Posts by arctic_haze 756 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Nov 2012
It's good to have a safe operating system. However the recent Microsoft patches introduce so many side effects that actually it is better to have an operating system. I know I'm safer with no Internet connection but I still need to comment on The Register from time to time. So I decided not to patch at all.
Seriously, this is not how it's done. You are actually trying to calculate the Schrodinger wave function, not the measurements values. In fact you are calculating probabilities, not actual values. So the only source of uncertainty in the calculations should be the approximation in the calculation methods (for example calculating partial sums where the real values is an infinite sum).
I think it is easy to guess my surname because the account is used mostly to see photos posted by the family. However because I do not post about myself, this guess would not help them much. They could learn that I used to upvote family members and recently posted something about Facebook and cute animals.
However, I seriously think about closing it down anyway.
I'm not even writing about private data security but rather about manipulation. I have an account under false name so I'm not worried about the former.
So I made yesterday a test. I make posts on FB linking several articles and YT videos about the company problems. None of them got a preview (with title and some graphic from the linked page). However, when I linked some webpages and videos about cute animals, all of them got the previews inviting to click the link.
Funny? No. Rather pathetic.
In fact Microsoft did it for me demanding since January that I manually set a registry key to get further updates.
There are simply too many issues with all the crap updates of the last three months, including performance decrease and various side effects. Just see the description of the March Windows 7 bunch:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4088875/windows-7-update-kb4088875
I am a customer of a bank which is so stupid it makes the clients choose a password for telephone communications with them and then when calling you trying to sell you some financial products (every time from a different number), they ask you for the password.
Our civilization is on the verge of collapse.
A tax on stupidity? Serves them well.
By the way, the guy may not be mad, after all. Flying on top of that thing would be insane but pretending to try while counting money seems in the good old tradition of showmanship.
Therefore I will say the Agnostic Prayer for the dead from "Creatures of light and darkness" by Roger Zelazny:
"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."
However, having said that, I still feel bereaved and sad.
Funny thing but I covered this in a lecture I had just yesterday. I showed the students the infamous 1975 Newsweek article, explained it was based on the NASA report which was five years late in data (they ended in 1970 and only for the Northern Hemisphere). I told them we had no satellite data and practically no circulation models at the time.
Finally I told them that this is what comes from using statistics only, without understanding the underlying processes. I showed them a paper by Wlally Broecker, the oceanographer, in Science from the same 1975. This is what Broecker wrote in the abstract of his paper:
"By analogy with similar events in the past, the natural climatic cooling which, since 1940, has more than compensated for the carbon dioxide effect, will soon bottom out. Once this happens, the exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content will tend to become a significant factor and by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1000 years."
Do I need to add that he was 100% right and the reason for that is that he understood the physics of greenhouse gases?
I am ready to defend any Article 5 country to this music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVVXNDv8rY0
A plus is the dragon language equally foreign to every Alliance member.
There is a new Firefox (57.0.4) which makes some timings more random to allegedly make it more difficult to exploit the two bugs.
I wonder how much slower Firefox becomes to protect itself from other processes I run on my personal computer. In theory the OS could eavesdrop Firefox, but it could be also done in many other ways.
Am I lucky? I've bought my Galaxy S5 Neo phone over 2 years ago and my networks still provides me with upgrades. I've received the latest one this month. The security patch level is November 1st.
I'm not saying which network (and county) it is but I hope that means things are improving.
I cannot conceive of any circumstance, no matter how bizarre, in which I would legitimately (no criminal intent) want a null root p/w (feel free to prove your mind is more warped than mine by coming up with one).
The protagonist of the Martian movie could have had a null root password in his abandoned Martian base, at least until he regained some semblance of communication with the Earth.
Beginnings of life is not exactly my field but I teach a lecture course which includes the geologic history of the Earth. In the first lecture I always mention the oldest traces of life on the planet (important in the context of when life started influencing geology). Almost each year I need to include even older datings of life traces.
I start teaching next month. I see it's time to update the first lecture, again.
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