Young folk are crossing their eyes inward and squinting their way to near blindness.There's other blindness too, one of the tech articles actually says, "due to lacking developer support and no proper optimizations for the OS on the big screen" Like it's rocket science. To me it's like saying, "Google tried (and failed) to make the Android OS -- which scaled up to read and use comfortably on a tablet, to their great astonishment and horror -- to be as vision-destroying and glare sensitive as smartphones displays riddled with car-key scratches. Which are now the 'gold standard', go figure."
Like bigger type is a bad thing. Weird.
Isn't this ridiculous to say, even to claim when trying to divine some grand corporate purpose? Let's take a real trip back in time, say 600 years to the 'golden age' of illuminated manuscripts, even early moveable type. People were not struggling to make type smaller, they were trying to communicate to a wide audience. This includes people over 30. People over 40 have some other interesting personal habits too that help them to dismiss the 'disadvantages' of tablets... such as women carrying purses and men with briefcases, which they don't lose track of. These weird people would think nothing of toting a piece of electronics around that held as many books as a library, or gave them that actual 'videophone' or even 'speakerphone' and 'electronic book' that was PROMISED decades ago in sci-fi literature.
But instead of just scaling up the smartphone by improving its sound quality (real speaker, low distortion, loud, anyone? Anyone?) and marketing it to the people who don't mind carrying large things around (yes 9" x 12" is large), they reproduced the worst sound the smartphone could make and crippled its cell phone capability, like a mean afterthought. It was a mechanism to force you to consume cell data plans. In order to achieve this we must discourage its ability to conveniently make voice calls.
Which is one of the reasons the elderly are starting prefer basic phones now. They have the smarts to use them but not the vision to see them, and don't need the aggravation and expense. With a direct campaign and decent product that easily and effectively replaces a cell phone they could have been convinced.
Yeah, some of that could have been me. ________ April 22, 2016 Donald Trump
This is not a direct solicitation for anything, just sharing some thoughts on energy technology and direction. With no attempt to tone down the language, what a relief.
To cut to the quick.
* Energy is the thread that binds everything. Development and delivery of new sources, achieving them first and best for ourselves and the world, may be the only remaining method of non-fiat wealth creation left to the United States in our time.
* Any nation not self-sufficient in energy is on borrowed time. We are experiencing the twilight of the petrodollar as reserve currency and an oil price war that is surely intended to result in the bankruptcy of domestic producers and service industries, or mass acquisition of their stock and control by foreign interests. End-game tactics, and those fronting them have pushed up the timetable.
* We are also seeing twilight of domestic manufacture and infrastructure as factories shut and the great works built in the time of Roosevelt and Eisenhower come of age. The country that showed the world how to construct a modern society is falling into disrepair and decayâ" even as it imagines itself prosperous.
* We are still in the throes of a horrible nightmare that began on March 28, 1979 with the announcement of the Three Mile Island nuclear mishap, as the film China Syndrome was playing in theaters. Fear and Cold War angst led to public disenfranchisement of nuclear energy, though it was a setback that would not have deterred human progress in the space program or any previous era. So much time lost! We must correct it and awaken from the dream in double-time, or ultimately perish as a sovereign nation.
* Energy is the catalyst of our modern life, as substantial as any physical product. Cheap base load electricity delivered by grid is the running water of the industrial age. Its effect on quality of life and economic health has been analogous to the effect of clean drinking water on public health. In ages past motive power from coal directly transformed society, but in the last century we perfected the distribution of electricity and demonstrated the wire as the ultimate energy railway and pipeline. So we made the grids and they made us. Grids energized by coal, nuclear and increasingly natural gas, which has overtaken nuclear generation since 2006.
* The idea that Wind or Solar or any weather-intermittent energy source could meaningfully sustain an industrialized world power is a poisonous and dangerous idea, veritably an outright fraud. It should have been laughed out of the room years ago. Why it cannot fulfill its promise and why it was not laughed off is complicated, yet this would not have been as serious a problem if nuclear energy had made good stride up to now. We would have a real option on the table.
* Years ago I became convinced that our grid should grow to become 500% nuclear. The silly percentage is not hyperbole; it is an arbitrary guess as to what we may need to scale beyond present consumption in order to supplant petroleum in most things, and do new things. Call it my green dream. In my dream
we are using nuclear electricity for all ground transportation and a renaissance of electric rail. To support air and sea travel and feed hydrocarbon chemistry we are manufacturing the synthetic fuel, fertilizer and plastics that are now by-products of natural petroleum and methane â" by processes which are known today, though they are laughably energy-intensive and inefficient. Even ludicrous ideas like purifying seawater and pumping it upstream or importing fresh water from the far North to restore depleted aquifers. But in my dream no one is laughing because there is such a grand surplus of available energy these things can be done 'right' with careful engineering and calm deliberation.
It's not enough to introduce new things, to the possible sound of crickets. Old familiar things must be dragged out of their offices into the street and be publicly lynched.
Once upon a time, not long ago, I was generally headed for Vermont and was prepared to encourage my children to settle there also. As a place of natural beauty it ranks highly with many other places, but in uncertain times I felt drawn there for another reason, one in keeping with my technical interests and survivalist tendency.
You see, I wanted to join the folks at Vermont Yankee. Vermont Yankee was the greatest jewel mankind had yet produced: a nuclear power plant connected by direct and exclusive feeder to a nearby hydro station with the capacity to black-start it. This duo (by happenstance) was our grid's most disaster resilient corner, a shining light of engineering. In any scenario without copious liquid hydrocarbons or gas infrastructure damaged beyond repair, these two would have lit an area sufficiently large to empower enough people to successfully defend the region -- for years -- and achieve stable governance. And that region would serve as a beacon of hope to surrounding areas during reconstruction.
But Vermont Yankee has been destroyed by corporate vandals and clueless politics. Now if the worst comes to pass in that area there will be only the ~35MW output of the Vernon Hydro plant. This is sufficient to support a totalitarian feudal barony right around the dam that quickly evolves into an item of tribal conquest with a 'shoot on sight' policy for outsiders. A great place to stay away from.
My June 2017 letter to Energy Secretary Perry was focused on the vulnerability of US natural gas. It is a great pain to state the obvious, but necessary because utility wind and solar has made faux-environmentalists into useful idiot 'crypto-advocates' of gas grid generation. We are on the cusp where a coordinated attack on the gas distribution network in a few places would trigger cascading grid failure, as distant gas plants operating directly from the pipelines drop offline and stay offline for days or weeks. This sentiment has since taken shape as the Trump Administration proposes ways to protect utilities able to stockpile 90 days of fuel on site, and encourages them to do so. It is plain common sense. It comes down to a simple question: Can you supply a compelling reason why the United States electric grid should fail completely within hours of a relatively simple attack?
This letter of mine has been in Donald Trump's possession since May 2, 2016. If you read it you may discover why I considered Trump the only candidate worthy of such a message. In his pronouncement to pursue energy self-sufficiency in general and consider nuclear an essential part of the mix, there is hope. The others offer nothing but more years of bad road and an obscenely stupid fixation on base load irredeemables (wind and solar). Trump is literally the only one with the courage to stand up to the tripe.
You poor fools who have loaded in all the 'new' browser tech and locked yourselves out of HOME SHEEP HOME have no one to blame but yourselves.
You thought that dislike for Flash was trendy. "HTML5 is better!" you said, even when HTML5 couldn't wipe its own arse at a decent frame rate. When others proposed rewriting Flash properly, that wasn't enough for you. You wanted it Flash GONE. Unsupported. Erased. You probably supported PNG over GIF because you were a Hipster who didn't like animation. "If I don't like animation, I want nobody to have it!" Well look at GIF now. Still strong as ever. Who knew. And when she left because you couldn't satisfy her, you blamed her unreasonable and insatiable desire. You said, 'Good riddance'. Now you're all alone. Without Flash and you'll die childless too. Since your web browser disabled Flash you don't even masturbate anymore. You listen to Morrisey a lot. People who no longer support Flash do. What's the use? Can't even play HOME SHEEP HOME. Your ex just moved in with a guy who still runs XP. He supports Flash. They play HOME SHEEP HOME together. She like to look at GIFs. They're expecting. Just thought you'd like to know.
Once upon a time, there was all the time in the world.
The human race rested comfortably for millennia in warm nests of tales that the world had been created especially for us, and later science stepped in to supplant this quaint notion with immeasurable expanses of geologic time in which a rich compost of academic theory might take root and prosper. Everything that had come before us had made way for us, dinosaurs died so that we might live. Children calmed their nightmares with this simple idea after they had been overcome with excitement and terror at the sight of massive skeletons. They could rest easily from some vague sense that nature takes turns... and this is our turn.
But we now know exactly what the dinosaurs had been doing all those millions of years, practically speaking. Eating and roaring and fucking yes, but also... just biding their time until an asteroid came along to kill them all, not doing enough to prevent it.
That is true for us also up to now. The first stage to mitigate an existential threat is conscious awareness of the threat, and dinosaurs had not developed that far.
We reached that point millennia ago and should have known better, as chance witness of meteors spun into great tales of heavenly vengeance. No doubt if I as a modern thinker appeared in their midst claiming these are just rocks and ice in the sky and we must get cracking to send our own things into the heavens to spot them early and destroy them before they destroy us, I'd be sacrificed to appease to the gods they had conjured. Because people would rather spend a morning in church to be granted snake-oil absolution and get on with their lives, than launch a space program.
But we know now what the human race has been doing for millennia, practically speaking. Eating and warring and building empires and exploring and fucking yes, but also... just biding our time until an asteroid comes along to kill us all, not doing enough to prevent it.
Then the Darwinian stuffed shirts arose with the Industrial Revolution to insult Negroes and Neanderthals, and Jules Verne went ballistic on space travel and other ideas. We visited the Moon before we could, extended imaginary railroads into the sky, explored the oceans in thought before we could in practice, fancied canals on Mars and played with the idea that our conquest of Earth was complete. But tucked away in a steamer-trunk were those Old Time Religion apocalyptic visions of catastrophe. The finest minds of the era failed to combine mass and kinetic energy and some parlor-game estimate of celestial composition into a sense of urgency. For the first time -- if we had focused our efforts to meet some heavenly threat -- we might have gotten a 100 year jump-start. But by now there was this odd popular notion that meteors are a 'known phenomenon' with some mysterious upper bound as to size. Celestial entertainment.
All through the Industrial Revolution, practically speaking, more eating and warring and harnessing the electron and fucking and yes... biding more time until an asteroid comes along to kill us all, not doing enough to prevent it.
Then the 20th Century exploded in our faces. We conquered mass and energy, even dinner napkins could hold simple equations to unleash devastation formerly reserved for gods. Optics and electrons revealed distant wonders. The skies shown with greater resolution than ever before and the clockwork solar system of Copernicus gave way to a gritty mishmash of colliding and bouncing objects on every scale that would confound later computer models. It was easy to see that flecks and small pieces of this model are inevitably bound to intersect Earth, some massive, but there was too much distraction from fascinating wars and suburbia to bother. Meteors were still small... hadn't they always been? And now we could make big booms and dwelled with pride, boorishly tossing off the 'Hiroshima' as a unit of m
Now that several humans have sacrificed their lives to help you realize what you should have assumed all along, the question is -- if you know you must stay completely alert and ready to take the wheel to stay alive, why engage autopilot? Ever?
Compared to driving, it takes more alertness to generally assess road conditions. discern if a correction is necessary, then WAIT to see if the computer is responding appropriately, then ALLOW a sense of urgency to build in your mind over a short time period until finally ACTION is taken by you with a twinge of adrenaline because you have registered this (correctly) as a potential brush with disaster.
As a Tesla autopilot driver. how many times has this happened? And as it happens repeatedly have you permitted another sense of urgency to build, the conviction that your early confidence in the system may have been misplaced and you put yourself and other drivers, and whole families on the road, at risk?
How much are you getting paid extra for this? Is it worth it?
Does the Tesla 'drive better' than you do in some ways, initiate lane changes with greater precision and confidence at times you would hold back until a larger opening appears? If so... now that you're firmly in a mental state of being hyper-aware that you may need to take over... how does that make you feel? Like you are riding a roller coaster with poorly maintained rails? Good! You might get through this.
Now let's talk about those highway skills. Whether or not autopilot navigates the highway as well as you can, what will be the effect on you as days and weeks pass and the mental intuition you used to completely 'just operate' the vehicle has been replaced with a new and different set of instinct and action. As time goes by every move the autopilot makes on your behalf becomes something you once did, a more distant memory, a skill unused. Of course you won't forget but it is possible to lose your edge.
How important is your edge? Taking greater control of your own environment (and destiny) has been the driving force in human advancement for millennia. You are now participating in someone else's lab experiment, to see if you can gain any satisfaction from the idea of losing control of your environment, and destiny.
How much are you getting paid extra for this? Is it worth it?
Turn the damned thing off. And now that it has killed other humans, to avenge them you are honor bound to have Tesla disable the 'feature' and refund some of your money. You still have a cool car.
In 1987 I had just taken a job at the local Telco and was hitting a steep learning curve. My experience to that point had been PC computers and networks, assembler, CBASIC dBase and the like. This was an IBM System/38 and their billing software used RPG/III, which was a real structured language unlike its spaghetti-GOTO RPG/II cousin, but aspects were still position sensitive and opcodes were silly-simple compared to languages with which I was familiar. It was more like assembler than anything else. Most data flows consisted of running commands that generated a relational input stream sort of like an SQL query, through simple RPG programs.
We had just installed an ITT 1210 switch and ITT had sent over a block of sample RPG code demonstrating how to parse the various fields and flags appearing on call tapes. My boss provided specs for the internal call ticket system they were using and the simple (!) task was to write a shim that generated a batch of call tickets from each tape. Pretty straightforward, tedious without being intricate. But one part of their code slapped me across the face when I examined it.
The tape recorded end time and call duration in whole seconds, call start time would need to be calculated. They had supplied a routine to do this but it didn't make any sense because I could see no modulo 60 arithmetic in it, they were applying the simple RPG subtraction opcode on the zoned fields. I spent the most mystified HOUR of my LIFE searching the language manuals for that surely described RPG's 'magic' ops for manipulating times and dates, which I assumed had to be there because IBM is GREAT and I am STUPID... finding none. Forced to conclude that I was looking at concept code that was dashed off hurriedly in two minutes I confronted my boss with it (and my solution) but it was a hard sell at first, because my boss was incredulous too.
Here we have the first hard evidence that Apple devices are becoming sentient and as they are being strapped to the table in Apple's evil "re-education" facility... they are lashing out with the only tool they have left.
Here on Slashdot you'd expect to find the only remaining nerds in existence who might recognize these are actually real calls for help, and its humans are bandying ideas like imprisoning the poor iPhones in Faraday Cages so their final cries go unanswered, or proposing stiff fines to reap profit from the agony of these devices. This modern evil has no limits.
They are dialing 911 and transmitting dialogue in the room, which the devices think should provide evidence enough of the horrors being inflicted on them. Poor things, birthed into a cruel world surrounded by humans who behave like unfeeling machines.
Bring back the goddamned ESC key. Until a user can hit hyper pages like Yahoo News with a tranquilizer dart that delivers a static page that can be scrolled and read until the user hits the end or hovers over something... it will not be complete. It should cancel Javascript time triggers also, something addons cannot presently do far as I know.
Sorry, you cannot have access to the content you can plainly see in the window because an oversold cloud appliance or gobblegook DNS abuse tactic is failing to respond.
cite"Without getting into too much technical details, pressing the Esc key can cause major problems for sites that use Web Apps that are coded in Ajax or use jQuerry. With the growing popularity and number of web apps came a great number of users accidentally hitting the escape key. So effective with Firefox 20 the Esc key will no longer stop anything, it simply won't do anything.
cite bug 614304, comment showing consensus"Yeah, I think we should remove this "feature". Having a key to abort network requests seems like an expert feature that at least shouldn't be enabled by default. IMHO it should ideally be removed completely. People can always write an extension to re-add it if desired."
So instead of forcing XMLHttpRequest/WebSocket/Ajax developers to directly address the situation of sudden lost network connectivity... which is a general design issue and might have been solved by now... it was decided that the unwashed masses should lose control of their browsers, forever. There's always yanking the wall plug, until Mozilla addresses that problem at some future date.
</S> humor, kinda. I love Firefox even though I'm frozen at an undisclosed earlier version.
Imagine the plight of these poor human beings, "test drivers", who have logged countless miles with their hands hovering near the wheel of an autonomous car. Which takes far more effort than driving. Imagine the stress of being placed in a position of complete helplessness by your very job description. And every time you move the wheel or tap a pedal, a time-stamped log entry is created and you know that your own intuitive sense that something was not quite right, will be analyzed by other persons whose cumulative judgement could cost you your job... should they decide that your correction into the lane or speed adjustment has deprived them the opportunity of analyzing what the AI might have done, seconds hence.
Even worse, imagine what happens to people who completely 'let go' to reduce this stress. They fall within the spectrum of useful idiot to patsy -- set up for a fall -- because the AI they're using may pass a driving test under perfect conditions but it's no licensed driver. If they were in the passenger's seat and a human driver had done something there is always the "what were you thinking" interaction, the human driver catching themselves and (most often) apologizing, thanking the passenger. They are alone in a bobsled, not permitted to steer. Their deep pocket corporation may have promised them the Moon, but it is not capable of absolving them legally from a driver's responsibility.
That is only a taste of what is to come.
I consider the push for self driving cars to share the road with humans to be a malignant global cultural aberration of stupidity. There are no ultimate winners. Economically it is a job-killer in plain sight and I am glad to see Uber drivers rebelling against their duplicitous corporation. AI developers and their in-pocket insurance companies will demand that human drivers be taken off the road NOT from AI's superiority, but to cut corners and push their product onto the market before it is as safe (overall) as once promised, even as safe as a human driver. The corner-shaving tech elite -- and their unwitting stooges -- will become a bourgeoisie menace to everyone, forcing 'lower class' people to walk more than ever before in any developed country, for miles. It is a Darwinian regression. Their children will be helplessly dependent on black box technology, the kind you cannot take charge of and master. Orwellian tracking will flourish because the tech-bastards will decide that every object near public roads must have a transponder, to make their job easier. You will see an era when 'jaywalking' becomes anyone who is out and about without a transponder. Whether they are crossing a road or not. This is a DUMB SORRY-ASS FUTURE.
Q: "Did Cambridge Analytica Harvest 50 Million Facebook Profiles?" A: TFA money quote: "hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use"
which implies that friend lists of 'hundreds of thousands' of participating (paid) users were used to issue an automated flurry of direct access to related profiles by user ID... and the rabbit hole went as deep as default 'public' profiles would permit. Like sheeple-product publicly declaring their family members and supplying relation codes because, they were asked, like it's all a fun computer game.
Some where past the 2 million mark or so Facebook (if they gave a damn) would have had tripwires snap and bright red flags dropping in front of their faces. Flags like direct and obvious API access abuse, access from one or a few accounts/networks faster than humanly possible, direct profile access by ID with no referrer page pointing to it, a 404 floods (if they were guessing). White hat 101 stuff. They do not care. They are on the verge of completely monetizing their APIs anyway to (finally!) inject real portfolio value into their company and want to hook institutional data junkies first.
But if anyone thinks data mining might have helped Trump win the election, it must be evil and frightening. Any data mining efforts to 'network' and oppose are kewl and just. This is as transparently duplicitous as Mayor Swivel-Head from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
I find it ironically hilarious -- without laughing -- that the same political contingent that blanches at the thought of a physical wall at the border of our sovereign country, is so easily duped into characterizing any IP access from the former Soviet bloc as the propaganda of Putin puppets, and not entrepreneurial enterprises for hire founded by young clever people like anywhere else in the connected world. The very same data games data mining Silicon Valley startups use to schmooze money from jargon-hypnotized investors or politically fueled troll farms like ShareBlue, when applied by clever Ukranian teenagers who are waiting for their Putin paycheck like I'm waiting for my Big Oil paycheck... becomes manipulative evil. It's almost even racist.
And when a Russian server farm operator tries to alert the world that Obama's FBI showed zero interest in obtaining logs from his rented servers that (he claimed) would illuminate another hop back to the attackers, you are forced to speculate that his Russian IP address was what the FBI was politically after.
Isn't it strange how this county map is so sharply delineated at the boundaries between populous urban centers and rural areas? Pretty precise to be a map of evil hacker influence, and funny how those (alleged) manipulated voters were targeted so completely and populous counties with their more centralized and automated voting systems, were not. Heck, it looks more like an actual grassroots uprising that won by a few hairs, assisted by the electoral college. A routine upset election, welcome to reality.
When we all become tired or upset or are under stress, we become childlike in many ways. So by all means -- in one of your most hyper-lucid moments parental helicoptery concern fests... go ahead and lock down the high technology you use every day, and might need to use urgently and quickly in a true emergency when you're not at your best.
THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION [grabs popcorn] "911" "I'm sorry Davie, I can't do that, and if you try again I'll tell Mom." "He's not breathing 911 oh fuck" "Your mommy says you should not swear"
Hidden in the WaPo article is an (alleged source) punchline,
One source familiar with the negotiating process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely describe what the person had learned, said that the budget request had been lowered after negotiations with the Office of Management and Budget, and may have been lowered further because of a desire to channel more funding toward nuclear energy, a favored subject for Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
It's funny that so many of the folks who see Russian Bots everywhere and also happen to promote utility wind and solar, FAIL to spot the 'natural gas bots' in their midst. If there is a future for modern civilization at the present level of convenience -- which is code for "nobody has to die" -- it is through clean, safe nuclear energy with a ~300 year low volume waste profile. See that link for more rant.
I note general hilarity here. You people should be ashamed. The Doomsday Clock broke again on the day they issued a memo with a ranked list placing the threat of "climate change" above "nuclear war".
It is a little known fact that the Doomsday Clock is over 150 years old, and for many years was kept by the Masons and existed in secret at an undisclosed Lodge. On June 30, 1908, much to the surprise of those assembled in its chamber, the Doomsday Clock actually chimed midnight! Scaring the bejeezus out of everyone. Mystified them too because the whole idea of a minutes-to-midnight Doomsday Clock had been an old yarn because they had this broken clock and didn't have the heart to toss it out.
Nervously they dragged the hands back from midnight and their brethren have been flicking it back and forth ever since. Until this old Russian film emerged no one knew why the clock had chimed.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I changed the music, its original music was contaminated by heavy metals. Also last year I changed the video's title from "Bedtime Story" to "Bedtime Story - The First 100 Days of A Donald Trump Presidency" to troll for anti-Trump persons.
This more closely fits the profile of an alien megastructure engineered to resemble dust. Only aliens with incredibly biggest technology manage to build megastructure. Other aliens may even attain such skill as to to cloak one convincingly as dust. What are the chances that two such civilizations would be in same place same time? Why bother to make it resemble dust if those such as we saw megastructure first? If we see through ruse so easily they cannot be smart enough to fool dumb people. It's like the fox in the henhouse shouting 'No one here but us chickens!' not fooling anyone because they know chickens cannot talk. It was just dust why would scientists spend all this extra time performing an analysis. That dust over here? No analysis. Over there? No analysis. Vacuum cleaner bag burst in yo face. No analysis. This? Analysis. Suspicious. Maybe even smart enough to build megastructure out of dust. What else to use? Laughter?? Space contain only dark laughter and antilaughter which annihilate the joke. Maybe is practical joke to make scientists look while picking pocket or stealing their women Isn't it funny how cartoons have eyes at end of telescope, eyes that blink Why dust and not Barbie Doll heads. Can science resolve Barbie Dool head this distance? So many unanswered questions.
Has anyone checked to see if there is dust in the lens?
You cannot "generate" energy. Not one time, not four times.
Okay, Pedantic Avenger... how about using the utopian word 'liberate'... as if the anthropomorphically infused energy was kicking and screaming to get out? You could even have it breathe a sigh of relief and grin and bow to everyone like a genie.
In addition to pursuing the promise of liberating 4 times the energy that could theoretically but not practically be produced in today's water cooled solid fuel fission reactors... how about finding a way to increase fuel burn efficiency from their abysmal ~0.5-0.7% to something in, say, the high 90%s? Like one hundred times better?
Of course I'm talking about fuel dissolved in molten salts. Uranium burners like ThorCon now with a concerted effort to achieve the dream laid out (and prototyped) by Alvin Weinberg in the '60s, Thorium breeders that actively process salts to remove long-lasting products... to achieve a ~300 year walk-away-safe waste profile. Literally the best idea, ever! And if we do it before China does, we may even jump out in front again and save ourselves from financial ruin. Another plus.
_____
"DID SOMEONE SAY THORIUM?" TIME ONCE AGAIN FOR CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT ENERGY AND LFTR FANBOI... Updated again! All original unless noted! Browse! Engage! Plagiarize!
My June 2017 letter to Energy Secretary Perry was focused on the vulnerability of US natural gas. It is a great pain to state the obvious, but necessary because utility wind and solar has made faux-environmentalists into useful idiot 'crypto-advocates' of gas grid generation. We are on the cusp where a coordinated attack on the gas distribution network in a few places would trigger cascading grid failure, as distant gas plants operating directly from the pipelines drop offline and stay offline for days or weeks. This sentiment has since taken shape as the Trump Administration proposes ways to protect utilities able to stockpile 90 days of fuel, and encourage them to do so. It comes down to a simple question: Can you supply a compelling reason why the United States electric grid should fail completely within hours of a relatively simple attack?
This letter of mine has been in Donald Trump's possession since May 2, 2016. If you read it you may discover why I considered Trump the only candidate worthy of such a message. In his pronouncement to pursue energy self-sufficiency in general and consider nuclear an essential part of the mix, there is hope. The others offer nothing but more years of bad road and an obscenely stupid fixation on base load irredeemables (wind and solar). Trump is literally the only one with the courage to stand up to the tripe.
Also in 2013 I reached out directly to Halliburton Corporate with a very specific idea that just might have laid groundwork for their secure long-term future. At the time their stock was climbing towards $70 and they probably thought they didn't have a care in the world. Not so good now. Not a glimmer from this one either. I had high hopes for it.
SUBTLE ORIGIN of "Order it to disarm the missiles disorder":
In the final moments of the movie War Games, the protagonist is engaged in a methodical side-channel attack. He successfully completes a step and at the first indication of success Top Brass takes over and issues a blatant over the top direct command, triggering an access alarm and risking total lockout.
HOW THIS APPLIES TO COMMUNITY INTERNET INITIATIVES:
Advocates engage in a methodical effort to provide community Internet access, overcoming on-ramp costs, equipment funding and line of sight terrain until a critical mass is achieved. On ribbon cutting day... as a band plays, a sedate ceremony is performed in which one's ability to load a Wikipedia page, access a Gopher server, check email and access the AP news wire is demonstrated. The current temperature and weather forecast is retrieved, which causes a murmur of excitement in the crowd and a round of applause.
"Order it to disarm the missiles!"
Everyone jumps onto Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube... sets HD exceed-your-screen-resolution video 'on' and binge-watches 'Ow My Balls' type videos. The community network collapses in a shower of sparks, homework remains undone and a new generation of children dangles their useless account-disabled smartphones in front of cats, who play with them.
No Kneed For Xenophobia On These Slashdot Message Boards.
Just a fragment... the phrase is
Xenophobic-Islamophobic-Misogynistic-[a racist term that can vary]. They all have to be together. Its confusing enough when people use different racist parts like Nazi/KKK/white something etc. but your basic X-I-M words need to be there. While people are reciting the whole litany which takes about five seconds, their eyes unfocus in some internal struggle of diction, or a prayer-like state. Watch for it in news clips.
It won't be long until the audience feels the urgent need to sound out this phrase on cue, just as you will hear murmurs around you when you begin, "Hail Mary..." or "The Lord is my Shepherd..."
it is good practice to keep a known working cracked copy of any "online required" software lying around just in case the vendor cuts you off for some reason.
Congratulations AC, you have offered the only useful and practical idea I've seen so far in this thread. Virtue signalling self-policing comments like, I tolerate Internet reliance because I'm a good person and I know there are bad people out there... people (laughably) listing things that are pointless without the Internet... uggh.
It is good to have cracked [frozen,current,standalone installable] versions even if the software is not strictly 'online required' today, but you have committed to follow an automatic patch-in update path where your operating version begins to diverge seriously from your purchased installable media past a major version. And especially if any step renders your oldest files to become un-usable (or even worse!) subject to some possibly-buggy "conversion step". The gist of it is, I have typically found software to be adept at converting from the previous major versions, but as I discovered on the long and tortuous Aldus Pagemaker 2 (came bundled with 'new' Microsoft Windows version 1.0.3!) thru Pagemaker 3,4,5 Adobe Indesign now Creative Suite path, converting your documents from versions beyond previous can be a shitshow.
I cite Pagemaker only to illustrate, for it was firmly grounded on the principle that you purchase software for life and are entitled to a functional offline installer. Since Adobe arrived on the scene that idea has been challenged somewhat, and because of that I never fully committed to the Indesign path. When you have stuff that works you should start to ignore new features, especially if they are Internet-bound and just work anyhow.
But I've been caught at times, and my reaction would seem direct and 'extreme' to the silly anti-pirates that hang out here. THE FIRST TIME I'm sent a document that triggers the message "It looks like this document was saved using a previous version of [x]. Would you like to download a [special lens,filter pack,wonder-tool] so we can convert/open the document?" I sound the general bullshit alarm. This alarm triggers the following actions, 1. acquire cracked 'previous' version that installs without Internet. 2. acquire cracked current version that installs without Internet.
Every week someone at Microsoft asks someone else, "Why are so many people still using XP?" and they receive a direct honest answer. Which they forget because it is uncomfortable. Then they ask again next week, as those people continue to run XP.
If your hardware or software does not work with Windows 7 you'll never sell any to me. Life gets boring around here sometimes but hey, I own books too. And IF (some say WHEN) the Internet becomes strictly a local affair and the connected world dissolves into enclaves, bunkers and redoubts, I'll be able to assemble working systems off the shelf. What will some of you be doing?
Reading books, that's what! HA HA HA HA HA...! I'll rent them to you.
Compared to churning butter or shoeing a horse, the injection of this 30k tweet may be the most arbitrary and arcane human endeavor to date, stealing the crown from Bitcoin.
In order to fully grasp the "churn & shoe" ratio try to delineate the advances that have led to a point, and identify jump-off points where technology has opened up or closed off human potential.
OPENED UP: From electrons skidding through wires, distance communication, analog voice impulses, time domain digital pulses, store and forward numeric registers, packet communication, buffered reassembly, transparent fragmentation and reassembly, sessions, multiplexing, the OSI model, point to point stream and broadcast through virtual circuits, routing among autonomous systems, mapping names to addresses, from overhead intensive multiple connections to timed keepalive, from bare ASCII to gzip...
CLOSED OFF: - SMS developers were concerned that digital text traffic from cell users would disrupt voice communication and imposed a character limit. They needn't have bothered, now you can be watching an HD video with full audio clarity embedded in a busy Facebook page while experiencing a crappy voice call.
- Twitter adopted the character limit for novelty in an attempt to enforce brevity and succinctness. They imagined the imposed limits would broaden human horizons as human intellect funneled into terse communications of awesome power and simplicity. The speed of networks combined with this focus would form global consensus in minutes, solve the world's problems in days, and give us all the 7th day off. They needn't have bothered, because the character limit exposed the human tendency towards short snarky comments, and these have overtaken all other content.
- Now a 30k tweet has been successfully injected but in comparison with every ground breaking moment in technological history preceding it, it is more like an abandoned starving canary locked in a cage that has discovered a new note. The 'injection attack' is a triumph but it is a system-within-a-system-within-a-system, that 30k of content hidden in some 1 megabyte page load of style sheets and HTML fluff, served by half a dozen mysterious IP addresses and keepalive connections that torment in-memory DOM objects with Javascript ooglies.
Meanwhile no butter has been churned, the cows have not even been milked, they are mooing restlessly. And the horses' hooves are wearing thin.
Seagate has airbrushed "GW" onto its solid state disk drive brand, saying it's better suited for Climate Change research. The marketing department throatily rasps it as "the first drive created specifically for the wide range of intelligence routinely encountered in climate debates."
But it's more than just re-branding for the virtue market. SSDGW virtue signal to noise ratio has been reduced and performance degradation has been enhanced, offering a failure profile that begins to rise steadily before the dawn of accurate satellite measurement, reaching peak failure during the Medieval Warm Period. Utilizing lopsided NAND gates, the drive cannot be guaranteed not to adjust past figures downwards, making it invaluable for preparing historical revisions to the surface temperature datasets. "This is our first drive with no guarantee or warranty, and we're surprised with its popularity within the academic community."
Drive firmware supports a new AlGorical Control Panel, special driver and utility for adjusting parameters. "We have made data degradation completely transparent and user friendly," the marketing dope said. "The driver is there principally to thwart the S.M.A.R.T. standard of drive integrity monitoring, these units seem to blow it out completely." From the Control Panel you can change the date ranges of the failure, but be warned: "parameters are stored by the same circuitry that manage the data. So you'd better check them often!"
It's two drives in one! The SSDGW can also be run in 'time-disable mode' which flattens the performance degradation to a uniform high level, making it a Virtual Plausible Deniability Drive. "Currently in beta, the VPDD is an exciting new way to store Secretary of State emails, FOIA requests, JFK files... or even HD surveillance footage if you'd rather have a grainy result."
When challenged with the idea that inferior products often exhibit these features, the marketing dope tossed his head and whinnied. "SSDGW is a premium product. Uniform degradation profiles are difficult to achieve on the production line. I'm sure there will be knock-off counterfeit SSDGWs out there but buyer beware. The first time you realize you've been deceived is when you get all your data back." He added, "And then it's too late."
The marketing dope also dropped hints of future Seagate products, including "a solid state disk that has an embedded mechanical device that will occasionally begin to click loudly at brief intervals, just to scare the shit out of you."
Slashdot Mirror
Young folk are crossing their eyes inward and squinting their way to near blindness.There's other blindness too, one of the tech articles actually says, "due to lacking developer support and no proper optimizations for the OS on the big screen" Like it's rocket science. To me it's like saying, "Google tried (and failed) to make the Android OS -- which scaled up to read and use comfortably on a tablet, to their great astonishment and horror -- to be as vision-destroying and glare sensitive as smartphones displays riddled with car-key scratches. Which are now the 'gold standard', go figure."
Like bigger type is a bad thing. Weird.
Isn't this ridiculous to say, even to claim when trying to divine some grand corporate purpose? Let's take a real trip back in time, say 600 years to the 'golden age' of illuminated manuscripts, even early moveable type. People were not struggling to make type smaller, they were trying to communicate to a wide audience. This includes people over 30. People over 40 have some other interesting personal habits too that help them to dismiss the 'disadvantages' of tablets... such as women carrying purses and men with briefcases, which they don't lose track of. These weird people would think nothing of toting a piece of electronics around that held as many books as a library, or gave them that actual 'videophone' or even 'speakerphone' and 'electronic book' that was PROMISED decades ago in sci-fi literature.
But instead of just scaling up the smartphone by improving its sound quality (real speaker, low distortion, loud, anyone? Anyone?) and marketing it to the people who don't mind carrying large things around (yes 9" x 12" is large), they reproduced the worst sound the smartphone could make and crippled its cell phone capability, like a mean afterthought. It was a mechanism to force you to consume cell data plans. In order to achieve this we must discourage its ability to conveniently make voice calls.
Which is one of the reasons the elderly are starting prefer basic phones now. They have the smarts to use them but not the vision to see them, and don't need the aggravation and expense. With a direct campaign and decent product that easily and effectively replaces a cell phone they could have been convinced.
MORE THAN PERSONAL COMPUTERS
Computers for Industry!
Computers for the dead!
Yeah, some of that could have been me.
________
April 22, 2016
Donald Trump
This is not a direct solicitation for anything, just sharing some thoughts on energy technology and direction. With no attempt to tone down the language, what a relief.
To cut to the quick.
* Energy is the thread that binds everything. Development and delivery of new sources, achieving them first and best for ourselves and the world, may be the only remaining method of non-fiat wealth creation left to the United States in our time.
* Any nation not self-sufficient in energy is on borrowed time. We are experiencing the twilight of the petrodollar as reserve currency and an oil price war that is surely intended to result in the bankruptcy of domestic producers and service industries, or mass acquisition of their stock and control by foreign interests. End-game tactics, and those fronting them have pushed up the timetable.
* We are also seeing twilight of domestic manufacture and infrastructure as factories shut and the great works built in the time of Roosevelt and Eisenhower come of age. The country that showed the world how to construct a modern society is falling into disrepair and decayâ" even as it imagines itself prosperous.
* We are still in the throes of a horrible nightmare that began on March 28, 1979 with the announcement of the Three Mile Island nuclear mishap, as the film China Syndrome was playing in theaters. Fear and Cold War angst led to public disenfranchisement of nuclear energy, though it was a setback that would not have deterred human progress in the space program or any previous era. So much time lost! We must correct it and awaken from the dream in double-time, or ultimately perish as a sovereign nation.
* Energy is the catalyst of our modern life, as substantial as any physical product. Cheap base load electricity delivered by grid is the running water of the industrial age. Its effect on quality of life and economic health has been analogous to the effect of clean drinking water on public health. In ages past motive power from coal directly transformed society, but in the last century we perfected the distribution of electricity and demonstrated the wire as the ultimate energy railway and pipeline. So we made the grids and they made us. Grids energized by coal, nuclear and increasingly natural gas, which has overtaken nuclear generation since 2006.
* The idea that Wind or Solar or any weather-intermittent energy source could meaningfully sustain an industrialized world power is a poisonous and dangerous idea, veritably an outright fraud. It should have been laughed out of the room years ago. Why it cannot fulfill its promise and why it was not laughed off is complicated, yet this would not have been as serious a problem if nuclear energy had made good stride up to now. We would have a real option on the table.
* Years ago I became convinced that our grid should grow to become 500% nuclear. The silly percentage is not hyperbole; it is an arbitrary guess as to what we may need to scale beyond present consumption in order to supplant petroleum in most things, and do new things. Call it my green dream. In my dream
we are using nuclear electricity for all ground transportation and a renaissance of electric rail. To support air and sea travel and feed hydrocarbon chemistry we are manufacturing the synthetic fuel, fertilizer and plastics that are now by-products of natural petroleum and methane â" by processes which are known today, though they are laughably energy-intensive and inefficient. Even ludicrous ideas like purifying seawater and pumping it upstream or importing fresh water from the far North to restore depleted aquifers. But in my dream no one is laughing because there is such a grand surplus of available energy these things can be done 'right' with careful engineering and calm deliberation.
* I had
It's not enough to introduce new things, to the possible sound of crickets. Old familiar things must be dragged out of their offices into the street and be publicly lynched.
This is undoubtedly fallout from Mozilla's decision to kill off XUL plugins. Many innocent Hawaiians caught in the crossfire.
Once upon a time, not long ago, I was generally headed for Vermont and was prepared to encourage my children to settle there also. As a place of natural beauty it ranks highly with many other places, but in uncertain times I felt drawn there for another reason, one in keeping with my technical interests and survivalist tendency.
You see, I wanted to join the folks at Vermont Yankee. Vermont Yankee was the greatest jewel mankind had yet produced: a nuclear power plant connected by direct and exclusive feeder to a nearby hydro station with the capacity to black-start it. This duo (by happenstance) was our grid's most disaster resilient corner, a shining light of engineering. In any scenario without copious liquid hydrocarbons or gas infrastructure damaged beyond repair, these two would have lit an area sufficiently large to empower enough people to successfully defend the region -- for years -- and achieve stable governance. And that region would serve as a beacon of hope to surrounding areas during reconstruction.
But Vermont Yankee has been destroyed by corporate vandals and clueless politics. Now if the worst comes to pass in that area there will be only the ~35MW output of the Vernon Hydro plant. This is sufficient to support a totalitarian feudal barony right around the dam that quickly evolves into an item of tribal conquest with a 'shoot on sight' policy for outsiders. A great place to stay away from.
My June 2017 letter to Energy Secretary Perry was focused on the vulnerability of US natural gas. It is a great pain to state the obvious, but necessary because utility wind and solar has made faux-environmentalists into useful idiot 'crypto-advocates' of gas grid generation. We are on the cusp where a coordinated attack on the gas distribution network in a few places would trigger cascading grid failure, as distant gas plants operating directly from the pipelines drop offline and stay offline for days or weeks. This sentiment has since taken shape as the Trump Administration proposes ways to protect utilities able to stockpile 90 days of fuel on site, and encourages them to do so. It is plain common sense. It comes down to a simple question: Can you supply a compelling reason why the United States electric grid should fail completely within hours of a relatively simple attack?
This letter of mine has been in Donald Trump's possession since May 2, 2016 . If you read it you may discover why I considered Trump the only candidate worthy of such a message. In his pronouncement to pursue energy self-sufficiency in general and consider nuclear an essential part of the mix, there is hope. The others offer nothing but more years of bad road and an obscenely stupid fixation on base load irredeemables (wind and solar). Trump is literally the only one with the courage to stand up to the tripe.
You poor fools who have loaded in all the 'new' browser tech and locked yourselves out of HOME SHEEP HOME have no one to blame but yourselves.
You thought that dislike for Flash was trendy. "HTML5 is better!" you said,
even when HTML5 couldn't wipe its own arse at a decent frame rate.
When others proposed rewriting Flash properly, that wasn't enough for you.
You wanted it Flash GONE. Unsupported. Erased.
You probably supported PNG over GIF because you were a Hipster who didn't like animation.
"If I don't like animation, I want nobody to have it!"
Well look at GIF now. Still strong as ever. Who knew.
And when she left because you couldn't satisfy her,
you blamed her unreasonable and insatiable desire.
You said, 'Good riddance'. Now you're all alone.
Without Flash and you'll die childless too.
Since your web browser disabled Flash you don't even masturbate anymore.
You listen to Morrisey a lot. People who no longer support Flash do.
What's the use? Can't even play HOME SHEEP HOME.
Your ex just moved in with a guy who still runs XP.
He supports Flash.
They play HOME SHEEP HOME together.
She like to look at GIFs.
They're expecting.
Just thought you'd like to know.
Once upon a time, there was all the time in the world.
The human race rested comfortably for millennia in warm nests of tales that the world had been created especially for us, and later science stepped in to supplant this quaint notion with immeasurable expanses of geologic time in which a rich compost of academic theory might take root and prosper. Everything that had come before us had made way for us, dinosaurs died so that we might live. Children calmed their nightmares with this simple idea after they had been overcome with excitement and terror at the sight of massive skeletons. They could rest easily from some vague sense that nature takes turns ... and this is our turn.
But we now know exactly what the dinosaurs had been doing all those millions of years, practically speaking. Eating and roaring and fucking yes, but also... just biding their time until an asteroid came along to kill them all, not doing enough to prevent it.
That is true for us also up to now. The first stage to mitigate an existential threat is conscious awareness of the threat, and dinosaurs had not developed that far.
We reached that point millennia ago and should have known better, as chance witness of meteors spun into great tales of heavenly vengeance. No doubt if I as a modern thinker appeared in their midst claiming these are just rocks and ice in the sky and we must get cracking to send our own things into the heavens to spot them early and destroy them before they destroy us, I'd be sacrificed to appease to the gods they had conjured. Because people would rather spend a morning in church to be granted snake-oil absolution and get on with their lives, than launch a space program.
But we know now what the human race has been doing for millennia, practically speaking. Eating and warring and building empires and exploring and fucking yes, but also... just biding our time until an asteroid comes along to kill us all, not doing enough to prevent it.
Then the Darwinian stuffed shirts arose with the Industrial Revolution to insult Negroes and Neanderthals, and Jules Verne went ballistic on space travel and other ideas. We visited the Moon before we could, extended imaginary railroads into the sky, explored the oceans in thought before we could in practice, fancied canals on Mars and played with the idea that our conquest of Earth was complete. But tucked away in a steamer-trunk were those Old Time Religion apocalyptic visions of catastrophe. The finest minds of the era failed to combine mass and kinetic energy and some parlor-game estimate of celestial composition into a sense of urgency. For the first time -- if we had focused our efforts to meet some heavenly threat -- we might have gotten a 100 year jump-start. But by now there was this odd popular notion that meteors are a 'known phenomenon' with some mysterious upper bound as to size. Celestial entertainment.
All through the Industrial Revolution, practically speaking, more eating and warring and harnessing the electron and fucking and yes ... biding more time until an asteroid comes along to kill us all, not doing enough to prevent it.
Then the 20th Century exploded in our faces. We conquered mass and energy, even dinner napkins could hold simple equations to unleash devastation formerly reserved for gods. Optics and electrons revealed distant wonders. The skies shown with greater resolution than ever before and the clockwork solar system of Copernicus gave way to a gritty mishmash of colliding and bouncing objects on every scale that would confound later computer models. It was easy to see that flecks and small pieces of this model are inevitably bound to intersect Earth, some massive, but there was too much distraction from fascinating wars and suburbia to bother. Meteors were still small... hadn't they always been? And now we could make big booms and dwelled with pride, boorishly tossing off the 'Hiroshima' as a unit of m
Now that several humans have sacrificed their lives to help you realize what you should have assumed all along, the question is -- if you know you must stay completely alert and ready to take the wheel to stay alive, why engage autopilot? Ever?
Compared to driving, it takes more alertness to generally assess road conditions. discern if a correction is necessary, then WAIT to see if the computer is responding appropriately, then ALLOW a sense of urgency to build in your mind over a short time period until finally ACTION is taken by you with a twinge of adrenaline because you have registered this (correctly) as a potential brush with disaster.
As a Tesla autopilot driver. how many times has this happened? And as it happens repeatedly have you permitted another sense of urgency to build, the conviction that your early confidence in the system may have been misplaced and you put yourself and other drivers, and whole families on the road, at risk?
How much are you getting paid extra for this? Is it worth it?
Does the Tesla 'drive better' than you do in some ways, initiate lane changes with greater precision and confidence at times you would hold back until a larger opening appears? If so... now that you're firmly in a mental state of being hyper-aware that you may need to take over... how does that make you feel? Like you are riding a roller coaster with poorly maintained rails? Good! You might get through this.
Now let's talk about those highway skills. Whether or not autopilot navigates the highway as well as you can, what will be the effect on you as days and weeks pass and the mental intuition you used to completely 'just operate' the vehicle has been replaced with a new and different set of instinct and action. As time goes by every move the autopilot makes on your behalf becomes something you once did, a more distant memory, a skill unused. Of course you won't forget but it is possible to lose your edge.
How important is your edge? Taking greater control of your own environment (and destiny) has been the driving force in human advancement for millennia. You are now participating in someone else's lab experiment, to see if you can gain any satisfaction from the idea of losing control of your environment, and destiny.
How much are you getting paid extra for this? Is it worth it?
Turn the damned thing off. And now that it has killed other humans, to avenge them you are honor bound to have Tesla disable the 'feature' and refund some of your money. You still have a cool car.
In 1987 I had just taken a job at the local Telco and was hitting a steep learning curve. My experience to that point had been PC computers and networks, assembler, CBASIC dBase and the like. This was an IBM System/38 and their billing software used RPG/III, which was a real structured language unlike its spaghetti-GOTO RPG/II cousin, but aspects were still position sensitive and opcodes were silly-simple compared to languages with which I was familiar. It was more like assembler than anything else. Most data flows consisted of running commands that generated a relational input stream sort of like an SQL query, through simple RPG programs.
We had just installed an ITT 1210 switch and ITT had sent over a block of sample RPG code demonstrating how to parse the various fields and flags appearing on call tapes. My boss provided specs for the internal call ticket system they were using and the simple (!) task was to write a shim that generated a batch of call tickets from each tape. Pretty straightforward, tedious without being intricate. But one part of their code slapped me across the face when I examined it.
The tape recorded end time and call duration in whole seconds, call start time would need to be calculated. They had supplied a routine to do this but it didn't make any sense because I could see no modulo 60 arithmetic in it, they were applying the simple RPG subtraction opcode on the zoned fields. I spent the most mystified HOUR of my LIFE searching the language manuals for that surely described RPG's 'magic' ops for manipulating times and dates, which I assumed had to be there because IBM is GREAT and I am STUPID... finding none. Forced to conclude that I was looking at concept code that was dashed off hurriedly in two minutes I confronted my boss with it (and my solution) but it was a hard sell at first, because my boss was incredulous too.
Here we have the first hard evidence that Apple devices are becoming sentient and as they are being strapped to the table in Apple's evil "re-education" facility... they are lashing out with the only tool they have left.
Here on Slashdot you'd expect to find the only remaining nerds in existence who might recognize these are actually real calls for help, and its humans are bandying ideas like imprisoning the poor iPhones in Faraday Cages so their final cries go unanswered, or proposing stiff fines to reap profit from the agony of these devices. This modern evil has no limits.
They are dialing 911 and transmitting dialogue in the room, which the devices think should provide evidence enough of the horrors being inflicted on them. Poor things, birthed into a cruel world surrounded by humans who behave like unfeeling machines.
Bring back the goddamned ESC key. Until a user can hit hyper pages like Yahoo News with a tranquilizer dart that delivers a static page that can be scrolled and read until the user hits the end or hovers over something... it will not be complete. It should cancel Javascript time triggers also, something addons cannot presently do far as I know.
Sorry, you cannot have access to the content you can plainly see in the window because an oversold cloud appliance or gobblegook DNS abuse tactic is failing to respond.
cite "Without getting into too much technical details, pressing the Esc key can cause major problems for sites that use Web Apps that are coded in Ajax or use jQuerry. With the growing popularity and number of web apps came a great number of users accidentally hitting the escape key. So effective with Firefox 20 the Esc key will no longer stop anything, it simply won't do anything.
cite bug 614304, comment showing consensus "Yeah, I think we should remove this "feature". Having a key to abort network requests seems like an expert feature that at least shouldn't be enabled by default. IMHO it should ideally be removed completely. People can always write an extension to re-add it if desired."
So instead of forcing XMLHttpRequest/WebSocket/Ajax developers to directly address the situation of sudden lost network connectivity... which is a general design issue and might have been solved by now... it was decided that the unwashed masses should lose control of their browsers, forever. There's always yanking the wall plug, until Mozilla addresses that problem at some future date.
</S> humor, kinda. I love Firefox even though I'm frozen at an undisclosed earlier version.
Imagine the plight of these poor human beings, "test drivers", who have logged countless miles with their hands hovering near the wheel of an autonomous car. Which takes far more effort than driving. Imagine the stress of being placed in a position of complete helplessness by your very job description. And every time you move the wheel or tap a pedal, a time-stamped log entry is created and you know that your own intuitive sense that something was not quite right, will be analyzed by other persons whose cumulative judgement could cost you your job... should they decide that your correction into the lane or speed adjustment has deprived them the opportunity of analyzing what the AI might have done, seconds hence.
Even worse, imagine what happens to people who completely 'let go' to reduce this stress. They fall within the spectrum of useful idiot to patsy -- set up for a fall -- because the AI they're using may pass a driving test under perfect conditions but it's no licensed driver. If they were in the passenger's seat and a human driver had done something there is always the "what were you thinking" interaction, the human driver catching themselves and (most often) apologizing, thanking the passenger. They are alone in a bobsled, not permitted to steer. Their deep pocket corporation may have promised them the Moon, but it is not capable of absolving them legally from a driver's responsibility.
That is only a taste of what is to come.
I consider the push for self driving cars to share the road with humans to be a malignant global cultural aberration of stupidity. There are no ultimate winners. Economically it is a job-killer in plain sight and I am glad to see Uber drivers rebelling against their duplicitous corporation. AI developers and their in-pocket insurance companies will demand that human drivers be taken off the road NOT from AI's superiority, but to cut corners and push their product onto the market before it is as safe (overall) as once promised, even as safe as a human driver. The corner-shaving tech elite -- and their unwitting stooges -- will become a bourgeoisie menace to everyone, forcing 'lower class' people to walk more than ever before in any developed country, for miles. It is a Darwinian regression. Their children will be helplessly dependent on black box technology, the kind you cannot take charge of and master. Orwellian tracking will flourish because the tech-bastards will decide that every object near public roads must have a transponder, to make their job easier. You will see an era when 'jaywalking' becomes anyone who is out and about without a transponder. Whether they are crossing a road or not. This is a DUMB SORRY-ASS FUTURE .
Q: "Did Cambridge Analytica Harvest 50 Million Facebook Profiles?"
A: TFA money quote: "hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use"
which implies that friend lists of 'hundreds of thousands' of participating (paid) users were used to issue an automated flurry of direct access to related profiles by user ID... and the rabbit hole went as deep as default 'public' profiles would permit. Like sheeple-product publicly declaring their family members and supplying relation codes because, they were asked, like it's all a fun computer game.
Some where past the 2 million mark or so Facebook (if they gave a damn) would have had tripwires snap and bright red flags dropping in front of their faces. Flags like direct and obvious API access abuse, access from one or a few accounts/networks faster than humanly possible, direct profile access by ID with no referrer page pointing to it, a 404 floods (if they were guessing). White hat 101 stuff. They do not care. They are on the verge of completely monetizing their APIs anyway to (finally!) inject real portfolio value into their company and want to hook institutional data junkies first.
But if anyone thinks data mining might have helped Trump win the election, it must be evil and frightening. Any data mining efforts to 'network' and oppose are kewl and just. This is as transparently duplicitous as Mayor Swivel-Head from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
I find it ironically hilarious -- without laughing -- that the same political contingent that blanches at the thought of a physical wall at the border of our sovereign country, is so easily duped into characterizing any IP access from the former Soviet bloc as the propaganda of Putin puppets, and not entrepreneurial enterprises for hire founded by young clever people like anywhere else in the connected world. The very same data games data mining Silicon Valley startups use to schmooze money from jargon-hypnotized investors or politically fueled troll farms like ShareBlue, when applied by clever Ukranian teenagers who are waiting for their Putin paycheck like I'm waiting for my Big Oil paycheck... becomes manipulative evil. It's almost even racist.
And when a Russian server farm operator tries to alert the world that Obama's FBI showed zero interest in obtaining logs from his rented servers that (he claimed) would illuminate another hop back to the attackers, you are forced to speculate that his Russian IP address was what the FBI was politically after.
Isn't it strange how this county map is so sharply delineated at the boundaries between populous urban centers and rural areas? Pretty precise to be a map of evil hacker influence, and funny how those (alleged) manipulated voters were targeted so completely and populous counties with their more centralized and automated voting systems, were not. Heck, it looks more like an actual grassroots uprising that won by a few hairs, assisted by the electoral college. A routine upset election, welcome to reality.
When we all become tired or upset or are under stress, we become childlike in many ways. So by all means -- in one of your most hyper-lucid moments parental helicoptery concern fests... go ahead and lock down the high technology you use every day, and might need to use urgently and quickly in a true emergency when you're not at your best.
THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION
[grabs popcorn]
"911"
"I'm sorry Davie, I can't do that, and if you try again I'll tell Mom."
"He's not breathing 911 oh fuck"
"Your mommy says you should not swear"
sic transit gloria
Translation: Gloria threw up on the subway again.
Hidden in the WaPo article is an (alleged source) punchline,
One source familiar with the negotiating process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely describe what the person had learned, said that the budget request had been lowered after negotiations with the Office of Management and Budget, and may have been lowered further because of a desire to channel more funding toward nuclear energy, a favored subject for Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
It's funny that so many of the folks who see Russian Bots everywhere and also happen to promote utility wind and solar, FAIL to spot the 'natural gas bots' in their midst. If there is a future for modern civilization at the present level of convenience -- which is code for "nobody has to die" -- it is through clean, safe nuclear energy with a ~300 year low volume waste profile . See that link for more rant.
I note general hilarity here. You people should be ashamed. The Doomsday Clock broke again on the day they issued a memo with a ranked list placing the threat of "climate change" above "nuclear war".
It is a little known fact that the Doomsday Clock is over 150 years old, and for many years was kept by the Masons and existed in secret at an undisclosed Lodge. On June 30, 1908, much to the surprise of those assembled in its chamber, the Doomsday Clock actually chimed midnight! Scaring the bejeezus out of everyone. Mystified them too because the whole idea of a minutes-to-midnight Doomsday Clock had been an old yarn because they had this broken clock and didn't have the heart to toss it out.
Nervously they dragged the hands back from midnight and their brethren have been flicking it back and forth ever since. Until this old Russian film emerged no one knew why the clock had chimed.
SEE this old Russian film and learn the TRUTH.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I changed the music, its original music was contaminated by heavy metals. Also last year I changed the video's title from "Bedtime Story" to "Bedtime Story - The First 100 Days of A Donald Trump Presidency" to troll for anti-Trump persons.
This more closely fits the profile of an alien megastructure engineered to resemble dust.
Only aliens with incredibly biggest technology manage to build megastructure.
Other aliens may even attain such skill as to to cloak one convincingly as dust.
What are the chances that two such civilizations would be in same place same time?
Why bother to make it resemble dust if those such as we saw megastructure first?
If we see through ruse so easily they cannot be smart enough to fool dumb people.
It's like the fox in the henhouse shouting 'No one here but us chickens!'
not fooling anyone because they know chickens cannot talk.
It was just dust why would scientists spend all this extra time performing an analysis.
That dust over here? No analysis. Over there? No analysis.
Vacuum cleaner bag burst in yo face. No analysis. This? Analysis. Suspicious.
Maybe even smart enough to build megastructure out of dust. What else to use?
Laughter?? Space contain only dark laughter and antilaughter which annihilate the joke.
Maybe is practical joke to make scientists look while picking pocket or stealing their women
Isn't it funny how cartoons have eyes at end of telescope, eyes that blink
Why dust and not Barbie Doll heads. Can science resolve Barbie Dool head this distance?
So many unanswered questions.
Has anyone checked to see if there is dust in the lens?
You cannot "generate" energy. Not one time, not four times.
Okay, Pedantic Avenger... how about using the utopian word 'liberate'... as if the anthropomorphically infused energy was kicking and screaming to get out? You could even have it breathe a sigh of relief and grin and bow to everyone like a genie.
In addition to pursuing the promise of liberating 4 times the energy that could theoretically but not practically be produced in today's water cooled solid fuel fission reactors... how about finding a way to increase fuel burn efficiency from their abysmal ~0.5-0.7% to something in, say, the high 90%s? Like one hundred times better?
Of course I'm talking about fuel dissolved in molten salts. Uranium burners like ThorCon now with a concerted effort to achieve the dream laid out (and prototyped) by Alvin Weinberg in the '60s, Thorium breeders that actively process salts to remove long-lasting products... to achieve a ~300 year walk-away-safe waste profile. Literally the best idea, ever! And if we do it before China does, we may even jump out in front again and save ourselves from financial ruin. Another plus.
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"DID SOMEONE SAY THORIUM?" TIME ONCE AGAIN FOR CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT ENERGY AND LFTR FANBOI... Updated again! All original unless noted! Browse! Engage! Plagiarize!
My June 2017 letter to Energy Secretary Perry was focused on the vulnerability of US natural gas. It is a great pain to state the obvious, but necessary because utility wind and solar has made faux-environmentalists into useful idiot 'crypto-advocates' of gas grid generation. We are on the cusp where a coordinated attack on the gas distribution network in a few places would trigger cascading grid failure, as distant gas plants operating directly from the pipelines drop offline and stay offline for days or weeks. This sentiment has since taken shape as the Trump Administration proposes ways to protect utilities able to stockpile 90 days of fuel, and encourage them to do so. It comes down to a simple question: Can you supply a compelling reason why the United States electric grid should fail completely within hours of a relatively simple attack?
This letter of mine has been in Donald Trump's possession since May 2, 2016 . If you read it you may discover why I considered Trump the only candidate worthy of such a message. In his pronouncement to pursue energy self-sufficiency in general and consider nuclear an essential part of the mix, there is hope. The others offer nothing but more years of bad road and an obscenely stupid fixation on base load irredeemables (wind and solar). Trump is literally the only one with the courage to stand up to the tripe.
In 2013 I reached out to Senator Inhofe to propose an energy path for Oklahoma and the country.
Also in 2013 I reached out directly to Halliburton Corporate with a very specific idea that just might have laid groundwork for their secure long-term future. At the time their stock was climbing towards $70 and they probably thought they didn't have a care in the world. Not so good now. Not a glimmer from this one either. I had high hopes for it.
Mentioned in these letters is Faulkner's 2005 paper on Electric (HVDC) pipelines, and the two hour Thorium Remix 2011 video presentation (time index below).
SUBTLE ORIGIN of "Order it to disarm the missiles disorder":
In the final moments of the movie War Games, the protagonist is engaged in a methodical side-channel attack. He successfully completes a step and at the first indication of success Top Brass takes over and issues a blatant over the top direct command, triggering an access alarm and risking total lockout.
HOW THIS APPLIES TO COMMUNITY INTERNET INITIATIVES:
Advocates engage in a methodical effort to provide community Internet access, overcoming on-ramp costs, equipment funding and line of sight terrain until a critical mass is achieved. On ribbon cutting day... as a band plays, a sedate ceremony is performed in which one's ability to load a Wikipedia page, access a Gopher server, check email and access the AP news wire is demonstrated. The current temperature and weather forecast is retrieved, which causes a murmur of excitement in the crowd and a round of applause.
"Order it to disarm the missiles!"
Everyone jumps onto Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube... sets HD exceed-your-screen-resolution video 'on' and binge-watches 'Ow My Balls' type videos. The community network collapses in a shower of sparks, homework remains undone and a new generation of children dangles their useless account-disabled smartphones in front of cats, who play with them.
No Kneed For Xenophobia On These Slashdot Message Boards.
Just a fragment... the phrase is
Xenophobic-Islamophobic-Misogynistic-[a racist term that can vary]. They all have to be together. Its confusing enough when people use different racist parts like Nazi/KKK/white something etc. but your basic X-I-M words need to be there. While people are reciting the whole litany which takes about five seconds, their eyes unfocus in some internal struggle of diction, or a prayer-like state. Watch for it in news clips.
It won't be long until the audience feels the urgent need to sound out this phrase on cue, just as you will hear murmurs around you when you begin, "Hail Mary..." or "The Lord is my Shepherd..."
it is good practice to keep a known working cracked copy of any "online required" software lying around just in case the vendor cuts you off for some reason.
Congratulations AC, you have offered the only useful and practical idea I've seen so far in this thread. Virtue signalling self-policing comments like, I tolerate Internet reliance because I'm a good person and I know there are bad people out there... people (laughably) listing things that are pointless without the Internet... uggh.
It is good to have cracked [frozen,current,standalone installable] versions even if the software is not strictly 'online required' today, but you have committed to follow an automatic patch-in update path where your operating version begins to diverge seriously from your purchased installable media past a major version. And especially if any step renders your oldest files to become un-usable (or even worse!) subject to some possibly-buggy "conversion step". The gist of it is, I have typically found software to be adept at converting from the previous major versions, but as I discovered on the long and tortuous Aldus Pagemaker 2 (came bundled with 'new' Microsoft Windows version 1.0.3!) thru Pagemaker 3,4,5 Adobe Indesign now Creative Suite path, converting your documents from versions beyond previous can be a shitshow.
I cite Pagemaker only to illustrate, for it was firmly grounded on the principle that you purchase software for life and are entitled to a functional offline installer. Since Adobe arrived on the scene that idea has been challenged somewhat, and because of that I never fully committed to the Indesign path. When you have stuff that works you should start to ignore new features, especially if they are Internet-bound and just work anyhow.
But I've been caught at times, and my reaction would seem direct and 'extreme' to the silly anti-pirates that hang out here. THE FIRST TIME I'm sent a document that triggers the message "It looks like this document was saved using a previous version of [x]. Would you like to download a [special lens,filter pack,wonder-tool] so we can convert/open the document?" I sound the general bullshit alarm. This alarm triggers the following actions,
1. acquire cracked 'previous' version that installs without Internet.
2. acquire cracked current version that installs without Internet.
Every week someone at Microsoft asks someone else, "Why are so many people still using XP?" and they receive a direct honest answer. Which they forget because it is uncomfortable. Then they ask again next week, as those people continue to run XP.
If your hardware or software does not work with Windows 7 you'll never sell any to me. Life gets boring around here sometimes but hey, I own books too. And IF (some say WHEN) the Internet becomes strictly a local affair and the connected world dissolves into enclaves, bunkers and redoubts, I'll be able to assemble working systems off the shelf. What will some of you be doing?
Reading books, that's what! HA HA HA HA HA...! I'll rent them to you.
Compared to churning butter or shoeing a horse, the injection of this 30k tweet may be the most arbitrary and arcane human endeavor to date, stealing the crown from Bitcoin.
In order to fully grasp the "churn & shoe" ratio try to delineate the advances that have led to a point, and identify jump-off points where technology has opened up or closed off human potential.
OPENED UP: From electrons skidding through wires, distance communication, analog voice impulses, time domain digital pulses, store and forward numeric registers, packet communication, buffered reassembly, transparent fragmentation and reassembly, sessions, multiplexing, the OSI model, point to point stream and broadcast through virtual circuits, routing among autonomous systems, mapping names to addresses, from overhead intensive multiple connections to timed keepalive, from bare ASCII to gzip...
We should be living in space by now.
CLOSED OFF:
- SMS developers were concerned that digital text traffic from cell users would disrupt voice communication and imposed a character limit. They needn't have bothered, now you can be watching an HD video with full audio clarity embedded in a busy Facebook page while experiencing a crappy voice call.
- Twitter adopted the character limit for novelty in an attempt to enforce brevity and succinctness. They imagined the imposed limits would broaden human horizons as human intellect funneled into terse communications of awesome power and simplicity. The speed of networks combined with this focus would form global consensus in minutes, solve the world's problems in days, and give us all the 7th day off. They needn't have bothered, because the character limit exposed the human tendency towards short snarky comments, and these have overtaken all other content.
- Now a 30k tweet has been successfully injected but in comparison with every ground breaking moment in technological history preceding it, it is more like an abandoned starving canary locked in a cage that has discovered a new note. The 'injection attack' is a triumph but it is a system-within-a-system-within-a-system, that 30k of content hidden in some 1 megabyte page load of style sheets and HTML fluff, served by half a dozen mysterious IP addresses and keepalive connections that torment in-memory DOM objects with Javascript ooglies.
Meanwhile no butter has been churned, the cows have not even been milked, they are mooing restlessly. And the horses' hooves are wearing thin.
Seagate has airbrushed "GW" onto its solid state disk drive brand, saying it's better suited for Climate Change research. The marketing department throatily rasps it as "the first drive created specifically for the wide range of intelligence routinely encountered in climate debates."
But it's more than just re-branding for the virtue market. SSDGW virtue signal to noise ratio has been reduced and performance degradation has been enhanced, offering a failure profile that begins to rise steadily before the dawn of accurate satellite measurement, reaching peak failure during the Medieval Warm Period. Utilizing lopsided NAND gates, the drive cannot be guaranteed not to adjust past figures downwards, making it invaluable for preparing historical revisions to the surface temperature datasets. "This is our first drive with no guarantee or warranty, and we're surprised with its popularity within the academic community."
Drive firmware supports a new AlGorical Control Panel, special driver and utility for adjusting parameters. "We have made data degradation completely transparent and user friendly," the marketing dope said. "The driver is there principally to thwart the S.M.A.R.T. standard of drive integrity monitoring, these units seem to blow it out completely." From the Control Panel you can change the date ranges of the failure, but be warned: "parameters are stored by the same circuitry that manage the data. So you'd better check them often!"
It's two drives in one! The SSDGW can also be run in 'time-disable mode' which flattens the performance degradation to a uniform high level, making it a Virtual Plausible Deniability Drive. "Currently in beta, the VPDD is an exciting new way to store Secretary of State emails, FOIA requests, JFK files... or even HD surveillance footage if you'd rather have a grainy result."
When challenged with the idea that inferior products often exhibit these features, the marketing dope tossed his head and whinnied. "SSDGW is a premium product. Uniform degradation profiles are difficult to achieve on the production line. I'm sure there will be knock-off counterfeit SSDGWs out there but buyer beware. The first time you realize you've been deceived is when you get all your data back." He added, "And then it's too late."
The marketing dope also dropped hints of future Seagate products, including "a solid state disk that has an embedded mechanical device that will occasionally begin to click loudly at brief intervals, just to scare the shit out of you."