mikevp

sigh

I met him briefly at one of the West Coast Computer Faires, in the early days of AutoDesk, or maybe pre-AutoDesk.

His name was familiar to me from the infamous "Pervading Animal Game" on the Univac mainframes. "Introducing a new way of distributing software, Pervasive Release. If someone asks you for your program, you can tell them that in all likelihood, they already have it." There were a number of other, more serious programs in the Univac 1108 ecosystem that had his name on them.

It would be unfair to call this a virus, as it went to great lengths to insure that it couldn't do any harm, other than the few kilobytes it took up in a "program file". (Think "directory" in modern terms.)

That's what I want -- I want all political anything, left right and center, expunged from my FaceBook.

There's a browser plugin "Social Fixer" that can do this really well by all accounts, but alas, almost all my facebooking is on my phone, which it doesn't support.

One analysis I read ages ago showed that an electric car (even of that time) was enough more efficient than a gasoline or Diesel car that even if the electricity to charge the batteries came entirely from coal, it was a net CO2 win.

"People need to place more effort on maintaining factual reputation. If someone spews bullshit once, they are on probation. If they do it twice, I don't listen to them anymore."

Bingo. Michael Moore has been on my personal _index expurgatorius_ for decades.

Much of what this film says is outdated enough to constitute deliberate mendacity, and deliberate mendacity is Moore's stock and trade.

Of course, Moore's latest documendacity doesn't mention nuclear as a carbon-free energy source.

I've long said that the moment an energy source -- ANY energy source -- threatens to be able to produce enough reliable 24x7 power to keep technological civilization from collapsing, All The Usual Suspects will find some reason to oppose it. The goal is the collapse of technological civilization and the depopulation of the planet. (These types assume that they will not be personally snapped because they are Oh So Special.)

I hadn't thought wind and solar were likely to meet the challenge of producing sufficient 24x7 energy to power our technological civilization, but Moore & co. seem to think there's a risk that it might.

Heh... Recalling a demonstration by an EE prof way back when. He had the bank of capacitors charging up on his desk, and was writing on the blackboard the equations of how much energy was stored. Hand raised in the back of the room. "Uh, Dr. Miagawa, I think you slipped a decimal point there." Prof looks over his work again, says "Oh, dear" unplugs the charger and backs away. He tapes two meter sticks together with a screwdriver on the end to discharge his little electrobomb. WHAMO, screwdriver vaporizes.

I'm pretty much convinced this was not a mistake, it was a "Be really CAREFUL with this stuff!" object lesson.

Agreed. Stories like this keep popping up, because this is something the whole world desperately needs. EEStor was one of the previous claimants to the title, but they flew by night.

After so many disappointments, I'm down to "Let me know when I can buy one at Fry's, until then, I am not holding my breath."

Talk about what if something magically dissolves the concrete casks betrays that the person bringing that up has no idea what they're talking about. The wastes are not in any liquid or soluble form inside the casks. They're solid chunks of glass, like tektites, meteoric glass that's known to have sat in sea water unchanged for over a billion years.

Those interested in what is already there at Yucca Mountain should go to Google Earth. Search for "Sedan Crater." Scan south.

Guess what those 1000-ish craters are.

But always keep in mind Gene Spafford's observation: Debugging is twice as hard as programming. So, if you write a program as cleverly as you can, you are by definition not smart enough to debug it.

Talking about reactor waste with an image of 55 gallon steel drums with the radiation trefoil on them... Sheer ignorant incompetence.

"Near-infinite" power source from decay of Carbon 14. In some low power applications this would be close enough to eternal as makes no difference, but calling it a "near-infinite" source of power in general is pretty wildly exaggerated.

Every now and then over the years, I've considered designing The Perfect On-line Discussion Group software.

Every time, I've gotten a half hour or so into the process and realized I'm re-inventing trn 4.0.

The anti-nuclear self-proclaimed environmentalists simply do not seem to understand the concept of "Base Load." They believe, or pretend to believe, that industrial civilization can be powered by "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy, and doesn't need 24x7 365 days a year energy.

I call this arithmetic denialism.

If you don't want to be an arithmetic denier, show me the energy source that can provide 24x7 energy all 356 days a year in sufficient quantity to power industrial/technological civilization. I see a startling lack of any energy source that passes muster with the anti-nuke sort of "environmentalist."

Call that what you like...

That's why all my passwords (including my Ring password) look like this:

c3Ve*w^ZHKmq1SQK&gGVQCezROLgZy

Individually generated, unique for every site I log into.

But before Prop 13, people on fixed incomes were getting taxed out of their paid-off homes they'd lived in for decades.

cf. XKCD -- "Bury it in the desert. Wear gloves."

Miracle battery breakthrough du jour.

I've been watching this soap opera for years. These announcements keep coming, but nothing I can pop down to Fry's and pick some up.

Let me know when they're on the shelf at Fry's or Best Buy, or I can order them from Amazon.

I feel this way about git itself.

https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/

Adding backdoors would lead to the Huaweization of American tech companies -- Sales of US tech products outside of the US would drop drastically. And the non-stupid bad actors (however small that subset is) would use something open-source, or perhaps sourced from their non-US allies.

"Ross Ulbricht, convicted of various crimes associated with launching the dark web site Silk Road, was sent away in 2015 for life without chance of parole. In his case, the government purported to believe that websites that allow people to exchange bitcoin for illegal objects are so damaging, so heinous, that justice demanded nothing less."

Uh... I believe soliciting murder of rivals may have had something do to with it. Leaving out that little ... detail... kind of casts a shadow on how much actual reasoning there might be in this reason.com article. I quit reading at this point.

I was thinking about switching over to it since Roadtrippers keeps cranking down the number of legs you can have in a trip for the free version. I guess I won't, now.

Ten minutes? How long does it take to type a user agent string into the curl command line?

In my case, a user agent string pretending to be Firefox is already part of my .curlrc, so it's no time at all, just grab the PoC code and fire away. (I've got commented out user-agent lines for a bunch of other browsers that I can uncomment as the need or mood strikes me.)

It's not like anyone could ever change their user agent in their curl config.

Oh, wait...

cat ~/.curlrc user-agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0"

People who buy hoity-toity "designer fashion" items are paying for those D&G or whatever letters on the item. I find it impossible to work up any sympathy.

I get Flexon frames. Actually, I haven't bought frames in years. I just have them put new lenses in the "time before last" frames. So, maybe Flexon has inflated in price, too, in the past few years.

But the fact that I'm still happily wearing Flexon frames from years ago, and they still look just fine, and are still comfortable, means it doesn't affect me.

They do gouge for some of the stuff I get on the lenses; anti-glare, scratch resistant, progressive multifocal. I could cheap out on some of this, but this, at least, is functional, not "Oh, look how kuuuul I am, my glasses have a "D&G" on them!" crap.

The reason you don't try to make bombs from power reactor plutonium: The long fuel cycle of power reactors produces too much Pu240 and Pu242. It's dang near impossible to get a nuclear explosion if there's much of those isotopes; their high spontaneous fission rate makes the bomb "fizzle" before the core can be sufficiently compressed.

Those who pretend to believe that industrial civilization can be run on "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy are engaged in arithmetic denialism.

"Editor's note: KVUE is not identifying Precopia's accuser because she hasn't been charged with a crime."

Seriously? Seriously!?!?

I think the public needs to know who this CRAZY PERSON is so they can keep a far, far distance away from her.

And she most certainly should be prosecuted, to the fullest extent of the law.

I think he's predicted 12 of the last 3 recessions.

Interesting...

At first, I thought nominating Carson for head of HUD was a very strange choice. He's a neurosurgeon. Why???

But then... He was Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, so he had some administrative experience.

Then, I realized that Ben Carson has one bit of very relevant life experience that no other HUD director has ever had: He grew up in The Projects.

I thought then that that might lead to something interesting. Seems I may have been right.

In the case of Rose Bird, at least, it wasn't "overturning too many death penalty cases", it was policy of a blanket rubber-stamp "overturned" on any and all death penalty cases. She was opposed to the death penalty, and was imposing her opinion on the matter over the law.

Germany's shutting down all its nuclear power in favor of "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy. And people are surprised that this doesn't work out so well?

"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic." -- Stuart Brand.

Oh, Hell no.

And I'm old enough I can just retire if they were to push it.

Tom Wolfe's old book "From Bauhaus to Our House" took on some of these issues. In particular, modern architecture's alleged "form follows function" taking some bizarrely twisted thought processes to end up building flat-topped buildings in climates with large snowfall. Seriously? What were they thinking?