It is human nature to believe that we are "better than average" at things that it is hard to really calculate a ranking on. Spouse, friend, driver, etc are just good examples. Like Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average, we find it comfortable to believe the same about many things -- morality just being one.
Just as wheels, gears and eventually engines allowed us to move faster and farther, modern internet tooling allows us to display our sense of moral outrage and whatever we want, whenever we want, making us feel very superior indeed.
The world isn’t really getting worse. But people have incentives to act like it is. New technologies give virtually anyone, at any given moment, a platform to express anger. These new ways of communication, from Twitter to Facebook, allow anyone to express outrage at the newest political dust-up or celebrity gaffe. And by expressing anger in this way, people are able to communicate something about themselves – that they are morally sensitive, that they care about injustice – so much so that they are willing to accept the cost of being upset to show it.
So the technology makes is much easier to show moral outrage and become a "moral grandstander":
Here is the basic idea. Grandstanders use talk about justice, rights or morality in general to show that they are good people. Grandstanders want others to think that they care more about justice, or empathize more deeply with the poor, or more clearly understand the plight of the factory worker than the average person. Some are more modest, and just want to show that they are on the right side of history. For grandstanders, moral and political discourse is a vanity project.
PRACTICING Christianity is a great fix to this (pretending to be a Christian is not). A practicing Christian gets to admit that they are a crummy sinner, deserving of eternal punishment, and beg for the Grace and Blood of Christ in order to cover their awful sins everytime they take Communion.
Other ways to temper our natural bent for seeing ourselves as "above average" or even "superior" would be philosophy, literature, or even better, regular CIVIL discussions with people who are roughly as intelligent and well-informed as we are, but are of "the other" moral tribe.
In such discussions, "status" is gained being calm and civil, and display of umbrage is NOT a signal of morality, but rather a signal of a lack of maturity. If our nation seeks to stave off a nasty divorce that we seem headed toward, such discussions are the only likely way back to being one nation.
A little change of pace. A good article full of details about the incredible capability of the only nation on earth able to carry out night all-weather carrier ops.
Even if we don't lose this preeminate position as we lost our spacefaring capability, there will be a time in the not too distant future when the computers do the landing, and then shortly a time when the only thing flying are drones. My guess is that in the next war, the carrier goes the way of the battleship, but part of life is appreciating the miracles of today.
To consistently put jet aircraft on the deck of a carrier at night and in stormy weather is a feat that ranks at the very top of individual and group operational skill. Greatness is not a right -- it is EARNED. We were once a nation that went to the Moon ... even in our decline, we still have men who can work together to accomplish incredible feats as "part of the job".
First of all, I don't believe that the NSA or other US government agency can't break the iPhone security. Interagency, they may have decided that they don't really care about these particular people so they are not going to break THIS ONE, but if the top security apparatus of the US can't break into an iPhone, the idiots at the top are even more incompetent than I thought. (and that is INCOMPETENT!)
I used to work with security stuff at IBM. We had a couple of guys that would "go missing" for a few weeks, "on business", but with nothing more official than that. The "over drinks / wink wink nod, nod, I really need to shoot you now was" ... NSA. It was VERY clear that they could break whatever was "secure", and were going to continue to do so.
With all due respect to Tim Cook and Apple, I work with a team of the best hackers on the planet. These hackers attend Defcon in Las Vegas, and they are legends in their local hacking groups, such as HackMiami. They are all prodigies, with talents that defy normal human comprehension. About 75% are social engineers. The remainder are hardcore coders. I would eat my shoe on the Neil Cavuto show if we could not break the encryption on the San Bernardino phone. This is a pure and simple fact.
And why do the best hackers on the planet not work for the FBI? Because the FBI will not hire anyone with a 24-inch purple mohawk, 10-gauge ear piercings, and a tattooed face who demands to smoke weed while working and won't work for less than a half-million dollars a year. But you bet your ass that the Chinese and Russians are hiring similar people with similar demands and have been for many years. It's why we are decades behind in the cyber race.
If you don't know what "social engineers" are relative to computer security, they are "con men, grifters, pickpockets". If you want to get a little humility on how good such can be, take a look at this. McAfee is VERY different ... he is running for president on the libertarian party this year ...
The top linked article is quite sad, but maybe the saddest part is this:
Perhaps most importantly, we need to end the culture of impunity that protects people who run illegal programs and continue to thrive in their careers after they are exposed, but vindictively pursues the whistleblowers who expose that illegality.
Only such a system, that offers transparently meaningful oversight and real consequences for those who violate our trust, has any chance of being trustworthy enough to remove the persistent global demand for platforms that preserve user privacy and security even at the expense of weakening the capabilities of their policing and national security agencies.
What part of THERE IS NO TRUST are these people missing? In order to have such a thing as trust, one would need shared values, say Christianity. A written Constitution that was actually followed would be good. Perhaps after a few decades of return to such, some level of "trust" in organizations and governments might recover.
Those are gone ... learn to be as untrusting and independent as you possibly can be, and then learn some more!
Marvin Minsky observations are common in physics books I like to read -- "Time Reborn" that I'm finishing up now has many.
The AI Koan covered in the column is:
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?” asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe,” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?” asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play,” Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?” Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Are you enlightened? It's a Koan ...
The column links together a lot of topics that I think are interesting, but the big points at the end are that government has a strong history of slowing down creativity and business in many and varied ways. He has a quote I think is worth remembering:
Government is what happens when the power to say no meets the power to move slow.
I'd argue that quote is only true relative to productivity and growth. Government can move VERY fast when increasing it's own power and destroying individual liberty!
He discusses the removal of the "Prudent Man Rule" in '79 which allowed a burst of venture capital to be unleashed, and the allowing radio spectrum to be used under Reagan, which gave us cellular phones and WiFi.
He sums it up at the end with a paragraph that is worth pondering for a bit ...
Our current national mood is very grim: anti-immigration, because we fear foreigners will steal our jobs; anti–Big Business, which wants to help foreigners steal our jobs; anti-finance, because we fear Wall Street will somehow figure out a way to make money stealing our jobs; anti-technology, because we fear that robots will steal our jobs. And we are, too often, anti-entrepreneur, too, resentfully suspecting that somehow the men and women who create the things that we do not want to live without are somehow getting over on us.
I enjoy Nicholas Carr as a writer and it was fun going back and reading my Blog on "The Big Switch" from March of '08. The world was a lot more positive back then, I was still more hopeful of technology advances helping our futures, and less worried about downsides. His predictions of computing moving to "The Cloud" are very much coming to pass.
I've also read "The Shallows" on which the linked Atlantic article is based, but did not blog on it (yet) ... I'm probably going to give that one a re-read, although it already obvious that the Atlantic article is a pretty darned good summary, right down to the "2001 A Space Odyssey" references ... in particular:
The Carr thesis, going back over a decade at least, is that our technology changes us in unpredictable ways, and we ought to be aware of that. His view on the Internet and Google in particular is that we are losing our capacity for "deep reading" and "deep thought", and are being "distracted". Like HAL, we are "losing our minds".
He recognizes that it goes back a long way. One of the fairly recent (in terms of history) pieces of technology that totally changed the world was the clock. To wit ...
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
Being a Lutheran, I recognize one of the other "big ones" as the printing press. Without it, Luther would likely have just been another heretic burned or hung to save his own soul at the behest of the Roman Church. Instead, 500 years ago in 1517, the printing press (invented 1436) allowed his arguments and eventually the Bible itself, to be put in the hands of the common people in their own language. The central power of Rome was de-centralized, and much of what happened with democracy, republican government, the rise of commerce and science, etc was a direct result.
However, as this blog laments, wisdom is much more dear than knowledge, and one of the many challenges with "artificial intelligence" is just what is "intelligence"? These are not new problems ...
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
Since 2008, I've become aware of at least SOME of the dangers of my own auto-didacticism (self teaching with no program of study) in the areas of philosophy, politics, theology and areas of science (primarily cosmology and mind / consciousness study).
I would argue that being "filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom" is pretty much the "disease of our day". I'm sure that the invention of writing was a contributor, but I'd argue that the abandonment of honor for history/tradition, infatuation with "the latest and greatest" as well as the pell-mell rush for "knowledge" (with abandonment of "values") and forced abandonment of "wisdom", since it may slow the headlong rush, was a decision -- not "inevitable". As in the case of most of our modern decisions, it is hard to call it a "conscious decision" because we seem to firmly avoid thinking with enough depth to make those sorts of determinations, and have for a lot longer than the Internet has been around.
Some parts of the technologies are as McLuhan said, endemic ... "the media is the message". Mass radio and television begat mass marketing and everyone standing around the water cooler discussing what was on Carson last night. Airplanes trumped battleships and nuclear missiles made it clear that no visible nation could get away with isolationism unless you had "cover" (that used to be the US, prior to Obama). It seems that is a lesson that will apparently require a few more millions of deaths to re-learn.
While Carr seems to think that "technology is destiny", I prefer to believe that **IF** we, FIRST considered meaning, wisdom, culture, human frailty, Gods will, tradition, etc, and THEN made use of technology with those goals in mind and primary, we could avoid at least the most onerous of the losses due to technology.
We **CAN** still enjoy an evening around a crackling fire, and we can still shut off the lights and have a beautiful candlelight service at church, and as I often do, we can settle down in a nice easy chair in front of a big window looking over the backyard with a remote / thermostatically controlled fireplace to keep us warm while we read in depth.
It is completely true that before the invention/discovery of tools, fire, language, writing, printing, computers, Internet, etc, we had less choices and "things were different". What is far from clear however is that we can abdicate our responsibility for making appropriate use of technology and blame the problem on "the technology made us do it". I agree with the following quote from the column on the fact that we are creating a lot of "flat people" these days, but I find it to be a choice rather than our destiny.
Before even the first crude spear, God enabled us to have "Free Will" -- the rest of the creatures only have instinct on which to rely. We need to quit thinking we are "apes with tools" and recognize that we are uniquely blessed to be human with the divine gift of consciousness!
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
My set of readers is small enough that I'm trying an experiment. If you go to ip address 69.66.197.8:81 and use ID "guest" and PASSWORD "xyz", you may be able to bring up something like the following. It's a Dlink DCS-5010L if that helps.
Since it is unoccupied most of the time, in general you should see nothing too interesting, but if you have the proper technical inclination, camera viewer software, or are just handy with browsers and such, you can even move the camera around. It is IR, so things show up ghostly at night. The main purpose is to be able to read the big thermometer on the wall pretty must usually "dead ahead" of the camera to make sure that the place isn't freezing up ... but I like playing with internet cameras. I have a couple around the house here as well so I can look in on my kitties, get e-mail if there is motion around my gun safe, etc.
My plan is to remember to kill the "guest" connection when we are down there as a public service -- seeing me running around in my undies would be hard to unsee!
The connection down there is DSL, so I'm pretty sure the IP will stay fixed ... I did set up a remote Dynamic DNS URL ... "lakeplace.from-ia.com", that ought to work as well, but it has failed me a couple times -- might be propogation. I'm pretty sure the IP is static on DSL anyway.
Naturally, if you see like masked men, water running across the floor, are looking in the daytime and are able to see that the thermometer is pointing "straight up or trending leftward", an email to bilber@mac.com would be really nice!
A small tech note for anyone trying to set up on at least Windstream or possibly any DSL, ** APPARENTLY ** ... my experience, and I've seen a couple posts to this effect, UNLIKE cable modem, if you try to access your internet IP from INSIDE your local modem firewall, you just get the modem / router no matter what you do! I wasted A LOT of time on that!
My inside IP for the camera was a static 192.168.254.8 using port 81, and the modem/router was 192.168.254.254 usign port 80, and NO MATTER WHAT I DID, I could not get to the camera using the outside IP adress that I listed.
FORTUNATELY I have a Verizon 4G data account, and thought "what the heck" and just gave it a try .. WALA, instant picture! ... we DON'T really want to talk about how much time I wasted trying to get at it using the Windstream DSL account at the shed ... yet another case where "the way it has always worked" on cable modems DID NOT work on at least the Windstream DSL connect.
Our speed SUCKS ... like 384K up and 1.2 Mbits down, but "it works" ... hopefully speeds will be improving. "The plan" is to get two outside cameras ... one pointing at the lake, one pointing at the road in front ... those ought to be more interesting at least sometimes. Is the lake frozen? Is the lake stormy? Is there snow? Is the farmer doing field work across the road? etc ...
Anyway, that is the future ... for now, be a spy if you like!
This article jumps a bridge too far relative to safeguards on aircraft. The plane doesn't need to COMPLETELY fly itself, it just needs to add more "self preservation" ... which the fly by wire craft like the Airbus already have -- as do most cars now. Rev limiters, lock-outs to prevent shifts to reverse, not starting in gear, etc. My Gold Wing won't stay running in gear with the kickstand down, thus preventing driving off and being up-ended by turning with it down.
Current planes limit the ability to pull up too fast on takeoff, fly over-speed, damage the engines, etc -- all these elements have good and bad points. A fairly recent slide off a runway was caused when a plane had not settled enough on the gear to allow the thrust reversers to be used. There was a way to override that, but they could not find that switch fast enough.
There are ZERO systems that are "foolproof", "suicide proof" or will not have unintended side-effects as the hardened cockpit door added as a result of 9-11 did in this case. The systems analysts game is a game of odds -- prevent the big failure, weed out anything "common". First do no harm.
Current nav information DEFINITELY allows the planes systems to know where it is relative to ground and where airports are at. There is really not much of an excuse for an autopilot to accept a command to fly the plane into terrain. Such a command ought to require two pilots to type in an override code at a minimum if it is even allowed -- I fail to see a scenario where flying a jet into terrain is "the best alternative available". It damned well better be in a landing configuration -- below 150mph, flaps deployed, etc, etc before the automation lets it get to say "1000 AGL" (Above Ground Level)
Our technology is not ready to allow commercial planes to go fly routes on their own, but it is clearly at the level where a plane ought not to allow a pilot to destroy it without putting up a very good battle! Certainly there need to be overrides and ways to "shut off most of the automation" -- because ALL systems can fail, but those overrides can be 2 man decision points.
Some of the more thoughtful may be saying, "Yes but, what if the other pilot is incapacitated" ... etc, etc. Again, this is about ODDS -- what are the ODDS that you not only need to disable all the automation, but ALSO the other pilot is incapacitated? Even that is possible to get around -- perhaps a flight attendant has a third code to cover that eventuality. I'm not doing a full design here -- it just ought not be as easy as it apparently was to allow one pilot to instruct a $70M plane to fly into terrain with a load of passengers.
The choice is NOT "remove the pilots" or just go on with the same risks. There are LOTS of incremental steps that can, and I'd argue ought to have been taken already given EXISTING navigational and programmed automation capabilities to make flying a modern aircraft into off-airport terrain an act that is nigh on impossible to execute.
OK, maybe not QUITE as small as the pair of units that power the Terminator in T3, but never the less a "Compact" Fusion Reactor (CFR) the size of a semi-trailer / container ship container vs a good sized building.
The article is well worth the read -- enough power for 80K homes or a major ship from a unit the size of a container -- lots of obstacles, certainly some likely over optimism, but WAY more real than "Hope and Change"!
It makes me think of Matt Ridley's excellent book "The Rational Optimist" which I read and liked but never blog reviewed. It gives a nice big picture of how from Malthus to Anthro Global Warming, alarmism as been constant, but so far human innovation has been FAR stronger.
The numerous predictions of "Peak Oil" and the reality of gas slipping under $2 due to Fracking is just one of the many examples of how innovation has a very strong tendency to trump a lot of what appears to be very rational pessimism that has the very bad Achilles heel of not taking technical innovation and the fact that "trend lines" often don't last into consideration.
Color me incredulous, Power Line was reporting on this last week! Apparently "The Party" (TP - Democrat) media arm has been willing/able to keep this under wraps, and it is STILL a smaller story than our latest attempt to put a rocket in space blowing up on the pad!
The computers at the WH being hacked by a "foreign power" -- possibly Russia in the week preceding an election is a sidebar story on American "news" outlets? Hello?? Anybody home??
My jaw is on the floor. I have a pretty iron clad rule about not blogging on right wing media "scoop" stories until I see them in lefty sources -- like CNN, NPR, etc in addition to Power Line, Fox, Drudge, etc, but this makes me wonder. Perhaps more stories are just never going to appear in TP controlled media?
There have been a lot of "strong hints" on how much the bias / media control has gone up under BO -- Gun Runner, Benghazi, IRS, journalism spying (it was ONLY Fox spied on, apparently until now at least), etc, but this is a nice simple rather amazing story. The computers at the seat of our executive power seem to have been hacked by a foreign power -- that certainly means we are VULNERABLE!!
Shades of "Atlas Shrugged", the once great nation is falling apart -- so far, no specific symbol quite as potent as the US rescue mission to Tehran burning in the desert with 8 dead Americans, not even able to reach Tehran, aborted by the great swimming rabbit warrior, Jimmuh Carter. An event I refer to as "The Jimmy Carter Desert Classic".
The lack of any specific symbol with quite the specific summary of our woes as the Carter Classic doesn't mean there are no candidates though. Even in the Carter Malaise we were a space faring nation -- not relying on Russia to hitch rides and watching China consistently operate as a manned space power. BO the anti-colonialist has to dearly love the optics of how far the mighty have fallen every time Americans ride up with the Russians. Hey, if the nation that controls the space over your head decides to hack your computers, shutting up seems the only valid option.
ISIS continues to grab territory while we (ostensively) attempt to slow their advance from the air -- an exercise in futility most likely to fade away after the election like more of our healthcare and our paper mache borders.
Perhaps the best symbol of decline so far in the BO takedown of the US is the head of a US citizen rolling on the ground, hacked off by an ISIS warrior as our laughing "Commander in Chief" enjoys a round of golf. SUCKERS!
WH computers hacked by Russia? TP and it's media arm are fine with that -- move along, no story here!
A few years back we heard a decent amount about "Carnivore", an FBI terrorist search program that scanned vast amounts of data -- emails, texts, voice, etc looking for terrorist connects. The Party (TP-Democrat) hated it, W was president back then and it is always "chilling" if there are any "privacy issues" with an opposition president in the WH.
Small matter that 90%+ of those building and operating Carnivore were dues paying union TP members.
Well, there is a semi-private version of "Carnivore" now called "CATALIST" that is a "Big Data" program -- claimed to be fully legal, and may well be, that is wiring elections for TP. The linked article is pretty fair on the subject, I'll try to be really brief on the synapsis of the threat. A lot of formerly thought to be brilliant pollsters and pundits were blind sided by BO in '12 ... the numbers looked like Romney ought to win. The analysis is that CATALIST is the big reason he didn't and it may be a big reason why this election is another "surprise".
The big picture here is that we can understand the import here since the left already went bonkers on this as far back as Reagan in the form of the "Religious Right" was getting out votes for Reagan -- never mind that Unions, The Sierra Club, Black Churches, Universities, etc had been doing this for Democrats for eons. Word of mouth and peers is the BEST way to get your voters active and out -- negative advertising is like junk mail. It moves the needle a few percentage points AT BEST, and it costs a lot -- it is a shotgun approach, little targeting.
But programs like CATLIST that know if you shop at Whole Foods, have a family member with a mental illness, don't attend church, own a Prius, etc are able to target you in a way that was never possible without what the computer industry calls "Big Data" -- at a very simple level, Google and Relational Data Base (RDB) mated and their offspring is Big Data / CATALIST.
The ability to gather vast amounts of data on people, identify their "hot buttons", and LINK THEM to like minded political workers is HUGE. "God, Guns, Gays" was the old cry from the left as to how evil Republicans got elected. On the left it might be "Environmentalism, Atheism, Veganism, Pro "gay marriage", anti-gun ...". But the funer the appeal, and who it is that makes the appeal, the more powerful it is.
There are reasons that this is an asymmetric battle space with a huge advantage going to TP, I'll touch on a few here.
TP owns the universities and government. The brainpower to create and operate this kind of operation is pretty much in their camp.
The agencies that hold the data are government and government IS TP. We likely see a tiny fraction of the situation with little hints like the IRS scandal. Your IRS financial data, your FBI data, your medical data -- they are all sitting in big government data bases. At the VERY LEAST, this can be "mined" (scanned for trends, correlations, etc without direct use of your ID) -- in the very likely case, items can be "leaked" across data bases with no record of "how we got that" WITH Idenity. We are only talking about "helping the voter connect with TP" after all -- a very good purpose if you are TP.
Conservatives may well have an easier time building a big data operation to track terrorists or make a profit. Like ALL technology, there is a lot that can be done here that is "good" or at least innocuous, but when used by the government, conservatives tend to get nervous. Their level of trust of the government is FAR lower -- and in fact their trust of large organizations of people is FAR lower. It likely stems from remembering things like the USSR and Nazi Germany were government operations, and the core belief that mankind is fallen and not infinitely perfectible in this world.
The simplest aspect here is that since over 50% of the population is now getting a check cut from the government in one form or another, all that is really required is for some especially dedicated TP "public servants" to be sure that those names are leaked to CATALIST so that the correlations have a good "seed".
Domination of their true enemy -- conservative opposition in this country, is what TP does best. They may be unwilling and ridiculous when it comes to foreign enemies (like telling them what we WON'T do, eg "boots on ground") but against what they see as domestic enemies, rest assured they are positively ruthless.
Good article that gives a rundown on the lack of warming for 16, 19 or 26 years depending on what model you want to pick. When it was 7 years worth, the Warmist Community wanted to hide it as a blip "Hide the Decline", but in their secret outed e-mails, predicted the game would be up if it went 15 years or more. Looks like they were pessimists, the hard liners are still believing along with 63% of Americans after 20 years.
In more immediate news, there is expected to be an early Polar Vortex the end of next week -- highs in the upper 50's here in MN, with temps as much as 30 degrees colder than normal west of the rockies. Predictions are looking like an earlier, colder and snowier winter than normal, possibly rivaling last winter. Oh, don't worry, USA Today assures us that the coming vortex is DUE to Global Warming ... so much for the Warmist worries that they would lose people if the temp didn't go up for 15 years!
Why do you think they re-branded to "Climate Change" from "Global Warming"?
I liked the last paragraph from the Ridley article. Think about all the hand wringing about oceans rising and possible weather effects around the earth, and how heartless you are if you don't care about the people that will suffer a century in the future.
If you compare the 1.3 B people with no electricity today with the prophesied damage from GW 100 years in the future, how would you square that calculation?? Compare how YOU would feel if it was say 2 degrees warmer today with how you would feel if you had no electricity today -- or any prospect for any in the foreseeable future.
Putting the icing on the cake of good news, Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung think the Atlantic Ocean may continue to prevent any warming for the next two decades. So in their quest to explain the pause, scientists have made the future sound even less alarming than before. Let's hope that the United Nations admits as much on day one of its coming jamboree and asks the delegates to pack up, go home and concentrate on more pressing global problems like war, terror, disease, poverty, habitat loss and the 1.3 billion people with no electricity.
I've been concerned the last couple of elections because the MSM quit complaining about electronic voting. It was a HUGE problem in 2000,2002 and 2004 -- in fact, a number of Democrats were pushing to hold up the results because of the "potential of electronic vote fraud in Ohio" as late as 2004.
We know that ACORN and other groups manufactured millions of votes in '06 and '08, which I thought they had calculated was "enough" for their purposes, and indeed it was -- for those elections. Now we are in the midst of a new election and I remain concerned about the left's lack of concern for electronic voting. So what happened? What was the technical, procedural or other change in electronic voting that very suddenly made it completely disappear as an issue?
Most of government is staffed by Democrats because of the number of lawyers and Government Union workers involved.
So most of the poll workers, people doing the contracts for the voting machines, handling of ballots, watchers, creators of procedures, etc are Democrats.
It is well known that wide scale voter fraud has been going on for a very long time in many locales -- Chicago is only one of the most commonly pointed out with the Daly Machine.
The "big problem" with electronic voting was the fact that the Democrats well known techniques for stealing elections needed to be "updated", and they were actually concerned that they could not figure out how to subvert the vote.
Now, I suspect that they have -- thus the MSM silence on the issue.
If the numbers in the linked article are correct -- only 1 out of 5 Republican votes being counted, it seems that they have gone over the top. One of the problems with voter fraud has always been "too much success". One finds out that there were more Democrat votes from an area than there were voters -- this is amazingly common, it was one of the things that showed up in a solid Democrat precinct near the UofM during the last MN Senate race. Turned out there were a couple hundred more Franken votes than there were voters -- so of course, this being MN, and the votes being for Franken, the answer MUST have been that "the machine had the wrong voter count". Minnesota media of course had no problem with that at all -- "obvious". And of course a machine that can't count the number of votes is TOTALLY reliable in registering the direction of the vote!!! (as long as they were for Franken).
It is worth going out and playing with Wolfram Alpha, it is pretty amazing and I would be completely unsurprised if it replaced Google for some classes of knowledge work.
I have "A New Kind of Science" -- I'm really not going to say that I understand it, but kind of like at the end of the video, I believe one has to take a "Super Programmers View of the Universe" ... it is all about software, "models".
Physics is a mathematical model that accurately predicts much of the physical universe, but it has to some degree broken down at the levels of the very small, the very hot and the very fast.
Wolfram believes that he has a better idea, Cellular Automata, as a better way than existing forms of mathematics to explain "virtually everything" ... the structure of the universe, language, thought, evolution ....
There are pieces that I think I kind of get ... sort of like reading the classics, Greek and Roman History, and a few thousand other things, I'm hopeful that I can reduce demands on my time in the future to undertake getting a bit smarter about this area.
(In my dreams, I may even take on and somehow come to grips with Roger Penrose: "The Emperors New Mind" ... sort of like "A New Kind of Science", I've taken a couple of runs at that one and decided, "I need a bigger brain, or A LOT more time" .... I have this sneaking suspicion that while "in theory", even a mortal ought to be able to figure some of this stuff out by taking longer, drawing on more supporting material, creating intermediate analogous models, etc, there is a fairly high risk this is "Non-computable in MooseSpace".
Pretty impressive. Suppose this is the most advanced thing that exists? Maybe, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. Make this a little smaller, give it Bin Ladin recognition capability, "sleeps" by day and re-charges with solar power and hunts at night? Little C4? Little nerve toxin projectile? Audio of a BO speech? (no wait, that last one would violate the torture prohibition, I apologize)
Mass produce a couple 100 thousand and make a lot of areas of the world "less terrorist friendly". True, countermeasures might be "netting", strong fans on openings to buildings, etc -- but putting a little window breaking firepower on something seems like a potential, as well as maybe a bit of a "swarm capacity"? "Hey, I've found him, all units converge!!" ... say each one of them carry's a few oz of C4 -- 100 of them going for a building/vehicle/etc in unison should be impressive.
Yes yes, it might be tough on tall skinny guys with beards in the assumed area, but how many tall skinny guys does the planet really need?
BO and the Fascists are hot on the trail of deciding what level of pay it is that everyone is worth. As near as I can understand their algorithm is that if you are smart enough to contribute to the Democratic party (Unions in general, Finance Industry, lawyers), then you deserve a high salary. Naturally, as with any good Democrat, this higher income will be "tax free" -- if you get in any trouble with the IRS, just contact BO, and he will appoint you to a cabinet position.
The old tired idea of "pay for performance", or "higher pay for higher capability / education / etc" has been replaced by "pay for votes", or as they like to say in Chicago, "pay to play". In a nation where only politics is important, why would people persist in some tired discredited capitalist ideas of income having something to do with some hard to compute concept called "value"?
Consider the difference between the pilots who crashed in Buffalo killing all aboard and "Sully" Sullenberger who dead sticked the Airbus into the Hudson for no loss of life. The horribly greedy Sully is reported to make about $140K a year, and moonlights as a consultant to make up for salary and pension losses down from at one time being able to focus on flying full time and make over $200K. Clearly, he erroneously believes that capability and experience are worthy of higher salaries, and he must think that he has some use for all those "riches". Why, if his wife works, he deserves to be punished with some BO tax increases for the "rich" just to show him how stupid it is to be making such "exorbitant sums"!!
The 49 year old captain on the Buffalo plane earned a way more respectable $55K a year, while his 24 year old co-pilot was earning a fairly spartan $24K and living with her folks because she couldn't afford a place of her own. Heil BO! Those are the kinds of "sustainable salaries" that Americans ought to be dreaming of!! The way I see it, "a pilot is a pilot", so what's the difference? I'm sure all those passengers aboard that Buffalo plane were much happier to have those low cost pilots right up to the point at which they had, shall we say, "higher considerations".
Put Sully behind those controls and they would have never been aware the plane had a pilot -- he would have never let his approach speed get low in the first place, absolutely nothing would have happened. But hey, salary is "immaterial" -- there is no difference in the kinds of people you attract with lower salaries than higher, other than the lower ones are BETTER PEOPLE!! -- many more of them vote Democrat, and that is all that counts!
Relative to wealth, two groups vote high percentage Democrat -- the really rich, because they can afford to, and the really poor (when they get out and vote) ... because they have given up hope. If you aren't really rich, it is a great time to pick up some hope for the next life, because your future in this one is a bit less bright than Colgan Air flight 3407 when the stick-shaker activated.
In the BO Economy, doing with less is the expectation. One pretty much has to have the internet in the current world unless we are down to ARs and beans over the fire. A discussion of some ways to get by without cable.
I spent a few hours over the weekend nursing a virus/spyware ridden relatives PC back to health. I'm probably one of the few Techie Geeks that actually finds this sort of thing kind of like a "puzzle challenge", so the time spent is better for me than most. A few observations:
The linked article points out that the Viruses are getting more sophisticated, including messing with your links, hosts, etc so you actually end up going to a fake site to supposedly download software to help you!
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware was one of the tools that I found I needed to use to remove "Antivirus XP 2009" from the machine.
The other took that I really needed was The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows" (UBCD4W). The box would not run, and most of what was needed to be done could not be done from Safe Mode, at least not in the machines state of infection.
One of the things that I was surprised had happened to the machine (I assume a virus did it) is that the ability to get to the Task Manager via Ctl-Alt-Del was disabled. Here is a link to the Registry entry to fix.
I ended up running SpyBot Search and Destroy under the UBCD4W boot from CD then booting and finding out I couldn't get to Task Mgr, so did the registry hack to get that fixed, and then started finding bad tasks running. One thing nice about the net is that as long as you have another working machine (and it is hard for me to even IMAGINE only having one computer!! ;-) ) you can just Google things that "look wrong" and if they are, you go out and do a Registry / Disk Search and try to get rid of any remaining ones. My guess is that for most folks it might be easier to just try another free download of something that you trust rather than the manual approach. Since I "mixed", I can't be SURE that if I'd found Anti-Malware earlier, that might have just done the whole trick rather than me mixing in some hacking around.
The subject book uses the history of industrial power from manual to water to steam to local generators to electricity supplied by utilities as a model for the ground covered to date and assumptions for the future of the move of computing power from individual companies and homes to the global "cloud or grid" of utility computing.
Carr believes that the Amazons, Googles, Yahoos and such are going to defeat Microsoft. In general, so do I, the model is changing. Software and solutions are already being delivered as services over the web with nearly zero impact on the client/user side. This Blog is done using Blogger, a free service of Google paid for by advertising. I happen to be typing it on a Mac computer, but that really makes no difference, the Firefox browser that the Blogger software runs within runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, and I'm sure a number of other platforms. This Blog is part of the cloud of the future.
He does some analysis of what we ought to all know to have been true since the first human whacked something with a rock or stick. Tools provide leverage; they allow one or a few people to create a lot more value than people without tools. They also move value around. Carr laments how small groups of people at YouTube, Facebook and such were able enlist vast groups of people to create all the content and then sell out to larger corporations for 100's of millions of dollars. He suspects more of this will happen and I suspect that he is right--I also suspect that a lot of other different large fortunes will be made in ways that are unforeseen to both Nick and I. If we DID foresee them, then I would guess we would go out and make them ourselves, or at least invest in those that will. He doesn't really say what he might DO about that, he just does some lamenting.
He ends up with a little ghost story about how the guys at Google want to create a computer smarter than we are, and they are really serious. In the epilogue he talks of how the move from candles to electric light caused us to "lose something" ... candles gave a glow, a reality that electric light did not. We have lost that. He laments that by the turn of this next century (2100), we will no longer have any people that had dealt with the world prior to the computer, and that will be a loss. He closes with this quote:
"As older generations did, they take with them the knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It's in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be."
It is a nice wistful quote, but how about books? At least the Roman Catholic Church would argue that we suffered a great loss due to books, since the reformation would not have happened without them. Fire? I'm sure that life prior to man having fire was very different than life with control of fire. Anesthetic? Certainly not having that would allow us to be MUCH more in touch with our bodies during surgery!
I don't disagree with him that much, and I like his prose, I'm just left with the "and your point would be"? I don't think he is suggesting either that we should give up progress or that we ought to really slow it down.
Maybe it is sort of like "once the Christmas of your son or daughter being 6 is over, it will never come again, no Christmas will we really like that ... we should be aware of that".
Very true! So we are aware. Now let's get that superhuman computer built and create the equivalent of fire that we will be unable to imagine the world without it's existence!
