In asking for Congress' approval, is Obama actually backing down?

Having seen David Cameron brought to heel by the UK parliament, has the incalculably Machiavellian "big-O" spotted a way to avoid the consequences of his own rhetoric? Until today, Obama was clear that he needed the authorisation neither of the United Nations (which he wasn't going to get) nor even of the U.S. Congress; now he's voluntarily decided to ask Congress for permission.

If the left suddenly drops its clamour for retribution (the right doesn't seem to be all that keen in the first place) during the debate, we'll know it was a put-up job.

Who wants to intervene in Syria?

I heard the oddest thing on the news the other day. I assume it was the BBC, just because of the utter wrongness of it, but I suppose it might have been Sky News also.

Someone was being interviewed, and the interviewer did the usual leftist thing of casually castigating their enemies, referring to right-wing bloggers who were baying for an intervention in Syria. And that's what's odd: as far as I can see, it's the *left* who are all for intervention in Syria; the right seems to have no appetite at all for such adventurism.

Now I understand...

Now I understand why Skylon is such a clever idea. From the comments on this slashdot posting about SpaceX's progress in returning a first stage booster to its landing pad under powered flight, I learned that most of the fuel a rocket uses is to get itself moving sideways not upwards (a posting on xkcd, Orbital Speed, makes the situation crystal clear).

If you think about it then, Skylon can spend a lot longer inside the atmosphere, breathing in its oxygen and hydrogen propellant mixture and gaining speed, than if it was simply going straight up, although of course there will become a point (presumably rather less than orbital velocity?) where friction will negate any further gains from staying in-atmosphere.

Judging from Elon Musk's comments on the [lack of] competitiveness of Ariane, ESA might well be advised to spend all its lifter budget on subsidising Reaction Engines instead. :-)

Putting all your eggs in one basket...

... is exactly what 99% of all birds do; and birds that don't, like of course magpies, end up diversifying by putting their eggs in other birds' single, "actively managed" baskets.

[OK, "99%" was a rhetorical device, but some large percentage.]

Perhaps putting all your eggs in one basket is in fact the strategy that works best, as long as you look after that basket?

Is the Economic Crisis an Indictment of Capitalism?

Every time there's a bit of turmoil in the markets, someone at the BBC trots out that question. I veer between being amused that anyone could be so stupid, and annoyed that they could be so lazy. Then again, the PC mindset at the Beeb requires that anyone who works there be able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, so it's no wonder that their poor dear little brains are pickled in a marinade of socialist group-think.

As luck would have it, Ludwig von Mises considered that very question on behalf of the worriers of his day [short answer: no] :-

It is almost universally asserted that the severe economic crisis under which the world presently is suffering has provided proof of the impossibility of retaining the capitalist system. Capitalism, it is thought, has failed; and its place must be taken by a better system, which clearly can be none other than socialism.

That the currently dominant system has failed can hardly be contested. But it is another question whether the system that has failed was the capitalist system or whether, in fact, it is not anticapitalist policy--interventionism, and national and municipal socialism--that is to blame for the catastrophe.

Hat tip to Shawn R at the Foundations of Economics blog, who concludes:

I was struck by how much of what Mises said about the response of many to the Great Depression applies closely to our current situation. Just like Mises, we must never tire of explaining the fallacies in the thinking of those who think the Great Recession is a clear case of the failure of capitalism. In fact, it is a quintessential example of the failures of interventionism to bring about anything other than economic destruction and relative impoverishment.

Cafe Ferret

Having seen the success of Cafe Luwak -- coffee made from beans that have passed through the digestive system of civets, where the digestive enzymes have removed the bitterness and, reputedly, made it taste like caramel coffee -- I am in search of a cheaper and, well, more British alternative.

Hence, Cafe Ferret. Now the ferret is an obligate carnivore, however I note that the civets who eat the (raw) coffee berries do so because they select the ripest, sweetest ones for their taste and, being unable to actually digest them, pass them through undigested but, of course, enzymatically transformed. Which suggests that civets are obligate carnivores too. Howsoever it may be, I have seen dogs and cats eat greenery when it suits them, so I think that ferrets may be induced to munch on a few berries a day, perhaps three or four, if they are especially deliciously sweet, without harming their little tummies. It's not as if I were planning to force-feed them bags of crisps!

Now, the coffee bushes can be grown in my b ack garden, in a greenhouse if necessary. But where to source the ferrets?...

Android: fragmentation and security - an extraordinary coincidence

We've been reading for years that Android is suffering dreadfully from fragmentation. Barely 2% of phones out there run the latest version of the operating system, while a good 40% and more are more than two major versions old. The problem is that the OS is installed (mostly) by the manufacturers, who then sit back and do nothing, losing interest because they just want to sell new phones, not support old ones, while the telcos may push out a couple of minor revisions, if you are lucky, and then they lost interest too, because they want to sell you a new phone with a new plan.

At the same time, Google faces challenges in maintaining control over the Android platform itself, as other players (Amazon, Alibaba, maybe soon Samsung) are choosing to fork the OS and mould it to their own plans, replacing links to Google's online services with their own.

Now, completely coincidentally, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the lack of updates, on the basis that older versions of the operating system have known bugs that are exploitable to gain remote control over consumers' phones; thus the telcos are lacking in their duty of care to the consumer. This, I have to say immediately, is a Really Big Deal, and I guarantee that the telcos will sit up and take notice. Not only do they risk FTC investigations into their business practices, and audits of their security, they have just been put on notice that they may soon be facing class action suits from aggrieved consumers, or at least by the ACLU and others on their behalf. In effect, their operations have just become materially more risky, and that will have to be noted in their statutory filings with the SEC... the consequences just go on, and they are all unpleasant.

My guess is that as the telcos wake up to the magnitude of their exposure here, they will rush todo two things. First, they will absolutely require from the handset manufacturers that they ship the latest version of the OS on new phones. Second, they will address the problem of updates. Here, the most desirable solution would be to make it somebody else's problem: try to enforce a requirement to keep the OS up-to-date on the handset suppliers. This may or may not stick, and certainly is likely to be limited in scope, perhaps to the consumer's contract term (where the phone sold via a contract) - arguably, if the consumer supplies their own phone, updating it is the consumer's problem. If it doesn't stick however, the telcos will have to manage the updates themselves, and the consequence of that will be a rush, nay a stampede, to make sure that the handsets are easily updateable from Google's stock updates. In other words, it will be the kiss of death for supplier's custom skinning of the OS.

The effect on forked versions such as Amazon's Kindle will arguably be less, since those firms are currently bearing the support burden themselves anyway, but at least those suppliers will be on notice that their versions of Android will need to be as secure as Google's. Otherwise they may be exposed to legal risk.

At a single stroke, the ACLU has gone a long way to solving the problems that Google is experiencing from zombie versions, excessive manufacturer skinning and shell replacements, and even, to a degree, forking. What an amazing coincidence!