SoylentNews

(This was written last year but never posted)

        I spent a hundred bucks on my next book last week.
        Each story had an illustration at the beginning, except one: “Watch Your Language, Young Man!” I could find no suitable old women on Google Images, so I figured I’d have to either find an old woman at a bar who would want to be the illustration of a shrewish old lady, or just get out my pencil and make one.
        Rust never sleeps! And boy, but my fingers seemed to be solid rust. Of course, when I was young I drew every day, or at least almost every day. I was damned good.
        Not any more. I haven’t drawn a single thing since my kids were born three decades ago. So of course when I sat down with pencil and paper, nothing was produced but offal.
        Damn. It was late and I’d had a few beers, so maybe I was drunk? I set it aside for the next morning.
        Several days and a couple sheets of paper later and I finally had a cartoon drawing of an angry old crone. I figured I’d digitize her the same way I digitized my slides—I’d use my phone’s camera. With an eight by ten image to photograph, it should work fine. After all, the cover of The Paxil Diaries is a photo of one of my paintings I painted when I still had talent, and it turned out all right.
        Not Mrs. Ferguson. The white paper was a neutral gray in the digital image. “GIMP’ll fix it,” I thought.
        Nope. Adjusting the brightness and contrast removed some of the details. Actually, a lot of them.
        Several tries later I gave up, and decided to just scan it. I went down to the basement, where the scanner’s been since I moved in here, and realized that first, it probably wouldn’t work any more, and even if it did it used a parallel port to get the image in a computer, and when was the last time you saw a parallel port? So I drove to Staples, where all the scanners were attached to printers!
        I finally found a sales guy, who found a couple without printers that cost more than the ones with printers attached. He said they always put printers on cheap scanners, so I bought one of the expensive ones, an Epson Perfection V39.
        I took it home and scanned Mrs. Ferguson, put her at the top of the story, printed her out, and shrunk down like that, again a lot of the details were gone. So I thickened some lines and rescanned. It’s fine now.
        I wasn’t going to mention it because when I bought the scanner I had the idea of scanning all the photo albums for Patty, but that’s taking a long time, they won’t be done by Christmas, and Leila says she can’t come this year, anyway.
        I have one scanned, and half its photos straightened out and separated from each other, but I’ll be at it for a while. I’m also going to scan the book my uncle co-write, and if I get permission from my aunt to publish it I’ll do so. Of course, it would only be of interest to family since it’s about family history, some of it ancient, fifteenth century ancient.
        I really like that scanner! It’s a lot smaller than the old one in the basement; that one’s four or five inches thick and a foot and a half by two feet, and has a power cord with a big box in the middle and a parallel port. The new one is smaller than my big laptop and needs no power cable, as it gets its power from the USB port. It uses the same kind of USB cable as your phone (unless you have an Apple, which is compatible with nothing).
        At any rate, I haven’t written much lately...

Whoa. Did the capacity of Li-ion batteries just triple while I wasn't looking?

Last time I checked they seemed to top out at 3000mAH, now I see a lot of 5800-6000mAH and even 9800-9900mAH cells for sale. Any reason I can't stuff these into an old laptop battery pack that originally came with 2200mAH cells? (and boost the battery life to 12 hours?)

Having recently added some more old PC parts to my collection, I had the opportunity to compare an Athlon II X2 against a Phenom II X2. The former CPU is a true dual-core die (Regor) whereas the latter is really a quad-core with two cores disabled (Deneb/Callisto). But functionally, the only difference between them is that Callisto has 6MB of L3 cache which Regor does not, instead having a larger 1MB L2 cache (vs. 512KB) per core. Presumably, the L3 is slower than L2 while still being faster than DRAM, so I was curious which would have a greater performance benefit. (I still wonder whether hitting the L3 is faster than snooping the other core's L2, or if having the L3 enables some kind of increased parallelization like write-behind caching of L2 victims maybe...)

I ran a few benchmarks, and the TLDR answer is that sometimes the CPUs tied, other times the one with L3 won (the one without L3 never won).

First I had to get the Phenom II X2 to work correctly in this board. Both of these CPUs launched after the last BIOS update for this particular MB. The Athlon II is setup correctly except for the CPU name string "AMD Processor Model Unknown." It doesn't like the Phenom II at all though for some reason. It boots up at 800MHz and is stuck there. The P-State limit register is set to zero and Phenom MSR Tweaker doesn't work.

I looked in the AMD docs to try and figure out what register settings were preventing me from changing the speed and I found out that I could change it by setting the COFVID control register. Actually you have to set it twice because it doesn't actually change speed unless the P-State bits change. So I wrote something like $0000000038013840 first, to change to a low speed and voltage and "P-State 1" (it's not really P-State 1 though, it doesn't use the data from P-State 1's register). Then I wait for a moment, and write it again with $0000000018001810. So without changing the actual P-State registers now I am at 3.2GHz. (Or 3.52GHz with a 10% overclock)

System specs:
CPU: Athlon II X2 or Phenom II X2
freq: 3520MHz
L2: 1024KB x2 or 512KB x2
L3: none or 6MB
northbridge: 1760MHz
HT: 1760MHz
RAM: DDR2-880 5-5-5-18
gfx: GeForce GT240
OS: Windows 2000

benchmarks:
CPU-Z version 1.75: 349 vs 349
my FreeBASIC software 3D renderer: 19.3fps vs 20.7fps
3dmark01: 35148 vs 41560
3dmark03 gfx: 24005 vs 24803
3dmark03 cpu: 1975 vs 2309
3dmark06 gfx: 8783 vs 8980
3dmark06 cpu: 2968 vs 3017
cinebench 11.5: 1.86 vs 1.90

If you listen to the pundits who support Planned Parenthood, the sky will surely fall if the abortion chain is defunded.

If even one Planned Parenthood affiliate or center has to close as a result of defunding, they say, the patients Planned Parenthood serves will have no access to health services elsewhere. This is utter nonsense, of course.

The claim that removing federal dollars from Planned Parenthood will shutter their doors is ludicrous. As Live Action News has previously reported, the organization’s own annual reports reveal that Planned Parenthood has been netting a profit for many years. Almost every year since 2000, Planned Parenthood’s revenue has exceeded their expenses — not just by a few dollars, but by tens of millions of dollars (yearly surpluses ranging from $18.5 million to a high of $127 million). In addition, with the threat of defunding now more real under the newly elected Congress and president, Planned Parenthood has repeatedly claimed that private donations are suddenly flooding into their coffers.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine what would happen if we applied this same logic — that a profitable organization should be taxpayer funded, merely because closing would disenfranchise its customers — to any other business. Let’s suppose it was thought that department store chains should receive taxpayer funding because online sales are hurting chain stores’ business. The argument could be made that these department stores have served many people, that they are located in many disadvantaged communities, and that poor people who do not have internet access will be disenfranchised if these stores close. Should we then give these stores half a billion taxpayer dollars every year (the amount Planned Parenthood receives) to keep them open?

The truth is that there are Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) already in place, which could serve the patients Planned Parenthood serves — outnumbering Planned Parenthood centers 20 to 1 — so why do Planned Parenthood spokespersons (many who earn six-figure salaries) want you to believe that American women could not survive without them?

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards has even made totally unsupported claims that millions would be without healthcare if Congress votes to defund Planned Parenthood. Richards recently told Rolling Stone:

        This is literally whether a young man in Texas can come to us for an STI testing, or whether a woman who has a lump in her breast can come to us in Ohio to have a breast exam or be referred for screenings, or whether a college student or a young person anywhere in the country can come to us for family planning. We’re talking about more than a million-and-a-half people who rely on Planned Parenthood, and for most of them we’re their only medical provider. As all of the medical institutions have said: There’s no one to take our place providing low- and moderate-income people with preventive health care. There isn’t any other entity that is doing that work.

Interesting that she mentions the breast screenings, because Planned Parenthood, as Live Action has documented, does not do mammograms — but FQHCs do.

I am curious, however, as to how the defunding of Planned Parenthood would cause the apocalypse, but closures of other non-profits — specifically hospitals, which one could argue offer far more needed “services” — would not.

Let me explain.

According to a 2015 report published by the Journal for Health Affairs, patient health was not significantly compromised when hospitals closed. The Non-Profit Quarterly reports pointed out with regards to the study that “vulnerable hospitals that have not been financially sustainable, with operating margins of ‑20% on average, have been the first to close, causing public concern that displaced patients will experience declining health and even death when access to care goes away.”

Despite this concern, the 2015 study found “no significant difference between the change in annual mortality rates for patients living in hospital service areas (HSAs) that experienced one or more closures and the change in rates in matched HSAs without a closure…. Nor was there a significant difference in the change in all-cause mortality rates following hospitalization….”

The unknown in the study was how the closures affected low income patients. But according to Non-Profit Quarterly:

        Researchers reported that among Medicare patients there were no substantial changes in admissions, lengths of stay, or readmissions, but also cautioned that the study should not be interpreted to mean that every hospital loss is harmless….

        While the study supports the argument that access to care has improved, the data does not, however, tell the whole story. One-third of institutions that were closed were “safety net” hospitals that treated large numbers of low-income and uninsured people. Since only easily-accessed Medicare patient information was reviewed, impact on those populations is still unknown.

Unknown? A study of three hospital closures from 2015, conducted by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured and the Urban Institute, actually found that lower income and elderly patients were negatively affected and “were more likely to face transportation challenges and thus more likely to delay or forgo needed care.”

But in Planned Parenthood’s case, there are already hundreds of FQHC alternatives available, open and ready to serve the public. A December 2015 Congressional Research Service report which compared the services of Planned Parenthood Federation of America-affiliated health centers (PPAHC) to those of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) found…

        FQHCs are required to provide primary, preventive, and emergency health services.
        FQHCs focus on providing more comprehensive primary care, dental, and behavioral health services.
        FQHCs provide far more services in a given year than do PPAHCs.
        PPAHCs focus their services on individuals of reproductive age; FQHCs provide services to individuals throughout their lifetimes.
        FQHCs served 22.9 million people in 2014; PPAHCs served 2.7 million.
        358 counties have both a PPAHC and a FQHC.
        FQHCs also receive federal grants that require them to provide family planning (among other services) to Medicaid beneficiaries.

Planned Parenthood and its supporters want the public to believe that only Planned Parenthood is able to care for the needs of the 2.5 million patients they “serve.” And they will suggest that if they are defunded and close facilities, the hundreds of FQHC that replace them (already in existence and serving patients, mind you) will be overwhelmed with patient influx, thus unable to address the many needs. (This was the same fear that plagued Democrats when they passed the Affordable Care Act, yet they argued that the system would be more than able to handle that influx.)

A study on the effects of the Affordable Care Act, conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and health care company Athenahealth, which gathered data from 15,700 of Athenahealth’s clients, found that new patient visits to primary care physicians only increased slightly. It was anticipated that uninsured patients now gaining insurance might have unmet medical needs, and their demand for services might overwhelm the capacity of primary care doctors. But according to the study, this idea proved false. Kathy Hempstead, director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told USA Today that the study “suggests that, even though there’s been a big increase in coverage, it’s a relatively small part of the market and the delivery system is able to handle the demand.”

For years, Planned Parenthood has been closing centers despite a steady increase in funding under the Obama administration. The Congressional Research Service found that the number of PPHAC affiliates and facilities has declined since 2009-2010, when PPFA reported having 88 affiliates (a 32 percent decline) and 840 health centers (a 21 percent decline). And, as of December 20, 2016, there are now only 650 Planned Parenthood centers, indicating a 22.67 percent decline.

In addition, Planned Parenthood patients have also decreased over the years. In 2014, Planned Parenthood saw 2.5 million patients — down a whopping 24.24 percent since 1996, when they saw 3.3 million and received far less government funding ($177.5 million in 1996 compared to $553.7 million in 2014). In contrast, FQHCs have increased the number of patients seen in each year since 2009. From 2009 to 2014, FQHC patients increased from 18.9 million to 22.9 million.

Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of abortion in the nation. Live Action has documented how Planned Parenthood manipulates its own data to cover up the fact that abortion – not women’s health care – accounts for the lion’s share of the corporation’s services for pregnant women.

Defunding the largest chain of abortion clinics will not send millions of patients to their demise — and Planned Parenthood knows this. The truth is that taxpayer dollars can be better spent on real health care organizations that will serve the American public and maintain the sanctity of life in the process.

http://liveactionnews.org/sky-fall-planned-parenthood-defunded-heres-why/

Found a story about my... well not my home town but the town you have to go to from my home town for anything besides gas, beer, or religion. Turns out Nick Cage's rental car broke down there and he had a thing or two to say about the place. See, that's what I mean when I say to folks who only see what my views on politics and other big shat are, you don't know me at all.

This kind of shit is just another day in a red state. If someone comes up and says you owe them something that you don't, you laugh and punch them in the face but if you see someone in actual need, you help your fellow man because it's the right thing to do and because you might need a hand too some time. In a place where most everybody grows up poor and having to work their ass off to get by, you help each other because it's just what you do. Nick could have broke down a half mile from where he did over by the meth dealers and he still would have gotten the same reception.

Updated... see below.

I was at a concert a while ago and recorded, what I found out later, was a debut performance of a song. As I am friends with the lead singer, I'd like to send her a copy, but there are a couple of "issues".

Part 1: Editing

So, I've got a couple video files that I want to "process". I have no experience with video and only very limited experience with audio file manipulation.

Here is the pertinent data from ffprobe on the 25.6 MB introduction:

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'intro.mp4':
  Duration: 00:00:18.54, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 11342 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1280x720, 11378 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 24.08 fps, 24.17 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 96 kb/s (default)

Here is the pertinent data from ffprobe on the 1099.8 MB song itself:

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'song.mp4':
  Duration: 00:10:39.32, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 14092 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1280x720, 14000 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 30 fps, 30 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 95 kb/s (default)

(1) At the outset I had accidentally activated the wrong camera on my mobile phone. I'd like to keep the audio of the singer introducing the song.

(2) The video of the song actually contains TWO songs. I'm only interested in extracting the first song (the first 4m40s) from this video.

(3) Optional, but would be really nice, I'd like to make a "title" with the name of the group, name of the song, date, and location with the intro audio playing in the background.

(4) Ideally, I'd like to catenate the intro from (3) to the video from (2) and create a single file.

I'm running Windows 7 Professional. Have you ever done something like this? What free tools would you recommend?

Part 2: Shipping

I expect the final file to be about 500 MB, give or take. How would you recommend getting the file to her? It is rather large to send as an e-mail attachment. I do not have drop-box or one-cloud or any of the other file-sharing services. I'd like to keep the file private. I can't be the first who wants to do this. What options do I have?

Update(s):

Update 1: 20170101a - Happy New Year!

I've completed step (1) and extracted the audio for the intro to a separate file, intro.mp3, using:

   ffmpeg -i intro.mp4 -ab 96k  intro.mp3

Yeah, I know. 96kbps is not the greatest, but it's what was captured in the video, so I'm stuck with it.

Now to extract just the first 4m40s video of the song to a separate file. Looks like this could be done with ffmpeg?

Update 2: 20170101b

With many thanks to fn0rd666, got the "magic" incantation for ffmpeg:

fmpeg -ss 00:00:00.0 -i infile.mp4 -t 285 -codec copy outfile.mp4

Which means: start at the very beginning of the source, read from the file infile.mp4, copy 285 seconds, copy input straight to output (no transcoding), and send the output to the file: outfile.mp4!

Sixteen: The Final Chapter

It's that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along nobody will remember
that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash. I might as well, too. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year's final chapter).

Some of these links go to /., S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info. Stories and articles meant to ultimately be published in a printed book have smart quotes, and slashdot isn't smart enough for smart quotes.

As usual, first: the yearly index:
Journals:
Random Scribblings
the Paxil Diaries
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015

Articles:
Useful Dead Technologies Redux
The Old Sayings Are Wrong
How to digitize all of your film slides for less than ten dollars
GIMPy Text
The 2016 Hugo convention

Song
My Generation 21st Century
Santa Killed My Dog!

Book reviews
Stephen King, On Writing
Vachel Lindsay, The Golden Book of Springfield
J. D. Lakey, Black Bead

Scince Fiction:
Wierd Planet
The Muse
Cornodium
Dewey's War
The Naked Truth
The Exhibit
Agoraphobia
Trouble on Ceres

Last years' stupid predictions (and more):

Last year I said I wasn't going to predict publication of Voyage to Earth and Other Stories, and I was right, it's nearly done. So this year I do predict that Voyage to Earth and Other Stories will be published. I'm waiting for Sentience to come back from Motherboard, who's been hanging on to it since last February. I may have to e-mail them and cancel the submission if it isn't back by this February.

I'll also hang on to last year's predictions:

Someone will die. Not necessarily anybody I know...
SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
The Pirate Party won't make inroads in the US. I hope I'm wrong about that one.
US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
I'll still be a nerd.
You'll still be a nerd.
Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N).
Slashdot will be rife with dupes.
Many Slashdot FPs will be poorly edited.
Slashdot still won't have fixed its patented text mangler.
Microsoft will continue sucking.
And a new one: DONALD TRUMP WILL (gasp) BE PRESIDENT IF THE US!!! God help us all! (He can't possibly be worse than George H. Bush or James Buchanan, can he?)

Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?

OK, I've really done it this time...

One of the things that Turgid jr. got for Christmas was a new Android tablet. It's useless.

Mrs Turgid suggested buying some kind of Amazon kids tablet, and I looked them up on line and they didn't look all that great, certainly not for playing Pokemon Go.

So I asked some of the guys at work about tablets for children. They said you can set up an unprivileged user account in Android and lock it down pretty well so that it's mostly safe for supervised use.

With that in mind I went online and ordered a 10" Acer tablet (Acer Iconia One 10) and lo and behold Acer have removed the ability to create multiple user accounts.

It's my own stupid fault for not unpacking it and trying it out as soon as I bought it. I could have sent it back...

To be honest, it never occurred to me that a manufacturer would remove the ability to have multiple user accounts. It just seems crazy...

Needless to say, this creates a tricky situation. How do you explain to a 7-year-old that Santa Claus is an idiot?

Can I root the machine and put something sane on it?

If there was any sort of "we're all in this together" feeling, it would help, but there isn't.

There isn't such a feeling because we aren't all in this together.

Why does US labor have to take a haircut while the 1% get lots more money?

Because you're competing with several billion people who will work for a lot less while the capital of those rich people does not. There's no reason to expect this to be fair. But at the same time, it's not unfair to expect you to adapt to the situation rather than make it worse.

For example, let's say you're the only plumber in a town. You are a paragon of virtue and don't abuse your effective monopoly position and offer prices comparable to neighboring towns which do have more than one plumber.

Then one day, five new plumbers move in and immediately start offering lower and lower prices. It's not fair to you. Nobody else in town has this sort of competition going on. You are losing wealth relative to everyone else who isn't a plumber through no fault of your own. Income inequality increases as a result with six poor plumbers.

At this point, you have a number of choices, all of them bad to some degree. For example, you can attempt to tough it out to be one of the last ones standing, knowing that you'll still have a greatly reduced market share and profit as a result. You can move to a new town and be a plumber there. Or you can abandon plumbing as a career altogether. Maybe you'll try to take a chance and create a new plumbing service that the other plumbers can't match (maybe it'll pay off, maybe it won't)..

There are all ways you could attempt to better your situation. But you could also choose to make the situation worse such as developing a drinking habit. I believe this is going on at a vast scale in the developed world. There's all this entitled talk about how the rich people owe us a good salary and such. Well, they owe the Indians and the Chinese good salaries too. And good salaries there are much less than good salaries in the developed world.

Bottom line is that developed world labor has to be able to offer something that developing world labor can't offer (and it can be as simple as access to a nice market, though the developing world has nice markets too) or it won't get the work for the pay that is desired. Developed world labor just doesn't have pricing power and won't get it until there is near parity with the developing world (which is improving at a good rate) or until some remarkable advantage is created (I'm not seeing the remarkable advantages in the long run).

You want what rich people have, but you don't have leverage to get it. You're not going to make your situation any better by making it harder for rich people to give you what you want.

I know a lot of you are disappointed I didn't go ahead and finish the debate on the MIT petition story. Tough.

Most days it's fun smacking down the willfully ignorant but sometimes outside forces conspire to make me too tired to bother. I just delete all the messages, pop open a beer, and watch some TV.

This was one of those times and you're just going to have to live with it.