Tag: technology

Fukushima in Nebraska?

Don’t look at me for any explanations. I don’t know anything about it, someone just shot me a link about a reported news blackout concerning reported flood-related problems at a nuclear plant in Nebraska earlier this month.

A shocking report prepared by Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) on information provided to them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that the Obama regime has ordered a “total and complete” news blackout relating to any information regarding the near catastrophic meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant located in Nebraska.

According to this report, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suffered a “catastrophic loss of cooling” to one of its idle spent fuel rod pools on 7 June after this plant was deluged with water caused by the historic flooding of the Missouri River which resulted in a fire causing the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to issue a “no-fly ban” over the area.

Given the way in which the Japanese government and nuclear agency blatantly and unapologetically lied about the full extent of the damage to the Fukushima reactors, I tend to doubt the US government is going to be any more inclined to give out accurate information of what happened or did not happen at Fort Calhoun. But at least we can safely assume that whatever the problems might actually be, they are less catastrophic than what happened in Japan unless Nebraska also experienced an earthquake and subsequent tidal wave.

Yes, Apple really is technofascist

Even the Macintossers are beginning to admit the obvious:

IPHONE users may soon be stopped from filming at concerts — as a result of new Apple technology. The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras. A patent application filed by Apple revealed how the technology would work.

If an iPhone were held up and used to film during a concert infra-red sensors would detect it. These sensors would then contact the iPhone and automatically disable its camera function.

As El Borak has already noted, there will no doubt be a version 2.0 containing a Law Enforcement switch that will turn off the iPhone cameras whenever police badges are detected nearby. Apple may make good products, but if you’re still buying them, you’re just not getting it.

The religion of Apple

You weren’t just imagining the cult-like behavior of the average Macintosser:

Apple devotees are notorious for their steadfast dedication to the computer and gadget manufacturer, standing in line for hours and sometimes days just to be the first to try out a new piece of hardware. According to a new study, the areas of the brain which produce that tenacity in Apple fans are the same spots that fuel religious fervor.

Scientists using an magnetic resonance imagine (MRI) machine presented Apple fans with images of the company’s popular gadgets. Upon doing so, they found brain activity that mirrors how a religious person’s brain reacts when presented with a picture of their chosen deity.

As Chesterton once said, when people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything. Including, apparently, Steve Jobs.

No worries

It appears Blogger is having serious technical difficulties. One can only presume Facebook is behind it. Normal posting will resume at the earliest opportunity.

A semblance of sanity

IP addresses are not people. And in related news, routers will not be permitted to vote in the 2012 election:

A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US may spell the end of the ‘pay-up-or-else-schemes’ that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person.

I’ve never understood the idea that an Internet connection can reasonably be pinned to a single individual. Even if there is only one computer connected to the local area network, who is to say that a different individual was not on the machine? But, given the 40-year war on common sense being waged by the U.S. judicial system, I suppose any semblance of sanity is to be celebrated.

Android is less evil than Apple

Talk about damning with faint praise…. Anyhow, being an Android user myself, I was concerned about reports that Google was doing the same thing as Apple in collecting location data on Android users. After looking into the matter, however, the behavior of the two companies appears to be rather different. The reason for my concern was that I had always kept the two options for location tracking, wireless and GPS, turned off, and it seemed astonishing that Google would be so stupid as to attempt to give its users a false sense of location security while secretly tracking them against their clear wishes as determined by their chosen settings. However, numerous people looking into the matter have determined that off really is off.

If you want to find out whether your Android phone is collecting location information tap Menu, Location & Security. You will see the screenshot shown above, which has two options for how your phone collects location information, either via wireless networks or by using GPS satellites. If you do not want your location information tracked, clear both check boxes.

Be aware that if you turn off location tracking, apps like Google Maps that show your location will not work. If you decide to turn location tracking back on, you will see the screen as shown below, telling you that you are allowing Google’s location service to collect anonymous location data, and that collection will occur even when no applications are running.

In other words, the real “problem” with Android is that people who have either never looked at their location settings or ignored at least one, and usually two, pop-up warning that their location will be tracked, don’t realize that they have opted in to location tracking. That’s not an actual problem; although it would be preferable if the default option was always set to off, the total cluelessness of many, if not most users, make it understandable why Google would have the default option set to on. The point is that it’s not nefarious and unlike Apple, Google has provided a way to completely turn off location tracking.

That being said, it is obnoxious that Google ties Android to a Gmail account and it would be vastly preferable if it did not do so. But it’s still to be preferred to the sheltered life in Apple’s technofascistic walled garden.

Can’t say I didn’t warn you

About the technofascists at Apple:

This is sort of a big deal. Apple is, without your consent or any warning labels, logging all of your iPhone’s location data and then transferring it over to your computer when you backup or sync your iPhone. The information is easily accessible — unencrypted and in a standard database format. (The option to encrypt is there, though I haven’t tested whether this option obscures your location data.)

Upshot? Any program you install or anyone you let on your computer could access this data, giving that program or that person full access to where you were and when you were there.

Check out the link. They have a map they were able to make of one of their employee’s locations. This is pretty egregious and is likely to have some unexpected ramifications. Just to give one example, given how popular iPhones are with women, it shouldn’t be hard to see that this “feature” is going to lead to more than a few divorces and breakups in the near future.

Killing the Internet

Succession riots in Egypt:

Egyptians are telling me Egypt’s internet has been disabled and that mobile phone service may be next. Twitter, used to coordinate public protests, has already been cut off.

This tends to raise the question… why does Obama feel that he needs a kill switch for the US internet?

Tech update

Needless to say, I was much amused by this patent application in light of all of the Macintossers initially dismissing the multibutton approach and declaring how stylistically horrific it is. Clearly it is much better to imitate the multibutton approach, only to do so in a manner that forces one operate by sight instead of by touch and places the virtual buttons directly under one’s palm, if for no other reason than Apple has blessed the approach.

Speaking of comparing the effectiveness of different interface approaches, we’re going to be releasing the performance results of various mice soon and it looks to be a bit of a scandal. We have compiled strong empirical evidence indicating that in between the switch from mechanical rollers to optical sensors and the advent of the the multibutton interface, there has been essentially no actual performance difference between so-called high performance gaming mice and cheap office mice. Here is a comparison of four mice, two of which have multibutton support and two of which do not. The difference in performance between the two multibutton mice is the result of their different approaches to the interface; there is a reason, after all, that clumsy people are described as being “all thumbs”. That comparison marks the fastest speeds recorded at 1920×1200 resolution, whereas the sustainable speeds that one can reasonably expect to maintain in consistent use are about 15% slower on both the conventional and multibutton interfaces.

Finally, on the practical application side, there is a new video focused on Mozilla Firefox and demonstrating how the default Firefox mode operates for those who might be interested.

Mailvox: le progrès, c’est moi

Remir throws down the gauntlet:

If you can beat an extrapolated 6.9 s for 10 clicks on a Meta, I will buy one. Likewise, if you beat 13.8 s for 20 clicks on a Meta, I will eat myself whole live on the Internet.

Now, I’m not saying that 21.59 s is slow, since it approaches the superhuman. I’m merely pointing out that you can’t reasonably expect to beat a jet with a propeller, even if it’s a turboprop.  Who needs extrapolation when you can simply do it for real?  Better start filing those teeth, Remir.

In addition to shattering the development team’s records, I thought it was interesting to note that the best of the 10 times that went into the 6.89 time was only 0.59, considerably slower than the present record of 0.41 that went into the 6.80 I clocked a few minutes later.  This led to an emotional epiphany in which I suddenly realized that I am presently at the very apex of human progress. The entire history of Man’s technological development and achievement over the millennia currently culminates right here: le progrès, c’est moi. Being a man who lost his fifth gear more than a decade ago, I harbor no illusions that this historical landmark in man-machine relations will be not surpassed soon, perhaps even today. But for one brief, shining, glorious moment, on a planet of 6,894,600,000 people, I can legitimately claim to be the world’s fastest mouser.