January, 2016 archive
No Place To Hide 0
The EFF reports on Senator Al Franken’s attempt to investigate Google’s business practice, in particular their tracking of school students’ activities on Chromebooks. Here’s a bit from the story. Read the rest, then you can join the EFF at the link on the sidebar, over there.————————————>
Yet without parental consent the company tracks and records students’ online activity in certain Google services and feeds it into an ad profile attached to the students’ educational accounts. Is there an educational purpose in that practice? Senator Franken has asked Google to explain why it collects this information, and as we raise in our FTC complaint, whether “Google [has] ever used this kind of data for its own business purposes.”
Dis Coarse Discourse 0
Amongst collective nouns, there’s a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, a pod of whales.
I propose a new collective: A bray of Trumps.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Politeness is a family matter:
The older brother was handing the handgun over to the younger sibling when it accidentally fired and struck the teen in the torso.
The older sibling is the son of a member of the constable’s command staff and investigators said the pistol involved the shooting was the father’s weapon.
There is now one less brother.
Bits Byte 0
The Guardian reports that Mike Hearn, “a longtime senior developer on bitcoin and the former chair of the bitcoin foundation’s law and policy committee, announced in a blogpost that he would be selling his coins and quitting development on the project,” because he has concluded that bitcoin is a failure.
Of course it is. It’s been a mug’s game from the start, a Ponzi scheme open only to techies with full pockets of real money, an elitist hipster con, suckering those who think that they are k3wl and l33t just because they understand “blockchain,” an electronic Enron enticing economic illiterates enamored of their magical computing boxes.
Here’s a short piece from the article:
But the main reason why XT never took off was the failure of the other major bottleneck: the miners.
Bitcoin is supposed to be a decentralised currency. Anyone can download the entire history of bitcoin transactions, and devote computing power to verifying future transactions (called mining). For a change such as the switch to XT to succeed, more than half of the computing power on the bitcoin network has to support it by updating their own software accordingly.
But very few people bother to mine for bitcoin. It’s expensive in terms of computer hardware, time and electricity so it is very difficult to beat professionally equipped outlets in the race for rewards. Those amateurs who do mine largely do so as part of pools, who share both computing power and rewards. Those pools, however, are also centrally controlled. As a result, Hearn points out, just two individuals control more than 50% of the power of the network. He adds that “over 95% of hashing power was controlled by a handful of guys sitting on a single stage” at a recent bitcoin conference.
Afterthought:
Ask me nicely, I’ll tell you what I really think.
Norment’s Torments 0
The Republican leader of the Virginia Senate, Tommy Norment (R–A Place that Should Have Known Better), has banned the press for their traditional access to the Senate floor because of transparency.*
The Richmond Times-Dispatch responds.
_______________
*He’s agin’ it.
Brand Loyalty 0
Clarence Page suggests that the brand may be the Trummp card:
This occurred to me last summer after I encountered former “The Apprentice” contestant Omarosa Manigault in the lobby of NBC’s Washington studios, shortly after Trump launched his campaign.
Newly hired to help lead Trump’s Ohio campaign, Manigault advised me that in assessing Trump’s appeal, “there’s a different analysis and metrics you have to use.”
“Reality television has now taken over television,” she said in an MSNBC discussion later. “People want to see real moments and see life unfold in front of them. Not scripted, but real moments.”
I fear it does no good to point out that there’s little that is real about “reality television.”
On the Wing 0
Another picture from my brother in Virginia’s Northern Neck.
The Trump Card 0
At the Boston Review, Sam Rosen spots a pattern of Trumpery. A nugget (follow the link for much more) (emphasis added):
