Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • December 20, 2022 3:16 AM

@ Winter, JonKnowsNothing, ALL,

Re : Tyranical idiocy

As we all know “strong men” have to posture, from being half naked on a horse barebacking through chopping entire families up with axes because… well just because they can.

“Their SOP is terror, towards their own soldiers and towards the enemy. As such they have not developed their art of war much from tamerlan.”

And pointless vindictive retribution for imagined slights.

During WWII quite a few Russian military fought the “common enemy” from Britain with British and American armed forces.

However on returning home, many never got that last mile… They were rounded up and treated worse than criminals.

It would appear that as you say nothing has changed “Terror with more terror on the side” is the dish of the day every day for many “non pure Russians”.

The notion of an overlord aristocracy debauching themselves and every one else as “peasant stock” to be hunted and abused at will appears not to have changed in more than a thousand years. Probably longer who knows few were literate, so records are few.

The thing is that “overlord” lifestyle was brutal short and mostly full of pain. Death came early simply because of minor disease, injury and other self inflicted lifestyle failings. Trapped by ignorance, stupidity and paranoia they rotted into drunkness, easily preventable disease and madness.

Lets be honest who would want to give up an even very modest Western life style for that sort of brutish paranoid “status”?

But people do, and not just from Russia, parts of South America and areas of the Middle East and Africa…

Clive Robinson • December 20, 2022 4:56 AM

@ name.withheld…,

“Immediacy of the mind…”

Ahh, but from whence the memory…

I find my cultural memories, have like their owner aged and what once would have caused a knowing nod or smile or groan of shared culture now sadly produces blank or vacant looks…

But worse is the loss of technical culture, that is truely scary…

Yesterday I “did Winter Solstice lunch” with my son at the Chinese Buffet (a family tradition) and we started talking about the resource issue of “getting off this rock” whilst we still had resource capacity to do so (the window is maybe a hundred years within our current capabilities).

I pointed out that due to the fact we are at the bottom of a very deep gravity well, our best bet currently[1] is small self replicating robots “launched by gun” to use the abundent energy up there to process raw materials at the top of the gravity well. Thus minimize the vast resources required to get payload up from Earth.

To say “gun launch” produced a blank look of incomprehension was an understatment. I explained that “gun launch” cost about 1/30th of the “fuel costs” per kg of load for a 100-200kg load and that as it was effectively “all in the gun” it was fully reusable with no multi-stage burn up or relanding weight etc making it even more cost effective. Also and importantly it took only about an hour to reload to relaunch, and weather was rarely an issue.

To say my son thought I was “blowing smoke up…” would be mild compared to his looks of disbelief. So I told him about Project HARP and the later Project Babylon work of Canadian Proffessor Dr Gerald Bull and how certain “on the take” Canadian Politicians not only killed off the AVRO Arrow in the 1950’s but HARP as well. But worse “arranged” to have him “jailed”in the US and took away his Birthright Citizenship. Then as Dr Bull gathered evidence of his innocence and was about to put UK and US IC in the spotlight… How Dr Bull was found dead outside his flat with five bullets in his back in 1990 (Mossad was blaimed at the time but later evidence questions this “fed to the MSM” assumption[2]).

And how one of the most promising minimum resource payload lift ideas got killed with Dr Bull…

Oh also have you noticed how satellites / robots are getting very small these days, way smaller than those ideas in StarWars.

Just for fun a few years back I built a Lego Technics Robot connected to a PC that could build Lego brick walls as “an ammusmant” so I know the “self replicating” mechanics are easily possible from “stock parts” and anyone who has seen a fully automated PCB assembly system can see they have real worth. I also later helped build a 3D-Printer that was used to print out stock parts for a number of other 3D-Printers, showing that self replication had advanced beyond “trivial”. What we need to get on and crack is self replicating “mining-refining” to make “feed-stock” to feed 3D-Printers and similar to make standard parts. As for satellites the smallest prototype I’ve made sofar is about half the voume of a “match-book fold” basically a rechargable coin-cell with a flexible surface mount PCB with a couple of solar cells and a small bar magnet. The hard part was not the design or build of the satellite, but designing a payload release device to meet “spec”.

What would be nice is if somebody would do a “technology tester/demonstrator” to “space certify” small lithium ion rechargable batteries. What many don’t know is that the Achilles heal of lithium ion technology is trying to charge below around 4C kills the cell, even though discharge temp minimums are a lot lower than this. Whilst it does get very cold in space it also gets corespondingly warm, and the average tempratures are well inside the lithiun ion curves. Lithium ion tech is sometimes called “fire in a pocket” because the energy density is sufficient to cause them to catch fire if they get damaged. But on an energy density to weight and store to discharge energy efficiency they are hard to beat currently. So for short lived micro to pico sats for VLEO they would be very usefull.

[1] Space elevators are a nice idea, but we do not “yet” have even remotely close to the materials technology to do it. But also getting the first elevator “up” from the bottom of the well would need more resources than we realistically could spare…

[2] The Israeli IC was fully aware of what Dr Bull was upto, not just from their own “investigations” but what the UK and US IC were telling them (and it would appear corrupt and compromised Canadian politicians as well) and that the so called “super-gun” was not a weapon of war and could be destroyed in just a single fighter-bomber attack. It was as described a space-launch system. Also Iraq had Scud missile technology that was way way more effective for warfare. The “scary scary big gun” story apparently came from an Iraqi defector of the same ilk as that who told the fabricated “yellow cake” stories (basically making it up for money and a good life in the USA, something the CIA has a bad track record for falling for).

Clive Robinson • December 20, 2022 5:57 AM

@ Winter,

“You forget to mention that Dr Bull was helping Saddam Hussein to build a super cannon.”

Are you refering to something other than Project Babylon?

The link you give is from “BBC Future” is actually a private company “privacy slurper” that I’ve found before requires you to enable things I’m not going to enable like “third party cookies”.