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Well, I was all the way back on version 3.4 so I took this chance to upgrade! It seemed to install just fine for me, so that's my limited testing report! : )

The proper procedure is to print a correction.  It's like 1984 all over again.  There is ZERO excuse for changing content vs. disclosing an update.  

There seem to be lots of excuses!!  Just none that are supposed to be acceptable to polite informed company.

1. How many forum members/visitors are reading this work? I know about 40hz, 4wd, and Perry Mowbray. Anyone else?

I'm "lurking nearby"! : )

Those are the conclusions I've drawn as well.  The harder question is what do I do about it?  And funny enough, the most reasonable answer I've been able to come up that actually works in practice is......ignore it.

Well, you can't quite "ignore" it because the foundation of all modern life outside your immediate location is someone else's report/anecdote. (If you want to go to the Basement, it's one more reason you can't ask your Deity for immediate verification of the facts!)

So then what Wikipedia made famous is "Citation Needed" as the very rawest of the raw stopgaps from stuff like the Aliens in the next thread over from the Guardian.

So then the entire concept of news is, underneath all the kaleidoscope spin doctoring, "something" is supposed to have happened. So if you tell anyone else, you basically get handed "Citation Needed".

But when your *Citation Changes*, they don't sweetly do Version Control like all you programmers do for a living. They just change it at will.

So yes, the more rampant this gets, it is absolutely PAST the slippery slope, because then you can't believe anything at all anymore, ever. Once you get past cute little bits of "common sense" like gravity, then it goes all Alice in Wonderland and it's almost not possible to function if the minute you pointed at a source, it has changed and then you can't prove why you're the only one that you can get hold of that ever saw the original version (versions!).

Cue all the SciFi stories - this is "locally" close to "alternate timelines".

It gets very very fast to a Matter of Degree.
After all, Obama isn't President. What? You are deluded into thinking he is? Why, because he said he was in the oath on the lawn, you think that matters? Who told you that? Were you there? What, you think the "nice steady stream of Obama-y things" means something?

I think it's cute. How the heck do people find such parallels? (Or is it photoshopped?)

Remember, one of the fun things about Da InterWebz is that you get to tap a world's worth of rare talents. So some people have a talent for pattern recognition. So I certainly imagine someone saw that news photo and their brain peeled off the matching cartoon graphic. 

It's related to the concept and talent for puns. I have a modest talent for those on "fast" days.

Try these:

A. This food dish:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frittata

Makes me think of:
A1: This person:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelly_Furtado

A2: And this song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITDD4doC6iw
"It means no curries, for the rest of your days!"

B. This Collectible Gaming Card:
http://magiccards.info/scans/en/mprp/10.jpg

And this politician:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlen_Specter

 

I'm actually a bit amazed/amused at the lack of unity in the dismissal spin stories.
Agencies deny it, companies deny it, then they admit it, but "only a little bit", etc.
Newspapers edit their own stories in the archives, etc.

Meanwhile here on another angle the Washington Post says that driver's ID's are in a searchable database at the local level.

So wait a min ... the big dogs "only look at 300 numbers", but the locals search millions of licenses?!

(Slashdot's version)
Officials Say NSA Probed Fewer Than 300 Numbers - Broke Plots In 20 Nations
http://news.slashdot.org/...broke-plots-in-20-nations

Interesting, Chris.

As an example of alternative workflows, it's interesting that your choice is about the *desktop*, because I consider that among the easiest places to get to. However, just for the sake of "different folks", I do it with TranDesk Desktop Splitter, because at the click of the mouse in the tray, I get "copies" of my desktop instantly. So then I can access the stuff there just about as quick.

On a new angle, this isn't a tabloid "professional gadfly" rag at stake. If you have *Forbes* calling 'Dis on *The Washington Post*, it's already hit the Meta Level. Even in "Orwell" the "people" knew history was changed but "couldn't prove it" etc.

Here now you have one first tier source calling out another one, and then of course now Forbes' copy is Out There.

Check out this bit from the Forbes meta-article:

"Flat denials from the technology companies seem to have staid criticism for now and may have been a factor in convincing the paper to make revisions to its reporting."

The thing about Flat Denials is they are aggressive but risky. If this were the old days, all of this would have been hushed up. But the internet is Made For Viral (viral everything - 1.0 was Pr0n, 2.0 was Social Cats, so maybe finally 3.0 is Freedom!?).

So then that leads to crumbling statements like: (Double Quoted from Forbes)
"It is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author."

Uh ... so they're not saying it's a photo-shopped fake slide, right!? So how does one reconcile "apparently real presentation slides" with "flat denials by the companies"!?

Well yeah, once you open THAT can of worms, courtesy of the Pandora Box Company, then all kinds of fun can be had! Restated for "Today's Audience", if you weren't around for the two days when the "real" story hit the viral web, then if you go back to it say, when you have time over a weekend, what might be there in the archive could already be Spin-Doctored.

Since I am also a fan of reporting on Int. Prop. mischief, if you're fast enough to quote the original "Real" article, and happen to have an over-documented link (meaning time it was pulled and more), then when the story behind the link changes, what's the copyright status of your original quoted article? What's the copyright status on a version that "doesn't exist"!?

Are you now a _______ (Insert attack noun here) because you're now quoting a "no longer authorized version of a news story"!?

So with this text based one you can point out what I am supposed to be seeing and then I can see it.

But for the normal ones, I have tried all the suggestions over the years that involved defocusing, looking at it cross-eyed, looking at it from certain angles, or from a certain distance, with my glasses off, etc. And even when you tell me what it is that I am supposed to be seeing, even when you take your finger and point it out to me, all I see is the noise.

Maybe a variant of the same kind of diagramming could work. Those things "work" (when they do!) because the un-focussing involves Dot A and Dot B (and lots of other dots - but I'm not yet sure if more than two "merge as a unit" at the same time) have to "merge together". So for example take a sharpie pen (or do it digitally etc) to one of those, and make a big black dot in two places and then say "fiddle with your eye focus until both of these dots are together".

Well, all I can offer is "proto-ideas".

1. "Feckless and Divided", but maybe the Judiciary is our first stop for hope. Legal precedent does work differently from both legislative and executive precedent. The latter two can just do absolutely whatever they want whenever they want. But the judges do get grumpy when someone violates precedent too badly. So occasionally a judge gets to lodge a nugget of precedent in the right direction. A nice simple example is the judge who got grumpy at Prenda Law. *Theoretically* the Judiciary can knock down both Exec and Legis side stuff with the "Unconstitutional Cannon". One problem is that if you misfire that cannon, it takes a long time to repair the damage. And figuratively they only get to fire it twice vs 100 proposed cases. So then they have to let a lot of stuff slide for another day. Sometimes they "code this" with a strange looking ruling that seems too narrow, but then a few of the smarter reporters have decoded it to say "we're with you, right idea, but one election cycle too early for the political gestalt. Watch this space in about three years." Meanwhile the "next level down" a "Federal Judge" can have a great time repairing medium sized problems, before the rather large wheelbased Powers of Mean finally encircle him/her and take the judge down.

2. "Sleeper Agent President (for good)"
Cynicism is what it is, but *theoretically* you do get a new chance for a new direction each eight years, if not each four years. (Incumbent effect.) So get one of those Big Dogs that we have "never heard of" who found out that he'll die of cancer in two years to blow out his entire fortune to fix the country, and then you do have about a 2 year window to go all Katrina on the establishment before anyone quite realizes what's going on. It's a Sacrificial President. He doesn't WANT to be re-elected.

The basic way that works is:
A. Executive Orders. The President "Says Things" and off they go to be done. So just go all Gambit from the comics and start wheeling out Exec Orders For Good. Someone in Congress will panic and try to make a bogus law to prevent "too many exec orders", but it will take them a long time to override a veto.

B. Sacrificial Political Capitol.
The things with this approach is, it basically works exactly once. Blast a broad swath of groundwork laws into place as fast as possible. Get the mood of the country excited that finally some stuff will change. Then get the mood of the country that any congressperson "Against Healing the Country" will get voted out.

It's a bit of a wild animal, but maybe we need a wild animal.

Accused bank robber wants NSA phone records for his defense

And so it begins...

Well it had already begun ...
This is just where it starts to get really really funny!
It's a brilliant defense! Especially if in fact he is innocent! (Wouldn't he be able to get them from the telco first - then purposely ask the NSA for their copy?)

Where the hell do you find these graphics?

Once they began succeeding demonizing porn, the Internet became For Graphics!

Sure, on target again 40hz.

I absolutely get that a former "trusted source" flips hands and then you have no idea where it goes - that's a classic precursor to malware vs less than aware users.

Slashdot's copy of this story adds a "Debian is not so innocent" wrinkle though:

"If you're wondering where it went, it moved to deb-multimedia.org, after the DPL (at the time) asked the maintainer to stop using the Debian name."

http://lists.alioth.debia...ners/2012-May/026678.html

So ... if you tell a maintainer to stop using the Debian name ... they just might!?

 It's really not that funny of a joke, real dry humor IMO.  

Well, it's quite funny if you take it at the original source of Weekly World News. I was then wondering why it ended up in the Guardian - am I missing something or is that a grade B but "real" paper?

Meanwhile, has no one else noticed that Moore's Law never seemed to hit the Space Age? The calculations should be cake by now. Shouldn't the manufacturing have gotten cheaper too?

Or did we get lucky exactly once to barely squeak through the edge of impossible through a bit of national delusion obscuring how dangerous it really was?

Instead, in a way, notice how "cheap" modern tech is. All this modern War on Terror junk is really kinda cheap, just guys sitting at computers listening to / reading our online chatter, but it's all modular - let's say $50k and poof, you have another analyst at work on it for a year. Whereas the costs to do the next stage of space flight, which is a Moonbase, are colossal, and in our current penny pinch pound foolish mode, we're squeezing ourselves out of the window to make it happen. I'd say it would take 100 years to do right, because that takes SERIOUS infrastructure to make it legit, not a 1 shot publicity stunt.

And if you think we're having fun hunting "terrorists" NOW, just wait when you risk blowing out the entire air reserves with a $100 bomb.
 

 It's really not that funny of a joke, real dry humor IMO.  It has always bothered me that we have massive radio telescopes (SETI), that for years has sent out messages into the cosmos telling any possible life-forms where we are in the universe with hopes they would send messages back.  The U.S. gov't stopped funding SETI in 1995, and now it's still being run with civilian grants and funds.
  So why does it bother me?  What makes us think that any intelligent lifeforms out there somewhere are friendly?  If they are advanced enough to speed of light travel, we would most likely be like ants for them to study and/or conquer.  Yeah, just like the series Falling Skies.  We have a plethora of resources here that would make for a nice pit-stop for any conquering entities looking to expand into the cosmos.  Hell, we may even be a food source ourselves!

Hmm, I'd put it 50-50 that super aliens are "nice". The basic theory is that aggression isn't sustainable etc etc. I'd put it more likely that we'd be considered "cute pets" or maybe an anthropology lab world. But more basically the timeline is just so tight - I'm not at all certain we'll still be "this race" 500 years from now. We could end up in a resource scarce dystopia not from WWIII, but just really maxxing out the "easy resources" and then when a glass of water is $12, a big bad epidemic of Bird Flu Six will spiral us down into the dark ages again via brain drain by losing 500 million people in a too-specialized world. So then when the aliens get here, we'd be back in twilight again.

FYI gang this can be read in the STDU viewer, though there seem to be a couple of formatting artifacts that I presume are not present on an ebook device. (At least in the epub version.)

Interesting that you chose to use a pen name.

I wonder if it's even possible to completely avoid politics and have a "purely technical" discussion about any technology of significance in today's world?

It might not be possible anymore.

For example, one aspect of the damage this "mind war" has had on me is that I have real trouble believing news stories are "just stories" without instinctively thinking of vicious angles.

Let's try Google Glass for a moment. That's the fore-runner of a signature piece of SciFi tech that's been part of Near Future stories for half a century. (Heads up type displays and data systems etc.)

But now it's got Google and remote server uploading and stuff all mixed up in the story. Our privacy has been eroded almost irreparably, but a few people with an IQ of 180 did a brilliant job of making us Like it! (Pun!) But at least a phone pic was just artificial enough so that in the seven seconds it took you to set it up, someone could object. But with "Always On" live filming, that could make us really nervous just to live our lives. Because forget Google per se - they're just the Apple analogy to the mp3 player. It's the Chinese knockoffs (here assumed to actually work, just maybe not as well, but 10 times cheaper!) that will spread, and then everyone will have the tech "automatically on".

I've worn "really heavy glasses" for years now as the "symbolic image" of these types of glasses. One day if I were to get a "new pair of glasses", people who know me might just give me a compliment/insult and forget about them ... and not even THINK to ask if they are data glasses!

Meanwhile half the time I see "innocent" news stories about interesting discoveries, I start seeing really nasty side effect uses of them.

Well, yes, here is half of the joke:

http://weeklyworldnews.co...-found-with-super-humans/

It's based on a Weekly World News (heh!) "story". (I didn't know they were Online!)

The next question is why the Guardian has it.

Could that be the next step of Vulnerability Reporting?

Today:
"Dear Guardian. I have found a security hole which could allow an attacker to compromise your systems. See attached concept notes."
"Dear Researcher: We appreciate your report, and we will work on it." (aka "Go away".)

Tomorrow:
"Dear Guardian. Because you failed to take my vulnerability report seriously, I posted a WWN tabloid item to your main web site. Regards, Researcher"
(Heard in Guardian CEO office) "RED ALERT! Get IT to fix this NOW!!"

 

Heh I have a 40 year calendar as part of a tourist souvenir that I thought was "good for the money"! It's also amazing me that I have kept up with it since 1999 after having moved four times since then!

Calendars are also a favorite trick of autistic "small-savants". Rain Man did a tiny bit of damage to the public impression because he was One in a Million. (Based on Kim Peek). Most "Savants" are far less talented than that. But of those, a bunch of them can do Calendar calculations. I knew one from child days at a summer camp. There was no way to check him, but he was reeling off days of the week confidently, so even if he maybe "missed a leap year" or something, he clearly had the concept-pattern down.

In a sense it's "easy enough to do" - there's only some twelve rules, then you just flip multiples of 7/14/28/100 until you get there.

I dunno, it feels different now.

I ignored the War on Drugs as the comedy it is, and it never mattered to my life.

But the interlocking agenda selling/sniffing internet data are different - they are much closer to the old horrors of 1984 and Harrison Bergeron. (No one seems to invoke that story lately!)

New Facebook Privacy Controls
 (see attachment in previous post)

That's awesome!

Eric Snowden 'missing' in Hong Kong

I'm of a mind that this is not foul play.  No one would be that stupid yet, would they?

Part of me feels like there's some vague irony in the fact that his name is "Snowden", like as in the Snowden from Catch-22.

Hmm.

"Snowden's choice to remain in Hong Kong was "baffling to some legal experts" reports the BBC's Jennifer Pak from the Chinese territory"

Earlier an article (that I can't quite place right now) was saying that going to Hong Kong was "brilliant" because it was supposed to be hard to extradite him from there.

He also applied to Iceland for asylum but they invoked a technicality and gave him a grumpy chilly answer back.

So we'll see a nice case of "if you anger the big bad wolf", does he blow your house down and eat you?

Yikes!

Good luck Miles!

I've been OD'ing on Dr. Who and other SciFi lately, and I'm giggling about a mental image of using your prior software to fix your life!

"Hit control F10 and a special version of BBSS recreates your wallet!"