Posts by Grunchy 670 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
You just have a proctored exam where all the students enter the examination room with only pencil + paper and 2 hrs and write us up an essay.
The AI bot is excluded!
(When I did my PMP exam they took my belt & shoes and made me go through a metal detector! And again if I visited the toilet facility!)
In the past, big religion was relevant because of the information they had gleaned from “private” confessions, that could then be leveraged for political influence and financial benefit.
Nowadays it’s the free email services that take the place of the confessionals.
They know everything about everybody , and complain they can’t make it pay somehow!!
“Do no evil,” indeed.
This is exactly like the 1980s when everybody set up their own BBS. Inevitably several were operated by similar asshole sysops.
BBSes gave way to “News” groups, which by the way are still active on the internet, and just as spammed out as ever. Then that all gave way to IRC or internet relay chat servers. Which at last gave way to dedicated web sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Incidentally, Twitter is a much simpler service than any of the BBSes of yore, anybody could duplicate it easily enough.
But you look at any combustible fuel and it's always based on hydrogen. Methane combustion is CH4 + 2 O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O, it's fundamentally a hydrogen fuel.
The trouble with pure H2 is it's a tiny wee molecule which wriggles its way out of any containment and into the grain structure of any kind of metal, leading to all sorts of brittle fracture and dangerous release. Just a tank sitting there is leaking trace hydrogen & possibly creating an explosive hazard, depending on whether there's some sort of trap for the H2 to accumulate.
Me & my dog don't like hydrogen and explosive events. She barks fiercely when that happens! We don't like those guys.
It is exceedingly important to monitor your diet in space because it’s a deadly, hostile, barren environment in which there is absolutely nothing to do whatsoever. So that’s why you need to carefully watch what goes “in,” plus whatever comes back “out” again.
It’s important to have varied activities to pursue when you become permanently locked in your space can, cuz otherwards you might go nuts-o.
YouTube went berzerk and flooded their player software with commercials, so I’d been forced to upgrade to “NewPipe” freeware that defeats the commercials by exploiting the download function to act as an alternate streamer. Of course I had borrowed Netflix credentials from various partners on my trusty old PS3 for years but I never once bothered to try it out; I don’t think they have anything worth watching? BBC archive puts out tons of interesting archival footage all the time. I think Netflix has the Game of Thrones series but it never sounded interesting to me. Of course I loved the 1978 Rotoscope cartoon movie of Lord of the Rings, too bad they never completed the project. Forced me to read all the books! And yes, absolutely exposed the glaring plot hole about the Great Eagles flying indiscriminately into Mordor. I was greatly disappointed in the CGI remake, of course. Couldn’t even get through the first movie. Well, they make out the Elves as having superhuman Kung-fu powers, don’t they. If you want to make a 1970s Kung-fu movie that’s magnificent, I’m all for it: but not in LOTR please! Two completely different things, my opinion.
I thought for sure that jackass Doug DeMuro would be involved, but alas.
This episode reminds me of the time the Donald Himself thought he could turn an easy buck with his patented “Trump’s Pump & Dump”, except that, being fundamentally an idiot, he managed to lose a fortune on the scheme.
It’s all here:
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-corporate-raider-stock-prices-tax-returns-1418843
“…relative scarcity of petroleum…”
Hmm you might not be aware of just how much petroleum we have in Alberta’s tarsands.
Agreed, the “tar” consistency makes it impossible to harvest unless it’s melted first.
Canada has been threatening to set up a Candu reactor nearby simply for the waste heat generated, to be exploited to melt tarsands for export.
Petroleum will become obsolete long before it ever runs out…
I still have the original voice assistant, that being Google Glass that I got for $50 second-hand so I could see what the fuss was about (much fuss about nothing, as it so happens.)
I laugh at everybody who Burned! their money on a Google Nest thermostat. A thermostat is an on-off switch that maintains a particular temperature and worth about $10. I would have splurged $20 for the programmable one, except the previous homeowner already did that. Yeah $300+ for Google surveillance thermostat just ain’t gonna fly around here.
I’ve got a Western Digital NAS downstairs that runs Windows Server 2008 or such, and that thing NEVER stops shuffling something on the disks. Same as my Win10 PC. I leave it on all the time, don’t bother putting it to ‘sleep’ or whatever, and it, too, never ceases chattering data back & forth.
I mention this because the modern cellular also never really shuts down, and meanwhile it could be running your SD flash device to death. For all anyone knows?
Yup, I still run the 3.5" floppy disk. I got my TEAC 27L4226 USB portable drive specifically to read old 1.44MB diskettes (most of my collection were still readable!)
When I was about 12 I bought my first storage media, a 3-pack of 5.25" diskettes from Radio Shack for $20 that held 360kb each for a combined total of over 1 MB! When a 20MB hard disk could cost thousands of dollars, and here any kid with $20 could buy convenient, interchangeable media of about the same order in size. I paid $20 for the TEAC drive (new) and don't think it's worth any more, though there are lots of people begging as much as $45. Just scrounge harder. Lately I splurged $40 for a 512GB SanDisk "Ultra Fit" USB 3.1 flash device which is about the size of a "Certs" candy. I'm aware of certain CNC tools that can still load G-Code from floppy but come on, modernization is cheap & easy. All of my 3d printers utilize SD card media.
Twitter is merely another web page run on commodity equipment, if the old team flees the miserable overlord and an outage develops, it’s not like a new team couldn’t easily take over. Or rip out everything they don’t understand and replace it with something they do understand.
I speak from the perspective of watching idiots like Donald Trump and Mike Lindell saying they’d make their own social network platforms, since they were booted off Twitter, and yup they both succeeded.
Twitter is a fundamentally simple platform that is noteworthy only because of the size of its user base. Other than that it’s really nothing but another BBS and I ran one of those for years. Ain’t nothing.
If Mike Lindell can do it, musk can too.
I noticed the same thing & sort of thought of, like, “Team America: World Police” or such a thing. Or like how UN was fixing to condemn Russia’s war but was thwarted because Russia has the nuclear veto.
I actually got to buy a Big Mac meal & enjoy it outside Lenin’s Tomb in the Red Square, I guess those fun days are done now. I suppose there won’t be any worthwhile reason to ever go back to Russia in my lifetime.
Right? Cops think they can stamp out murder with their endless “war on murder,” but new people are always gonna be buying new guns and new machetes and the murders never stop, it’s obviously hopeless. Time to end this ridiculous “war on crime” as a lost cause. I’m not advocating for a free-for-all death society but you’ve got to admit life hasn’t changed much since America started having massacres on a weekly if not daily basis. What’s wrong with smoking a little weed every day? Seems to me it’s “my” personal decision to become an addict, if that’s my ambition. Crime isn’t the problem: it’s laws and cops that are the problem. “Civilized society,” my ass! Give me crack and shotguns any day ;)
I’ve got endless video games: retro units, Mame rom collections, hacked consoles, steam sales, humble bundles, epic giveaways, flight sim 2020, scumm collections, and emulators galore. But I find most of that to be a bit too complicated and cumbersome.
Instead I’ve got 3 go-to’s: Dr Mario; Trackmania Turbo; and Trials Rising Gigatrack.
(Oh, and MS Mahjong.)
All the content comes from the customers. The website works right now, if it goes bad just power off / power on. What “work” were all these staff doing?
Furthermore “hardcore” is a meaningless term, anybody who didn’t chicken out just got easy promotions.
Which reminds me to apply to work for Twitter., I bet there’s openings.
Well, yes, crypto is worth less in so-called “actual money.” But who needs actual money once you’ve got crypto internet money?
Just buy stuff in crypto, come on! Free yourself of that unnecessary burden of Fiat money. As soon as everyone is spending crypto doge or whatever, we’ll all be burning the worthless Fiat money in the burning barrel or fireplace or incinerator.
That isn’t the point of crypto assets. “Customers” pay the money into the exchange and in return they get their virtual asset on the blockchain, visible to everyone who understands how to access it.
NOW they want to trade in the virtual asset back for real money all of a sudden?
See that’s suddenly a problem, because all that original money got spent already.
In fact it would be really great if all the original customers could go ahead and buy another round of crypto assets again, please. And soon, monthly obligations are coming due imminently!!
It’s just “Skype” but with another stupid name.
Skype had this test feature where you could see how Microsoft screwed up your microphone or loudspeaker, which they had called “test call,” and which they now made into a paid-for feature.
Amazingly, when it did work, it was the exact same British-accented lady saying “if you can hear your own voice you’ve configured Skype correctly.”
I logged into a community college “distance education” course that used Teams, and ever since then Teams has been maddeningly broken. It keeps asking if I want to use my personal account or the college account, which doesn’t work since I finished the course 2 years ago. But Microsoft Teams is hopelessly broken and cannot ever be corrected. The service is garbage echoes anyway, they’ll never do anything about it.
I’ve got a PC with gigabytes of Ram and Terabytes of HDD, why do I need “the cloud” at all? I’ve got enough resources to be completely independent, why would I deliberately ignore that in order to have Google as my landlord?
I’m really pleased with the “Ghost Spectre” re-imagined version of Windows 10. They disabled all of the Microsoft telemetry and surveillance and figured out how to defer their forced update scheme until Dec 31, 2049.
Of course this was done for “professional gamers” to stop Microsoft and other bad actors from stealing all the computer resources to run their spyware, “Chrome OS” is 100% spyware: everything you do is given directly to Google spies to examine at their leisure.
Plus I’ve become a fan of Abandonware, I can download and run Photoshop Elements 9 from archive.org for nothing, same as Adobe Acrobat XI Professional (with the OCR functionality). They can’t even report back to Adobe my activities since Adobe shut down all their old servers in a bid to isolate users. My newest PC is 5 years old, most are about 10 or older, and can boot an M.2 NVME right off a PCIE slot with nothing more complex than a Clover Bootloader.
The best part of Ghost Spectre is that they blocked Edge completely (without even having to install the “DoNotUpgradeToEdgeWithChromium” registry key), plus I offloaded the Internet Explorer 11. I guess I’m pleased with my Mozilla Firefox browser, at least it’s not the resource hog that Chrome is, or one of Microsoft’s surveillance apparatuses.
I have never once even considered using any Chromebook, even if it were free. No thanks, man!
I reformatted my M.2 and installed “ghost spectre” Win 10 pro, minus all the Microsoft telemetry and surveillance, no “Edge,” no Microsoft account. Best of all: no updates until Dec 31, 2029!
So whereas Ubuntu compels you to apply updates every 6 months, I’m not participating in that for 8 more years.
I think the future of warfare is "telepresence," the ability to deploy robots to conduct attack remotely. Just look at Ukrainians and their killer drones, and I understand that by-and-large they are piloted with "first person" headsets. (Not VR, not AR).
The killer drones are also extremely tame, they wouldn't be competitive whatsoever on "drone racing league," for example.
(The whole point of artillery is to be able to shoot your enemies without having to be in the same neighborhood. ICBM, to shoot them without even being on the same land mass!)
The episode in which LaForge introduces Data to alien alcohol and the whole Enterprise winds up tumbling right toward Barnard’s Star. Scotty synthesizes transparent amorphous dilithium which develops a massive magnetic field and attracts all the elemental hydrogen for parsecs around, enough to slow down the craft (but only after Picard and Riker succeed in hoisting the ancient mainsail). At the last second it snaps into shape, righted the craft, and caught so many photons it slingshot Enterprise back toward Jupiter at Warp 5. Afterward they are all joking around and Rimmer and Holly appear on deck and introduce Data to Space Weed… honestly, NASA is blatantly copying Roddenberry with even its misadventures at this point.
The delivery trucks are outfitted with surveillance cameras that monitor each and every delivery driver. Plus drivers are compelled to constantly run a “delivery app” that also demands permissions to surveil both microphone & camera, plus gps location and speed, plus the accelerometer. It’s a dystopia!
(Actually it’s pretty much the same as any Google app for surveillance, except this one focuses strictly on drivers rather than on everybody in general.)
In the Star Wars movie their project was to kill all the hoverbike jockeys. Even though they never rode one before, they finished the project easily in just a couple minutes. None of the hoverbike armor was the least bit effective. To be fully accurate, everyone should have died!
It’s only mentioned in “archive” web pages!
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/LanguagesUtilities/Conceptual/MacAutomationScriptingGuide/index.html
(Scripting was pretty much never useful for anybody except for hackers, which is why MS Office was ultimately forced to disable macros “by default”! Odd that they feel the need to resurrect this again…)
Yeah it’s called “chemical cremation” and your liquidated remains get flushed away to water treatment, you know, like faeces. Definitely with all the other faeces. They say it’s more environmental than getting scorched into ash via natural gas.
(Shakespeare called regular burial service tantamount to becoming “worm’s food,” so he takes top points for grossest description.)
I have here before me a prediction about the future, published in 1992 as “Popcorn Report” by a futurist known as Faith Popcorn. One future trend to be aware of, she contended, was “cocooning,” wherein you shop from the comfort of your own home (using some kind of computerized order catalog) and later have your orders delivered to and deposited at your house. She also predicted the “Security-Screen,” a hand-held remote control unit that will guard your front door, watch over your baby, scan the grounds, give you messages, and even turn off the pot roast! Cellular telephone? She didn’t go that far, but she did hit most of the typical home-control applications.
But she also gives an in-depth description of a “virtual reality supermarket”: some call it cyberspace, others call it artificial reality. What virtual reality is, is a technology that makes it possible to synthesize a world — a 3-dimensional, touchable, feelable, hearable, visible, interactive world — through computer-generated images and sensation. To enter this world, a person puts on some special clothing (at the time of 1992 this consisted of gloves and goggles) that gets connected to a computer the experts are calling a Home Reality Engine.
And because it’s a VR supermarket, what will we be doing in cyberspace? We will be shopping to buy things!
Back in 1992 this all belonged to VPL Research of Redwood City, California, or you could also say this was all demonstrated in 1992 “Lawnmower Man” by Stephen King.
Last I heard Musk wanted to buy it so I deleted my ~50 odd posts I had ever made and deleted my user account, and have never been on it since. I actually never communicated with anybody on Twitter and literally could not care less about the “hashtag” scheme. Perhaps I fundamentally just never understood what it was for? I guess you could “follow” somebody, but I couldn’t think of anybody who says anything of any merit on Twitter.
(As you can imagine, my few 50 posts had zero impact on anyone anyway.)
If optane had only advantages over flash then it should have been more competitive, but it seems like that wasn’t the case?
For example I hadn’t heard anything about optane for at least 10 years. I thought it sounded pretty good at the time, but then never heard about it in the slightest ever since!
I have 2002 Eldorado ETC with OnStar, you know, the old analog cellular network that was obsolesced back awhile ago. I never paid a nickle to those guys. If I get into a wreck on the highway perhaps I’ll be able to use my regular cell phone to call for help? I don’t think I’m liable to buy GM nuthen’ if this is what they’re up to (and besides — the Eldorado still works good! Don’t care about new cars thanks.)
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