Posts by GrimJack

I have a Fitbit and walk to the gym and back for about 7-8k steps, stretch, swim, do some isolated machines and some core including 'the wheel' but mostly I wander around the apt. wondering why I came into this room and what it is I was going to do.

Daniel1977 - if you want to start a religious discussion don't be stupid about it. If you want to start a relifious discussion you had better be ready with some intelligence and some interesting ideas. Jesus saves, Moses invests is pretty old hat. Do you have any interesting comments on the Eusebius controversies? Keep in mind that Gibbom was not quoting from the original Eusebius Histories but quoting from someone who had 'mistranslated' (I use the scare quotes because most authorities that it was an actual lie and not a translation error).

Also make sure that you are discussing Eusebius of Caesarea not Eusebius of Nicomedia as the former was the actual historian in Constantine's employ and the latter was the one who babtized Constantine.

I try not to have the TV on unless one of my shows is on:
Elementary (he's going to London - will House be his dad?
Person of Interest - Current favorite quote "no one understands how hard it is to target through a brick wall"
Foyle's War

Why would you need to physically move it around?

Because the point of having gold as a standard is the paper currency can at any time be redemed for gold (even if only theoretically) - the people would have to beleive that their country has the gold to back the currency - for each currency in use so the Nation's Bank would at least looked like it could cover its currency

The Gold standard for currency worked well,

The Gold standard only worked because it was illegal for citizens to own gold and the value of gold was artificially frozen at $28 per troy ounce here in the US

Potential investors are taxed to the point they have no money to invest, potential entrepreneurs think twice about starting a business on a loan

This is one of your craziest statements - there is no one in the US who is taxed to that extent. Taxes in the US are at an all time low and the countries infrastructure is failing to show that.

Mike 2k said that very well; a slightly different way to look a fiat currency is that it is the value of 'work' produced or a convenient way to keep track of barter. Carrying around bushels of wheat to trade for pounds of fish is just plain awkward. So we all agree that a certain number of pounds of fish are worth a certain number of bushels of wheat - since it is a relationship that is in constant flux we try to assign a value to the relationship and all agree to accept that valuation. Currently, the most stable currency in the world is the US$ so the world agrees to use the US$ for keeping track. There are a lot of people who somehow think that backing currency with gold is a good idea - but it isn't for a couple reasons; there isn't enough gold in the world to back the world's economy and the cost of shipping gold around the world would suck all the value out of the gold. If the world were to agree to use gold as the standard, it is essentially the same thing as the world agreeing to use the US$ as a standard - both are arbritrary.

As a sort of joke, the Big Mac has also been used to compare world's productivity - The Economist first did this back in 1986 - the current comparison tool is here.

VS: a little googling seems to imply that the shelf life of the current model of cruise missile is 10 years. After that time the probability of some part of the system to fail approaches 50%. I was not able to discern if each part of the system had a 50% probability of failure or the entire system had a 50% chance of failure. If the past is any predicter, we will create a new generation of cruise missiles and sell the 'stale' ones to our allies. Though since the old AS-15s are out there, I am sure that one nation or another can use one of them as a model from which to work.

The rebels are allied with Al Qaeda and very anti-US. They are probably worse than Assad. They are being strongly supported by Saudi Arabia who would like to get the US involved as well. This is no-win for the US (except maybe the arms companies who like to have the US at war with someone).

I agree that it is a no-win for the US but this quote show a complete lack of understanding of the politics of the Mid-East. I understand that sometimes nuance is difficult but you really should try it. A quick overview: Saudi Arabia is Wahabi Sunni (the Wahabi sect of the Sunni is one of the strictest), Iran is Shi'a and Syria is Sunni(74%) but the leadership is Alawite Shi'a(11%), the Druze are monotheistic ethnoreligious - they accept a little of this, a little of that, call them the Unitarians of the Mid-east(3%), 3 Shi'a subgroups of Twelver, Ismali, and Zadis comprise 2%. Don't forget the Kurds are 10%. There are also Christian and Jewish populations so totaling up all the non-Sunni we get about 16% of the population. This is only a breakdown by religion; we could breakdown the population by ethnicity, the non-Arabs such as Kurds, Turkmen, Circassians, Chechens, Bosnians and Albanians with a plethora of smaller ethnic groups. And there are the

Saying the rebels are allied with Al Qaeda is just wrong. Yes there are Al Qaeda in the fighting but that is what Al Qaeda does. The issues …

If a war was started it would be a little nuclear bomb here and there...

But we are not talking about starting a 'war' this is just little 'piss-ant' nations releasing WMDs. Japan has a cult that released sarin gas in their subway system. Biologic developement of weapons is fast becoming a DIY affair - or they could just break into one of the 2 labs in the world that still have smallpox samples. Nuclear war seems so 'last century' that I doubt that is a true WMD threat any more. If people can be convinced to don explosive vests, it is not a stretch to think they can be convinced to be infected with a MRSA, or TB or Pneumonic plague and have them fly around the world or just hang out in an airport and infect all the travelers.

I think that with the use of gas on his own people was crossing a Rubicon. What is done in response are the issues that arise. Chemical weapons are the first WMD; weapons that are indiscriminant - killing large swathes of people with no controls. The ban covers

asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases and of bacteriological methods of warfare <

This is a Pandora's Box that is being opened; allowing a rogue nation to use a banned weapon gives any nation carte blanc to follow suit. A little gas attack here, maybe some poison there, then just a little bit of anthrax or smallpox and suddenly there are pandemics across the world.

There is no posssible 'win' in a war with Syria/Egypt/Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan - there was a possible, incredibly tiny window of opportunity in Afghanistan back when Osama was trapped in the mountains, but so far we have lost every shot we took at interfering in other countries' affairs (at least since WWII) - we took a lot of shots. Hell, we are responsible for most of current shit going on over there.

I just made a curry oxtail soup with lentils - I will be eating this for a long time. I dumped a pound of lentils in - I gotta stop using up all the beans at once.

Before the PC age it was blamed on the TV age - in fact, the obesity rate in the US is on the way down now. RJ have you seen the movie "IF"? I must assume you have.

After I got out of the service, I gained weight til I was about 240, then Coke came out with their 16 oz bottles sold in 8-packs; they sold for about $1.30 and I was drinking about 103 oz of Coke per day. The next thing I knew I weighed 155 pounds and my clothes were falling off me. I used to say that the Coke ate the food before I did and I pissed it out. Good time, good times. sigh.

valiant inability keeping in new game

harpoon

Ketchup eating tofu sauteing unabashed epicurian, killed in a mealtime explosion.

furrfu

coffee snort - the comments were much more informative than the article. It seems very much like the article was written across a 'Chinese Wall' - oh, I guess the new way to say that is google re-translate. In the process I discovered:

tranlate from German to German - listen "pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch"

it becomes a beat-box

Wanton or oddious liberal winnowing of real time heresies

heretical

in order to restore the tranquility Tibetans are incidentally presently enjoying.

I am not sure what you mean with this particular phrase. The Chinese government just completed a rail line to Tibet and are now giving land to Han Chinese to lure them to Tibet. Rather than 'conquering' the Tibetans the plan is to overwhelm them with numbers. At the end of the current phase, the Han Chinese will outnumber the Tibetans and there will no longer be a 'Tibetan' culture; there will be another Chinese province. In 1953 there were about 100k Han in Tibet. Since that time it has been Chinese policy to settle retired military in Tibet allowing a more pro-Chinese civilian population. It is pretty hard to get 'solid' information from the area so population figures are not particularly trustworthy since each 'side(?)' releases data supporting thier particular agenda.

Well, we could start the equivalent of kite fighting - drone on drone fights. Now if I could use the drone output for a total immersion flight, say with 3D glasses - that would be exciting but I would probably start vomitting due to the 'balloon head' aspects of the current response times. Balloon head is term used by the users of certain medications where physical movement of the head leads perception of movement.

War profiteering sort of falls under 'the Broken Window' fallacy - whereas something like the government works projects not only get money to the people who spend it immediately for necessities but there is the long term result that can be seen to this day; dams, bridges, park trails, art, et cetera. Ninety per cent of this type of economic support is trickle up - families get fed, local businesses are supported, goods and services are transported to where they are needed on roads produced by the work of the people. Larger businesses are supported by the increased demand for trucks, resources, and so on.
On the other hand, giving the same amount of money (either in tax breaks or whatever) does not get down to the local, human level except as 'keeping a job you already have'. Notice that the current market forces are not producing more jobs, they are producing more effecient use of jobs already in existence. There are job ads that specifically request applicants already have a job; they are not for people who are unemployed.

CanadaFred: and that was part of the horror behind 1984 - the constant state of war which engendered the need for control of history and people.

Sorry JW - I should not have yanked your chain. - I knew you could not help yourself.

Anyone see the movie 'slackers' - the POV shifts everytime whoever is the 'current' POV meets someone to that person. One of the characters is a guy who walks around with all sorts of video equipment draped all over himself - he does not believe it happened unless it was taped. (this was back when video was the storage media of choice).

The Artificial Kid by Bruce Sterlinggoes into the pendant idea in some detail except that the Kid has 3 or 4 cameras following him at all times. He has combat for the entertainment channels. Since many of things I could say about how good the book is and so on would be spoilers, I will just say that it was pretty good

Yeah, POTUS is essentially a slightly right of center politician but is played up by both sides as a far left activist (though the right seems to see/push him to the extreme left hence the 'socialist' label). He is just a politician who happens to fit a 'frame' for both the left and the right. Among other things, he is black and this reaches deep into the fears of the right and reaches deep into story that the left wants to believe of itself.

Er, RJ ,yeah one last comment then back on topic - I had that same study in mind along with the one I mentioned but thought it might be too much.

The issues I have with the expectation of privacy in public is context. A political example was Fox News displaying a picture of POTUS 'obviously' staring at the behind of a woman; this was plastered all over the news and internet. Then the video from which the pic was taken was aired and it showed POTUS helping a woman up onto the level where he was standing. The picture was purposely taken out of context for its political implications.

The point this leads to is that if the police have five years worth of snapshots of where and when you vehicle is/was, it can be cherry-picked to prove any story-line; and if you don't know what data base the pics come from, you can't demand to see the entire record. I do not expect privacy in public but I also do not expect that every thing I do in public to be available to the world.

I remember back in 2010 there was a pendant for sale that could be programmed to take pictures of your surroundings either in continuous mode (on different time scales from seconds to hours) or on some other criteria. Would you be comfortable with one of your friends having and using this? How about that guy who had a camera installed in …

Klahr-R - Yep, I am a graduate of MCRD San Diego but I got out in 69 and even then marines were complaining that boot camp was getting to easy (this was always in comparison with 'how tough I had it'). When I was a young punk programmer, Cray was the fastest machine in the world and they timed it by adding or subtracting wire-length. When I entered a command line error, it would respond "bad card".

Oh, my point with Watson is that what it could do now shows that it can keep up. There are theories of the mind that supposes that below awareness, all of our experiences are summed into larger and larger units that include all possible responses to a situation. An example is that when a novice plays chess, he examines all the possible moves then narrows the focus to the legal moves then to moves that improve his situation; an intermediate player no longer sees illegal moves; and a master no longer see bad moves.

Klahr_R: interesting ideas but (there is always a but)
1) it is possible to identify people from their keyboard style - it was considered as a replacement for passwords at one of my old jobs so it is possible that the entire world of data will include keyboarding styles which will be the interwebs version of fingerprints. Add the ubiquity of built-in cameras (I remember a recent phone commercial that showed the movie stopping when the viewer looked away).
2) Remeber that a computer program beat Jeopardy's best.
3) Refer back to phone commercial - did you read the PK Dick story Minority Report was based on? In the movie, I found it odd that the 'minority' from the title who spent her entire life floating in a fluid was able to stand let alone walk and/or run.
4) I went through Marine Corps boot camp - there is a lot going on during recruit terrorizing. They take away everything that identifies you as an individual - cloths, hair, et c - then you are screamed at for hours on end, made to run with a full duffle; pick it up, put it down - yadda yadda yadda; once the porcess destroys your personality, it is built back up as a member of a team, taught to respond immediately to commands. Who gets to decide what personalities need to be leveled? The privacy improving with rank seems to correlate with wealth - the more wealth you …

My desttop does not get shut down; on this machine my BOINC is Quake-Watcher and quakes don't rest. But I monitor the graphics/screensaver to make sure that it is using my sensor (I once watched the screensaver for a couple minutes [it shows the plate edges and the most recent quake activity] and noticed that it was not using my sensor so I rebooted). I also use this computer for my old games, I am back with Morrowind - reliving old conquests. My laptop I usually shut down when I am not using it especially since I use YOURKARMA as my link since I moved and have not bothered to find a provider. I was going to stay with Speakeasy which was boght by MegaPath (yeah - they might as well have named themselves 'Deathstar' as far as I am concerned, they were going to raise my rates for fewer services + it took them minutes (entire minutes) to find my account.

YourKarma charges a flat rate of $15.00 per gig and is the tiny 3X3 device that uses 4GL. I can put it in my pocket and connect anywhere in the world that has 4GL. It is an open device that alows anyone to use but they have to set up an account with YourKarma (and they start with a free 100m + I get 100m for hosting them - though I don't do anything).

JW - back to your old tricks again; fanning hysteria with multiple links that are all about the same thing and that thing is going nowhere. Email tax, internet tax,modem tax - it is all a tempest in a teapot.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Samuel Johnsom

I just ran into this - so those of you who think unconstitutional Crimes Against Nature laws are harmles.

“This is a law that is currently on the Louisiana books, and the sheriff is charged with enforcing the laws passed by our Louisiana Legislature,” Hicks said. “Whether the law is valid is something for the courts to determine, but the sheriff will enforce the laws that are enacted.”

Do you still think that Crimes Against Nature laws are a laughing matter?

The laws against spitting in public served a very good purpose when they were put in place - chewing tobacco use was nearing 50% of the population at one time - every bar had spitoons everywhere for this same reason. Along the same lines, most people think that Prohibition was a complete failure, but what it did was change how Americans drank. Before prohibition, people drank beer for breakfast; alcohol was everywhere all the time. With Prohibition, drinking became something that people went out to do. Without Prohibition, the US would be much like Russia.

But I digress.

If you keep your mouth shut, the flies won't get in (Mexican proverb)

I use 'track me not' which searches the major databases for random phrases about evry 30 seconds - I wish I could put some of my more interesting phrases into the search db.

If you can keep your head while all about you lose theirs - you might be a headhunter

It took place underground after a (supposed) worldwide nuclear blowout. Some of the scenes are oddly current. The POV shifts often sometimes it is the view from the medicine cabinet (you see someone open the cabinet, take some pills and drop them into the toilet - illegal drug behavior), sometimes it is a corridor (a robot cop walks into a wal, adjusts his gun-belt, then walks into the wall again with a voicer-over saying "officer malfunction in corridor"). There are an unlimited number of tv channels including a channel that is just officers beating someone. On and on - I loved it but if you see it, it is a thinking about it movie so it does not move at a pace we are now adjusted to (er, it is slooowwwww). And yes, at the end, the hero appears to escape to an opening to the sky with the sun rising (since it was filmed in California they ran a sunset backwards which leads to seeing a seagul flying backwards - heh,heh but a sunrise is a good note to end on).

The problem with checklists is that they are checklists. No one is one thing and not another; most people are a seething mass of contradictions that continually 'vote' on what is going on leading to how you feel on the conscious level. Some days your psycopath wins, sometimes it is the angel; heck sometimes it is the sociopath. There was an interesting TED Talk about on NPR (generic name for public radio) last night about mental issues - one was a reporter who worked to help get a psychopath out of prison. The pp (for short) had claimed psych. issues to get out of a 9 month jail sentence and ended up in the psych ward for 12 years(an approx. - I did not listen too closely). Every time he went up for his release hearings, they decided he was a pp based on the checklist. He kept changing his behavior to convince them he was okay but that behavior was on the checklist. Take the test honestly every couple years (or months) and see if things change for you.

Has anyone (other than me) seen THX1138; it was George Lucas' directorial debut - it show a pretty dystopian world that is 1984/Brave New World-ish. The 'illegal drug crime' scene that opens the movie is someone not taking their drugs. All the actors have shaved heads and wear white onesies; essentially, the entire population are freckled except for one character (who is not the main character) and it is extremely difficult to tell people apart - lots of fun things happen. Also masturbation is obligatory and screwing is illegal.

From the title of this thread, I was sure someone had leaked my journal - whew!

Actually I think the illustration should actually be more Venn-like, hmmm - Venn and the art of the internat.

Please note that porn has been the driver of much of the technology of reproduction (pun un/intended), most recently video, cd, dvd and even the internet.

Brevity is the heart of wit - let me add 'and wisdom' to that quote.

I actually like some of the 'original' manga - like Yoshitoshi's "One Hundred Views of the Moon" The original paintings are destroyed in the process of creating the blocks (sometimes there are over 100 blocks to print to make one complete print). His drawings and sketches for each painting/print (and others of course) are what eventually evolved into Mangas.

Okay, I take liberties with the history; Yoshitoshi was actually one of the last of the Ukiyo-e artists but I so love his work. There was a local art gallery that had collected samples of all 100 woodcuts - it was an amazing collections that showed what happens over time to such a complicated process. Original prints were stunning, but over time you can see that the blocks became worn from use and some of the blocks were missing (after 200 years, losing one or more of the 100-200 printing blocks is entrop at work).

What many fail to realize that VA Crimes Against Nature laws are still on the books. Sure there are people who laugh at Cuccinelli; many people think that the sodomy laws are dead - settled law, it is called. But look at what the SCOTUS has overturned; they have ignored precedent in the past and can do so again. There have been at least 2 UNSUCCESSFUL attempts to remove the C.A.N. laws from the books; that is correct, the C.A.N. law is 'unconstitutional' but the VA legislature can/will not remove the law from their books.

Tracking cars requires image processing which is still computationally expensive

Hunh? Tracking cars via the license plate is a simple damned database seach. Every cop car in Seattle automatically scans every single car it passes every day, all day, 24 hours a day. It is all logged into a database - now what do you think would be used as the key? A simple search on the db key will bring up every time that plate was scanned whether it was parked or moving; using google maps with the data gives a detailed record of every where the car was passed and the time of day. Add simple pattern matching to begin suspicion. The boring things you do every day when looked at by person/system looking for a pattern will find a pattern that could be suspicious.

I am more of a "Brave New World" believer - that seem like a more probably future; I think there are even more horrid possibilities available that make even a merger of 1984 and Brave New World seem like the free life. Neither of those worlds included nanotech, MRIs, or any of the more modern technologies that can be turned against us.

Okay, so it is not just Seattle - it is everywhere

There was just a story about the local police (Seattle,WA,USA) using some automated license plate readers; they scan every plate that the reader can looking, comparing the plates to a list of stolen vehicles - the kicker is that there is no shelf life on the data. The system was put into place about 5 years ago so here in Seattle, if they know your plate # they can track your movements. Sigh, try as I might, I just can't stay under their radar (unles I choose not to drive, use a card and avoid all ccts).

But ripping off corporations - that was serious stuff.

The crime that would bring corporate armies down on you was being able to turn your t.v. off - but Big Time TV was allowed to broadcast with very little influence.

I was ready to buy someone's shitty tape to CD when suddenly, then an official version was out.

BigPaw: I'm dancing; I'm jumping - which do you prefer?

Sometimes I worry that "1984" blinds people to other, more insidious outcomes. I just bought the complete "Max Headroom"; there are some interesting convergences happening. Killer drones with facial recognition; extreme rich/poor differences. I have to watch more episodes to see what else is beginning to align.

I concur with Rev Jim that nothing I say is worthy of scrutiny, but I am careful with Internet searches!

See, this is the Panopticon affect; already you are self-censoring - avoiding saying anything that could be mis-interpreted, mis-used, or O'Reilly-ed (taken out of context for sensationializing).

Here is where Edward Snowden did us all a favor: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had to apologize for lying (misstating) to congress whether or not NSA has dossiers on US citizens - he made a flat declaration "No, sir - not wittingly". If for no other reason, this makes Snowden a whistleblower.

on the other there is the reality that with today's technology any one can kill or injure large numbers of people with materials costing only a few hundred dollars.

I guess this is where the giving up freedom for security quote should fit. Now we have to monitor our own thoughts on the off-chance that some search parm or another might be misunderstood by the NSA so we don't look guilty of 'bad thoughts' - this is the panopticon at work. Now if you want to know how fertilizer is able to explode, you don't dare research it. What if you want to know about how rice in milk thickens for your recipe (ricin - typo) Just for laughs I just googled "ricin recipes for rice pudding" the top 4 results were 1) wiki - ricin 2) gun nut threatens president 3) recipe for chocolate rice pudding 4) Use rice in a sentence.

So let's hope I am still posting in a couple months (worse yet, I am going to go visit my cabin in Montana).

"No mention of guns or gun laws will be tolerated on this thread or I'll get a mod with non-lethal powers to remove your post, or at least have you publically pilloried for not reading this notice"(thank you diafol)

In another life, another thread - I tried to bring up what is fast becoming a United States Panopticon:
just ran across this article about a judge's allowing a subpoena of over 100 accounts, for over 9 years - blanket from google, ms, and yahoo.

For those of you who do not like to clicky-click, The first case is Chevron subpoenaing all the internet traffic for all the people who testified against Chevron in which Ecuador won an $18.2 billion judgement from Chevron. The effing judge said that the fishing trip that Chevron was on is okay. They can track every single location that each of the 30 different 'anonymous' individual accounts ever logged in from for 9 years.

The Panopticon bit comes from the fact that since we don't ever know if or when what we say online ever is subjected to subpoena we will all monitor our own behavior.

Discuss