Posts by thx1138v2

Latest from the coming AI robot apocalypse: we're going to be fine

How to tell if the message you are reading is produced by an AI engine

You will see common words apparently repeated but out of order such as: "the code contained in our brains is focused on making sure we get to see another day and on pass on our genes to the next generation."

Notice the "...and on pass on our genes..." should be "...and pass on our genes..."

I've been seeing them all over the place on the internet lately but I'm kind of wondering if it has something to do with my recent brain surgery.

Internet of So Much Stuff: Don't wanna be a security id-IoT

This says it all

The "S" in "IoT" stands for security.

Unable to give up on life on Mars, bio-boffins now thrilled to find boron

Well, I read it as bourbon. I can see why they would be thrilled in either case but drilling for bourbon seems more news worthy.

Do fear the Reaper: Huge army of webcams, routers raised from 'one million' hacked orgs

The most succinct exlanation

'The "S" in IoT stands for security.' - USAFRet

Let's go live now to Magic Leap and... Ah, still making millions from made-up tech

Reminds me of something else

A super-believer founder who seeks out press attention.

Brand-name investors (U.N., China, EU, and anyone looking to put someone else's money in their

pockets)

Big-name board members (Al Gore, Barack Obama and any other politician looking for a global problem to solve that doesn't exist).

Industry buzz and fawning media articles.

Periodic promises of the most amazing doom ever – just sit tight and believe.

The only science involved is "political science", an oxymoron if I've ever heard one.

Hipster disruptor? Never trust a well-groomed caveman with your clams

And then, back in the ancient days of 2016, The Caveman Martini was invented...

...by yours truly.

Being out in the hinterlands with gin, dry vermouth, and, uh a hem, cough, cough, cubed ice and being repulsed by the idea of fricking ?ICE CUBES? in a Martini, the caveman instinct kicks in.

Grab that towel there and that large somewhat hollowed out stone over there and this nifty fist sized rock nearby, wrap the ice effing cubes in the towel, place it in the large stone's hollow, and pound it with the fist sized stone. TAA DAA! Crushed ice in The Caveman Martini.

Add a small sliver of Habanero pepper, lay back, and howl with the coyotes.

Google touts Babel Fish-esque in-ear real-time translators. And the usual computer stuff

English to English, German to German, etc

And since they'll be translating, they'll also modify content to be what they think you SHOULD hear instead of what was actually said. They already do it on their news site.

Are Asimov's laws enough to stop AI stomping humanity?

Laws? What laws?

The real threat is not AI taking over but the misuse of it by those who say, Ethics? What ethics? e.g. politicians and/or tyrants. Think Stalin, Hitler, Mao or more recently Chavez, Maduro, KJU, ISIL, Mugabe. Not all people are good people.

Time to rethink machine learning: The big data gobble is OFF the menu

Indexing

I don't remember which one at this point but there was a programming manual with an index that contained the following entries:

Endless loop - See loop, endless

Loop, endless - See endless loop

Add that to ->garbage in ~= garbage out ->

Ahh, fractal insanity.

DON'T, whatever you do, let that manual into your shack.

Re: What's your data maturity level?

AI/ML can answer all of those questions, silly. I'm too busy selecting my lottery numbers at the moment... Hey, how about...

Re: Objectives?

More ice cream in hot weather is ALWAYS a winner. I'll sign up for that.

Re: I get this feeling of déjà vu …

Of course if you can run it again in 2010 with your time machine you'll have no need for the results assuming your time machine also works properly in forward mode.

What programmers?

Why not replace the programmers with AI/ML? Then you can have all you want with no need to "value" them. I admit that might take a bit of marketing but that's the name of the game really - not computing. [/sarc]

Shock: NASA denies secret child sex slave cannibal colony on Mars

Oh, really?

If you don't believe there are alien "chimeras" right here on Earth do a search on "Sheila Jackson Lee". That creature is not from this planet.

FOIA documents show the Kafkaesque state of US mass surveillance

In other words...

Resistance is futile!

Pentagon trumpets successful mock-ICBM interception test

Re: Just for the record ...

SDI never had to actually work. The USSR couldn't counter it and attempting to do so would have destroyed their already failing economy. That was the value of SDI.

Phase I testing complete

Phase II - capture ballistic missile in flight.

Phase III - return to point of launch.

Receiving one of their own would surely give everyone in the world second thoughts about launching.

Microsoft raises pistol, pulls the trigger on Windows 7, 8 updates for new Intel, AMD chips

How does that great big target bulls eye feel?

By doing this Microsoft has just painted a huge bulls eye on every non-10 Windows computer for hackers to target. Future exploits will be disclosed and only blocked/resolved in 10. So all a hacker has to do is find the earlier OS's and he's got a winner.

They should probably move their HQ to Italy, maybe Corsica to be consistent. Win10 or WinX, as I call it, has become the "expediter" who helps your project along by not burning down your office. Extortion by any other name.

2017 is already fail: Let’s try a Chinese reboot

Count your blessings

At least you didn't get cookies written by a writer having a bad day.

Your best friend is fucking your wife

Your dog was just now run over and

is lying in the gutter bleeding to death

Your lotto numbers for the day are

1 1 1 1 1 1

etc

Smart guns are a neat idea on paper. They'll never survive reality

The wisdom of Yogi Berra

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."

Amazon files patent for 'Death Star' flying warehouse

What about that jet stream thingy, huh? Winds at 250MPH won't have any effect on a descending drone? Maybe they'll email back to you the coordinates where the drone actually landed and you can go pick it up, huh?

Three certainties in life: Death, taxes and the speed of light – wait no, maybe not that last one

And there is no vacuum. "Empty space" is full of plasma and neutrinos.

Re: Science? What happened to "hypothesis" vs "theory"?

Indeed. The more I study science the more I find that the "laws" of science are the laws of man - the laws of conformity within the scientific community. Nature cares not about the "laws" of man.

Re: Creates more problems than it solves?

Unless, of course, nothing in the universe is constant which leads to an infinitely variable universe which leads to the concept of an infinite universe which leads to the concept that there is no such thing as time - each instant of time is a one-shot configuration of the universe. So to travle in time one would have to reconfigure the entire universe to a previous configuration to travel back in time or reconfigure the entire universe to configuration that has not yet occurred to travel forward in time. That would get a bit difficult with an infinite universe, not to mention an infinitely variable universe.

“Why is geometry often described as 'cold' and 'dry?' One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line... [b] [u]Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity[/u] [/b].” – Benoit Mandelbrot

What Mandelbrot has introduced is the concept of fractional dimensions. And fractions, being infinite, leads to the concept of infinite _dimensions_ on both larger and smaller scales.

Constant?

What about the vacuum part?

The correct phrase is "speed of light in a vacuum". But there is no perfect vacuum. Space is full of plasma. Even the least dense areas of space are not a perfect vacuum. So is it possible that a photon could travel 14 or so BILLION years and not encounter some form of plasma ion? And even if it doesn't collide head on with an ion, wouldn't the charges involved modify the trajectory, however minuscule that modification might be? And wouldn't multiple interactions invoke multiple modifications?

And then there's all those neutrinos. We are told billions of them are passing though out bodies every second. We are also told they "rarely" interact with matter, but "rarely" is not "never".

Silicon Valley's oligarchs got a punch in the head – and that's actually good thing

The only thing we can say about Trump is that no one has any idea what he will do as president. He's has absolutely no track record in public office and political campaigns are exempt from truth-in-advertising laws so he could literally say anything that he thought would get him votes during the campaign.

Campaigning is, simply put, self promotion. Here's what he had to say about that: “I play to people’s fantasies,” Donald Trump wrote in his 1987 memoir, The Art of the Deal. “It’s ... a very effective form of promotion.”

I suspect it was the Never Hillary vote that won the election for him. For those with memories of the '90's Clinton administration, it was a vote against Hillary more than a vote for Trump. The sellout of the country's assets by the Clintons started back then and has continued ever since, the instances stated in the article only being the latest round. Interestingly, the final say of whether assets could be sold or transferred to a foreign country was with the Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce being an office under the executive branch, during the Clinton administration that decision making authority was moved to the State Department. And, wa la, Hillary Clinton becomes the Secretary of State in the next Democratic party administration.

The change back in the day enabled the Clinton administration to arrange the sale of long range missile guidance technology to China over the objections of the CIA, DoD, and Commerce Department.

http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/1998/june98/psrjune98.html

The same cast of characters were present in the Obama administration while Hillary was Secretary of State as when that technology transfer took place. Hillary Clinton of course, Leon Panetta was Whitehouse chief-of-staff who became SecDef at one point and head of the CIA at another time during the Obama administration, and Gary Locke was a Democratic campaign contribution bundler with family ties in China who became U.S. Ambassador to China under Hillary's State Department.

People who remember those things and all the other scandals from the Clinton administration are, I think, the ones who voted Never Hillary.

As far as Trump goes, we'll see, but I don't expect him to uphold many, if any, campaign promises.

What will happen when I'm too old to push? (buttons, that is)

And we old geezers don't want ANYTHING that talks. I've got a wife, two kids, and 3 grandkids that somehow think that talking proves they are alive - or something - although the grandchildren have moved it up a notch. They seem to think they have to SCREAM at each other, the dog, the walls, and/or Grandpa to prove they're alive. Funny, they never scream at Grammy.

I don't want a GPS that is telling me, "Go straight for six point two miles" when I can clearly see the lake in front of me that is about 30 yards away while I'm at a T intersection. Lying bitch is trying to drown me. That was my first experience with talking auto tech. Self-driving cars? What about that frigging lake, HUH? HUH?

And microwave ovens need only beep once, please. I've decided the reminder beeps are a devious plot to get me to damage the damned thing so I can pay to have it repaired. I've outsmarted it with gritted teeth and a little growling so far but my dentist is likely to reap the rewards of that.

An Amazon gift card is sufficient. So I can buy paperback novels. Nope, no electronic gizmo needed. When the mega-EMP strike occurs I'll have plenty to read while I starve to death, thank you.

Intel: New x86 AI instructions

Optional AI? Silly you.

"That being said, wouldn't it make much more sense to have fit-for-purpose specialized hardware off-CPU..."

Off CPU? Surely, you jest. That removes the possibility of them cramming it down your throat whether or not you want their AI spying on you. Or Alphabet's or Microsoft's or Yahoo's AI.

Having offended everyone else in the world, Linus Torvalds calls own lawyers a 'nasty festering disease'

My favorite lawyer, when asked why she was so ball busting aggressive towards EVERYTHING, replied, "I tried being nice once. Didn't like it."

Maybe Linus should meet her.

Windows 10 Anniversary Update: This design needs a dictator

"Or does it have some clever hidden punning meaning perhaps. Win … Win-anne … Wau…Wau-ten."

Win 10 10

Rin Tin Tin

Woof, woof.

The return of (drone) robot wars: Beware of low-flying freezers

Coming soon: drone mail delivery. After all, mail is just small packages. The check's on the drone.

Captain Piccard's planet-orbiting solar aircraft in warped drive drama

Re: Oh come on...

The key is in that last paragraph: "You may be ending your around the world flight today, but the journey to a more sustainable world is just beginning." - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

"Sustainable development", i.e. "sustainable world", is globalist speak for destroying private property rights. That means ALL private property rights from home ownership to private enterprise. See U.N. Agenda 21. Their point of view is that only global government can provide responsible management of planet's resources so they must control everything and everyone.

http://blog.heartland.org/2014/04/u-n-agenda-21-impacts-private-property-rights-and-freedom/

Think that's foolish? They have organizations all the way down to the city and county governments promoting "sustainable development". If you see any of your local government leaders promoting "sustainable development", get rid of them sooner rather than later. Many times the individuals aren't from an Agenda 21 organization but use or hire "consultants" who are. Once you start looking for it, you'll find it everywhere.

BOFH: Free as in free beer or... Oh. 'Free Upgrade'

XD or XPD?

Re: Happy days

The IRS does the same with their forms in the U.S. every year. It keeps this contractor fed, turning a large PITA into a profit center.

Re: Erm...

as long as the ladder isn't damaged.

Re: Homework

But, but, but... it's a FREE upgrade.

If only...

more offices had windows that open the gene pool would be in considerably better shape.

You can always rely on the Ancient Ones to cock things up

Portals to the Gods

Computers are portals to the realm of the gods. Some gods are good and send you unrequested photos of laughing babies. Some others, well, not so much. They can do much worse than bad punctuation.

Do you REALLY want a portal to the gods inside your car? That water feature could have come directly from a radiator at 100C while you're tooling down the highway above the speed limit. Of course such a disaster would then stick the accelerator to the floor and disable the brakes at the same time. Some lessons from the gods are tough.

Here's a great idea: Let's make a gun that looks like a mobile phone

Just a few facts

It's not the job of the police to protect you. Their role is to apprehend the criminal after the fact. Yes, there is some deterrent in their presence but as my father said, "Locks only keep honest people honest." The criminal pays no attention to locks - or police.

There's a very simple question that needs to be answered: Do you believe that an American Citizen has the right to defend their life, their property, and the lives of others anywhere they have a legal right to be?

But the first argument you get from the anti-gun believers is, "That's what the police do." The anti-gun crowd loves to cite statistics regardless of how skewed they may be but they'll never bring up the following.

Across America there are, on average, 2.4 sworn police officers for every 1000 citizens. In the cities, the lowest ratio is 1.1 and the highest - let me say that again - the HIGHEST is 4.4 per 1000. And that city with the highest ratio of 4.4 per 1000 population is Chicago, if you can believe it.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/09/17/chicago-tops-major-us-cities-with-44-swo

Divide that by three shifts and we see how well the police can protect any one person, family, school, church, theater, or gathering. Look up your city here:

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/78tabledatadecpdf/table_78_full_time_law_enforcement_employees_by_state_by_city_2012.xls/view

The point is that the U.S. Constitution does NOT guarantee protection. It guarantees the RIGHT OF THE INDIVIDUAL to protect one's self, property, and others and that's what makes this very elegant question so very important. In the end, it is always up to the individual in the moment to protect themselves, their property, and others.

If government has any responsibility at all, it is to protect our right to protect ourselves, our property, and others.

I have rural property and I have a home in a large city. Living in a city removes one mostly from the danger of wild animals and makes people feel more secure. But the truth is that population densities in cities are very high which means people in cities are surround by the most lethal predator on the planet at all times - humans. That doesn't just apply to America.

The only thing worse than no security at all is a false sense of security.

Behold, Microsoft SQL Server on Linux – and a firm screw-you to Oracle

What MS isn't saying

They'll be installing Windows 10 on the machine one dark night in an automatic update to SQL. Dual boot? BAH! HUMBUG!

Spanish cops discover illegally parked flying car

There are some people you just don't want to piss off

In my much younger days I worked as an assistant superintendent for a construction company that built apartment complexes in the U.S. These were relatively large complexes, 400 to 600 units and 20 to 40 buildings.

One job I worked on had only one subcontractor that did just the framing. They would go through 3 or 4 for 40' semi truck's of lumber a day. They bought nails for their nail guns by the truck load also so they had storage areas to keep their supplies over night.

Most of the buildings on this project were three stories so they used a forklifts called Dyna Lift's to move materials. They were four wheel drive, four wheel steerable, and had booms that would reach the top of the third floor to lift trusses up for the crews to handle. No cranes needed.

The electrical contractor couldn't quite keep up with the pace so occasionally would park his truck in front of the gate to the framer's storage area to be cute.

Nooooo, problem for the framers. He got warned twice before his truck ended up on the third floor of a building that had been floor decked but had not had the walls stood up yet. The funny part was that the electrical guy reported his truck stolen when he came back and it wasn't there. The cops found it and almost died laughing.

So I'd be looking for a Dyna Lift rather than a crane.

Don't EVER piss off a crew with a Dyna Lift.

Apple fires legal salvo at FBI for using All Writs law in iPhone brouhaha

Love that Dilbert. Of course they could give Wally three more people to help him gather and correlate the data and then they could have it in six months or so.

US DoJ files motion to compel Apple to obey FBI iPhone crack order

Chain of evidence

I'm not exactly sure about this but I don't think Apple can break that phone because the FBI can't turn the phone over to Apple without breaking the chain of evidence. That means that Apple would have to turn the software to unlock the phone over to the FBI with instructions about how to perform the procedure.

If that is correct and considering that the government's demonstrated lack of security on their own networks that are hacked on a fairly routine basis it wouldn't be long before that code was turned out into the wild.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong about the chain of evidence issue.

Coding is more important than Shakespeare, says VC living in self-contained universe

"The Gettysburg address is about humanity. It is inspiring regardless of time or purchasing trends."

Which is why it is, in the view of VC's, worthless. There can't be an unending cycle of upgrades, addons, etc. for which to charge people.

Make a bar-b-que pit that lasts forever and you'll only ever sell one to each customer.

Learn you Func Prog on five minute quick!

Or, as my wife (the uber-goddess of literal) would say, I'm sorry dear but you just can't do math with letters. They're letters for God's sake. You might be able to do math with words like "six" and "two" but letters like "x" and "y"? No wonder you're confused all the time.

Her son says that she, having gone to a parochial school, balances her checkbook with "nun-math".

I just say, "Yes, dear."

Confirmed: How to stop Windows 10 forcing itself onto PCs – your essential guide

Re: DisableOSUpgrade is insufficient

http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-block-windows-10-upgrades-on-your-business-network-and-at-home-too/

Microsoft encrypts explanation of borked Windows 10 encryption

Fix? This IS The Fix

Anyone at NSA or GCHQ will tell you that the only encryption worth its salt is the one that only they can break. Who, pray tell, do you think provided the new encryption algorithms? So much cheaper for Microsoft to just use an existing system than develop their own. Got to keep an eye on that bottom line, don't ya know.

Knowing MS, however, we might expect the NSA encryption to end up in Europe and the GCHQ version to end up in North America. Which, of course, will require an update to the ORtRTAE (One Ring to Rule Them All Encryption).

Of course, the immediate fix is to copy your data from the encrypted drive to an unencrypted drive or MS encrypted drive so "they", whoever that might be, can have access to it.

If it still works six months from now, count yourself lucky

Geeze Louise!

You're getting Apple cooties all over your PCs! No wonder they don't last. Apple cooties have a very strong redox reaction with anything non-Apple. You didn't know that? It's not that PC's suffer from engineered obsolescence but that Apple products are engineered for competition DESTRUCTION.

Google "quantum chemistry". No, you can't get rid of the cooties by washing your hands - it's quantum scale and, as such, will work it's way into your DNA. I seriously hope you're not intending to have any children in future. If you have young children now it may be too late. You'll see what Apple cooties do to progeny when they reach three years old. That little cyborg will be running your life and any computer (even Apple) the little monkey touches will disintegrate in their hands. Of course they'll smile sweetly at you with wide eyes and say, "An elephant stepped on it!" If you unwisely choose to argue with that you'll be rewarded with the inescapable logic of a three year old who now commands, "Get me a doggie, daddy, to keep the elephants away." Cats and elephants are friends so don't even think about going there.

Apple's engineered obsolescence is long term and the DNA cooties will even destroy Apple machines that have reached their expiration date. Even Neo couldn't defeat this one. YOU ARE DOOMED.

Sysadmin's £100,000 revenge after sudden sacking

Programming by witchcraft

In earlier days we used the term "programming by witchcraft" to identify cases where adding a line of code that apparently did nothing, like "a = a", but triggered something in the compiler or OS that caused the program to run differently. You could move the code to a different position and the program would change how it functioned or put it back in the correct location and the program would run as intended.

We were under a serious dead line when all of a sudden one of the modules didn't work. Someone else who obviously wasn't a witch had removed some code that had a comment above it saying DO NOT remove the following line. I had developed the original code and my boss came to me and threatened to fire me if it wasn't fixed in an hour. So I go wading back through the code and since the comment and code were both removed it was a bit hard to find - it's hard to see what isn't there. Running a diff on the previous and current code it jumped right out. I put the code back in but not the comment and went to lunch. I don't take well to being threatened.

I was laid off three years later in the same manner as in this article when another company bought the original company. Of course the new managers cleaned house and brought in their own programmers. About a year later one of the programs wouldn't work. Apparently no one could determine what the problem was. I knew immediately what it was when another employee from the company contacted me to see if I knew anything about it - someone had removed the witchcraft. My reply? "Programming by witchcraft - Google it."

Boffins could tune telescopes to listen to lasers on Mars

Which got me to thinking...Mars is red because of, well basically rust. Sooo with all that spinning rust up there and now a laser interface who will be first to claim Mars as their private data storage device?