Weapons on planes are everyday normality. We can’t ban them all.

I noted earlier that you can make a pretty dangerous Gauss rifle using a few easily available and legal components, and you could make a 3D-printed jig to arrange them for maximum effect. So I suggested that maybe magnets should be banned too.

(Incidentally, the toy ones you see on YouTube etc. typically just use a few magnets and some regular steel balls. Using large Nd magnets throughout with the positions and polarities optimally set would make it much more powerful). 

Now I learn that a US senator (Leland Yee of San Francisco), HT Dave Evans for the link http://t.co/REt2o9nF4t, wants 3D printers to be regulated somehow, in case they are used to make guns. That won’t reduce violence if you can easily acquire or make lethal weapons that are perfectly legal without one. On the ground, even highly lethal kitchen knives and many sharp tools aren’t licensed. Even narrowing it down to planes, there is quite a long list of potentially dangerous things you are still very welcome to take on board and are totally legal, some of which would be very hard to ban, so perhaps we should concentrate more on defence and catching those who wish us harm.

Here are some perfectly legal weapons that people carry frequently with many perfectly benign uses:

Your fingers. Fingernails particularly can inflict pain and give a deep scratch, but some people can blind or even kill others with their bare hands;

Sharp pencils or pencils and a sharpener; pens are harder still and can be pretty sharp too;

Hard plastic drink stirrers, 15cm long, that can be sharpened using a pencil sharpener; they often give you these on the flight so you don’t even have to bring them; hard plastics can be almost as dangerous as metals, so it is hard to see why nail files are banned and drinks stirrers and plastic knives aren’t;

CDs or DVDs, which can be easily broken to make sharp blades; I met a Swedish ex-captain once who said he always took one on board in his jacket pocket, just in case he needed to tackle a terrorist.

Your glasses. You can even take extra pairs if the ones you’re wearing are needed for you to see properly. Nobody checks the lenses to make sure the glass isn’t etched for custom breaking patterns, or whether the lenses can be popped out, with razor-sharp edges. They also don’t check that the ends of the arms don’t slide off. I’m sure Q could do a lot with a pair of glasses.

Rubber bands, can be used to make catapults or power other projectile weapons, and many can be combined to scale up the force;

Paperclips, some of which are pretty large and thick wire;

Nylon cord, which can be used dangerously in many ways. Nylon paracord can support half a ton but be woven into nice little bracelets, or shoelaces for that matter. Thin nylon cord is an excellent cutting tool.

Plastic zip ties (cable ties), the longer ones especially can be lethally used.

Plastic bags too can be used lethally.

All of these are perfectly legal but can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I am sure you can think of many others.

Amusingly, given the Senator’s proposed legislation, you could currently probably take on board a compact 3d printer to print any sharps you want, or a Liberator if you have one of the templates, and I rather expect many terrorist groups have a copy – and sometimes business class seats helpfully have an electrical power supply. I expect you might draw attention if you used one though.

There are lots of ways of storing energy to be released suddenly, a key requirement in many weapons. Springs are pretty good at that job. Many devices we use everyday like staple guns rely on springs that are compressed and then suddenly release all their force and energy when the mechanism passes a trigger point. Springs are allowed on board. It is very easy to design weapons based on accumulating potential energy across many springs that can then all simultaneously release them. If I can dream some up easily, so can a criminal. It’s also easy to invent mechanisms for self assembly of projectiles during flight, so parts of a projectile can be separately accelerated.

Banned devices that you could smuggle through detectors are also numerous.  High pressure gas reservoirs could easily be made using plastics or resins and could be used for a wide variety of pneumatic projectile weapons and contact or impact based stun weapons. Again, precision release mechanism could be designed for 3D printing at home, but a 3D printer isn’t essential, there are lots of ways of solving the engineering problems.

I don’t see how regulating printers would make us safer. After hundreds of thousands of years, we ought to know by now that if someone is intent on harming someone else, there is a huge variety of  ways of doing so, using objects or tools that are essential in everyday life and some that don’t need any tools at all, just trained hands.

Technology comes and goes, but nutters, criminals, terrorists and fanatics are here to stay. Only the innocent suffer the inconvenience of following the rules. It’s surely better to make less vulnerable systems.

Wind farm compensation claims undermine their investment potential.

I don’t make many recommendations on investments, but when something comes along that has clear effects, I sometimes do. I am not a financial adviser, and you aren’t paying for my advice, so I make my argument as a futurist and you make your own decision whether to take it on board or not. I take no responsibility for your financial decision, though please feel free to pass on any credit.

I have often advised against anything other than very short term investment in the green industry, and still do. It is volatile at best, with many bankruptcies already, and shows especially poor long term prospects as the poor quality science underpinning it is shown up for what it is – often worthless and counter-productive. This time it is even clearer to me. Avoid investing in wind farms, even more than yesterday.  Here’s why.

Finally there is a proper peer-reviewed scientific study proving what most people suspected already, that wind farms cause health problems and depression in people living near them. Easy-to-read summary of the key bits in the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9653429/Wind-farm-noise-does-harm-sleep-and-health-say-scientists.html

The study’s finding were about sleep loss and increased depression, both of which were found to be much greater in communities close to wind turbines. However, these are both known to cause other serious health problems and reduce life expectancy. Suicide links with depression too, so there may also be a measurable impact on suicide rate near wind farms, another study waiting to be done. If as has been proven, wind farms cause loss of sleep and depression, it is therefore reasonable to expect a scientific study to prove a link between wind farms and serious health problems and even early death or suicide.

Separately, the industry has tried to bury and misrepresent the conclusions of a previous proper study that showed their negative effects on house prices. The results however remain valid, there is a proven effect. Erecting a wind farm lowers nearby property values.

Where people have their health or their financial state damaged by a company, and in this case often both, it surely can’t be long before class action suits follow for damages. Once the courts and claim companies get past dealing with the PPI mis-selling compensation claims, there will likely be another swathe based on loss of house value and damage to health attributed to proximity to wind farms.

What is less clear is whether the taxpayer will have to fork out instead. Since the proof of damage is recent, earlier ones could be except from reasonable blame. Since the farms have been commissioned by government, government might be considered to blame and the farm owners and manufacturers only liable for extras caused by specific circumstances or specific designs. Those who recommended, commissioned, housed, built and ran the farms, and who received all the financial benefits even in full knowledge of the harm they were causing, can be expected to deny any wrongdoing and to try to shift blame to avoid  facing the consequences. The taxpayer might well have to pick up much of the bill for damage done in spite of protesting loudly and being ignored all along. However, it will be a brave investor who ignores the risk that justice might actually work against the guilty parties. Justice happens sometimes.

My conclusion is simple: wind farms are now proven to cause damage to property value and health and large compensation claims are likely to follow sometime. Further scientific studies are likely to add weight to the evidence, making compensation payouts highly likely, and there is no provision for this in the tariff guarantees. In the extreme, farms could even be forced to close, eradicating future income (and related production-related tariffs) while leaving the up-front costs and there is no certainty that government will compensate farms for the loss. These prospects therefore obviously damage the value of investments in wind farms.

Blocking Pirate Bay makes little sense

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9236667/Pirate-Bay-must-be-blocked-High-Court-tells-ISPs.html Justice Arnold ruled that ISPs must block their customers from accessing Pirate Bay. Regardless of the morality or legality of Pirate Bay, forcing ISPs to block access to it will cause them inconvenience and costs, but won’t fix the core problem of copyright materials being exchanged without permission from the owners.

I have never looked at the Pirate Bay site, but I am aware of what it offers. It doesn’t host material, but allows its users to download from each other. By blocking access to the Bay, the judge blocks another one of billions of ways to exchange data. Many others exist and it is very easy to set up new ones, so trying to deal with them one by one seems rather pointless. Pirate Bay’s users will simply use alternatives. If they were to block all current file sharing sites, others would spring up to replace them, and if need be, with technological variations that set them outside of any new legislation. At best judges could play a poor catch-up game in an eternal war between global creativity and the law. Because that is what this is.

Pirate Bay can only be blocked because it is possible to identify it and put it in court. It is possible to write software that doesn’t need a central site, or indeed any legally identifiable substance. It could for example be open-source software written and maintained by evolving adaptive AI, hidden behind anonymity, distributed algorithms and encryption walls, roaming freely among web servers and PCs, never stopping anywhere. It could be untraceable. It could use combinations of mobile or fixed phone nets, the internet, direct gadget-gadget comms and even use codes on other platforms such as newspapers. Such a system would be dangerous to build from a number of perspectives, but may be forced by actions to close alternatives. If people feel angered by arrogance and greed, they may be pushed down this development road. The only way to fully stop such a system would be to stop communication.

The simple fact is that technology that we depend on for most aspects of our lives also makes it possible to swap files, and to do so secretly as needed. We could switch it off, but our economy and society would collapse. To pretend otherwise is folly. Companies that feel abused should recognise that the world has moved on and they need to adapt their businesses to survive in the world today, not ask everyone to move back to the world of yesterday so that they can cope. Because we can’t and shouldn’t even waste time trying to. My copyright material gets stolen frequently. So what? I just write more. That model works fine for me. It ain’t broke, and trying to fix it without understanding how stuff works won’t protect anyone and will only make it worse for all of us.