actual dwarf hidden in the console.
Dr. Who did not spend his time debugging arcane API incompatibilities after version control branches incorrectly and legacy memory-mapped data type formats change after a compiler and library upgrade, forcing some off-by-one read of noble structs to ignoble garbage that makes pointers overflow and underflow, careening wantonly through memory structures like spiders on LSD. All of this causing nothing to happen in the real world, it just sits there inoperative.
Dr. Who has no need for do-lotsa-think-first Object Oriented threaded systems either, he is impulsive, violently productive and has visited three Universes in the time it takes you to decide on whether to capitalize or encapsulate or do whatever the hell you do, or not.
OBSERVATION: When given the means and opportunity to make an actual audio recording of Mr. I-Listen-To-You that would have been admissibly real, capable of rendering into a complete transcript, with real historical value... instead choosing to tap out 3rd party observations.
Like 'dim' streetlights in Winter because they have frozen over, and (for cities that don't think of these things ahead of time) failure to install seasonally enabled heating units into the enclosure. All in all the human-time and effort of manufacturing and deploying these new solutions, along with the added heater circuit to make them useable, will really eat into that eco-energy difference equation.
Lots of eco initiatives these days come down to someone smiling and pointing to a little device that saves a few ergs of energy here and now, and just over the ridge there is a brand new factory making these things that is poisoning rivers and people with heavy metals. While very little energy is actually saved and unintended consequences pile up.
(Thank You Planet Saving Fluorescent Bulbs for saving the planet by seeding our landfills with elemental mercury instead of evil carbon. And giving me a HEADACHE whenever I am trapped in a room with you.)
And with LED light bulb revolution say goodbye to lots of radio communications. While the goofy things thrive on DC it is achieved through the use of really radio-noisy often insufficiently shielded switching power supplies and forced rectification. And brief high current pulses to 'cheat' higher light output without causing overheating.
Our city has LED traffic lights and even moderately strong FM stations disappear completely at intersections. I have no doubt that this interference affects emergency services' communications too, and that a whole lotta FCC Title 47, Part 15 violations are going on.
No one seems to care because people seem to be stupid when it comes to so-called eco-friendly product selling jobs. Sorry I so incorrigible about the subject, I do love the planet.
The ProMed moderator links to related background research, points out that there are 5 specie of Enterovirus distinct enough that one vaccine could not fit all, it is 'premature' to announce it this way until the particular agent and mechanism is identified.
So by all means forge ahead, but be prudently wary of anyone who implies this is in the final stage where a vaccine is just around the corner.
--- If we were to fund LFTR research with the same dedication and fervor that we funded the polio vaccine, America could be energy-independent within 30 years, forever. Off-topic, pretend it's my sig.
I didn't feel very jokey-jokey about the subject, so I decided to write a short story for the treasonous bastards of the NSA. Hope you like it assholes, hope it makes you think about what the future will bring. I am channeling Phillip K. Dick today. Or perhaps I was inspired by this.
________
LAST WISH
It was a bright little office with an official seal and large letters on the door: The Pact. A hole in the wall really. A series of blurred young faces, documents to sign. A ten minute 'psych' interview with pointless questions, presumably to check his mental fitness, or perhaps to kill time while they ran a more complete background check of family and friends to ensure there were no lawsuits waiting in the wings. No matter, he knew he would sail through it easily, and made small talk with a faceless young man. A formality.
They led him down a hallway to a large silent room with a comfortable chair in the middle. "The flat panels on the armrests respond to your touch, and to some extent you can steer or pause the content." Then with a wordless nod the technician leaves the room through a doorway that secures with an gentle click. The lights dim slowly.
Points of light surround him which grow into images; sounds rise all around. It is a mosaic, computer constructed but at times seemingly guided by an artist's hand. Images of him as an old man, as a young man. Yearbook photos, recent photos. Various favorite musics, voices he recognizes as his own, friends, others. He even recognized some things from the ancient website 'Facebook', the company long dissolved and its data merged by Congressional decree into the Federal Cloud. But this is just the beginning.
It is what they refer to as the 'personal public torrent', a period of media gathered from all possible sources for which there exists a 'contract of assent'. You can access it for a fee, even take a copy with you for an additional fee. He knows however that the show will not last long, he has led a mostly solitary life unworthy of note. They will mostly spare him everything: long blurry shots of his back, walking down empty corridors, sitting at his desk. He knew a camera was nearby though he never bothered to spot it, not once in 30 years. Now there is an incredible mosaic filling the screen. It is Times Square full of people. Popups appear with his face from different angles and a red line traces across the mosaic indicating his walking path. But they are just showing off, he thinks. Anyway he is walking alone and he remembers that night as one of sadness, she was out of his life then. He is grateful when it passes quickly. Perhaps they sensed his mood. Family photos now, so distant in the past they could be for someone else.
They have done their job well. He has not glimpsed her or heard her voice even once. It had been late in the evening when he found the brief official note, pursuant to such and such public law, she was being 'unpersoned' and her effects would be removed from the cloud. She had left for work that morning with a kiss and had simply not returned. He remembered when they first met, she would chide him for not speaking out along with her, not joining the Cause, going with her to meetings. He would tease her in return, telling here to be plain and boring, that is the way to avoid trouble. That faded dog-eared copy of 1984 she would wave at him like a bible and slap on the table as she spoke. Her face so beautiful then.
He was grateful when the public torrent finally slowed then ceased. If he knew how he would have ended it sooner. It was as if they were tormenting him, with relish, for these lonely years that had passed uncounted.
The screens now display in total darkness a horizontal red line and flashing question mark. A soft female voice. "The public torrent has ended. Proceed to the exit now and the fee is due. If you choose to stay the fee will be waived and you will be bound to the Pact. To continue, tap both hands twice
Sure, you can scan the net and find some SCADA controllers small water pumps in East Podunk Oklahoma. But they don't control big city plants.
Well here I am in West Podunk Oklahoma and our water pump is controlled by an Emitrol Sytstems relay board connected to an IMSAI 8080 with RS-232 to our PDP-8. I talk to the pump and post to Slashdot with an LA36 DECWriter. It does lower case but it sure looks funny.
Don't go touching my pump now. This is my pump. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny you should mention Thorium.
Here are a couple of letters (postal+email) I have written to Senator Inhofe and Halliburton Corporate. They express my sense of urgency. I invite everyone to review them and comment. Flames are welcome too. Whopee! I have a 'foe' now! Movin' on up.
And if your own process of discovery also leads you to some conclusion that is best expressed by getting the word out -- please do so. Whether you are not a thorium advocate, please consider the underlying issue, the necessity for an urgent PUSH to develop energy independence.
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
It's about keeping the lights on.
Thanks for reading this, that and the other thing.
have neutrinos actually been detected yet?
Kinda sorta. Their existence has been inferred by experimental results.
Here is a nicely written neutrino primer for humans that answers your detection question. If you already know everything about the subject, visit the Wiki neutrino page to learn what you already know, revel in the obviousness of it all and have a good chuckle at the expense of folks like me who find it to be very jargony.
I first learned of neutrinos while doing web research on Neapolitan ice cream. This amazing ice cream has three flavors, and it appears that neutrinos also have three flavors. This cannot be a coincidence. Since any unified theory which does not include ice cream must be incomplete, I see this as evidence that we are close to solving some great puzzle.
If you are at a cocktail party and overhear particle physicists in a discussion of the "Solar Neutrino Problem", step right up and say that it was Mean Mr. Sun who ate all the chocolate, leaving us to detect only the yucky vanilla and strawberry -- he even left the spoon in the freezer! You will be greeted with smiles and knowing glances, and they might even invite you on the road to tour with them. Particle physicists are always surrounded by groupies and hot women.
Good chemical debunk, this is a physically (laughably) impractical as well.
The sewer network for our city of 23,000 with some heavy industry, generates around two miliion gallons of flow a day. There are ~1100 manholes, but thirty main branches where one would definitely want $ensors, that would narrow it down to several hundred houses. Flow takes from 15 minutes to 10 hours to travel down these branches. In this hostile environment of liquid and floating and suspended solid it is difficult to keep even mechanical flow monitors operational (we don't bother), the thought of a sensor that requires immersion and direct contact cracks me up. The thought that these subterranean sensors need 24x7 radio links makes me hoot 'n holler.
Okay... (wiping eyes)... so branch number five sounds an alarm. What do you do now?? You need to systematically place MORE sensors at all upstream branch points and wait for another positive. Then finally after several of these iterations you are down to one city block and have to stick a sensor on a camera in the upstream manhole and roll it slowly down the line until you hit a positive again. Then try to figure out which house the tap is for, it's not always obvious and we often need to pour dye to be sure.
So the perps would need to be really cooperative and pour lots of it out at regular intervals for days to assist this tracing process as city workers slowly and visibly converge on their neighborhood.
BUT HOLD ON. If some really clever roboticist could make an autonomous sewer walking spider that could crawl through 6 inch pipes (with roots and other obstructions) and maintain radio contact, which is a real bitch down there, then we'd have the beginnings of something.
Sometimes it takes an infinite amount of money and time to implement a Clever Idea. But it's worth the wait.
No he's right -- the penny was for me.
I'm from the Government and I'm here to help.
"Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named... but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot. [...] This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health but as proof of his/her strength. Look for it. Study it. Friday, it is too late to save this culture... this worldwide culture, not just the freak show here in California. Therefore we must now prepare the monasteries for the coming Dark Age. Electronic records are too fragile; we must again have books, of stable inks and resistant paper. But that may not be enough. The reservoir for the next renaissance may have to come from beyond the sky."
~Robert A. Heinlein, from the novel Friday
...and they certainly weren't Trinitron displays
Shadow mask, I used the word Trinitron for its retro big science effect ...as in "Son... it's Atomic".
You're right ...but that's all you are.
More on the XY Monitor tube that was used in the Real Tempest
If the NSA tunes their TEMPEST receiver towards you and the signal resolves into a TEMPEST game, would they chuckle at the irony?
Thinking about that statement just made my brain pop. The statement is even funner than it seems! Due to the lack of horizontal and vertical trace with synchronizing blanking intervals, the Real Tempest would have probably thwarted a standard Van Eck Phreaky NSA TEMPEST device.
You could say Real Tempest used a form of visual encryption.
It's a fresh angle of looking at it, a matter of a pinion, this "What's our vector, Victor?" versus raster, frigid polar coordinates failing to pinpoint warm Cartesian wells, the difference between Playfair and elliptic curves kind of thingie.
I like all kinds of thingies.
what do you mean with pixels?
Real Trinitron Pixels of red, green and blue writ by slap-happy vector beams that danced and played 'round the screen to actually draw the thing just as you would. Using angles 'n stuff.
Pac Mans and other computer mens and wimmins make the poor beams trace out this dreary left to right up and down on but mostly offey and horizonta-blinkey thing where the beam travels a mile and a half just to say "GAME OVER" in the middle.
In a Real Tempest the beams do not travel a thousand miles. They draw what needs to be drawn and draw it again. Until the machine explodes, because it is dangerous and has high voltage inside.
Pixels on a Real Tempest are tiny little holes from which you may gaze directly into electrons, not some I'm a little crystal short and stout, turn me over and the oh-so-safe light can't get out, kind of thingie.
When you play Real Tempest real particle beams are slapping electrons through those pixel-hoies right in your face. Ten thousand volts is yearning to scream in direct arc through you and your sweaty sneakers to ground. It restrained only by prickly glass. It is whispering, "Go ahead... piss on my anode cup. I dare ya! You know you want to."
It is difficult to communicate to younger readers the level of excitement and danger we experienced as we were growing up.
REAL Tempest fits entirely memory locations 0x9000-FFFF, its lines are ONE pixel wide (but it's a BIG one!) and it does not have whiny buzzy switching power supply. It has a large throbbing step-down transformer and a whopping thirty-two thousand microfarad capacitor in the power supply. It has a flyback transformer feeding a CRT that bristles with actual electricity terror death.
Real Tempest machines go out with a real BANG.
What is shown is some Fisher Price low voltage plastic computing device, obviously meant for children, whose level completion screen is full of whoopy flashes and dancing bears distracting artifacts and eye candy as in, deer-meets-headlights.
The Real Tempest, when a level is complete it launches you into the middle and flies you through the tunnel, this was the COOLEST damned thing we ever saw when we first sawed it, and gets back down to business. No goofy crap.
THIS IS WHAT A REAL TEMPEST IS. IT CAN HURT YOU..
If the NSA tunes their TEMPEST receiver towards you and the signal resolves into a TEMPEST game, would they chuckle at the irony? If a bear shits in the woods and laughs because shit got on his 'bear' hands would he laugh hysterically and change brands of toiley paper?
NOT 'man in the middle', and no direct compromise of the Google Frontend Server (GFE) is being described here. MUSCULAR is passive taps on presently unencrypted private links between the companies' global data centers. In theory these would be sited on the borders of the United States or (safely) within foreign space.
This cooperation between the Brits and the Gits is ESCHELON in action. Your tax (and drug) dollars at work. I see that the latest Snowden revelation identifies an interception point that is magically distant from Kansas. All the better to take our minds off what NSA is doing in Kansas.
Frankly (and sadly) I do not believe that NSA has ever sited any of their communications taps to avoid gathering domestic traffic. I believe full disclosure would reveal this.
Okay, maybe during the Cold War -- but If there ever were any NSA folk who'd be aghast at the idea of vacuuming their neighbors' telephone calls and private emails, where desk analysts can issue flags that key ancillary targets automatically derived from social networks and phone logs... including their own sons and daughters... those people are not objecting now. They are are gone to grave or recently retired in comfortable surroundings, watching these goings-on with growing discomfort and distaste.
Or long retired. I may have met some of them in the islands as a kid, grim and reserved with little to say about current events. I really wish they would speak up now while there is still time. Especially the ones who witnessed first-hand how the KGB ran Eastern Europe, how Chairman Mao 'purified' China, how Hitler first captured Germany with promises to lead them out of inflationary ruin.
To do these things right it would be a great help to have good intel on all your citizens. Do they realize how incredibly stupid this all is?
Under massive domestic surveillance EVERYONE in the entire country is subject to direct blackmail. NO ONE IS EXEMPT. This is because everyone has a loved one, child, friend relative that has actionable events in their past. This means they get to choose who leads the country by eliminating all opposition. Scandals will just keep coming to light. For more on that see my post about blackmail and 'duress'
Under massive surveillance EVERY ONE of the classic and hallowed checks and balances which keep our Republic together and human traditions that civilization on track is subject to TOTAL CORRUPTION and outright NULLIFICATION.
No human judge is exempt, no jury safe from side-channel tampering. With private communications intercepts it is possible to select or disqualify jurors based on a pretty complete profile of their views. No more Twelve Angry Men.
Under massive surveillance every possible terrorist scenario that hurts us is avoided. Give thanks and praise. But more chillingly, every scenario could benefit the intelligence community will inevitably become a reality, if not in your time then your children's. All they need to do is contact people, ignore people and prepare to capitalize on the event. No more 'acts of God' or tragedies that galvanize honest people into surprising yet dignified ways to some surprising yet triumphant end.
History becomes a script written by the most ruthless and least inhibited who happen have access to the secrets. We see seeds of this in our own time.
Under total surveillance financial markets are relegated to sideshows for the programmed accumulation of wealth (and targeted ruin). By forming an alliance with entities that emit High Frequency Trades, a shadow government can maintain a presence that is unlikely to be detectable or discernible, and in any case, when manipulation begins real humans will react predictably, helplessly.
There is a reason we have evolved so quickly as a species. Not just intelligence, but applied freedom to think, act,
"The NSA has gone far beyond the intent of the Patriot Act, particularly in the accumulation and storage of metadata," Sensenbrenner said. "Had Congress known that the Patriot Act had been used to collect metadata, the bill would have never been passed."
This gentleman is either insufficiently clued -- or is acting on advice given by someone he trusts, someone who is insisting that the word metadata must be used in all Congressional inquiry.
It's a straw man, this metadata sharing agreement. NSA probably decided early on that the voluntary data-sharing plan is doomed. So they will pressure Congress to fixate on that, and they will advise them to choose their words carefully, so as not to speak of (or legislate against) interception and taps on the backbone network. If you ask Clapper whether he's tapping the Internet backbone you will get an answer about metadata.
These senators on the Intelligence Committee have probably been briefed that, if someone shakes and taps their watch and asks what time it is, they should reply "It's time to speak of metadata sharing agreements. And ONLY that.
This is item number 5 on my timeline of diversion, and we are proceeding as planned.
We must try to get our representatives to ask NSA direct questions about large scale domestic traffic gathering -- if we can.
What makes you so sure?
That they are STILL trying to hide something BIG? Years in the telecom and ISP business, NSA-watching since the Internet went global and way before. I am one of those people who might have become a spook, though I am glad I did not. From its all-to-brief brief mention in David Kahn's The Codebreakers [1967] which I carried around as a kid like some overstuffed bible, my interest was piqued by James Bamford's Puzzle Palace [1982] which introduced the world to the topic of the 'piggyback slurp' and laid out directly NSA's intentions to tap the world. The whole world -- Charter be damned -- from the start.
A few anecdotes from good friends in the telecommunications trade who alluded to special cordoned-off spaces within AT&T's Magens Point cable terminus in St. Thomas US Virgin Islands, drunken conversation in bars with reminders not to speak of such things... a rather suspicious 'underwater landslide' fiber outage between St. Thomas and Puerto Rico c.1995, which I suspected at the time might involve a submarine because a telco friend noticed that after all his voice circuits were back there was an eyebrow-raising 'unusually long period' before the data circuits came up, even though they were physically interspersed and not supposed to be broken out at the carrier level... circumstantial stuff, sure. Pure speculation is as fascinating as the real thing.
Since then, revelations about Room 614A and Hepting vs. AT&T, the little mouse who could have roared all the way to the Supreme Court, had they not declined to hear the case.
I'm not talking about individual stakeouts or FISA warrants or occasional 'oopsies' of a few domestic intercepts. I'm discussing large scale Tier 1 total interception of data with selective routing and forwarding of target traffic onto side channels via 'dark' or leased fiber on a scale that is approaching 'total'. This includes voice too: terrestrially trunked cell calls and landline (there is practically no difference these days, it's all turkeyfart compressed).
Which is why I posted here back in June my theory that PRISM slides were made as part of a limited hang-out. I came to this conclusion because I found the allegation that Internet service providers named grant direct back-doors to NSA to be preposterous (and still do, too much risk of exposure by now). The purpose of the hang-out was for Google and company to discredit the allegations honesty to relegate it to 'hoax' status... and provide a topic that diverts attention away from the total-tap-slurp operation.
Steve Gibson of Gibson Research has come up with another theory that I find interesting, it may fit Occam's Razor better than my own. He presented it recently in Security Now #408: The State of Surveillance, audio and full transcript available. GOOD STUFF. His angle is that "direct access to their servers" means all unencrypted SMTP-mail and HTTP from tap points directly upstream. It is all about fiber and taps. Taps are about splitting light... and that is what prisms do.
If you have a good traffic tap and encrypted intercepts, add a bit of coercion for the providers to divulge their private SSL keys and they can replay the past SSL sessions they have gathered.
It is time for everyone to learn about and implement Perfect Forward Secrecy.
Thar be dragins in our midst. Slay them.
NSA and the Desolation of Smaug
The government may get a warrant for the contents of one safe-deposit box, but they don't have
the right to a warrant for the combination to the bank's vault.
Right you are! I believe they already have many contents of the vault already in their possession as spooled encrypted intercepts. Obtaining the keys would allow them to retroactively replay sessions. I raised an alarm about the possibility of "compelled" SSL private key sharing back in June, with a Congressional testimony wish list::
NSA needs to be summoned to Congress to disclose the nature and extent of their domestic communications backbone piggyback-slurp operation: its collection points, its storage capabilities and the number of personnel who are aware of and have access to this raw data source. And whether SOME of those personnel are foreign nationals recruited for the task to reduce their exposure and liability. (Greetz Israel.)
NSA needs to be summoned to Congress to disclose any SSL private key sharing agreements, an intimidation tactic that goes like this, "We're either going to move in here with secret directives, equipment and gag orders ... OR you will share all your private keys on a regular basis," which gives them access even to emails that never left their networks, they can read it as you drop it off and pick it up.
Two months later, LavaBit falls. How many others did not, just handed over the keys?
For further background on these dragons in our midst, see NSA and the Desolation of Smaug
[nuclear] if you're in North America ~30% of your electricity comes from it.
I meant to type ~20%. The actual figure is 19.7% in 2011, it has been as high as 20.6% in 2001.
Source: EIA Annual Energy Review 2012
Coal burning power plants emit most of the mercury in this country. Using a CFL actually reduces the total mercury released into the environment because, in spite of containing a whopping 4mg of Hg, the electricity saved reduces Hg emissions by more than 4mg.
I'm with you on the accuracy of those whole-planet-averaged figures in the link... but on the face of it they are comparing mercury dispersed by emissions over a wide area to a 4mg DOLLOP of mercury deposited in a landfill within the space of a few cubic inches. A substance with an EPA limit of 2 parts per billion in 'safe' drinking water.
That's like saying, we have found a way to offset 1000 statistically possible deaths of children that could (and on average, do happen) by placing 1000 land mines at playgrounds at random, per year. Comparing a poison slightly everywhere thing with a bunch of poison sure-things.
It doesn't end there. "Most mercury vapor inside fluorescent light bulbs becomes bound to the inside of the light bulb as it is used. EPA estimates that the rest of the mercury within a CFL -- about 11 percent -- is released into air or water when it is sent to a landfill, assuming the light bulb is broken." So 89% of this mercury is sitting there bound to glass. In my version of reality, 100% of the bulbs will be broken and reduced to small grain size. They will be buried and subject to extreme stresses, such as the plows of future generations in the mists of time. I also assume that everything in the landfill will be ingested by something or someone, some day. Topsoil everywhere is subject to this wormy process, and say in a thousand years, today's landfills could comprise mostly excellent topsoil. Except for the poor kid who ate that tomato with the EnergyStar logo on it.
I'm sort of leaning in the let our power plants more safely distribute mercury over a wide area while we read by incandescent light and come up with better ideas for power generation, kind of direction.
Recording another passenger some distance away, on a moving train, with a mobile phone microphone? You wouldn't make much out.
Of course you're right. That leaves the other 999 reasons Twitter is TSOTD.
Perhaps rolling the phone into a magazine or newspaper and pointing it in the general direction of
the target might help. Most have gain control that would bring up the level to compensate for reduced noise.
Or if there is an empty seat near the target, write a note that says "Do you mind if I sit here? The guy next to me smells bad and I don't want to hurt his feelings." The person you show it too will probably glance around then nod quietly and you can successfully relocate without drawing attention.
Jimmy the atmospheric sensor to make the train's oxygen masks all drop at once. Then grab the subject's mask and tie your phone to it, letting it dangle in front of him. I'd try this first.
1. pick some good thing that once was rare, metered, unaffordable
2. something that has become common, unmetered and affordable
3. something that is not owned or directly under government control
4. claim that some people somewhere are 'abusing' their 'privileges'
5. cite financial losses based on hypothetical behavior, as compared to hypothetical profits
6. if the blue party is in power, fool the red party into promoting and defending it, the majority blues will oppose it because it is a 'red' thing without knowing or caring why. Or vice versa.
7. find Hollywood celebrities to talk about conserving it, write moral conservation memes into soap opera dialog
8. bring the Terrorists into it. Somehow. Anyhow. Equate unregulated (competitive) business with terrorism.
9. pass sweeping 'reform' legislation by voice vote while most of Congress is in recess
10. Congratulations! You have now made life suck a little more. But your children will only resent you a little bit because things aren't a whole lot worse.
Applies to just about everything.
ON RARE EARTH ELEMENTS
A Rare Earth Element revival in the United States could help to bring industry and real manufacturing back to our shores. It goes right along with the promise of Thorium to satisfy all grid and process heat requirements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8
Here Stephen Boyd tells us what "rare earth elements" are, and why they are vital to modern technology: He is incredibly hyper and excited about them, as you should be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J16IpITWBQ8
While everyone is talking about China 'Western industry through its aggressive focus on manufacturing and 'low wages'... there is ANOTHER way China has become almost a 'sole source' of modern technology: it has negotiated exclusive manufacturing contracts based on its willingness to mine rare earths, yet not export them without a penalty ... this has caused production of electronics and magnet-oriented devices (think batteries, wind turbines) to be relocated to China. Meanwhile the United States, once the world's largest producer of these has mostly ceased -- in part because a slightly radioactive by-product, Thorium, presently has no market and is (unfairly IMO) lumped in with hazardous. More background and some ideas for using the Thorium here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MauEg9vqh9k
ON URANIUM
Love it or hate it, if you're in North America ~30% of your electricity comes from it. The worst uranium mining nightmares arose from a Cold War appetite for nuclear weapons and a government that abused its authority and brand of secrecy to sideline health and environmental consequences... not the smaller level of mining necessary to keep nuclear power reactors going.
Clearly some thinking needs to be changed.
I very much doubt that LED lights produce output in the 90 - 110 MHz band. Switching supplies are generally 0.1-2 MHz. But hey, call the FCC. They don't mess around when it comes to interfering devices.
It's not your 'traditional' switching supply such as the ones that revolutionized electronics. The modular PC switching supply is inside a Faraday cage and has toroidal chokes so (almost) nothing but pure DC escapes the cage.
LED light systems tend to use HF pulsed current to drive the bulbs, and whether it's the bulb fixture or the pulsed power supply is actually in a separate control box with a long radiating (improperly shielded or grounded) wire connecting to the bulbs, I don't know. But the results are just as described here with noisy spectra shown here around 100Mhz.
Yeah, too bad I work for the city and there is a bread and butter conflict of interest.
Everything he does is by the seat of his pants. To do seat of the pants things you need to grasp handles that are connected to levers which control valves and apertures that gloop glop into gloping chambers. Every button is a Frankenstein switch that tosses a relay accross the room, and for every relay there is an Override Lever.
You need steam driven technology to propel your contrivances, with beefy pistons, moving fluids and rotating coils. You need planetary gears and axles and rocket assisted rotation (NOTE: replace rockets after each use). You need self destruct device timers with real gears so you can save yourself with a piece of chewing gum.
If you have a computer companion on board you cannot stoop so low as to conduit everything, make yourself into a helpless git by relying on digital to analog circuits to (hopefully) permit you to ask the computer to fly what is actually YOUR own goddamned ship.
Your computer must consist of a hybrid electro-mechanical system that is mobile and pot-bellied, that loco-motes where it is needed and drives multiple robotic arms (with Mickey Mouse gloves) to grasp aforesaid mechanical controls just as you would. In case of a virus or malfunction you can then just kick the stupid thing out of the way and take control of your own destiny, rather than whimper and die like some horrid little clam trapped inside a malfunctioning shell.
Every control system on your ship must be able to operate with a kick, or be disabled by kicking harder.
There must be lots of blinking lights, but they must be operated by relays and stepper contacts.
And if your computer plays chess, it is because there is an actual dwarf hidden in the console.
Dr. Who did not spend his time debugging arcane API incompatibilities after version control branches incorrectly and legacy memory-mapped data type formats change after a compiler and library upgrade, forcing some off-by-one read of noble structs to ignoble garbage that makes pointers overflow and underflow, careening wantonly through memory structures like spiders on LSD. All of this causing nothing to happen in the real world, it just sits there inoperative.
Dr. Who has no need for do-lotsa-think-first Object Oriented threaded systems either, he is impulsive, violently productive and has visited three Universes in the time it takes you to decide on whether to capitalize or encapsulate or do whatever the hell you do, or not.
And he does it all with levers and dials.
And girls. He does it with girls.
Case closed.
OBSERVATION: When given the means and opportunity to make an actual audio recording of Mr. I-Listen-To-You that would have been admissibly real, capable of rendering into a complete transcript, with real historical value... instead choosing to tap out 3rd party observations.
CONCLUSION: Twitter causes brain damage.
The jury is still out on Slashdot.
Like 'dim' streetlights in Winter because they have frozen over, and (for cities that don't think of these things ahead of time) failure to install seasonally enabled heating units into the enclosure. All in all the human-time and effort of manufacturing and deploying these new solutions, along with the added heater circuit to make them useable, will really eat into that eco-energy difference equation.
Lots of eco initiatives these days come down to someone smiling and pointing to a little device that saves a few ergs of energy here and now, and just over the ridge there is a brand new factory making these things that is poisoning rivers and people with heavy metals. While very little energy is actually saved and unintended consequences pile up.
(Thank You Planet Saving Fluorescent Bulbs for saving the planet by seeding our landfills with elemental mercury instead of evil carbon. And giving me a HEADACHE whenever I am trapped in a room with you.)
And with LED light bulb revolution say goodbye to lots of radio communications. While the goofy things thrive on DC it is achieved through the use of really radio-noisy often insufficiently shielded switching power supplies and forced rectification. And brief high current pulses to 'cheat' higher light output without causing overheating.
Our city has LED traffic lights and even moderately strong FM stations disappear completely at intersections. I have no doubt that this interference affects emergency services' communications too, and that a whole lotta FCC Title 47, Part 15 violations are going on.
No one seems to care because people seem to be stupid when it comes to so-called eco-friendly product selling jobs. Sorry I so incorrigible about the subject, I do love the planet.
Best media reporting
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7926026.stm
Most notable analysis (scroll to bottom, in square brackets)
http://www.promedmail.org/direct.php?id=20090308.0959
The ProMed moderator links to related background research, points out that there are 5 specie of Enterovirus distinct enough that one vaccine could not fit all, it is 'premature' to announce it this way until the particular agent and mechanism is identified.
So by all means forge ahead, but be prudently wary of anyone who implies this is in the final stage where a vaccine is just around the corner.
---
If we were to fund LFTR research with the same dedication and fervor that we funded the polio vaccine, America could be energy-independent within 30 years, forever. Off-topic, pretend it's my sig.
I didn't feel very jokey-jokey about the subject, so I decided to write a short story for the treasonous bastards of the NSA. Hope you like it assholes, hope it makes you think about what the future will bring. I am channeling Phillip K. Dick today. Or perhaps I was inspired by this.
________
LAST WISH
It was a bright little office with an official seal and large letters on the door: The Pact. A hole in the wall really. A series of blurred young faces, documents to sign. A ten minute 'psych' interview with pointless questions, presumably to check his mental fitness, or perhaps to kill time while they ran a more complete background check of family and friends to ensure there were no lawsuits waiting in the wings. No matter, he knew he would sail through it easily, and made small talk with a faceless young man. A formality.
They led him down a hallway to a large silent room with a comfortable chair in the middle. "The flat panels on the armrests respond to your touch, and to some extent you can steer or pause the content." Then with a wordless nod the technician leaves the room through a doorway that secures with an gentle click. The lights dim slowly.
Points of light surround him which grow into images; sounds rise all around. It is a mosaic, computer constructed but at times seemingly guided by an artist's hand. Images of him as an old man, as a young man. Yearbook photos, recent photos. Various favorite musics, voices he recognizes as his own, friends, others. He even recognized some things from the ancient website 'Facebook', the company long dissolved and its data merged by Congressional decree into the Federal Cloud. But this is just the beginning.
It is what they refer to as the 'personal public torrent', a period of media gathered from all possible sources for which there exists a 'contract of assent'. You can access it for a fee, even take a copy with you for an additional fee. He knows however that the show will not last long, he has led a mostly solitary life unworthy of note. They will mostly spare him everything: long blurry shots of his back, walking down empty corridors, sitting at his desk. He knew a camera was nearby though he never bothered to spot it, not once in 30 years. Now there is an incredible mosaic filling the screen. It is Times Square full of people. Popups appear with his face from different angles and a red line traces across the mosaic indicating his walking path. But they are just showing off, he thinks. Anyway he is walking alone and he remembers that night as one of sadness, she was out of his life then. He is grateful when it passes quickly. Perhaps they sensed his mood. Family photos now, so distant in the past they could be for someone else.
They have done their job well. He has not glimpsed her or heard her voice even once. It had been late in the evening when he found the brief official note, pursuant to such and such public law, she was being 'unpersoned' and her effects would be removed from the cloud. She had left for work that morning with a kiss and had simply not returned. He remembered when they first met, she would chide him for not speaking out along with her, not joining the Cause, going with her to meetings. He would tease her in return, telling here to be plain and boring, that is the way to avoid trouble. That faded dog-eared copy of 1984 she would wave at him like a bible and slap on the table as she spoke. Her face so beautiful then.
He was grateful when the public torrent finally slowed then ceased. If he knew how he would have ended it sooner. It was as if they were tormenting him, with relish, for these lonely years that had passed uncounted.
The screens now display in total darkness a horizontal red line and flashing question mark. A soft female voice. "The public torrent has ended. Proceed to the exit now and the fee is due. If you choose to stay the fee will be waived and you will be bound to the Pact. To continue, tap both hands twice
Sure, you can scan the net and find some SCADA controllers small water pumps in East Podunk Oklahoma. But they don't control big city plants.
Well here I am in West Podunk Oklahoma and our water pump is controlled by an Emitrol Sytstems relay board connected to an IMSAI 8080 with RS-232 to our PDP-8. I talk to the pump and post to Slashdot with an LA36 DECWriter. It does lower case but it sure looks funny.
Don't go touching my pump now.
This is my pump.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.