Hacking Predator

Even the Wall St Journal's reporters can fall for technical baffle gab. The enemy has been receiving video from our Predator drones for nearly a year. This is kinda serious, it essentially puts US drone reconnaissance at the disposal of the enemy. Damn near as good as having your own fleet of drones. The drone electronics broadcast their video in clear, not encrypted.
The obvious fix is to encrypt the video in the drone. Encryption at video rates (18 megabits/sec) could be done on a printed circuit board maybe 5 by 7 inches. There is room inside the drones for such a card. So why hasn't that been done?
"The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the US, Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes."
Journal reporters Siobhan Gorman, Yoichi J. Dreazen and August Cole printed this bit of malarkey in a front page WSJ story Thursday. They should have known better.
Networks move bits from place to place. They don't care what the bits are, what they say, whether they are encrypted or not. All the network does is move the bits from one place to another. Nothing in the network need be changed to move encrypted video. The unnamed officials are offering excuses and bad excuses at that.
And three clueless journalism school graduates fell for it. Even the best newspapers go brain dead occasionally.

NH Hampshire does its bit for the housing market

According to NPR, NH building code will require sprinklers in all residential construction, starting next year. Just the thing to spark the sale of new houses, shiny chrome sprinkler heads sticking out of the living room ceiling. To say nothing of the extra few thousand dollars added to the price of the house.
This bit of user friendliness is brought to you by the fire departments of America who lobby for anything fire suppressive. The firemen are the largest group on the building code committees and they pushed this one.
The insurance companies did a good imitation of a hole in the ground on this issue. They figure it's a wash. Fewer fire claims but a whole bunch more water damage claims when the sprinklers sprinkle down the house when they shouldn't.
We are probably stuck with it although the NH legislature could overturn if they cared. If we can do some good work next November, maybe this irritant could be rolled back.

Pratt & Whitney goes to Russia

The Russian Irkut company selected Pratt & Whitney engines for their new MS-21 medium sized airliner. Pratt will supply the ultra modern geared turbofan PW1000G engine.
Hmm. The Russians are going to stay in the airliner business. Right now Aeroflot advertises that ALL their international flights use Boeing aircraft. The old Russian built Tupolevs are uncomfortable for passengers, hard to maintain, and scary to ride in. And plenty of them are still in service on Russian domestic flights. Looks like the Russians want to fly in made in Russia airliners even if the engines come from America.
That's the way to bring unemployment down, make world class products and export them. The Russians came to Pratt & Whitney because their engines are the best, not because they love Americans.

How many CAT scans are being billed?

Listening to NPR this morning. Someone was ranting about CAT scans, excessive Xray exposure from. The ranter did not, as is typical of ranters, have any numbers on the amount of radition (number of REMs) in a scan. Journalism school graduates are innumerate. This one slipped up and let out that 72 million CAT scans were billed last year.
Wow. The population of the US is only 300 million, that means nearly a quarter of the population was CAT scanned last year. That's a hell of a lot of CAT scans. If each scan cost $1000, that's $7.2 billion worth of scans.
Are all these scans necessary? I doubt it. Would they have occurred if the patient had to pay for them? I doubt it.
Note: I used to design CAT scanners many years ago.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (movie)

Well, the movie made it to DVD the other day. My little low speed video store had a whole wall of copies ready to rent. Didn't seem like all that many had been rented. So I rented one, mostly 'cause they didn't have anything better.
Half Blood Prince is the weakest of the Harry Potter movies. It suffers from the curse of the sound man, you can't understand the dialogue. Poor mike placement, score overpowers the dialogue, and the actors mumble. The plot is difficult to follow, even for someone who has read the book. The scene jumps from here to there and back again in a pseudo random manner. For instance in a dramatic scene Voldemort's followers attack Harry. They throw a ring of fire around the house and Harry goes tearing off thru a head high field of some-thing-or-other, wand out, in hot pursuit. Lots of zap flash bang, but at the end of the scene you can't tell what happened. Did Harry get Bellatrix? Did someone scare her off? Did Bellatrix kill someone? The scene fades out leaving me wondering what happened and what was the point. The final quest with Dumbledore for the Horcrux is unclear. How did Dumbledore know to search this wave swept rock? Why does Dumbledore incapcitate himself drinking from the font? How does Harry fight off the cave monsters and drag Dumbledore back to Hogwarts? And why does Dumbledore send Harry away and let the bad guys kill him? In short, the movie ends on an unsatisfactory note, Dumbledore dead for no good reason, the Horcruxes still at large, and Harry vowing to leave Hogwarts and pursue his anti-Voldemort quest.
Finally, the camera work is poor. Dark unlit scenes, low contrast, and you can't figure out where you are. A lot of "fade out the color to black and white" effects which are irritating to this viewer who thinks his color TV is dying when the color goes away. Shots of the Hogwart's Express steaming across an open midwest prairie, rather than English countryside. How did the train get onto the prairie from lush green England?
Too bad. And no wonder it doesn't seem to be renting all that well.

Dr. Christina Romer on Meet the Press

She is a middle aged woman, blond, bright red suit, no jewelry and little makeup. She is on, or head of, the presidents council of economic advisors. This is the first time I even heard her name. Host David Gregory pressed her to explain how Obama could do yet more economic stimulus without going deeper into debt. In the course of this discussion she said "The administration has down everything possible in the health care bill to reduce the cost of health care". Gregory let her get away with this spin/lie/whopper/untruth/what-do-you-call-it. In actual fact, health care cost reduction means malpractice reform, selling insurance across state lines, and allowing the import of drugs from all first world countries.
None of which is in the healthcare bill. She knows it and so does Gregory.

Getting charts out of Excel

Like many, I use Excel for charting nearly any kind of data. And, if I need the chart in any other MS Office application (Word, PowerPoint etc) I just cut and paste. What about moving an Excel chart to a non MS application or the web?
It can be done but the how-to is non-obvious. You have to do "Save as WebPage" from the file menu. This produces TWO files on your disk. The first file has the extension .HTML which is a wrapper of HTML code, and a second .gif file which is the actual graphic file of your chart. The .gif can be uploaded, merged or even edited with a graphics edit program.