Toy STory 3

I saw it last night. Charming. This sequel is every bit as good as the preceding Toy Stories were. Gotta hand it to Pixar, they can do good sequels. Their technique improves, the scenes are more and more realistic. The story is a heart breaker, Andy is grown up, 17, and going off to college. Andy's toys are in dire straights, given to a day care center run by a sadistic teddy bear. Escaping from daycare, they wind up in a packer truck headed for the dump. There is a happy ending. By a miracle they escape the dump's incinerator and make their way back to Andy, who boxes them up and donates them to a very little, very cute, girl. Brings a lump to your throat.

NSA to monitor internet

"US plans Cyber Shield to Utilities, Companies" read the headline in the Wall St Journal. Fearful of cyber attack that might shut down the electric grid or other critical infrastruction, NSA is running a secret surveillance program that gathers who knows what information to "protect" critical infrastructure from hackers.
The article went on to say that electric companies are using the public internet to remote control generators, switches, tranformer banks and other equipment. NSA claims that their top secret internet monitoring software can protect against cyber attack.
Trouble is, it won't work. If the hacker knows equipment internet addresses he can monitor traffic and decode it, learn the passwords, and then take control by transmitting perfectly genuine command messages. No way NSA can tell the difference between legitimate command messages from the electric companies and dangerous messages from hackers. Bits is bits, and they all look alike, ones or zeros.
Real fix. Command and control of critical infrastructure shall NEVER go over the public internet. Electric companies must be required to buy private circuits to operate the electric grid. The public internet is just too vulnerable. Unless we want the lights to go out all over the country just before the next Al Quada atrocity, we must harden the command and control network.

How far should the Nanny State go?

Table saws. Old power tool, the most essential power tool in the wood shop. I started out using my grandfather's Walker Turner 8 inch saw more than 50 years ago. That saw went to my brother, and I moved on to a radial arm saw.
These things are dangerous, no doubt about it. They will sever any body part coming in contact with the blade. I still have all ten fingers, but my brother, who is at least as careful as I am, got cut badly a few years ago.
Some years ago, a safety device was invented. Electronics sense contact between flesh and blade and a clever mechanism stops the blade so rapidly that fingers survive with minor scratches. They do an impressive demo, running a hot dog into the spinning blade. The hot dog emerges unsliced. The inventor has raised capital, started a company to make tablesaws incorporating his "SawStop" technology.
The trial lawyers are moving into the field. One of them sued a leading maker of tablesaws for selling ordinary saws, lacking the "SawStop" technology, after an accident. The court agreed with the trial lawyer, and ruled the maker liable for selling an ordinary tablesaw. The case is under appeal.
The trial lawyer found a sympathetic reporter at NPR to did a piece on All Things Considered advocating his position. The NPR piece advocated federal regulations requiring the new, and costly, "SawStop" technology to be made mandatory on all new tablesaws.
Is this wise or fair public policy? Today conventional tablesaws and SawStop tablesaws compete in the market place. Consumers largely buy the conventional saws because they are considerably cheaper. Most people are deciding that the extra safety of the "SawStop" isn't worth the substantial extra cost. Should federal regulation prevail over the wisdom of the market place? Is the extra safety worth the cost? Who should make this decision, the individual or the government?

NASA to make the Muslim world feel good ?

Damn, that's new. I thought NASA was about space travel, not touchy feely relations with a hostile culture. I mean we have the State Dept and the Peace Corp, and a raft of non governmental organizations all just so eager to improve US relations with the whole world. I think NASA should concentrate on space exploration and let the touchy feely stuff go to agencies that do that sort of thing full time.
Kennedy started up NASA to get the the moon, ahead of the Russians. NASA was supremely successful in this task. Once accomplished, NASA turned to building and then operating the Space Shuttle, Hubble Space Telescope, and a bunch of interplanetary missions. Shuttle being the big end of the stick. Trouble is, Shuttle turned out to be dangerous to fly, and expensive to boot. So the Shuttle is going away, and NASA doesn't have anything to do.
NASA tried to build a new ground to orbit system based on a brand new rocket and a great big capsule. They could have bought working rockets from Space X, Lockheed and Boeing, but instead squandered their funding on a brand new design. Obama hasn't decided what NASA should do in the space exploration business, so he has drafted them into the world wide PR campaign.
I liked it better when NASA did space travel.

Firefox; fix for "server not found" error.

The Firefoxers have been "improving" Firefox. One "improvement" which has been causing trouble since version 3.5 is "network prefetching". This software glitch tried to think ahead and go out and open websites before you need them. Unfortunately, it doesn't work right, and you draw a lot of "server not found" error screens. PITA.
There is a fix. You can turn network prefetching off and the bug goes away. I just did it, and it works like magic.
Just add a boolean variable named network.dns.disablePrefetch, with value "true" to firefox's config file. This file is named prefs.js and lives way down in Documents and Settings on the C drive. In principle you could merely edit this file with a text editor, but there is an easier way. From within Firefox go to pseudo-website about:config. Just put "about:config" on the address line as if it were a website you wanted to visit. Firefox will open prefs.js and display it in ASCII, in alphabetical order. Right click on a blank spot and Firefox will allow you to change values or add a new variable. Select "new" and enter network.dns.disablePrefetch as the name of the value. Assign it a type of Boolean, and a value of true. Fixes the problem.
Why has this bug persisted from Firefox 3.5 and into 3.6? The Firefox software people claim the problem comes from bugs in network routers and not Firefox. They may be technically correct, but that doesn't help us users much.

Firefox 3.6

Firefox 3.6 isn't as good at connecting to web sites as previous versions. You keep getting to the "Server is unavailable" error window.
Small work around. Try the "refresh" button in the toolbar. It's a blue curled up arrow, right next the the red X "stop loading" button. Works better than the "try again" button on the error window.

Sunday Pundits (again)

ABC had Paul Krugman calling for yet another stimulus bill. Last one wasn't big enough. Krugman is a NY Times op ed writer and a Nobel prize winning economist. Listening to him this morning makes you wonder why this turkey won the Nobel. He starts out explaining than another $500 billion or so makes no difference in the budget deficit. Then he claims that there is a difference between "long term" deficit and "short term" deficit. I don't see that, deficit is deficit.
What Krugman doesn't understand is the US economy is the biggest in the world, by a lot. We have a debt approaching 100% of US gross national product (GNP). That's more money than there is in all the world. We are too big, and need too much money to be able to borrow it all. Little dinky place like Greece can borrow 100% of its GNP, and because their GNP is tiny, the money is there. The US GNP is too huge to finance. The Obama budget runs trillions and trillions of dollars in debt, for ever. Today we can sell T-bills at 3.5% interest, mostly because the US government is considered the soundest investment on the planet. Tomorrow that won't work. Today the Chinese are raking in more money than their economy can handle, so they are parking it in a safe place, namely T-bills. Tomorrow their economy will be big enough to absorb all their earning and they will stop buying T-bills. Look for interest on T-bills to jump up from 3.5%.
In short, Nobel prize winning Krugman thinks he sees the light at the end of the tunnel. He doesn't realize that it is the headlight of an onrushing train.