Musings of a minor megalomaniac
I’ve been warning people we didn’t think this Internet thing all the way through for many years. So in typical fashion, the government will now layer on some regulation to band-aid the problem. If it has silicon and software in it, it’s probably network-enabled.
Bob couldn’t think of everything. -but they got the 1st part right. This problem will go away as soon as somebody figures out how to make cyber security just as profitable if not more so, than cyber crime.
Cosmic science and art intersect on JWST.
“There are many different potential combinations of wavelengths and filters, all of which result in different ways of displaying the data — as well as different aesthetic experiences.”
Techies don’t always do the best job of solving tech problems, for some reason. Their solutions typically involve layering more tech onto the problem. I’ll belay my currently-due anti-cellphone rant in favor of kudos to Google for early indications on the Pixel 7. I’m not exactly looking forward to another phone upgrade, having barley scratched the surface on the 6 after a year or so.
The cellphone industry has staked out their balance sheets in terms of competition and ever-shortening upgrade cycles. So be it. I’ll get on the upgrade bandwagon after they figure out how to balance the battery with milestone hardware and the soft Stuff on it. Lithium and cobalt are very environmentally questionable.
“Phone” is or was supposed to be the operative term in the telephony ecosystem. They’ve evolved into handheld computers capable of doing a few things very well, some passably well and the rest churning entertainment, shopping and gaming into micro-sized experiments in frustration. JMHO – not that I was ever any sort of PC gamer. Looks like Google might try keeping the phone part front-and-center for the time being. Nice.
We’re in the green transition period where petroleum interests will increasingly demonstrate their intransigence. If you thought gas prices been bad lately and even thought about relaxing with recent month’s declines, buckle up.
I chuckle every time I hear some MAGA nitwit spew that New World Order nonsense, with Pelosi and Biden behind it somewhere on their Gitmo barges. Greedy bastards running the oil and gas industries saw the advantage in globalism fifty years ago. They just plug in the price per barrel on their spreadsheet to output whatever they feel the market might bear, and adjust production accordingly. Damn, we are stupid.
I read a story in Wired last year about how they developed this technology in Iceland. It implied serious scalability doubts, but apparently the Stuff is ready for prime time. It’s obviously long past time to start cleaning the atmosphere on this wretched planet. All is not yet lost, but try telling that to the people in Ft. Myers.
Being a lowly DoD contractor, I never got close to the Skunkworks and some of the other incredibly high-tech stuff going on in the company. I had my hands full with piddly little satellite and security Stuff. Our formidable scientific and technology capabilities are second to none.
…at least the part I knew. Cost overruns were getting so common and inflationary it was almost expected by the time I left the program. I was a little surprised the last GEO got built and launched. But the mission lives on, and so does the next gen space-based missile warning system-of-systems.
If the Russians liked those Javelins, they’re really gonna like this High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative:
“The 300-kilowatt laser is ready to integrate with the DOD demonstration efforts, including the U.S. Army’s Indirect Fires Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) Demonstrator laser weapon system.”
After the Ikonos contract ran it’s course, I almost got a job with the Lockheed branch then-called Coherent Technologies in Louisville where they developed this thing. It’s always fun breaking stuff, as opposed to building it.
It’s always been an issue. New telescope, new models, new worlds – it’s all new, so get to work. MIRI anomaly.
Here’s a quick tip for anybody concerned with their online privacy and security: Don’t use apps, plugins, add-ons or really anything that doesn’t come shrink-wrapped or checksum-verified from the source. Even that shrink-wrapped stuff can be a little sketchy, if you’re not careful (Solarwinds!) The 1s and 0s mixing it up on your electronic devices are pretty much out of control once you get more than 1 or 2 levels removed from the platforms on which they stand.
I haven’t trusted much beyond the operating system(s) that wasn’t open source for decades. Even those can be tricky. I stopped trusting Micro$oft at all, after the push for maximum subscription monetization back around the turn of the century. The old KISS maxim applies: Keep It Simple, Stupid!
Betcha Tom Selleck’s slow cousin Mike LIndell’s got enough crap on that thing to keep the FBI busy for quite awhile. Coded just right, software itself can be a form of misinformation.
He took ’em all, and almost always got it right. Too bad Gus wasn’t the one calculating how the Command Module doors were secured on Apollo 1, but you can’t do everything yourself. Scrambling out of that sinking spalshdown was one thing, but there was no way those guys could escape the first really big NASA disaster. Gus Grissom was one of those true leaders who did it all, and led from the front.
Exoplanets – what a concept. Planets outside our galaxy. This is what order-of-magnitude improvement in optical capture looks like. Tarantula Nebula.
“On the personal side, I also intend to pause twitter activity, as I notice current microblogging platforms tend to mostly contain flame wars, self promotion, or shared links I could find anyway with a good feed reader.”
I would exhort Emmanuel to go ahead and take the next step: Run your own site like I do. It’s not that difficult for anyone with a modicum of administrative ability and probably alot safer from a security standpoint, as well. The ISPs are running back-haul caching servers for their own purposes, so bandwidth is not going to be an issue in many cases.
The whole Web3/Crypto push is nicely idealized in their de-centralized vision(s), but presently lacks any practical development, implementation or operational tenets with the usual exceptions of attempting to generate value where none exists.
As a 22-yo Airman 1st Class hangin’ tapes at Buckley Air National Guard base in 1983, I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into. By the time Lockheed laid me into retirement, I was doing test and integration work for the Block 10 iteration of the most amazing space-based ISR asset the world has ever seen. Then it was the Space-Based Infra-Red System (SBIRS). Not sure what nomenclature it’s labelled with now other than just another piece of our space-faring system-of-systems.
Internet security vis-a-vis the Online Finance ecosystem is sketchier than ever these days. Don’t give them any help.
Starting to look like it’s gonna be time to build a new workstation later this year. Prices are receding from chip shortage peaks. The next gen AMD platform looks like a game changer. They got to the point where, with the exception of the usual network slowdowns, I pretty much stopped waiting for them a few years ago. There was a time in my computing past where things like video encoding and compiling might call for a coffee break while things crunched away for seemingly endless wait times. But it’s always fun putting a new one together and enjoying that new car smell-type thing for awhile.
