The Australian Government is in your Wifi, Stealing Your Moneyz!

Starting from about 2009, an Australian research firm CSIRO sued its way over existing patents to over 200 million dollars of reimbursement for patent violation. According to the firm, they were the group responsible for the creation of WiFi and have been victimized by the world producing its invention without paying them back. A further lawsuit recently granted them about a $4 royalty on every WiFi enabled device sold, needless to say, that's a whole lot of money.

The controversy here however, isn't the fact that these multimillion lawsuits haven't really surfaced in commercial news, but because the claim of the firm to having "invented" WiFi is shaky at best. Moreover, other electronic inventions such as the Flash Memory Devices that are in every flash drive, iPod, and iPhone today have never rally been definitively copyrighted, highlighting an issue of intellectual property in our changing electronic world.

China: Underloved, Underappreciated

With election year rolling in to the dockets of politicians nationwide, international issues that fall short of wars roll right out of those same dockets. The Obama Administration has handled the Iran/Iraq situation for now, and steered the nations economy somewhat through troubled times, but the issue of international trade has been in the backstage for quite a while now, and a major player is getting a little riled.

Ever since the Bush administration, the United States has been pressuring China to raise the value of its currency, the Chinese Yuan. Because of the very biased conversion rate of aproximately 8 yuan to one dollar at the start of the century, China's manufacturing industry has been booming due to low relative cost of manufacturing. In a Chinese sweatshop, workers are paid a few yuan a week, and the same goods they make by the thousands sell for a few dollars worth of profit each. Just assuming that one happy meal toy equivalent takes 1 yuan to make and makes a profit of 1 dollar, the profit margin is a huge 800%.

The policy of high conversion rate, however, has its downsides. Because the currency is so weak, the Chinese businessmen who make their profit in Yuans are at a disadvantage when purchasing American goods, a meal in New York can easily cost a week of a Chinese tradesman's salary. This leaves the average Chinese household and businesses with a tiny amount of purchasing power for the amount of labor they produce. And to further worsen the issue, the sensitive goods that China want to import, like high end manufacturing know-how and weapons/space development technology is being marked as banned goods by the international community, so even though the Chinese in general have a large amount of relative buying power, no one will sell them what they want.

These factors lead to the situation we saw a few years back, with every cheap thing in Wal-Mart being made in China. The import-export surplus equaled to almost 10% of China's GDP at its peak, and that is a very large number thought to be unsustainable by many economists. Manufacturing jobs flowed out of the US and into China where better markets and cheaper labor and materials can be had, which is why the US was hit a lot harder than China by the global recession.

The Bush administration thought it could solve the economic turmoil in America by forcing China to raise the value of its currency. Done through some one-sided and brutal diplomacy, the Chinese agreed to the request. The conversion rate is now 6 yuan to one dollar and dropping, but the United States is hardly very appreciative...

Thanks to Bush's antics in office, most of what he has done for the country has been smeared in bias. Public opinion polls today reveal that more than 50% of Americans still blame China in some way for the current recession despite the recent change. Instead of congratulating China for their remarkable progress to our request, the people of the United States would love to see harsher China policies. Obama is being a little indecisive, but several republican candidates would like to see even more economic demands on China to ultimately make China the economic servant of the "developed" world.

Already the change in conversion rate is hurting the Chinese economy. China, which holds some trillions of US debt, is rapidly losing relative debt value thanks to the conversion change that was almost forced upon them. 1 trillion dollars of debt used to be bought by 8 trillion Yuan, but now the effective value of that same debt is only 6 trillion. Over the course of 4 years, China has lost 2 trillion Yuans of debt value per trillion dollars of debt held, to a market being manipulated by the US. Instead of even a pat on the back or plain indifference, China is being faced with even more pressure for lower conversion rates and more open markets.

You can only extort so much money out of a country, and when you go too far, the country getting pushed blows a really big gasket. When Germany was being pushed over the brink, it embraced Hitler and started WWII, and should China, who is the only country showing steady signs of growth at a time of global economic strife so much as looks down the path of blood and iron, the rest of the world should be very scared indeed. Even if the "free world" can rein in the dragon, the world will lose the largest producer and exporter it has ever seen, and this little recession we are getting right now will then seem like "the good old days".

A Strange End

In the world of modern high energy physics, there exists one type of particle that can single-handedly reduce the entirety of the Earth to a smoldering rock. That particle is whats known as a "strange" particle, a hadron (mass made of quarks) composed of quarks so massive that it needs to gain mass in order to maintain stability, and it gains mass by energizing the quarks of ordinary matter into massive "strange" quarks and then assimilating it. The process feeds upon itself and will continue until all the matter surrounding it has been converted and assimilated into one super massive particle, which will remain stable for an unknown period of time. It is comparable to some sort of viral/bacterial particle, changing and accumulating the matter around it in order to sustain its own stability.

While this type of doomsday particle exists only in theory, the fact that theory allows it is a scary thought indeed. The accidental production of one tiny little particle can destroy all of the Earth. In the future, should this particle ever become realized, it will posses the same threat to entire planets as what threat nuclear weapons posses against our cities today.

Dyson Sphere, Take II

A long long time ago some genius physicist by the name of Dyson predicted that as technology evolved and population grew, the only way to meet an advanced civilizations energy demands is to build a massive superstructure that would completely enclose the sun, capturing most of its energy for our use. Simple mathematics will reveal that such a massive undertaking is simply impossible because the amount of matter required to construct such a large structure simply does not exist within our solar system. This mathematical argument convinced me for a short while, but then an alternate solution presented itself.
The sun emits so much energy across so broad a spectrum that if we only captured a small spectrum of its emission, the energy gained would still be significant. While the Dyson sphere will capture all of the sun's rays, it would be possible to capture only the ionized energy by projecting via magnetic containment several panels of plasma-state gasses with distinct focal points on generators. While most of the visual light from the sun will pass through the plasma, ionized particles will be reflected to energize a generator. The same particles that power our auroras will then be shoved onto conductors where their excess electrons energize the circuits projecting the plasma barrier, and excess energy is shipped off elsewhere for consumption.
The concept is still a far ways off, but its a lot closer to reality than the massive Dyson sphere. The technology to contain plasma already exists, as with the ability to produce electricity when given a supply of ions.

High Efficiency Launch Unit

There has been a lot of recent talk in regards to the development of space beyond earth's mesosphere, several plans have been proposed by the scientific community and the most popular, or rather, the most debated plans are the deployment of a system of space based solar power plants, a plan to send mining missions to the moon for Helium-3 ore, and the time tested space based ballistic missile defense plan.

As absurd as some of these plans sound, there is merit, or the public believes there to be merit in all of them. We've all seen the James Bond movie where the bad guy puts a giant mirror into space and beams down the suns energy by reflecting and concentrating it. NASA has recently smashed a probe into the moon to create a cloud of lunar dust for analysts, a stunt which revealed that the moon does indeed have deposits of potentially valuable Helium 3 ore, and the United States have been dreaming of a "Star Wars" orbital missile defense system since the cold war.

The reason that these plans are not already becoming reality is not that they will bring no benefit, but the sheer economical cost alone to implement them far outweighs the results. All 3 plans call for large amounts of material to be launched into space, and the most efficent launch rockets we have right now costs about $5,000 per POUND of payload. This means that a mining probe, a solar panel, or a laser would cost millions to launch apiece, and even if we get a significant amount of these things into orbit, we still need to send stuff up, most likely human astronauts (which are very prone to dying), to repair and resupply them.

The scientific community has some good stuff going with the whole development of space thing, but what it needs to do is to take a step back and realize that before we can build castles in the sky, we have to get our feet off the ground. The absurd amounts of funding going towards prototype defense satellites and mining probes are much better used to develop new launch vehicles, some of which I hope to propose in later articles.

The Lost Oil

Oil, the most precious energy resource since the advent of the internal combustion engine, the lifeblood of nearly all of mankind's creations. Prospectors have searched for the last century for this black gold, and after having turned over every last inch of land on this planet in search of it. Now, after every rock has been turned, we fail to find new reserves and this limit has caused a wave of terror in the commodities market since the last decade. Prices of oil are rising, and with it, the price of nearly every other commodity, but is this planet really running out of oil?

To realize the full implications of that statement, one has to realize that only 30% of the earth's surface is land, the other 70% water, meaning that if the concentration of resources is the same on land as under water, there lies more than twice our current assessable reserves of oil and metals under the ocean.

We have only recently developed the technology to develop and extract resourcess from the ocean floor, and by recently I mean think back about 2 years, Gulf of Mexico, BP oil spill. Sure, the whole event was an embarrassment, but the fact that one poorly laid out oil well could leak enough oil to cloud up the entire gulf of Mexico literally speaks volumes about how much oil is out there, under the waves. For those who like hard statics over comparative imagery, a very gloomy estimate puts the worlds oceanic oil reserves at at least 30 trillion barrels, 800 billions of which are within the shores of America, compare that to the 1.4 billion barrels tucked away in Siberia.

The good news dont even end there, there are far more frequent and violent seismic activity occurring under the waves than on land, and while this is a good thing for us humans who live on land, its a great thing for underwater mineral reserves. In the Pacific "Ring of Fire" alone, where several tectonic plates come together to grind under each other, millions of tonnes of iron, nickel, copper, and even gold are being brought near the surface and deposited on the ocean-floor. There are already companies such as Nautilus who are expressing interest in these reserves which could very well hold enough metals to run the world for another century.

As mush as prices are rising, this planet is not going to run out of the black stuff any time soon. There wont be wars over petroleum or any other resource, just a lot of red tape about who gets to develop what, and speaking of red tape, my next post is going to cover one UN treaty that just so happens to get in the way of the development

Reasoning, Path to Truth or Verbal Weapon?

Reasoning, the ability of the human mind to apply logical thoughts and this thing called "common sense" to experiences and information accumulated, all with the intention of coming to a truth or conclusion. For centuries this ability to reason has been viewed as a path to truth and self-enlightenment, but recently, people credit the development of this skill to be based on the human desire for victory, be it physical contest, or in the case of reason, verbal contest.

Two people disagree on something, and when the facts alone are not enough to prove one side wrong and another side right, reason is used by both sides to try to see which idea is more right. But instead of both ideas coming together into one new idea, both sides usually hold firm to their own ideals, and will often bend the facts in an attempt to sway the public opinion. This phenomenon occurs daily on CCTV (I know, who watches that right?) and politicians trying to protect their own positions and benefits. They are the people who cant compromise because if they do they lose support, and so they must defend their starting positions to the last thought, usually with reason.

But at the end of the debate, reasoning is still used for other purposes, mathematics, theoretical science just to name a few, but then remains the most important question, was reasoning created just so we can "win", or is it really meant as a tool for finding the truth?