Pro Liberi

Silencing dissent

Technology is great for getting the wordout and bypassing censorship in really bad countries like China, North Korea and the UK.

However it seems that there are some areas when even technology can’t help but instead is used against freedom.

Read here at Guido’s, albeit a bit late, about the Stasi clamping down on people stirring up trouble. Explain to me again who the good guys and the bad guys are now. I’m getting confused.

Thinking out rather than plugging in

I like the sound of it already. The ability to move prosthetics with the mind using just a cap rather than full surgery to insert a data port. Read here.

Now obviously, like voice recognition software, it is going to take a bit of tailoring for each user but as our knowledge of the brain increases then we should be able to just put a few sensors on key points on our heads and read everything.

Only downside is with the way our political systems are going downhill it seems its going to be a bad time for people to be looking at things like this. Put a helmet on a terrorist (Or someone that speaks out about a government) and it’ll be the best lie detector you can buy. Only 75% accurate, well the odds are…. Judge puts Black cap on.

Now when I close my eyes and imagine something. I can see it in my mind. How long before we have images being dragged from our minds for viewing? Sounds a big leap but sometime the first steps are the hardest.

Dynamics, Force and a bit of action

When I was told about this advert my imagination run riot. A Merc sportscar drives upside down in a tunnel. I had visions of a scene from Men in Black where the car drove upside down through a tunnel. In the films case it has held there by special effects but in the Mercs case I though how light is the car? What downforce is being exerted? Was it specially made? How long is it up there? Watch it and see.

Still impressive though but a long way away from escaping from plod inside a tunnel. Shows how much I am willing to consider when it comes to technical advancements.

I wonder if they would let me have a go?

Must be me

What invisible objects will look like?

Duh! Nothing or they are not invisible. One of us doesn’t understand what invisible means.

Why are we waiting?

It seems that every time we look around there is something that will change the way we live. Either making life easier or making it longer or something.

Now I realise that as a species we have stagnated due to the political situation on the planet. With socialists in charge no one wants to invest money and hire staff and equipment if they are not 100% sure they will get their money back.

Yet there are many things out there that people would buy in a heartbeat just so they could save money on day to day living. Window cleaning is one that falls in the middle. You can do it yourself but you normally don’t bother because it’s a pain and only costs a few quid. However to businesses it costs a lot more for that new heavily glazed skyscraper.

Yet somehow I just don’t see these things coming to market in the next 5 years or so.

I think I need to live to 1000 to see what I was expecting to see ten years ago.

Politicians. Scum of the earth. At least now I understand in the Omen where the devil rose from Politics. We can’t say we were not warned.

Be your own Iron Man

Via Ivan, who should be writing his own blog, I present the The World’s First Practical Jetpack – The Martin Jetpack.

Of course you will have to build your own suit of armour and find your own weapons. The UK version comes with a sharpened spork providing you can get the relevant approvals from HMG.

Ever since James Bond flew to his Aston with one in Thunderball I have loved these. I think I need to win the lottery to have the lifestyle I want.

Bloom Boxes

Could this be the breakthrough we are waiting for? The Bloom Box seems to be getting lots of hype and is being giving a major public launch tomorrow. It’s said it’s powered one of Googles datacenters and saved over $100,000 worth of electrickery. However at a cost of around $800,000 that, like all green technology, isn’t a saving except in CO2 output. They say the cost will be at $3,000 in under 10 years.

Maybe then we will all have one. And with a byproduct being hydrogen gas we can all have a home fueling station for our hydrogen cars at the same time. Free gas will have fossil fuels dropped in about 20 milliseconds.

Sounds too good to be true? Let’s wait and see.

Humans are the weakest link

It doesn’t seem that long ago that Chip and Pin was going to cure all evils. I ddn’t want it because I have several cards and can’t remember too many numbers but my security mind won’t let me make them all the same. In the end I still have all the cards but only use two of them when I’m out and about. The others I use on-line. That will change when they start charging.

So from what I understand since Chip and Pin arrived card fraud, via forged signature, has gone down significantly although other fraud has increased more than enough to compensate. Such is life.

Now it appears that Chip and Pin has been compromised and by the sound of it by a method that should be impossible if the security system was implemented correctly.

It seems the tea leaf enters the pin which a hacked stolen card overrides and approves regardless of what is typed on the keypad. Now in a sensible system this flaw should not work. The PIN should be on the banks server and the ATM reads the card number, gets the PIN from the terminal and then checks against the banks mainframe PIN via encryption. No match equals a fail. How anyone should have a card that can override this and approve a transaction is pure folly.

It seems that the human, in this case designer, is still the weakest link. How this got approved is beyond me. I wouldn’t have signed off on this.

Thinking over the box

As in the boxed in traffic.

Meet the Kolelinia a proposal to put bike lanes in the sky above the traffic.

At first though I looked forward to these spandex wearing nutters providing entertainment by falling from the lines to the joy of those stuck in the traffic below. It’s amazing what you can find to cheer you up. However, thinking just that little bit further I realised that they would be landing on something below that would then cause a traffic jam and hold us up. So not so good.

Personally I don’t see this being for bikes. Too dangerous to get past H&S. It has so many holes in it that it will never see the light of day here. Too dodgy but think about this in the third world. Less beurocracy and less cars. They could use this technique to bridge ravines, rivers and dangerous areas. Fix the bikes to the system so they can’t be removed, or fall off, in a similar way to chair lifts but where you power the system yourself via the pedals.

Just to get you interested

A long time ago I discoved that the MoD had a paranormal office in Whitehall. Dedicated to the investigation on things that go bump in the night and objects that fly around the sky. I looked out for jobs in this area but never seen them advertised or even mentioned.

Now it appears that they are releasing some of their files. Just enough to get you interested while retaining enough to get you asking, why not the rest?

I was actually approached by one of the UFO researchers guys (alt : UFO nuts) once asking me about what was going on where I was working and when I looked there were websites about all the things they believed were going on where I worked daily. They even followed my car when I started driving away. They seemed just like the geeks I was working with, Sci-Fi nerds, and myself but were out and about in the fresh air. It was a scary time. I bet they would get short thrift from plod nowadays but then there was nothing that could be done bac in the dark ages.

I think the policy of denial for everything and covering things up leads to these theories. It’s counterproductive but such is everything with government.

And for the record. They don’t release Top Secret files they declassify them from Top Secret which makes them available for release. IMO the UK Gov tends to overclassify everything by default anyway which leads to the bizarre situation of UK documents shared with the US being available online in the US whilst the UK equivilants are classified. Thats why I laughed so much over this about the US complaining about the UK releasing documents. Good for the Goose.

Pro Liberi

Recent Posts

Posts this Month

Archived Posts

Categories