A Scanner Darkly

Yeah.

Kansai Airport

No room for an airport? Build an artificial island.

Quote of the Week

"In American free speech theory, the press is often described as fulfilling “the watchdog function,” deriving from the notion that the public representatives must be watched over to assure they do the public’s business faithfully. In the context of the Internet, the concern, most clearly articulated by Neil Netanel, has been that in the modern complex societies in which we live, commercial mass media are critical for preserving the watchdog function of the media. Big, sophisticated, well-funded government and corporate market actors have enormous resources at their disposal to act as they please and to avoid scrutiny and democratic control.

Only similarly big, powerful, independently funded media organizations, whose basic market roles are to observe and criticize other large organizations, can match these established elite organizational actors. Individuals and collections of volunteers talking to each other may be nice, but they cannot seriously replace well-funded, economically and politically powerful media."

--from Yochai Benkler's "Wealth of Networks"


In other words, if the Internet succeeds in killing the old media paradigm of big centralized news-gathering/dissemination orgs, the bloggers and yappers creating "user generated media" for free ain't gonna save Democracy's ass.

Dominator vid

Dominator

Hey, kids. What's more fun than a drone plane?

A swarm of pilotless drone planes linked in a network and equipped with pattern recognition and a fuzzy logic AI system --

Some geewhiz stuff from Defensetech.org --

Drone Swarm for Maximum Harm
(There's a section on the impact of cheap, numerous unmanned aircraft in my book Weapons Grade, now in paperback. Here's one man's vision of what they could mean.)

The awesome future of air power is just around the corner – but the Air Force doesn't want it. That’s the word from Gregory Jenkins of the USAF’s Air Armament Center, self-styled 'heretic' and architect of a concept he calls Just In Time Strike Augmentation (JITSA).

There are many fleeting targets on the modern battlefield that appear briefly and are gone. Think Saddam Hussein’s entourage slipping from one hideout to the next, or a Transporter-Erector-Launcher moving into firing position, or a pickup full of insurgents fleeing after staging a mortar attack. An air strike that takes five minutes to arrive is useless in these situations.

Jenkins’ vision is a networked battlespace with unmanned aircraft maintaining continuous surveillance over a wide area. At the cutting edge is Boeing’s Air Dominator, a 100 lb drone with a 12-foot span which looks like a model aircraft. I interviewed the people involved in the Dominator program two years ago here. Although Boeing say they have nothing new to report, there have been enhancements since then. A special lightweight fuel cell could bring its endurance to over 40 hours, and there’s a sophisticated new vision system for mid-air refueling to increase endurance even further. Each Dominator will carry out up to three attacks using munitions similar to but more versatile than the BLU-108 Skeet . (Some sources claim this has been increased to eight submunitions; Boeing say it’s still three).

Above all it will be cheap, so unlike the solitary MQ-1 Predator drones, Dominator will be used in packs, with a large number of hunter-killers accompanied by a few 'gateway' vehicles providing networked communications and refuelling. Each craft folds away into a pod just eight inches square and four feet long for transport and launch. The plan calls for two dozen or so were to be delivered by an F/A-22 Raptor jet at high speed, but Jenkins is thinking much bigger.


You don’t need a stealthy, high-performance aircraft to deliver something that can travel hundreds of miles on its own. In the JITSA scheme Dominators would be packed in pallets of twenty on a C-17 transport plane, with thirty pallets in all – that’s a total of six hundred drones. A loadmaster would handle the individual release of as many as needed. It’s something akin to a British FOAS concept of replacing bombers with a transport plane packed with palletized cruise missiles.

Once in position, the swarm would maintain air dominance over a wide area, providing both of continuous surveillance and instant reaction. Jenkins estimates that any target in the kill zone could be hit within 2-4 minutes maximum. None of those fleeting targets would escape.

Against a conventional force, Jenkins calls the JITSA system a ‘back breaker’, destroying armor, artillery and air defences on a massive scale, not to mention taking out air forces on the ground.

Dominators can also tackle targets that would normally take much larger munitions by being smarter. You might need a 2000 lb laser guided bomb to destroy a bridge, but a few Dominators can simply destroy vehicles attempting to use it. The bridge is denied to the enemy just as well, and you don’t have to rebuild afterwards.

The system can also neutralize deep bunkers which are invulnerable to the heaviest bombs. Missiles or stores of WMD are not going to harm anyone if they are stuck underground with a swarm of Dominators overhead 24/7, ready to attack anything the minute it emerges. Underground command centres become prisons.

Hey, ain't that great?

Or, what about some loud mouth, barely published SF writer who accidently stumbled on our plan for world domination? He's easily recognized by his gun metal gray 2004 Mustang GTO he's still paying for. We've already loaded his erratic driving pattern into the AI. Yeah. There he is. The swarm is on its way.

Lock.

Ultraviolet

OK. It's not that I had a bad time. I'd be happy to watch Milla Jovovich arrange her sock drawer.

It's a case of too much movie and too little budget. There are some great ideas (a zero-dimensional storage space) and a few cheesy ideas (a virus in the future that turns people into vampires). Even a cheesy idea can make a helluva SF movie, rightly handled. Unfortunately, there ain't enough money to pull it off. The special effects barely rise above 1997 video game level. The martial arts stuff is well staged, but it seems fakey in the crappy special effects context. All rather bloodless, which is ironic in a vampire movie. Even bad production values are forgiveable -- with a strong script. But the script is incoherent. Connective tissue has been snipped away to keep the action going. As a result, I have little idea what's going on.

The moral of the story: if you ain't got a lot of bucks, make sure you've got a strong script with a narrative that drives through like a tank through a mud hut. Come to think of it, that's a good idea even if you do have money.

Milla. Love ya, babe. Call me.

Sopranos endings

OK, here we go. The Sopranos' final season, finally. How will the fucking series end?

Here’s my take –


The A-4 aka Meadow’s-Got-a-Gun ending
In this version. Season 6 would have two story arcs: Phil Leotardo’s smoldering resentment over Blundetto leads to an all-out gang war with Tony’s crew; an FBI team we actually take seriously (a la “The Untouchables”) gets on Tony’s case. In both arcs, Tony emerges victorious. He wipes out Leotardo’s crew and absorbs his action; the FBI screw up. He’s on top of the world, ma. On top of the world.
Somewhere along the way, AJ gets either killed or brain-damaged as a result of getting sucked into Tony’s life. Meadow, one day, just decides Tony has to die, buys a gun, and puts a bullet in his brain. While this happens, “Woke Up This Morning” plays in the background. The theme song turns out to have been a prophecy. The end was contained in the beginning. Everything comes full circle.

The Goodfellas ending
The name “Sopranos” turns out to be a prophecy. The Feds back Tony into a corner and he sings. He winds up in the Witness Protection program amongst the pod people of suburbia.

The Firefly ending
The crew of the Firefly goes back in time. Mal emerges and says “Best be coming with us, Mr. Soprano. They’s fixing to cancel your series and we could use your particular brand of expertise.”

The Psychology Today ending
Tony has a breakthrough in therapy and resolves his personal demons. He makes restitution and goes back to college and starts studying to be a Life Coach.


The Russian mobster returns
The good news: he’s dead. The bad news: he’s undead.

The ducks return
And kill Tony

The Godfather III ending
The Pope offers Tony a motion picture deal: the Mad Max series, reshot in Aramaic, with Tony as producer and Christopher as screenwriter/director. The script is in development and the Pope comes to America. The Pope makes a sub rosa visit to the Badabing and dies on a poisoned canoli meant for Tony. The assassin returns, and kills Meadow by mistake. Tony falls to his knees. Opera music plays.