XYBER TIMES

NASA's Problem

2011-04-09T12:29:00.000-04:00

They forgot how to dream. The agency has all sorts of problems, but its most significant problem is the lack of imagination. As the agency lashes out at the government, presidents, and contractors in a bid to find someone to blame it need only look in a mirror. Somewhere along the line NASA lost the big dear and, understandably, people lost interest. It was only a matter of time before people began to ask, and very rightly so, "what, exactly are we giving NASA billions of dollars for?". NASA's plan for the future seemed to be 20 years and $150 billion. For the longest time it appeared that every time the agency was asked what they needed to accomplish a specific goal, they answer would be, "20 years, $150 billion". It went from an agency that put men on the moon in under a decade to one that constantly needed more time and more money to accomplish even the most mundane of tasks. At a time when the public wants to see people living on the moon NASA tells them that would be difficult it would take a long time to figure out and cost a lot of money. The sad part is that the public probably would have been happy to give NASA gold plated rockets if that's what they needed to send a man to mars, but instead the lads and ladies over there sat at their computers and in their break rooms crunching numbers nobody cared about for reasons no one could discern. As Nikola Tesla said, “Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” In short NASA lacked audacity, if takes a certain amount to strap explosives to person rear in an attempt to launch them from this planet.

Umm okay? Tips to net dating.

2011-04-09T11:59:00.000-04:00

I guess the good folks at Uncoached are fulfilling a needed service with their guide to internet dating. Perhaps calling it a guide is misleading, they offer tips on making sure your internet dating experience turns out not to suck. If i were offering tips I could probably sum it up with two tips:
1. Don't Lie Bastards (and Bastardettes) !!
2. It's the Internet, not a magic lamp so keep your expectations realistic. Vampires may or may not be real, but they sure as heck don't glow!

GE Likes Solar

2011-04-09T11:43:00.000-04:00

So according to the folks at GreenBiz General Electric (GE) really seems to like Green Energy, no not the Incredibly Hulk. They seem to be investing a bit in clean and renewable energy. On a side note, not really, it was recently revealed that GE didn't pay any taxes for the previous year. Out of something like $14 billion in profits they managed to pay no taxes at all, in fact the way they finagled their loopholes the government (you and me) actually owe GE about $3 billion. Right about now you're wondering what this has to do with solar power. As the GreenBiz article states, GE is investing $600 million in solar power. Score one for the environment and freedom from oil right? Well, kind of, if GE was really serious they would invest a lot more in Green technology as they obviously have plenty of surplus funds laying about. What this actually is, is a corporate publicity stunt. This act lets GE dissipate some of the flack its going to catch for not paying any taxes by say, "that might be true, but we've invest X amount of money into new technology." The worst part is that they will probably write this "investment" off as well and we will owe them even more money next year.

Packard Bell's New Tablet

2011-04-09T11:20:00.000-04:00

Packard Bells is showing off its new Liberty Tab. You can head on over to the good people of Engadget for the details. It does look very pretty though. The problem I'm having with tablets at the moment is that we are currently in a "tablet boom" kind of like the PC or Laptop booms of the '90s. The tablet technology is still too new, they still haven't really figured out to stream line the process and the pricing is still up in the air. Remember back in the '90s when every computer that came out was obsolete in roughly 3 months? Well that's where we currently are with tablets. The hardware, software, and processes still haven't been hammered out. Currently we're seeing new and improved versions of tablets that haven't even been released yet. There are tablets being released in a few months that already have their successors being advertised. My point in this brief rant is; unless you really really want a tablet, because lets face it nobody needs one, and you have the extra money lying around to blow on one, you should wait until all the dust settles and the novelty of the devices wears off a bit.

Audible.com, Why Can't I Quit You?!?

2011-04-04T14:31:00.002-04:00

If you've never heard of Audible.com , it is an Amazon.com offshoot. If you've never heard of Amazon.com , go ahead and put your tinfoil hat back on because the CIA is coming after the radio signals in your fillings. Audible.com is the place to go if you enjoy audio books. Personally i was never that big a fan of books on tape/cd (whatever), i always preferred the paper. to me a book is not a book unless its made of paper. There just isn't anything like that book smell, or the feel of a book in your hands, or the sight of a newly added book to your collection. Why then, am i talking about a website designed specifically to sell audio books? Well that's simple, they do it very well. So well in fact that i seem to have developed a bit of an Audible.com addiction. In under a year I've managed to purchase more than 50 audio books through the good people of Audible.com , that's over a thousand hours of listening enjoyment.

First let me say that my conversion to the audio book was not entirely voluntary. I took a new job that requires we to commute 3 hours every day. FM radio pretty much sucks, in any given hour you will hear the same song at least 3 times and with the distance i travel it is hard to pin down any station for long be it FM or AM. So as i was listening to a certain podcast, the host happened to mention that if you go to audible and put in a code you would get a free audio book. Free is always nice, so even though i wasn't the biggest fan of audio books i didn't have anything to lose. I really don't recall what my first download was, there have beenn so many since, i believe it may have been the first book in the Honor Harrington series but don't quote me on that. Anyway, I downloaded my first audio book and i was hooked. A good reader is a voice actor, and through their acting they thoroughly engross the listener in the storyline. I think that more than anything go me hooked on the audio book. With subtle inflection a good reader can have you feeling any number of things for a character drawing you deeper into it all and leaving you wanting more and more.

Audible.com has a very simple interface, you just download an audio manager/player to your computer and once you download a book you can listen to it there or you can use your favorite audio program whether that's iTunes, Media Player, Winamp etc., and yes you can even opt to download your new listening goodness to your mobile device whatever that may be. I think my favorite part of the interface is that Audible.com keeps your audio book library online so you can even listen to them there or if something happens to your downloaded copy you can download it again.

Everyone wants to know about price, of course. Audible.com has a subscription service that starts at $14.95 (when this posted), with its lowest level subscription you get discount pricing and 1 credit. The credits are audible gold, you can get most books for a credit and every month you get a free credit. For comparisons sake I'm going to use Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings, the hardback ink and paper book is $27.99, the audio cds are $79.99, the audible download without a subscription $63.93, audible download with a subscription is about $45.00, or you can use your free credit that only cost you $15.00. Bottom line, for $15 you can get an $80 forty-five hour long audio book. Any way you look at it the folks over at audible.com are passing out great deals.

Disclaimer: I really love Audible.com and even though it would be super awesome of them to give me trucks full of money for my opinion, they do not. I am not employed by audible and they haven't given me any money or promised me anything. I just think they have a great thing going and i think anyone who loves books should give them a try.

The Up Side to Bandwith Limits...

2011-03-27T19:43:00.000-04:00

There has been a lot of talk regarding net neutrality and bandwidth limits for cellular markets and home Internet use. I will have to agree that as a whole they suck. Having said that, i think there will be a bright side to this. What could that possibly be? Simple. It will speed up the Internet. I know what you're thinking, "well duh! That's the whole point". The providers say the limits will cut down on the amount of traffic thereby making things faster. I think that rather than cutting down on the traffic content providers and designers will instead streamline their websites and limit all of the bandwidth hungry graphics, functions, and animations that slow down a site. Think about it, a graphics intensive site today loads on a DSL connection at about the same rate a simple graphics clear site would have loaded on a dial up connection 10 years ago. As connections have grown faster, content providers have added more bandwidth hungry content thereby slowing connection and leading to faster connections in a constant cycle. With the upcoming bandwidth limits, content providers will be forced to tone down their sites in an attempt to keep their visitors. Think about, let's say you have 200MB of data usage and you want to check out 5 different sites, if each of those sites takes 50MB of data to access then your screwed. Sites 1-4 are happy because they got your traffic, site 5 is out of luck. If those sites could slim themselves down to 25MB they would get more hits and people would be happier with the faster upload times.

Guess Not?

2011-03-23T08:13:00.000-04:00

A while back i brought up a rumor that Roger Ailes of Fox News was to be indicted. So far there has not been any real news on the matter. Either the rumor is false or Ailes and Fox News are much better at keeping things quiet than we though. If you're wondering how it's possible for anyone to keep a secret these day, it is actually very simple they just bury the unpleasentness in a ton of other information. The next time you watch your nationally televised news provider of choice take note of how many actual different topics they talk about, how many times they repeat the same stories and ask yourself "what does this have to do with the natioin as a whole".

Roger Ailes To Be Indicted?

2011-02-27T17:22:00.000-05:00

It seems that Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News, is going to face indictment soon for encouraging people to lie to federal investigators. I wonder if Fox News will carry the story. You can check out

ritholtz.com
freakoutnation.com
businessinsider.com

for more information. Of course what information is out there about the supposed indictment is very slim at the moment. After all, when government does work, it still doesn't work on the weekends, so we'll have to wait till monday to hear anything concrete. Remind me to tell you about the news cycle and friday news dump one day.

To The Halls Of Montezuma! Again..

2011-02-24T11:01:00.000-05:00

Way way back when the United States was just a wee bit of a nation there were these guys called the Barbary Pirates. They based themselves out of Tripoli in what is today Libya and made their beer money by terrorizing shipping in the Mediterranean Sea. For the older, richer, more powerful nations like Britain, France and Spain, the Barbary pirates were mostly just a nuisance. They paid the pirates what amounted to protection money and their ships were left alone. Obviously no one wanted to pay off pirates, but it was cheaper than the cost of hunting them down or the loses they would take in the meantime. The fledgling US of A needed stable trade routes if it was going to remain a viable nation and pretty much all of its trade was with Europe. The young United States was by no measure an overly rich or powerful nation, and it needed the trade routes lousy with Barbary Coast Pirates.

A certain tall red-haired gentleman happened to be the President of the United States at the time. He went by the name of Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson. President Jefferson knew that there were only a few options for dealing with the sea cockroaches; pay the protection money like everyone else, do something about the pirates, or try to run ships in and out quickly hoping they weren't detected. Two traditions were borne out of Jefferson's decisions; the first was that the United States Marines got a nifty hymn, and the second was the US tradition of not negotiating with terrorists. As Jefferson saw it, the seas were free for all peaceful transactions and anyone that would try to keep people from conducting themselves peaceably on the worlds oceans were declaring war on the human condition itself.

The young US, fresh from victory over one tyrant, wasn't about to bow to another. Instead they sent in the marines. In the dark of night the marines snuck into the area where all the pirate ships were moored, set fire to one of their own ships and sailed it into the Barbary vessels. As the pirates were running around frantically trying to contain the unexpected fires the newly minted American started hammering them. I won't go into the details, but as the sun rose Tripoli learned not to screw with the United States as Europe learned not to underestimate the new nation. I suggest the above books if you really want to get down to the swash buckling details.

On a side note, I suggest you look up John Adams "Treaty of Tripoli", yes THE John Adams. Short version is the Adams administration along with congress put on paper that the United States was not a Christian nation. Don't take my word for it, look it up.

Okay let us fast forward about two hundred years so we can meet Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi. Quick short story is that Libya was part of the Ottoman Empire, after WWII it was placed under UN stewardship until it could manage it’s own affairs. It had a somewhat democratic government for a while and then Colonel Qadhafi instigated a coup that left him as the dictator in chief. Trust me, I could write volumes on the former Ottoman Empire states under mandate and stewardship. Instead I suggest you read the King-Crane Commission Report (dry and interesting in one) and check out the CIA World Fact Book listing on Libya for all sorts of awesome background info. If you had not noticed, dictators tend to be a tad un-hinged. There could probably be psychological studies on whether crazy people become dictators or if all the power makes them lose their ever-loving minds. Regardless, Qadhafi is a now a grade “A” nut bag no matter how he began.

In Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Tunisia, and Libya the crippling income disparity along with the suffocating government control led the average joe on the street to do something. In Egypt it was peaceful, all the people who wanted change simply showed up and demanded that the president resign. After a bit of song and dance he ultimately did. The movements in all of these countries began at roughly the same time but progressed in different manner. Once Mubarak in Egypt finally stepped down, the other autocrats in the region began putting pressure on the remaining conflict nations to get their houses in order. When one dictator falls it weakens all the others. This brings us back to Libya.

The Libyan protests began relatively peacefully, but under pressure from neighboring despots the Libyan authority decided they needed to stamp this fire out fast. Qadhafi and his son vow to go down fighting, they promise that they won’t let anybody take them from power and blame outside aggressors for the turmoil in their country. While they bluster, their military personnel defect rather than following orders to gun down their family and friends. Qadhafi needs to break the protesters momentum and hold out long enough for them dissolve. For the protesters the most important thing is organization, if they can’t hold together Qadhafi and his rented forces will crush them.

Why does all of this matter to you? Libya produces oil, and we love the crude. More importantly if the protesters succeed the power vacuum in the region will either be filled by a new democracy (you can never have enough) or an even more brutal dictatorship. Either way the balance in the entire region will be severely affected.

Such Interesting Times

2011-02-23T22:07:00.002-05:00

There is an old, and misattributed saying that, when the Chinese want to curse someone they say 'may you live in interesting times' the idea being that times of peace are,well, less than interesting(ie boring). If you haven't noticed all of the interesting goings on in the world lately, I'll have to assume that you've been in a coma or trapped in a South American mine. As you learn to eat and pee without a tube, and as you try to re-acclimate your jelly spheres to the light I will attempt to get you caught up on all that you have missed. If I can, i will also try to clear up some of the things you may not have missed but weren't very clear. You should consider yourself warned however for ignorance is bliss and a little knowledge can cause a lot of misery.