Tech
How Anti-Nuclear-Power Hysterics Kill
Two stories, one about the dangers of contaminated spinach and another on the NY Times’s ignoring of irradiation as a preventative for food borne illness, show us how the moral posturing and emotional hysteria of the anti-nuclear-power left have not only vastly contributed to global warming, mercury poisoning, strip mining, general air pollution, etc. but have also been responsible for the deaths and maiming of virtually everyone who suffered from food-borne microbial illness in the last 40 years.
Can This Ship Be Saved?
The SS United States, a fast and beautiful passenger liner, was built in 1952 and operated in commercial service until 1969. She is now in danger of being scrapped.
Lots of pictures in the slideshow at the link; also, some of the comments are interesting.
More about the ship at Wikipedia, and here is an organization which is attempting to save this vessel.
I Want to Be Like Norm
This panel below is from a the web comic “Escape From Terra”. It’s a pretty good hard science fiction story which examines how a libertarian/anarchist society might function in space. The centeral conflict revolves around those in space trying to keep their freedoms in the face of ever-present encroachment from the statist world-government of Earth (it’s modelled on the EU).
In the story, two pilots deliver a chunk of a comet to a self-made billionaire who is hiding out on his own little artificial habitat. The billionaire has to hide because he keeps creating disruptive technologies that empower ordinary people to live their lives independently of the state, and the government doesn’t like that — to the point it wants to see him dead.
In this panel, the billionaire explains his motivations:
[Source]
Every geek in the world should strive to emulate the late Norman Borlaug. Geeks and business people have done more good for the world than all the politicians and wannabe-politicians combined.
In 1969, the people who changed the world for the better weren’t left-wing, pro-communist-victory “activists” but the engineers and scientists who landed men on the moon and fired up the first two nodes of the Internet. People who view “progress” in terms of politics first and foremost have done far more harm than good. Yet, as the comic points out, we know their names while the names of those who made our lives so much better are erased from common history .
People in the developed world (and increasingly the rest of the world as well) have lives of physical comfort, social equality and political freedom mostly because of the efforts of geeks like Borlaug who use knowledge and hard work to turn dirt and water into happiness.
When artists whip out posters of people like Borloug instead of the glorious leader du jour, we will know we have become a truly wise civilization.
The Myth of “Security Through Rarity”
If malware was water falling from the sky, the experience of people running the big three desktop operating systems would go something like this:
Mac OS X: “Is it sprinkling? I thought I felt a drop there. Did anyone else feel a drop? No? Maybe I just imagined it.”
Linux: “Oh, yeah… I definitely felt a sprinkle or two there.”
Windows: [Can’t say anything because they’re pinned to the foot of Niagara Falls by tons of down rushing water.]
For the last ten years, there has been a raging debate among computer geeks as to why Mac OS X and Linux have virtually no problems with malware while Windows is often almost crippled by it. The most commonly accepted explanation is called “Security Through Rarity.” This concept holds that on a technological level Mac OS X and Linux are just as insecure as Windows but that the relatively small market share of the first two operating systems makes it unprofitable for malware programmers to spend the time trying to infect them.
I have longed believed that the basic premise of “Security Through Rarity” largely explained why I can run my Mac OS X machines without any additional anti-malware software but don’t dare do the same for my Windows machines. For the last decade, I and everyone else who believed in the concept have expected that “any day now” the Mac’s immunity from malware would end in a shocking gotterdammerung of a Mac malware pandemic but it hasn’t happened yet. Just as the failure of other types of apocalyptic prophesies undermine people’s faith in those prophesies, the fact that the long-prophesied Mac malware apocalypse has never manifested in more than a trivial manner has caused me to reexamine my belief in the “Security Through Rarity” concept.
There are several good reasons to doubt that “Security Through Rarity” explains the lack of malware that exploits Mac OS X in particular.