perfidy

It is a commonplace that the advance of technology killed the Feudal age. The cost of training, equipping and supporting the Medieval knight was large, relative to the economic output of the era. And this cost was necessary because in many respects it was the best bang for the buck given the technological and economic realities. So the military necessity, the social structure and the available technology mutually created and supported each other in an environment where there had been significant collapse of large-scale institutions and in which there were powerful threats to local populations.

As technology fitfully advanced, new military paradigms arose. The rise, first of archers and pikemen and then the firearm, created a tactical environment unfriendly to the armored knight, which then made the cost of training, equipping and supporting the expensive and arrogant knight sufficiently unpleasant that he faded from the scene.

Technology didn't stop with killing the knight. Masses of musket-equipped soldiers were eventually joined with mass-produced muskets, mass-produced canned goods, and eventually mass-produced mass production. Soon, even the emaciated descendants of the knight - the aristocracy - was on its knees.

Democracy triumphant! Workers of the world unite, and eat the rich! Buy large quantities of Chinese trinkets!

However, the rise of capitalism and democracy were not without their downsides. While the initial wave led to decentralization of economic and political decision-making, the system did not provide much in the way of safeguards against the eventual re-centralization of power using the techniques and technologies that the age of mass production and eventually the information age provided.

Crony capitalism, regulatory capture, the unfettered rise of the financial industry - we are seeing that allowing these things to happen, and especially to happen with the seal and approval of a democratic mandate, equivalent to the mandate of heaven - is probably not a good idea. In fact it likely will lead to the collapse of modern society - and if you read zero hedge, you'll know that this will happen sometime before next Tuesday.

There are new technologies on the horizon. The maker movement, 3D printing, home fabricators, automated CNC routers, the nascent technological cornucopia will soon force upon us vast changes, fully equivalent in scale to the changes brought by the industrial revolution, and before it the late medieval technology boom in metallurgy and clockwork and the harnessing of wind and water power.

These technologies, if you listen to the hype of their creators and promoters, will lead to a golden age of libertarian skittle-shitting unicorn rainbow happiness. And hey, they might be right. It might be stage one of the rapture of the nerds, and all humanity will just leap forward into the promised land where everyone is safe from obnoxious jocks with big muscles and little understanding of the wonders and nuances of star trek minutia and WoW guild politics.

But will it?

Just to be contrarian here for a moment, what if the new technology does not result in further democratization and libertarian society fertilization? Okay, sure, the cost of many things will go down, and that would be an argument in favor of the established perception of the economic and social potential of this complex of technologies. Global design and local production will surely have a vast effect, one corner of which will be lower cost of some goods.

But will the cost of absolutely everything go down? I think, yes and no.

The rifle is a simple piece of technology. Mass produced in quantity and distributed, it is and has been the center of large national armies for half a millennium. To be sure, we have accreted a lot of things around the hoary and grey-bearded rifle-equipped infantryman. Artillery, air forces, etc, ad nauseam. And those can generally only be produced by nation states because you need to own the factories to make these expensive items that allow the democratic citizen soldier to prosper on the battlefield.

The concentration of power enabled by mass production and democratization has been focused on the nation-state, and increasingly on the parasitic large corporation/finance behemoths that interpenetrate and influence the nation-state. As Aretae recently pointed out, the interference of the nation state in even simple things like transportation networks hugely distorted the 'natural' growth of economies. And this leads to interesting thoughts.

The growth of new methods of production might lower the cost of some things enough that the cost of other things, especially networks of things will go up, relatively speaking. (If useful things become cheap enough, you can get lots of them. If they are intelligent things, having lots of them will grant capabilities beyond a linear extrapolation of having just one would lead you to expect.) Will the cost of these networks of things rise to the level at which you need the concentrated essence of economic power - the nation-state - to effectively field fighting forces with them? The likeliest case, given the wider range, is that the cost would fall between the normal individual's means and national-debt-inducing.

If there is a collapse, or pseudo-collapse, in national and international economies and society as a result of the recent and ongoing unpleasantness - what will happen? Local-producing makers and fabricators will create regional trade networks. Trading designs globally, but producing locally, we can imagine whole new industrial ecosystems growing up around descendents of today's maker spaces. The modern smithy will be a fab lab where the local artisan can produce circuits, finished parts in plastic and metal or wood - customized and perfectly suited to the task at hand. No more mass-produced assembly line toys from China - if you want something, you go to the smithy and he makes it, just like of old.

But the thing is, a fully realized maker fab will be able to create enormously sophisticated devices and indeed entire infrastructures on a custom and ongoing basis. This goes far beyond printing interesting dildos in pink ABS plastic. Drones, drone controllers - and therefore systems of surveillance, mini-missiles, over the horizon attack capabilities, metalstorm pods, munitions, AAD systems, all networked and controlled by systems of software modeled on modern game software.

Producing rifles - even super-cool, electrically activated, rapid-fire, armor-piercing, self-homing bullet firing metalstorm rifles - with this nearly automated manufacturing technology would be the smallest thing. Equivalent to the medieval smith making a knife - a trivial exercise.

In a world that is suddenly regionalized (at best) or hyper-localized (at worst), where large-scale institutions are enfeebled both by the growing power of new technologies and the economic systems that evolve around them as documented by people like John Robb; and of course by their own inherent flaws as ably documented by Moldbug and Foseti - you have something that starts to look a lot like the pre-feudal age where the common folk are at risk from the still powerful remnants of the old order, and from out of context threats like vikings and other mobile bandits.

And what defends local communities from threats? A defense infrastructure that is complicated to produce, and difficult to utilize. While the local maker can produce any simple tool almost at cost from scrap metal and plans pulled out of the cloud (just as the medieval smith could produce simple tools from pig iron and the sweat of his brow) creating a complex of drones, missiles and automated defense systems that might be very like that imagined by Daniel Suarez in his books Daemon and Freedom(tm) is more on the order of a highly skilled armor smith producing a complicated and effective suit of armor, and the sword smith creating a usable and durable sword out of high-grade steel. And the horse breeder providing destriers, and the community providing for the feeding and training of the knight who used them...

What if the new proto-medieval knight (the old one was the thug who was skilled at arms, and seized the opportunity to create an economic situation that would support him and provide defense for the people sufficient enough that they accepted the rest) is the techno-geek gamer who understands the means of designing and utilizing the new high-tech to provide for the defense of the commons. And whose training to be effective takes years, and requires the output of a significant community, and works best when the skills are transmitted in a master/apprentice mode.

Because one guy with a rifle won't be an effective combatant in a world with networked drones, micro-missiles, sensor networks, and who knows what else that could be created with a mature fabbing technology. And as easy as a rifle is to learn to use, learning to use complex networks of weapons won't be.

Technology forces cultural changes. But not usually in ways that we expect. Our current system is between two and four centuries old, depending on how you count it. Technology is undermining it, along with its own inherent and multiplying flaws. That's about as long as things generally last. In times of great change, things don't normally continue on a linear extrapolation of current events, or even the events of the last century. We are perhaps foolish to imagine that the result of the changes taking place will be merely the elimination of only the bad parts of the current system.

Upon receiving the following informative missive from the Cuyahoga Board of Elections, I was initially excited by its cover. "Instructions for New Optical Scan Voting System Inside," it promised, and I thought, "The BOE is going to SCAN MY RETINAS to figure out who I'm voting for." Then I considered the fact that any such equipment was probably manufactured by Diebold, and that meant that my eyeballs could be hacked by anyone with an iPod, some jewelry wire, and an old dog-eared copy of Electric Company magazine, and I instantly felt dubious.

But no, alas, there will be no Sci-Fi-Channelesque machine that says "Access Granted" in a soothing feminine robot voice. Instead, we here in the rustbelt will be employing the skills we mastered in 1982 while taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Evidence these instructions:

So, apparently, I am to fill in the circle? When I cast my vote for George Washington? Isn't he that dude who hangs out on the stoop down the street and asks me for loosies every time I walk by on the way to the bodega? Huh. I didn't even know he was running for office.

our ethical robot overlords

So, humanity has been working on making things fly like insects and birds for - what? - millennia? And working toward that endeavor seriously since Galileo.

It’s a crazy dream of humanity for thousands and thousands of years, and now I see the damn solution to the problem - a toy that mimics the flight of a dragonfly - on a commercial on a basic cable station during, appropriately enough, an airing of the new series of Doctor Who.

Ladies and gentlemen, the future is here.

My son turned to me, and said, "Let me tell you the rules about robots." Enumerating them with his fingers, he laid them out for me:

1. Don't burn yourself
2. Keep telling them what to do
3. Stay smarter than the robots

My son has come up with a new three rules for robots. And you know, I think they are a vast improvement on Asimov's original Robotic Laws.

[wik] Later in the trip, he added a fourth law:

• Don't let the robots into the woods, they might break themselves

I don't know about any of you, but I've worked with "that guy" more times than I can count.
 

My latest post over at Murdoc Online

As I expected, in the comments for my last post someone recommended that the battleships be brought back from retirement. We all love the battleships. Armored to the point of (near) invulnerability, graceful, powerful, and loaded with 16” guns. A battleship broadside delivers a mind numbing amount of shells on target. We dig that. It’s a spectacle. And of course, naval support of Marine landings is an important role. But how useful is it?

Step back a bit. There is a reason that battleships were relegated to a subsidiary role. And that reason is air power. The primary consideration is not that the airplane can deliver more firepower more accurately, because until very recently the accuracy bit was sorely lacking, and there is no way that a teeny, tiny airplane – or even many teeny, tiny airplanes – can deliver the weight of fire that a battleship can. I imagine that a single gun from a battleship weighs as much as a plane.

The reason that the carriers and their air wings achieved primacy in battle is the range and speed of the aircraft. Airplanes are faster than boats. Now, much faster. That is what allows a carrier to control a bubble hundreds of miles in diameter, while a battleship is limited to, essentially, line of sight.

Here Over at MO, the commenting-American community is often attacking the esteemed air arms of our military for their addiction to air power as a means of conducting warfare. I have seen many complaints that the battleship – and artillery for the Army – are slighted in favor of highly expensive fragile airplanes that deliver itsy little bombs. And it is true that the more, uh, “focused” among air power advocates seem to believe that air power is the cure for all ills.

Yet, while we (and especially Dfens and James) might legitimately and with the certain conviction that we are in the right argue that the way that the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and even the Post Office procure, design, screw up and eventually buy combat aircraft that are tragically expensive and often not really suited to the roles that they need to fill; the fact remains that an aircraft will always be more flexible, faster, and cover a greater range than any battleship or Crusader self-propelled gun.

The flexibility of air power is a gift from the almighty – load the bombs or missiles you need, and any target within a thousand miles is doomed in a space of hours, or less. Doesn’t matter if it’s a building, a bunker, a bridge, a boat or a tank column. Artillery, no matter how puissant (talking guns here, not rockets) is not hitting beyond a couple dozen miles, and neither is a battleship. And both move at 40 mph or less.

With the coming of precision guided bombs, the effectiveness of our planes has drastically increased. Once it took a thousand bomber raid using tactics of questionable morality to get an even chance at taking out military targets. (Combat air support was usually a bit more effective than strategic bombing, but still had limitations.) Now, with the wonders of modern technology at our service, we can actually take out that bridge. Or that building. To the point that the primary limiting factor on the employment of air power is not the accuracy of our weapons, but of our intelligence. (In more ways than one.)

A plane can move at speeds of hundreds of miles an hour over a range in the thousands of miles and destroy anything we can detect, with near perfect reliability. The constraints are the ability to detect targets, and the bomb loads of the planes in question.

The fault, then, is not that we have foolishly mothballed battleships or canceled artillery programs. It’s that we are buying airplanes foolishly. It is natural for the Air Force and Naval, Marine and Army Aviation to go for the biggest, most expensive and technologically sophisticated aircraft they can build. We can sort of forgive them for that. We want the coolest toys, and our contractors love the money they get for designing and mismanaging high technology weapons programs. It’s also completely wrong.

Where we’ve screwed up is in buying two dozen billion dollar stealth bombers instead of a hundred less capable, higher capacity bombers. Look at the service we’re getting out of the B-52, still. The F-22 is ridiculously expensive, and seriously flawed as many have pointed out in the comments here. It’s invisible to radar. It can kill any other plane that dares to leave the ground. Bats can’t detect it. Yet, it can only carry one medium sized bomb and it’s gun has less rounds than a police revolver. It’s utility is therefore limited by the small number of credible enemy fighters for it to destroy.

The fact that the air heads are always pushing for multi-role aircraft as a “savings measure” is frankly retarded. The planes end up costing more than twice as much and aren’t as effective in either role. What we need is ground support, in quantity, to make up for two things: the fact that artillery delivers a heavy weight of fire, and the fact that my kid’s scooter is faster than most artillery.

Let’s buy a couple squadrons of F-22s, we can use them for the really tricky stuff when we go to war with China. Same with the B-2. Fine, the Air Force can be happy with that. I’m sure the naval version of the F-35 will be an adequate interceptor. Stealthy-ish and fast, it is probably more than a match for any potential air threat. Let us buy a few. Keep the research fires burning so that we can take advantage of any new tech that comes down the pike. But let’s not buy a thousand planes at a hundred mil a pop for no damn reason.

As much as I love and covet advanced technology, we need to back off just a bit. The capabilities of our potential enemies just don’t require it, and in pursuing it, we deny ourselves capabilities that we know we need, and that can be used against any enemy, large or small. A relatively small force of very high technology planes will serve to assert and maintain air superiority. Likewise, stealth bombers of various types are the kind of doorknockers we need to take out air defenses and hit high-value targets deep inside enemy territory. But using an F-22 for CAS, or relying on a billion dollar stealth bomber to loiter over an insurgency is not an optimal solution. Instead, let’s build airplanes that suit our needs.

Like that new version of the A-10 that coolhand77 suggested in the comments. Something tough, simple, and capable of carrying a double buttload of very, very smart bombs. And, of course, the modern avionics to make best use of those bombs. And why don’t we give it to the Army while we’re at it. Forcing the Army to use helicopters regardless of whether they are fit for the task is slightly daft. Modern bombs are very effective indeed – clustered munitions, smart bombs, precision guided munitions of all kinds – delivered in quantity by cheap, high-payload attack bombers will be what we need to provide support for infantry on the ground.

And let’s build a naval version. What we need – to make restoring and then crewing vastly expensive battleships unnecessary – is a replacement for the A-6. A carrier air wing that has, say, a navalized, new model A-10 capable of carrying a substantial amount of ordinance could perform the role of naval support for amphibious landings that an Superbugs and F-35’s simply cannot thanks to their limited payload capacity.

For the Air Force, a B-52 replacement based on a commercial or military cargo plane would be a cost effective way to deliver, when needed, large amounts of ordinance in a environment where control of airspace is more or less a given. The advent of stand-off weapons like the J-SOW even means that targets can be serviced from a distance even when control of the air is not complete.

For the price of one $200mil F-22, we could have twenty or so A-10s, each capable of delivering many times the weight of bombs. The A-10s we have in service have been or are being modified to better use smart weapons, but we need more, not less of this type of plane. The naval need for this sort of aircraft is even greater. Likewise, the $2bil cost of a B-2 bomber would likely give us eight B-767 bombers, each with about three times the bomb capacity of the stealth bomber.

Air power is useful, cool, and lethal. Our addiction to buying the state of the art prevents us from actually employing air power to maximum advantage.

Patton has accused me of being overly concerned about wasting a scarce natural resource. The category tag. In this, of course, he is completely wrong. Naturally, I could have argued that over-categorizing a post dilutes the utility of tags. And I would have been right. But that wasn't the point. I was attacking him on aesthetic grounds, and just to stick a stick in his eye.

Just to prove that I am not some sort of homo-tree-hugging-enviro-commie, this post, which really is about everything, is tagged with every category we have. And, when I have a free moment, I'll add some new categories, and add them to this post.

So there.

I find, to my embarrassment, that I am utterly unable to top this. The Reg reports on a notional rule of engagement for autonomous killing machines. Boiled down, it's “Let machines target other machines, and let men target men.” But these quotes are priceless:

Many Reg readers will be familiar with the old-school Asimov Laws of Robotics, but these are clearly unsuitable for war robots – too restrictive. However, the new Canning Laws are certainly not a carte blanche for homicidal droids to obliterate fleshies without limit; au contraire.

It isn't really made clear how the ask-permission-to-kill-meatsacks rule could really be applied in these cases.

Which seems to suggest that a robot could decide, under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear. Effectively the robot is allowed to disarm enemies by prying their guns from their cold dead hands.

As clever as Mr. Canning is in trying to come up with these rules for our lethal robotic servants, in the end the three rules are going to add up to one thing: if it is human, kill it.

I couldn't top the title, so I stole it. It seems that evil and mad scientists in China have created the world's first remote control pigeon. No more worrying about running out of batteries with your rc plane, just throw some crumbs on the ground to refuel your pigeon. Then, send them out on bombing missions.

And while you're waiting for the iPhone to be released in June, build your own home fabricator.

Teaching robots to play hide and seek may seem cute now, when robots are clumsy and stupid. And, for the most part, unarmed. But hide and seek isn't so cute when you're hiding, and the seeker is smarter than you, armed with plasma cannon, and thinks you are vermin.

Eminent smarty science types maintain that the one thing that truly separates us from all the other animals on the planet is our cleverness. That, and thumbs, but definitely cleverness.

And while there are some things which can hardly be improved upon that have endured unchanged for centuries, even millennia (the wheel, beer, the music of Slayer), that doesn't stop people from trying to perfect the already perfect. Get that? That's perFECT the already PERfect. The written word is such a blunt instrument.

A good friend of mine, an enterprising and endlessly creative cook whose inventiveness, whose cleverness never fails to astound me, found something in the endless wastes of the internet that's so shockingly creative, so incredibly clever, and so far beyond even his most inspired moments, that I just have to bring to your attention.... season shot, the shot made of seasoning.

Cook a game bird in one piece
No shot left in the bird
Season on impact
The answer: Season Shot

Season Shot: Ammo with flavor

Hot damn. It's environmentally sound, potentially quite tasty, and totally safe on human teeth as well. Let's see a dolphin come up with that! Boo-yah!!!!

The ubiquitous "dogtag" is getting a makeover.

Matter of fact, several thousand improved identity tags are already downrange. The new tags are more than just a visual display of name, ssn, blood type, and religious preference stamped on a flimsy splinter of aluminum. Oh no. These babies will be all electronical and whatnot, and record every med you're taking, all your allergies, all your ow-ies, every injury and sickness you were ever treated for, and could probably archive every time you beat off too, 'cept that where soldiers are concerned no device yet conceived has the memory capacity to store that much data.

But the real clever bit is that field medics will have electronic readers, somewhere between PDAs and medical tricorders, that can read the data on e-tags just by proximity. Medics will not have to dig around a wounded servicemember to plug the new tags into their reader, and gone will be the days where that medic or corpsman had to find the old tags before he could see bloodtype or that he's allergic to such-such med. Taking it a step further, those med readers will tie into your permanent health records, maintained at your post or base of origin, the hospital where you were (or are about to be) treated, or presumably your civilian health system or the VA after you get out.

I think there's alot that can be weird and kludgy with such a system, particularly with all the vagaries of wireless data transmission that have to occur without fail. I might also be unsure about power use/supply/resupply to those readers, particularly with forward units or SOF far away from reliable energy supply or logistics trains.

But I'm not skeptical of the overall program concept, and I think it's a tremendous advantage.

There has been of late a continual trickle of developments in the field of nanotechnology. Some we have covered here at Perfidy - such as the liquid armor developed at the University of Delaware. For a long time, nanotech was pipe dream, or at best the limited product of extreme efforts at the edge of laboratory experimentation. We seem to be reaching a turning point, though, where the techniques of manipulating matter at its smallest, along with ever increasing computer power is leaving the labs and becoming well, not industrialized, but certainly within the reach of more than few dozen scientists. The latest is the invention of a new material that can clot blood almost instantaneously. This substance

Their work exploits the way certain peptide sequences can be made to self-assemble into mesh-like sheets of "nanofibres" when immersed in salt solutions.

In the course of that research they discovered one material's dramatic ability to stop bleeding in the brain and began testing it on a variety of other organs and tissues. When applied to a wound, the peptides form a gel that seals over the wound, without causing harm to any nearby cells.

Rather miraculous. A magical fluid that when applied to a wound, instantly seals it.

And that is the thing about nanotechnology. It seems magical in its effects, though we know that very practical and sober minded scientists have used logic and research at every stage in the development, and that it obeys all known natural laws. We will, I think be confronted by this effect more and more, and much sooner than we think. These things that we are seeing now - potions of healing and +5 magical armor - are just scratching the surface of the potential of nanotechnology. These materials, while wonderful and amazing in their innate capabilities, are nevertheless still ordinary matter - just very cleverly arranged ordinary matter. When we get to the point where we can truly begin to add intelligence to matter - nanotech computers embedded in materials that can respond to commands issued by those computers - we will have smart materials that will dwarf the seemingly magical abilities we've seen so far.

I hope, though, that we don't see a trend of naming new nanotechnological wonders after D&D magic items. Even though I do want a vorpal sword.

In another development in the emerging science of hooking brains up to machinery, scientists at the Washington University of St. Louis have wired a spas up to Space Invaders. While this experiment is of little practical value, researchers soon expect to be able to hook paraplegics up to Asteroids, and - if all goes well, they hope that one day normal people may be able to play Tempest with nothing more than a twitch of grey matter.

Naturally, fantasists and dreamers hailed this development as a prelude to the imminent arrival of bionic limbs, and the revival of the Six Million Dollar Man on the big screen. One may hope that this will be the outcome, though of course the Ministry fears that these scientists are skirting along the precipice of species treason. Today, sure, it's a human. But what happens when it's disembodied rat brains hooked up to something like, say, this:

Well, as you're running for cover in the smoking ruins of your town, well then you won't think those researchers were all that cool after all.

[wik] The article, strangely, did not list the kid's score.

[alsø wik] Even more strangely, the author of the article felt that it was necessary to describe how the game Space Invaders works. Isn't Space Invaders more or less part of the collective cultural Weltanschauung, and thus not in need of explication?

While I doubt this will cause a significant change of direction among automotive safety engineers, it seems that Silicone Breast Implants Save Lives.

Forget airbags, silicone breasts will do 1 hour, 21 minutes ago

A woman in the northern Bulgarian town of Ruse has survived a car crash thanks to her silicone breasts which acted as an airbag, a newspaper has reported.

The 24-year-old ran through a red light and crashed her car into another vehicle at a busy crossroad in the middle of town Saturday, the daily Standart said Monday.

"The two cars were crumpled past recognition in the crash but the woman's silicone breasts acted as airbags and saved her life," Standart wrote, citing eyewitness reports.

But survival as well as beauty comes at a price as the woman burst her silicon implants in the crash

Who knew?

[wik] Lucky for her, she hit the dash tits-first

[alsø wik] Either that, or she had silicone implants inserted in a non-traditional manner

I'm sure that people who invent new kinds of robots all have perfectly well-adjusted social lives, play some ball on the weekends, take the kids to the movies, get together with friends and cook up a big batch of corn smut chili. I'm sure that's the case.

I've heard of robots that learn, robots that walk, robots that build cars, Real Dolls, robots that turn into cars, robots that act as companions to lonely people, and even teledildonics. All very exciting developments in the world of technology, except for that one of those things is incurably foul.

And I'm sure that the minds that came up with the innovation of making robots with soft, human-like skin are perfectly together people with sane minds and clean habits who have never even heard of that one incurably foul thing and thought that it needed to be a robot.

I'm just saying. I don't know what's creepier; a killer robot that mimics a person, or the weird shit that lonely people in their basements are thinking right now.

I think I need to go take a walk. And a shower. And a brain enema.

There's been a lot of reports lately about replacements for the venerable, if disappointing, battery. Battery technology has been around for centuries - milennia if you believe the Bagdad Battery is really a battery - but has always suffered from several key flaws as a store of energy. One, it's not a very dense store of energy. Two, it usually contains noxious, acidic, toxic (or all of the above) substances. They're heavy, and often fragile. And they have a goofy name. Several avenues have been investigated - fuel cells, capacitors, and now micro-miniaturized gas turbines. Fuel cells are nifty, I guess. The capacitor idea being developed at MIT has some cool nanotechnology. But this new idea from MIT just has cool written all over its tiny, silicon body.

A gas turbine has several essential components. A compressor, a combustion chamber, and a turbine to generate electricity. Gas turbines have been used for decades, but they range from table top to ship power plant in size. Until now, no one has come close to developing one that is smaller than a quarter. Using the same techniques as chip manufacturers, the researchers at MIT have created the components of their turbine on silicon wafers. Six of these wafers are stacked and bonded together to form a complete engine.

he MIT team has now used this process to make all the components needed for their engine, and each part works. Inside a tiny combustion chamber, fuel and air quickly mix and burn at the melting point of steel. Turbine blades, made of low-defect, high-strength microfabricated materials, spin at 20,000 revolutions per second -- 100 times faster than those in jet engines. A mini-generator produces 10 watts of power. A little compressor raises the pressure of air in preparation for combustion. And cooling (always a challenge in hot microdevices) appears manageable by sending the compression air around the outside of the combustor.

All of the components work, but the team has yet to get it all to work at once. They hope to have a working prototype in operation by Christmas.

If successful, this would be fantastically cool, and useful. If one of these babies can in fact run for ten times as long as a battery of the same weight, that's a major improvement. But the real improvement would lie in the refueling. If these turbines can be refueled rather than recharged, well instead of having to replace whole batteries, a small can of JP5 could recharge anything that runs on electricity. A major drawback of batteries is the lack of interchangeability. My cell phone, iPod, laptop, flashlight, radio controlled car, and wireless mouse all take different types of batteries. If a can of jet fuel looking just like a can of zippo lighter fluid could recharge any battery no matter the size, then you've got a real weight savings. In the military, this would eliminate a severe logistical problem for combat troops. For the average joe, it would be convenient as well, if not a matter of life or death.

Convenience, power, flammable substances, and tiny fan blades whirring at 20,000 rpm. What's not to like?

So, there I was - out of town the past couple days, when I got a call on my cell, from one of my correspondents who happens to have both my office number and my mobile.

The message? "What's wrong with your office phone service?"

I called the office number from my cell phone, and as reported, heard that

We're sorry - your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.

WTF? I think I'm still in business, and I know the bill is paid, I said to myself. But at the time, I wasn't in a position where I could spare the inevitable hour+ the search for a solution would take on the phone to some hair-lipped dipshit in Bangalore, Mumbai, or New Jersey. So I punted. (Actually, "teed off" is a more appropriate sports metaphor, under the circumstances)

When I got back to town this evening, I decided I'd spend some time building up karma points, and I've heard that talking to soulless retards is good for one's karma balance. And so I called for technical support. The menu tree on the automated answering system at the service provider was clearly designed to ensure that, except for the most serious problems, no human would ever be bothered with my travails. When I'd finally gotten to the point where I was allowed to make a selection proving that I had, in fact, checked all the obvious problems and found them n/a, I did as requested, and pressed "1" to be transferred to a supposedly sentient being. After the standard boilerplate about how, to ensure quality, my call might be recorded, I heard a couple clicks, followed by a message:

We're sorry - your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.

After I'd taken a moment to mop up a bit of the blood that burst, geyser-like, from my ears, I called again, and speed-pounded all the same responses as the first time, this time reaching quite the chatty Kathy (though his name was Greg) who asked me to do all the standard shit, and who seemed credulous as I paused after each request for just a long-enough time to allow him the delusion I was actually following his instructions. And when it was all over, I had several phone lines on which I could make outbound calls to anyone, but could only receive inbound calls from other customers of the same provider, though none from anyone who'd been smart enough to choose a different telephone company.

Just as I had been when the call began.

Except for one thing - I now have an "RT Ticket" (whatever that is) and a promise that the engineers in New Jersey will provide something (not necessarily a solution, but something) within 24-48 hours.

Marvelous. Just bloody marvelous. I don't think it would be right to name the company with whom I've so enjoyed this mincing waste of time and loss of telephonic contact from much of the business world, because, while the truth is an absolute defense against libel claims, and everything I've related here is the truth, they don't have a forum here to defend themselves.

[wik] Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, Vonage sucks. Like a Hoover.

[alsø wik] Correction, Vonage sucks like a Hoover trapped inside a Eureka.

[alsø alsø wik] On third thought, Vonage sucks like a Hoover trapped inside a Eureka, jammed up Dave Oreck's ass. Sideways. No disrepect to Dave Oreck intended, of course.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Yes, Virginia, this does get me out of the hot seat, probably at least until the esteemed Minister Ross weighs in again.