Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Education, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

On The Chopping Block

14 Comments

(My CEI colleague) Iain Murray says that part of a budget deal should be to eliminate the Department of Commerce.

It’s not actually the first one I’d go after (I’d get rid of e.g., Education, Labor and Energy first), but I understand the potential appeal. But it does serve many necessary functions that would have to be redistributed elsewhere. For instance, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wouldn’t find a comfortable home in the State Department, nor would NOAA or the weather service. Granted, the latter is kind of a mess right now, in terms of not getting needed new satellites up (particularly now that we’re headed into the heart of hurricane season), though it’s not clear whether that’s NOAA’s fault, or NASA’s, which actually manages the development of the satellites. Also, giving over the commercial export list to the State Department could make ITAR even more of a disaster than it already is. It would also raise the issue of finding a new home for the Coast Guard (and the Space Guard, if we ever get one).

There is a reason that Commerce has been around a lot longer than the three agencies I mention above as better targets — if it didn’t exist, we’d probably have to invent it in some form. And unlike education, energy, or labor, we actually do have a Commerce Clause in the Constitution (flawed and overstretched though its interpretation has become).

Administrative, Technology and Society

Firefox Problems

2 Comments

So, I recently upgraded to Firefox 4 in Fedora Core 14. It’s not officially supported (it’s supposed to be part of Core 15), but it seemed to install all right from an rpm. The other day, after an unrelated reboot, it started acting strangely. It wouldn’t reload my tabs from the previous session (the “Restore” button did nothing but go gray when I hit it). Also, it’s no longer loading Firefox 4 when I click on the icon for it — it loads 3.6. I actually removed 3.6, and 4, and reinstalled 4, using yum (after renaming my old .mozilla folder). I didn’t reinstall 3.6. Yet when I run Firefox, it runs 3.6. Other symptoms — the Firefox tab in the task manager at the bottom of the screen has no Firefox icon (it’s just generic), the search function doesn’t work.

Does anyone have any idea what’s going on?

[Update a while later]

Per a suggestion in comments, I did find a Firefox 5 package for Fedora 14. It seems to be working all right so far, except I’ve probably lost all the open tabs I had (and there were many dozen). Though perhaps all of the open tabs were part of my problem…

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Heinlein, Fascist

112 Comments

The LA Times interviews some young idiots in fandom:

As the literary and academic worlds open to science-fiction and genre writing, Heinlein lacks the cachet of J.G. Ballard, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson and others. Films based on Dick’s books, good and bad, keep coming. But Heinlein’s film adaptations, in the last half century, since 1950’s “Destination Moon,” culminated in 1997’s “Starship Troopers,” widely disliked by his fan base.

Non-SF writer William Burroughs probably has more influence inside the genre’s literary wing than Heinlein, who won four Hugos (the award voted by the fans), sold millions of copies, and was termed the field’s most significant writer since H.G. Wells.

“His rabid fan base is graying,” said Annalee Newitz, who writes about science fiction for Wired and Gawker. “To literary readers, the books look cheesy, sexist in a hairy-chest, gold-chain kind of way. His stuff hasn’t stood the test of time,” because of characters’ windy speechifying and their frontier optimism.

“Here at the store I actively resist promoting him, because he was a fascist,” said Charles Hauther, the science fiction buyer at Skylight Books. “People don’t seem to talk about him anymore. I haven’t had a conversation about Heinlein in a long time.

And you’ve obviously never had an intelligent one.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Is The Space Age Over?

35 Comments

The Economist seems to think so. More thoughts later.

[Friday morning update]

Clark Lindsey has a good comment over at their web site:

The author uses the cheap-shot pejorative “Space Cadet” to demean those in favor of space travel. So I will use “Earth Child” to characterize the author’s parochial one planet view.

Go read all, as he takes Earth Child to task. A lot of the other comments there are also pretty critical and disdainful.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

More comments over at NASA Watch.

Science And Society, Technology and Society

Rolling Back The Clock?

8 Comments

I’ve always thought that progeria was sort of an existence proof that the aging process is a lot more amenable to external intervention than many want to believe. After all, if it can be accelerated on such a grand scale, why not be able to slow, or even reverse it? Yes, I know that some people think it’s a violation of the Third Law, but I don’t buy it. We do cellular repair perfectly well for years before it starts to decline, and if the repair mechanisms can be made to work again, there is no law of thermodynamics that says we can reduce the entropy again.

So this is a very exciting development, with profound societal implications if it pans out:

The drug rapamycin has been found to reverse the effects of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a fatal genetic disease that resembles rapid aging, in cells taken from patients with the disease. Rapamycin, an immunosuppressant drug used to prevent rejection of transplanted organs, has already been shown to extend life span in healthy mice. Researchers hope the findings will provide new insight into treating progeria as well as other age-related diseases.

As Glenn says, faster, please.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Natural Gas Fiasco

21 Comments

…at the New York Times:

Natural gas just might be the energy solution environmentalists say they want, but actually can’t stand because nothing would put them out of business faster. Forbes blogger Chris Helman words it perfectly:

We would have thought that the Times would be in favor of plentiful, low-cost natural gas. It burns a lot cleaner than coal, and with nuclear off the table for now, gas is poised to fuel U.S. economic growth for more than a generation to come. I can only guess that the problem, as the Times sees it, is that as long as we have all that cheap gas, there’s precious little need for solar panels, windmills and other cornerstones of their much-heralded but slow evolving green jobs revolution.

Forbes, on the other hand, thinks it’s pretty awesome that thanks to drilling ingenuity the U.S. has proven to have one of the world’s biggest and cheapest hoards of clean-burning gas. Now that’s a story.

This may be a solution to some of the idiocy in California as well, given out high electric rates due partly to NIMBY reluctance to build generating capacity and the insane carbon law they passed. We’re currently paying fifteen cents a kilowatt-hour in SoCal (more for amounts exceeding baseline). I can buy a generator like this one (or smaller), and produce the same power for about a quarter of that at current gas prices (and they’re likely to continue to go down). But I imagine if I were to do that, the carbon nazis would come after me. Also, I’m not sure if they’re designed for steady use, but I think that if you could come up with one that was fairly quiet and could run 24/7, it will become pretty attractive to a lot of people around here.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Fedora Sound Problem

5 Comments

For the first time evah, I finally got the Nvidia drivers installed on my machine (I had been using nouveau), and the video is great. Problem is, I’ve lost sound in videos. It’s not an intrinsic sound problem — I can still hear system sounds, and the audio in Second Life (which is the reason I finally broke down and fought with the system to get the video drivers installed) is fine. But when I play Youtube, silence. Anyone have any ideas?

[Update a while later]

It’s not just Youtube — videos in general don’t work (e.g., PJTV).

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, continuing to narrow it down. It’s a Firefox problem. Things are fine in Opera (which I assume means that it’s not an underlying Flash problem).

[Update a few minutes later]

Never mind. I shut down and restarted Firefox, and all seems to be well now…