As safe as . . . . .

I'm not even going to mention any names here since I don't want anyone else doing stupid things and I have NO idea who reads this (if anyone).
I find this whole thing very disturbing: as a well known geek site told me recently, anyone who wants to can find sites that will allow them to conduct DOS attacks and a whole raft of other net nastiness  . . . . . very cheaply, from a paypal account or credit card- then you merely add the target address and choose from a pulldown menu your type of attack. There are a variety of plans you can get - each attack lasts sixty seconds after which you need to renew.   There are a couple of caveats - you can find out who uses the site, and it is not protected against all of  the attacks it can provide.  . . . . supposedly the site is only for security people to test their servers.  Yeah right.

I always knew the net was as holey as a swiss cheese but this is just nuts. A teenager with a grudge can attack anything on the net. Of course, bigger and better protected servers won't notice so much but an individual might.

Did you hear about that guy who worked for WIRED who lost all his data, IDee etc.?  Apparently it was a seventeen year old kid who did it using one of these attack sites.  Yah, it's gossip but as I said above, I don't want everyone to know all about these sites: it's a bit like publishing a hitman's phone number in a national paper. You could hope that it was safe but I am not going to bet on that.

Is this freedom?

Are we being wound up in the leadup to some new global mega-agency of "Net Cops" appearing? 

I'm not sure I like either of these scenarios. 

Popularity Vs. Progress

Today, a couplet of stories that caught my eye:
1. Your Facebook likes can be use to determine your intelligence and sexuality.
This not only appears on WIRED but also in the new slimmed-down Sydney Morning Herald which adds that apparently liking the "Wu-Tung Clan" denotes masculinity.  I thought it was Wu-Tang myself, but then I have no idea who they really are, I assume a rap act . . . . .
Okay, I exist on Facebook but that is all.  Why I would want to tell the corporations what I like and dislike is beyond me.  The popularity of things is no measure of their worth, especially in the long term. 

and then there is this:
NIST has created a refrigerator chip that can get down to 256 mK, which is pretty close to the temperatures where superconductivity occurs if I am not mistaken. The unit is very small too, which would mean that superconducting computer chips could be made. That would not only produce possible speed gains for computers but also since this is such a small cooler and all solid state,  maybe these coolers could be added to more conventional chip designs to boost performance.
No report of the power consumption of the cooler though.
To me this is much more interesting than the Farcebook survey, but then I guess I really am a nerd.

In other news: By the number of views, m y artwork blog (The Z-Buffer) is much more popular than this blog. I guess no-one really gives a shit about reason, sense or philosophy,  but someone cares about a bit of art.

Finally, today is the end of my second voyage of  misery and defeat at the hands of a dating website.
I don't think it is just me either: there is something weird and bad going on there. Stay away from all "dating" websites folks,  remember if you meet "the love of your life" after a few days they don't get any more $ out of you so they have no interest in helping you really, and there are some very sick people out there who want to rip you off.I was contacted by several of them. I have never had so many vampires and panhandlers hitting on me before. It's not that they are even intelligent or even tactful about it either: tragic really.

If Ye Ask Me, We're All Doomed

That was the famous quote by The Scotsman in "Dad's Army".
Just have a read of this article by Ross Gittins in the SMH:

"The four most disproportionately influential industries in Australia, they say, are superannuation, banking, mining and gambling."

Note that in my view, these are all useless to the common citizen:  I for one still strongly suspect that my super money will magically disappear before I get to collect whatever pittance is left after the administration fees because they are are playing with my super money on the giant casino called "The stock market". 
Then there is the news that the Super percentage is to be increased, which will place additional pressures on employers and drive more small operators out of business, but who cares, right?

I don't even need to say anything about the banks.

Mining giants are working hard to get rid of employees by bringing in computer operated machinery,  but then they never employed that many people anyway: they have those huge machines for good reason - employees are costly and troublesome, don't you know?

Gambling? An "industry"? Not in my definition: I thought an industry produced something useful for it's customers.  It needs a new definition, something like "parasitic business that slowly kills the host".

So in short, none of these operations does anything much for the good of the nation or (perish the thought) the citizens (or "consumers" as they are now called), but they have a disproportionate influence on government . . . . . .

Oh, that's right, that's called "corruption". 

World's Greatest Patent Troll?

Read here about Jerome Lemelson, a man who spent his whole life suing for patents, not only that though: he figured out how to scam the patent system so that he could sue for patents he didn't actually have by posting an application years before that was deliberately vague so that when the technology developed he could "amend" his existing patent and sue those who actually developed the invention.
This guy never invented anything: all he ever did was suck from corporations and businesses using the power of lawyers.
Amazing stuff, I would call it legal crime.
 It just makes me wonder what other dodgy operations are going on like this today.
Thanks to Fortune Magazine for the article.

Bring on the Robot Lawyers

"Scientology defectors queue up to claim back multimillions of 'misused' donations"

 Note that the "defectors" have some serious complaints, but not about church policy as such but rather about what has been done with moneys they donated for specific purposes that it seems did not get  there.   Don't believe a word of any church that was invented by a failed science fiction writer folks.  My own "Church Of Nothing" could also come into that category but then I don't want you to believe anything at all, so it is truly exempt. It also does not ever ask for any money from anyone. :) 

I cannot safely criticise one "religion" without criticising all of them for similar reasons: In my view they should all be paying tax on their income at the very least.  

I really wish they had to prove the validity of their preposterous claims in a court of law in order to get permission to operate, but sadly that is never going to happen. It might make great entertainment though . . . . . 

A lot of ventures that begin with good intentions seem to be hijacked by power hungry ratbags who then adjust the rules so they can get rich off the efforts and donations of "followers".

Bring on the Robot Lawyers I say. A machine that has no emotions cannot be emotionally manipulated and with ruthless  rationality, the mountains of bullshit that cloud he minds of people today could perhaps be reduced to foothills of foolishness in less than a century.

The Liars And Robbers Exposed

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

-------------------------------------------

Neo-liberals' economic policy just a get-rich-quicker fraud

Date

January 21, 2013

Category

Opinion

George Monbiot

How they must bleed for us. Last year, the world's 100 richest people became $241 billion richer. They are now worth $1.9 trillion.
This is not the result of chance. The rise in the fortunes of the super-rich is the direct result of policies. Here are a few: the reduction of tax rates and tax enforcement; governments' refusal to recoup a decent share of revenues from minerals and land; the privatisation of public assets and the creation of a toll-booth economy; wage liberalisation and the destruction of collective bargaining.
The policies that made the global monarchs so rich are the policies squeezing everyone else. This is not what the theory predicted. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples - in a thousand business schools, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and just about every modern government - have argued that the less governments tax the rich, defend workers and redistribute wealth, the more prosperous everyone will be. Any attempt to reduce inequality would damage the efficiency of the market, impeding the rising tide that lifts all boats. The apostles have conducted a 30-year global experiment, and the results are in. Total failure.
Before I go on, I should point out that I don't believe perpetual economic growth is either sustainable or desirable. But if growth is your aim - an aim to which every government claims to subscribe - you couldn't make a bigger mess of it than by releasing the super-rich from the constraints of democracy.

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Last year's annual report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development should have been an obituary for the neo-liberal model developed by Hayek and Friedman and their disciples. It shows unequivocally that their policies have created the opposite outcomes to those they predicted. As neo-liberal policies (cutting taxes for the rich, privatising state assets, deregulating labour, reducing social security) began to bite from the 1980s onwards, growth rates started to fall and unemployment to rise.
The remarkable growth in the rich nations during the '50s, '60s and '70s was made possible by the destruction of the wealth and power of the elite, as a result of the 1930s Depression and World War II. Their embarrassment gave the other 99 per cent an unprecedented chance to demand redistribution, state spending and social security, all of which stimulated demand.
Neo-liberalism was an attempt to turn back these reforms. Lavishly funded by millionaires, its advocates were amazingly successful - politically. Economically they flopped.
Throughout the OECD countries taxation has become more regressive: the rich pay less, the poor pay more. The result, the neo-liberals claimed, would be that economic efficiency and investment would rise, enriching everyone. The opposite occurred. As taxes on the rich and on business diminished, the spending power of both the state and poorer people fell - and demand contracted. The result was that investment rates declined, in step with companies' expectations of growth.
The neo-liberals also insisted that unrestrained inequality in incomes and flexible wages would reduce unemployment. But throughout the rich world both inequality and unemployment have soared. The recent jump in unemployment in most developed countries - worse than in any previous recession of the past three decades - was preceded by the lowest level of wages as a share of gross domestic product since World War II. Bang goes the theory. It failed for the same obvious reason: low wages suppress demand, which suppresses employment.
As wages stagnated, people supplemented their income with debt. Rising debt fed the deregulated banks, with consequences of which we are all aware. The greater inequality becomes, the UN report finds, the less stable the economy and the lower its rates of growth. The policies with which neo-liberal governments seek to reduce their deficits and stimulate their economies are counterproductive.
''Relearning some old lessons about fairness and participation,'' the UN says, ''is the only way to eventually overcome the crisis and pursue a path of sustainable economic development.''
As I say, I have no dog in this race, except a belief that no one, in this sea of riches, should have to be poor. But staring dumbfounded at the lessons unlearned in Britain, Europe and the US, it strikes me that the entire structure of neo-liberal thought is a fraud. The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome. The complete failure of this world-scale experiment is no impediment to its repetition. This has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with power.
Guardian News & Media
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Every so often an article comes along that just says everything better than I can say it, and this is one of those.  What I want see now is what (if anything) is going to be done about it . . . . . . 
 

Egyptian Science

My seven year old niece introduced me to Horrible Histories, which is so good (being both truthful and entertaining) I had trouble choosing which one to show . . . .  and then I found this one.
Some day not too far in the future, our scientists will probably be regarded with the same respect this gent gets. Enjoy.