Posts by Scott Pedigo

I checked my recently received electric bill from the EWZ (Electric Works for the City of Zurich), to get the breakdown on the sources of electricity, which they conveniently supply. For 2012, the energy sources were overall 66.7% renewable (composed of 64.7% hydro, 0.4% solar, 0.3% wind, 1.3% biomass), 26.6% nuclear, no fossil. Of that, 98.7% was produced in Switzerland, the remainder imported.

That shows that getting rid of their nuclear plants, which like Germany are planned to be phased out, is going to require something to replace them. Either fossil (gas turbine) or looking the other way and importing nuclear power from France. But, unlike Germany, there is a significant amount of hydro, so the problem with base load is not as acute.

Next you know, someone in Hollywood will be shopping a script which involves a super-villain taking control of spacecraft as part of a plot for world domination + profit. No wait...

Paris, because she never got to be a Bond girl.

He's not allowed to spill the Beetle Juice.

Smilianets is no longer smiling, I guess we can call him Smilianyets.

If someone steals your Facebook password, then...

...you have lost face.

I'm reminded of the South Park episode where one of the kid's fathers buys a Blockbuster video store for $10,000 using the family's savings: http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s16e12-a-nightmare-on-face-time

Coincidentally, the kettle body reminds me of a WWII era German helmet.

When Nerds Collide

Sort of a weak interaction, isn't it?

From the screen shot it looks like it has a 1990's Leisure Suit Larry level of graphics, but without any of the smutty humour, and probably plays like a boring version of Sim - something. I actually bought and played (maybe twice) Sim-Ant, by the makers of Sim-City, where you try to get your ant colony to drive the humans out of the house, and it bored me to tears. The game seems oriented to appeal to wanna-be game developers, which I estimate would be a small subset of the total gamer population. So the game is probably a hard sell to start with.

Add to that, this: as another poster pointed out, if the deliberately "cracked" version of the game, which the few interested people try out, is rigged to not allow the players to ever win, then if those players go on to assume that this is how the game normally plays, they'd sure give it a thumbs down. The company may have shot themselves in the foot with that trick.

I tried to go the one-control-to-rule-them-all route and had about as much success as Sauron. It was a mid-range Philips RC, for about 50 bucks. The problem was this: it only recognized a certain set of devices for its built-in support, and the memory for the learning mode was insufficient.

I have a collection of devices spanning a great age range. The radio receiver + amp, with 6 channel inputs, is a name brand, but over 20 years old. It cost a lot at the time and is still going strong, so no reason to replace it. The large plasma screen TV is an off-brand, pre-production model, about 5 years old. It doesn't even have a name and model number. Then there are a couple of DVD and Blue-Ray players. The programmable RC had in its built-in catalog similar stereo amps from the same manufacturer, but not the exact model. Sadly, the differences were just enough to make using the wrong model unsatisfactory.

So I had to use the learning mode for everything: point the old RC at the new one, press a button, and map that to a button on the programmable RC. Repeat for every device. After about 80 buttons, the new wonder RC ran out of memory, leaving me unable to control everything.

Memory is cheap, but when manufacturers are trying to save pennies, this is what happens.

Now If The Stolen Laptop Had Only Been Purchased By A Web-Cam Sex Operator...

it would have been fun all-around.

With sticky keyboards, natch.

I guess Wimpy will be banned from getting any paydays loan in order to pay for a hamburger today. He'll just have to wait until Tuesday.

Paris, because she can't wait for it either.

OK, so the light is 13+ billion years old. It was emitted when the universe was much smaller. So there is this ball of soup, expanding, and at a certain point it has expanded far enough to cool off sufficiently for some subatomic particles to combine into atoms, emitting a certain spectral pattern, which we can now detect, red-shifted. Can somebody 'splain me where those photons have been travelling for the last 13 billion years? I mean, in all that time, they haven't been absorbed by anything or we wouldn't be seeing them now. But when they were emitted, the universe was small, say only a few hundred light-years across versus the current, what, 26 billion? So if I imagine a light-emitting ball of soup, the radiation that is going radially outward is an ever expanding wave front, going away from the matter of the ball, which now includes us. The light that got emitted in the other directions, like back toward the center of the ball, could only travel for a few hundred light years without going out the other side. So, what... the light has been going around in circles?

All Bets Are Now Off

The high-roller was king for a day, but his scam was deduced by an ace detective. The pair of cheaters, flush with victory, must now go straight.

"The government is certainly signalling a harder line on mapping regulations, with proposals released in September last year including a requirement for all commercial map service providers to locate their data centres inside the country.

The aim is that tighter regulation will boost national security by reducing the likelihood of sensitive geographical information ending up in the wrong hands. China is also planning to increase fines for providers which fail to include its “full territory” when compiling maps, as sometimes happens when cartographers decide disputed lands such as the Diaoyu Islands don't belong in Chinese territory."

So the obvious solution is to put your data center on the Diaoyu Islands, or on a boat anchored next to them.

I think Contact has to be in there.

That was a film which dealt with big issues:

Who represents the human race?

What is the role of religion when presenting the human race to aliens?

How does belief coexist with science?

How much faith should we put into grasp of reality and our own technology?

Who pays for space exploration?

Focus on crafting? That will only work if he figures out a way to keep the bots and 3rd world, gold-selling farmers from ruining the in-game economy. I predict it will take about a week.

Of course, once the capsule leaves Earth orbit, for the next 500 days, the inhabitants will be presented with a great opportunity to buy a time-share condo.

Obviously you cannot use CFC (Church's Fried Chicken) to cool off your server. You have to buy her KFC.

I look forward to the day when all their base are belong to us.

If I'm not mistaken, a WIMP is accompanied by a BLIMP. Or is that seven years of college down the drain?

"After the address I'm sure Ted will have plenty to say."

Well, words will presumably come out of his mouth. Whether they will be placed in some kind of coherent order or will be the result of cognitive dissonance remains to be seen. The most likely result: John Stewart will have some new material.

Ring me up, before I go go,

I'm not planning on goin' so low

"... Big Blue, too, could help someone nasty to obtain, retain and analyse ... data about us all."

They already did that, didn't they? In the 1930's, didn't they sell data processing equipment (punch card based?) to the Nazis to help them keep track of all the Jews?

We are one step closer to.. Planet of the Apes.

All your video are belong to us.

If they solve the leakage problem, how will I get my drives back down from the ceiling?

"Beyond having such great instincts as a filmmaker, he has an intuitive understanding of this franchise - he understands the essence of the Star Wars experience."

He has an intuitive understanding of lowering the target demographic of a half-way decent film franchise for teenaged males to a gaggingly sappy one for prepubescent children, marketing of action figures, and Burger King tie-ins?

But can they explain red states versus blue states?

I guess Israel will have to block the import of LEGO into the Gaza Strip and Palestine now. Otherwise the next thing will be LEGO-copter attacks on settlements. Using a Patriot (or Israeli equivalent) to shoot them down will not be cost effective. The Israelites will either have to infect the flight control system software with some nefarious virus which causes the rotors to overspeed, or else build Israeli LEGO anti-copters which seek out and destroy any other copters with the wrong color pattern.

I'm just happy to get imported maple syrup of any kind in Switzerland. I drench my home-made pancakes in it, and always have some sliced ham (in lieu of real Canadian bacon) on the side, as I love the salty-sweet taste combination. Once a tasted pure maple syrup, as opposed to the 10% maple / 90% corn syrup stuff that is your typical pancake syrup, it became a luxury I was willing to pay for. To the chagrin of my wife, unless there is company present, I will lick the plate clean, rather than see any syrup go to waste. Three kinds of maple tree? When are they going to start selling the stuff like wine, so that I can appreciate the difference in flavour of the three varieties? Maybe they already do in Canada, but I've never seen it.

I get the security thing: if I were a parent (I'm not), then I'd want some assurance that my kids were in school, not off playing hooky. When I was in middle school, there was a home room role call, so you at least had to show up. There, and in high school, my teachers of individual subjects sometimes marked down attendance and in any case would have noticed if I weren't in class. We weren't supposed to leave the school grounds during the day, but some students did anyway, including me on occasion. Many drove to a nearby Macs rather than suffer what the school cafeteria dished out, which was relatively harmless. Others got up to various sorts of no good.

So if I had kids, yeah, I'd want the school to keep a good eye on them, even given the fact that its a case of do-as-I-say and not-as-I-did. The world seems a little more dangerous now than it did when I was in school. There are more drugs available, both varieties and amounts, kids using them at younger ages, and there are more incidents involving gangs, guns, and mobbed kids going on rampages. We had underage alcohol use, the occasional weed. Now you've got meth, crack, ectasy, other and designer drugs in the mix, not to mention date-rape drugs.

Does that justify tracking kids with RFID chips instead of just taking attendance, having some hall monitors to challenge wandering students, and maybe a couple of school security guards keeping an eye on the entrances and parking lots? Maybe, but I don't like it. It does smack of Big Brother, and that cannot simply be rationalized away.

Will it get kids used to being tracked, as a stepping stone to the government taking away ever more of our right to privacy? Maybe, but it might do the reverse. It might engender new skills at evading surveillance. Kids will be swapping cards, putting tin-foil around them, hacking the computers, and what-not. They'll just learn new ways to get up to no-good.

The Evidence Room

So from now until forever, there is going to be a brown box in the evidence room of the Finnish police station with a Pooh laptop in it? I can see it now.... years in the future, the Finnish "Cold Case" squad cracks open the box and finds the laptop. On it, are pictures of a 9 year-old girl. "What!" they exclaim, "this must be an unsolved child pornography case!" After a long investigation, to their shock and dismay, they find that the laptop contains the fingerprints of a retired Finnish policeman. He is charged and arrested for possession and distribution of child porn, thrown into the slammer, where he becomes the unwilling wife of the tossed salad man, and eventually dies in prison of AIDS."

</end of daydream>