Web Teev gets Betterer

The grand non-event that was Netflix free for a month is nearly up. It was a non-event because when I went to use it, it installed MS Silverlight  (which I already had) . . . .  then nothing. Not a soss . . . nor could I find any help that would allow me to figure out why it didn't work .  . . . . but then I really don't care,  I stopped watching telly a long time ago.  Netfix and it's ilk are really Teevee on a computer - and we have a Teevee already. 
The one thing I saw recently that I enjoyed watching was a cartoon show from Adult Swim called "Rick and Morty".  It was free over the net of course. 

Intelligence? You must be joking!

Have a look at this: Someone has assembled a large database of people from data publicly available  on LinkedIn, Facebook and other sites who claim to have experience using Spook grade software and work experience in  Spookery.   I can see a whole lot of people getting dismissal notices if this is true: seroiusly, you would have to be pretty stupid to post online in publicly available databases anything relating to your job if you really were a spook, right? I can imagine that some poor idiots might post claims to work for Security Organisations in attempts to impress people or counter their personal sense of insignificance . . . . It would be nice to think that REAL spooks would not be so dumb . . . . .  but then human nature is what it is.  Oh well, look on the bright side: anyone looking for a job in spying can probably expect a whole lot of vacancies coming up real soon.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam.

I always thought Farcebook and Twitter (it doesn't need a parody name) were corrupt, but the level of corruption is well beyond what I thought. Have a read of this:
The Bot Bubble

It details the work going on in a company in the Phillipines where staff create fake Farcebook accounts, roughly one every three minutes,  which are then sold on to click farms.
Amazing stuff.

I'm with Neil

Yesterday there were protest rallies in our major cities by anti-Islamist group calling itself "Reclaim Australia", counterpointed by vocal group of counter-protesters.
See here and here in The Guardian for details.

What is the big deal? It's all about religion, or personal beliefs and how they affect others.
Perosnally I cannot see where Islamic beliefs have any effect at all on modern Australian white folks apart from their visibility in our shops and streets.

Recently I read an article, I think it was on The Verge where Neil De Grasse Tyson defended Scientology by saying that it is no different from the numerous other religions around  - and therefore has the same rights to exist as them. The point he emphasised was that any religious belief must be allowed provided the believers don't try to force their beliefs on everyone else.

I'm with Neil: I don't think any religion should have tax-free status but I agree that  any religion or set of beliefs has the right to exist. 
Our planet is spead with different groups who all live according to differing sets of local rules but there are principles we all have in common and these are what we share.  Personally I don't believe anything and have made a point of detailing my disbelief but it seems my un-religion is not very popular, and I'm guessing that it is because people like the idea of shared fantasies of importance. 

The intolerance of other people's beliefs is creating a big stink. These people are stirrers and worse still they are deluding themselves if they imagine that Australia is going to become some sort of White anglo paradise: it never was, and never will be - and it certainly won't become an Islamic state unless some Islamic nation invades us, and I really can't imagine why they would want to do that.

Max Headroom

Do you remember Max? Here is a page devoted to the show and Max, with details of what happenned and why . . . . . it was one of my alltime favourite Teevee shows as it mocked the media madness . . . and was strangely prescient for it's time. Enjoy it here courtesy of The Verge.

. . . . and don't forget "Paranoimia" by Art Of Noise.

A glimmer of intelligence

No, I am not talking about Artificial Intelligence, I mean Andrew Ng as reported here.
Finally, a sane comment as opposed to the loonies worried about comic-book robot nasties taking over.
Maybe, just maybe Stehpen Hawking is good at theoretical mathematics relating to black holes, (those thing that cannot be easily detected because there isn't much there to detect ). . . . but he does seem to have overstated the problem of malignant AI  - but then if you have read any of my previous posts you will know that I can't see any "machine intelligence" appearing soon. [ No, although I am sorely tempted I won't make a snide remark about human intelligence here. ]

All you need to do is look beyond the hype about how fantastically powerful the next generation of computers will be (and it's always "the next generation") and look at the real progress being made and you will see that it is slowing down as we hit some serious barriers, and these are not financial, they are physical barriers to more miniaturisation. Of course, there are still plenty of new or different techniques to try but this means more time, more research and no guarantess that any of those options will pay off.  We have already done most of the cheaper, easier things to squeeze more transistors onto a chip and now each step is harder, more expensive and gaining less.
Once they started talking about "Cloud" computing I suspected that Personal Computers were hitting some sort of limit anyway.

Actually I'm kind of glad since my current PC cost me a heap and if it didn't last a few years more I would be very annoyed.

 Note the button that says "Space Phone". This is a very old remote, not sure what the space phone was.

Here is ashot of new Apple Laptop's innards: the small square top centre is all the mobo there is:

They sure skooshed all the working bits down -hey wait: that looks about the same size as a phone. . .

The wonder of reverse image search

I have known about it for a while now but only recently I have found some use for TINEYE.

Tineye does "reverse image search": what that means is basically that you can give it an image and it will find all of the places that image can be found on the net. Useful? well consider that you have a low res picture and you want a better copy of it. You could try using "de-blurring" software on a zoomed up version of hte one you have but the results are less than great . . . . . or you could try Tineye. 
It can also be useful if you make original images and you want to see if anyone else has been posting them without telling you . . .

And now a public apology to my friend S. who really is innocent and didn't deserve the cruel comment I posted previously. I chalk it up to having my trust clobbered recently by being robbed over the net and some other trust issues that I won't discuss here. Suffice to say that I hope things will be straightened out soon.

And now a small cartoon courtesy of The NIB relating to the dire economic situation in certain nations:

Guess the Titanic already sunk huh?