Posts by GrimJack

• Sorry about the flying car issue! *

  Regarding block-chains - a new twist, it appears that certain types of banned porn is being written into the block-chains. Either actual pics of child porn or pointers to where to find it. (this is from an article on Gizmodo a year ago). The issue appears to be with the way porn laws are written - ie, it is illegal to possess child porn:
  As the researchers note, “Since all blockchain data is downloaded and persistently stored by users, they are liable for any objectionable content added to the blockchain by others,”

I am not sure but I bet that we will not get flying cars until we get self-driving cars. In crowded cities, people have trouble traveling in 2 dimensions so how could we possibly allow people to drive flying cars.

Actually, I am pretty upbeat about getting self-driving cars although that might be a misnomer - cars will probably have some initiative but the majority of traffic will be controlled by groups of autonomous car-intelligences. They will band together to protect themselves from the really bad drivers.

Grumpy/Grim

My Amiga 1000 was stolen during a burglary while I was in Paris; I bought a 3000 then upgraded to 1500 - I kept them for years but I was never geek enough to bring them into the 21st Century. My monitor blew up in 1999 and I ended up building a windoze machine from scratch. The Amiga is still the only machine I know of that could have 2 different screen resolutions at the same time (and it multitasked - multiple windows running the boing bounce). It was the goto machine for the world graphics competitions for the longest time.

Dani, Yes it gave me fits b/c NOTHING looked the same and I had to tweek LastPass (my p/w protection program) to get in; the 'stay logged in' feature is pretty nice. But all is well now.

Back in the day - early Obama administration - there were some guys on here that seemed to be Libertarian but had names like 'Sturm' and said I should check out the website AceofSpades. I look back and realize that they were effing ÁltRight/White supremecists - back then I just thought they were clueless teens. Not blaming DaniWeb at all - just thinking about the discussions that came up back then (one of the guys who kept trying to convince me I was Libertarian eventually died of stomach cancer or something - I missed him b/c we had some interesting discussions. That 'Sturm' dude - don't miss him at all.

Actually, I did not google because I used it as an excuse to come back for a visit. So, now I googled it and it is fixed - ''check aps and files'' off.

I have been otherwise occupied for the last 10 years or so - got a job with the IRS (boo, hiss) on a seasonal basis. Got back into making puddles of glass (casting) and bead-making. I started a project I call 'Ramdom act of art' where I walk up to random strangers (hence the name), state the project name and hand them a glass sculpture that I have made. I have been doing this for a few years now but I still have way more glass pieces than a person could consume in a lifetime. I have taken to hiding them around town and around the forest where my family has a cabin. I hide them along trails, next to roads , anywhere that an observant person might glance.

I am going to retire pretty soon - I consider myself semi-retired now since I am collecting SS and working only part of the year.

My place is still an absolute mess (though I did clean up the kitchen somewhat recently). I have a cat named Freya who I call GG (the cycle is Freya is Odin's wife and is sometimes referred to as Odin's Gold and also as the Golden Goddess hence GG). She is a black cat with gold highlights (shhh, she is a black and gold tortois-shell but don't tell her that).

I used to be a backroom techie but now just shout at computers and wax nostalgic about VMS and how wonderful the Amiga was.

It seems to me that would get pretty messy right off the bat. My cell could only hold a stack of about 10 wings before they started falling off; plus how do you use the phone with all that food stacked on it? and your greasy fingers from the wings?/s

It blocks every attempt to modify any file anywhere. I give Steam and all its subsidiary .exes permission and then it says that there is no permission to modify 'Documents'. I just bought the darned machine to game with and it is freaking driving me nuts. Any suggestions on where to go to fix this?

I think that the proposed tarif wars may have conributed to some of the drop.

OMG! So many faces from the past (I just stopped by to ask a simple (?) about Windows 10's effing Defender) - I am gobsmacked that you guys are still around.

ReverendJim: I think we still have a long way to go re heat dissipation. Circuits running at near absolute zero temperatures would not generate nearly as much heat due to super-conductivity.
IIRC there was an attempt to defeat the heat dissipation issue with 'code reversal' - instead of shorting the bits to zero and producing a lot of heat, they run the calculations in reverse returning the processors to their original state. I just assumed that as the processors got faster, they would move in this direction but apparently not.

Maybe using DNA and RNA as computers might get around the heat issue? It would certainly be an increase in complexity, moving from binary to quaternary computing.

Of penguin dreams and other things

http://www.heavymetal.com/v2/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/bloom-county-2015-berkeley-breathed-5.jpg

What do you call it when someone does the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome - a freethrow champ.

If you are glisading down Mount Rainier - know your ice-axe arrest

HiHe: agreed - I wonder sometimes about all those different 'stink' producers available on the market - up to and including one that allows you to set moods. The most I want to do is to is, maybe, light a joss stick. The one most effective trick I learned (I am a cat person) is to bag and seal everything that I scoop out of the cat box; it seems that 'cat smell' is usually not from the cat box but from the garbage where the scoopable is stored until disposal.

HiHe: agreed - the only true solution is to not have a smoker nearby. What I am offering is a way to remove 99.97% of particles that are .3 micrometers or larger. The outer filter is charcoal activated and removes the (relatively) huge chunks from the air before the 'interception, impaction, diffusion' takes place in finer detail.

Once you start talking about chemicals in the air, cigarette pollution becomes buried in all the other crap a typical apartment dweller has to breath. From carpet outgassing to neighbors outgassing (fart joke).

The first college I went to had been called Montana State Normal School - it was a teachers college. It was there I first heard:
Those who can - do
those who can't - teach
those who can't teach - teach teachers

PLBKACAND MY FAVORITE lmgtfy

I recommend that you research HEPA air purifiers. I think that you can get better air cleaning at a lower cost. I know that Honeywell air cleaners do a good job and have reuseable filters (you can rinse them in the sink - once you have a cleaner, the filter cost becomes significant. Most HEPA cleaners will be rated by how large a room that they can clean and how many times per hour they will they will clean all the air in the room.

Good luck. Most 'big box' stores and large discounters like Fred Meyers and Target will have them and will allow you to turn one on to hear what they sound like

Important caveate - make sure it says 'true HEPA' as that is a standard that can not be wishy-washied away. I have seen phrases similar to 'HEPA-like' that implies more than it means. The range in costs is from $80 and up; most of the cost difference is the volume of air it can clean in a set amount of time.

Almost all experts outside of the FBI do not think it was the N.Koreans who hacked Sony. Many think it was a disgruntled (ex?)employee - in the beginning of the year, there were massive layoffs; a lot of them system administrators.

It gets better! Ubber is now charging a $2.00 booking fee in New York City! Life is good.

People still forget about the Blackberry; still so secure that is the only cell phone the President can use. Still uncrackable after all these years.

Paris - till I walked the whole city from Arrondissement 1 to 20 looking for pochoir (Jeff aeroplane, MissTik, banksie, et cetera

You need a lot of money, a lot of hardware that emmulates a super-computer, the software, and plenty of time. all the easy bitcoins have been mined; you now need at least a couple quatrillion (10^15th) cycles; you need to be able to know where to start looking (we are talking pretty damned deep into at least aleph 1 infinities - which is considered the cardinal # all the aleph null infinities.) Well, actually you don't need to know any of that crap - all you really have to do is buy/lease the software that does the math for you. The fact that you ask the question at all means you should probably find something easier to do.

Can you dig it! In the midst of the hostage situation in downtown Sydney, Uber was charging $100 to get to safety plus 4 times normal milage. I know - they claimed it was an accident of 'surge-pricing' but that was the 2nd or 3rd explanation not the first. One wonder how they would have dealt with 9/11 and/or any of the east coast huricanes.

Outrage reached critical proportions quickly resulting in the promise of free rides and refunds for those who already paid. Sigh!

Well, if we don't count my just cooking some lamb in the kitchen I will have to say Buenos Aires AR. My first and only visit to that continent. (other continents include Europe and Australia).

With new laptops as low as $200.00, that screen better be pretty cheap. TSA cracked the screen on my laptop - I did not notice it until I opened the computer deep in the heart of the Tobacco Root mountains, 3 weeks after I flew. Now I just leave it hooked up to a monitor and keyboard, using the laptop like a desktop.

Vega: We used to spray tumbleweeds with fake snow and use them as Xmas trees. Hard to believe that 'weeds are not native to US - what would a western be w/o the lonesome train whistle and tumbleweeds rolling down the empty streets?!

The only real use I have for laptops is to attach external monitors and keyboards to them. I hate HP products because of the the excess shite that they load on it.

In Seattle the main distraction is plate subduction quakes plus there has been so much fill that the ground could liquify and everything sink just a bit - they found a valley of mammals that seem to have been standing around when the ground liquified, then resolidified and they died trapped body deep in ground.

I have a great new knock knock joke - you start it

I still have checks from my last apt - I pay rent and utilities with checks. I use to send 7 page letters; I use send letters that wandered through mazes and their ideas were complete when it could go not further but if it rejoined another stream, they would blend seamlessly. I once bought a tablet of pages that could be broken into puzzle pieces and I would write pages and pages then mix them all up - good times, good times.

could you please produce several other examples of such language "distortion"?

How about the entire English language is a distortion of Middle English which was a distortion of - well, you get the idea the distortion goes back Sumerian/Hindi. Even East Coast (USAIAN)language distortions (dialects) can be traced to the century that those areas were colonized by the British; from New England to Florida.

It is amazing how much of your thought processes are built right into your question and scare quotes - OMG, what were you thinking when you wrote "distortion"

What I am beginning to hate is the torture of 'criminals' or they catch the bad guy and someone just slugs them. Hawaii 50 is big on knocking bad guys around after they have them in custody (plus I hate that constant bickering). NCIS alwasy seems to add a little gratuitous violence bordering on torture when they need some information. In Person of Interest, the people they shoot in the knee is always in the middle of the action and if there is any torture done it is by the psycho-bitch with god in her ear.

@kplcjl: no it didn't - the story started from the point of view of the stranded traveler and followed that point of view for a number of years and landed to rescue the stranded traveler - consider it Worm Ourobores eating its way through the earth until it finds another like itself and asks it to marry him but the answer was "I can't silly, I am your other end".

ddanbe:

Time travel? What if you go back in time and killed your father or mother or both, when they were 10 years old?

Read All You Zombies Every single person in the short story is the same person - she started out as a teen who was seduced by an older man, became pregnant, her child was stolen, she had a sex change and became a writer using the pseudonym of "unwed mother". The bartender at his local hangout sent him into a time machine back into the past where he seduced himself (and so on - probably the single best time travel story ever told).

vmanes: 4th dimension, time travel....they give me headaches!

I read a time travel novel years ago that started with the point of view of someone being rescued and ended with that same point of view being the rescuer - my head hurt for weeks. Then I read "All You Zombies" and nearly had a migraine.

EP: of course I did, sigh. Look here.

Here is a referral to 77 'interesting' kybrds, including the wrist one - I liked #1, #11, maybe 14&15, #42, #46?, #57 could be interesting, #77 is just too vegan.

There is an interesting twist on the Flatland named "the Planiverse" - Flatland was a 2d world seen from above; Planiverse is 2d world seen from the side (ie a computer screen).

Time is not a dimension it is a coordinate; there is a 4th dimension and it is the space occupied by a hypercube,hypersphere, and so on. The mathematics of lower dimension space has some interesting 'tiling' properties - I especially like Kellor's Conjecture that state that tiling an N-dimensional space with N-dimensional hypercubes of equal sides yield an arangement in which at least 2 hypercubes have an entire (N-1)-dimensional "side" in common.

It has been proven true in dimensions 6 or less and false in dimensions 8, 10, and 12.

How useful you find the laser keyboard might depend on how you learned to type. I learned on a manual typewriter where there was almost an inch of play while the key lifted the impact hammer to strike the page - the feedback is important to me. I worked with a guy who learned on a computer keyboard and he would be perfect for the laser kybrd. Hmmm, as I type this I realize how important alignment is - I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you would waste a lot of time making sure you are hitting the correct keys. I would say if you are a touch typist, it won't work but if you normally monitor your fingers then it would be worth a shot.

I have always been interested int this Keyboard

The book "Stank On Zanzibar" starts with (among other very VERY weird shit) the human race, standing shoulder to should, could fit on Zanzibar and ends with ... a list of deaths then "Despite the foregoing, the human race by tens of thousands would be knee deep in the water around Zanzibar"

Window glass is made by floating molten glass on molten tin.

Glass is vitrious ie. an amorpheus solid that softens as heat is applied until gravity is able to affect its shape.

It is theorized that glass will also melt at temperatures near zero k

I just went all nostalgic and listened to Frank Zappa "Trouble Every Day"

The baby sitter showed up for the evening watching the couples grandfather. They went over all the details with the sitter, said goodbye to their grandfather and went out to dinner. So the babysitter was watching TV with GF who was sitting in the middle of the couch all stiff and proper. Suddenly, GF started to lean to the left so the babysitter propped him up with some pillows. Some time passed and GF started to lean to the right so the babysitter got some more pillow and propped him up on the right. They watched tv for a couple hours when the couple came home; they paid the babysitter and sat down the GF and asked him how the evening was. He replied that all in all it was a pretty good evening but the babysitter wouldn't let him fart.

borborygmi - it just roils off the tongue

Sort of interesting tidbit about Scientology is that they have branch called SeaOrg; in order to join SeaOrg, you sign a pretty long contract; one of the items on the contract is that you agree to work for SeaOrg for one billion years. I am trying to imagine what someone would be thinking if they signed such a contract and what someone was thinking when they wrote the contract.

I just got the stainless steel top for my workbench - my hot glass workbench is now ready to go. While I was in the shop where they manufactured the top, I saw that they had copper - so pretty, I think I will have some shelves and storage pockets made out of copper (dang, I hope it does not look too garish!)

What word is pronounced the same after you remove 4 letters?