If you don’t know what that is, you must not be into computers…so I’ll tell you.  It’s a $25 (or $35) computer, smaller than a credit card – though thicker – that uses an ARM processor (like in most mobile phones and tablets.)

The whole thing only uses 5W of power, and runs Linux (at least for a start.)  There’s videos of it online running XBMC (popular media server software) and doing all sorts of interesting things.  There’s also an addon (already) called the Gertboard that will let you control devices and motors and so on.

What I like the most about it is that I could put a computer – a fully-capable computer – anywhere I could supply 5W of electricity.  I could control things with it, take pictures, really do whatever I wanted.

To a lot of people, the Raspberry Pi represents a cheap computer.  And though that is certainly true, to me it means more of a chance to hack stuff together.  5W isn’t a lot of power – it’s low enough to run on battery power and/or cheap battery backup power, it’s small and it’s very capable.

Besides all that, it doesn’t run some strange embedded operating system that nobody uses – it run Linux – so there’s an absolute ton of software already out there for it.

To me the represents a new opportunity to hack.  To play with a new system and see what you can make it do…see what you can make it control or where you can make it fit.  For me, this brings back memories of sitting in a friend’s basement (you know who you are, Pete) with his 300 baud modem to see what it could do and how far it could go.  Those wild-west days of whatever went that passed from our consciousness a long time ago.

So it’s not just a chance to play with a new toy…it’s the chance to actually learn something new, and maybe even to invent something.

We truly do live in interesting times.

And though I suppose it makes sense, as they’ve been unable to keep up with the digital photographic revolution, it’s going to be sad to see the old girl go.

My whole life, the name Kodak has been synonymous with photography. From the Super 8 movies my Dad shot of us as children, to the film and paper used for my high school pictures, to the Kodachrome slides I shot in the 90′s, Kodak has been with me the whole way.

Of course, the advent of the digital camera has seen the end to all that, and I knew in my heart when I bought my first digital camera – a Canon S10 Digital Elph with all of 2.1 Megapixels – that the day would come when ‘classic’ photography would go away.

Yes, there are still niche markets for things like reverse-engineered Polaroid film (The Impossible Project) and there are still people out there creating daguerrotypes, but the mainstream went digital years ago and there’s no going back.

One thing that’s changed and that most people don’t realize is why people take the pictures they take. I remember when ‘the camera’ only came out for special occasions like Christmas and birthdays, and of course you took it on vacation. Just about every picture of me as a child is of me at Christmas, on my birthday, or somewhere on vacation.

Comparing this to the pictures we have of our kids, all of which are digital, you can see a real difference. Sure, we have the birthday shots, and we have the Christmas shots, but we’ve also got loads of Easter shots, playtime shots, walking-down-the-street shots – we’ve got shots of the kids doing just about anything you can think of, and we’ve got thousands of them. Pushing the button on a digital camera costs nothing, so there’s no disincentive to taking another shot, or another 100 shots.  Though the subject of the photos is as important as it always was, the photograph itself is a worthless commodity item because it’s just so cheap to create.

Add to that the ever-decreasing price of global data transmission and you get services like Facebook. Yes, Facebook, where not only do I get to see pictures of what people are doing or where they are, I can easily see them while they’re still on the slopes or wherever it is they are while they’re still there.  It also lets me see critical things like what people are about to eat for dinner…or what their dog ate for dinner.

Because pictures are so cheap to create, we’re snapping the things at an alarming rate. I can’t find any numbers that look credible to me, but I don’t think it would come as a surprise to anyone if it were that 10 billion digital pictures were taken every day.

And because the things are so cheap to create, we don’t put the same value on them that we used to. Pictures are disposable things now – valueless things that exist only as a stream of digital bits – and that’s how we treat them.

I also worry about keeping our digital photo library backed up, but that’s another article.

It’s a real shame, too, because negatives and slides are tangible, valuable objects that have stood the test of time.  And you’ll never just stumble across a hard disk drive in a shoebox in the back of the closet.

Since Robert Dziekanski was cruelly taken down by four RCMP officers with substantial assistance from such a Taser, I have been watching this with great interest.  And I say it’s about damn time.

For Taser to maintain for so very long that their guns are absolutely harmless to all simply defies reason.  Anything that can make someone involuntarily drop to the floor and writhe in pain cannot possibly be harmless, yet through aggressive litigation they have managed to silence law enforcement, courts, lawyers and even medical examiners.

Tasers were originally approved as a “less-lethal” alternative to the use of a firearm in disabling dangerous suspects.  I don’t know specifically when it happened, but somewhere along the way it became okay to zap anything that didn’t immediately succumb to a spoken word or two – whether they were a danger to anything or anyone, including themselves – became irrelevant.

For that irrelevance, I blame Taser.  They present reams and reams of research and evidence that they have bought and paid for as though it is the empirical scientific data it is not.  It only serves to reassure the people that use them that they will do no harm.  And if it will do no harm, what harm is there in zapping an old lady when she’s small and you’re obviously huge?

Not that it matters.  Our police do need something that is less lethal than a gun, and that thing might as well be a Taser.  It is less lethal, after all.  And I suppose I’d rather be knocked down with electricity than with a hail of bullets just about any day of the week.

But let’s at least acknowledge that these things are dangerous.  Let’s admit that they can cause grievous bodily harm, and let’s get the people who carry them to treat them with the same respect they would treat a firearm.  As long as the capacity to kill is there, it cannot be ignored.  To do so makes fools of all of us.

It does strike me that Big Tobacco did much the same thing for a very long time.  Cigarettes weren’t addictive, they weren’t dangerous, they just tasted great and made you a sexy cowboy or something.  Of course, now we know they were lying through their teeth the whole time, and I suspect the same sort of revelation from Taser in the years to come.

So, come on, Taser.  Fess up to these things being dangerous.  Sell them as something that is dangerous.  I’m sure Glock or Smith & Wesson or Colt or Browning or whoever doesn’t get sued when someone gets shot by a gun they made, so put yourselves in the same boat.  It won’t stop the police from buying them, but I suppose you might sell less cartridges for them as they would hopefully be used much less.

As I sit here right now, a wire-cutting machine is making its way through the riser tube on the top of the blowout preventer.  And through the cut that is being made, an absolute torrent of oil is coming forth.

Just a couple minutes ago @ 11:07PM:

You can see the oil starting to gush out past the wire into the coin-slot that has been cut.  It looks to be under rather high pressure.

11:11PM:

The notch hasn’t been cut much further in by now, but you can see that the amount of oil forcing itself out has increased dramatically.  And all this while the broken part of the riser continues to gush at seemingly the same rate as before.

One gets the sense that cutting off that kinked pipe is going to release an absolute torrent of oil, and they had better have that cap ready to go or this is going to be really, really bad.

11:14PM:

Even worse now.

2.  I bet Tiger Woods’ wife Elin has an extra-large putter.  So she can hit 2 balls at once.

This e-mail and its attachments are confidential and intended for use by the above named recipient(s) only. If you are not the intended recipient, please note that any use, modification, dissemination, edition or reproduction (either in whole or partially) of this e-mail and/or its attachments, or of the information contained herein, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail by mistake, please notify the sender immediately, and immediately delete this e-mail with its attachments and any copy of it from your computer system.

Now, IANAL, but it seems to me that if I receive something from someone that was unsolicited…I can do whatever I want with it.  I can modify it, disseminate it, edit it or reproduce it in any form that my little heart desires.

Indeed, that’s the law.  The real law.  And no lawyer can write anything that breaks the law.

Strictly prohibited?  Funny stuff.

I would think that the only possible grey area would be that if I had received an email that was not actually addressed to me – but that really doesn’t happen any more (if it indeed ever really did) – so big deal.

What goads me the most about this “legal” warning is that the original writer of it was obviously relying on the gullibility of the masses to protect…something…should it manage to slip out. Big, fancy, legalese to confuse and dumbfound us mere mortals.  Kind of like getting a DMCA takedown notice for something that you wrote, but that somebody else might not like.

Anyway, I just wish that people would grow up and get rid of that silly, silly warning.  Maybe replace it with:

If you have happened to get this message by mistake, we would appreciate it if you could let us know so that we can fix the problem on our end.  We’d also like to ask that you then delete this message.  Thank you very much, your friends at Company X.

Now go and get that done.

This does not, of course, mean that they have something that they can mount on a missile.  And from what we’ve seen, it’s not like they have a working long-range missile anyway.  By most accounts, it will take them at least a couple more tests to get to that point.

The Obama Administration has reacted the same way that previous ones have.  A warning of dire consequences and an attempt to restart talks.

DPRK has responded by declaring the 1953 truce to be void, and every time anyone says anything – seemingly anything at all – they call it an Act of War.

So where does this leave us?

I’m beginning to think that this is all a big joke, and I’m really starting to think that the best approach to North Korea would be to ignore it.  Completely.  Like so:

NK: “Hey, USA!  We’re going to test a nuke!”
USA: (Yawn) “What’s on CBS?”
NK: “Really, we’re going to test, and we’re restarting Yongbyon!”
USA: “Oh look, Dave’s got Madonna on again – we can’t miss this.”
NK: “Okay, we’re going to do it now!”
USA: “click….click….”

And really, after that, who cares?  Why should we care what they do?

Here are a couple of reasons why we’re supposed to care:

• North Korea has enough arillery in range of Seoul to flatten the city in short order, and doing that would be a bad thing.
• They have close to 1.2 Million-strong standing army, and everyone else that can carry a chopstick is said to be in reserve.  Basically, the country is a barracks.
• They might have a nuke or two they could deliver on the back of a truck.
• We’re scared of them.

Seriously, I’m tired of it.  Tired of it, and I’m nobody.  I have no power, no armies at my command, and I’m 39 years old which means I don’t even remember the Korean War.  And I’m so tired of this crap.  It needs to end so the rest of us can get on with our lives.

I’m worried that Kim Jong Il is losing it.  Losing his grip on reality, and maybe losing his grip on his country.  It makes me want to tell a story.

Over the weekend I visited an old friend of mine for his 40th birthday party.  He held a poker game, $20 buyin, so we played.  I lost a couple hands on bad beats that could have gone the other way, and then I went on tilt.  I went on tilt because I was frustrated and I wasn’t thinking clearly.  I already lost the game and it was going to take something big to get me back in it.  So, in for a penny – in for a pound.

And I think the DPRK is on tilt right now.  The thing that’s kept me believing that they’ve always been about bluster and brinksmanship – but not actual action – is that Kim Jong Il likes being alive.  He drinks Hennesy, like show tunes, writes his own plays and so forth.  He hasn’t been a man that you would think is just plain nuts.

But, with him havnig suffered a stroke and obviously looking very gaunt in recent pictures, I’m wondering if he’s still playing with a full deck.

It’s time to call the bluff.

The object of fighting any War is to gain security. In this regard, I did and still do believe that we have done the right thing in Afghanistan. The right thing is not always the easy thing, but to deprive Al-Qaeda of their Taliban protectors and to attempt to return Afghanistan to the community of nations is a noble effort. We harbour no doubts that Afghanistan was the staging ground for numerous attacks, including those of September 11, 2001.

I also believe that the USA had to hit back after those attacks. To sit idle or to engage in protracted diplomacy would have sent the wrong message to those who would wish harm to the USA and its allies.

But Iraq, well, that’s an entirely different kettle of fish.

When I saw Colin Powell, a man for whom I had nothing but the greatest of respect, give his speech at the UN Security Council on the eve of the Iraq War, I was in awe. Not only was the man whom many would consider one of the USA’s foremost statesmen of the day putting himself in the spotlight to relay to us what the American Administration knew about Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but over his right shoulder sat George Tenet – then director of the CIA. Well, I thought, if he’s got Tenet sitting behind him – by extension, putting his own reputation on the line – then that must mean that the very best intelligence available has been brought to bear on this. And they must be telling the truth.

A few short years later, we know that the evidence that Powell presented was entirely fabricated. Why, we’re not sure, but Saddam did try to kill Dubya’s daddy and Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et. al. wanted to finish the job that Bush Senior did not. I refuse to believe that a man of Powell’s unimpeachable reputation knew that he was being hoodwinked, and I believe it had a lot to do with his departure from the State Department.

But, pulling back from the whys and hows, let’s focus on what the United States might have been done with this $1,600,000,000,000.00 …other than going to War.

Dependence on Oil

Let’s see. I remember reading something – perhaps in Scientific American or Wired – that said it would take roughly $100 Billion of government investment over 10 years to develop the remaining bits and pieces that are holding back widespread adoption of Hydrogen as a fuel for vehicles. Things like more efficient ways to make it, and especially a safer storage tank to put into cars to hold the stuff. There is no doubt that these things are within the technology that we have now or could develop if given enough resources (money) to pursue them.

Imagine that we didn’t care about Oil any more. Just imagine what it would be like to live in a World where North America stood at the cutting edge of the Hydrogen Millennium. We wouldn’t have to worry about emissions targets any longer, and the export of technology to other countries wanting to catch up would reap trillions in trade. Certainly we would all benefit.

So, $100,000,000,000.00 later, we have a Hydrogen Economy and we’re all non-polluting. Sheer genius, and all for 1/16th the cost of the wars up to now.

Now what do we do with the other $1,500,000,000,000.00? A lot, to be sure.

Cure the Sick

How about we throw $100 Billion at Cancer research and another $100 Billion at AIDS? If it’s enough money to convert us all to Hydrogen, it must be able to do some good against these killers. Of course, the cleaner air we’d all have from the Hydrogen power might well get us a head start, but I would think that if $200,000,000,000.00 couldn’t cure AIDS or Cancer it would surely give us a very great number of advances and other things we could use.

So now we’re down to $1,300,000,000,000.00. That money sure goes fast when you’re doing good work. Think how many guns, trucks and tanks didn’t get made while we were making the World a better place for everyone.

Speaking of which…

Making the World a Better Place

I think that if the World is ever going to really be a better place we need to better educate the people that inhabit it. And that means seriously reaching out to developing nations and giving – yep, giving – them what they need to educate their children.

A good start to that might be the OLPC project. Negroponte’s done an amazing thing here: He’s given the World the ability to put a computer in the hands of every kid on the planet. The only thing that holds it back is the cost.

So let’s order a Billion of them. If the project is ever to reach that $100.00 per unit cost that was originally touted, it will be when we’re building a billion of ‘em. So the straight-up cost would be $100,000,000,000.00 for the laptops. Let’s double that to allow for bribing all the politicians and dictators in the World that don’t want this for their people, and then let’s triple it to allow for distribution, repairs and contingency.

So that’s $300,000,000,000.00. Not a small amount, but can you really put a value on educating the entire planet?

And we’re down to an even $1,000,000,000,000.00. That’s a nice round number, isn’t it? And in the process we’ve developed a Hydrogen Economy, very likely cured AIDS, Cancer and who knows what else, and we’ve given every kid on the planet a computer with which to propel themselves from poverty and enrich themselves, their families, and their nations.

And to think we could have been killing people the whole time!

Conquer World Hunger

There will be people out there that will say that spending 300 billion dollars on computers is the wrong thing to do in a World that’s so hungry. Well, I’m not going to get into the whole “There is enough food for everyone” argument, so let’s just toss another 300 billion at that.

Not all the billion kids we’d give laptops to are going hungry to begin with, and 300 billion would feed (at $24 per month) 1,041,666,666 kids for a year. Or 520,833,333 kids for 2 years, or 260,416,666 kids for three years, and so forth. However you slice it, it would feed a lot of kids for a long time.

So now we’re down to $700 billion dollars. I’m starting to feel a little poor, aren’t you?

Really Make the World Safer

Let’s pick the top 10 most distressed countries on the face of the Earth and offer $100 for every firearm turned in. Let’s spend 10 billion per country, meaning about $7.5 billion for buyback and $2.5 billion for administration, bribes and destruction. For $100 billion dollars we could rid the World of 750,000,000 guns.

I think that ought to be a lot of them, and we’re still left with 600 billion dollars.

So let’s get a little crazy!

Fusion Power

For all this Hydrogen fuel and everything else, we need massive sources of safe, cheap power. And fusion is the way.

Unlike Nuclear Fission, which all current power-producing reactors use, Nuclear Fusion does not produce harmful wastes. The problem with Fusion is the immense amounts of power that are needed just to start the process and contain it. Another problem is the fantastic amount of money that a real power-producing fusion reactor is going to cost to build.

The current pinnacle of fusion research is ITER. It’s supposed to cost about $7.6 billion to build and operate, and I think we should put $200 billion toward building two full-size reactors once we learn our lessons from ITER.

And that puts us down to $400 billion.

Finally…

Climate Remediation

We’ve messed up the planet pretty badly. We’ve pumped trillions of tons of CO2 back into the atmosphere that Gaia herself took hundreds of billions of years to sequester, and we’ve done it all in less than a couple of hundred years.

There are some very smart people out there that have come up with methods of atmospheric CO2 capture. I say we give them what money we have left and see how far it takes us toward cleaning up our own mess.

I don’t really think $400 billion will be enough to do the whole job, but it should at least get the ball rolling in a major way. Perhaps these programs could be sustained through taxes on countries and companies that still emit CO2, but that’s a political decision…and I’m not a politician.

Let me know what you think

What would you do differently? Have I missed something obvious?

That’s right. When I pay with cash, if my change is $1.59, I won’t take the four or nine pennies that will be foisted upon me.

It’s not like the “Take-a-Penny, Leave-a-Penny” tray you see in a lot of places, where you take your pennies and toss them in there. No, this is a more powerful statement than that, it’s “I say No to Pennies.”

So, say no to pennies. You can have a whole pocket full of the things and still not be able to buy a stick of gum, so let’s just ditch the things and move on with our lives. The more of us that don’t want pennies, the less pennies will be needed, and the less it will cost us all anyway.

People who know me would tell you that I’m rarely at a loss for words, but watching this video – of a man who wasn’t threatening anyone and merely needed assistance – disgusts me. It just disgusts me.

Yes, he was agitated. Yes, he was sweating. Shit, if I’d just spent 10 hours sitting in an airport after being on an aircraft (for the first time, I understand) for who-knows-how-long from Poland, I might be agitated myself.

The RCMP initially said that the encounter was initially amiable and then degraded and the officers were left with no choice but to stun the poor man. And that was, and forevermore will be, total bullshit. I don’t see any of that in this video. Not 25 seconds – TWENTY FIVE SECONDS – after you see the first RCMP officer enter the picture they are shocking him. First they surround him, he recognizes they are police and certainly seems to me to acknowledge that.

Then some words are exchanged…whatever they might have been…and then you see Mr. Dziekanski quickly raise his hands in submission. You can’t see why it is that he raised his hands, but I would surely bet that this is the moment when the Taser was produced by the officer with his back to the camera.

He raises his hands, even cowers a little. To me that body language means submission. But the officer then raises the weapon, causing Mr. Dziekanski to try to run for cover, and he is then shot and given the first of two to four shocks. Then he’s dogpiled by the RCMP officers…and then it’s all over for Robert Dziekanski.

And to think the Coroner could not determine cause of death. What a complete load of bullshit.

I think Paul Pritchard (who shot the video) should be given a medal. That’s right, a medal. Give him the Order of Canada and whatever other accolades we can pile upon this man, and hold him up as a shining example of freedom in action.

For if it were not for Mr. Pritchard just happening to be in the right place at the right time, and having the foresight to film the proceedings for all to see, we most certainly would only ever have the official RCMP story on what happened that day. That he had to sue to get the tape back is simply amazing to me.

And that absolutely disgusts me. When the hell did the stun gun go from last-ditch-but-for-the-pistol protective weapon to something that is deployed against someone that hasn’t even threatened physical harm? It’s now a tool for compliance rather than the life-saver it was sold to the public as. I say bullshit. Ban the damn things.

The RCMP are the face of Canada to the World. More people in more places recognize the Red Tunic and Stetson hat than damn near anything else – certainly more than any other Police Force in the World. And now what are they? No better than jack-booted thugs.

The whole affair is morally repugnant. And I think the RCMP are probably glad that Robert Dziekanski is dead…for at least he cannot now sue them for damages.

I’m ashamed of the RCMP, and I can only hope that I don’t run across one if I’m walking down the street one night, drunk and with a stapler in my hand. I could end up dead.