There's a growing trend around here for newspapers to offer various book collections, probably to try to counteract their plummeting sales or something. Under slogans having to do with investing in one's culture and stuff, they're offering a new book each week for a relatively small price, and you're encouraged to buy them all to own the complete collection. While not bad in itself, this affair gets funny when the competition gets tough and the companies start getting really creative with their advertising. For instance, one collection is currently advertised along these lines: [display frog] For those who read, this is a future prince. For the others, it's just a frog. Yeah, pretty original, until they get to this week's book: The Marquis de Sade. WTF.
On a totally different thread, I've been wanting for a very long time to comment on dr. Michio Kaku's pet show Sci-Fi Science, which I also find very unfortunate. His take on the possible real-world implementation of various sci-fi memes is sometimes plausible, at few times interesting, at many times outrageous, and the show itself is worth watching if you're otherwise terribly bored. I personally liked him much more when he was making brief appearences in various science shows than as the star in his own project. On to the point:
1. About one in three 'problems' has negative matter as a solution. Enough with the negative matter that falls upwards, it's purely theoretical, there are some clues as to its possible existance, but for now it's pure speculation.
2. Let's make a sci-fi-style force field/shield, only it's not a force field it's a matter+laser shield. Reasonable, until the enemy spaceship attacks you with lasers, which your carbon-nanotube-or-whatever-future-material shield can't supposedly withstand. His idea - coat it with "photocromatic materials", which change color in response to light exposure, just like those adaptive sunglasses. Those are supposed to absorb the laser. Why on Earth would he use photocromatic materials instead of a mirror or nothing is beyond me. The energy absorbed by the shield with or without said materials is basically the same. It either melts or it doesn't. Maybe it absorbs more so that the laser doesn't pass through the shield and on to the ship? Who knows. That doesn't solve the shield melting problem though. It just looks like a half-baked hack with a lot of buzztech.
3. He suggests that teleportation might work by digitising a human, memories included, sending the data along a series of laser beams (x-ray laser beams IIRC, for the added coolness and information density) and reconstructing the human at the destination. He openly admits to this resulting in two identical humans, memories and personality included, but states that we've got enough time to work the kinks out of this problem. I find this "brute force" approach questionable and I've got a big problem with it. Would you like to be killed at point A after being copied to point B? There's got to be a more elegant solution. Even if it were possible to clone me with little error and come up with an identical self-aware being, the two of us would be disconnected. The new mind would be a different mind. Sure, to my friends I might look the same and they might never notice, but I sincerely doubt that what I call "me" would be the same. Kill the first body and the second would surely function OK as a new person with my exact same traits, but I strongly doubt that I'll awake inside it as if nothing happened.
And the list goes on.
There are of course the cool solutions such as the self-reconfigurable robot, but many of them are, as I said, unfortunate.
Some might label me pathetic for picking on a low-budget pop-sci entertainment show, but there's a deeper thought here. Some time ago being a geek was something to be proud of, as geeks could display high levels of skill and competence, and in a larger sense, a greater understanding of the world. Now there's a new breed of geek, the sci-fi/fantasy game geek, who also takes great pride in their passion but often times lacks the high levels of practical skills and only displays a great understanding of some fantasy world. It can of course be argued that this projects positively into the real world, but generally the fiction geek combines all the disadvantages of being a geek with none of the advanges of being a geek. Everyone who watched Sci-Fi Science would agree with me.
After all, some people watch a movie or read a book and enjoy it as such, some find parallels with human society, some dream of being princesses and frog-princes, and some dream of being Jedi wielding extendable porous ceramic lightsabres with nuclear batteries, adamantium cooling fans and superconducting plasma confinement magnets. Or something like that. There's nothing wrong with either case, and of course there's always money to be made.
Showing posts with label sarcasm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sarcasm. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
aliens
Just about every popsci show I've seen in the last few years favors the idea of aliens being everywhere. I'm sick and tired of hearing "reputable scientists" utter the stereotypical sentencte: "The Universe is probably teeming with life". Just because a lot of extrasolar planets have been found lately and just because alcohol's been found in deep space (along with other organic chemicals such as aminoacids) and just because bacteria can live everywhere on Earth doesn't mean that life just appears everywhere there's water and heat. And then becomes intelligent. A few decades ago you didn't see this almost-consensus that aliens must exist with high probability. Now everyone's being disgustingly optimistic about "not being alone in the Universe".
There are a lot of problems with the whole extraterrestrial life issue.
First, you can't do statistics on a sample of one. Therefore, you can't scientifically predict anything about life elsewhere. If we were to find life on Mars or Jupiter's moons or wherever, we'd have a sample of 2, which would still be insufficient, but a lot better than 1. To be pedantic, we don't even have a clear, universal definition of life, or a clear method to identify it; we can only speculate that if it existed, it'd be similar to what we see on Earth because the physics and chemistry are the same everywhere.
Second, we are very limited in our capabilities to detect extraterrestrial life. Radio searches have so far yielded nothing and I personally doubt they ever will, because radio "leakeage" from aliens would be too weak to be detectable. The whole "our TV shows have already reached dozens of stars" is bullshit, the signals are too weak to be detectable. A 100 kilowatt radio source on Earth would shine just about 10^-24 watts of power on a generous alien antenna (one square kilometer) placed not very far away (10 light years), for the same reason that distant stars appear so dim to us. If that antenna were connected to an incredibly sensitive receiver, say cooled to a tenth of a degree above absolute zero, the electronic noise due to thermal motion would still be 1000 times stronger. They could probably barely receive Morse code, which takes a lot less bandwith than human speech. Ramp up the distance to 100 light years and the signal gets 100 more times weaker. So in order for the aliens to hear us, either they'd have to have incredibly advanced receiver technology, or our beam would have to be focused and directed towards them. We're faced with the same problem when trying to detect alien radio signals. We could probably detect a signal if it was being intentionally broadcast, but we haven't yet. This raises another problem: how many times, and for how long, did we transmit such signals into space? Not that many, not that long. Maybe the aliens are doing likewise.
What other means of detection could we use? Take artificial lighting for instance. City lights on Earth can be seen from space, and they have a very distinct spectral signature. Aliens would possibly also use artificial lighting at night, but light has the same problem as radio signals. Maybe if we had a telescope powerful enough to see planets around other stars, we'd be able to detect these hypothetical lights. At least we'd know what to look for, given that aliens would probably see in the same frequency range as we do, because their eyes or whatever they have would adapt to the spectrum of their star, which would be similar to ours. If we watched the planet from the right angle, we could possibly even see these lights turning on in the evening and off in the morning. The total power coming out of our lights is much bigger than the power from our radio transmitters, so things might be the same on their planet. Light is also easier to detect than decoding radio signals.
Another thing that comes to mind are nuclear explosions. Any sufficiently developed aliens would do them, even if just for testing. They would be strong enough to be detectable, but did we ever see any sudden flash of light near a star? Did we ever look for one? I have no idea.
Finally, contrary to what some may think, there's not a shred of physical evidence that aliens have ever visited us. That might be due to the difficulty of interstellar travel, but nonetheless it hasn't happened.
So yeah, even if aliens exist, they can't get to us and we can't get to them. Relativity, which is pretty much proven to model this world correctly, while not forbidding faster-than-light travel, predicts that such travel would result in grandfather paradoxes and such. We also can't talk to them, because information, however we send it, radio, lasers, X-rays, whatever, only travels so fast. Maybe in a "parallel reality" we could, but not in this one. So there. We are alone.
There are a lot of problems with the whole extraterrestrial life issue.
First, you can't do statistics on a sample of one. Therefore, you can't scientifically predict anything about life elsewhere. If we were to find life on Mars or Jupiter's moons or wherever, we'd have a sample of 2, which would still be insufficient, but a lot better than 1. To be pedantic, we don't even have a clear, universal definition of life, or a clear method to identify it; we can only speculate that if it existed, it'd be similar to what we see on Earth because the physics and chemistry are the same everywhere.
Second, we are very limited in our capabilities to detect extraterrestrial life. Radio searches have so far yielded nothing and I personally doubt they ever will, because radio "leakeage" from aliens would be too weak to be detectable. The whole "our TV shows have already reached dozens of stars" is bullshit, the signals are too weak to be detectable. A 100 kilowatt radio source on Earth would shine just about 10^-24 watts of power on a generous alien antenna (one square kilometer) placed not very far away (10 light years), for the same reason that distant stars appear so dim to us. If that antenna were connected to an incredibly sensitive receiver, say cooled to a tenth of a degree above absolute zero, the electronic noise due to thermal motion would still be 1000 times stronger. They could probably barely receive Morse code, which takes a lot less bandwith than human speech. Ramp up the distance to 100 light years and the signal gets 100 more times weaker. So in order for the aliens to hear us, either they'd have to have incredibly advanced receiver technology, or our beam would have to be focused and directed towards them. We're faced with the same problem when trying to detect alien radio signals. We could probably detect a signal if it was being intentionally broadcast, but we haven't yet. This raises another problem: how many times, and for how long, did we transmit such signals into space? Not that many, not that long. Maybe the aliens are doing likewise.
What other means of detection could we use? Take artificial lighting for instance. City lights on Earth can be seen from space, and they have a very distinct spectral signature. Aliens would possibly also use artificial lighting at night, but light has the same problem as radio signals. Maybe if we had a telescope powerful enough to see planets around other stars, we'd be able to detect these hypothetical lights. At least we'd know what to look for, given that aliens would probably see in the same frequency range as we do, because their eyes or whatever they have would adapt to the spectrum of their star, which would be similar to ours. If we watched the planet from the right angle, we could possibly even see these lights turning on in the evening and off in the morning. The total power coming out of our lights is much bigger than the power from our radio transmitters, so things might be the same on their planet. Light is also easier to detect than decoding radio signals.
Another thing that comes to mind are nuclear explosions. Any sufficiently developed aliens would do them, even if just for testing. They would be strong enough to be detectable, but did we ever see any sudden flash of light near a star? Did we ever look for one? I have no idea.
Finally, contrary to what some may think, there's not a shred of physical evidence that aliens have ever visited us. That might be due to the difficulty of interstellar travel, but nonetheless it hasn't happened.
So yeah, even if aliens exist, they can't get to us and we can't get to them. Relativity, which is pretty much proven to model this world correctly, while not forbidding faster-than-light travel, predicts that such travel would result in grandfather paradoxes and such. We also can't talk to them, because information, however we send it, radio, lasers, X-rays, whatever, only travels so fast. Maybe in a "parallel reality" we could, but not in this one. So there. We are alone.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
power
Are you deeply concerned with pollution, global warming, nuke accidents and all the shit that comes with modern, power-hungry technology? Are you thinking green, feeling green, living green? Caring about the environment? Celebrating Earth Hour by switching off the lights and burning stuff? Or are you just concerned with your electricity bill, netbook battery, or living in Japan where the power grid's flaky after the quake?
Well, then use a goddamn low-power web browser while you surf for pr0n!
Well, then use a goddamn low-power web browser while you surf for pr0n!
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
research 2
Look on the fourth page in this pdf, which is published in a scientific journal by someone who's a scientific doctor. Look at Figure 3. Yo dawg, I heard you like screenshots so I put a screenshot in your screenshot so you can copy while you paste!
Friday, August 13, 2010
research
Hey look, this researcher working with both CERN and Fermilab writes that the protons in my ass might contain higher generation quarks. (do search the article for "ass"). I always thought life was made up of ups and downs... but I'm now feeling strangely charmed.
Friday, April 30, 2010
fail
Recently the ubuntu guys decided to move the buttons to the left of the window and eliminate the icon, like so:
Worst idea ever. When I browse in a maximized browser or when I keep my Pidgin on the right edge of the screen it seems like the window is falling off into the void, because the space on the top-right corner is so empty.
Fortunately, this being an open system, you can change this, but not from some user-friendly application like the theme selector (where by the way, the sample window decorations are still drawn the classic way -- double fail), no, you have to use the gconf-editor, a kind of registry editor for Linux (ugh) and modify the button_layout under apps/metacity/general:
Worst idea ever. When I browse in a maximized browser or when I keep my Pidgin on the right edge of the screen it seems like the window is falling off into the void, because the space on the top-right corner is so empty.Fortunately, this being an open system, you can change this, but not from some user-friendly application like the theme selector (where by the way, the sample window decorations are still drawn the classic way -- double fail), no, you have to use the gconf-editor, a kind of registry editor for Linux (ugh) and modify the button_layout under apps/metacity/general:
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
ads
I was browsing the Web for Information. There it was, the front page. An annoyingly blinking red-on-green banner was announcing that I am the 999999th visitor and it was congratulating me. I would've smiled if it weren't blinking red-green/green-red. Of course I couldn't have been the 1e6-1th visitor because (a) that's too improbable and (b) that site claims to have one million visitors, yeah right! So I scroll down, trying to ignore the ad, and I see this other banner, a vertical one this time. This one is blinking red/blue. It's saying that I'm the 10000th visitor, but this time, "this is no joke!". This time I laugh. At least this number was plausible, visitor-count-wise. Of course it would've been much cooler to be the 999999th visitor because (a) the number is almost 100 times bigger and (b) it's not one million, it's one million minus one (that's being creative!). But sadly, the lesser number was more probable, and besides, that wasn't a joke. Deciding that I had to settle for ten thousand, I scroll down and laugh again when another red-green/green-red banner (this time neither horizontal nor vertical, but squareish) informs me that I'm the 999999th visitor after all! OK, now I'm confused.
I fire up a new browser but this time under the guest user so that my files would stand a lesser chance of being trashed by malware. Wow, now I'm suddenly the 12796869939th visitor! That site must have a lot of traffic, given that I was at most the 999999th about 10 minutes ago. The "this is no joke" banner disagrees by a much smaller percentage this time, indicating 12769870797. The square one says 12796871217, but there's a twist: I'm the 12796bla-blath visitor to see "this lucky banner", so maybe there are other sites showing the same banner and there goes my "not enough visitors visiting this crap" argument down the toilet. The small difference could even be explained by the different times my browser queried the ad server for the three banners while loading the crap. [must be a very big server.] I hit Refresh and lo and behold, I'm either the 999999th or the 10000th visitor again. This clearly can't be, because I already visited the site before as both the 999999th and the 10000th, under a different identity.
So I hold my breath and click the first banner.
It asks for my name, address, and e-mail address. There you go. Move along, nothing to see here, and quit clicking stupid adverts and quit encouraging spammers by opening their e-mails and clicking on their links and buying their cockpills, because if you encourage spammers and spammers send me spam, then you're indirectly to blame. The fuck!
I fire up a new browser but this time under the guest user so that my files would stand a lesser chance of being trashed by malware. Wow, now I'm suddenly the 12796869939th visitor! That site must have a lot of traffic, given that I was at most the 999999th about 10 minutes ago. The "this is no joke" banner disagrees by a much smaller percentage this time, indicating 12769870797. The square one says 12796871217, but there's a twist: I'm the 12796bla-blath visitor to see "this lucky banner", so maybe there are other sites showing the same banner and there goes my "not enough visitors visiting this crap" argument down the toilet. The small difference could even be explained by the different times my browser queried the ad server for the three banners while loading the crap. [must be a very big server.] I hit Refresh and lo and behold, I'm either the 999999th or the 10000th visitor again. This clearly can't be, because I already visited the site before as both the 999999th and the 10000th, under a different identity.
So I hold my breath and click the first banner.
It asks for my name, address, and e-mail address. There you go. Move along, nothing to see here, and quit clicking stupid adverts and quit encouraging spammers by opening their e-mails and clicking on their links and buying their cockpills, because if you encourage spammers and spammers send me spam, then you're indirectly to blame. The fuck!
Sunday, March 29, 2009
copyright
Came up with this while drinking with other computer engineers. Steps to become a rich lardass:
1. Write computer malware (virus, internet worm, whatever, can be mostly harmless)
2. Let it spread
3. Go public
4. Spend zero to 6 months in jail or do community service or pay a small fine or something
5. Sue antivirus companies for copyright infringement because of your virus signature that they include in their product which they distribute without your written permission
6. Collect $5 per antivirus copy/update distributed
Then, foreach virus_writer joe in earth.people {the above}
And suddenly you can't have antiviruses anymore. Dude, sick, what the fuck.
1. Write computer malware (virus, internet worm, whatever, can be mostly harmless)
2. Let it spread
3. Go public
4. Spend zero to 6 months in jail or do community service or pay a small fine or something
5. Sue antivirus companies for copyright infringement because of your virus signature that they include in their product which they distribute without your written permission
6. Collect $5 per antivirus copy/update distributed
Then, foreach virus_writer joe in earth.people {the above}
And suddenly you can't have antiviruses anymore. Dude, sick, what the fuck.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
work
Today I extended my "to do" note window 64 pixels downwards in order to prevent scrolling the "to do" list. It can grow 448 more pixels before reaching screen height. Depending on whether the speed at which the tasks are executed is influenced by the length of the "to do" list, or by the entries' age, the screen is predicted to fill up somewhere around September or October. I guess there is little or no influence, so I better plan on buying a higher resolution display. Put that on the "to do" list.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
testicles
A very funny piece of news caught my attention today. Don't you just like the part with the North and the South? :D Apparently some Florida senator thinks truck nuts are offensive and must be banned. WTF? Not only that, but the guy owns a gun shop! :)) So basically, the way I see it, is: killing people is not obscene, but displaying a pair of fake animal testicles is. Way to go dude, way to go. See my previous post about some people having zero respect for life. Of course, people are hypocrites, and morality is just a word. ("Stop the world... ... Peace is just a word...") I guess to some people it is moral and ethical to own and sell guns, but it is unethical to well, jack off to porn, kiss in public, or stick some plastic balls on your truck.
Here in Romania most people are Christian Orthodox, meaning we start celebrating Easter this night. One of the bigger TV establishments here is running an entertainment show intended as a fund raiser to help some sick kids who need a ton of cash to well... live. You dial a number and donate $$$ if you like the stars' performance. The $$$ go to some kids who need surgery. One of the kids needs a treatment based on stem cells if they are to well, live. Of course, one can't treat people with stem cells in the 'civilized' western world anymore, because it's illegal. They have to do it in China. Why? Because some people think they have the moral authority to decide who lives and who doesn't. Because they don't necessarily value life, but they have to appease the vocal fanatic hypocrites who don't know shit about anything but feel they have the answer to life, the universe and everything else in some book or text or judgment or something. Whatever. Go on preaching damnation, salvation, environment, cloning, genetic engineering, global warming and nuckular \/\/ar while I go eat a sandwich or something.
Here in Romania most people are Christian Orthodox, meaning we start celebrating Easter this night. One of the bigger TV establishments here is running an entertainment show intended as a fund raiser to help some sick kids who need a ton of cash to well... live. You dial a number and donate $$$ if you like the stars' performance. The $$$ go to some kids who need surgery. One of the kids needs a treatment based on stem cells if they are to well, live. Of course, one can't treat people with stem cells in the 'civilized' western world anymore, because it's illegal. They have to do it in China. Why? Because some people think they have the moral authority to decide who lives and who doesn't. Because they don't necessarily value life, but they have to appease the vocal fanatic hypocrites who don't know shit about anything but feel they have the answer to life, the universe and everything else in some book or text or judgment or something. Whatever. Go on preaching damnation, salvation, environment, cloning, genetic engineering, global warming and nuckular \/\/ar while I go eat a sandwich or something.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
discrimination
Once I read some label/advertisment/whatever that had an intersting notice: "Foobzbar is an affirmative action / equal opportunity employer." At the time, I viewed that as a very positive thing and discussed it with people: look, this is civilized. Foobzbar is (at least in writing) a modern company. They specifically state they don't discriminate. Bla-bla. Then I learned what affirmative action really means :) When I first read the notice, I thought it had something to do with you getting promoted based on your merits. Man, was I fucking wrong. As can be read in the Wikipedia article, it's nothing but positive discrimination, and in many countries it's unlawful. Yes. Illegal. Like all kinds of discrimination should be. I don't even find any merit in commenting any further.
I will however comment on the current events in Romania and Italy. It seems some Romanian guy went to Italy (a lot go there to work an pay taxes, and a few go there to steal or beg). The guy allegedly robbed a woman, beat her up and raped her. She later died. Of course the press, being the shitpresser that it is, erupted in anger towards all Romanians, as if some guy committing a crime makes me a criminal too. Then it seems the woman wasn't actually raped, just violently robbed. So all the posters put up by extremists with emotional crap like "how can you look a raped woman in the eyes" and bloody crying faces were left without merit. Whatever. Discussions, talk shows, prime ministers meeting, shit for the press to feed on. I don't even care. I went to Italy once, and well, big deal. I'm never stepping there again. I mean, I heard some guys speaking Italian in the subway. Should I have started yelling "Booo, mafiozzi! Pizza spaghetti! Francesco Pazzi!" ? No. But Romanians are now genuinely afraid to speak Romanian in Italy for fear of being assaulted.
This being said, here is my short essay on why I don't like France but France is OK, but Italy sucks.
There's a flash film that shows why. I've last seen it some good years ago, so I had to google for the link. I wanted to search for "italy eu flash". Oddly enough, after typing f I got a suggestion for just that, and the first hit had the film I was looking for :D
But I have to add some stuff.
1) I visited some famous museums there, and most of the statues had their penises chopped off. Ouch. How very Latin, I should say.
2) The Pope lives there. The Pope is anti-progress, anti-freedom, anti-sex-ed, anti-everything and they should put a rabbit in his holy place. Italy gave the Pope his seat back (a whole state!) in the early 20th century (fuck Roman numerals), plus some money, when they could have chosen not to do that. They should have told him to respect their authority and shut up. What? You want a state? Ha-ha. No. What do you mean you had it before? So? The Dacians had their state untill we conquered them in the 1st century when we were called Romans. And now that the Roman Empire has fallen apart they're called Romanians, otherwise they'd still be under out authority. No. You don't get your state, beat it.
3) The Roman Inquisition
4) The Roman Empire
5) Electricity plugs :)
Look. Look at this map. Do you see? Do you SEE? :)
Roughly above the equator is the civiliz-pardon me, relevant world. Well, count Australia in too. So, what do you see? You see America in purple and Europe + Russia in green. Those are the two main standards for electricity plugs. Let's analyse. I belong to the green majority, so I can safely say I have "normal" plugs :) Like the one currently on top-left of the Wikipedia article. America is America, they have their own standard, it's OK. Who's gonna argue :) Japan uses the same type apparently, so that makes it even more OK. Of course, one can always use two stripped wires, two matches and a 100-250V AC/DC-to-DC universal supply and plug into every plug in the world, but that's dangerous and maybe illegal. There are all sorts of adapters, but I'll intentionally ignore that due to the fact that man, I forgot it at home! So this discussion is perfectly warranted :) So there's the American plug, and the "normal" Russian plug. Then there's the British plug which is well, British. That's also OK. I mean, they have the pound instead of the euro, they have a queen, they're British :) They have every right to be particular about their heritage, language, lifestyle, weather, and electrical plugs. It's perfectly acceptable, because they're British and London, unlike Rome, is a really cool city. And then there's Italy, where plugs have three pins and don't fit in the rest of European sockets. However, some European plugs do fit into Italian sockets ha-ha :) So when you, the fascist Italian, travel abroad, your plugs won't fit. They won't fit anywhere else in the world. That's because they're Italian. Ha-haa! That's what you get for being Italian, loser. Think twice before discriminating against my people, asshole.
Peace brothers.
I will however comment on the current events in Romania and Italy. It seems some Romanian guy went to Italy (a lot go there to work an pay taxes, and a few go there to steal or beg). The guy allegedly robbed a woman, beat her up and raped her. She later died. Of course the press, being the shitpresser that it is, erupted in anger towards all Romanians, as if some guy committing a crime makes me a criminal too. Then it seems the woman wasn't actually raped, just violently robbed. So all the posters put up by extremists with emotional crap like "how can you look a raped woman in the eyes" and bloody crying faces were left without merit. Whatever. Discussions, talk shows, prime ministers meeting, shit for the press to feed on. I don't even care. I went to Italy once, and well, big deal. I'm never stepping there again. I mean, I heard some guys speaking Italian in the subway. Should I have started yelling "Booo, mafiozzi! Pizza spaghetti! Francesco Pazzi!" ? No. But Romanians are now genuinely afraid to speak Romanian in Italy for fear of being assaulted.
This being said, here is my short essay on why I don't like France but France is OK, but Italy sucks.
There's a flash film that shows why. I've last seen it some good years ago, so I had to google for the link. I wanted to search for "italy eu flash". Oddly enough, after typing f I got a suggestion for just that, and the first hit had the film I was looking for :D
But I have to add some stuff.
1) I visited some famous museums there, and most of the statues had their penises chopped off. Ouch. How very Latin, I should say.
2) The Pope lives there. The Pope is anti-progress, anti-freedom, anti-sex-ed, anti-everything and they should put a rabbit in his holy place. Italy gave the Pope his seat back (a whole state!) in the early 20th century (fuck Roman numerals), plus some money, when they could have chosen not to do that. They should have told him to respect their authority and shut up. What? You want a state? Ha-ha. No. What do you mean you had it before? So? The Dacians had their state untill we conquered them in the 1st century when we were called Romans. And now that the Roman Empire has fallen apart they're called Romanians, otherwise they'd still be under out authority. No. You don't get your state, beat it.
3) The Roman Inquisition
4) The Roman Empire
5) Electricity plugs :)
Look. Look at this map. Do you see? Do you SEE? :)
Roughly above the equator is the civiliz-pardon me, relevant world. Well, count Australia in too. So, what do you see? You see America in purple and Europe + Russia in green. Those are the two main standards for electricity plugs. Let's analyse. I belong to the green majority, so I can safely say I have "normal" plugs :) Like the one currently on top-left of the Wikipedia article. America is America, they have their own standard, it's OK. Who's gonna argue :) Japan uses the same type apparently, so that makes it even more OK. Of course, one can always use two stripped wires, two matches and a 100-250V AC/DC-to-DC universal supply and plug into every plug in the world, but that's dangerous and maybe illegal. There are all sorts of adapters, but I'll intentionally ignore that due to the fact that man, I forgot it at home! So this discussion is perfectly warranted :) So there's the American plug, and the "normal" Russian plug. Then there's the British plug which is well, British. That's also OK. I mean, they have the pound instead of the euro, they have a queen, they're British :) They have every right to be particular about their heritage, language, lifestyle, weather, and electrical plugs. It's perfectly acceptable, because they're British and London, unlike Rome, is a really cool city. And then there's Italy, where plugs have three pins and don't fit in the rest of European sockets. However, some European plugs do fit into Italian sockets ha-ha :) So when you, the fascist Italian, travel abroad, your plugs won't fit. They won't fit anywhere else in the world. That's because they're Italian. Ha-haa! That's what you get for being Italian, loser. Think twice before discriminating against my people, asshole.
Peace brothers.
podding
How seriously can you take a university that teaches classes on iPods? Really! :D I mean, ... listen to this: "... for the first time allows you to create your own auditory world bla bla" What? I mean doh. This is what you're teaching university students? I mean, I would feel intelectually insulted if someone attempted to lecture something like that to me. Well, actually I did a couple of times, but that's another story. Dude! What kind of university students are those who can't figure out for themselves that a music player coupled with a digital music library/store allows you to create your own auditory world? It's silly to have a course about that, and it's discrediting to the university, at least in my view. But then again, I guess they have a lot of courses on even more trivial subjects. So it's no wonder that a lot of people who claim to be experts in some field actually have little idea of what they're doing. Take the music "industry" for instance. When Steve Jobs launched the iPod and iTunes, he had to work hard to convince them to allow music to be bought off the Internet. Then he had to work even harder to convince them to allow the purchase of individual songs rather than full albums. The man knew what he was doing, and the enormous commercial success of his idea is proof of that. But people who counted and who should have really known better didn't initially approve of his idea, and that was plain stupid. I mean, here is this huge economy ruled by people who we're supposed to credit for its functioning, right? We should trust that they know what they're doing, that they do everything to ensure that everything goes well. Hell, this is so stupid. One day a man comes and states the plain obvious -- you're doing it all wrong! This is how it should be done! And it works, and the numbers speak for themselves. But it took someone like Jobs to actually implement such an idea, not because it hadn't been thought of before, but because he had the necessary charisma and influence. And one might think that "artists" (I somehow hate that word in its modern meaning) should be, well, you know, smart people. They should feel the world around them, they should be aware of their fans' opinions and feelings. But no, you had big names saying that no, albums are "thematic" and shit, and they should be sold as a whole, not broken up into songs. Why? Probably because the record house said so, and that's degrading to an artist's status. Everybody knows that people like to select the songs they listen to and build playlists and shit. It's been done that way for a long, long time, ages before the iPod, with MP3s. But some are unwilling to acknowledge that. I mean, people buy CDs, the companies get their money, then they vocally bash illegal downloads (which probably got the buyer to buy the CD in the first place), and it kind of works, so why actually encourage legal downloads? Why offer a service that actually fits like a glove over what the users actually want? I mean, if the billions are pouring in, then fuck the consumers, as long as they consume. Right.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
heartless
Today I feel unusually dark, cynical, unemphatic, insensitive, uncaring, angry, hateful, cruel, heartless. Heartless is a doubly inappropriate term in this case, as a) the heart is the source of emotion, just like the brain serves in cooling the body, and b) I am fully capable of feeling disgust, loathing, aversion, hate, as well as pleasure in others' suffering.
For example, I was reading about some big company testing their cosmetic products on animals. Well, I would feel a little bit safer if a product I'm using had been tested on something similar to my skin. Cruel and unethical to do that on rats or cute fuzzy rabbits, which are classified as pests? I agree. It would be ethical to test them on humans, both towards the animals and towards the end-users, who can be assured of a more reliable test. To the question of which humans should the products be tested on, I can only answer by pointing towards the ones who fanatically campaign for this idea that I fully endorse.
For example, I was reading about some big company testing their cosmetic products on animals. Well, I would feel a little bit safer if a product I'm using had been tested on something similar to my skin. Cruel and unethical to do that on rats or cute fuzzy rabbits, which are classified as pests? I agree. It would be ethical to test them on humans, both towards the animals and towards the end-users, who can be assured of a more reliable test. To the question of which humans should the products be tested on, I can only answer by pointing towards the ones who fanatically campaign for this idea that I fully endorse.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
dim prospects
Fluorescent lamps use a gas discharge to generate light, unlike incandescent bulbs that just heat up a filament. The discharge is initiated by a high-voltage pulse generated by the ballast coil in combination with the starter. The ballast coil also controls the power going into the discharge, because gas discharges have negative differential resistance and like to draw very large currents if allowed. Traditional fluorescent lamps also have filaments (yeah, incandescent filaments), which need to heat up to allow electron emission which facilitates the discharge. New 'compact' lamps don't have ballasts, starters or filaments, but rather a high-frequency driver circuit. What all this leads to is that fluorescent lights are not dimmable with the usual 'dimmer switches' that chop the first part of each period of the input voltage waveform to a larger or smaller extent according to the dim setting.
I was looking ways to dim fluorescent lights.
And I found this while googling (using Google Search to find info on the interwebs):
"
[damned be copy-paste-with-formatting]
I have heard that there is mercury in Compact fluorescent bulbs.
"
No shit, have you really? :)
Of course there's fucking mercury in all fluorescent lamps, and of course it's toxic :) You thought that just because of all the hype around fluorescents being more power efficient than incandescents (yeah, they really are), they would be environmentally-friendly too?
I was looking ways to dim fluorescent lights.
And I found this while googling (using Google Search to find info on the interwebs):
"
[damned be copy-paste-with-formatting]
I have heard that there is mercury in Compact fluorescent bulbs.
"
No shit, have you really? :)
Of course there's fucking mercury in all fluorescent lamps, and of course it's toxic :) You thought that just because of all the hype around fluorescents being more power efficient than incandescents (yeah, they really are), they would be environmentally-friendly too?
Sunday, September 2, 2007
grandiose bullshit medley
This is going to be a masterpiece of crap.
It all started today around 4:30 am when I was watching Zone Reality. I'm starting to like channels like Zone Reality more and more each day, in contrast to some channels I grew up with like Discovery. I learned English mostly by watching TV. Cartoon Network and Discovery. Now that cartoons are translated and spoken in Romanian, I don't watch them anymore. I can't imagine a bigger step to dumbing down the infant population than translating cartoons to Romanian and dubbing them over. I --- learned --- English --- from --- cartoons - you-fucking-idiots. But of course, it's cooler to learn it from multi-k$ courses. It's not cool when a high-school student argues with his teacher over the existance of the word "informatics". On the other hand, English words are penetrating common Romanian in a very annoying fashion. I mean, we have native words for 'job', 'rating', 'poll', to 'apply' for something, and so on. But no, we don't use them anymore. 'Cause it's not k00l, you know, not modern, not trendy. But people that have some kind of authority and influence with the masses don't concentrate on this. No, they dub over Western cartoons so that in the end we don't know how to speak neither proper Romanian, nor proper English. We're losing both our culture, and a proper coverage of Western culture. We're defacing our own language AND getting less and less proficient with international languages such as English. Which I learned from cartoons and perfected with the help of some good teachers. And why all this? So that some incompetent translators and lousy actors can get paid for it. Ok, maybe they're not all incompetent and lousy, but when someone says "about 10 miles" and you translate "about 16.1 kilometers", you can be called anything but competent. (For example.) Happens everytime with movies. At least they are only subtitled, for the moment. There are bigger xenophobes out there who dub even these over. How stupid need you be to dub a movie over? Are your viewers so illiterate / incapable of distributed attention to just read the subtitles? Sheesh. On the up side, my cable company now broadcasts cartoons in two languages and my tv tuner can decode both. So now I can watch cartoons like they were created. With all the untranslateable language puns and twists in place. But most TVs don't have that feature, so the vast majority of children are deprived of the benefit of learning the most important international language, the language of the Internet, in a natural fashion. Instead, they hear their parents 'apply' for a 'job' that will bring them some more 'cash', without understanding where those damned words come from. It's a double-fucking-paradox. It seems that everything was better when I was younger and that everything is getting worse by the minute. I learned a lot of stuff from Discovery as a child. Now I only see cars, muscle cars, hot rods, cars, some more cars, a little more cars, then some remote-controlled cars, and cars. And the 104th re-run of How It's Made episode 5 on both Discovery and Discovery Science at the same time. Oh, and Romanian commercials featuring female voices with over-emphasized bass and either skinny or dumbly-monotonous male voices. No wonder people download shows over the Internet. Oh well. At least I got to see a documentary about Death Row on Zone Reality. To be fair, I've seen similar ones on both Discovery and National Geographic. Bottom line is, in the U.S., the most 'democratic' and 'free' country in the world, more than 100 people were sentenced to death and then acquited following appeal, in the last 30 years. Well. Either some of those are criminals that were wrongly acquited and are now living among us^H^Hthem, or some of them were wrongly convicted in the first place, or some of the other thousands that had their sentence carried out were wrongly murdered by the state. Or all 3 choices. Why the fuck do I wear a Texas t-shirt? Because they have a town called Corpus Christi there? Fuck. No, because my mom gave it to me and it's nice, but hell. Dude. The State murders people. Probably. I have no direct evidence, I can't tell that for sure. But most probably, the state kills innocent people. What the fuck. That's wrong, dude! The death penalty should be abolished. And prison security increased, and more resources put into re-habilitation programs. But hell, what do I know. I know nothing. The state doesn't really care that much about the security of its citizens, or the rehabilitation of criminals, or the killing of innocent people. It cares about its image. It needs people to still find it acceptable and respect its authority so that the economy works as a whole and some_kind_of_average(people, mood) equals "everyone's happy". But the people that are unlucky enough not to afford good a good defence attorney, or who are otherwise unlucky, don't really count. Nor do the people that work at NASA doing leading-edge research, that are required to allow severe intrusion of their privacy for 'national security' reasons. Oh well. Maybe they will succeed with their lawsuit. But why the hell am I defending NASA? I mean, they blew up two shuttles and killed two crews even if they were warned about the severe problems they were having. I'm not defending them, in fact screw them, I'm defending human rights. Fuck it, not only does the Church / do the Churches try to control every aspect of everyone's sex life, now the state is questioning people about it. By the way, there's nothing in the U.S. constitution that prohibits the state from controlling its citizens' sexual behavior. Or so I understood, I'm no expert. All in all, until a few years ago it was illegal in many U.S. states for two people to engage in 'sodomy', 'actions against nature' or other vague words meant to refer anal or oral sex. In some cases it was between homosexual men, in other cases it extended to heterosexual couples as well. Around 2000-something these laws were finally overturned in some supreme court. Dude! In the third millenium and the 21st century (which BTW if you don't count years from zero and you don't because there were no computers and addressable memory then, starts in 2001 and not in 2000 like everyone said), people can't have anal sex in the United States of America. Cool. Read Wikipedia, then check with more 'reliable' sources if you don't believe me. Well. At least there's free speech. Kind of. For now. For instance, I don't know if I can dump all this putrid bullshit on a server located here. I probably can, because I hate inciting to racism, violence, underage sex or stuff like that and therefore I don't do that. On the other hand, I hate the Church(es) for example. They passed some law here that don't allow you to offend religions/churches/whatever anymore. There are laws like that in many 'civilized' places around the world, and ultimately, they're probably good. But I still hate religion and the churches that enforce it because, apart from their distorted vision on physics and biology, they are constantly trying to control people's sex lives. Dude! In Christianity I think it all starts from Mary. She supposedly gave birth to the Son of God without prior sexual intercourse with a male, which is of course the natural way of creating children. No, the Holy Spirit couldn't have entered a body created from human flesh through normal, God-created sex. It had to enter an unfertilized egg and fertilize it. Dude. Why? Because the Church says that sex is impure. It's dirty and it's a sin. By making Mary a virgin and also making her the mother of the Son of God in the stroies, the Church has a really strong argument against sex. I so fucking hate that. Ok, I fucking understand that when there were no doctors and no condoms, sexually transmitted diseases mandated that people have as few sex partners as possible in order to limit transmission. You couldn't teach people that, so the saints / enlightened dudes / whatever told it to them in a form they respected. And there are a lot of social reasons for which the religious dogmas and norms around the world are the way they are. So yes, religion has always had its good parts. And it still has. And we need a certain degree of stability in society. But it's the twenty-fucking-first century now and times have changed and some traditions need to die and religion needs an upgrade! Free Love! But no, I'm telling total bullshit here. A lot of dudes are trying to bring their own 'upgraded' religion and mostly all they've come up with is crap. No. Things are good just the way they are. Let them evolve. No. We are surrounded by crap. But hopefully I can say all this. I don't know. If it's not allowed, I don't care, I can delete it. I can even apologize. My mind will still be free. Hopefully. I could then probably disperse this stuff over some underground networks, but I'm afraid few people care about this so then I won't. I heard the news this morning: Chinese authorities launched some kind of 'virtual cops' that look like policemen and are embedded/overlaid in web pages and are clickable. With more and more computer scientists and hackers in the U.S. refraining from publishing cryptographic research for fear of the DMCA (even its name sounds horribly stupid), and with the possibility of limiting the cryptographic strength of Internet communication between private users by law, how much til the formerly free world becomes an Orwellian nightmare akin to a living dead machine with money instead of blood and brain-numbed human beings instead of cells? Will I need to go deep into the mountains to teach my children technology, for fear of being traced by Big Brother? I certainly hope not. I mean, scientists and hackers are doing reasearch in order to discover better protection algorithms, while crackers are cracking the weak algorithms unhindered and gaining profit from it. The former are prohibited by the DMCA to work on certain systems and topics, while the latter do it anyway because they don't go public, they don't write their names on scientific papers and publish them, they work underground. You could hypothetically define a "protection bit" and set it to "one" in a music file and write some software that doesn't allow you to copy it. No encryption no nothing. If someone writes a new software that simply ignores that bit, that's illegal. If someone publishes the location of that bit in the file so that anyone can set it to zero again and use the original software to copy the files, that's illegal. Well, actually it's probably not. That's an extreme example just to get the idea. There need to be "reasonable measures" in place, but they don't have to be strong or secure in any way. There's justice for you, sawing off its left hand and right foot. Oh, and just to complete the puzzle of the world falling apart around me, let's check this out. Some blokes at MIT made a system that transmits energy without wires. Oh wow. Now I can power my laptop without plugging in the power cord, I can get power wirelessly. Woooooooow. And it's called "WiTricity" Wooow that's so Coool. Big fucking stale bucket of crap. It's old technology, in fact it's more than a hundred years old and it was invented by TESLA, the same guy who invented the method used everywhere in the world to carry electrical energy from the power plant to the consumers! And it's based on the work of a lot of guys that did physics and maths and philosophy a hell of a fucking lot of years ago when people still thought that God was angry when lightning streaked across the sky. But Tesla was just a madman born a few hundred miles from where I live who did some weird stuff in his lab. He's not MIT, he doesn't do overrated Media and AI (childish people and stupid robots) and he doesn't market WiTricity. No, he's just smart and plays with resonant circuits. It took more than 100 years after the brilliant mad genius patented the stuff to "imagine a future in which wireless power is feasible". Hey, let me tell you something. There is no wired/wireful electricity. Electricity is fields. It lives in space-time. It needs no wires. It's wireless by nature. 'Electrical' energy flows around the wires, not through them. They just guide it by means of mobile electrical charges. So take your WiTricity and you know what to do with it. At radio frequency of course. To their merit, they acknowledge the technology and concepts as being old, but with no significant past interest. Well, that's the problem. We're so profit- and instant-results-driven that we forget what progress is. And that's why, when all my high-school friends were going to MIT and other famous schools in the States to learn science and engineering and lots of humanities, I stayed at the Bucharest Polytechnic drinking beer in The Jack till morning, hacking hardware and coding software. And speaking English on the 'net. Because that's what the Net is all about. Fuck internationalization, double-fuck i18n, if it's Global it has to be English. I hate it when I google something technical like hacking the Linux kernel and the top two hits are in Japanese. Or German, or Russian, or Polish, or Czech, or Portugese, or Romanian so that nobody gets offended. Of course, I'm wrong, I know. I should disable non-English results. I can't afford to do that, what if I miss something? I also know I'm a hypocrite, for I also discuss in Romanian on Romanian forums, but that's somehow wrong too. It's knowledge lost to a minority, globally speaking. The Net should be global, international, thus English.
It all started today around 4:30 am when I was watching Zone Reality. I'm starting to like channels like Zone Reality more and more each day, in contrast to some channels I grew up with like Discovery. I learned English mostly by watching TV. Cartoon Network and Discovery. Now that cartoons are translated and spoken in Romanian, I don't watch them anymore. I can't imagine a bigger step to dumbing down the infant population than translating cartoons to Romanian and dubbing them over. I --- learned --- English --- from --- cartoons - you-fucking-idiots. But of course, it's cooler to learn it from multi-k$ courses. It's not cool when a high-school student argues with his teacher over the existance of the word "informatics". On the other hand, English words are penetrating common Romanian in a very annoying fashion. I mean, we have native words for 'job', 'rating', 'poll', to 'apply' for something, and so on. But no, we don't use them anymore. 'Cause it's not k00l, you know, not modern, not trendy. But people that have some kind of authority and influence with the masses don't concentrate on this. No, they dub over Western cartoons so that in the end we don't know how to speak neither proper Romanian, nor proper English. We're losing both our culture, and a proper coverage of Western culture. We're defacing our own language AND getting less and less proficient with international languages such as English. Which I learned from cartoons and perfected with the help of some good teachers. And why all this? So that some incompetent translators and lousy actors can get paid for it. Ok, maybe they're not all incompetent and lousy, but when someone says "about 10 miles" and you translate "about 16.1 kilometers", you can be called anything but competent. (For example.) Happens everytime with movies. At least they are only subtitled, for the moment. There are bigger xenophobes out there who dub even these over. How stupid need you be to dub a movie over? Are your viewers so illiterate / incapable of distributed attention to just read the subtitles? Sheesh. On the up side, my cable company now broadcasts cartoons in two languages and my tv tuner can decode both. So now I can watch cartoons like they were created. With all the untranslateable language puns and twists in place. But most TVs don't have that feature, so the vast majority of children are deprived of the benefit of learning the most important international language, the language of the Internet, in a natural fashion. Instead, they hear their parents 'apply' for a 'job' that will bring them some more 'cash', without understanding where those damned words come from. It's a double-fucking-paradox. It seems that everything was better when I was younger and that everything is getting worse by the minute. I learned a lot of stuff from Discovery as a child. Now I only see cars, muscle cars, hot rods, cars, some more cars, a little more cars, then some remote-controlled cars, and cars. And the 104th re-run of How It's Made episode 5 on both Discovery and Discovery Science at the same time. Oh, and Romanian commercials featuring female voices with over-emphasized bass and either skinny or dumbly-monotonous male voices. No wonder people download shows over the Internet. Oh well. At least I got to see a documentary about Death Row on Zone Reality. To be fair, I've seen similar ones on both Discovery and National Geographic. Bottom line is, in the U.S., the most 'democratic' and 'free' country in the world, more than 100 people were sentenced to death and then acquited following appeal, in the last 30 years. Well. Either some of those are criminals that were wrongly acquited and are now living among us^H^Hthem, or some of them were wrongly convicted in the first place, or some of the other thousands that had their sentence carried out were wrongly murdered by the state. Or all 3 choices. Why the fuck do I wear a Texas t-shirt? Because they have a town called Corpus Christi there? Fuck. No, because my mom gave it to me and it's nice, but hell. Dude. The State murders people. Probably. I have no direct evidence, I can't tell that for sure. But most probably, the state kills innocent people. What the fuck. That's wrong, dude! The death penalty should be abolished. And prison security increased, and more resources put into re-habilitation programs. But hell, what do I know. I know nothing. The state doesn't really care that much about the security of its citizens, or the rehabilitation of criminals, or the killing of innocent people. It cares about its image. It needs people to still find it acceptable and respect its authority so that the economy works as a whole and some_kind_of_average(people, mood) equals "everyone's happy". But the people that are unlucky enough not to afford good a good defence attorney, or who are otherwise unlucky, don't really count. Nor do the people that work at NASA doing leading-edge research, that are required to allow severe intrusion of their privacy for 'national security' reasons. Oh well. Maybe they will succeed with their lawsuit. But why the hell am I defending NASA? I mean, they blew up two shuttles and killed two crews even if they were warned about the severe problems they were having. I'm not defending them, in fact screw them, I'm defending human rights. Fuck it, not only does the Church / do the Churches try to control every aspect of everyone's sex life, now the state is questioning people about it. By the way, there's nothing in the U.S. constitution that prohibits the state from controlling its citizens' sexual behavior. Or so I understood, I'm no expert. All in all, until a few years ago it was illegal in many U.S. states for two people to engage in 'sodomy', 'actions against nature' or other vague words meant to refer anal or oral sex. In some cases it was between homosexual men, in other cases it extended to heterosexual couples as well. Around 2000-something these laws were finally overturned in some supreme court. Dude! In the third millenium and the 21st century (which BTW if you don't count years from zero and you don't because there were no computers and addressable memory then, starts in 2001 and not in 2000 like everyone said), people can't have anal sex in the United States of America. Cool. Read Wikipedia, then check with more 'reliable' sources if you don't believe me. Well. At least there's free speech. Kind of. For now. For instance, I don't know if I can dump all this putrid bullshit on a server located here. I probably can, because I hate inciting to racism, violence, underage sex or stuff like that and therefore I don't do that. On the other hand, I hate the Church(es) for example. They passed some law here that don't allow you to offend religions/churches/whatever anymore. There are laws like that in many 'civilized' places around the world, and ultimately, they're probably good. But I still hate religion and the churches that enforce it because, apart from their distorted vision on physics and biology, they are constantly trying to control people's sex lives. Dude! In Christianity I think it all starts from Mary. She supposedly gave birth to the Son of God without prior sexual intercourse with a male, which is of course the natural way of creating children. No, the Holy Spirit couldn't have entered a body created from human flesh through normal, God-created sex. It had to enter an unfertilized egg and fertilize it. Dude. Why? Because the Church says that sex is impure. It's dirty and it's a sin. By making Mary a virgin and also making her the mother of the Son of God in the stroies, the Church has a really strong argument against sex. I so fucking hate that. Ok, I fucking understand that when there were no doctors and no condoms, sexually transmitted diseases mandated that people have as few sex partners as possible in order to limit transmission. You couldn't teach people that, so the saints / enlightened dudes / whatever told it to them in a form they respected. And there are a lot of social reasons for which the religious dogmas and norms around the world are the way they are. So yes, religion has always had its good parts. And it still has. And we need a certain degree of stability in society. But it's the twenty-fucking-first century now and times have changed and some traditions need to die and religion needs an upgrade! Free Love! But no, I'm telling total bullshit here. A lot of dudes are trying to bring their own 'upgraded' religion and mostly all they've come up with is crap. No. Things are good just the way they are. Let them evolve. No. We are surrounded by crap. But hopefully I can say all this. I don't know. If it's not allowed, I don't care, I can delete it. I can even apologize. My mind will still be free. Hopefully. I could then probably disperse this stuff over some underground networks, but I'm afraid few people care about this so then I won't. I heard the news this morning: Chinese authorities launched some kind of 'virtual cops' that look like policemen and are embedded/overlaid in web pages and are clickable. With more and more computer scientists and hackers in the U.S. refraining from publishing cryptographic research for fear of the DMCA (even its name sounds horribly stupid), and with the possibility of limiting the cryptographic strength of Internet communication between private users by law, how much til the formerly free world becomes an Orwellian nightmare akin to a living dead machine with money instead of blood and brain-numbed human beings instead of cells? Will I need to go deep into the mountains to teach my children technology, for fear of being traced by Big Brother? I certainly hope not. I mean, scientists and hackers are doing reasearch in order to discover better protection algorithms, while crackers are cracking the weak algorithms unhindered and gaining profit from it. The former are prohibited by the DMCA to work on certain systems and topics, while the latter do it anyway because they don't go public, they don't write their names on scientific papers and publish them, they work underground. You could hypothetically define a "protection bit" and set it to "one" in a music file and write some software that doesn't allow you to copy it. No encryption no nothing. If someone writes a new software that simply ignores that bit, that's illegal. If someone publishes the location of that bit in the file so that anyone can set it to zero again and use the original software to copy the files, that's illegal. Well, actually it's probably not. That's an extreme example just to get the idea. There need to be "reasonable measures" in place, but they don't have to be strong or secure in any way. There's justice for you, sawing off its left hand and right foot. Oh, and just to complete the puzzle of the world falling apart around me, let's check this out. Some blokes at MIT made a system that transmits energy without wires. Oh wow. Now I can power my laptop without plugging in the power cord, I can get power wirelessly. Woooooooow. And it's called "WiTricity" Wooow that's so Coool. Big fucking stale bucket of crap. It's old technology, in fact it's more than a hundred years old and it was invented by TESLA, the same guy who invented the method used everywhere in the world to carry electrical energy from the power plant to the consumers! And it's based on the work of a lot of guys that did physics and maths and philosophy a hell of a fucking lot of years ago when people still thought that God was angry when lightning streaked across the sky. But Tesla was just a madman born a few hundred miles from where I live who did some weird stuff in his lab. He's not MIT, he doesn't do overrated Media and AI (childish people and stupid robots) and he doesn't market WiTricity. No, he's just smart and plays with resonant circuits. It took more than 100 years after the brilliant mad genius patented the stuff to "imagine a future in which wireless power is feasible". Hey, let me tell you something. There is no wired/wireful electricity. Electricity is fields. It lives in space-time. It needs no wires. It's wireless by nature. 'Electrical' energy flows around the wires, not through them. They just guide it by means of mobile electrical charges. So take your WiTricity and you know what to do with it. At radio frequency of course. To their merit, they acknowledge the technology and concepts as being old, but with no significant past interest. Well, that's the problem. We're so profit- and instant-results-driven that we forget what progress is. And that's why, when all my high-school friends were going to MIT and other famous schools in the States to learn science and engineering and lots of humanities, I stayed at the Bucharest Polytechnic drinking beer in The Jack till morning, hacking hardware and coding software. And speaking English on the 'net. Because that's what the Net is all about. Fuck internationalization, double-fuck i18n, if it's Global it has to be English. I hate it when I google something technical like hacking the Linux kernel and the top two hits are in Japanese. Or German, or Russian, or Polish, or Czech, or Portugese, or Romanian so that nobody gets offended. Of course, I'm wrong, I know. I should disable non-English results. I can't afford to do that, what if I miss something? I also know I'm a hypocrite, for I also discuss in Romanian on Romanian forums, but that's somehow wrong too. It's knowledge lost to a minority, globally speaking. The Net should be global, international, thus English.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
press 2
tv and radio stations get censored quite heavily. certain things can't be shown/spoken on tv/radio between certain hours ("to protect children") or never at all. (here) no poll results can be shown on tv prior to elections. and so on. certain authorities will fine stations that don't comply or even revoke their broadcast licence. well: how much until the internet starts being censored too? in 10 years time, would i be able to say fuck on this blog, and do it legally? this is really worrying. i mean, this blog can be read anytime by anyone in the world, irrespective of their age. (kids go away!) sure, unlike tv stations, i don't need a license in order to post here. but will it still be like this 10 years in the future? fcuk {politics, control, the system}. potentially contaminated yogurt best before september the 11th has been confiscated. oh the irony.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
man space man enter
I was watching some documentary on some channel while the other was airing commercials, about air crashes. Except for all the sensationalist parts, it's acceptable and fair to watch. So this pilot was flying some large passenger plane and suddenly hits turbulence or something, I wasn't paying attention. What I did pay attention to was the way he managed to crash it into some houses on the ground killing a lot of people. It seems the rudder control sensitivity was higher than he expected and so he violently jerked it full-swing left and right, repeatedly, thinking the plane's erratic movement was due to the (long-gone) turbulence. In fact he was fucking up the plane himself. This violent struggle with the obedient machine, pictured through the usual crappy computer graphics, continued until the tail fell off from the excessive and repeated stress. Partly the builder's fault, but come on! I could be potentially sitting quietly in my home, and suddenly be crashed by a falling plane, why, because the pilot didn't RTFM! (Fire and smoke and shitty CGI again). Yes, human life is just another commodity. Sad.
P.S.: Kids! Read The Friendly Manual!
P.S.: Kids! Read The Friendly Manual!
Sunday, July 1, 2007
supposedly
according to earthmove.info and google calculator, the earth moved approximately one billion miles while i was having sex.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
