Posts by Mike Flugennock 2068 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
"...if we can crack the propulsion system, and the living and breeding in space problem, pretty much everywhere in the universe is only about 3 human generations away. Of course, the civilisation they've left behind might be long gone..."
Congratulations, you've just outlined the premise of at least a dozen sci-fi movies, most notably Planet Of The Apes.
"Automated takedowns are the cancer that is killing YouTube."
Killing YouTube? Hell, I left YouTube for dead three or four years ago. Got tired of them pestering me about the music in my videos, telling me they're leaving them up so they can run "relevant" advertising next to them.
I've since moved most of my content to Vimeo -- no anal-retentive music police, no pop-up or pre-roll ads, no "recommended" video links, no wading through endless footage of twerking and ice-bucket dumping and cats falling off of tabletops and plane-crash porn and schlocky music videos and people throwing dry ice into swimming pools just to find some interesting and challenging content.
...I chose to stick with 7.0.4 on my 4S. I don't give a shit if IOS 8 is supposed to run OK on my phone or not; all I know is the past three or four upgrades have failed to deal with the battery-drain issue.
I ended up having to turn off wifi on my phone to keep Apple from shoving unwanted upgrades down my throat. I've still got a 7.0.x upgrade installer stuck on my phone, scarfing about a gig and a half, and can't find any way to get rid of it that doesn't involve procedures which go "over my head" and run the risk of bricking my phone.
Do you think that we can now safely declare the term "disruptive/disruptor" to be officially played? These tech clowns have pretty much beaten it to death and drained it of any impact.
Like "ecosystem", "disruptor" is now on my list of words which are sure signs that the user is entirely devoid of any original ideas.
"Senior Disruptor"? Cripes, gimme a big, fat break. Hell, the job title on Wile E. Coyote's business card -- "Super Genius" -- sounded more substantive than that.
While lunar conditions don't match Mars, it'd still be a good place to test-run technologies we'll need to build and maintain bases on Mars -- with the advantages of a low comms lag time, and being only a day and a half or so away from Earth with current technology if things go really south on you... handy for training crews and learning how to build and deal with stuff in a place where your comms lag time is nearly twenty minutes, and Earth is seven or eight months away.
Sadly, radio is still stuck in the '80s. Ugh.
"...The only major media certain to die is the printed newspaper. Its problem is the time lag in delivery..."
...and the fact that most major city dailies -- at least in the US -- are basically like Pravda circa mid 1950s -- a big fat load of shit-shoveling by the government, corporations and the Parties. If every goddamn' US big-city daily ceased publication tomorrow, I wouldn't miss them.
"20 years ago the interactive TV we were developing had mark-up which could be embedded by the content provider or the series producers to increase revenue.
Our demo had a button you could press to reveal web links to items in the TV show you were watchin. The clothes that the characters were wearing in the episodes, the cars they were driving, watches etc. Links to fan websites.
It was the ultimate goal for product placement advertising..."
With all respect, that sounds like many folks' idea of Hell.
Beat you to it, man. Born 1957, here. Watched John Glenn's Mercury flight on a clunky 19-inch B&W portable which was only portable in the sense that it had a handle on the top. A common book in many US households was the infamous troubleshooting and tube-testing guide. You could actually open up the set, pull the suspect tubes, and take them to tube-testing kiosks which were ubiquitous in many drugstores and supermarkets.
I can also remember when TV via satellite was a big-ass deal; watched '64 Olympics with the caption "LIVE VIA SATELLITE" burned across the bottom of the screen.
Color was still a big deal then, too. Even though there were a fair number of color sets in use when I was a young boy in the mid '60s, they were sick-ass expensive, and not all programs were broadcast in color; those that were, were preceeded with a little bumper announcing, for example, "the following telecast is brought to you in Living Color, on NBC".
Not much channel-hopping back then, either; changing the channel involved a major commitment to getting up, walking across the room and ker-chunking that big-ass knob.
Still, it seemed as if there was so much more cool stuff on when I was a young boy, and a teenager. At first I chalked it up to just getting old, until I started hearing more and more people far younger than I remarking that TV today sucks.
Got an emailing from ThinkProgress last night mentioning how many of "my favorite Web site" were joining the big corporate PR stunt... uhh, sorry, the Internet Slowdown: Upworthy, Netflix, YouTube, reddit, the usual suspects.
Oh, yeah, these are so very much my favorite friggin' Web sites, especially clickbait pioneer Upworthy (their motto: "What Happened Next Will Blow Your Mind")
Hell, the internet at my house is already plenty slow, especially in the evenings, when the wife hogs the wifi binge-watching "Treme".
All my passwords for my important stuff are generated by the random character generator in cPanel.
Here's where the "passpattern" bit comes in. In the beginning, I had to type the newly-generated passwords by reading them off a page in my notebook, but after a while, I discovered that I was memorizing them through repetition -- not by learning the actual character sequence, but through "muscle memory", that is, by remembering keystroke finger positions, if that makes any sense.
Kinda the same way I'm typing now, as I learned to "touch type" in high school in preparation for all those research papers I'd have to write in college.
...and have done it with the MER rovers several times with no problems, the idea of optimizing and reformatting a system from 125 million miles out scares the hell out of me, when I think of the times a simple OS update on my desktop has blown up in my face.
It's got nothing to do with what's "progressive" or not.
Facebook's technology really is creepy, and it really does help facilitiate stalking and the grooming of children for exploitation.
Full disclosure: In most quarters my politics are considered "progressive", even borderline anarchist.
"...I hope it will soon be a "user-free content-whoring network"
once people start to realize they can do without all that crap..."
Seriously... I can't think of anything I can do with Facebook that I couldn't do with a simple Web site, or a blog, or a listserv.
Dark Social: wave of the future?
Yeah, it may be "quaint", but at least if I lose twenty bucks out of my wallet, all I've lost is twenty bucks.
...and there's no goddamn' way in hell you can tell me that cash is anywhere near as messy as what I'd have to deal with if some Russian mafiosi got hold of my credit card info or my banking site logins and sucked my accounts dry.
Shill much?
"...Unlike Twitbook, where they post tiny details about their own sad and boring lives to anyone dumb enough to be bothered to read it..."
Whether or not Twitter is as you describe it depends entirely on the user.
I've been on Twitter for a little over three years. I use it primarily for checking the news, connecting with fellow activists, and posting my latest cartoons/blog links, and I only "follow" accounts involved in activism or "hard news" sites. No accounts I follow -- or which follow mine -- are the kind of my-cat-barfed-on-the-sofa bullshit that Twitter got its reputation for in the early days.
Basically, you put into it what you get out of it. If you're one of those clowns who insists on broadcasting banal personal minutiae, then, yeah, you're going to get more cats barfing on sofas than you can handle.
As I recall from following the NEAR/Shoemaker mission some years back, bodies such as these -- comets and asteroids -- have such weak gravity that it's said that you don't so much land on it as dock with it.
Though not as "glamourous" as places like Venus, Mars, or Titan, I've always been fascinated with these bodies, and am really looking forward to seeing views from "on the ground" on 67P.
Best of luck to ESA and the Rosetta team!
Holy. Fuckin'. SHIT.
Still, that's not half as long as some of the lists I get when I hit the "Options" menu in NoScript on a lot of other sites I visit. On a couple of sites I've visited -- I forget which, now -- the pop-up list menu in NoScript goes top-to-bottom on a 17-inch monitor and keeps scrolling.
Your list includes a handful that I allow temporarily, in case I want to share an article on my Twitter feed, and whose permissions are revoked when I'm done.
I have university-level training in graphic design and illustration; my degree program also required a couple of semesters' study of film and photography. My degree is in design and illustration, though, not journalism.
For the past fifteen years or so, I've been involved in editorial cartoon and video work for Washington, DC and other Indymedia and activist media outlets -- which, I guess, would make me a "citizen journalist".
Most of the important images and video coming out of Ferguson, Missouri have been supplied not by CNNMSNBCFox, but by concerned citizens "on the ground" in Ferguson, shooting stills and video and transmitting live streams. They took on the job of telling the story of what's going on there when "professional" journalists either couldn't or wouldn't and, in many cases, actively worked to spread disinformation.
I could list other examples of important news being broken by "citizen journalists", often in direct opposition to the de facto news blackouts imposed by the likes of CNNMSNBCFox, but I don't want to hog the thread.
Get bent.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
