South Korea to use cloned dogs to sniff for drugs and explosives

INCHEON, South Korea: The country that created the world's first cloned canine plans to put duplicated dogs on patrol to sniff out drugs and explosives.

The Korean Customs Service unveiled Thursday seven cloned Labrador retrievers being trained near Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul. The dogs were born five to six months ago after being separately cloned from a skilled drug-sniffing canine in active service.

Due to the difficulties in finding dogs who are up to snuff for the critical jobs, officials said using clones could help reduce costs.

[From South Korea to use cloned dogs to sniff for drugs and explosives - International Herald Tribune]

I had tuned out these cloning-related news in the past because they all seemed to focus in pure academic research and the morons that oppose it without as much as trying to read the description of what is it that the scientists are trying to do. I have no idea if this is the first mainstream announcement about cloning animals for a practical purpose, but if it is I hope they get away with it.

Of course, this is the kind of thing that we can't do in the United States. Even if the dogs in question were trained as guides for the blind, or as rescue dogs, a political element in this country will effectively seize the opportunity to crush the scientists simply to make a few cheap headlines.

This is a real world application to a controversial scientific discipline, not one more attempt of soulless Science trying to destroy God, or whatever the hell is it that these people think cloning is all about.

I am eagerly awaiting for South Korean scientists to find the perfect pig with the perfect body composition for maximum bacon processing. Then it can be cloned and we can solve world hunger with delicious bacon.

Comcast: FCC lacks any authority to act on P2P blocking

The man who spoke for Comcast at Harvard last month has told the Federal Communications Commission that the agency has no legal power to stop the cable giant from engaging in what it calls "network management practices" (critics call it peer-to-peer traffic blocking). Comcast vice president David L. Cohen's latest filing with the Commission claims that regulators can do nothing even if they conclude that Comcast's behavior runs afoul of the FCC's Internet neutrality guidelines.

"The congressional policy and agency practice of relying on the marketplace instead of regulation to maximize consumer welfare has been proven by experience (including the Comcast customer experience) to be enormously successful," concludes Cohen's thinly-veiled warning to the FCC, filed on March 11. "Bearing these facts in mind should obviate the need for the Commission to test its legal authority."

[From Comcast: FCC lacks any authority to act on P2P blocking]

In other words, "Fuck the FCC."
That's the funny thing about common sense: you can't teach it. If you find a loophole in federal law, why brag about it? All you are going to do is draw attention to yourself and the loophole, and before you know it, the loophole will be closed.
Do you really think that a government agency is going to let a private company give them that UFIA out in the open? And in an election year?
Of course not.
Here's what I don't understand: why act so bold when they are no longer the only game in town when it comes to broadband? Here in North Virginia they are still strutting around as if they own Fairfax County. Seems their suits haven't figured out that Verizon has been selling FIOS here for a while.
The other thing I can't understand is their billing. Every month the bill is different, and my tiers never come out straight. Are these people actually interested in making money? The one thing I know for sure is once I call them to tell them about my new FIOS line they'll start throwing discounts at me, as if it is going to make a god damn difference.

FCC spectrum auction is completed with $19.6 bln in bids - MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- A sale of communications airwaves by the federal government to the commercial wireless industry closed Tuesday, after 261 rounds of bidding and $19.6 billion in bids.
The end of the auction means that, within a short period of time, the Federal Communications Commission will reveal who the winners of the valuable radio spectrum licenses are, and where in the country they acquired airwaves.
The proceeding was conducted on a blind-bidding basis, which means that, throughout the sale, bidders have been anonymous. The FCC put this in place after some potential participants in the auction argued it would enhance competition.

[From FCC spectrum auction is completed with $19.6 bln in bids - MarketWatch]

As one of the many customers that made the jump from analog to digital, which is what allowed this bidding to happen, I would like to say the following:
"Where's my cut?"
And by cut I don't mean two discount coupons to buy ATSC tuner boxes.
Actually, I don't care, I was hoping they would make like bandits. Now I hope they can take that freed up bandwidth and do something creative with it, maybe solve the last mile problem for rural america once and for all.

The Faraday Cage

A real Faraday Cage is an enclosure that blocks electromagnetic radiation. Over the past few years I have been struggling with my condo because sometimes it feels like I am living inside of a Faraday Cage: my cell reception always sucks and I never get enough signal strength from my wireless access point.

Once we got the two AppleTVs, it got worse. Two AppleTVs streaming off two separate Macs, both on 802.11g is too much of a pain in the ass, and this is assuming the network is running normally. Mine wasn't, so performance for PJs AppleTV was always subpar when used in streaming mode. Because of that, his is setup to pull the actual content instead of streaming it.

Here's more or less what the network was like:

Red: 100MB ethernet.
Blue: 54MB wireless.
Green: Mac / AppleTV pair
I decided to hell with it, why bother with wireless when the condo is just 1000 square feet? I asked my friends around, and they all recommended the same: wire it yourself.
One of my coworkers lent me his crimping tool and his line testing gizmo, plus a bag of RJ45 connectors. I spent about $40 in cable, plus some really neat cable staples and a $10 5-port 100MB ethernet switch.
Last night was patch cord training, since I had not put together an ethernet cord since sometime in 1998. After two hours I had three completed patch cords that could actually pass the gizmo tests.
Today I wired my office, ran a line to PJ's room and made more patch cords. This is what the network looks like right now:


Red: VoIP line (off the Comcast Arris MTA)
Green: 100MB ethernet in my office
Blue: 100MB line to PJs room
Orange: 100MB ethernet in PJs room
There was virtually no benefit to the Mac Book Pro (which was never more than 10 feet away from the wireless access point), but my AppleTV is a little bit more responsive. The real benefit is that now there are no more networking issues with the stuff in PJs bedroom.

You SPACE.com -- Plutonium Shortage May Thwart Future NASA Missions to Outer Planets

NASA is facing the prospect of trying to explore deep space without the aid of the long-lasting nuclear batteries it has relied upon for decades to send spacecraft to destinations where sunlight is in short supply.

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin told a House Appropriations subcommittee March 5 that the U.S. inventory of plutonium-238 - the radioactive material essential for building long-lasting batteries known to the experts as radioisotope power systems - is running out quickly.

"Looking ahead, plutonium is in short supply," Griffin told lawmakers during the first of two days of hearings on the U.S. space agency's 2009 budget request.

[From SPACE.com -- Plutonium Shortage May Thwart Future NASA Missions to Outer Planets]

You know things are hurting when the world's only nuclear superpower is running out of plutonium-238. Or maybe it isn't. Maybe what they mean is "we don't have more plutonium-238 for you to waste in missions we find useless."
I find it weird that the Russians are down to their last 10 kilograms of it. How do we know they didn't decide to crank up nuke production and send us back to Cold War #2? Or maybe we are the ones doing this?

By the way, according to Wikipedia we have purchased 16.5 kilograms from them.

FMG-9 Prototype

This is just awesome:

The funny thing is how they built it off commercial components, so they can probably turn that around into a commercial product in not a hell of a lot of time. The problem is that the second that thing hits the market it'll find itself into some military use-only control list.

'Virtual' border fence gets OK - Security- msnbc.com

WASHINGTON - A 28-mile “virtual fence” that will use radars and surveillance cameras to try to catch people entering the country illegally has gotten final government approval.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Friday was to announce approval of the fence, built by the Boeing Co. and using technology the Bush administration plans to extend to other areas of the Arizona border, as well as sections of Texas. These projects could get under way as early as this summer, officials said.

[From 'Virtual' border fence gets OK - Security- msnbc.com]

And by "people entering the country illegally" they mean Mexicans. Has anyone told Homeland Security about the Maginot Line? Even if the virtual fence works, it is only 28 miles long, all they will need to do is hire their coyotes to take them to the end of the fence, where there's either no fence, or something that can be dug under or climbed over. By the way, this is a $20 million program, and it had to be reviewed after they had burned through the first $15 million. Nice.

Rogue satellite destroyed by SM-3 ship-launched missile

It looks almost like when Alderaan was blown up.
What I am really enjoying about the press coverage of this event is how everyone pretty much understood that the shooting was more than just removing the threat of that dangerous satellite plummeting down to earth: it is also a technology demonstrator of a functional ballistic missile shield.
I also think it's really cool that the kill vehicle is kinetic (basically a huge bullet) instead of an explosive warhead. Tom Clancy explored this scenario with a similar platform, except the kill vehicle was an anti-air warhead. The technical challenge for that scenario was that the tracking software was making it follow the hottest part of the ballistic inbound, which is wrong since it would aim the missile at the tail end of the flying fireball surrounding the inbound. The warhead flies faster than the velocity of the explosive in the intercept missile, so by the time the missile blows up, the inbound is already too far to feel the explosion. Clancy's solution: switch to a radar tracker, which let them (at least in theory) track the actual inbound.
Fun stuff.

Navy missile hits spy satellite - Space- msnbc.com

WASHINGTON - A missile launched from a Navy ship successfully struck a dying U.S. spy satellite passing 130 miles over the Pacific on Wednesday, a defense official said.

Two officials said the missile was launched successfully just after 10:30 p.m. ET. One official, who is close to the process, said it hit the target. He said details on the results were not immediately known.

The goal in this first-of-its-kind mission for the Navy was not just to hit the satellite but to obliterate a tank aboard the spacecraft carrying 1,000 pounds of a toxic fuel called hydrazine.

[From Navy missile hits spy satellite - Space- msnbc.com]

The missile used has been reported as a variant of the RIM-161 SM-3.
What I find fascinating is that the purpose of the mission wasn't simply to intercept the satellite, but to hit a specific spot, the hydrazine tank. Also, at least in the SM-3, the warhead is a kinetic warhead, which means that the missile kills by punching its target, not by blowing it up with an explosive warhead and/or the shrapnel generated by such an explosion.