Various bits and pieces

• Drug decriminalization success story in Portugal, via Scientific American and via Salon.
• The dark side of Dubai — the paradise in the desert, built on debt by slave labor.  Anyone can come, one way or another, but not just anyone can leave.  It’s been the perfect resort for some of the more repellent social classes; but now it’s drying up and blowing away on the wind.
• A rebuttal from a Dubai journalist airs some of the UK’s dirty laundry, before declaring that “out of respect for Britain” he’s not going to.  Wait, I thought you just did...?
• “America the Illiterate”
• Human rights abuses unimportant to “useful idiots”
• “The ship is sinking: Quick, add water”
• Modernized energy systems less secure; critical infrastructure at risk?
• IBM Fellow Carl Anderson says the end of the Moore’s Law era is at hand
• On the lighter side, fire eating:  Indian woman earns Guinness world record by eating 51 Naga Jolokia peppers.  She said she wasn’t feeling well, having eaten 60 at a local event earlier in the day...

(Some links via 7leaguebootdisk, some from elsewhere)

My brain has committed advertising again

Picture this.

Long zoom in on a Buddhist temple somewhere in China or Nepal.  Camera flies into the great hall, where hundreds of shaven-headed Buddhist monks sit zazen in ranks.  We pan around the room getting the thousand-year-old historic atmosphere before pulling in closely on the field of monks.  As one, they reach down to the floor in front of them, picking up identical wrapped packages from the floor.  We zoom in on one monk to see the distinctive wrapper of [insert major sandwich chain here], before the monks strip the wrappers off their sandwiches and hold them up before them with both hands.

As one voice, five hundred monks chant:

“NOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM....................”

...And bite.

Tire change FAIL

ihnjh,ijls ... “Insert jack BEFORE removing wheel”

(It was a full-size Dodge truck.  I was half tempted to stop and wait to see what his next brilliant move was, but I was afraid he might ask me to hold his beer.)

"This deal is getting worse by the minute."

mrmeval points to more information on the dark side of the proposed new Cybersecurity Act of 2009, via Karl Denninger:

But I’ve read the actual draft bill that allegedly was proffered, and while most of the time what is published on WND is about as diametrically opposed politically to my views, this isn’t one of those times.

On page 21 and 22 it is established not only certification of “security professionals” in the computer field but mandatory licensing for anyone performing compute security services not only to the government but also to any “critical infrastructure system or network.”

Got that?  If you do infosec, and your company works on or supplies equipment for any government network, or anything that your company works on or supplies equipment for is declared by the government to be “critical infrastructure”, you’ll now need a license from the government to continue to hold your job.

And there’s more:

Second, page 40 has some truly frightening implications, among them granting the Department of Commerce plenary authority to invade networks and access the data therein irrespective of Constitutional or legal restrictions against that action.

Let’s put that into plain English too:  The cybersecurity act would grant the government complete authority to perform warrantless searches of any computer network, looking for anything. They wouldn’t even need to show cause. They could just do it because they felt like it, even if they had to hack their way in.

Finally, there is a provision within this draft allowing The President to order disconnection of any “critically important” infrastructure - but it does not define what that is, once again, granting effective plenary authority to The President to silence communications irrespective of Constitutional protections regarding Free Speech.

Let me add here that there is nothing to stop the President from declaring the entire Internet, or any part of it, to be “critically important”.

I will also remind you that this comes on top of AG Holder declaring that it is the position of the Obama Administration not only that the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping in violation of FISA was perfectly legal, but that it’s immaterial whether it was legal or not because — again, in the opinion of the Obama administration — nobody can sue the government anyway even for doing something it knows is clearly illegal unless it publicly distributes any information gained thereby.

Many of us thought at the time that the Clinton administration acted as though it was above the law.  Then the second Bush administration showed Bill Clinton how that’s done.  People got sick of it, and voted for Obama’s promises of hope and change.

Well, now Obama’s making George Bush look like a piker.

“When does enough become enough?  When does No have meaning?”

Denninger goes on to say,

The First Amendment is first for a reason - without Freedom of The Press, which happens to fundamentally include the right to freely communicate between ourselves, there is no means by which corruption and evil can be effectively exposed.

The Second Amendment is second for a reason — if The First Amendment falls, you’re going to need The Second Amendment, and fast.

I hope it doesn’t get to that point.  But honestly, if we don’t get a turnaround soon, I think it’s only a matter of time.

Chinese "Carrier killer"

From USNI via military.com, discussion of a Chinese “carrier killer” anti-ship ballistic missile that can attack surface ships at 2000km range, with a time-to-target under 12 minutes.  As noted in the article, US Navy ships currently have no ballistic missile defenses.

“The Navy’s reaction is telling, because it essentially equals a radical change in direction based on information that has created a panic inside the bubble.  For a major military service to panic due to a new weapon system, clearly a mission kill weapon system, either suggests the threat is legitimate or the leadership of the Navy is legitimately unqualified.  There really aren’t many gray spaces in evaluating the reaction by the Navy…the data tends to support the legitimacy of the threat.”

(Hint: Read the dateline...)

Somalia redux

SFGate has an analysis of the issues surrounding the Somali pirate problem.

In private, however, U.S. officials acknowledged there were way too few to counter a rising scourge of piracy along the lawless Somali coast.

Even as more Navy ships, including the guided-missile frigate USS Halyburton, arrive near the Horn of Africa, there will be fewer than two dozen international warships patrolling an area nearly five times the size of Texas.

“It’s a big area and you can’t be everywhere at once,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Thursday.

[...]

Outside advisers have recommended expanding the task force mandate to hunt pirate “mother ships” far from shore.  These nondescript larger vessels shelter the small speedboats that pirates usually use to quickly close on a commercial ship and scramble aboard.

The only problem with this is that, until they attack, it’s very hard to tell a pirate gang mothership towing pirate skiffs from a fishing fleet mothership towing fishing skiffs.

Whitman’s statement is true, as far as it goes.  But you don’t have to be everywhere at once.  You just have to be where the pirates are.

But how do you know where the pirates are, or where they will be?

Well, the thing is, you don’t care where the pirates are ... except when they attack.  And in order to attack, they have to go where the ships are.  And you know where the ships are.

I have a modest proposal.

It goes like this:

1. Station two or three multinational “depot ships” at each end of the pirate-infested stretch of ocean off the Horn of Africa.  Patrol only the borders of the area, but keep air support on standby in case needed.
2. Every ship entering that stretch of ocean swings by one of the depot ships.  When it does so, a squad of Marines board.  (Or Royal Marine Commandos, or French Naval Commandos, or Legion Étrangére, or Spetznaz.)
3. When the ship leaves the dangerous area, it swings by another of the depot ships, where its Marine detachment disembarks, ready to board the next merchant ship travelling in the opposite direction.

To attack, the pirates have to come to the ships.  But under this plan, the Marines will always be there first, waiting for them.  Better trained, better armed, with the advantage of superior numbers and a superior tactical position.  It will go very badly for the pirates, particularly if the nations involved agree to return to the old standard of piracy carrying an automatic death penalty.  In the unlikely event that the pirates are able to muster a large-scale coordinated attack against a single ship in an effort to overwhelm its Marine detachment, the Marines on board call in air support, which simply sinks everything in the vicinity of the target vessel.

Piracy off the Horn of Africa will very rapidly become a very, very non-profitable proposition.