Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: December 2, 2012

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net and technology news

by Alan Lenton

This week’s somewhat reduced offering comes with pieces on burger flipping machines, Toshiba’s new fast wiping four TB hard drive, badass sci-fi computers, global warming (or not, as the case may be), a DIY book scanner, a Battletech robot, the world’s oldest restored computer, Amazon, atmospheric rivers, rumors of a Google-FTC settlement, and another robot - this time one that can read books at 250 pages a minute.

That’s not a bad achievement for the morning after an evening that started out with an hour or so of whiskey tasting at the local wine store - with unusually generous amounts to taste. This was followed up with a delayed thanksgiving dinner (one family member was halfway up Mount Everest on Thanksgiving Day, so we waited till she got back). I eventually dragged myself out of bed three hours late this morning to toil over this magnificent epistle. Well I think it’s magnificent, anyway.

And, a reminder for you all, there won’t be an issue next week, because I will be out of town on family business over the weekend, but Winding Down will be back in glorious black and white the following weekend, the 16th December. Hopefully by then I will have worked out what the Xmas publishing schedule will be.

And now...

Shorts:

Bad news for all burger flipping graduates. A company called Momentum Machines (fabulous name) have invented a machine that churns out made-to-order burgers at industrial speeds. If this works as well as it appears to, then I predict its very speedy spread in the big chains, because the bulk of their costs are staff costs. Soon, even burger flipping will no longer be a suitable job for graduates unable to find a job in their chosen field...
http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/

Toshiba have just introduced an interesting four terabyte drive. It’s interesting not merely because of the huge amount of storage on a single drive, but also because of what it can do to the data stored on the drive, should you be prepared to pay extra. It can offer near instantaneous cryptographic quality data erasure on the drive.

I can see lots of uses for this sort of drive - both legal and dubious. However, I do wonder just how long it will take the authorities to catch on and make ‘ordinary’ people require a license to possess one of these. Perhaps it will become a criminal offense to possess one, or prima facie evidence of wrong doing.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/29/tosh_4tb/

Fancy a bit of light reading in the run up to Xmas? Then take a look at the URL for this piece, it points to a piece about ten badass brainy computers from science fiction. All the old favourites are there - HAL 9000 from ‘Space Odyssey, MCP from ‘Tron’, and Skynet from’ The Terminator’, to name but three of the best known.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/29/ten_smart_sentient_computers_from_scifi/page3.html

Homework:

I note that the latest figures released by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization show that global warming graunched to a halt in 1998, and has stubbornly refused to meet the predictions of the global warming ‘experts’. Given that the figures were compiled from the three main climate databases - NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British one compiled jointly by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia, it seems unlikely that the result is an error.

Incidentally, global warming since 1950, still only stands at a mere half a degree, well within the level of historical fluctuations of temperature. Even climate warming hardliners are starting to concede that warming is not proceeding as expected, and are starting to look for reasons why temperatures are not increasing, after spending some time trying to convince everyone that the last 14 years are a statistical fluke.

Personally, I have little doubt that the global weather systems have even more surprises to spring yet. After all meteorologists are still having difficulty predicting next week’s weather, let alone the next four or five decades’ weather!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/29/wmo_global_temp_figures_2012_doha_ninth_hottest/

There’s an interesting project starting up at the moment. It’s to produce a Do It Yourself book scanner, which any community can build to turn their paper books into e-books. The plans for the scanner are completely free, and you are free to share them with other people. It also includes free and open software to correct the pages scanned for any distortion caused by the pages not being completely flat.

This is, to my mind, a brilliant and worthwhile project. Not only can individuals scan their own, already purchased books, but communities who often self publish pamphlets and booklets on local history and about their communities, can scan their own material for posterity.
http://www.diybookscanner.org/

Geek Stuff:

Ever since my old friends John and Kelton at the now deceased Kesmai Corp revealed their multi-player Battletech game way back in the early 1990s I’ve waited for someone to produce a real battle mech. Now at last someone has done just that, though you’ll need a cool US$1.35 million and some loose change to buy one. It’s produced by Japanese inventor Kogoro Kurata, and boy you should see the video of it trundling down a Japanese high street.

It uses a diesel engine for motive power, which makes it useful for ambling round the local neighbourhood intimidating any beer soaked hooligans you might have been having problems with, before pulling into your friendly gas station and saying, “Fill ‘er up!” It’s 13 feet high though, so you’d better watch the roof.

Having watched the instructional video I have to admit that I did have a couple of worries. To start with the driver operates the Gatling guns by smiling. Moral, do not stand in front of one of these beasts and try to make the driver laugh. Secondly, it’s a ‘No Smoking’ robot! Look, let’s be realistic about this. You are driving down the local high street in in a 13 foot high, four ton, mech creating havoc, panic and mayhem, and someone is going to tell you that you can’t smoke? Do me a favour...

Finally, I was more than a little alarmed to discover that you can control the beast via a 3G network. That’s just fine when I’m doing the controlling, but what about the local hackers using their iPhones to take it on a rampage? I can just see the court scene now. “Honest, your honor, it was a drive by hacking that caused my robot to stomp four police cars and the mayor’s limo...”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/29/mech/

Scanner: Other stories

World’s oldest digital computer restored to life at age 60
http://www.gizmag.com/harwell-dekatron/25189/

Amazon’s AWS computing cloud services are growing three times as fast as the dot com part of Amazon
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/29/amazon_aws_update_jassy/

Mysterious atmospheric river soaks California, where megaflood may be overdue
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/11/30/mysterious-atmospheric-river/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_physics_201211302400

Google-FTC settlement may be in the works
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/google-ftc-settlement-may-be-in-the-works/2012/11/28/1291d37e-3992-11e2-b01f-5f55b193f58f_story.html?hpid=z3

Watch this book-riffling robot read 250 pages in a minute
http://io9.com/5962798/watch-this-book+riffling-robot-read-250-pages-in-a-minute

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.

Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
2 December 2012

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.

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