Posts by Version 1.0 5405 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Social Media is more like malware, harvesting the masses and making money selling them. If Social Media was just a drug then I wouldn't take it, I'd not complain about it, but it would be more like swallowing nicotine, not smoking it. I never liked just smoking nicotine when I was a kid but it was easy to make it enjoyable when you rolled your own and added a little improvement (OK, so the seeds popped sometimes).
x86 was high performance but the prior 8080 and Z80 versions were amazingly easy to setup with all sorts of interfaces with the CPU's, making the basic design and construction of devices very reliable. Since then the whole environment has changed, most of it good but there are some issues so dumping items that are difficult to use, or not used much, is just a way to move forward.
I helped my wife teach all the users at her school not to open attachments - they had been told not to open all "safe" attachments but were ignoring the instructions so I gave her "Australia.exe" to send to everyone ... LOL, it just flipped the screen upside down so everyone was screaming!
But afterwards they understood what might happen.
Given all the issues we have with bank transfers and wire-transfers around the world for fully legal sales, I thought that bitcoin was a great idea originally. It made bank transfers so fast and inexpensive but those features became such a criminal advantage too. So the crypto concept is good but back in the earlier days walking around town with a boy scout hat on, and an eight-inch knife in my belt was fine too.
So the problem isn't crypto, it's the way we are all behaving these days, getting emails like bitcoin_receipt.pdf.img etc.
A big Carrington event has the potential to insert large voltages into everything that conducts electricity and we have a lot more things these days than we did 170 years ago, the power lines might cook and virtually every house has electrical lines running through the building - you can think that fibre-optics would be OK but they have lots of electrical components too so it would probably quit too. So everyone's cell phone might catch-fire (the battery getting charged with 80 volts via USB) and Tesla's could start flying across the yard.
Basically virtually nothing is constructed to survive a Carrington event these days, it's not expected to happen even though it might.
I haven't attended an art class for nearly 60 years now but originally, as a kid, I was drawing nude males (naked civil servants) and females - I'm not Quentin Crisp but I grew up in that world occasionally. So these days I still see clothes as just draped over a body that my early work predicted ... as a result I have no interest in nudity because there's nowhere I can't see it, regardless of what anyone (LOL or any politician) is wearing.
There's a fair bit of evidence that life on Earth land appeared then, our inner fish moved from the water onto the land and air, leading to the creation of reptiles and even mammals eventually (just another few billion years). So we may eventually find some small fossils in Mars that reveal that life is not totally uncommon in the Universe.
And had her work failed but instead she'd just donated a few thousand pounds to a political party, then she'd have been "Lady" Kathleen Booth. We have so many great technologists, scientists, and other wonderful workers achieving magnificent things and they just need to die before the country gets to appreciate them - we need to start appreciating people like Kathleen much earlier, not just making stupid donators "Lords" ...
I have always raised a glass to former wonderful people and taken a sip before pouring the rest on the turf for them. Tonight it will happen again.
A rock that came in from space and ended up in the soil and water - this has the potential to change things because it may have delivered a start to genetics. You can read an article in Science News that documents that all of the bases in DNA and RNA have been found in meteorites. So rocks from space may change the world over time.
The largest hard drives I ever worked with (DEC RL02s) fitted in a standard 19" rack and weighed 34 kg, I've still got a couple that boot the PDP11 but I think every disk drive is smaller these days. A week ago I thought I'd lost my laptop but then I discovered it was sitting behind a disk that I was getting ready to put in the drive.
I agree, watching the corporate mail server I don't see the deliveries have "dropped 31 percent" ... but it looks more like they have been chopped a lot more than 31 percent. The anti-virus scanning is catching a lot more these days, could this be a result of the cyber-criminals working from home, using traditional infections instead of making new ones? Maybe, maybe not - we need to just be careful, not think that we know what's happening.
Given that a strike on Mars, throwing rocks into space, means that gravitation would pull them towards the sun, I suspect that any rocks thrown from the Earth might be more likely to be found on Venus. Certainly some might head towards Mars but I think the chances are low so we'll probably not find any dinosaur fragments on Mars.
But we were "born" about 3.5 billion years ago - documented by Dr. Neil Shubin; initially we were fish that worked their way out of the shallow water and started walking around (on four new legs) so the potential for discovering fossils on Mars that reveal a new form of evolution is very interesting. Maybe only microbes these days but in the past we might find a real physical person existed on the planet.
American states like Georgia are busy making it legally acceptable to remove your rights if you are not a white GOP voter. Your voting rights can be removed if someone else has the same name but lives in a different location and an anonymous person submits you as an illegal voter. Reporter Greg Palast has been documenting how party elites purge voters for years now - in America it's legal to stop people voting when they have been accused of voting incorrectly, even if there is no evidence that they have did it.
So maybe both countries have a bunch of crappy views of their worlds.
I expect that all the malware creators are writing for Windows 10 and 11 - these are the most common operating systems on new computers purchased by people with plenty of money ... typical targets. But how much malware and virus infections are being created for Windows 7 these days? I expect that most people using those older operating systems are not busy posting on Twitter, Facebook, etc., and are not using online banking accounts so the amount of malware out there aimed at Windows 7 and 8 is probably low, potentially making the older operating systems not "more secure" but maybe less risky for most users.
I don't 100% agree with everything that anyone says about this but I like the way his comments and thoughts make me think about things ... virtually everything he's documented is smart and very educational, but of course we're finding new facts all the time so everyone's "statements" need to get updated as our theories change. If you want to evaluate the current quantum theory world then remember the classic (the icon defines Einstein, but I'm confident that they could be friends):
"I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein
We need a Prime Minister who is concerned about fixing all of the issues affecting the UK that have appeared in recent years ... but we're only going to get a Prime Minister who's good at getting elected. This is pretty much like writing software and saying it works, but never checking it ... The current update with Liz Truss is just like installing Windows 11 and finding issues that will be "fixed next week" for the next few years.
It's worth looking at the cell-phone industry as an example of this, originally companies were selling decent inexpensive phones with replaceable batteries, but now they cost about 4x to 6x as much and are designed to be very hard just replace the battery.
So building devices that are not repairable is far more profitable - it makes the CEOs happy.
Studying atomic details is like doing a crossword puzzle - you have clues and come up with "answers" that look good and then the next few clues result in different "answers" that indicate the first one might have been wrong unless the new answers are wrong too. That's fascinating and very helpful when you look for the next "answer" in both atomics and crosswords.
We're all made of protons and every physical thing in our world is too ... OK, I'm off to have a beer full of protons, I guess they must taste great!
Certainly it was an error but this is the modern "let's get a website running" world - saying that "You should be put out of business!!" is like saying you need to sell your house if you forget to lock the front door and lose your TV to a thief. If you were working with the health care industries (I do) then you would know that their maximum concerns are always the health of the patients that they are working with.
This type of data theft is normal these days, it's the environment that Google has created to be "healthy" (for Google, not you).
Absolutely, layer by layer suggests that our view of the physics of our planetary evolution is good, this doesn't prove anything yet but that fact that we can even see these pictures is marvelous! I think that we have the chance of getting to know a lot more about planetary life possibilities and the evolution of any form of life in the future.
Damn, I love science so much more that all of today's politics and political stupidity.
> "Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Google claiming the internet titan captured biometric data from millions of Texans without notice and consent" but he's probably supporting the current claims that Trump never captured an government data and stored it in his Mar-a-Lago home ... so maybe Google can just say that the FBI has uploaded all that biometrics data from millions of Texans and eliminate the entire accusations in the same way the the Republicans are attempting?
Sure, I think that they are all busy making money from us.
Ever since AI appeared I have always seen it as Artificial Idiots, sure it can work but there is no guarantee that it must work. I don't see AI as "bad", I just don't see it as error-free. Teaching students to never assume that everything works, unless they work to verify it, is educational.
When you look at all the events that our planet has seen since it was created, then it suggests that we have been very lucky to still be here - and so it might explain why we see virtually nothing when we look around the universe for other intelligent life-forms. Evolving life as a planet starts to grow older seems to be fairly reasonably easy given a few billion years ... but all this evidence suggests that surviving life on a planet is probably a lot less common. We have been very fortunate!
When I was six years old my mum talked to the library manager and got me a set of "Adult" tickets which made me so happy, I could head home with a couple of Biggles books (I have read so many of W. E. Johns books), and some books about research into early telepathy testing and human evolution. And then I started reading about how to start drawing ... lots of books with illustrations of the naked human posture that showed how to draw accurately.
So I believe that limiting children to little kiddy events and preventing them from seeing the adult environment has the potential to result in problems - as adults we think we're smart but actually (just look at current politics) we can be stupid too. It's best to teach kids that stupidity is normal but needs to be avoided.
These days everything is tested to show that it works and then it's seen as done and once it's done, the testing is seen as complete. It's uncommon for manufacturers to test things with the aim to show that they don't work - once you fail that test you can be a lot more comfortable then just being shown a note that says it looks like it's safe; "It was unhackable (because we didn't try to hack it)"
> "The agency said that Black Axe and the other groups are responsible for most of the cyber-enabled financial fraud around the globe."
If this statement is correct then what will change, will we see no more financial fraud, but is this just creating an opening for other fraud groups? Certainly shutting down fraud is very helpful but human society and our living environment has evolved to create fraud everywhere these days so I think this is just a minor help for a few weeks unfortunately because the fraud environment is remaining unaffected, we're probably just jailing a few people who've been working at it, but not doing anything to prevent it happening next week.
We would see posts like, "So let me get my granddad to read that book he wrote, Mein Kampf"
Virtually everything created with a nice idea these days, gets taken over by malfolks, I remember thinking that Facebook sounded like a nice idea when it was created, but these days virtually all social communications are being manipulated to cause problems for people.
Given the current economic and post pandemic working world, I wonder if this was just a result of the Russian customer placing an order before the Ukraine mess and then someone given the job of getting this paperwork done and an order shipped afterwards when they had never been involved with these issues before? People talk about seeing delays everywhere in the business world - these are usually a result of people trying to get things done that they have never done before to try and help their employer get things done. It doesn't help to punish people for stupidity that they never knew about, it's much better to work at making sure the problems don't reoccur so that we all get a better world in future.
It's a good YouTube video, nice to watch but think how much better a BBC documentary video production would have been while working with video produced from the drone by the BBC - the BBC has classic film and production people resulting in wonderful documentaries!
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