Huxley vs Orwell

 Rico says his friend Dave forwards this:

Confusion in Argentina

Rico says he knows it's not the same movie, but it should be...

Chief Meanie: It's no longer a blue world, Max. Where could we go?
Max: Argentina?

School for girls

Tirdad Derakhshani has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about a project by Angelina Jolie:

Angelina Jolie is bringing grrrl power to Afghanistan. Brad Pitt's partner has opened an all-girls elementary school in a village outside Kabul. She told E! News she picked the area because of its population of refugees, people often deprived of social services. She says more than two hundred girls have enrolled.
Jolie will fund the school through sales of her Style of Jolie jewelry line. "Beyond enjoying the artistic satisfaction of designing these jewels, we are inspired by knowing our work is also serving the mutual goal of providing for children in need," Jolie told E! News.

Rico says it's nice to see Hollywood doing something good for the world...

Surprise! I'm guilty!

Barbara Boyer and Jacqueline L. Urgo have an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about an unlikely confession:

Steven L. Goff (photo) first landed in jail as a young man who made "bad and stupid decisions" during his "misspent youth," he wrote in an online profile. Mostly for drug possession and distribution, he noted. Now, at 41, the Ventnor man is back in jail after he surrendered recently, making a surprise confession to the murder of Frederick Hart, then fifteen, of Galloway Township, nearly 23 years ago. "I did the crime and I'm prepared to do... whatever I gotta do," Goff said at his first court appearance before Atlantic County Superior Court Judge Michael A. Donio in Mays Landing. "I was prepared to enter a guilty plea right here and now," Goff said.
The judge interrupted: "Whoa, let's back up..." advising Goff he had not been charged nor indicted, and was entitled to a lawyer.
At times crying and struggling to compose himself, Goff said he could not afford a lawyer, and would request a public defender only if it expedited the process. He remains in jail with bail set at one million dollars.
Before Goff surrendered, authorities did not know for sure that Hart had been murdered.
Hart disappeared in May of 1990, but it was not until December of 1991 that a hunter discovered his remains in a wooded area behind the Clubs Condominiums in Galloway Township. By then, the body was so decomposed that authorities could not say conclusively how the teen had died.
Authorities have not said whether Goff told them why he killed Hart, how the two knew each other, or why Goff came forward now.
In his rambling online profile, Goff shared his thoughts on controlling information: "I firmly believe that information and its control in content, creation and distribution to the masses... is more powerful than oil or gold," he wrote on a website for online stock traders.
Goff walked into the Galloway Police Department and confessed to fatally stabbing Hart on 7 May 1990, when he was eighteen, authorities said. He is charged with murder and a weapons offense. On a Twitter account, Goff used a picture of himself and his dog, a beagle mix. A quote beneath the picture says: "You miss a hundred percent of the shots you never take."
According to his online profile for Stockpickr!, Goff originally was from Egg Harbor. Police said he most recently lived in an apartment on Hillside Avenue in Ventnor. In the online profile, he said he worked as a plumber and electrician, and he keeps few friends. He mentions nothing of a family.
Goff detailed that he was in jail from the ages of 18 to 24. Having a felony conviction limited what he could do in life, which angered him because "I have some big ideas...", he wrote.
According to state criminal records, Goff's troubles with police began as a teenager. He was charged with burglary in Atlantic County in 1990 and in Burlington County in 1991. He pleaded guilty both times, records show. In 1992, he was sentenced to a five-year sentence, with a mandatory two years, on a conspiracy charge. He was paroled in 1994.
In the profile, Goff did not include a political affiliation, only that "I'm for the greater good of our species". For religious views, he listed agnostic/atheist, "a man of science and logic, not faith". His real passion, he wrote, is the stock market. He called himself an "economics junkie." He also wrote that he dreamed of being discovered for his economic and social strategies, and that he would like to work most for Rupert Murdoch or Richard Branson. He called himself a math whiz and wrote: "I would love to teach kids."
As he stood in court, his prophecies for his life fell short: that he would make a lot of money, that he would "look toward my future and not worry about my past".

Rico says that 'for the greater good of our species', we need to remove this moron from the planet...

They really do tawk like dat

Sean Monahan has an article at Philly.com about the Philadelphia accent:

On the day we moved to Philly in 1976, my two fellow Syracuse émigrés and I went to a restaurant and ordered Cokes. “Three coe-ewks,” the waitress nodded.
I thought she was calling us “kooks” (which we certainly were) but when we asked for directions and she advised us that our destination was "down-y schtreet", we realized our new city was a different universe, linguistically .
So in the same week a venerable Northeast Philly cheese-steakery replaces its slur-ish name, Chink’s, and Daily News columnist Helen Ubinas bravely wonders aloud whether it's time to rename the Italian Market, we also hear that the city's distinctive dipthongs are disappearing.
University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor William Labov and two co-authors have found that the Southern-inflected sound of Philadelphia is giving way to a more generically "Northern" accent. The shift is evident when field recordings of rowhousers in the early 1970s are compared with their current counterparts.
The Labov study, published in the academic journal Language, notes that "sound change in progress in Philadelphia has been facilitated by the application of forced alignment and automatic vowel measurement."
Having long thought of the Philadelphia dialect as a mashup of Southern, Cockney, and Tastykake Krimpets, I find this research fascinating. But I can imagine how the waitress who introduced me to Philly-speak might react to a phrase like "forced alignment and automatic vocal measurement": "Sounds bohw-gis."

\

Rico says it'll be a shame if Philly goes accent-less...

History for the day

On 3 April 1948, President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan, which allocated more than five billion dollars in aid for sixteen European countries.

Gubs for the day

Sheryl Stolberg has an article in The New York Times about the NRA:

With the Senate set to debate gun control this month, a National Rifle Association task force released a 225-page report that called for armed police officers, security guards, or staff members in every American school, and urged states to loosen gun restrictions to allow trained teachers and administrators to carry weapons.
Asa Hutchinson (photo), a former Republican congressman from Arkansas who led the task force, unveiled the report at a packed news conference with unusually heavy security, including a bomb-sniffing yellow Labrador retriever. A dozen officers in plain clothes and uniforms stood watch as he spoke; one warned photographers to “remain stationary” during the event.
Among the study’s central conclusions is that “the presence of armed security personnel adds a layer of security and diminishes response time” in a shooting, Hutchinson said. He cited a 1997 Mississippi case in which an assistant principal ran to his truck to retrieve a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and subdued a gunman who had killed two students.
The recommendations— which also included expanding police presence in schools— drew immediate criticism from gun control advocates and many Democrats, who have been fighting to tighten gun restrictions after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December.
“Arming the teacher is merely a response to the last tragedy,” said Representative Mike Thompson, a California Democrat who is chairman of a House task force on gun violence. “The one before that was in a shopping mall in Oregon, and the one before that was in a movie theater in Colorado. I don’t think the proper response is to arm all the projectionists in the movie theaters or all the vendors in the mall.”
After the Newtown shooting, Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive director, announced that it would devise a plan to put armed guards in every school. Technically, Hutchison’s task force is independent of the rifle association, even though it paid for the study, and LaPierre was not present on Tuesday. But critics see no distinction between the two.
Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy group here, criticized the study as “nothing more than a continuation of the NRA’s attempts to prey on America’s fears, saturate our schools with more guns and turn them into armed fortresses.”
But the report did get support from at least one Newtown parent: Mark Mattioli, whose six-year-old son, James, was killed. “I think politics needs to be set aside here, and I hope this doesn’t lead to name-calling,” said Mattioli, who joined Hutchinson at the news conference. “This is a recommendation for solutions, real solutions that will make our kids safer. That’s what we need.”
At least one state, Indiana, is considering the idea of armed officers at schools. A proposal that would require public and charter schools to have an armed “protection officer” on school property during class hours passed a House committee.
The task force panel called on the departments of Homeland Security, Education, and Justice to coordinate school safety efforts and provide grant money for schools to assess their ability to prevent and respond to attacks. It recommended that officers or employees who are armed take a forty- to sixty-hour training course to be developed by the rifle association based on a model the task force has designed. The group also called on states to require schools to develop security plans.
But how and whether the task force recommendations will be put into effect— and the cost— was unclear.
The timing of the announcement was not a coincidence: Congress will wrap up its spring recess after this week and is expected to consider gun legislation after lawmakers return. President Obama has called for tough new controls on gun ownership, but the prospects for such legislation are murky— a testimony to the NRA’s prowess as a lobbying force.
A plan to revive and revamp a ban on assault weapons, which expired in 2004, is almost certain to be defeated. President Obama is pushing for a measure that would impose mandatory background checks for gun buyers, and the Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, the majority leader, has promised to present a bill that would expand background checks to the floor for a vote.

Rico says that sometimes you can't tell if a commenter is being sarcastic or not:

NYTimesWebEditorsSuckChicago Gun control is great. I love the idea that only the trustworthy police will have guns. You should jail anyone with a gun, unless they are a cop or a soldier. You never hear about them shooting people randomly.

Scam for the day

From: "Nokia  Award Promo"<infosite71@nokiamail.com>

Date: April 2, 2013, 7:09:21 EDT
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: winning result
Reply-To: <timsung174@nokiamail.com>

Your email has won you 1,000,000 GBP and Nokia Lumia920 in Nokia Award Promotion 2013. To claim send your Name,Tel No,Adds,Occu, to the email below:  timsung174@nokiamail.com

Trains

Paul Nussbaum has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about local trains:

The Obama administration will weigh fifteen alternatives for improved passenger rail service between Boston and Washington, ranging from modest upgrades to a new high-speed Northeast Corridor that would allow trips between Philadelphia and New York City in about forty minutes.
The fifteen "preliminary alternatives" were unveiled recently by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), which plans to come up with a single "preferred alternative" by mid-2015, complete with cost estimates and possible construction schedules. The goal is to lay out a feasible plan for investing in the nation's busiest rail corridor through 2040, with proposals for updated equipment, more trains, new stations, and possible new routes.
Without an infusion of money to revamp the overcrowded, outdated corridor, the Northeast's economic future will be stifled, the FRA said. The rail corridor traverses a sector of the nation that produces twenty percent of the country's gross domestic product.
The fifteen alternatives presented were broad concepts, long on generalities and short on specifics. They fall into four categories, A through D, that could be characterized as "good", "better", "best", and "visionary". Within each of the categories, three or four possible alternatives were offered. The least ambitious of the alternatives would make modest improvements to the existing 457-mile corridor to allow top speeds of 160 mph and provide new express trains, similar to upgrades now being made by Amtrak. The fastest Acela Express trains now reach speeds of 150 mph on a short segment of the corridor. The most ambitious four alternatives propose a second line dedicated to high-speed trains that could travel at 220 mph and cut the ride between Philadelphia and New York City to about forty minutes.
The four high-speed alternatives offer different possible routes between Boston and Washington. One would parallel the existing route, but could mean new stations in Center City or at the Philadelphia International Airport.
Another proposes a new route north of New York City, through Danbury and Hartford, Connecticut, while another suggests a route through Long Island and under Long Island Sound to New Haven.
A fourth proposes a route that bypasses Baltimore, traveling, instead, through Annapolis and the Delmarva Peninsula to Wilmington. North of New York City, that route would go under Long Island Sound and then north through western Connecticut and Massachusetts to Boston.
The FRA's study is broader than last year's proposal by Amtrak for 220 mph rail service between Washington and Boston by 2040. That Amtrak plan calls for trips from Philadelphia to New York City in 37 minutes, half the time of the fastest Acela Express trains now.
Amtrak's proposed one-hundred-and-fifty billion dollar high-speed rail service may be considered by FRA planners as part of the solution, but the FRA says it will consider other alternatives for high-speed travel, as well as new options for commuter and freight trains.
The current rail corridor, which handles more than two thousand Amtrak, commuter, and freight trains daily, suffers from major congestion and delays, and "many components of the system are in a state of disrepair or, worse, have reached the point of obsolescence," the FRA says.
The FRA will seek ways to increase capacity and boost train speeds and reliability, while adding service along the main route and on feeder lines such as the Keystone Corridor, linking Philadelphia and Harrisburg.
The next step on the way to a preferred alternative is a series of public meetings next week in New Haven, Connecticut; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington.

Rico says that, as a frequent user of trains, it's nice to see improvements.

Feebs

John P. Martin has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about the local FBI:

Among the first decisions Ed Hanko (photo) faced as he settled into his office last week as the FBI's top agent in Philadelphia was where to put the photo. The weathered black-and-white print shows about sixty helmeted coal miners at a plant in Ashley, Pennsylvania, just outside Hanko's hometown of Wilkes-Barre. Near the middle stands his father, Joseph, a second-generation Polish immigrant who never made it to high school.
When Hanko was twelve, his father took him to the mine for the first time. They boarded an elevator and disappeared into the earth, dropping into darkness until the boy could no longer see his hand in front of his face. When they resurfaced, the elder Hanko delivered his message: stay in school, he told his son, and get a better job than me.
Hanko, now 52, heeded the advice.
Still, he likes to keep the photo just a glance away, to remind him of his roots, his late father, and the people Hanko now serves. It landed prominently on a bookshelf on his first day in his eighth-floor corner office in the William J. Green Federal Building. "Whenever I feel like I'm having a bad day," Hanko said, "I look at the picture of my father."
As the special agent in charge (SAC) of the Philadelphia division, he'll oversee the eighth-largest FBI division, one with more than five hundred agents and support staff covering more than half the state and three South Jersey counties.
Hanko said he didn't arrive with specific marching orders, or a belief that Philadelphia poses any unique challenges for the Bureau. "We have what every big city has," he said.
His task is to provide his staff the tools to do the job, and to represent not just the local face "but also the ethical face" of the FBI, he said. Hanko has taught courses in ethical leadership at the FBI Academy and in the field for local police.
Becoming an agent wasn't a goal when he was young, Hanko said. Getting a college degree was. He was a cash-strapped student at King's College in Wilkes-Barre in the late 1970s, he said, when he saw an ad on a college bulletin board. The Baltimore Police Department was luring recruits by paying their way at the University of Baltimore.
Hanko signed up.
After three years in uniform, and two more working narcotics cases, Hanko applied in the mid-1980s to the FBI. His score on the multipart exam, 89, fell short. He accepted the decision. But his friend Ed Goetz could not. Goetz was a classmate and state trooper who had passed the FBI exam. Goetz was perplexed. To him, Hanko was too smart to have missed the cut.
Months later, Goetz, then a new agent, was sent to the Baltimore office and assigned to the squad that reviewed applicants. One day, he asked to see Hanko's file. A secretary couldn't find it, so Goetz looked himself. He found the folder behind a file cabinet, as if it fell there, and began scouring it. "I remember looking at the scores, and saying: The way I add these scores up, it looks like he passed," Goetz, now a vice president of security for Exelon Corp., recalled in an interview. So Goetz took the file to a supervisor, who confirmed a momentous typo in the results: Hanko's 89 was really a 98, a passing grade. The supervisor asked if Hanko was a good guy. "I said he's a great guy," Goetz recalled, "and he'd make a great FBI agent." Within days, the FBI called Hanko back.
Hanko said he routinely shares that story with agents, and told it twice last week. The lesson: check your facts, then check them again, as too much is at stake. "We put people in jail," Hanko said. "We can ruin careers."
His own 27-year career has included posts in a half-dozen offices, including Newark, Detroit, the FBI Academy, and, most recently, Cincinnati.
His arrival here is a homecoming of sorts— he reported to the Philadelphia division while working in its Scranton office a decade ago— though not one he actively sought.
Hanko had been the top agent in southern Ohio for less than eighteen months when he was asked to take over Detroit last year. He declined, but wasn't given the same option after Philadelphia's leader, George Venizelos, left to run the larger New York City division for the FBI.
Still, Hanko left an impression in Ohio. He sent a squad of agents to Columbus, the state capital, to focus solely on public corruption, and was there for the first indictment against a sitting Ohio legislator in a century. He also partnered agents with local police on a Safe Streets task force that targeted violent gangs overrunning city neighborhoods. In a year, the task force crippled four drug networks, said Karl P. Kadon III, an assistant US Attorney who prosecutes violent crime. That kind of collaboration "didn't happen before he got here", said Kadon, a former city prosecutor. Kadon said Hanko struck him as gregarious without being phony, intense without being overbearing. Hanko's energy, he said, is contagious. "I have never worked with an SAC who was able to motivate and drive forward his or her agents like Ed," he said.
The idea of safe streets runs high on the list of Hanko's priorities. He has a soft spot for the vulnerable and little tolerance for bullies, a sense of justice heightened as the parent of a 20-year-old daughter with Down's syndrome. (He has two other children, a 27-year-old daughter, and a 24-year-old son who served two tours in Iraq with the Army's 25th Infantry Division.)
Michael Dessoye, the chief of detectives for the Luzerne County District Attorney's Office, got to know Hanko during the agent's years in Scranton. Dessoye hailed him as "a cop's cop", and predicted that his roots and background as a police officer will win him respect and cooperation of local law enforcement agencies here as they did there. "There's just one badge, as far as Eddie is concerned," Dessoye said.
There have been regrets. Hanko said he is still haunted by a case that began in May of 2009 with a phone call from a colleague in Detroit. A five-year-old girl, Nevaeh Buchanan, had been kidnapped outside her home in Monroe, Michigan, about thirty miles south of Detroit. As the office's crisis management coordinator, Hanko supervised the search. Eleven days after her disappearance, Nevaeh ("Heaven spelled backwards, Hanko pointed out), was found dead along the banks of the nearby River Raisin. Investigators believed she had been buried alive.
Agents had no shortage of suspects. Hanko recalls being shocked by how many registered sexual offenders lived in or near the girl's neighborhood. The list included Nevaeh's mother's boyfriend. But his alibi turned out to be unimpeachable. Eventually the case went cold. It sticks with Hanko for one reason: "Because I didn't solve it, and that guy's still out there" and probably has attacked again, he said. "In so many other cases, for the most part somebody paid for what they did."
SACs, as the lead agents are called, often stay in their posts two to three years, shuffled from office to office by the FBI brass. Five years from the bureau's mandatory retirement age, Hanko hopes to buck the trend. "I'm hopeful that I would stay here and finish out here," he said. "Can I guarantee it? No."

Rico says that, for once, they got the right guy for the job.

Ban fire extinguishers?

The Philadelphia Daily News has an article about a weird one:

Seven people were hospitalized after police say a Drexel Hill man went on a bizarre rampage spraying a fire extinguisher in Atlantic City's Public Safety Building.
Tom McHugh, 29, a former Penn State lineman who was kicked off the team in 2003 for public drunkness, had just been let out of jail at the building on disorderly-conduct charges related to one of two tangles with police, police said.
About 8 a.m., McHugh somehow got up to the fourth floor, where top Atlantic City Police administrators have offices. When he was confronted by officers, he grabbed the device from the wall and sprayed three of them in the face before he was wrestled to the ground, police said.
The building was evacuated for several hours.
Investigators said McHugh was arrested twice the day before for disorderly conduct, according to new reports. The first arrest occurred about 6:15 p.m. after he allegedly was scaring and chasing children on North Carolina Avenue. After being released about 9 p.m., he was arrested again a few hours later for allegedly stealing items from a convenience story, CBS 3 reported.
McHugh faces charges of aggravated assault on police, resisting arrest, possession of a destructive device (the extinguisher), and related offenses.

Rico says well, they didn't shoot the idiot...

Restarting nuclear facilities

Kim Hyung-Jin and Foster Klug have an article in Time about North Korea:

North Korea said it will restart its long-shuttered plutonium reactor and increase production of nuclear weapons material, in what outsiders see as its latest attempt to extract US concessions by raising fears of war.
A spokesman for the North’s General Department of Atomic Energy said scientists will quickly begin “readjusting and restarting” the facilities at its main Nyongbyon nuclear complex, including the plutonium reactor and a uranium enrichment plant. Both could produce fuel for nuclear weapons.
The reactor began operations in 1986, but was shut down as part of international nuclear disarmament talks in 2007 that have since stalled. North Korea said that work to restart the facilities would begin “without delay”. Experts estimate reactivating the reactor could take anywhere from three months to a year.
The nuclear vows and a rising tide of threats in recent weeks are seen as efforts by the North to force disarmament-for-aid talks with Washington and to increase domestic loyalty to young North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by portraying him as a powerful military commander.
The announcement underscores concerns about North Korea’s timetable for building a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach the United States, although it is still believed to be years away from developing that technology. The US called for North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions, saying it would be “extremely alarming” if Pyongyang follows through on a vow to restart its plutonium reactor.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the US is taking steps to ensure it has the capacity to defend itself and its allies, and that President Barack Obama is being updated regularly. “The entire national security team is focused on it,” Carney said. But Carney noted that a string of threats from North Korea toward the US and South Korea have, so far, not been backed up by action, calling the threats part of a counterproductive pattern. He called on Russia and China, two countries he said have influence on North Korea, to use that influence to persuade the North to change course.
China, North Korea’s only major economic and diplomatic supporter, expressed unusual disappointment with its ally. “We noticed North Korea’s statement, which we think is regrettable,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said. South Korea also called it “highly regrettable”.
Yukiya Amano, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the North’s decision “is another step which is deeply troubling for us and the world.”
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that North Korea appears to be “on a collision course with the international community”. Speaking in Andorra, the former South Korean foreign minister said the crisis has gone too far and that international negotiations are urgently needed.
US Secretary of State John Kerry called North Korea’s recent rhetoric “provocative, dangerous, and reckless”. He also vowed that the United States would defend itself and its allies South Korea and Japan from North Korean threats. “We have heard an extraordinary amount of unacceptable rhetoric from the North Korean government in the last few days,” Kerry told reporters at a joint news conference with visiting South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se.
North Korea is under a UN arms embargo over its nuclear program. It was one of three nations voting against a UN treaty regulating international arms trade; also voting “no” were Iran and Syria.
Hwang Jihwan, a North Korea expert at the University of Seoul, said the North “is keeping tension and crisis alive to raise stakes ahead of possible future talks with the United States. North Korea is asking the world, ‘What are you going to do about this?’” he said.
The unidentified North Korean atomic spokesman said the measure is meant to resolve the country’s acute electricity shortage, but is also for “bolstering up the nuclear armed force both in quality and quantity”, according to a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The statement suggests the North will do more to produce highly enriched uranium. The technology needed to make highly enriched uranium bombs is much easier to hide than huge plutonium facilities. North Korea previously insisted that its uranium enrichment was for producing electricity— meaning low-enriched uranium.
Kim Jin Moo, a North Korea expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in South Korea, said that by announcing it is “readjusting” all nuclear facilities, including the uranium enrichment plant, North Korea “is blackmailing the international community by suggesting that it will now produce weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium”.
The North’s plutonium reactor produces spent fuel rods laced with plutonium, and is the core of Nyongbyon. It was disabled under a 2007 deal made at now-dormant aid-for-disarmament negotiations involving the North, the US, South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia.
In 2008, North Korea destroyed the cooling tower at Nyongbyon in a show of commitment, but the deal later stalled after the North balked at allowing intensive international fact-checking of its past nuclear activities. North Korea pulled out of the talks after condemnation of its long-range rocket launch in April 2009.
North Korea “is making it clear that its nuclear arms program is the essence of its national security and that it’s not negotiable,” said Sohn Yong-woo, a professor at the Graduate School of National Defense Strategy of Hannam University in South Korea.
North Korea conducted its third nuclear test in February, prompting a new round of UN sanctions that have infuriated its leaders. It has since declared that the armistice ending the Korean War in 1953 is void, shut down key military phone and fax hotlines with Seoul, threatened to launch nuclear and rocket strikes on the US mainland and its allies and, most recently, declared at a high-level government assembly that making nuclear arms and developing a stronger economy are the nation’s top priorities.
The Korean Peninsula technically remains in a state of war because a truce, not a peace treaty, ended the Korean War. The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea as a deterrent to North Korea.
Washington has said it takes the threats seriously, though Carney said the U.S. has not detected any military mobilization or repositioning of forces in North Korea. The North’s rising rhetoric has been met by a display of US military strength, including flights of nuclear-capable bombers and stealth jets at annual South Korean-US military drills that the allies call routine, but that North Korea claims are invasion preparations.
South Koreans are familiar with provocations from the North, but its rhetoric over the last few weeks has raised worries. “This is a serious concern for me,” said Heo Jeong-ja, 70, a cleaning worker in Seoul. “The country has to stay calm, but North Korea threatens us every day.”
North Korea added its five-megawatt plutonium reactor to its nuclear complex at Nyongbyon in 1986, and the country is believed to have exploded plutonium devices in its first two nuclear tests, in 2006 and 2009.
There had long been claims by the US and others that North Korea was also pursuing a secret uranium program. In 2010, the North unveiled to visiting Americans a uranium enrichment program at Nyongbyon. Analysts say they don’t believe North Korea currently has mastered the miniaturization technology needed to build a warhead that can be mounted on a missile, and the extent of its uranium enrichment efforts is also unclear.
Scientist and nuclear expert Siegfried Hecker, one of the Americans on the 2010 visit to Nyongbyon, has estimated that North Korea has 24 to 42 kilograms of plutonium, enough for perhaps four to eight rudimentary bombs similar to the plutonium weapon used on Nagasaki in World War Two.
It’s not known whether the North’s latest atomic test, in February, used highly enriched uranium or plutonium stockpiles. South Korea and other countries have so far failed to detect radioactive elements that may have leaked from the test and which could determine what kind of device was used.

Rico says if we had a country on our borders that was doing this shit, they'd be radioactive by now...

Scam for the day

From: "Mr.Steve Johnson"<stevejohn0@ymail.com>

Date: April 2, 2013, 8:28:51 EDT
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: Your Urgent reply pls.
Reply-To: <stevejohn020@gmail.com>

Dear friend,
I am Mr.Steve Johnson, and I will like to invest in your country. Please if you have an investment opportunity, or you know someone who can carry it out; then kindly get back to me with your private email address and phone contacts ASAP, to enable me convey to you in details and know your role in the investment plan.

Regards,

Mr.Steve Johnson.

April Fools'

Josh Voorhees has a Slate article about Google on April Fools' Day:

Before you email your friends about Google Nose or make plans to leave a flower in Slate's Google Graveyard for YouTube, take a look at your calendar: Yep, it's April 1. OK, now that that's out of the way, feel free to enjoy the tech giant's latest April Fools' Day pranks. (The Next Web has a rundown of a few others the site's running today here.)

Both are good, but for my money neither lives up to the concept of Gmail Paper, which (though fake, alas) promised to send you printed copies of all your email.

Rico says people actually get paid to think these things up and create them...

Mass shootings

William Saletan has a Slate article about gubs:

In the last few days, investigators in Connecticut and Arizona have released thousands of pages of documents about the Tucson and Sandy Hook massacres. The documents, coupled with investigative leaks and with testimony about the movie theater shooting in Aurora, paint a clearer picture of what caused these tragedies. It isn’t just high-capacity magazines or defenseless victims. It’s a failure to link firearms access to mental health information.
On 29 September 2010, Pima Community College told the parents of a troubled student, Jared Loughner, that he was being suspended for a raving video he had made. College officials stipulated that before returning to campus, he would have to “obtain a mental health clearance indicating that, in the opinion of a mental health professional, his presence at the College does not present a danger to himself or others.” The officials advised Loughner’s parents, with whom he was living, to remove any firearms he might use. So Loughner’s dad took away the shotgun his son had bought from a local store in 2008. As compensation, the father gave his son money to cover part of what the gun had cost.
What did Loughner do with the money? He went back to the same store and bought a Glock pistol. The clerks at the store had no idea anything crucial about Loughner had changed. They made him sign the same ATF Form 4473 and go through the same background check, with the same result: he passed. After the shooting, they handed over his forms to the police, proudly explaining their strict protocol for verifying each customer’s identity. Mental fitness wasn’t part of the protocol.
On 6 December, a week after the Glock purchase and a month before the shooting, Loughner put two spent cartridge casings from the gun in an envelope, with a note describing them as proof that he had “planned my assassination”. Police later found the envelope, along with The Anarchist Cookbook, in a safe in his room. Apparently, his parents hadn’t looked inside it.
Three weeks before the shooting, Loughner showed the Glock to a friend. It had an extended clip full of rounds. The friend later told police that Loughner had failed to give a satisfactory answer to his question: “Why the hell do you have this?” Noting that Loughner had “crazy thoughts” about the government, the friend assured investigators that, when Loughner showed up with the gun, “I kicked him out of my house.” Fat lot of good that did.
Three hours before the shooting, Loughner tried to buy ammunition at a Wal-Mart. The clerk, uneasy about Loughner’s agitation, told him the ammo wasn’t in stock. The press calls the clerk a hero: “Tucson ammo seller lied to make Loughner go away.” So what did Loughner do? He went to the next Wal-Mart and bought the same ammo twenty minutes later. Warnings don’t get passed, even between Wal-Marts.
A year after the Tucson shooting, James Holmes, a neuroscience student at the University of Colorado, began to unravel. Dr. Lynne Fenton, a psychiatrist at the university, has testified that she met with Holmes on 11 June 2012 and subsequently contacted a campus police officer in part “to communicate my concerns” about him. Reports from Denver, citing sources close to the investigation, say that Fenton requested a criminal background check on Holmes and contacted colleagues on the university’s Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment team because Holmes was fantasizing about killing "a lot of people".
What did Fenton and her colleagues do about this menace? Nothing, apparently. Holmes was already in the process of leaving the school. He had dropped out of the neuroscience program on 10 June. By 12 June, he no longer had access to campus facilities that required security clearance. He wasn’t the university’s problem anymore. So Fenton and the threat assessment team dropped the case. University officials never reported it to police in Aurora, where Holmes lived.
Over the next month, Holmes bought an arsenal of weapons and military gear from merchants who knew nothing about his condition. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms lists eight local and online purchases from June 13 to July 14, providing Holmes with a Glock, several 30-round magazines, a 100-round drum magazine, two laser sights, body armor, and chemicals for making bombs. He eventually stockpiled four guns and more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition, which he used on July 20 to kill 12 people and injure 58 more.
Adam Lanza’s atrocity came five months later, but the warning signs began years earlier. A New York Times article found by police at his home describes a shooting spree at Northern Illinois University that killed five people and injured more than 20 others. The date on the article—Feb. 18, 2008—doesn’t quite match the Times’ online archive, which probably means Lanza clipped it from the print edition.
The Hartford Courant says Lanza also kept articles about the 2011 mass shooting in Norway. The New York Daily News, citing a Connecticut State Police colonel, says Lanza had a “spreadsheet 7 feet long and 4 feet wide” that compared body counts and weaponry from so many mass killings “it had to have taken years” to compile. (Last week, prosecutors called the Daily News story a “disclosure” and didn’t dispute it.) Police records also mention the discovery of three photos at Lanza’s home depicting “a deceased human covered with … what appears to be blood,” as well as a “digital image print of a child and various firearms.” That comports with the Daily News account of a two-year-old picture showing Lanza “strapped with weapons, posing with a pistol to his head.”
You’d think that Lanza’s mother, who lived alone with him, might have stumbled across one of these clues. Even if she never found any of the photos or the giant spreadsheet (how did he print it without her help?), she told friends more than a year ago that he was burning himself with a lighter. Yet she continued to buy him deadly weapons and train him in their use.
All three guns Lanza brought into Sandy Hook Elementary School—a Glock, a Sig Sauer, and a Bushmaster—were registered to his mother. In addition to these and the shotgun in his car, a search of their home turned up two rifles, 10 knives (four of them with blades at least nine inches long), three Samurai swords, a spear, a bayonet, and more than 1,700 rounds of ammunition. Police also found a holiday card with a check Mrs. Lanza had made out to her son for another handgun.
Every detail suggests that this woman, in her blind folly, armed her son for mayhem. She bought four of her guns between 2010 and 2012, as he was deteriorating. (Records suggest two of them were purchased in October and December 2011.) She took him to shooting ranges to practice. He showed up at Sandy Hook with 10 high-capacity magazines, each with 30 rounds, and fired more than half the 300 bullets in less than five minutes. When police entered her house and found her dead—apparently having been shot before she could get up—her gun locker was open, with no signs it had been broken into. The weapons were there for the taking.
The more we learn about these cases, the more they complicate the gun debate. Loughner, with a handgun, fired at a faster rate than Holmes or Lanza did with their rifles. Holmes’ giant drum magazine didn’t help him; it jammed his weapon. The cops in Connecticut think Lanza picked an elementary school because it was an easy target, just as the National Rifle Association says. And these guys were nuts, not crooks. Criminal background checks wouldn’t have stopped them.
When I look at all the documents, the common thread is mental illness. Worries and warnings about it weren’t heeded or shared. Loughner couldn’t go back to class, but he could buy a Glock. He couldn’t get ammo at one Wal-Mart, but he could get it at another. Holmes merited an alert to a college threat assessment team, but not to the dealers who sold him 6,000 rounds. Lanza’s mother, lost in denial, failed to recognize that he shouldn’t be anywhere near a firearm.
Disclosing mental health problems makes all of us uneasy. We don’t want to live in a country where every therapy session is public information. Many of us don’t want to live in a country where guns are confiscated over gossip. I can’t tell you how to link weapon sales to behavioral assessment in a way that avoids those scenarios. But I can tell you this: Until we do, there will be more carnage.

Rico says WHAT

NRA's post-Newtown initiative

Josh Voorhees has a Slate article about the NRA:

Back in December, after a noticeably long silence in the days that followed Newtown, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre took the stage in Washington, D.C., to unveil the gun lobby's answer to the tragedy that left twenty first-graders and six school staff members dead: the National School Shield Program, an effort to provide school's with armed guards. Beginning tomorrow, expect to hear a lot more about the NRA-backed plan, as CNN reports that the group has finished its final report on the initiative, and is set to unveil its more formal recommendations to Congress:

The NRA will announce its own findings, and issue a report on how they believe schools can prevent future gun violence similar to the Newtown tragedy. The National School Shield Program will present to lawmakers, law enforcement, school officials, and the public a combination of policy proposals and resources to implement its recommendations.

The NRA is expected to give Congress legislative proposals in the report. Law enforcement officials will find training recommendations to prepare the armed guards who the organization believes should be available to schools. State and local officials will find guidelines on how to alter their ordinances to permit the armed guards.
The timing of the release is no coincidence. It comes as the gun control/safety debate continues to heat up in the Senate, where lawmakers are at work on a deal that would expand background checks. While the NRA plan is likely to garner a lot of attention, given the lobby's position in the national gun conversation, it's worth remembering that the group's proposal is an attempt to shrink the larger debate to focus it on school shootings specifically, and not gun violence in society at large.
Also worth remembering: there are doubts about how effective such a shield program would be (an armed guard at Columbine was unable to prevent that tragedy), and concerns about what it would cost to implement (at least $5.5 billion if extended to every school in the country).

Rico says it's still a good idea but, just because it's the NRA, it'll never fly...

A like-minded cat

Rico says his friend Bill, knowing Rico's distaste for the cold, sends this:

Neither can Rico

Alex Rogers has a Time article about our hapless President:

At the White House’s annual Easter Egg Roll, President Obama was joined by a gaggle of kids and some of the Washington Wizards, including point guard John Wall. According to bystanders, the President’s basketball skills did not impress. Here’s the pool report from Alex Leary of the Tampa Bay Times:

POTUS stepped to free throw line and kids were asked to stand on opposite sides, depending on whether they think he would sink it. Most kids moved in one direction, but one boy went to the “miss” side.
“Oh, man,” a stunned POTUS said, hands on hips. The boy didn’t budge. And three others joined.
In sharp form, POTUS released the ball. It bounced off the rim and circled it: miss.
“Come on. Come on. Did you see that?” Obama said.
It got worse. A little while later, after playing tennis, Obama started to take shots amid the kids and pros.
Miss. Miss. Off the rim. Miss. Miss. Off the rim. Airball.
He moved closer to the net. But time and again, he missed. Of 22 shots POTUS took, he made two. (22 was the general consensus of the reporters.)
At one point, POTUS handed a ball to a boy and asked for help. The boy made the layup. “He couldn’t make one. I had to help him out,” said Kahron Campbell, ten, of Landover, Maryland.

Rico says just because the guy's black doesn't mean he can play basketball...

Breastaurants?

Rico says the very phrase, let alone the working conditions, are anti-feminist (and thus highly lucrative):

u

Robotic jellyfish

Matt Peckham has a Time article about new robotic technology:

Mention unmanned drones these days, and you’ll conjure images of tiny plane-like vehicles packing serious heat. Mention unmanned deep-sea drones that look like umbrella-shaped aquatic critters, and you’ll probably conjure something more like a blank stare.
And yet the notion of a lifelike jellyfish robot isn’t new: researchers at the University of Texas in Dallas, Providence College in Rhode Island, the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford University, and Virginia Tech have been jointly working on the technology for years. Last March, for instance, we wrote about their work on Robojelly, a silicon-based, hand-sized robot that wriggles like a jellyfish by flexing synthetic muscles to pump out water.
Why not something sleeker or more powerful, say an octopus or a shark? Because the way a jellyfish moves is so efficient that it’s even been studied for non-oceanic engineering purposes, from crafting more efficient submarines and balloon-like flying devices to developing superior alternatives to propeller-based wind turbines.
Imagine a fully-realized version of such a robot running underwater surveillance missions for the Navy— the marine version of a weaponless drone, in other words, perhaps poking around someone’s oceanfront property (or, heaven forbid, employed in a civilian capacity by ignoble paparazzi to stalk celebrities). Cool, but a little creepy, right?
Also: not a pet project. The researchers have a five million dollar grant from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and the Office of Naval Research to build robots capable of autonomously scooting around the ocean blue. Their purpose could range from undersea spying for the military to more innocuous activities, say keeping tabs on environmental issues like oil spills or creating detailed maps of the ocean floor.
Now meet Cyro, the nearly-six-foot, 170-pound latest iteration of this robo-jellyfish project. That’s considerably bigger than Robojelly, in part because a larger robo-jellyfish could carry a more substantial payload, including enough power to stay in the ocean for lengthy periods of time, say weeks, months or longer still. Also, Robojelly required a tether to provide power— Cyro requires none.
According to Geek.com, Cyro consists of a central waterproof shell linked to eight mechanical, segmented, linearly actuated “arms”, over which a piece of pliable silicone is stretched, allowing the arms to flex the sheet and emulate an actual jellyfish’s movements. Cyro gets its name from a species of jellyfish dubbed Cyanea capillata, or “lion’s mane”, as it’s more commonly known, plus the word robot. The lion’s mane jellyfish is the world’s largest, found in northerly waters, with some specimens’ bells (the main body) exceeding eight feet in diameter.
The research team still has miles to go before Cyro’s action-ready– it currently gets just four hours from its nickel-metal hydride battery. And it’s not the only game in town, with underwater surveillance research extending to projects like Georgia Tech’s intriguing one to develop collaborative, autonomous robotic entities with specialized functions— robots that communicate with each other to perform distributed roles. Imagine a sea of aquatic micro-bots swimming somewhere out there, doing whatever military-minded micro-bots do.
Still, nothing quite beats the uncanny visual of an underwater robot pulsing along like a jellyfish— almost indistinguishable from an actual jellyfish— potentially keeping tabs on all our maritime moves.

Rico says the future is gonna be weird...

Battery life stinks, and will for years

Jared Newman has a Time article about batteries:

In the five years since Apple released its first iPhone, touch-screen smartphones have become thinner, lighter, faster, and more capable. But through it all, battery life has mostly stayed the same.
You can probably make it through the day on a single charge, but not without a degree of caution. You’ll want to keep Bluetooth turned off when it’s not in use, and avoid long stretches of data use over 4G. High-end games and streaming video are guaranteed to melt away battery life, and if you’re spending a few hours in a dead zone, you’re better off powering down instead of wasting precious juice searching for a signal.
Because battery capacity hasn’t improved much over the years, the batteries themselves have gotten bigger, limiting how thin and light phones can be. Meanwhile, technologies like 1080p screens and wireless screen mirroring have been hamstrung by batteries that can’t keep up. Bad battery life can be an Achilles’ heel for otherwise solid phones; by the time you realize your phone’s battery stinks, it might be too late to send it back to the store.
The good news is that there’s plenty of interest within the tech industry to make smartphone battery life better, and there’s no shortage of emerging technologies to make it happen. The bad news is that any significant improvements to battery chemistry are at least a couple of years away.
Virtually every smartphone today relies on lithium-ion batteries, which provide power by transferring electrons between the anode and cathode of a battery cell. The amount of lithium ions inside the battery directly affects how long your phone can last on a charge.
The problem lies in the graphite that stores lithium ions in the anode of a battery. Graphite has a theoretical limit to how much lithium it can hold, and today’s batteries have pretty much reached it. While bigger batteries are always an option, as seen in Motorola’s Droid Razr Maxx, most people don’t want thicker, heavier phones, so phone makers sacrifice battery life in the name of slenderness.
With graphite-based anodes reaching peak capacity, the race is on to replace graphite with silicon, a material that can offer ten times the capacity of today’s batteries, at least in theory. “There’s a lot of research going on, because silicon is the best material for absorbing lithium, and it has the highest potential capacity of any material now,” said Phillip Roberts, CEO of California Lithium Battery.
Swapping silicon for graphite isn’t easy. Silicon swells while charging, causing electrical contacts to break during discharge, and ultimately degrading the battery. That’s a dealbreaker for smartphones, which need to survive through at least a couple of years’ worth of daily recharging.
California Lithium Battery is working on a composite of silicon and graphene– a Nobel-prize-winning material made from atom-thick layers of graphite– that combines the capacity of the former with the stability of the latter. And unlike some other silicon-based anode solutions, this composite, which is licensed from Argonne National Laboratory, prevents the agglomeration of silicon that leads to swelling and reduced cycle life, Roberts said. He hopes that, within six months, the company can produce material by the metric ton and send it out to battery makers and phone makers for testing. In two years, the company expects its silicon-based anode to replace the graphite-based anodes in existing batteries, bringing a thirty percent improvement in capacity. “I would say that, within two years, you’re going to see that technology. It’s happening relatively quickly. Behind the scenes, there’s a lot going on,” Roberts said. When paired with other advances in cathode and electrolyte materials, he expects capacity to improve by a hundred percent, possibly within three years.
Three years may seem like a long time to wait for a battery bailout, but that’s the reality for many companies that are pursuing new chemistry. At best, we can hope for modest gains in a couple years, followed by bigger improvements down the road.
What’s the holdup? Some groups are still working out the kinks of their technology. Others are trying to secure investments to begin large-scale production. Once the technical work is done, it still takes time to test new battery technology, not only for longevity and runtime, but for safety.
“Part of the time, probably at least half of the time, is not due to the technical part, but due to what is needed to sell the product,” said Harold Kung, a professor at Northwestern University. Kung led the research on a graphene-silicon composite anode that could lead to two or three times the capacity of today’s batteries. A spin-off company called SiNode is trying to commercialize the technology, but between raising funds, producing large quantities and testing a full-cell battery, Kung thinks it’ll be at least five years before a product is on the market.
Other companies are more optimistic, but are facing their own challenges. Leyden Energy, for instance, has developed an electrolyte– the part of the battery that transfers lithium between the anode and cathode– that reduces the swelling caused by silicon. This “lithium-imide” solution could bring a 25 percent to 45 percent improvement in capacity in a couple years, but only if Leyden can get the battery to last through more charges. Right now, the company’s batteries only recharge about half as many times as today’s lithium-ion batteries. “We’ve got the swelling phenomenon pretty well under control, but we’re still working on optimizing cycle life,” said Rick Wilmer, Leyden’s CEO.
Meanwhile, research out of Stanford University uses silicon oxide nanotubes to contain the silicon, preventing it from swelling. A spin-off company called AmPrius is trying to commercialize the technology, and has the backing of big-name investors like Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Still, it’ll be a while before the technology achieves its full potential. Yi Cui, who led the nanotube research, said a commercial product is a couple years away, as the company figures out a low-cost way to scale up manufacturing. Even then, the technology will only bring modest improvements– around eight to ten percent– at first. The technology could reach a forty percent capacity improvement over time but, to go any higher, new cathode materials will be necessary.
Menachem Anderman, head of Total Battery Consulting, cautioned against expecting huge gains in capacity from lithium-ion batteries, even with silicon instead of graphite. He said there tends to be a trade-off between cycle life and runtime, and while the technology will always get better, drastic improvements are unlikely to happen in the next four or five years. “I don’t think with lithium-ion we can go 3x from where we are today; 2x would probably be a stretch,” Anderman said. “There’s always continuous improvement, but yeah, somebody looking for 5x performance? It’s hard to envision.”
While we wait for bigger improvements to the batteries themselves, other parts of our smartphones are lending a hand by becoming more efficient. Scotland-based Sofant, for instance, is working on a “smart antenna” that figures out where a wireless signal is coming from. Instead of wasting energy by blindly searching in all directions, Sofant’s antenna uses software to find the direction of the signal, and points itself in the right direction with a small mechanical system itself in the direction of the signal. “Antenna technology has not advanced as much as other sensors and elements of a smartphone,” Sofant co-founder Ahmed El-Rayis said, “hence it has a dramatic effect on the battery life.” A smarter antenna could provide double the battery life over conventional antennas, El-Rayis said, and would also help to prevent dropped calls. Sofant’s plan is to work with chip makers, such as Qualcomm, to integrate the necessary components, and with phone makers to include the antenna in their hardware designs.
Other companies, such as Eta Devices and Quantance, are working on more efficient power amplifiers, which would prevent phones from working so hard during high-bandwidth uses like streaming video. Smartphone processors are also becoming more efficient, with low-power subsystems that burn less battery life during basic tasks. And display technologies like Sharp’s IGZO are allowing for higher screen resolutions with lower power consumption.
“There’s just a ton of innovation going on on both sides of the equation, the amount of power available and the amount of power that’s required, that continues to allow devices to run longer per charge,” Rick Wilmer of Leyden Energy said. “So I don’t know if it’ll ever end in terms of continuing to push so that devices run longer per charge.”
If better batteries aren’t in our immediate future, it’s not due to lack of interest from the tech industry. “I can tell you that some of the very large battery companies… they’ve come to us, telling us that they’re under extreme pressure to supply to the Apples of the world, and others, smaller, lighter weight batteries,” said Steven Visco, CEO of PolyPlus.
PolyPlus has developed a lithium-metal electrode that opens the door to entirely new battery chemistry, including lithium-sulfur and lithium-air. But the technology is still four or five years away from being used in rechargeable applications, and the company doesn’t plan to target consumer electronics at first.
Companies working on silicon anode technology have also felt the pressure from battery and device makers. California Lithium Battery was attracting so much attention that it changed its initial focus from electric cars to consumer electronics. CEO Phillip Roberts said “pretty much every smartphone maker” has shown interest in the company’s technology. “We haven’t contacted one company ourselves,” Roberts said. “Every group so far that we’re working with contacted us.”
You have to wonder, though, how phone makers will use new battery technology once it’s available. Will they finally deliver the rock-solid, twenty-four-hour batteries that we need, or will they push for ever-thinner devices that are just nice to look at? It seems we have a least a couple years to agonize over the answer.

Rico says he hopes they figure it out soon; recharging his iPhone every day is a nuisance...

The hardware dilemma

Ben Bajarin has a Time article about hardware:

If you are a technology company not named Apple, then the answer to this question is vital to your future. The fact of the matter is that all technology companies (other than Apple) do not solely control their own future. Samsung, HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, LG, HTC, Nokia, and the rest must rely on either Google or Microsoft to supply the operating systems for their smartphones, tablets, or PCs. So the answer to the question of whether to use Google’s or Microsoft’s software is as strategic as it gets. Making a wrong decision could mean the end of your company.

Google
Right now Google’s platforms are hot-ticket items. But they come with a price— or a lack of a price, for that matter. Google would prefer that all hardware that runs its software be virtually free. That may seem counter to the logic of Google releasing a $1300 Chromebook, but that is simply a strategy to take advantage of a particular market and get early adopters to pay Google for its own market research. It is actually quite brilliant.
The long game for Google, however, is one where its services are running on every device, and getting there requires that the hardware be practically free. This is the world I firmly believe Google wants to see happen. As we study average selling prices of phones, the price deflation happens extremely fast with Android devices, and this is very telling. So if I am one of the brands trying to make money in the hardware game, I should be mindful of betting my future on a company that would rather me not make any money on my hardware. Also, Google gets almost all of the ad revenue that comes by way of Android devices. In Samsung’s case, it gets ten percent, but the rest goes to Google. Who really makes money in this case? If you say Google, you are correct This is part of Google’s end game. How do others make money?

Microsoft
Microsoft, on the other hand, genuinely wants its hardware partners to make money. This is why the company requires a healthy premium for the license of its software. The assumption is that Microsoft software adds value, and is therefore valuable. That value should translate into a reasonable price willing to be paid by the mass market in order to capture that value. This was how it worked for nearly two decades in the peak of the PC era, so is there reason to believe it will not work again with devices in the post-PC era?
The challenge with Microsoft is that its ecosystem is well behind Google’s, mainly when it comes to apps. To put all your eggs, or even most your eggs, in Microsoft’s basket brings with it the assumption that the company will yet again get it right someday, after many tries. Maybe it will.

The Universal Downsides
There are several downsides to licensing someone else’s software as the main interface your customers will be using. First, the hardware manufacturer does not actually own the end user. This creates platform loyalty but not hardware loyalty. In this scenario, the next time a consumer needs to buy a new PC, smartphone, or tablet, he or she may stay loyal to Microsoft or Google, but the previous hardware hardware manufacturer must now compete for that customer each time there’s new hardware to be purchased.
The downside of platform loyalty for the hardware manufacturer comes with the other challenge of licensing someone else’s software. Your competitors may also license that software, which makes standing out much more difficult. Differentiation must go beyond hardware, as it can begin to create customer loyalty. But when all your competitors not named Apple are running the same software as you, it makes it difficult to stand out in a crowd. I call this the sea of sameness, and it’s getting bigger and deeper every year. Standing out in a sea of sameness is the biggest downside of licensing someone else’s software.

This is why every Android OEM adds some 'secret sauce' to its flavor of Android. In fact, it is fascinating to think about how with each new product, the Google part of Android becomes less and each OEM’s part takes over more. HTC’s phones run Sense, Samsung’s phones run TouchWiz, and Motorola’s phones run Motoblur. These tactics are how each company attempts to stand out in a sea of sameness. The problem is that these tactics can only go so far.
As an industry analyst, it is this differentiating point that continually intrigues me about Apple.  Love it or hate it, Apple is the only company that runs software not found on any other hardware but its own PCs, smartphones, and tablets. In this regard, Apple is truly unique, and has the ability to stand out in a sea of sameness.
This is why there must be– and will continue to be— consolidation in the hardware side of this industry. The current players, which license software from others, can not keep going the route they are going forever. Companies may take a stab at building their own operating systems, in an attempt to go more vertical like Apple, but they risk losing time and resources to competitors. The platform providers like Microsoft and Google may also start making more of their own hardware, which will complicate matters even further and cause consolidation to happen even faster.
These are certainly tricky waters to navigate. Even those who have done this before are in uncharted territory. The companies that brave the turbulent waters of the sea of sameness will either sail through or sink with the flag of Google or Microsoft mounted high on their masts.

Rico says he still has a big tee-hee for all these poor benighted fools trying to beat Apple at their own game...

Movie review for the day

Rico says he watched The Assault, a French-made (and fortunately subtitled) movie about the Air France hijacking in 1994. It stars, of course, a bunch of Frenchmen and -women we've never heard of, but was a nicely-paced drama about taking down the jihadi hijackers. (Though why the GIGN was still queer for revolvers, Rico will never know; maybe because the French don't make a nice pistol like the Glock that everybody else uses...)

So, how did it turn out? The GIGN got in, but then couldn't kill the two hijackers who were in the cockpit for what seemed like forever... Without flash-bang grenades (first developed by the British Army's SAS in the 1960s) or gas, and without armor-piercing rounds in their rifles, and using those anemic revolvers, they were forced to shoot it out through the open cockpit door (amazingly, not hitting the pilot or co-pilot in the process). The commando leader took eight rounds, but lived... In the end, none of the hostages were killed, all the hijackers were, and the GIGN had nine wounded. To use an appropriate, if pseudo-French, phrase, a real fuque de clusteur. 

A deadly chemical attack

Aryn Baker, the Middle East Bureau Chief for Time, covering politics, society, culture, religion, the arts, and the military in the greater Middle East, including Pakistan and Afghanistan, and currently residing in Beirut, Lebanon, has an article about Syria:

Reports on bombings in Syria these days have become routine. But when Mohammad Sabbagh, an industrialist from Aleppo, heard about the attack near his hometown on 19 March, the details stopped him cold. Survivors and witnesses of what was being described by the government news agency as a chemical attack said they smelled something like chlorine. As the owner of Syria’s only chlorine gas manufacturing plant, Sabbagh knew that, if chlorine was involved, it most likely came from his factory.
The attack killed thirty-one people, including ten soldiers, and wounded scores more. In the immediate aftermath, the Syrian government and the opposition traded accusations. The government claimed that “terrorists”, its term for the rebels that have been fighting the regime for two years, had fired a “missile containing a chemical substance” at the village of Khan al-Asal in retaliation for their support of the government. Kasem Saad Eddine, spokesperson for the opposition military council of Aleppo, accused the government of attacking its own people in order to smear the opposition. “The regime is trying to hide its crime by accusing the FSA,” he told Time, referring to the Free Syrian Army, the loose confederation of rebel groups fighting the government. Eddine also accused the Syrian government of launching a second chemical attack near Damascus, causing an unspecified number of casualties. Whatever the case, the attack at Khan al-Asal marks a chilling evolution in a war that has already taken seventy thousand lives and disrupted, perhaps permanently, millions more. If it turns out that the government has used chemical weapons, international demands for armed intervention will increase. If the rebels used them, the escalation in tactics indicates that the war is about to become even bloodier.
The United Nations has acquiesced to a Syrian government request to send an investigation team into Khan al-Asal, which is expected to arrive on site this week. The team will be headed by Ake Sellstrom, a veteran chemical weapons inspector from Sweden, who was instrumental in investigating and dismantling Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs in the 1990s. It is not yet clear if the UN team will investigate other accusations of chemical weapons use in Syria, nor it is clear how much access they will have; the final details for the trip will be worked out in the coming days. The team’s mandate is limited to a technical investigation, which means that they will only be able to ascertain whether or not chemical weapons were used, and not who used them— a frustrating outcome for those seeking clarity. Nevertheless, the findings could be a strong indication of who might have been behind the attacks. The Syrian government is believed to possess one of the biggest stockpiles of chemical weapons in the world, including nerve agents Sarin and VX, as well as mustard gas, though it has repeatedly said it would never use such weapons against its own people. The opposition, though it also says would never use chemical weapons, does have access to at least one item that could be used in a chemical attack: Sabbagh’s chlorine gas.
In August, rebel forces took Sabbagh’s factory by force, as part of a sweep that also netted them an electricity station and a military airport about thirty kilometers from Aleppo. Sabbagh, who has since fled Aleppo for Beirut, says that his factory is now occupied by Jabhat al-Nusra, a militant group with strong ties to al-Qaeda that has been designated a terror group by the US. He knows this, because his site manager has struck a deal with the rebels: they supply two hundred liters of fuel a day to keep the generator running so that the valves of his $25 million factory don’t freeze up. The factory isn’t operational anymore, but this way at least, says Sabbagh, it might be one day in the future. In the meantime he has no idea what has happened, if anything, to the four hundred or so steel barrels of chlorine gas he had stored in the compound. The yellow tanks, which hold one ton of gas each, are used for purifying municipal water supplies. “No one can know for certain, but if it turns out chlorine gas was used in the attack, then the first possibility is that it was mine. There is no other factory in Syria that can make this gas, and now it is under opposition control,” he says.
To Faris al Shehabi, head of the Aleppo Chamber of Industry and a strong government supporter, it was obvious from day one that the rebels had their eyes on the gas. “Why else would they capture a factory in the middle of nowhere? For the sniper positions?” he asks sarcastically while meeting with Time in Beirut, where he is traveling for business. “We warned back then that chemical components were in the hands of terrorists, but no one listened.”
The investigation, when it starts, will be hobbled by the passage of time. According to a chemical weapons expert familiar with such inquiries, who spoke on condition of anonymity over the telephone, the investigating team will examine soil, air, and oil samples taken from the blast site. It is unclear whether they will have access to survivors (who probably bear little traces of the chemicals so long after the attack) or to autopsy reports. But initial assessments based upon body counts, photos, and video footage taken at the hospital after the attack seem to rule out nerve agents or mustard gas. “Looking at the death rate relative to the number of people exposed, it couldn’t have been a weaponized nerve agent,” says the expert. “And mustard gas rubs off on whoever touches it, but you don’t see the medical personnel taking additional protective measure when they treat the patients. So it’s pretty likely it was something else.”
A doctor who treated victims immediately after the attack, and who asked not to be identified, said few of the patients had visible wounds. Most suffered from severe cramps, vomiting, headaches, and troubled breathing. Those who died, did so right after breathing the gas, he says. “Our staff are not used to dealing with such cases, it was the first time we treated something like it.” Several hours after the attack, two doctors returned to the blast site to warn people away. The smell, described as “rotting garbage”, was still there.
As unlikely a deliberate use by the Syrian government of a nerve gas might be, especially considering the near certainty of an international reaction, few believe that the opposition has the wherewithal to make even crude chemical weapons. “It’s a question of capabilities,” says Greg Thielmann, a chemical weapons expert at the Washington, D.C.-based Arms Control Association. “Even if they had chemicals, where would they get access to a delivery system?” More likely, he says, the mass poisonings were a “side effect of a high explosive device that released a chemical in the vicinity.”
Who might have detonated that kind of improvised chemical explosive device, however, is impossible to tell. Government supporters frequently make the link between Jabhat al-Nusra and the al-Qaeda-affiliated militants in Iraq who experimented with chlorine bombs at the height of that country’s sectarian war in 2006 and 2007. There, insurgents rolled the yellow barrels of chlorine gas onto the back of pickup trucks packed with explosives. The effects were negligible, says the chemical weapons expert, who points out that the heat of the blast tends to evaporate the chlorine, diminishing impact. Still, by linking al-Qaeda’s failed chemical weapons attempts in Iraq with allegations that Jabhat al-Nusra is doing the same, the Syrian regime can buttress its longstanding charge that the rebellion against its rule is being driven by radical Islamists.
Rebel spokesman Eddine says the allegations are ridiculous. He holds that the regime was actually trying to target FSA rebels who had taken a nearby military school, and missed, hitting the pro-government village nearby. To pro-government industrialist al-Shehabi, the idea that the Syrian army would use crude chemical weapons doesn’t make any sense. “Why would the army use primitive chemical weapons against civilians in a not-so-important area, and not use the real chemical weapons we supposedly have when we are faced with our enemies taking over our strategic military bases?”
Both believe that the pending UN investigation will clear everything up. In fact, the investigation, says weapons expert Thielmann, is likely to make the situation more complicated— especially if it turns out, as suspected, that a substance just short of a proscribed chemical agent was used. Citing President Barack Obama‘s warning nearly a year ago that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government would be a “red line” for US intervention, Thielmann points out that chlorine might not qualify. “It becomes a very fuzzy red line. Was Obama only talking about chemical weapons prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention? Well, depending on how you look at it, chlorine would not be prohibited.” So Syria’s brutal civil war grinds on.

Rico says a single cruise missile into Assad's bedroom would solve this problem...

A nuclear cul-de-sac

Mark Thompson has a Time article about North Korea:

The mutual bluster and braggadocio persisted over the weekend on the Korean peninsula, as North Korean leader Kim Jong-un continued to drive his state down an atomic dead-end. He brayed anew at the state of war between his impoverished nation and the alliance of South Korea and the US, at least when his websites, seemingly hacked over the weekend, were operational.
The US military, for its part, saw Kim a pair of B-2 bombers, and raised him a squadron of F-22 fighters. The best fighters in the world, the F-22s –  normally based in Japan –  flew to South Korea’s Osan air base to participate in the continuing US-Soul Korean month-long military exercise that has unnerved Pyongyang.
It’s almost as if the US Air Force has moved a branch of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to South Korea. First, Eisenhower-era B-52s flew missions over the peninsula, followed by Reagan-era B-2s. With the dispatch of the George W. Bush-era F-22s, the Pentagon is running out of airpower muscles to flex. It will be years before the next-generation fighter, the F-35, is operational.
But North Korea can take solace from the fact that the F-22, operational for three US wars, has seen action in none of them. Designed to combat Soviet fighters that were never built, the world’s best and most costly fighter— $350 million a pop— is now poised to strike fear into a nation that cannot even adequately feed its people.
“The real threat is to what North Korea might be boxing itself into,” Representative Peter King, a Republican from New York, said on ABC Sunday. “Kim Jong-un is trying to establish himself. He’s trying to be the tough guy. He is 28, 29 years old, and he keeps go further and further out. And I don’t know if he can get himself back in.”
That’s the nuclear cul-de-sac: with his threat to attack the US and South Korea with nuclear weapons, Kim has effectively painted himself into a corner. Anything less than that could be seen as retreat among his more hard-line military generals, whose country he rules only with their blessing.
King, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said he fears that a face-saving tit-for-tat military exchange could spiral out of control. “I wouldn’t be that concerned about them hitting the mainland US right now, even any US territory,” he said. “My concern would be that he may feel, to save face, he has to launch some sort an attack on South Korea or some base in the Pacific. And then the president of Korea, President Park may respond against North Korea.”
Tensions escalated further over the weekend, when North Korea threatened to shutter a factory complex it operates just inside its border with South Korea. The eight-year old Kaesong industrial park is a vital source of cash for North Korea, with more than fifty thousand citizens earning close to a hundred million dollars annually. The factory, which has continued to operate normally– with hundreds of South Korean workers traveling to work there each day– has withstood prior strains between the two Koreas. US experts say its shutdown would be grim news.
The military calculus is pretty simple on the peninsula: after a half-century of preparation, North Korea’s massive numbers of artillery tubes and rockets could initially inflict tremendous damage on South Korea, including Seoul’s ten million residents.
But, as US officials have made clear privately for years, any major strike by North Korea against US or South Korea targets would be suicidal: neither the US nor the South Koreans have any interest in returning to the status quo ante if the balloon goes up.The Americans and South Koreans know this, and have certainly made it clear to China, North Korea’s closest ally. It’s a safe bet North Korea knows it, too. The only question now is whether Kim Jong-un believes it.

Rico says the real question is whether Kim gets to be thirty or not...