Famed Aerospace Designer Burt Rutan on the Government’s Role in Technology Development

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Leonard David:

?And we?re sitting there amazed throughout the 1960s. We were amazed because our country was going from Walt Disney and von Braun talking about it?all the way to a plan to land a man on the Moon?Wow!?
The right to dream
But as a kid back then, Rutan continued, the right to dream of going to the Moon or into space was reserved for only ?professional astronauts? ? an enormously dangerous and expensive undertaking.
Over the decades, Rutan said, despite the promise of the Space Shuttle to lower costs of getting to space, a kid?s hope of personal access to space in their lifetime remained in limbo.
?Look at the progress in 25 years of trying to replace the mistake of the shuttle. It?s more expensive?not less?a horrible mistake,? Rutan said. ?They knew it right away. And they?ve spent billions?arguably nearly $100 billion over all these years trying to sort out how to correct that mistake?trying to solve the problem of access to space. The problem is?it?s the government trying to do it.?

I believe Rutan is correct. Government should generally provide incentives for private industry to address problems that we as a society believe need attention. Examples include: broadband (true 2 way), education, energy and space exploration.

Total Information Awareness Goes Offshore

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Robert O’Harrow Jr:

It began as one of the Bush administration’s most ambitious homeland security efforts, a passenger screening program designed to use commercial records, terrorist watch lists and computer software to assess millions of travelers and target those who might pose a threat.
The system has cost almost $100 million. But it has not been turned on because it sparked protests from lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, who said it intruded too deeply into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Bush administration put off testing until after the election.
Now the choreographer of that program, a former intelligence official named Ben H. Bell III, is taking his ideas to a private company offshore, where he and his colleagues plan to use some of the same concepts, technology and contractors to assess people for risk, outside the reach of U.S. regulators, according to documents and interviews.
Bell’s new employer, the Bahamas-based Global Information Group Ltd., intends to amass large databases of international records and analyze them in the coming years for corporations, government agencies and other information services. One of the first customers is information giant LexisNexis Group, one of the main contractors on the government system that was known until recently as the second generation of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening Program, or CAPPS II. The program is now known as Secure Flight.

This is not a big surprise. I’m sure we’ll see more of it.

The Politics of a San Francisco City Wide Broadband Study

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Matt Smith:

As San Francisco boondoggles go, this $300,000 study — and
who-knows-how-many-million-dollar fiber-laying project — is a mere whisper in the wind. Yet it becomes more of a screaming fit in the library when one considers that Ammiano and his fellow supervisors are proposing we throw a tax fortune at the idea of providing better local telecom
options for consumers, when for the past six years they’ve advocated policies that ensure the grip of local monopolists SBC and Comcast on our digital information systems.
For reasons I’ll explain, Ammiano’s advocacy on behalf of small groups of neighborhood activists who believe, without evidence, that new cell-phone antennae harm their children’s brains may have helped preserve SBC and Comcast control over San Francisco data and voice networks. Widespread
substitution of cell phones for local home lines represents one of the greatest threats to SBC’s monopoly. New wireless broadband technology being implemented this year could threaten the dominance of Comcast and SBC over fast Internet access.
Yet Ammiano’s anti-antenna campaign has made San Francisco cell service some of the worst in the world.
“If they would spend the same energy on encouraging new entrants into the local telecom market” as they have on city fiber optics, notes Daluvoy, the city Telecommunications Commission VP, “the economic benefit to the city would be tenfold.”

Smith’s article highlights the politics of true broadband. SBC is similarily entrenched in Wisconsin, both physically and politically. Our politicians need to move on from this legacy telco thinking and open up the publicly financed networks to true competition AND encourage FTTP (fiber to the premise or home).

Democratic Plan to Reduce Property Taxes

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Steven Walters:

The Assembly’s Democratic leader says he will offer a plan next year to exempt the first $100,000 of an owner-occupied home’s value from property taxes for public schools.
The change would lower property taxes on the average home by about $950 a year, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
Rep. James Kreuser (D-Kenosha) said his plan to amend the Wisconsin Constitution could not become law until 2007, at the earliest.
Still, he said, it would be better than Republicans’ plans to limit property tax bills for the next three years, while they try to rewrite the constitution to control state and local government spending.

Meanwhile, Avrum Lank says that a Tax Foundation study ranks Wisconsin 41st out of 50 states in business tax climate.

Cow Quarter…. Coming Soon

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Meg Jones:

Following a “first strike” ceremony featuring a contingent from Wisconsin, the first Wisconsin quarters began rolling off the assembly line here and at the mint in Philadelphia. They’ll continue to be minted for the next 10 weeks until an estimated 400 million to 500 million will be circulating through Americans’ pockets and purses.
Soon, Wisconsin’s quarters will be plunked into soda machines and Salvation Army red kettles, tossed into church collection plates and casino slot machines and wind up in kids’ piggy banks and tollbooths for those who have to travel through Illinois.

FDA Approves Use of Chip in Patients

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Diedtra Henderson:

Medical milestone or privacy invasion? A tiny computer chip approved Wednesday for implantation in a patient’s arm can speed vital information about a patient’s medical history to doctors and hospitals. But critics warn that it could open new ways to imperil the confidentiality of medical records.
The Food and Drug Administration (news – web sites) said Wednesday that Applied Digital Solutions of Delray Beach, Fla., could market the VeriChip, an implantable computer chip about the size of a grain of rice, for medical purposes.
With the pinch of a syringe, the microchip is inserted under the skin in a procedure that takes less than 20 minutes and leaves no stitches. Silently and invisibly, the dormant chip stores a code that releases patient-specific information when a scanner passes over it.

Barnaby Feder & Tom Zellmer

Biometric Iris Scanning Replaces Hotel Keys?

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Gizmodo:

A Boston hotel called Nine Zero is using biometric iris scanning to replace room keys, allowing guests to gain access to their rooms with just a quick flash of the eyeball. Using a system from LG, first-time guests have a picture of their iris scanned, which is quickly encrypted to a hashed numeric code and the source image deleted (meaning they don’t keep a copy of your iris on file, just the results a scan of your iris would provide). Because the data can be held on to indefinitely, returning guests can make reservations and gain access to their rooms without ever talking to a clerk, booking a room by email and getting their room number in response.