Wendell's Rants

Cell-Phone Privacy Rant

By Wendell Clifton
Written 10/20/1997

Our freedom is being infringed upon again in the form of a federal law that restricts what we may listen to on the radio. Specifically, we are not allowed to listen to other people’s cell-phone calls on our little police scanners. At first, this seems reasonable. Why should someone listen to someone else’s private conversations? That is unfriendly and unneighborly. It is also not the issue. When you use a cell-phone, you are broadcasting, just like the local network affiliates. Obviously, you intended to be heard or you would have used a more secure form of communication, such as the telephone, federal mail, or encrypted email. You have a right to broadcast, as guaranteed by freedom of speech and freedom of press. This also implies a right to listen. If you broadcast, assume you will be heard, even if listening is illegal. Security is the responsibility of the insecure. Those who desire security must obtain it for themselves. Relying on a promise that no one will breach their security is ignoring reality. There are always people willing to do something they aren’t supposed to do. The cell-phone companies need to be aware that people want their privacy. Coercing the federal government to make laws against snooping doesn’t even come close to insuring privacy. All that does is reduce the cost of adding security features to cell-phones. The answer is not to legislate away our freedoms, but to scramble our transmissions. Scrambling will add at least a little protection from the casual listener. This is the responsibility of the cell-phone companies. Let the cell-phone companies know that you want true privacy, not pretend privacy created by a group of money grabbers who mock freedom by lobbying for laws that sap our freedom, a little bit at a time. Perhaps we will someday regain the freedom to listen to anything that comes into our homes.

Wendell's Warp Factor Rant

By Wendell Clifton
Written 08/21/1996

Star Trek did many things to expand the way our generation thinks about space travel. One of my favorite Star Trek inventions was the Warp Drive warp factor. In the original series, you could calculate your true velocity by multiplying the warp factor cubed by the speed of light. This means that warp factor 2 equaled 8 times the speed of light (2 X 2 X 2 = 8). What a wonderful way to bring vast distances within a simple framework that anyone could use! Beginning with The Next Generation, warp factor was changed to be a logarithmic scale. What a disaster! Now a calculator is required for even the simplest of speed and distance calculations. The reason given for the change was that the original definition of warp speed would allow the galaxy to be explored too quickly. Let's examine that premise. Captain James T. Kirk often said, "Ahead, warp factor 2!" So what was he really telling his crew? At warp factor 2, the Enterprise would be traveling at 8 times the speed of light. If the average distance between stars is similar to the distance between our sun and the nearest stars, 4 light years, then it would take 6 months to get to the nearest star system from earth. The crew had to be bored out of their minds. The length of the original Enterprise mission was supposed to be five years. That would mean the Enterprise could visit ten star systems, five on the voyage out from earth and five on the return. Not enough material here for 79 original episodes, not to mention the several hundred that came later. The original Enterprise rarely exceeded warp 10. That would be 1000 times the speed of light. It would take one and a half days to get to the next star system from earth. The Enterprise has been known to travel to several systems in a single episode. Warp 10 is just too slow to account for this. At warp 100, the Enterprise would be traveling at one million times the speed of light. It could go from system to system in less than five minutes. I would imagine that the Enterprise's true velocity would be somewhere between warp 10 and 100. Where could the Enterprise go at warp 100? It could traverse the galaxy in less than a month. Does this mean that the whole galaxy would be explored in just a few years? The galaxy has over 100 billion stars. Even if all the ships at the disposal of the federation were used to explore the galaxy, at a rate of one star system per day, it would take millions of years to visit every star. It would take over two years to get to the Andromeda galaxy, the largest galaxy in our local cluster. It has more than 200 billion stars. Several smaller galaxies and star clusters exist much closer than that. Now lets imagine that the Enterprise could travel at infinite speed. It would still be necessary to stop from time to time to visit the star systems. There simply isn't any way that any ship or fleet of ships could explore the nearby universe in any reasonable amount of time. Therefore, there doesn't need to be any restriction on the maximum speed of a starship. With the new system of calculating warp, the highest warp factor is 10. That is supposed to be infinite speed. The Enterprise can't go that fast, but it can get to warp 9.6 or 9.7. This new scale is a poor tool for measuring velocity because in just a few tenths of a warp factor, you go from being limited to just travel in your own galaxy to traveling the entire cosmos. I wouldn't want to be at the controls of a ship where accidentally nudging the "throttle" a little could put me in the Virgo cluster or further. Also, the Enterprise went faster than warp 10 in the final episode the Next Generation series. What would be the point if you can already travel at infinite speed? Speaking of infinite speed, in Voyager, a shuttle craft reached warp 10 and supposedly occupied all points in space. Infinite speed does not require that you occupy all points in space. You need to occupy only the points between your current position and your destination or only 2 points - your current position and destination. Traveling at infinite velocity means arriving at your destination at the same moment you depart. No time has passed. The original warp factor definition allowed plenty of room for technical advancement in the Federation. There was no need to place a cap on the size of the explorable universe. There is just too much universe for everybody to see everything, even with the help of infinite velocity. Now if I could just figure out how to build warp drive . . .