Category Archives: View

Chaos Manor View, Saturday, August 01, 2015

Thursday I came back from medical appointments exhausted, and Thursday night I came home from my LASFS meeting early, with a stomach ache and other internal problems, and feeling worse than I have in weeks.

Bad night Thursday night. But woke up Friday morning after finally going to sleep feeling a lot better, but harried; I hadn’t got much meaningful work done Thursday, had another medical appointment at one o’clock meaning I was rushed, and I began to feel indigestion and nausea again.

And things went crazy; in particular, Firefox acted strangely, and when I restarted it the session manager never appeared, and I couldn’t find it. Part of my memory system is opening links readers send to me so I am reminded of them.

And it was still acting strangely. And I had to go. Came back with stomach ache and Zantac didn’t help a lot; I can only conclude mild stomach flu or food poisoning. And at my age I notice that piling on minor annoyances can quickly result in my bringing on a real disaster.

Restarting the Windows 7 system cured several of the problems; I think Firefox has a real problem with garbage collection. There is also ambiguity in how Firefox treats the “maximize” button, and their new way of accessing Options is perhaps an improvement but also unfamiliar.

In any event All is more or less back to normal; I feel as if I am recovering from either mild stomach flu or mild food poisoning – the symptoms are pretty well the same – and I am improving, so between Zantac, milk of magnesia, and Alka-Seltzer I ought to be fully recovered by Monday. Eric is bringing down Swan, a computer I can use at night in the back room; now that we have wired fast Ethernet back there Things may go better.

Baen and Simon and Schuster announce Lord of Janissaries, http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Janissaries-BAEN-Jerry-Pournelle/dp/147678079X or http://books.simonandschuster.com/Lord-of-Janissaries/Jerry-Pournelle/BAEN/9781476780795

This is not. Alas, the new Janissaries 4 Mamelukes, which, I swear, I am working on and now that my two finger typing is improved – I type that and take longer to correct all the typos than it did to type the sentence. I keep hitting two keys at once. But slowly I improve. Anyway I have not forgotten the book. But Lord of Janissaries, the new title, is not new: it’s all three of the original books in one enormous volume. More than 850 pages, with the maps in back as an appendage. Type big enough that I can read it, which is as well because I opened it at random and came on a scene that affects what I’m doing now, and I better go read it all again. Fortunately it still holds up, so if you need some good bed time reading this may be your answer.

And I just thought of a new Mamelukes scene, so maybe it’ll get worked on faster than I thought.

Eric is hard at work getting the up[stairs straightened out; our Ethernet switches up there are really old and it gets hot, and it’s probably time to replace them, oh my… Meanwhile I think I can type in the Surface Pro 3 faster than on this comfort curve keyboard: bigger keys. So I can take it back there with the docking station and a large screen monitor.

The election is early days; Mr. Obama is not popular, Mrs. Clinton not a great deal more so, and opportunists are throwing themselves into the Republication nomination scene. What the Republicans need is good lower level party work; get the ground game up to speed, Forget the nuances, it’s time to win. There are plenty good candidates who won’t stand out in this early melee. It’s time to take Congress and the Presidency and get out of this Depression. And make no mistake; it is a depression, mostly brought on by regulations. It’s now easier to open a neighborhood bank in most European countries than in the United States, and growing government won’t fix that. Whole agencies need to be abolished.

People have had it with Hope and Change; can we just get back to normal economic growth and take advantage of the enormous upswings in technology? But we won’t do that by growing government. Increasing regulations, and all the rest that Hope and Change always equates to.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Friday, July 31, 2015

I opened in the afternoon with this, and there are several lessons to be learned.

I cannot find session manager, none of the controls seem to work, it Windows 8’s me on screen size, they have gone insane.  I can’t restore yesterday.

Anyone know anything about this?  Is there an instruction set?  Are they all lock up in a madhouse?

{jerryp}

Firefox has gone mad 
I hadn’t heard about Firefox breaking as spectacularly as all that (and I’m writing this on Firefox 39.0 under Windows 7, with no problem at all). But I have been seeing complaints on Windows blogs that Windows 10 has made it harder to set Firefox as your default browser.
http://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-cries-foul-on-changes-to-windows-10s-default-browser-settings
I expect we will soon see more problem reports about Firefox, because Mozilla has announced that beginning with version 41, all add-ons for Firefox must be signed. I don’t know why — is someone publishing malware add-ons? — but I have written some add-ons of my own, so I probably won’t upgrade soon.

John David Galt

I can’t find session manager, and it jumps to full screen without my telling it to.  When in full screen the only way out is the Windows key; nothing in Firefox shows a way off that screen.  Maybe my computer has gone mad? But it’s Windows 7, and nothing else is crazy.

Back from medical.  Tired.  But I think Firefox has gone insane.  Someone enlighten me?

{jerryp}

There were many lessons to be learned. I’ll start with them tomorrow. The problem was not Firefox. The lessons were – well, perhaps interesting.  Tomorrow.

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, July 30, 2015

There is new material at Chaos Manor Reviews. http://chaosmanorreviews.com/ I am still in fiction mode, but today was a day of adventures… See below

Don’t waste your passion on the election yet; it’s early days.

A day of adventures. It began with Roberta telling me that when I go to the front downstairs office, she doesn’t get to sleep until I go back to the back bedroom where there is my hospital bed – since my stroke we have had to be in separate bedrooms. That’s frequently at midnight or after. She hears me trundle past her bedroom door.

That induced panic because I don’t change subjects well. For instance, yesterday I worked on fiction, and I’m not really here when I’m doing that; it takes me a while to focus on this page, or answer mail, or whatever. It’s particularly difficult just at the moment when our book really needs my attention.

Before the stroke I got most of my best work done at midnight and thereafter, but I only slept about four to six hours a night. I need more sleep now. And if I don’t get some time to refocus – that’s the main effect of that stroke on me, difficulty changing the subject I’m thinking about, with mild panic when that inevitably happens – it’s going to be hard to keep up this place and do fiction. I like doing this place, and apparently a lot of you want me to; my subscription renewal rate is high, and while I could always use more I get enough from subscribers to make a significant contribution to my income. For which thanks, of course. But that’s a strong incentive for keeping this up. Another is that I enjoy rational discussion, and while the Internet has provided us with plenty of communication, rational discussion gets increasingly more rare as time goes by.

About then I discovered that my ancient ThinkPad needed updates, the way I used to synchronize outlook pst files doesn’t work any more, I bumped Alien Artifact – my Windows 7 main machine – and the front panel came off. I couldn’t get it back on while sitting in my chair, and I had to keep telling myself that despair is a sin

The ThinkPad was the way I did this place from the beach house when we used to go down there. I kept all the Outlook pst files in a root folder called, surprisingly, Outlook, on both my main desk machine and the ThinkPad. When I’d go on the road, or to the beach house, I’d simply copy the Outlook folder with Xcopy from my main machine to the ThinkPad. Xcopy, because I could use /D /Y to copy only newer files, saving a lot of time. I’d tell Outlook to leave the old files on the server. Then off I’d go. When I got back I’d reverse the process, so the main machine knew what I’d been doing, then bring Outlook up on me desktop and merrily proceed.

But that was on an older main machine that’s still upstairs, and I don’t use it anymore; I now have a new system, Alien Artifact, as a main machine and it was set up while I was still in the rehab hospital, and the Outlook pst files are stored all over the place to the default whims of Microsoft and Windows 7 and Outlook 2007, and it’s incomprehensible to me; I have no idea of how to daily synchronize two machines in Outlook.

And I had a physical therapy session at Kaiser at 1300 but I needed a shower first and that would have to be first because the girl who helps me shower would not be here when I got back, and I left in a black mood.

But before I left, Eric pointed out that I have a perfectly good modern 64-bit machine upstairs and fast Ethernet in the back room, and we can simply bring Swan down to the back room and synchronize with this machine, and Peter pointed out that all I really need is a good chair and I can work back there after Roberta goes to bed at ten, and since I don’t need the wheel chair back there I can have a better chair to sit in and watch TV and socialize with Roberta, and the wheel chair is certainly not very comfortable so all I really need is a good comfortable office chair back there.

I pondered this as we got to Kaiser, where the physical therapist took my blood pressure and pronounced it dangerously low and sent me to urgent care. I refused to panic, but I must admit I wondered about it. We got there and I got a red flagged card which got me to see the nurse – who took my blood pressure and found it my normal 121/68 as it has been for years. Apparently the new instrument in Physical Therapy was improperly calibrated.

Got home to find the ThinkPad couldn’t update and failed to boot, would I like it to attempt to restore? Never did that before, but what the hell. Told it yes. Then got out of my chair and onto my knees and was able to put Alien Artifact’s front panel back on without problems.

Alien Artifact with his front cover back on properly. Was easy once I could get at it.

ThinkPad trundled a while and restored Windows 7 fine, and seems none the worse for wear; he is a little ancient and may need replacing but I’m hoping the Surface Pro 3 will do take his place. The Surface has larger keys and easier to type on, but the screen is smaller; and it’s been devoted to alpha versions of Windows 10; but that experiment is about over. Precious, the Surface Pro, seems stable now, and I’ll start to putting her to good use. Or try to.

The cramped quarters I now live in; they won’t let me work upstairs in the grand office. But we wrote Mote in God’s Eye here, on a Selectric typewriter, and Zeke lived here all his life

This weekend I hope to get Alex and Eric over to bring down Swan and get her set up in the back room and we’ll worry about synchronizing Outlook; my agent sent reasonable royalties for May, so I can afford a good office chair, probably a duplicate of the Henry Miller I’m in now, and keep it in the back room in place of the wheel chair which can go to someone who needs it; and the ThinkPad popped up with “Threat Warnings” but Norton said it could fix them; turns out I haven’t used it much and Windows Security Essentials wasn’t happy either, so I’m doing all the scanning anybody wants, smoothly and without problems.

And I typed all this, two fingers, but I got several whole sentences without errors – some of that is that I have trained autocorrect to find lots of words with numbers in them where I hit two keys at once, but also I’m not hitting two keys at once so much either. I got nit for not in that last sentence, and ion for in in this one, but fortunately I found those.

So, after many adventures, it has been a good day after all. When I get back from my LASFS meeting tonight I will have Precious in the back room and see if I can add anything to this, but any mail I’ll have to put in from here, where I won’t get until tomorrow. But for a day which looked like disaster, it turned out well.

The 97% consensus of climate scientists is only 47%.

<http://fabiusmaximus.com/2015/07/29/new-study-undercuts-ipcc-keynote-finding-87796/>

Also, note that the survey questions were biased – there wasn’t any option for disputing the statements, only ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Other’.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

I remain of the opinion that we have insufficient data; but Bayesian analysis would indicate spending more on data than on amelioration of either coming warm or coming cold age. Reduction of uncertainties will save money; preparations before uncertainty reduction is expensive. Do we buy blankets or bathing suits?

And there are repeated stories like this:

Mind-Blowing Temperature Fraud At NOAA.

‘Almost half of all reported US temperature data is now fake. They fill in missing rural data with urban data to create the appearance of non-existent US warming.’

<https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/mind-blowing-temperature-fraud-at-noaa/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Mostly the Iron Law at work. 

Quote from Madison

Jerry,

I think this quote from Madison is quite apropos for today:

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

— James Madison to W. T. Barry, Aug 4, 1822, James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, vol. 9 (Correspondence, 1819-1836) [1910] <http://oll.libertyfund.org/people/james-madison>

Some days I think we are now in the Farce and Tragedy.  But as you remind, despair is a sin.

Regards,

Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

The joys of ‘smart’ rifles.

<http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-can-disable-sniper-rifleor-change-target/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

: Massive Surveillance Crisis

I can’t find the words to describe this shocking development other than to say this is both disgusting and monumental:

<.>

CISA is an out and out surveillance bill masquerading as a cybersecurity bill. It won’t stop hackers. Instead, it essentially legalizes all forms of government and corporate spying.

Here’s how it works. Companies would be given new authority to monitor their users — on their own systems as well as those of any other entity — and then, in order to get immunity from virtually all existing surveillance laws, they would be encouraged to share vaguely defined “cyber threat indicators” with the government. This could be anything from email content, to passwords, IP addresses, or personal information associated with an account. The language of the bill is written to encourage companies to share liberally and include as many personal details as possible.

That information could then be used to further exploit a loophole in surveillance laws that gives the government legal authority for their holy grail — “upstream” collection of domestic data directly from the cables and switches that make up the Internet.

Thanks to Edwards Snowden, we know that the NSA, FBI, and CIA have already been conducting this type of upstream surveillance on suspected hackers. CISA would give the government tons of new domestic cyber threat indicators to use for their upstream collection of information that passes over the Internet. This means they will be gathering not just data on the alleged threat, but also all of the sensitive data that may have been hacked as part of the threat. So if someone hacks all of Gmail, the hacker doesn’t just get those emails, so does the U.S. government.

The information they gather, including all the hacked data and any incidental information that happens to get swept up in the process, would be added to massive databases on people in the U.S. and all over the world that the FBI, CIA, and NSA are free to query at their leisure. This is how CISA would create a huge expansion of the “backdoor” search capabilities that the government uses to skirt the 4th Amendment and spy on Internet users without warrants and with virtually no oversight.

</>

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/249521-cisa-the-dirty-deal-between-google-and-the-nsa-that-no-one-is

Once we start looking at counterintelligence programs, false flag operations, and so on, things get even more interesting….

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Krebs on Security has posted a new item.
Starting today, Microsoft is offering most Windows 7 and Windows 8 users a free
upgrade to the software giant’s latest operating system — Windows 10. But
there’s a very important security caveat that users should know about before
transitioning to the new OS: Unless you opt out, Windows 10 will by default
share your Wi-Fi network password with any contacts you may have listed in
Outlook and Skype — and, with an opt-in, your Facebook friends!
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/07/windows-10-shares-your-wi-fi-with-contacts/

I have numerous comments from informed sources; the consensus seems to be that all the default options are opt in; but you should be aware of them.

Windows 10 Shares Your Wi-Fi With Contacts

In spite of the hysteria, I believe it is already fully opt-in.

The only, only, only thing that defaults to “on” is that the service is enabled. Every time a user adds a new Wi-Fi network, the dialog box specifically asks whether to share it with contacts or not, and which contacts to share it with from the three available options (Outlook/Facebook/Skype). All four of those questions, at least on my machine with a clean install, defaulted to OFF.

If the service itself is turned off, none of those sharing questions will be asked.

Now, if someone has turned on the service and shared a network, maybe it defaults to enable sharing the next time; I didn’t test that.

I think this business Krebs raises (and the Register raised) about how a friend could share your Wi-Fi credentials without your permission is just nonsense. That still takes a deliberate effort. If you have a friend who would do that, you need new friends.

Rare outbreak of sanity

http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-windows-10s-wi-fi-sense-feature-is-not-a-security-risk/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61

Eric

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, July 29, 2011

“the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality,”

former Iran President Hashemi Rafsanjani

It is Wednesday morning and Niven and Barnes are coming, so this will mostly be a placeholder; but we have important announcements. My partners are waiting so I must go.

Microsoft’s new ‘privacy’ policy.

from

<https://edri.org/microsofts-new-small-print-how-your-personal-data-abused/>

“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to”, for example, “protect their customers” or “enforce the terms governing the use of the services”.

It seems pretty clear that people who harbor controversial views should probably give Windows 10 a pass. Else the Social Justice Warriors who’re rife in large corporations like Microsoft will report them to the relevant authorities for public shaming and attitude adjustment.

And of course, there’s no risk that this information would ever be compromised by, say, hackers and sold to the highest bidder. None whatsoever.

How comfortable are you now writing your new novel manuscript on Windows 10, sir?

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Not very, but fortunately I don’t have anything on Windows 10 machines that isn’t open. It is disturbing. All your thoughts are belong to me…

EmDrive

(clip from UK Telegraph story)
…this week Martin Tajmar, a professor and chair for Space Systems at Dresden University of Technology in Germany also showed that it produces thrust.

The drive is capable of producing thrust several thousand times greater than a standard photon rocket and could get to Mars within 70 days or Pluto within 18 months. A trip to Alpha Centauri, which would take tens of thousands of years to reach right now, could be reached in just 100 years.

“Our test campaign cannot confirm or refute the claims of the EM Drive but intends to independently assess possible side-effects in the measurements methods used so far,” said Prof Tajmar in an interview.

“Nevertheless, we do observe thrust close to the actual predictions after eliminating many possible error sources that should warrant further investigation into the phenomena.”

Full article here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11769030/Impossible-rocket-drive-works-and-could-get-to-Moon-in-four-hours.html

The point that I haven’t seen reported on, is that this is a first iteration of the design.  A proof of concept.  Think of the meager capabilities of the first working gasoline engine, and then compare that to the engine under the hood of your car… or the diesel engines that power heavy construction equipment.  Compare the Wright Flyer to a Boeing 787.

There is tremendous opportunity for improvement here.  We may be standing on the verge of a change so fundamental, as to be difficult to fully comprehend.

Regards, Charlie

This is from a less volatile source than previous stories were, but we still don’t know that “It works.” Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Obviously this would be a game changer if it’s real. We can hope. If real it’s the key to the solar system.

And this:

EM drive yet again

Jerry,

Yet another article about the EM drive.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11769030/Impossible-rocket-drive-works-and-could-get-to-Moon-in-four-hours.html

This time, they’re basically saying they’ve thought really hard about what side effects might be causing false results, but after eliminating those effects they still see thrust being generated. The final speculation is that there is an unknown interaction with subatomic particles that constantly transfer state from matter to energy and back again.

So basically we have a drive that relies on the aether, but this time its a practical and measurable effect of a theory about mass-energy equivalency that we didn’t really think was useful except or visible except on the event horizon of a black hole (Hawking radiation). At least that’s what it sounds like they’re talking about, from the perspective of someone who read some of Hawking’s easier books 20 yrs. ago. Still, wouldn’t that be neat, creating an energy or propulsion source out of hawking radiation without needing a captive black hole, and all you need is a bit of electricity to make it work?

Sean

I agree that if you reject relativity and embrace an aether theory, Newtonian mechanics can be saved; all the crucial experiments against aether I know of can be explained by the local aether field being entailed by planetary mass and a finite speed of propagation of gravity (probably but not absolutely necessarily the speed of light, which might in fact vary with local gravity field strength);  even with variable speed of light the equations appear to be simpler than relativity tensors. If the EM drive actually produces thrust it is the most important physics discovery of the 21st – and likely of the 20th centuries.  But that is still a big if.  We have reason to do more confirming experiments now; and if there really is thrust, the results are profound – so profound that we cannot assume that thrust without more evidence. Apparently the next tests are not prohibitively expensive.

Petr Beckmann would not have been astonished by the EM drive; Robert Forward would have been, but not overwhelmed. But it is not the Relativity universe any longer, and much of what is studied in advanced theoretical physics would be proved wrong.

But we are still entitled to doubts about the thrust.

Make no mistake: if the EM works, the world changes.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-choice-conventional-war-now-or-nuclear-war-later-1438125451

Israel’s Choice: Conventional War Now, or Nuclear War Later

By

Norman Podhoretz

Almost everyone who opposes the deal President Obama has struck with Iran hotly contests his relentless insistence that the only alternative to it is war. No, they claim, there is another alternative, and that is “a better deal.”

To which Mr. Obama responds that Iran would never agree to the terms his critics imagine could be imposed. These terms would include the toughening rather than the lifting of sanctions; “anytime, anywhere” nuclear-plant inspections instead of the easily evaded ones to which he has agreed; the elimination rather than the freezing of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure; and the corresponding elimination of the “sunset” clause that leaves Iran free after 10 years to build as many nuclear weapons as it wishes.

Since I too consider Mr. Obama’s deal a calamity, I would be happy to add my voice to the critical chorus. Indeed, I agree wholeheartedly with the critics that, far from “cutting off any pathway Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon,” as he claims, the deal actually offers Tehran not one but two paths to acquiring the bomb. Iran can either cheat or simply wait for the sunset clause to kick in, while proceeding more or less legally to prepare for that glorious day. <snip>

It is all worth reading; and the logic is powerful. Mr. Obama assuages Israeli dismay with the irrelevant coming release of Pollard. There is nothing about the rationality of irrationality.

Lion Murderer Walt Palmer Has Done More For Conservation Than You Have.

[Warning: ‘adult language’.]

<http://indefinitelywild.gizmodo.com/lion-murderer-walt-palmer-has-done-more-for-conservatio-1720901473>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

What you call adult language I would call childish, but it is certainly needlessly scatological; that is mostly in the comments, of course.

I don’t type well any longer, so I am conserving that energy for fiction this week; but this presents the free trade argument for animal preservation fairly well.

I have never been much of a large animal hunter, but in WWII I certainly supplemented the family meat pot with rabbits unfortunate enough to encounter me and my gazehound Spitz dog. Farms had enough butter, eggs, milk, and cheese, but meat was scarce because we needed the butter, eggs, milk, and cheese…  The arguments against a free market in endangered animals are generally emotional; the results have universally been an increase in the number of endangered individuals. Tearing the ivory keys off old pianos does little to preserve living elephants, although hunting them down benefits the bureaucrats who are paid to do it.  It may be an unpleasant thought, but a free market in Ivory would likely result in more elephants, and more mercenaries paid to guard them.  It would also generate quite disturbing stories, many true, and a lot of adult language.  The issues are seldom discussed rationally; hence the scatology.

This was priceless

Pretty good, check it out about 40 seconds in

#Top5 Pesky Monkeys | JukinVideo Top Five

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.