Electric Smart Grid is hackable

Simmering along under the radar is the "Smart Grid" plan. At bottom "Smart Grid" would let the power company turn off your water heater and air conditioner when they are running out of electricity. The electric companies have to build enough power plants to meet peak load (warm summer afternoon or cold winter evening) but these expensive plants sit idle, earning no revenue, during most of the day. If PSNH could switch of customers air conditioners on hot summer afternoons they would not have to build so many power plants. They save money, we customers can no longer count on electric appliances working when we need them.
To add smart to the grid, electric meters and major appliances are connected to the internet to accept orders from PSNH. Major weakness, Internet hackers can fake out anything connected to the internet, with the result that your appliances can be switched off anytime someone else wants to. Not good.

Good article on US Pakistani relations

I saw this on Instapundit. I've traveled in Pakistan and this article sounds about right to me. One thing the author omits. The Pakistanis I met and talked with were VERY interested in obtaining American support for /alliance with Pakistan against India, China, Al Quada and the various other bogymen out there. They all had problems with various aspects of US policy, but they all saw the US as powerful, reasonably benevolent, essential, and a great place to live.
There are a few things to remember about Pakistan. It's big, 160 million people. About 20 million live in and around Karachi, do manufacturing and trading, have radio and TV and read newspapers. The rest of them, 140 million, are tenant farmers, scratching out a crop with hand tools. No radio, TV, newspapers, many are illiterate. But they are not stupid. When their landlord runs for public office, they know to vote for him lest something bad happen to them. So the majority of Pakistan's elected parliment is landlords, with little sense of responsibility to the general welfare of Pakistan. Every 15 years or so the corruption of the parliament gets so bad that the Pakistani Army steps in to clean things up. After some time goes by, the army will relinquish control to the elected civilian leadership. Pakistan is in that phase right now. They have gone thru this cycle two or three times in the 60 years since Pakistan became Pakistan. They will probable keep on doing it. The Pakistani Army is highly respected and enjoys as much or more confidence among the population as any Pakistani politician.

Spruce up your blog

>Spruce Up Your Blog
>Choose from thousands of Widgetbox widgets to add to your blog. Slideshows, Twitter, >Polls, Countdowns and more.
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So it says on my blogger dashboard. Question. Does anyone know just what these spruce ups do, other than clutter up the page? How many of them slow down access to your blog?

Why is the US economy still on the rocks?

70% of the US economy was consumer spending. Cars and groceries and clothes and appliances, restaurant meals, amusement park tickets, home renovations, boats and RV's, sporting goods. Trouble is, buying this stuff can be postponed. You can always squeeze another year out of the old car, wear old clothes a little longer, do without a new flatscreen as long as the old CRT still works.
Today, any consumer with two brain cells firing has to be worried about losing his/her job. With that hanging over them, the rational reaction is save money and don't buy everything except groceries. So consumer spending is down, a lot. And will stay down until the consumers feel a little safer in their jobs. With 70% of the economy on vacation, demand is down, and manufacturers are not hiring. Which makes people fear for their jobs all the more. It's a vicious circle. The last time this happened, it took World War II to snap us out of it. Nobody wants to do World War III just to restore full employment in the US.
Just watched Meet the Press, with Allan Greenspan, Mayor Bloomberg, Ed Rendel, and some others. No one mentioned this, not even Greenspan who used to be a pretty sharp Fed chairman.
We are in trouble until our leadership figures out what makes the US economy tick.

Wikileaks and leakers

Wikileaks has posted an incredible amount of classified reports from Afghanistan. This mass of stuff reveals names and home villages of interpreters, and much demoralizing information about Afghan allies which hurts the US cause and aids the Taliban. There have been loud calls to censor Wikileaks.
Actually we ought to focus on the leaker. Who is it that got their hands on 90,000 secret documents ? Did he have a clearance? How could any one individual have a need to know that many things. Did he/she take advantage of the gaping loopholes in Windows security to make his haul? Were the computers holding this mass of classified properly secured? Like no connection to the public internet, autorun disabled, Long and strong passwords changed every 60 days, virus protection up to date, removable media devices (CD, floppy, thumbdrive) removed.

Whither NASA?

Or, how to get men into space. NASA wanted to scrap the Space Shuttle and build a new booster and space capsule, kind of an enlarged Gemini system. Reason, the shuttle is expensive and dangerous and old. The new booster (Aries) was going to be able to loft as much weight as the Shuttle, about 24,000 kilograms or 24 metric tons. The NASA people were all kinds of enthusiastic about doing a new rocket design, and they pushed ahead as fast as possible and actually flew the first prototype before the Obama administration cut off the funding.
NASA should have simply bought either the Atlas V or the Delta IV boosters from SpaceX. These boosters have been launching communications satellites for years and have as much lift capacity as Aries or the Shuttle. NASA kept saying that Atlas and Delta were not "man rated" and thus unacceptable and dangerous. This was a smokescreen intended to let NASA have the fun of doing a new design, in house. "Man rating" is a paperwork exercise to document every single part that goes into the rocket on the idea that after doing a load of paperwork, the part wouldn't dare fail.
Now the Congress is getting into the act. Their plan is to keep the Shuttle flying and avoid laying off the 10,000 man Shuttle workforce. Which was the major reason for ending the shuttle program, all those bodies cost a lot of money. Senator Bill Nelson, D-FLa. is spearheading that effort.
Then, scenting a chance at a contract, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne is proposing a pair of new booster designs, one using LOX and liquid hydrogen, the other using LOX and kerosene (jet fuel).
So what is really going down? Probably a struggle between the cost savers who want to reduce NASA to a tourist attraction at Cape Canaveral, and pork processors who want to keep the massive shuttle workforce on the payroll.

Chevy Aveo roadtest

So I selected "economy" as the renta car type, and sure enough, I get a Chevy Aveo sedan (not the hatchback). Drove it for a week. A singularly unimpressive little econobox. Not that there is anything truly wrong with it, it seats four grownups and has a trunk big enough to take four "fit-in-airline-overhead-rack" bags. The radio and the air conditioner work.
On the down side, the styling is somewhere between utilitarian and downright ugly. It's tall, and feels tippy on the highway. The engine is puny and loud. Gas mileage was 27 in mixed thruway city driving. My Caddy Deville used to get 27 on the highway, the old VW Beetle would do 30, and a Subaru will do 32. Seems a shame not to get world class gas mileage in return for giving up size and comfort. In daylight it is difficult to impossible to tell what gear it's in. After dark the tranny shifter is illuminated and you can see whether you are in R for reverse or D for Drive, but in daylight, forget it.
Upon return, my Mercury Grand Marquis felt so quiet and so comfortable after a week in the cramped and noisy Aveo.
Chevy is asking $12K base for this thing and $15K with options. For less money than that you can get a much nicer used car.