Volunteers have crafted a replica of a device used to crack German codes during the Second World War. The Turing Bombe machines were all destroyed after the war. The replica has taken years to build.
The rows of silver dials and tangle of scarlet wires look more like a telephone exchange.
But this is the inside of the Turing Bombe, the part-electronic, part-mechanical code-breaking machine and forerunner of the modern computer, which cracked 3,000 messages a day sent on Nazi Enigma machines during the Second World War.
There were 210 such bookcase-like Bombes that gave Britain advance warning of Hitler’s plans and shortened the conflict by two years……
…..The original Bombes, invented by brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, were made using reinforced brown Tufnol plastic moulded from sheets a tenth of an inch thick, a cast-iron framework and 12 miles of intricate wire circuits.
I suspect that your desktop computer can do rather more than the Bombe could. It is still a fascinating bit of history recreated.
The Obama administration has made much – very much indeed – about the supposed savings in health care costs by putting medical records online. Where no laws cover the privacy of those records, one adds. It turns out that insurance companies are already using some online information against those applying for insurance.
Trying to buy health insurance on your own and have gallstones? You’ll automatically be denied coverage. Rheumatoid arthritis? Automatic denial. Severe acne? Probably denied. Do you take metformin, a popular drug for diabetes? Denied. Use the anti-clotting drug Plavix or Seroquel, prescribed for anti-psychotic or sleep problems? Forget about it.
This confidential information on some insurers’ practices is available on the Web — if you know where to look.
What’s more, you can discover that if you lie to an insurer about your medical history and drug use, you will be rejected because data-mining companies sell information to insurers about your health, including detailed usage of prescription drugs. (Emphasis added)
These issues are moving to the forefront as the Obama administration and Congress gear up for discussions about how to reform the healthcare system so that Americans won’t be rejected for insurance.
So, how much do you think will be saved by putting all of your most intimate health details online? If this is going on in the private sector, how much worse will it be when government decides for you who gets treatment?
The quest for “free” health care will end up being very, very expensive.
To our liberty.
Anyone else troubled by this? The Obama administration is now making personnel decisions – in private companies.
The Obama administration asked Rick Wagoner, the chairman and CEO of General Motors, to step down and he agreed, a White House official said.
Wagoner’s resignation was one of the remarkable strings attached to the new aid package the administration is offering GM, based on recommendations from the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry, headed by the Treasury Department.
The White House confirmed Wagoner was leaving at the government’s behest after The Associated Press reported his immediate departure, without giving a reason.
The surprise announcement about the classically iconic American corporation is perhaps the most vivid sign yet of the tectonic change in the relationship between business and government in this era of subsidies and bailouts.
I would not know Rick Wagoner if I tripped over him. But I am very troubled by a government that offers aid, then punishes those who take the offered hand. This is now happening at the executive level, not just the legislative.
It says rather a lot about the integrity of the government right now.
None of it good.
Via Memeorandum.
Residents of Australia’s Queensland have figured out a way to eradicate (or at least slow down the spread of) cane toads. What organizers hope will be an annual event, the so-called Toad Day Out occurred this weekend. In what can only be described as an act of revenge, the captured toads will become fertilizer.
As part of north Queensland’s inaugural Toad Day Out, people in Cairns will be encouraged to collect as many toads as they can.
They’ll be euthanased in freezers, taken to an environmental waste management plant and processed with other waste to make agricultural compost.
Manager of the SITA plant, Haydn Slattery, says more than 100kg of toads may be collected.
“Each year the Cairns plant produces 25,000 tonnes of compost, and it predominantly goes to the canefields,” he said.
“I’m sure (the growers) will appreciate the fact that the toad they know so well is at last putting something back.”
The captured toads must be alive when brought in to the weigh stations and are then killed by either freezing them or putting them into a plastic bag full of carbon dioxide gas. This, apparently, gets high marks from the Australian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The RSPCA is dead set against cane toad golf, but is four-square athwart the idea of freezing or gassing them. They admit the toads are a “menace” that “must be eradicated” but get positively dyspeptic over some methods of eradication versus others.
How, one wonders, do the folks at the RSPCA know that freezing or gassing toads is more friendly than hitting them?
Canadian computer security experts have found more than 1,200 computers in 103 countries infected with a malicious software that allowed hackers to take over – almost completely – their victims computers. The hackers could even turn on the computer’s webcam to watch whoever was using the computer.
These were not the computers of average folks. These were computers used by high-ranking government officials and other high-profile folks. Like the Dalai Lama. The attacks were traced to China, although the researchers do not blame the Chinese government directly.
Among the affected computers were those in embassies belonging to Germany, India, Romania, and Thailand, and in the ministries of foreign affairs for Barbados, Iran and Latvia.
The researchers say the infected computers acted as a kind of illicit information-gathering network, and that they observed sensitive documents being stolen from a computer network operated by the Dalai Lama’s organization. They traced the attacks to computers located in China, but stop short of blaming the Chinese government.
A separate report by researchers at Cambridge University, also published Sunday, alleges that the Chinese government or a group working closely with it is responsible for the attack on the computer in the office of the Dalai Lama.
Media officials at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and State Council Information Office declined requests for comment Sunday. The Chinese government has repeatedly denied past allegations that it sponsors cyber attacks.
The particularly insidious part of these attacks is that they have been spreading the malware by sending the victims what appears to be an email from someone the victim knows. The email contains a file that, when opened, infects the victim’s computer.
Looks like it’s time to begin scanning all incoming mail, even from people you think you are safe with.
… And savages a couple of patrons. Okay, I have got to work on that punchline. But that is exactly what happened in the city of Cottonwood, Arizona last week. Patrons of the Chaparral Bar had a bobcat walk in. Apparently, the bobcat didn’t like the patrons or the service and bit a couple of customers. Cottonwood police destroyed the animal in the bar’s parking lot. And yes, it was rabid.
The bobcat had been on a bit of a spree prior to entering the bar, attacking one woman and frightening another.
There is actually video of the bobcat’s bar visit posted at YouTube. Judging from what the video shows, I think we know why the bobcat really bit the patrons:
He didn’t like getting his picture taken.
So, this bobcat walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Whatever you do don’t take his picture.”
(Via freind of the Crabitat JA Jance who sent in a link the Seattle Times story about this incident.)
