Musings of a minor megalomaniac
In appropriate fashion, PBS and NASA teamed up to present the most comprehensive, information-filled launch coverage program ever. It’s a long sit for anyone not totally fascinated by space stuff like me, but the important part is pictured below. Webb Is up, looking good so far, representing a new, comprehensive, information-filled future for space explorers the world over:
Finding things I agree with in current events has become somewhat challenging lately.
I have some issues with him, like being the son of a South African emerald miner, pushing to open factories in the midst of raging Covid, insider trading and burning enough hydrocarbons in 30 seconds to heat a small town all winter every so often. But overall he seems to have right ideas 🙄. And he’s going against some of the toughest Oil ‘n Gas forces in the country.
Electric cars, space/starlink, tunneling – good luck, and go for it, Elon!
This is why my truck does not need even a battery to start and run if it’s daylight and parked on a hill. Back in the last century, vehicular electronics were known to cause more problems than they solved. This state of affairs was well demonstrated in the early Dodge Cummins PCMs. They were technically computers, and did offer some improvements – when they worked. Tesla has just provided a great contemporary example of what happens when they don’t. Nowadays it all comes through the net, so your car really has nothing to do with it, except failing to operate correctly when a bit gets stuck sideways somewhere in an incredibly complex neural net control system.
I got around to upgrading a few of the security cams over the past couple months. These things have improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. Even relatively low-budget models now come with high resolution and other nifty features. The critter cam on the northeast corner now sees the whole creek/park area north of the house. It was pretty cold here yesterday, so I spent most of the day re-organizing the server to leverage those, and the results were good.
I’ve been through several iterations of different security cam software over the years. They seem to have made good progress since I started using them, but support and configuration issues involved with the all-in-one cam systems is just not ready for prime time, IMHO. It’s time consuming and tedious to do it manually with an FTP server and bash scripts, but that’s the only reliable way to manage security cams these days unless you are paying high prices for commercial software and subscription services.
The cams will do everything on their own if you just take the time to learn them.
The hot seat was getting a little warm for Zuckerboy, so he figures to just add a new name, hoping to obfuscate and distance himself and the company from the huge flaming dumpster fire it is. This greedy little nerd can suck my dick and choke on it.
It’s been 18 years since I retired from the Air Force. They still let me on base, but being retired is an outsider position, with no real insight to what’s going on in the organization. This year’s Heritage Foundation report confirmed suspicions brewing in news reports for years.
“For decades, the perception of American strength and resolve has served as a deterrent to adventurous bad actors and tyrannical dictators,” the report reads. “Regrettably, both that perception and, as a consequence, its deterrent effect are eroding. The result is an increasingly dangerous world threatening a significantly weaker America.”
Being conservative hawks, of course they’re always lobbying for more defense spending. Playing catch-up will be a more expensive defense strategy, with less available to spend on it going forward. Chickens are roosting.
The real story is the stratospheric level of techno-ignorance demonstrated.
Never been much of a Twit, myself. I tend to agree with Dave Chappelle on the topic – it’s just a digital bathroom wall. But now that Fuckbook’s insidious business practices are finally out in the open, it’s time to pivot. I’ve been using the Twitter for my own algorithm and engagement testing – but the only real goal is delivering depraved insults to selected individuals.
Youtube could be a legitimate service, if they cleaned it up. I deleted my Fuckbook account years ago when it started getting really shitty. Twitter came into focus when the Orange Fuckwit began leveraging it for his misinformation campaign(s) in an epic thumb-nose to Democracy and the Rule of Law. Smart people always knew the only reason these platforms exist is to monetize personal user data without the owner’s consent.
The 1st phase of this little exercise demonstrates how quickly they nail the marketing vectors. I might be Twitter’s least active user. I follow nobody and block everything. My last logon before today was 2 weeks ago. The only football stuff I’ve done online this season were NFL.com to see the schedule reading nothing, and one streaming service (on which I do not even have an account) watching games. It’s no big stretch to imagine what happens when those algorithms get tweaked and applied in even more targeted fashion.
Even more concerning: how and where’d they get a low-interest fan’s info with just a few weeks of minimal online NFL activity that never even touched their platform? We used to call it triangulation in the missile targeting business. In the data-mining business, the payoff is like the Ferrari ultimately produced from stuff taken out of the ground.
With little more effect than Zucky’s offerings over the years. Youtube finally decided enough was enough and started restricting vaccine misinformation. Yay. How long you think they might allow the next propaganda-infused threat to humanity to fester before taking action? I bet it’s until they can no longer get away with ignoring and deliberately overlooking it. Marketing profit dollars rule until the problem becomes existential. Until then, the corporations will continue raking it in.
Once again… “…designed to replace the 1990s-developed Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) program, which notoriously faced a series of severe cost overruns and schedule delays, with the final satellite in that constellation only to be launched in 2022.”
We’ll see. We knew it was off the rails back in 2004 while I was working systems security at the Boulder facility when the original LEO constellation was cancelled. Even then, it was hard for a technically competent engineer to imagine how the integration effort for such a system could ever succeed at scale.
Guess we’ll try again. If there is one thing certain, this government does not learn from it’s mistakes.
I was wrong about GEO-6, assuming it would not even finish getting built. Now waiting to see if it flies.
Can’t figure out why the Russians are so interested in my web site ever since the 2016 election. Everything’s political, but WTF do I know?! I guess the Trumplicans must be paying them well.
Inside Russian Hacking Culture. “Let me say that we know very well the insides of the software used on many websites,” Kovalyev said. “And so we know where the holes are. But you make it easy by not fixing even what you can fix. And so we visit. Hello!”
That’s like a mugger bragging about where to find all the darkest, smelliest corners of the NYC subway.
Randall’s on a roll…
The James Webb Space Telescope will re-define the term awe-inspiring, for me at least.
Went shopping for a phone after the battery in my Pixel 3 swelled up and found Google finally made a smartphone I can really appreciate. My two primary priorities in a phone are battery life and camera. The 5a delivers on both points, with the additional bonus of a reasonable price. I have been completely turned off by the $1k “flagship” phones. So double the money gets you incremental performance increases – meh. Now I have my cellphone super-camera cake while it eats battery for days at a time on a single charge for only $449. Best phone ever.
It’s been reported to overheat with video recording, so maybe not the right unit for you if that’s a priority. I might step up to a 6 out of curiosity for the new chip tech, but this will be my daily driver.
Didn’t take so long for this one, now that everyone walks around with more processing power in their pocket or purse than what ran the original Space Shuttle. Everybody’s had their doubts about human nature. Took some computing power to amplify it to the point of mass psychosis.
