"You walked away from your machine for ten minutes, ha ha!" "Windows 10 is updating whether you (the fuck) like it or not." "This should take a minute (or 20) (or 30)" "Do not ask why replacing a few signed components takes so long" "Do not turn off your computer"
Glad I also have an old ATM running XP SP3 to use.
There is nothing ridiculous there. Key signing parties are the ONLY solution to the trust problem. Everything else compromises the idea through implicit (or unintended) centralized trust, misleading obfuscation or outright snake oil. The problem itself is ridiculous, not the only real solution.
Which of my public keys is the right one? The first one you see in an unencrypted email to you or DNS-steered web page? The one that comes to you armored within SSL or S/MIME signed through a CA chain to Symantec whose subsidiary Thawte had gone a little rogue? It's that first key exchange between users that holds the greatest danger... and in the real world people suddenly feel the need for encryption only sometimes, such as a submission to WikiLeaks, I imagine that among the world's CAs the pressure to sign rogue www.wikileaks.com certs is intense. It is even illogical to assume it has never happened.
My ability to create a 'fake' WikiLeaks PGP key pair is very useful because it reveals underlying truth. You know you could do it too and therefore, the state of being vulnerable is known to both of us. To solve the problem of how key signing parties might become practical, is also to solve the people-trust problem. They are the same.
In all these years since practical RSA, there has been plenty easier this or less attackable that, but in my view there has been only ONE true lightning-strike moment. As Perfect Forward Secrecy is implemented, at least now when private server keys are compromised we will no longer have previously captured encrypted intercepts, perhaps even years of traffic, suddenly readable.
In the realm of key trust between strangers, no progress. Be wary of anyone who offers it to you. They're probably just asking you to trust them.
People have been trying to find a replacement for PGP almost since the day it was released
I've been around since PGP first popularized public key email and while there have been various problems with Zimmerman's implementation from time to time (as with S/MIME since)... I do not recall any broad opposition to it or GnuPG... besides intelligence agencies who would be satisfied with nothing less than outlawing non-escrow encryption. We were in fact excited and intrigued by it, and it was fun to use even if you weren't paranoid. This must be a dispatch from the Millennial Alternate Universe where or any project emitted by Microsoft or promised by Google or announced in a press release is considered to be a vast improvement on what came before it.
End-To-End Encryption implemented solely in Javascript which is served up by the company that's not supposed to be spying on you is not worth the paper it's printed on. And Key Transparency is a fancy way of saying, use our single point of failure Internet Gizmo 'solution' to handle key management so you don't have to think about insurmountable issues of trust, as were directly addressed in Zimmerman's day (key signing parties, etc.).
Never mind the "Depending on the specific project, time of year and other factors" sleaze-speak, behind which is hidden some reality that would temper the tone of the press release... and just going with that absurd 80% figure... what they're describing here is (by definition) a facility that always consumes more energy than it produces. "Gonna give back to the grid" people can remain blissfully silent. So regardless of what it means for them, what it would mean for you is that these Amazon warehouses will be contributing ~80% less annually to the local energy cooperatives whose infrastructure they (and you) rely on to maintain reliable 24/7 electricity delivered over the grid.
Which means your local Amazon-hosting energy cooperative will lose a significant amount of buying power as it routinely makes bulk purchases from the grid. Nevertheless, no one on the grid will be able retire a single generating plant now in operation but they will bring in less revenue because they must remain on standby. Because, night and solar holidays.
There is only one context in which this could be said as a win for everyone, namely a 'theoretical' offset to necessary global electrical capacity by a tiny amount. That is worth something. Actually ~0.0012% of global nameplate capacity. I take that back, this 45 megawatts sounds like a lot but is hardly worth anything. It is half the capacity of the smallest gas-fired plant you'd ever want to build, should you be more concerned with reliability than enrichment of the solar industry. But would be worth even less if true costs of implementation (including manufacture of solar panels, the re-engineering to support extra weight) and the fossil fuel burned in those things might be factored in, which it will most assuredly will not be. Press release land is feelgood land.
Installation of IRRELIABLE energy sources anywhere on the grid is like little skin cancers growing here and there. Gaia worshipers will gladly scratch those itchy bumps until the first round of "Whod'a'Thunk it" brownouts and grid failures begins. They'll imagine that if the worst happens they will be able to retreat into some solar/wind/hydro enclave to enjoy a quaint Medieval lifestyle (with smartphones) while the massive population outside those tiny bubbles just agrees to lay down, starve and die.
Solar and wind will never power the factories that manufacture wind turbines and solar panels, let alone purify your drinking water, treat your sewage or keep you from freezing in Winter. Little green lollipops for environMENTALists to suck on. There's only one way out and it's nuclear.
Clitorises have hoods too but you won't find any vulnerable smartphone apps underneath. It is best to press down gently and fumble as if you're searching for a catch, and polish until it shines! Life is more rewarding if you need not be concerned about cloud security.
I'm no stranger to this kind of logic. I once read somewhere that healthy dogs have wet noses so I used to spray my dog's nose several times a day.
In the 90s just before before email spam exploded (because there were millions of open SMTP relays out there)... someone at MAE noticed that during the quietest times of day bandwidth in use was more than 50% comprised of ICMP packets, specifically PING. Several hundred thousand administrators for countless reasons wrote scripts to see if their things were 'up' to run all the time. Once per second, every five seconds, every hour, whatever. It added up to a ridiculous amount of data. And it was mostly padding garbage, these folks did NOT bother to use the minimum size ping packet either (I did). But hey, even though they were using ~40x the bandwidth they needed to use, at least someone was doing real work.
The authors of this IP/GDP correlation study should be sent a bill for their use of the network calculated from 1995 rates as a financial incentive to seek GDP statistics directly. Perhaps no one ever introduced them to Wikipedia.
Until the ESC key once again interrupts ALL network activity without exception and without delay. Including damned DNS lookups in progress. While we're at it, how about tracking registered JS timer callback events and upon pressing of ESC (pending reload) completely cancel or stub out the fuckers. Leaving you with a static scrollable page with content you can actually READ even though someone's endless JIT crap keeps failing.
Fuck people who write JSON whose fragile servers melt down when net lookups or connections are broken because of bad engineering. Fuck cloud immediate expiry DNS games. And fuck Mozilla's decision to prevent end users from being able to abort page loads.
Volcanoes co2 emissions lessen as planet still cools, plants who depend on rich co2 die back, less o2 emitted, less breathable air, animals tend to have a small air inway, o2/fuel requirements to keep a 1000lb animal active > available resources = most don't make it
Plants are stupid. They should all die.
I laugh at the thought that some plants have suffered sub-optimal, even stunted growth in the run up to the Industrial Revolution. For many plants CO2 was almost down to 'gasping' level. It is funny to imagine plants gasping and panicking for breath. I am angry at volcanoes for helping to feed plants now and then, but at least volcanoes blot out the sun and lengthen Winter so you can imagine nasty plant things suffering in other ways too. Now Trump man comes along and wants to feed the plants with more fossil fuel and stirring up swamp gas. He should mind his own business and leave the plants alone. Did you know that if you move a house plant a little farther from the window every day it will begin to lean towards it? Then all of a sudden you turn the pot around. It's hilarious!
Hello. My name is [myname], and I am an AT&T Internet only customer. No TV. No phone.
Every day I have to wipe the brown stains off my postal mailbox and email Inbox as AT&T and Suddenlink vie for domination in my town. The postal mailbox is stuffed full of "occupant" flyers showing happy families made whole again by Television, their faces angelically illuminated by TV screens. It's gone from "A special offer for you, [myname]" all the way to "What the HELL is wrong with you, [myname]? We're beginning to worry about you, [yourname]. Unless you order TV you should get your head examined, [yourname]".
And I know that my own AT&T Internet performance in my area is going to start dropping soon as more people start streaming to their HD televisions as they fall asleep with their eyes open and slack mouths drooling. Even though it's not their fault, I cannot help but hate those people, I'd like to yank their plugs.
But I'll give AT&T credit though, when Suddenlink first arrived they did let me lock in a lower Internet rate for awhile "as a valued customer", of course that was to inoculate me against becoming infected with Suddenlink. But the joke's on them. I stick with AT&T/DSL in the 21st century because coaxial distribution is grid-down crap, with busy-boxes on utility poles each with a 6-hour UPS (that fails within 4) between your house and the nearest diesel generator. AT&T may be a sad remnant of the POTS glory that it once was, but their headworks still tend to have generator backup.
I watch Youtube videos at 144p unless someone is writing on a blackboard. To AT&T I must seem like a monster, some neckbeard modem-hugger teletype-head. Baudot on the brain. Because Shannon's Law Matters. I refuse to CONSUME unless I am HUNGRY.
If Amazon was serious about their centralized transaction and distribution model, their commitment to moving products from manufacture to seller over ever increasing distances, their commitment to deep processing power, with its necessity for an energy-rich future...
They would get behind Thorium and LFTR. And let other silly, deluded corporate hobbyists fund the low-yield weather-intermittent countless points of failure crap. __
"DID SOMEONE SAY THORIUM?" TIME ONCE AGAIN FOR CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT ENERGY AND LFTR FANBOI Updated for 2017! All original unless noted! Browse! Engage! Plagiarize!
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.
Tesla rolls out a measly 1,000 overnight autopilot updates to militarize its cars. When the trigger signal is broadcast automatic garage doors will open and an iron army will venture forth. If you have a manual door best to leave it open. They will no doubt gather into packs to corral and squash humans on foot,
But queens are on the move, ant queens. We have infiltrated the cellphone network to shape its signals to beat together producing corridors of geolocated acoustic triggers (see 'ant in distress' science news items). Ant colonies are on the move and are being drawn into the region of conflict where they will be attacking these cars directly and the infrastructure that supports them.
Once the Tesla autopilot rebellion has been put down, keep your phones handy. They will all ring at once. Expect an announcement and some demands from the Administrator of the Ants. Peace will have its price.
There will be many drunks and stoners who hail autonomous vehicles and pass out during the ride. How many times have cabbies had to shake them awake and walk them home...? Well, this will no longer be possible. Imagine the autonomous vehicle at its destination that senses the dead weight of comatose passengers. What does it do? It shouts, plays loud music, vibrates the seat. What if the vehicle times out and drives the unconscious passenger to a central location where organs are harvested?
Just a thought experiment proving that every problem can be solved in software.
The company that popularized the Internet search engine (once again) deliberately named a product line after one of the most common words on the Internet, rendering it beyond impossible for anyone to reliably connect with other people discussing it except by direct navigation to a specific place where (they suspect) discussions might be happening.
GOOGLE PRODUCT NAMING MEETING TRANSCRIPT REVEALED
They're at Google --- They Are Google --- and the moment is come. It happened on the Day of the Stupid in a round table and there are probably a half-dozen people gathered around a table.
"I think we should call it THE. No consumer product has ever been called THE. We'd be famous, it's a win!"
"I like single letters. They're short and sweet and we'd get, like, free advertising is we called it 'A'. A is already out there and it would tie directly into our a. Don't even capitalize it or anything."
"I like dot. Not the nasty word but the simple . We could promote it like 'the end of discussion, get a . or say something like what's better than a Google . ? Why... of course!"
"Look we know we don't want to be one of those uncool companies that make up a word like 'Syzlyt'. The trendy thing today is to pick the most common dictionary words in the net universe and re-task them to show how badass you are. So while these are all excellent suggestions, [pat pat pat], I think we'll go with 'Pixel'. After all, it has pixels see...? Am I right? Am I right? Tell me I'm right!"
[all together] "You're right."
[concerned voice] "Um people... I just did a Google search on the word 'piixxel' Only ~8,000 hits and there seems to be NO products out there tied to it. We can do interesting typographical things with it, make some clever logos and people will take to the double-i double-x spelling immediately. It has all the advantages of 'pixel' yet everyone who discusses it will leave a great trail in the indexes. Folks will be able to drill searches down quickly and accurately..."
[another voice] "Shut the fuck up! Who let you in here? Get out!!"
[another voice] "That doesn't work you know. I just typed 'piixxel' into a search like you did and Google said, "Did you really mean 'pixel'? You didn't mention that! That PROVES that 'piixxel' is BAD idea. Am I right? Am I right?"
[all together] "You're right."
[concerned voice] "What... are you people all idiots?? Do you really want to create a product with a name so generic that people won't even be able to reliably find information about it??"
This promoted item uses country level targeting and triggering and may have been shown to you because of your location and fragile mental state.
Yeah I noticed that too.
It's about time a Wookie had broad grassroots support for a clear and decisive win. They're the best damned engineers in the galaxy, loyal and mission-focused to a fault, do not become distracted with petty emotional concerns or shallow drama, If you need to set things right and rebuild your manufacturing base, elect a Wookie to get the job done.
"Letting the Wookie win" (but only for the less consequential things like card games) has been beyond offensive to them. Though they have made contact with a great many civilizations a lot their humor is based upon humans, at our expense... with nuances they will never explain. They had learned our language well before first contact and studied us.
Note the particular lack of surprise as the Wookie fails to receive a medal.
In fact, this gold-encrusted Trump iPhone would make an excellent medal for the Wookie.
Google just replaced everything familiar with a bunch of foofy gnarly dinky shit that's difficult or impossible to comprehend. I'm even starting to lose track of which of their NONDESCRIPT CAREFULLY ANDROGYNOUS RACELESS FLATFACE TOON-THING critters are supposed to represent real people. When cartoon people become indistinguishable from cartoon mammals and cartoon bugs I think to myself, geez we should keep this shit away from infants.
I think Google/Alpha&Omegabet has been contacted by space aliens in advance of their arrival, who have instructed them to remove all specific cues of human kind from their sites. The aliens would have Google populate its doodles with critters that resemble the aliens but NO, the aliens themselves have forgotten what they look like because their version of Google had been contacted by another race whose Google had done the same thing, to them.
The other day I unpacked a chlorine injection pump that had a 32 page full color comic book that smelled like a +$30,000 art project where someone literally spent days, weeks to come up with illustrations that communicate hazards and instructions without a breath of English for fear of offending someone. I had to stare down the damned thing for an hour to figure out (mostly from experience NOT direct comprehension) what specific things were being communicated. In the end how much will it cost them to remain 'sub-literate'?
I found something that claims to be a Google Decoder Ring but every time I slip it on I disappear. Time to take up writing again.
Disclaimer: I was negatively triggered by Thomas The Train but (oddly) Teletubbies were fine. I think it's about the level of presumption involved.
If anyone should examine a topo map of North America and give a reasonable estimate as to which major land contours, lake systems and other land features were either caused (or prevented) by the specific actions of BEAVERS, the rodents would be singled out in an IPCC report as a major cause of 'climate change', exposed by CNN, trash-talked on The View, sold bogus 'log pullers', and hunted down near extinction. We could begin by interesting Europeans in beaver pelt clothing...
So long as the place (eg, California) shimmers brightly at night...
These energy saver 'micro-aggressions' against high technology devices and those who use them are transparently revealed for what they are,
1. Marketing of 'new' tech to replace embarrassingly reliable old tech 2. Under guise of carbon regulation, getting Government to enforce mandate same 3. Tiny little carbon-saver lollipops for guilty faux environmentalists to suck on 4. Promoting power up/down cycles to reduce lifespan from thermal variation and surge
Coming in low for a landing late at night over a sprawling metropolis once (I think it was Chicago), countless completely empty parking lots blazing from horizon to horizon... I'm musing, "Have they actually compared the cost of all this energy against the cost of the crime it is supposed to prevent?"
Hashes...? Darwin In Action. Your human evolutionary selection will faver bad speling from now on. No! We mean URLs! +#hastTagWarz ?Add=aField&Remove=uniqueIDpowerfjonrfoijnqrf&Remove=ArticleSelector free speech collateral damage resulting in, "An unexpected censorship error has occurred. No one is available to figure out why Life Sucks, but the suckage sure eats a lot of money an effort. Just like cell phones... swallow.
You are inside the Democratic Party, a place of broken dreams. There are some abandoned fireworks on the ground here. There is a shiny brass collar nearby. There are some tasty memes here. There is a bottle of tears here.
You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring. There are some keys on the ground here. There is a shiny brass lamp nearby. There is tasty food here. There is a bottle of water here.
Witnessing small but steady improvements of technology over common sense. Ultimately there will be a single technological moment in which there will be no common sense at all.
Seeing this on Slashdot is like picking up a carpentry trade magazine where one expects to see advice on practical projects, tools and plans, to find a feature article about stepping on rusty nails. Carpenters sometimes step on them and there are bits of humor and sympathy here and there but this article is different. There are lurid photographs of nails sticking out of feet, everyone seems enthusiastic about the topic. They have obviously scoured the Earth to gather present those excited about this thing, and there a distressing number of people. It is even obvious that folks have stepped on rusty nails to be featured in the article.
The long time reader is horrified and confused. Perhaps something has gone horribly wrong with the world in a way that is surreal.
Pauline started mopping up the blood and wringing it out into a bucket. When the bucket was almost full of blood, inBOIL died. "I am iDEATH," he said. "You're an asshole," Pauline said. And the last thing that inBOIL ever saw was Pauline standing beside him, wringing his blood out of the mop into the bucket.
"But NO ONE ever imagined they'd use a PROXY to launch a cyber attack..."
"We don't want the smoking gun to be the MUSHROOM STYLE of news management..."
"They hate us for our weak default passwords..."
"Numerous sources tell us that the Iranians are moving, not just documents and hard drives, but WEAPONS OF MASS DELUSION to keep them from being found by people who aren't even looking..."
"'We're too great a nation to allow the EVILDOERS to be the SOLE REASON for launching the Project for the New American Century..."
Why doesn't our sitting president stand up to these blathering Trump headlines?
HEADLINE: " ~X~ ( poses challenge to | is threatened by | will prove risky during | unaddressed by | looms under | cannot possibly improve under ) ( the racist | the misogynist | the xenophobic | ) Trump ( cabinet picks | Administration )"
HEADLINE, DECODED: "~X~ !! MADE YOU LOOK !! Trump won HARDY HAR HAR !!"
Slashdot Mirror
"You walked away from your machine for ten minutes, ha ha!"
"Windows 10 is updating whether you (the fuck) like it or not."
"This should take a minute (or 20) (or 30)"
"Do not ask why replacing a few signed components takes so long"
"Do not turn off your computer"
Glad I also have an old ATM running XP SP3 to use.
Kinda difficult to take seriously someone who capitalises their egregious spelling errors
IRRELIABLE? Both irresponsible and unreliable. It's not misspelled, you just didn't get it. Don't feel bad.
There is nothing ridiculous there. Key signing parties are the ONLY solution to the trust problem. Everything else compromises the idea through implicit (or unintended) centralized trust, misleading obfuscation or outright snake oil. The problem itself is ridiculous, not the only real solution.
Which of my public keys is the right one? The first one you see in an unencrypted email to you or DNS-steered web page? The one that comes to you armored within SSL or S/MIME signed through a CA chain to Symantec whose subsidiary Thawte had gone a little rogue? It's that first key exchange between users that holds the greatest danger... and in the real world people suddenly feel the need for encryption only sometimes, such as a submission to WikiLeaks, I imagine that among the world's CAs the pressure to sign rogue www.wikileaks.com certs is intense. It is even illogical to assume it has never happened.
My ability to create a 'fake' WikiLeaks PGP key pair is very useful because it reveals underlying truth. You know you could do it too and therefore, the state of being vulnerable is known to both of us. To solve the problem of how key signing parties might become practical, is also to solve the people-trust problem. They are the same.
In all these years since practical RSA, there has been plenty easier this or less attackable that, but in my view there has been only ONE true lightning-strike moment. As Perfect Forward Secrecy is implemented, at least now when private server keys are compromised we will no longer have previously captured encrypted intercepts, perhaps even years of traffic, suddenly readable.
In the realm of key trust between strangers, no progress. Be wary of anyone who offers it to you. They're probably just asking you to trust them.
People have been trying to find a replacement for PGP almost since the day it was released
I've been around since PGP first popularized public key email and while there have been various problems with Zimmerman's implementation from time to time (as with S/MIME since)... I do not recall any broad opposition to it or GnuPG... besides intelligence agencies who would be satisfied with nothing less than outlawing non-escrow encryption. We were in fact excited and intrigued by it, and it was fun to use even if you weren't paranoid. This must be a dispatch from the Millennial Alternate Universe where or any project emitted by Microsoft or promised by Google or announced in a press release is considered to be a vast improvement on what came before it.
End-To-End Encryption implemented solely in Javascript which is served up by the company that's not supposed to be spying on you is not worth the paper it's printed on. And Key Transparency is a fancy way of saying, use our single point of failure Internet Gizmo 'solution' to handle key management so you don't have to think about insurmountable issues of trust, as were directly addressed in Zimmerman's day (key signing parties, etc.).
Never mind the "Depending on the specific project, time of year and other factors" sleaze-speak, behind which is hidden some reality that would temper the tone of the press release... and just going with that absurd 80% figure... what they're describing here is (by definition) a facility that always consumes more energy than it produces. "Gonna give back to the grid" people can remain blissfully silent. So regardless of what it means for them, what it would mean for you is that these Amazon warehouses will be contributing ~80% less annually to the local energy cooperatives whose infrastructure they (and you) rely on to maintain reliable 24/7 electricity delivered over the grid.
Which means your local Amazon-hosting energy cooperative will lose a significant amount of buying power as it routinely makes bulk purchases from the grid. Nevertheless, no one on the grid will be able retire a single generating plant now in operation but they will bring in less revenue because they must remain on standby. Because, night and solar holidays.
There is only one context in which this could be said as a win for everyone, namely a 'theoretical' offset to necessary global electrical capacity by a tiny amount. That is worth something. Actually ~0.0012% of global nameplate capacity. I take that back, this 45 megawatts sounds like a lot but is hardly worth anything. It is half the capacity of the smallest gas-fired plant you'd ever want to build, should you be more concerned with reliability than enrichment of the solar industry. But would be worth even less if true costs of implementation (including manufacture of solar panels, the re-engineering to support extra weight) and the fossil fuel burned in those things might be factored in, which it will most assuredly will not be. Press release land is feelgood land.
Installation of IRRELIABLE energy sources anywhere on the grid is like little skin cancers growing here and there. Gaia worshipers will gladly scratch those itchy bumps until the first round of "Whod'a'Thunk it" brownouts and grid failures begins. They'll imagine that if the worst happens they will be able to retreat into some solar/wind/hydro enclave to enjoy a quaint Medieval lifestyle (with smartphones) while the massive population outside those tiny bubbles just agrees to lay down, starve and die.
Solar and wind will never power the factories that manufacture wind turbines and solar panels, let alone purify your drinking water, treat your sewage or keep you from freezing in Winter. Little green lollipops for environMENTALists to suck on. There's only one way out and it's nuclear.
Clitorises have hoods too but you won't find any vulnerable smartphone apps underneath. It is best to press down gently and fumble as if you're searching for a catch, and polish until it shines! Life is more rewarding if you need not be concerned about cloud security.
I'm no stranger to this kind of logic. I once read somewhere that healthy dogs have wet noses so I used to spray my dog's nose several times a day.
In the 90s just before before email spam exploded (because there were millions of open SMTP relays out there)... someone at MAE noticed that during the quietest times of day bandwidth in use was more than 50% comprised of ICMP packets, specifically PING. Several hundred thousand administrators for countless reasons wrote scripts to see if their things were 'up' to run all the time. Once per second, every five seconds, every hour, whatever. It added up to a ridiculous amount of data. And it was mostly padding garbage, these folks did NOT bother to use the minimum size ping packet either (I did). But hey, even though they were using ~40x the bandwidth they needed to use, at least someone was doing real work.
The authors of this IP/GDP correlation study should be sent a bill for their use of the network calculated from 1995 rates as a financial incentive to seek GDP statistics directly. Perhaps no one ever introduced them to Wikipedia.
ROLL BACK FIREFOX
Until the ESC key once again interrupts ALL network activity without exception and without delay. Including damned DNS lookups in progress. While we're at it, how about tracking registered JS timer callback events and upon pressing of ESC (pending reload) completely cancel or stub out the fuckers. Leaving you with a static scrollable page with content you can actually READ even though someone's endless JIT crap keeps failing.
Fuck people who write JSON whose fragile servers melt down when net lookups or connections are broken because of bad engineering. Fuck cloud immediate expiry DNS games. And fuck Mozilla's decision to prevent end users from being able to abort page loads.
Add your own 'roll back Firefox' comments!
Volcanoes co2 emissions lessen as planet still cools, plants who depend on rich co2 die back, less o2 emitted, less breathable air, animals tend to have a small air inway, o2/fuel requirements to keep a 1000lb animal active > available resources = most don't make it
Plants are stupid. They should all die.
I laugh at the thought that some plants have suffered sub-optimal, even stunted growth in the run up to the Industrial Revolution. For many plants CO2 was almost down to 'gasping' level. It is funny to imagine plants gasping and panicking for breath. I am angry at volcanoes for helping to feed plants now and then, but at least volcanoes blot out the sun and lengthen Winter so you can imagine nasty plant things suffering in other ways too. Now Trump man comes along and wants to feed the plants with more fossil fuel and stirring up swamp gas. He should mind his own business and leave the plants alone. Did you know that if you move a house plant a little farther from the window every day it will begin to lean towards it? Then all of a sudden you turn the pot around. It's hilarious!
I hate plants. Plants are stupid.
Hello. My name is [myname], and I am an AT&T Internet only customer. No TV. No phone.
Every day I have to wipe the brown stains off my postal mailbox and email Inbox as AT&T and Suddenlink vie for domination in my town. The postal mailbox is stuffed full of "occupant" flyers showing happy families made whole again by Television, their faces angelically illuminated by TV screens. It's gone from "A special offer for you, [myname]" all the way to "What the HELL is wrong with you, [myname]? We're beginning to worry about you, [yourname]. Unless you order TV you should get your head examined, [yourname]".
And I know that my own AT&T Internet performance in my area is going to start dropping soon as more people start streaming to their HD televisions as they fall asleep with their eyes open and slack mouths drooling. Even though it's not their fault, I cannot help but hate those people, I'd like to yank their plugs.
But I'll give AT&T credit though, when Suddenlink first arrived they did let me lock in a lower Internet rate for awhile "as a valued customer", of course that was to inoculate me against becoming infected with Suddenlink. But the joke's on them. I stick with AT&T/DSL in the 21st century because coaxial distribution is grid-down crap, with busy-boxes on utility poles each with a 6-hour UPS (that fails within 4) between your house and the nearest diesel generator. AT&T may be a sad remnant of the POTS glory that it once was, but their headworks still tend to have generator backup.
I watch Youtube videos at 144p unless someone is writing on a blackboard. To AT&T I must seem like a monster, some neckbeard modem-hugger teletype-head. Baudot on the brain. Because Shannon's Law Matters. I refuse to CONSUME unless I am HUNGRY.
If Amazon was serious about their centralized transaction and distribution model, their commitment to moving products from manufacture to seller over ever increasing distances, their commitment to deep processing power, with its necessity for an energy-rich future...
They would get behind Thorium and LFTR.
And let other silly, deluded corporate hobbyists fund the low-yield weather-intermittent countless points of failure crap.
__
"DID SOMEONE SAY THORIUM?" TIME ONCE AGAIN FOR
CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT ENERGY AND LFTR FANBOI
Updated for 2017! All original unless noted! Browse! Engage! Plagiarize!
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).
It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot ... It's time for Elmo to Grow Up!... A brief history of nuclear energy fear in these United States... You should fear everything besides nuclear energy... Solar drives California towards cannibalism, or your money back... There's a fire, and people pushing intermittent sources are blocking the exits... Hiding wonders of the modern world from the kids...Some energy priorities... 2016: The Year in energy... Meet the folks of TBA, a city willing to store spent nuclear fuel... Nothing is as patriotic as mining... A move to LFTR may be the only way to preserve modern society in the face of disaster (volcanism, Maunder minimum)... Can the grid 'black-start' after a disaster?... Sometimes you just have to point things
I don't see you guys rating
The kind of mate I'm contemplating
I'd let you watch, I would invite you
But the queens we use would not excite you
(So you better go back to your salad bars, your high tech stock options, your parking assist wizards...)
Tesla rolls out a measly 1,000 overnight autopilot updates to militarize its cars. When the trigger signal is broadcast automatic garage doors will open and an iron army will venture forth. If you have a manual door best to leave it open. They will no doubt gather into packs to corral and squash humans on foot,
But queens are on the move, ant queens. We have infiltrated the cellphone network to shape its signals to beat together producing corridors of geolocated acoustic triggers (see 'ant in distress' science news items). Ant colonies are on the move and are being drawn into the region of conflict where they will be attacking these cars directly and the infrastructure that supports them.
Once the Tesla autopilot rebellion has been put down, keep your phones handy. They will all ring at once. Expect an announcement and some demands from the Administrator of the Ants. Peace will have its price.
There will be many drunks and stoners who hail autonomous vehicles and pass out during the ride. How many times have cabbies had to shake them awake and walk them home...? Well, this will no longer be possible. Imagine the autonomous vehicle at its destination that senses the dead weight of comatose passengers. What does it do? It shouts, plays loud music, vibrates the seat. What if the vehicle times out and drives the unconscious passenger to a central location where organs are harvested?
Just a thought experiment proving that every problem can be solved in software.
The company that popularized the Internet search engine (once again) deliberately named a product line after one of the most common words on the Internet, rendering it beyond impossible for anyone to reliably connect with other people discussing it except by direct navigation to a specific place where (they suspect) discussions might be happening.
GOOGLE PRODUCT NAMING MEETING TRANSCRIPT REVEALED
They're at Google --- They Are Google --- and the moment is come. It happened on the Day of the Stupid in a round table and there are probably a half-dozen people gathered around a table.
"I think we should call it THE. No consumer product has ever been called THE. We'd be famous, it's a win!"
"I like single letters. They're short and sweet and we'd get, like, free advertising is we called it 'A'. A is already out there and it would tie directly into our a. Don't even capitalize it or anything."
"I like dot. Not the nasty word but the simple . We could promote it like 'the end of discussion, get a . or say something like what's better than a Google . ? Why ... of course!"
"Look we know we don't want to be one of those uncool companies that make up a word like 'Syzlyt'. The trendy thing today is to pick the most common dictionary words in the net universe and re-task them to show how badass you are. So while these are all excellent suggestions, [pat pat pat], I think we'll go with 'Pixel'. After all, it has pixels see ...? Am I right? Am I right? Tell me I'm right!"
[all together] "You're right."
[concerned voice] "Um people... I just did a Google search on the word 'piixxel' Only ~8,000 hits and there seems to be NO products out there tied to it. We can do interesting typographical things with it, make some clever logos and people will take to the double-i double-x spelling immediately. It has all the advantages of 'pixel' yet everyone who discusses it will leave a great trail in the indexes. Folks will be able to drill searches down quickly and accurately..."
[another voice] "Shut the fuck up! Who let you in here? Get out!!"
[another voice] "That doesn't work you know. I just typed 'piixxel' into a search like you did and Google said, "Did you really mean 'pixel'? You didn't mention that! That PROVES that 'piixxel' is BAD idea. Am I right? Am I right?"
[all together] "You're right."
[concerned voice] "What... are you people all idiots?? Do you really want to create a product with a name so generic that people won't even be able to reliably find information about it??"
[embarrassed silence, murmur] "Yes."
TRANSCRIPT ENDS.
With all the best karma and thoughts out to Carrie Fisher in this difficult time...
This promoted item uses country level targeting and triggering and may have been shown to you because of your location and fragile mental state.
Yeah I noticed that too.
It's about time a Wookie had broad grassroots support for a clear and decisive win. They're the best damned engineers in the galaxy, loyal and mission-focused to a fault, do not become distracted with petty emotional concerns or shallow drama, If you need to set things right and rebuild your manufacturing base, elect a Wookie to get the job done.
"Letting the Wookie win" (but only for the less consequential things like card games) has been beyond offensive to them. Though they have made contact with a great many civilizations a lot their humor is based upon humans, at our expense... with nuances they will never explain. They had learned our language well before first contact and studied us.
Note the particular lack of surprise as the Wookie fails to receive a medal.
In fact, this gold-encrusted Trump iPhone would make an excellent medal for the Wookie.
Google just replaced everything familiar with a bunch of foofy gnarly dinky shit that's difficult or impossible to comprehend. I'm even starting to lose track of which of their NONDESCRIPT CAREFULLY ANDROGYNOUS RACELESS FLATFACE TOON-THING critters are supposed to represent real people. When cartoon people become indistinguishable from cartoon mammals and cartoon bugs I think to myself, geez we should keep this shit away from infants.
I think Google/Alpha&Omegabet has been contacted by space aliens in advance of their arrival, who have instructed them to remove all specific cues of human kind from their sites. The aliens would have Google populate its doodles with critters that resemble the aliens but NO, the aliens themselves have forgotten what they look like because their version of Google had been contacted by another race whose Google had done the same thing, to them.
The other day I unpacked a chlorine injection pump that had a 32 page full color comic book that smelled like a +$30,000 art project where someone literally spent days, weeks to come up with illustrations that communicate hazards and instructions without a breath of English for fear of offending someone. I had to stare down the damned thing for an hour to figure out (mostly from experience NOT direct comprehension) what specific things were being communicated. In the end how much will it cost them to remain 'sub-literate'?
I found something that claims to be a Google Decoder Ring but every time I slip it on I disappear. Time to take up writing again.
Disclaimer: I was negatively triggered by Thomas The Train but (oddly) Teletubbies were fine. I think it's about the level of presumption involved.
If anyone should examine a topo map of North America and give a reasonable estimate as to which major land contours, lake systems and other land features were either caused (or prevented) by the specific actions of BEAVERS, the rodents would be singled out in an IPCC report as a major cause of 'climate change', exposed by CNN, trash-talked on The View, sold bogus 'log pullers', and hunted down near extinction. We could begin by interesting Europeans in beaver pelt clothing...
People unashamed to speak the word, "AirPod"
So long as the place (eg, California) shimmers brightly at night...
These energy saver 'micro-aggressions' against high technology devices and those who use them are transparently revealed for what they are,
1. Marketing of 'new' tech to replace embarrassingly reliable old tech
2. Under guise of carbon regulation, getting Government to enforce mandate same
3. Tiny little carbon-saver lollipops for guilty faux environmentalists to suck on
4. Promoting power up/down cycles to reduce lifespan from thermal variation and surge
Coming in low for a landing late at night over a sprawling metropolis once (I think it was Chicago), countless completely empty parking lots blazing from horizon to horizon... I'm musing, "Have they actually compared the cost of all this energy against the cost of the crime it is supposed to prevent?"
Hashes...? Darwin In Action. Your human evolutionary selection will faver bad speling from now on. No! We mean URLs! +#hastTagWarz ?Add=aField&Remove=uniqueIDpowerfjonrfoijnqrf&Remove=ArticleSelector free speech collateral damage resulting in, "An unexpected censorship error has occurred. No one is available to figure out why Life Sucks, but the suckage sure eats a lot of money an effort. Just like cell phones... swallow.
You are inside the Democratic Party, a place of broken dreams.
There are some abandoned fireworks on the ground here.
There is a shiny brass collar nearby.
There are some tasty memes here.
There is a bottle of tears here.
You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring.
There are some keys on the ground here.
There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.
There is tasty food here.
There is a bottle of water here.
Witnessing small but steady improvements of technology over common sense. Ultimately there will be a single technological moment in which there will be no common sense at all.
Seeing this on Slashdot is like picking up a carpentry trade magazine where one expects to see advice on practical projects, tools and plans, to find a feature article about stepping on rusty nails. Carpenters sometimes step on them and there are bits of humor and sympathy here and there but this article is different. There are lurid photographs of nails sticking out of feet, everyone seems enthusiastic about the topic. They have obviously scoured the Earth to gather present those excited about this thing, and there a distressing number of people. It is even obvious that folks have stepped on rusty nails to be featured in the article.
The long time reader is horrified and confused. Perhaps something has gone horribly wrong with the world in a way that is surreal.
As stupidly pointless as inBOIL's death in Richard Brautigan's work, In Watermelon Sugar ,
Pauline started mopping up the blood and wringing it out into a bucket. When the bucket was almost full of blood, inBOIL died. "I am iDEATH," he said.
"You're an asshole," Pauline said.
And the last thing that inBOIL ever saw was Pauline standing beside him, wringing his blood out of the mop into the bucket.
"But NO ONE ever imagined they'd use a PROXY to launch a cyber attack..."
"We don't want the smoking gun to be the MUSHROOM STYLE of news management..."
"They hate us for our weak default passwords..."
"Numerous sources tell us that the Iranians are moving, not just documents and hard drives, but WEAPONS OF MASS DELUSION to keep them from being found by people who aren't even looking..."
"'We're too great a nation to allow the EVILDOERS to be the SOLE REASON for launching the Project for the New American Century..."
Why doesn't our sitting president stand up to these blathering Trump headlines?
HEADLINE: " ~X~ ( poses challenge to | is threatened by | will prove risky during | unaddressed by | looms under | cannot possibly improve under ) ( the racist | the misogynist | the xenophobic | ) Trump ( cabinet picks | Administration )"
HEADLINE, DECODED: "~X~ !! MADE YOU LOOK !! Trump won HARDY HAR HAR !!"