Don’t Write Off British Manufacturing and Engineering …

 General  No Responses »
Jul 212013
 

It sometimes seems fashionable to put down British manufacturing and engineering such as when the well known idiot Jeremy Clarkson announced: “We don’t manufacture anything any more”.

Whilst it is true that Britain no longer makes more goods than the rest of the world combined, if you take the trouble to look you will find a surprisingly big industry. The trouble is that we all too often look backwards and compare today with the 19th century. Time to stop doing that, and actually look at today’s industry.

To quote the Wikipedia article (which has some other quite dated figures): “manufacturing output has increased in 35 of the 50 years between 1958 and 2007” and “output in 2007 was at record levels, approximately double that in 1958”. And: “In 2008, the UK was the sixth-largest manufacturer in the world measured by value of output.”

We may not make as much stuff as we used to, but what we do make is a lot more valuable.

A few points that illustrate just how well Britain is doing :-

  1. Of 11 constructors within Formula-1, 8 are based in the UK. Including teams such as Mercedes which you would quite reasonably assume were based in another country.
  2. Despite a series of governments that believe that spending money on space is a waste of time, the UK space industry is still worth £9 billion a year.
  3. BAE Systems is the third largest defence company in the world.
  4. GlaxoSmithKline is the fourth largest pharmaceutical company in the world.
  5. Of the 100 companies in the FTSE-100, around 33 can be regarded as manufacturing companies of one kind or another.
  6. A lesser known company (ARM) designs what is probably the most successful family of computer processors ever – ARM-based processors are found in 95% of all smartphones.

 

Should We Allow Ian Brady To Commit Suicide?

 General  No Responses »
Jun 292013
 

To ordinary people, the odious Ian Brady is as mad as a hatter. Nobody who commits the kind of crimes he is responsible for can be “all there”. Whether he is mentally ill, or legally insane is only relevant as far as deciding whether he should be kept in prison or in a secure hospital.

According to the reports on his mental health hearing, he wanted to be declared sane so he could return to prison where he would not face enforced feeding. He claims to be on hunger strike as he no longer wishes to live. For whatever reason, secure mental hospitals will force someone refusing to eat whereas prisons will not.

In terms of deciding whether he was well enough to be returned to prison, it is probable that the right decision was made. Whilst we should not blindly trust mental health care professionals, when they say he is too ill to be returned to prison, we need a very good reason to disagree.

However if Ian Brady had asked a different question; to be allowed to starve himself to death without being force fed, we would have a very different question to answer.

Normally there are very good reasons to force feed someone who is mentally ill and attempting to starve themselves. Some mental illnesses result in depression so severe that suicide seems like the only way out. But after appropriate treatment, the patient can be quite different.

Is Ian Brady suffering from this sort of mental illness? Apparently he is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, so the answer without additional information is perhaps. If he is not subject to episodes of clinical depression then there may be grounds for stopping the force feeding.

Now of course there is another question to answer here: Should we allow him to commit suicide before he has owned up to his crimes and detailed where the last undiscovered body of known victims is buried?

If we decide that Ian Brady should not be allowed to starve himself to death, it seems reasonable that we let him know the reason why and how he can work towards changing our minds.

What’s Missing From The New Mac Pro

 Computing  No Responses »
Jun 122013
 

Apple’s teaser of their replacement for the venerable Mac Pro has raised quite a few hackles “out there” amongst a certain kind of Mac Pro prospective customer. They’re wrong.

It is quite possible that Apple has done some extensive research on whether internal expansion with storage and PCIe cards is necessary or not. And it is quite possible that most of the old Mac Pros had not been expanded in this way.

But Apple are wrong too (and of course I’m right whilst everyone else is wrong  :-P): Internal expansion is important for some people, and they are quite possibly the sort of people that you don’t want to antagonise. Specifically the enthusiasts who would rather keep their storage internal, who want to add accelerator cards of one kind or another, etc.

Whilst the enthusiasts may not be the majority of Apple’s customers, they do have a certain amount of influence. People asking the enthusiasts at the moment may well get told to get an old Mac Pro right now so they are not limited by the expansion capabilities of the new Mac Pro.

And there’s a way that Apple could have done both; kept the neat design of the new Mac Pro, and allow the enthusiasts to have “internal” expansion. And it could be done by simply allowing the new form factor to expand the case through the base – allow it to “click” onto a PCIe expansion cage, or a two-drive enclosure.

Sure that would require some sort of special bus in the base, and a sensible way of attaching cases to the base in a secure enough manner. But it would also mean that the new Mac Pro was as expandable as the old without the use of the cable tangle that most external devices require.

Take a look behind most large tower PC’s and you’ll find a tangle of cables attaching screens, keyboards, mice, external drives, and odder devices. Apple’s new Mac Pro will just make this worse when they could have done something even more radical and showed the industry how to improve the situation.

The NSA and GCHQ Are Spying On Us …

 Security  No Responses »
Jun 082013
 

Which is news how exactly? Spying on us is what the NSA and GCHQ are for.

Over the last day or two, we have been hearing more and more of the activities of the NSA (here) and GCHQ (here) spying on “us” (for variable definitions of that word). Specifically on a programme called PRISM which monitors Internet traffic between the US and foreign nations, but not on communications internal to the US.

Various Internet companies have denied being involved, but :-

  1. They would have to deny involvement as any arrangement between the NSA and the company is likely to be covered by heavyweight laws regarding the disclosure of information about it.
  2. It’s also worth noting that they have asked the company executives whether they are involved in PRISM, but not asked every engineer within the company; it is doubtful in the extreme that any company executive knows everything that happens within their company. And an engineer asked to plumb in a data tap under the banner of national security is not likely to talk about it to the company executive; after all the law trumps company policy.
  3. The list of companies that have been asked, and have issued denials is a list of what the general public think of as the Internet, but in fact none of the companies are tier-1 NSP; whilst lots of interesting data could be obtained from Google, any mass surveillance programme would start with the big NSPs.

What seems to have been missed is the impact of agreements such as the UKUSA agreement on signals intelligence; the NSA is “hamstrung” (in their eyes) by being forbidden by law from spying on US domestic signals, but they are not forbidden to look at signals intelligence provided by GCHQ and visa-versa. Which gives both agencies “plausible deniability” in that they can legitimately claim that they are not spying on people from their own country whilst neglecting to mention that they make use of intelligence gathered by their opposite number.

There is some puzzlement that PRISM’s annual cost is just $20 million a year; there is really a rather obvious reason for this … and it also explains why none of the tier-1 NSPs have been mentioned so far either. Perhaps PRISM is an extension of an even more secret surveillance operation. They built (and maintain) the costly infrastructure for surveillance targeting the tier-1 NSPs and extended it with PRISM. In particular, the growing use of encryption means that surveillance at the tier-1 NSPs would be getting less and less useful (although traffic analysis can tell you a lot) making the “need” for PRISM a whole lot more necessary.

As it turns out there is evidence for this hypothesis.

But Are They Doing Anything Wrong?

Undoubtedly, both the NSA and GCHQ will claim what they are doing is within the law, and in the interests of national security. They may well be right. But unless we know exactly what they are doing, it is impossible to judge if their activities are within the law or not. And just because something is legal does not necessarily make it right.

Most people would probably agree that a mass surveillance programme may be justified if the aim is to prevent terrorism, but we don’t know that their aims are limited to that. The surveillance is probably restricted to subjects of “national interest”, but who determines what is in the national interest? Just because we think it is just about terrorism, war, and espionage doesn’t mean it is so. What is to stop the political masters of the NSA or GCHQ from declaring that it is in the national interest to spy on those involved with protests against the government, or those who vote against the government, or those who talk about taxation (i.e. tax avoidance/evasion)?

Spying is a slippery slope: It was not so very long a ago that a forerunner of the NSA was shut down by the US president of the day because “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”. But intelligence is a tool that is so useful that more and more invasive intelligence methods become acceptable. It is all too easy to imagine how today’s anti-terrorist surveillance can become tomorrow’s 1984-like society.

That does not means that GCHQ should not investigate terrorism, but that it should do so in a way that we can be sure that it does not escalate into more innocent areas. Perhaps we should be allowing GCHQ to pursue surveillance, but that it should be restricted to a specified list of topics.

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