Complete course covering company conception – cremation

If you’re sick of crappy management guides that insist on using the same letter for each point, fight back in kind:

Free-floating AI battle drone orbs (or making Glyph from Mass Effect)

I have spent many hours playing various editions of Mass Effect, from EA Games. It is one of my favourites and has clearly benefited from some highly creative minds. They had to invent a wide range of fictional technology along with technical explanations in the detail for how they are meant to work. Some is just artistic redesign of very common sci-fi ideas, but they have added a huge amount of their own too. Sci-fi and real engineering have always had a strong mutual cross-fertilisation. I have lectured sometimes on science fact v sci-fi, to show that what we eventually achieve is sometimes far better than the sci-fi version (Exhibit A – the rubbish voice synthesisers and storage devices use on Star Trek, TOS).

Liara talking to her assistant Glyph.Picture Credit: social.bioware.com

In Mass Effect, lots of floating holographic style orbs float around all over the place for various military or assistant purposes. They aren’t confined to a fixed holographic projection system. Disruptor and battle drones are common, and  a few home/lab/office assistants such as Glyph, who is Liara’s friendly PA, not a battle drone. These aren’t just dumb holograms, they can carry small devices and do stuff. The idea of a floating sphere may have been inspired by Halo’s, but the Mass Effect ones look more holographic and generally nicer. (Think Apple v Microsoft). Battle drones are highly topical now, but current technology uses wings and helicopters. The drones in sci-fi like Mass Effect and Halo are just free-floating ethereal orbs. That’s what I am talking about now. They aren’t in the distant future. They will be here quite soon.

I recently wrote on how to make force field and floating cars or hover-boards.

How to actually make a Star Wars Landspeeder or a Back to the future hoverboard.

Briefly, they work by creating a thick cushion of magnetically confined plasma under the vehicle that can be used to keep it well off the ground, a bit like a hovercraft without a skirt or fans. Using layers of confined plasma could also be used to make relatively weak force fields. A key claim of the idea is that you can coat a firm surface with a packed array of steerable electron pipes to make the plasma, and a potentially reconfigurable and self organising circuit to produce the confinement field. No moving parts, and the coating would simply produce a lifting or propulsion force according to its area.

This is all very easy to imagine for objects with a relatively flat base like cars and hover-boards, but I later realised that the force field bit could be used to suspend additional components, and if they also have a power source, they can add locally to that field. The ability to sense their exact relative positions and instantaneously adjust the local fields to maintain or achieve their desired position so dynamic self-organisation would allow just about any shape  and dynamics to be achieved and maintained. So basically, if you break the levitation bit up, each piece could still work fine. I love self organisation, and biomimetics generally. I wrote my first paper on hormonal self-organisation over 20 years ago to show how networks or telephone exchanges could self organise, and have used it in many designs since. With a few pieces generating external air flow, the objects could wander around. Cunning design using multiple components could therefore be used to make orbs that float and wander around too, even with the inspired moving plates that Mass Effect uses for its drones. It could also be very lightweight and translucent, just like Glyph. Regular readers will not be surprised if I recommend some of these components should be made of graphene, because it can be used to make wonderful things. It is light, strong, an excellent electrical and thermal conductor, a perfect platform for electronics, can be used to make super-capacitors and so on. Glyph could use a combination of moving physical plates, and use some to add some holographic projection – to make it look pretty. So, part physical and part hologram then.

Plates used in the structure can dynamically attract or repel each other and use tethers, or use confined plasma cushions. They can create air jets in any direction. They would have a small load-bearing capability. Since graphene foam is potentially lighter than helium

Could graphene foam be a future Helium substitute?

it could be added into structures to reduce forces needed. So, we’re not looking at orbs that can carry heavy equipment here, but carrying processing, sensing, storage and comms would be easy. Obviously they could therefore include whatever state of the art artificial intelligence has got to, either on-board, distributed, or via the cloud. Beyond that, it is hard to imagine a small orb carrying more than a few hundred grammes. Nevertheless, it could carry enough equipment to make it very useful indeed for very many purposes. These drones could work pretty much anywhere. Space would be tricky but not that tricky, the drones would just have to carry a little fuel.

But let’s get right to the point. The primary market for this isn’t the home or lab or office, it is the battlefield. Battle drones are being regulated as I type, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be developed. My generation grew up with the nuclear arms race. Millennials will grow up with the drone arms race. And that if anything is a lot scarier. The battle drones on Mass Effect are fairly easy to kill. Real ones won’t.

Mass Effect combat drone, picture credit: masseffect.wikia.com

If these cute little floating drone things are taken out of the office and converted to military uses they could do pretty much all the stuff they do in sci-fi. They could have lots of local energy storage using super-caps, so they could easily carry self-organising lightweight  lasers or electrical shock weaponry too, or carry steerable mirrors to direct beams from remote lasers, and high definition 3D cameras and other sensing for reconnaissance. The interesting thing here is that self organisation of potentially redundant components would allow a free roaming battle drone that would be highly resistant to attack. You could shoot it for ages with laser or bullets and it would keep coming. Disruption of its fields by electrical weapons would make it collapse temporarily, but it would just get up and reassemble as soon as you stop firing. With its intelligence potentially local cloud based, you could make a small battalion of these that could only be properly killed by totally frazzling them all. They would be potentially lethal individually but almost irresistible as a team. Super-capacitors could be recharged frequently using companion drones to relay power from the rear line. A mist of spare components could make ready replacements for any that are destroyed. Self-orientation and use of free-space optics for comms make wiring and circuit boards redundant, and sub-millimetre chips 100m away would be quite hard to hit.

Well I’m scared. If you’re not, I didn’t explain it properly.

How to actually make a Star Wars Landspeeder or a Back to the future hoverboard.

Star Wars (all trademarks acknowledged, but I’ll immediately remove them on request from the studios) made me a bit annoyed in the first opening seconds, when I heard the spaceship coming through space, but I did quite like their land-speeder though and I’d like to have one. Like most futurists, I get asked about flying cars every week.

Let’s dispose of pedantry first. Flying cars do exist. Some are basically vertical take off planes without the wings, using directed air jets to stay afloat and move. I guess you could use a derivative of that to make a kind of land-speeder. The hovercraft is also a bit Landspeedery, but works differently. Hovercraft are OK, but a Landspeeder floats higher off the ground and without the skirt so it it’s no hovercraft. Well, we’ll see.

This morning, well, in the middle of the night, I had an idea, as you do. Usually, ideas I have in bed tend to be total rubbish when inspected in the hard light of day. But this morning I had 3, two great, one not so great, so I can write about that one for free – the others I’ll keep for now. The less great idea is how to make a Star Wars Landspeeder or Marty McFly’s hover board from Back to the Future. Both would be almost silent, with no need for messy skirts, fans, or noisy ducted air jet engines, and could looks like the ones in the films. Or you could employ a designer and make one that looks nice.

Patrick Kiger reliably informs me that you can’t do that.

http://blogs.discovery.com/inscider/2013/04/a-real-version-of-marty-mcflys-hoverboard.html

Nice article, good fun, and states more or less the current line on tech. I just beg to differ with its conclusions.

Conventional wisdom says that if it isn’t using noisy ducted air jets or hovercraft skirts, it probably has to be magnetic, as the landspeeder is meant to be anyway, so needs a special metal track. It couldn’t work on a pavement or side-walk. The article above nicely points out that you can’t use magnetic effects to levitate above concrete or asphalt. Or else it has to use anti-gravity and we don’t know how to do that yet.

Well, I pointed out a good while ago with my linear induction bicycle lane idea that you could use a McFly style hoverboard on it. My daughter’s friends were teasing me about futurists and hoverboards – that’s why.

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/hover-boards/

That would work. It would be totally silent. However, the landspeeder didn’t stay on a linear induction mat laid just under the entire desert surface, did it? That would just be silly. If you had a linear induction mat laid under the entire desert surface, you’d put some sort of horse shoes on your camel and it could just glide everywhere at high speed. You wouldn’t need the landspeeder. (Getting off the track a bit here.)

So, time to explain my idea, and it isn’t anti-gravity:

You can use magnetic levitation to produce a landspeeder or hoverboard that would work on a sidewalk, pavement, road, or even a desert surface. Not water, not the way McFly did anyway. You could also make the hover tanks and everything else that silently hovers near the ground in sci-fi films. And force fields.

But… sand, asphalt and concrete aren’t made of metal.

Graphene is a really good conductor. Expensive still, but give it a few years and it’ll be everywhere. It is a superb material. With graphene, you can make thin tubes, bigger than carbon nanotubes but still small bore. You could use those to make coils around electron pipes, maybe even the pipes themselves. Electron pipes are particle guides along which you can send any kind of charged particles at high speed, keeping them confined using strong magnetic fields, produced by the coils around the pipe, a mini particle accelerator. I originally invented electron pipes as a high bandwidth (at least 10^22bit/s) upgrade for optical fibre, but they have other uses too such as on-chip interconnect, 3d biomimetic microprinting for things like graphene tubes, space elevator rope and others. In this case, they have two uses.

First you’d use a covering of the pipes on the vehicle underside to inject a strong charge flux into the air beneath the hoverboard (if you’re a sci-fi nut, you could store the energy to do this in a supercapacitor and if you’re really twisted you might even call it a flux capacitor, since it will be used in the system to make this electron flux). The result is a highly charged mass of air. Plasma. So what?

Well, you’d also use some rings of these tubes around the periphery of the vehicle to create a very strong wall of magnetic field beneath the vehicle edge. This would keep the charged air from just diffusing. In addition, you’d direct some of them downwards to create a flow of charged air that would act to repel the air inside, further keeping it confined to a higher depth, or altitude, so you could hover quite a distance off the ground.

As a quick but important aside, you should be able to use it for making layered force fields too, (using layers of separated and repelling layers of charged air. They should resist small forces trying to bend them and would certainly disrupt any currents trying to get through. But maybe they would not be mechanically strong ones. So, not strong enough to stop bullets, but enough to stop or severely disrupt charges from basic plasma weaponry, but there aren’t many of them yet so that isn’t much of a benefit. Anyway… back to the future.

Having done this, you’ll hopefully have a cushion of highly charged air under your vehicle, confined within its circumference, and some basic vents could make up for any small losses. I am guessing this air is probably highly conductive, so it could be used to generate both magnetic and electrostatic forces with the fields produced by al those coils and pipes in the vehicle.

So now, you’d basically have a high-tech, silent electromagnetic hovercraft without a skirt to hold the air in, floating above pretty much any reasonably solid surface, that doesn’t even have to be smooth. It wouldn’t even make very much draft so you wouldn’t be sitting in a dust cloud.

Propulsion would be by using a layer of electron pipes around the edge of the vehicle to thrust particles in any direction, so providing an impulse, reaction and hence movement. The forward-facing and side facing pipes would suck in air to strip the charge off with which to feed the charged air underneath. Remember that little air would be escaping so this would still be silent. Think of the surface as a flat sheet that pushes ionised air through quite fast using purely electromagnetic force.

Plan B would be to use the cover of electron pipes on the underside to create a strong downward air flow that would be smoothed and diffused by pipes doing the side cushion bit. Neither would be visible and spoil the appearance, and smooth flow could still be pretty quiet. I prefer plan A. It’s just neater.

There would be a little noise from the air turbulence created as the air flow for propulsion mixes with other air, but with a totally silent source of the air flow. So basically you’d hear some wind but not much else.

Production of the electron pipes is nicely biomimetic. Packing them closely together in the right pattern (basically the pattern they’d assume naturally if you just picked them up) and feeding carbon atoms with the right charge through them at the right intervals could let you 3D print a continuous sheet of graphene or carbon nanotube. Biomimetic since the tube would grow from the base continuously just like grass. You could even produce an extremely tall skyscraper that way. (I used to say 30km as the limit for this, but more recent figures for graphene strength suggest that might be far too conservative and structures up to 600km may be theoretically possible, but that would need a lot cleverer engineering and certainly couldn’t grow the same way).

Could it work. Yes, I think so. I haven’t built a prototype but intuitively it should be feasible. Back to the Future Part 1 takes Marty to Oct 21, 2015. If we really wanted, a really good lab could just about make most and maybe all of this capability by then. On the other hand, Star Wars is set very far away and very long ago, so we’re a bit late for that one.

 

The bright potential future for BT

I left BT in 2007 after 22 years. (For my US readers, BT is Britain’s version of AT&T). Like most employees of most companies, I had a few gripes over the years, but overall, BT was a good company to work for – humane to its staff, while trying to do a good job for both shareholders and customers in a difficult political climate, with pretty sound ethics. It wasn’t perfect, but what company is?

I currently have BT broadband problems, as you do, again, but I still like BT and still keep all my shares, hoping one day they might get back up to what I paid for them. BT holds a unique place in my investments, being the only one I have ever lost money on (well, if I actually sold my shares now I’d lose). But it is a good company, and entirely fixable. My perhaps unjustifiably high regard for the company in spite of any evidence to the contrary doesn’t extend to the board. BT has a lot of excellent and devoted staff, and they are the reason for its survival, I would say very much in spite of it a long history of rubbish CEOs, including Livingstone. (I would exclude Vallance from my rubbish CEO list, I thought he actually did a pretty good job in the circumstances he faced.) As an engineer who could see the vast potential profits from relatively small investments that were open to a decent sized IT company, they all seemed incompetent to me, determined to ignore those potential markets and investing stupidly in others but focusing mainly on cost cutting as the only tool they could really understand. I don’t think any BT CEO since 1985 has deserved their grade or pay. BT gives its staff appraisals, and if I was his boss, I’d have given Livingstone 3 out of 10. At least now he’s in government, he will just be one incompetent among many so he will blend in just fine.

I won’t bother with the details of mistakes made. They are history. The future could still be bright if the new CEO is any good. Sadly, I don’t know Patterson. He joined the board after I left and I had no contact with him beforehand so I know nothing about him. I wish him the very best of success, for everyone’s sakes and if he does well, I’ll very happily sing his praises.

(I know it’s easy to say I could have done a far better job than most BT CEOs. I am certain that I could, and I certainly wouldn’t have made most of the huge errors that I saw, but anyone could say that and of course it is unprovable , and in any case,  I knew lots of other employees that would still have done much better than me. I guess it is a bit like US presidents. With 300 million people to pick from, you really have to wonder how the hell some of them ever got elected.)

So, what should BT do now? I declare my financial interests. I have a few shares, and one day if I am still alive they’ll give me a pension, and I remain a customer, so I do really want them to flourish, but otherwise I have had no financial exchanges with BT since I left in 2007.

A lot of the potential for BT has existed for a long time, and it is proof of previous CEO incompetence that it remains mostly untapped. Other areas are quite new.

There are a few valuable assets that BT makes too little use of to date. One is trust. BT has always achieved a very high trust rating from customers. Sure, they might whine about occasional lousy customer service or call centre delays, but mostly they still trust BT. Technically, customers assume their kit will work pretty reliably and they will eventually fix it with only modest annoyance when it fails. That’s better than it sounds compared to a lot of companies (Hotpoint, British Gas and O2 to name three at the very top of my most recent customer service hate list). They also trust BT on security, again an advantage not to be sniffed at. More importantly, customers trust it morally. It is quite a nice company. It pays its taxes. It has good old fashioned values and doesn’t do services that are morally questionable except where required to by law. It leans towards the customer’s side on questions of privacy v state surveillance. Again, a whole lot better on several important topical points than many big IT and web companies right now. A decent CEO would make his marketing departments do wonders with those advantages.

BT’s main physical asset is a very widespread network, much of which is fibre. But is has seriously floundered on decent speed broadband roll-out for badly miscalculated economic reasons and has ended up losing large numbers of customers onto mobile and other broadband providers. Firstly, it has to fix that by greatly accelerating its roll-out of fibre to cover the entire population within towns and suburbs. Further than that, it can plead poverty to government to extract subsidies for uneconomic roll-outs in some country areas, and fob others off with custom solutions. How close the fibre actually gets to the end customer is not important and there are many feasible architectural solutions. The data rate the customer gets is important.

The data rates it needs to provide via that fibre must be at least 50Mbit/s, which I calculated a long time ago is the latent demand of an average household today. It must be ready to increase those basic rates quickly through 100Mbit/s in 2015 into Gbits/s soon after.

It should by default provide high speed wireless from all of those homes into the nearby area. This will allow serious competition with mobile companies, especially since many customers carry tablets with only wireless LAN access. Those tablets and many smartphones rely on cloud provision for many services such as photo, video and music storage, as well as download services such as TV on demand. Decent wireless rates in the vicinity of most homes and business properties would make fairly ubiquitous broadband a reality, with none of the tiny date rate limits and poor connections offered by mobile operators. (As an aside, not doing that ages ago instead of crippling the company with the costs of unnecessary 3G licenses was one of the big errors I mentioned).

With high speed ubiquitous access, and still loads of building space to place storage and servers, BT could be a first class cloud provider (as Bonfield should have understood, coming from a computing company in the days when the cloud was still called distributed computing and computing on demand). Its engineers have understood cloud technology principles since the 80s, but it has never really invested in it properly. Now that other companies are threatening to put in their own access to their own clouds, BT is vulnerable to attack if it doesn’t quickly seize the opportunity by the throat. This may well become another missed opportunity for BT.

Another one (that CEO Heiffer should have understood, coming as he did from the finance world) is banking. BT manages to charge profitably on calls that cost just a few pence. Micro-payments is resurfacing once again as a valuable service. So far, no company has succeeded in delivering an acceptable micro-payments service but BT has the geographic coverage and technical skill to pull it off. It could go further and do proper full-service community banking. Again, a huge advantage has fallen into its lap thanks to the demise of trust in conventional banks. If any company could make community based banking work, BT could. The political climate is very favourable to get appropriate regulatory consent, society is ready and even eager, and the technology is available and proven with which to make it. Trust is the magic extra ingredient that BT has more of than other players.

Cloud financing, buying and other community based enterprises are all up-and-coming now, drawing from social and business versions of cloud thinking. Again, the core ideas go back decades. BT has been involved in their debates since over 20 years ago and holds a good hand of cards. It still could help a great deal to stimulate economic redevelopment of the UK by implementing just some of its ideas in this space. It is ironic that Livinsgtone failed to understand this enormous opportunity while he was CEO of BT, yet has now been made Minister of State for Trade and Investment. Why would anyone think he will suddenly understand now?

BT could also develop some of its many inventions made at its research labs. In many cases, small development costs are all that should be needed to generate large incomes. BT’s policy for ages has been to starve any forward looking R&D and only feed proven markets. That is no way to grow. Serious R&D investment could reap many times over in rewards. AI, convergence of IT with biotech, sponge nets, augmented reality, novel interfaces, 3D comms, digital bubbles, biomimetics and many others offer potential. Even the railways are open to attack. Conventional rail is still only equivalent to BT’s old circuit-switched lines that it used until the 1970s. A company that has been in front runners for 40 years of packet switching developments ought to be able to apply equivalent thinking to rail and road to gain rich rewards, converging time-wise as it does now with self driving cars, electrics, self organisation, high speed wireless, super-capacitor development and a host of other technologies BT understands well. Here again, rich pickings are available, and BT has one of the best positions to capitalise.

I could go on, but that is enough examples for now. BT has been offered a fresh start with a fresh CEO. If he is even a bit brave he could easily achieve things very far beyond any of his predecessors. As I said, I don’t know him so have no idea if he will be good or bad. Let’s hope he is up to the job and not just another huge disappointment.

Deep surveillance – how much privacy could you lose?

The news that seems to have caught much of the media in shock, that our electronic activities were being monitored, comes as no surprise at all to anyone working in IT for the last decade or two. In fact, I can’t see what’s new. I’ve always assumed since the early 90s that everything I write and do on-line or say or text on a phone or watch on digital TV or do on a game console is recorded forever and checked by computers now or will be checked some time in the future for anything bad. If I don’t want anyone to know I am thinking something, I keep it in my head. Am I paranoid? No. If you think I am, then it’s you who is being naive.

I know that if some technically competent spy with lots of time and resources really wants to monitor everything I do day and night and listen to pretty much everything I say, they could, but I am not important enough, bad enough, threatening enough or even interesting enough, and that conveys far more privacy than any amount of technology barriers ever could. I live in a world of finite but just about acceptable risk of privacy invasion. I’d like more privacy, but it’s too much hassle.

Although government, big business and malicious software might want to record everything I do just in case it might be useful one day, I still assume some privacy, even if it is already technically possible to bypass it. For example, I assume that I can still say what I want in my home without the police turning up even if I am not always politically correct. I am well aware that it is possible to use a function built into the networks called no-ring dial-up to activate the microphone on my phones without me knowing, but I assume nobody bothers. They could, but probably don’t. Same with malware on my mobiles.

I also assume that the police don’t use millimetre wave scanning to video me or my wife through the walls and closed curtains. They could, but probably don’t. And there are plenty of sexier targets to point spycams at so I am probably safe there too.

Probably, nobody bothers to activate the cameras on my iphone or Nexus, but I am still a bit cautious where I point them, just in case. There is simply too much malware out there to ever assume my IT is safe. I do only plug a camera and microphone into my office PC when I need to. I am sure watching me type or read is pretty boring, and few people would do it for long, but I have my office blinds drawn and close the living room curtains in the evening for the same reason – I don’t like being watched.

In a busy tube train, it is often impossible to stop people getting close enough to use an NFC scanner to copy details from my debit card and Barclaycard, but they can be copied at any till or in any restaurant just as easily, so there is a small risk but it is both unavoidable and acceptable. Banks discovered long ago that it costs far more to prevent fraud 100% than it does to just limit it and accept some. I adopt a similar policy.

Enough of today. What of tomorrow? This is a futures blog – usually.

Well, as MM Wave systems develop, they could become much more widespread so burglars and voyeurs might start using them to check if there is anything worth stealing or videoing. Maybe some search company making visual street maps might ‘accidentally’ capture a detailed 3d map of the inside of your house when they come round as well or instead of everything they could access via your wireless LAN. Not deliberately of course, but they can’t check every line of code that some junior might have put in by mistake when they didn’t fully understand the brief.

Some of the next generation games machines will have 3D scanners and HD cameras that can apparently even see blood flow in your skin. If these are hacked or left switched on – and social networking video is one of the applications they are aiming to capture, so they’ll be on often – someone could watch you all evening, capture the most intimate body details, film your facial expressions while you are looking at a known image on a particular part of the screen. Monitoring pupil dilation, smiles, anguished expressions etc could provide a lot of evidence for your emotional state, with a detailed record of what you were watching and doing at exactly that moment, with whom. By monitoring blood flow, pulse and possibly monitoring your skin conductivity via the controller, level of excitement, stress or relaxation can easily be inferred. If given to the authorities, this sort of data might be useful to identify paedophiles or murderers, by seeing which men are excited by seeing kids on TV or those who get pleasure from violent games, so obviously we must allow it, mustn’t we? We know that Microsoft’s OS has had the capability for many years to provide a back door for the authorities. Should we assume that the new Xbox is different?

Monitoring skin conductivity is already routine in IT labs as an input. Thought recognition is possible too and though primitive today, we will see that spread as the technology progresses. So your thoughts can be monitored too. Thoughts added to emotional reactions and knowledge of circumstances would allow a very detailed picture of someone’s attitudes. By using high speed future computers to data mine zillions of hours of full sensory data input on every one of us gathered via all this routine IT exposure, a future government or big business that is prone to bend the rules could deduce everyone’s attitudes to just about everything – the real truth about our attitudes to every friend and family member or TV celebrity or politician or product, our detailed sexual orientation, any fetishes or perversions, our racial attitudes, political allegiances, attitudes to almost every topic ever aired on TV or everyday conversation, how hard we are working, how much stress we are experiencing, many aspects of our medical state. And they could steal your ideas, if you still have any after putting all your effort into self censorship.

It doesn’t even stop there. If you dare to go outside, innumerable cameras and microphones on phones, visors, and high street surveillance will automatically record all this same stuff for everyone. Thought crimes already exist in many countries including the UK. In depth evidence will become available to back up prosecutions of crimes that today would not even be noticed. Computers that can retrospectively date mine evidence collected over decades and link it all together will be able to identify billions of crimes.

Active skin will one day link your nervous system to your IT, allowing you to record and replay sensations. You will never be able to be sure that you are the only one that can access that data either. I could easily hide algorithms in a chip or program that only I know about, that no amount of testing or inspection could ever reveal. If I can, any decent software engineer can too. That’s the main reason I have never trusted my IT – I am quite nice but I would probably be tempted to put in some secret stuff on any IT I designed. Just because I could and could almost certainly get away with it. If someone was making electronics to link to your nervous system, they’d probably be at least tempted to put a back door in too, or be told to by the authorities.

Cameron utters the old line: “if you are innocent, you have nothing to fear”. Only idiots believe that. Do you know anyone who is innocent? Of everything? Who has never ever done or even thought anything even a little bit wrong? Who has never wanted to do anything nasty to a call centre operator? And that’s before you even start to factor in corruption of the police or mistakes or being framed or dumb juries or secret courts. The real problem here is not what Prism does and what the US authorities are giving to our guys. It is what is being and will be collected and stored, forever, that will be available to all future governments of all persuasions. That’s the problem. They don’t delete it. I’ve said often that our governments are often incompetent but not malicious. Most of our leaders are nice guys, even if some are a little corrupt in some cases. But what if it all goes wrong, and we somehow end up with a deeply divided society and the wrong government or a dictatorship gets in. Which of us can be sure we won’t be up against the wall one day?

We have already lost the battle to defend our privacy. Most of it is long gone, and the only bits left are those where the technology hasn’t caught up yet. In the future, not even the deepest, most hidden parts of your mind will be private. Ever.

Phoenix-based business strategy will win in a fast-changing world

I am leaving for a conference in a few minutes, so this one will be brief. I hate working in airports and hotels.

Businesses worry how they will survive the next 5, 10, 15 years. They should perhaps stop worrying. The primary purpose of a business is to make money. So here is a better strategy than worrying and spending loads on long term planning:

Spot opportunity

Use cloud based thinking and virtuality to get business up and running explosively quickly.

Employ as few staff as possible as full employees, buy the rest in on short term consultancy contracts and freelancing. That keeps admin overheads minimal. Make them use their own kit and use cloud for IT support and provision. That makes IT staff, risks and costs minimal.

Develop quickly and make your money fast with no regard to longevity.

When competition or other market erosion forces start making an impact, cash in and close down while value is still good

Re-invest in next idea, rising like a phoenix using the cash from the last business

This approach is very light-weight. It needs far less administrative load and can be far more task focused, with higher profit margins.

Live fast, die young, resurrect.

OK, flight to catch.