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Changes Afoot (The Pain of the Liberal Elite)
This has been quite a year. I have successfully avoided any C++ for about six months, which is a big win since it makes me want to puke. I have settled into the relaxed world of Java while keeping my hand in at C. In my copious spare time, I'm working through my Clojure book. I also need to do some more work on my Secret Plan for World Domination(TM).
However, I am very angry and hurting.
I find myself far less engaged in matters of technology since my country is going down the toilet. I want a boat. I want to live by the sea and go sailing and to do a bit of fishing. I wish I had my own company. I'm tired of working for people with no vision who are still trying to figure out whether to adopt ideas that were demonstrated to be successful two decades ago. We are leaving the European Union, the world's most successful and advanced trading bloc, for no discernible reason, on 31st January. Remain has lost the battle.
Now the focus is on Scottish Independence to escape the Alt-Wrong Brexit which will turn us into some kind of backward Dickensian sweatshop. This member of the Liberal Elite is hurting now, and that's all that matters apparently. I definitely have work until about April.
For the record, my ancestors were poor Scottish subsistence farmers, but thanks to the post-WWII Welfare State and universal free education, my family pulled itself up into central heating and double glazing. We also benefited from the free-at-the-point-of-use National Health Service, for which I pay many hundreds of pounds per month in Income Tax and National Insurance. Apparently this qualifies me as a member of the Liberal Metropolitan Elite, despite the fact that I do not and have never lived in London, and I have a modest education and a reasonable job. I'm a very modest man with much to be modest about.
The plan is to relocate "home" to Scotland as and when independence happens. Hopefully the 2020 vote will be positive. In the meantime, I can try to get sent abroad to work. We're running out of good things to do here thanks to Brexit, and the future "opportunities" are both unpleasant and subject to funding from unreliable sources. And I might be getting my first ever pay cut, which will hurt my extended family because I spend about 500 pounds per month helping them out.
In other parts of the UK, many people don't appreciate the difference between the political consensus in Scotland and eg. England. For example, in Scotland, people voted to have higher Income Tax (1%) to have better public services. England just voted by a landslide for massive deregulation (workers' rights, environmental protection, food standards, NHS/USA trade deal).
Regarding the US takeover of our NHS, there is a petition. In "trade deals" everything is on the table,
We've had nearly a decade of Austerity: cuts to the Welfare State, Education, National Health Service, Police, Armed Forces, Social Care, the legal system etc. and yet the Great British Public (actually the English public) voted for this on steroids by a landslide for at least another five years, including a hard Brexit. The re-elected people such as Iain Duncan Smith, a very wealthy man (thanks to his wife) who is getting a knighthood for his reforms to the welfare state (harsh cutbacks and draconian medical tests) which have brought misery to hundreds of thousands of people.
They also re-elected disgraced MP and Home Secretary Priti Patel, a proponent of the Death Penalty amongst other things, and who has a very hard-line attitude to immigrants and refugees, despite being the daughter of refugees to the UK herself.
Of course, we must not forget, the Prime Minister himself, Boris Johnson, twice sacked from his day job (with right-wing newspapers) for lying who is also a brazen racist and homophobic bigot, amongst other things.
Apparently I do not understand why this has happened. I do not understand why my own behaviour has made this happen. Apparently, despite my attempts to help the less fortunate that myself, I "sneer" and "show contempt" for them. Apparently paying tax to fund a civilised society is not appreciated.
Other than sneering, whinging and generally being a pining Remoaner, what have I done?
First of all, I have been making donations to my local food bank and other food charities, and to obviously distressed people begging in the street After the Second World War, my grandparents' generation voted, by a landslide, to establish a comprehensive Welfare State, from cradle to the grave, to ensure that there was a basic safety net for their fellow human beings such that this sort of suffering would not have to be endured, and they (and I) were happy to pay for it. We're all in this life thing together, after all, and we never know when our luck might change.
I have also made several donations to Hope Not Hate in order to fund campaigns against fascist bullies and bigots such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and Nigel Farage.
I have continued to support The People's Challenge and to Gina Miller's various causes.
We lost. It's now time to start "getting over it." I'm bitter, angry, tired and despondent but it's time to plan for the future and to move on.
England has chosen the far-right USA model of extreme deregulation and pursuit of profit. Scotland has aligned itself politically and economically with countries such as Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. I prefer the Scottish model.
There is one fly in the ointment: the UK Parliament (Westminster), currently dominated by the English far-right, has to "approve" a Scottish Independence referendum (Section 30) to make it legally binding. They say they'll deny it. Why? They say Scotland is a drain on UK finances. You'd think that this brave new patriotic England would be delighted to be relieved of yet another burden?
2020 looks to be a very interesting year politically, particularly for the UK. Happy new year.
What Texans are good for
Shit exactly like this.
Nineteen: 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).
I want to apologize for my absence from S/N for the last six months or so; I’ve been busy offline. I’ve penned a few SF stories I’m shopping to the magazines, and took out a mortgage and bought the house I’ve been renting for ten years.
I’ve also written a few articles that really should have been at S/N but I only posted at mcgrew.info. I apologize for that, too. I did write more articles than last year, even if they didn’t all go to S/N.
I’ve kind of always been like that; I was away from slashdot from about 2000 to around 2005. I haven’t been there for a few years now. I'll try to be here a lot more next year.
Some of these links go to /. (these would be old stuff), S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info.
As usual, first: the yearly index:
Journals:
Articles:
A Useful Computer Program Using Only HTML
As mentioned above, I’m shopping the SF. You’ll see it sooner or later.
Last years’ stupid predictions (and more):
I predicted that I wouldn’t have a book ready in 2019. I got it right!
I’ll also hang on to most of last year’s predictions;
Someone will die. Maybe you, maybe me. Not necessarily anybody I know... we can only hope. I did lose a friend and some acquaintances this year.
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.
Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N). I have no idea if that one or the following held up, anybody been there lately?
Slashdot will be rife with dupes.
Many Slashdot FPs will be poorly edited.
Microsoft will continue sucking. Windows 10 really sucks, it sucks that they’re stopping support for 7 next month, and it sucks that I’m not sure if my new Dell convertible laptop will run Linux.
There will be elections in the US
Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?
End of Year Stats
JMH requested some site data and I haven't done one of these up in a while, so here goes.
Top 20 viewed stories of 2019 as of NOW()
+---------------------------------------------------------+------------------+-------+
| Story | Submitter | Hits |
+---------------------------------------------------------+------------------+-------+
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/06/24/1233205 | martyb | 36429 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/08/23/0136213 | Anonymous Coward | 14008 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/03/26/0356205 | Anonymous Coward | 13165 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/01/25/0435205 | martyb | 12502 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/04/11/1029234 | Anonymous Coward | 12021 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/04/15/2012241 | Freeman | 10861 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/01/20/192257 | aristarchus | 9113 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/03/21/0256218 | martyb | 9083 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/01/03/1431210 | aristarchus | 8672 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/01/27/1941254 | martyb | 8612 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/04/18/1615204 | martyb | 8555 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/05/01/1713236 | AnonTechie | 8528 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/04/17/0824259 | aristarchus | 7718 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/01/13/1816246 | takyon | 7396 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/02/22/0241259 | aristarchus | 7272 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/03/17/1114248 | Anonymous Coward | 7226 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/02/15/0416210 | martyb | 7190 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/11/01/1146203 | Anonymous Coward | 7135 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/02/12/2347255 | takyon | 6730 |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/03/11/0256224 | RandomFactor | 6525 |
+---------------------------------------------------------+------------------+-------+
Most mods for ... in 2019 (in order of the db id of the reason)
Offtopic
+----------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+----------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 1007 |
| realDonaldTrump | 221 |
| Runaway1956 | 186 |
| aristarchus | 138 |
| khallow | 51 |
| Ethanol-fueled | 47 |
| Azuma Hazuki | 28 |
| jmichaelhudsondotnet | 28 |
| fustakrakich | 26 |
| c0lo | 25 |
+----------------------+------+
Flamebait
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 1817 |
| Runaway1956 | 194 |
| aristarchus | 155 |
| Ethanol-fueled | 139 |
| Azuma Hazuki | 121 |
| realDonaldTrump | 86 |
| khallow | 83 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 76 |
| ikanreed | 63 |
| Bot | 40 |
+--------------------+------+
Troll
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 4490 |
| Runaway1956 | 470 |
| realDonaldTrump | 431 |
| Ethanol-fueled | 307 |
| khallow | 278 |
| aristarchus | 242 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 178 |
| Azuma Hazuki | 177 |
| jmorris | 117 |
| VLM | 101 |
+--------------------+------+
Redundant
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 466 |
| aristarchus | 54 |
| khallow | 50 |
| realDonaldTrump | 46 |
| Runaway1956 | 45 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 26 |
| fustakrakich | 19 |
| DeathMonkey | 19 |
| c0lo | 15 |
| Bot | 11 |
+--------------------+------+
Insightful
+--------------------+-------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+-------+
| Anonymous Coward | 11091 |
| Runaway1956 | 900 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 650 |
| Azuma Hazuki | 612 |
| JoeMerchant | 512 |
| DannyB | 468 |
| Thexalon | 465 |
| c0lo | 441 |
| DeathMonkey | 410 |
| ikanreed | 405 |
+--------------------+-------+
Interesting
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 6465 |
| JoeMerchant | 536 |
| takyon | 516 |
| Runaway1956 | 495 |
| DannyB | 307 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 279 |
| bzipitidoo | 265 |
| c0lo | 257 |
| Azuma Hazuki | 256 |
| Thexalon | 232 |
+--------------------+------+
Informative
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 6776 |
| takyon | 589 |
| DeathMonkey | 531 |
| c0lo | 420 |
| Azuma Hazuki | 366 |
| Runaway1956 | 354 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 337 |
| NotSanguine | 227 |
| JoeMerchant | 219 |
| ikanreed | 217 |
+--------------------+------+
Funny
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 5100 |
| DannyB | 422 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 319 |
| Runaway1956 | 276 |
| c0lo | 245 |
| Bot | 242 |
| takyon | 235 |
| aristarchus | 234 |
| realDonaldTrump | 214 |
| Gaaark | 199 |
+--------------------+------+
Overrated
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 497 |
| Runaway1956 | 63 |
| Azuma Hazuki | 51 |
| DeathMonkey | 27 |
| ikanreed | 27 |
| aristarchus | 26 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 25 |
| c0lo | 24 |
| realDonaldTrump | 22 |
| The Shire | 19 |
+--------------------+------+
Underrated
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 610 |
| Runaway1956 | 73 |
| realDonaldTrump | 36 |
| Ethanol-fueled | 34 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 26 |
| Azuma Hazuki | 22 |
| khallow | 20 |
| VLM | 18 |
| Arik | 16 |
| aristarchus | 16 |
+--------------------+------+
Spam (including moderations that were reversed)
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 321 |
| DeathMonkey | 8 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 5 |
| aristarchus | 4 |
| NPC-131072 | 2 |
| mars90 | 2 |
| mrpg | 1 |
| edIII | 1 |
| sigterm | 1 |
| stretch611 | 1 |
+--------------------+------+
Disagree
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 677 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 93 |
| Runaway1956 | 75 |
| khallow | 54 |
| fustakrakich | 34 |
| Azuma Hazuki | 30 |
| Arik | 24 |
| janrinok | 21 |
| c0lo | 20 |
| The Shire | 19 |
+--------------------+------+
Touché
+--------------------+------+
| Nick | Mods |
+--------------------+------+
| Anonymous Coward | 2758 |
| DeathMonkey | 234 |
| The Mighty Buzzard | 192 |
| Runaway1956 | 161 |
| c0lo | 157 |
| takyon | 138 |
| Azuma Hazuki | 131 |
| DannyB | 128 |
| khallow | 96 |
| fustakrakich | 95 |
+--------------------+------+
HA! The only moderation list I didn't make was Offtopic!
NVIDIA, CUDA, and F@H on Linux
Ohhhh-kay - video cards on Linux have always been a hassle. Nothing works right, right? Except, when it does work right, it's really right!
I've finally figured out how to make NVIDIA GPU's work right, and I'm documenting it here, for myself and anyone else who can use the information.
First, you download the SGFXI script from https://smxi.org/site/install.htm
After a new install of your OS, run the script. It takes all the headache out of blacklisting Nouveau etc. It's all in the script, you need not even think about it. By default, the script will install the latest current NVIDIA driver. Using the switch -o when you invoke it, you can choose which driver to install. But, the choices are limited, it doesn't support all available NVIDIA drivers. It's probably best to just go with the default, which is currently 440.40.
That latest, greatest, shiny new 440.40 should be your choice of driver anyways, right? Nope. It doesn't crunch very well, if it crunches at all.
The script runs, and announces that the driver is installed, asks if you want to restart your desktop. I always just reboot the computer.
So, the computer boots to your desktop, with 440.40, it's time to install the good, working CUDA driver. Grab the CUDA toolkit from https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads
I boot into single user before running it, but that isn't strictly necessary. Navigate to wherever you downloaded it to, and invoke it with './cuda_10.2.89_440.33.01_linux.run' or similar, as Super User. Some of the NVIDIA installers balk at SUDO, so you probably need to be SU instead of SUDO.
It's a very large download, 2.5 gig if I recall correctly. Just wait for it to extract itself, and you'll get a menu, giving you options of features to install. For our purposes here, we ONLY NEED the driver. I'm not a programmer, and I'm not going to learn how to make CUDA jump through hoops. F@H has already figured that out, they just need the proper driver to make the hoops with. Unselect everything but the driver, and tell it to run.
When the driver is installed, reboot, and install F@H, or whatever programs you might be running that require CUDA.
IF you had your card working with any other driver, this 440.33 driver will make your GPU look like an upgraded video card!
And, no, the sgfxi script will not install this driver. If you extract it, and put it into the sgfxi/downloads folder, the script will simply tell you that the driver is unsupported.
For science, I should repeat the process a couple dozen times. I'm lazy though - 4 runs is more than enough!
I hope someone finds that useful! Enjoy.
Merry Christmas
You're all getting ten extra mod points courtesy of the goofy staff here at SN. Let us know if they don't fit and we can exchange them.
Five sentenced to death in Kamal Khashoggi assassination
Saudi Arabia's public prosecutor said on Monday five people had been sentenced to death over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in October last year, but two top figures investigated over the killing have been exonerated.
"The court issued death sentences on five men who directly took part in the killing," the prosecutor, Shalaan al-Shalaan, said in a statement.
Saudi prosecutors had said deputy intelligence chief Ahmed al-Assiri oversaw the Washington Post columnist's killing in the kingdom's Istanbul consulate in October 2018 and that he was advised by the royal court's media czar Saud al-Qahtani.
Moving on
Of the 11 unnamed individuals indicted in the case, five were sentenced to death, while three face jail terms totalling 24 years, and the others were acquitted. All can appeal the verdicts.
A key thing here is that it's a huge public acknowledgement that the Kingdom killed Khashoggi. But none of the higher ups involved, particularly the Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman are affected. And it remains to be seen what comes of the people sentenced to death. They might win those appeals or their executions might be faked.
Only cops should have guns!!
Here, we have a case of "blame the victim", and the cops are going to get away with it. The fact that she is young, white, and pretty will work against her, I'm sure. And, she's from Alabama. The Gestapo busts in on her, while she's taking a nap, shoot her down, and they have the nerve to say, "Well, if she hadn't pointed her gun at our officers . . . "
This, among many other incidents, is why I can't follow the liberal logic. WTF do any of you want the cops to have guns, but deny yourselves the opportunity to defend yourself from those rogue cops? Disarm the police, then I might think about giving up my own weapons. Key words are "might" and "think about".
WILMER, Ala. (WALA) -- A huge investigation underway after a woman is shot during an undercover warrant roundup. It happened Thursday morning at a home in Wilmer on Old Moffat Road.
Turns out the suspect agents were looking for was already in Metro Jail.
"As agents went up to the house they detained two men outside, who said there was a woman still inside. As they went to make entry into the house... This lady had armed herself with a shotgun and the entry team was giving her orders to drop the gun, put the gun down, drop the gun several times -- over a period of a few seconds it seems like... And there is video recordings of that. She didn't and she pointed the gun at one of them -- then two or three agents fired upon her striking her three or four times," said Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran.
The woman idenitfied as Ann Rylee was not who agents were looking for. Instead, they were there to execute outstanding drug warrants for 41-year-old Nicholas McLeod -- the uncle of Rylee's fiance.
McLeod has a long drug arrest history. Prior arrests list the home on Moffat Road as McLeod's home address. Turns out he was already in Metro Jail. McLeod booked in on Wednesday at 3:36 p.m. on the outstanding warrants.
Sheriff Cochran says had they known -- they wouldn't have gone to the house.
"We do know there was a miscommunication... And we've narrowed it down to one of two things: The investigators did not make one final check this morning to send teams out to make the arrests or warrants section did not communicate to the computer system -- that the warrants were no longer active. We're running that down," said Cochran. "However, if she would not have pointed a gun at the agents -- they would have determined all of that on the scene and would have bid her a good day and thank you very much."
It's a multi agency team -- running the warrant round-up consisting of Mobile County Sheriff's deputies, Homeland Security, and agents with the U.S. Marshals Office. Sheriff Cochran tells us it was not one of his deputies that fired the shots.
Meanwhile, there is no body camera footage because the Mobile County Sheriff's Office doesn't have body cameras.
The Alabama Bureau of Investigation was called in to take over the case.
All content © 2019, WALA; Mobile, AL. (A Meredith Corporation Station). All Rights Reserved.
https://www.fox10tv.com/news/mobile_county/mcso-sheriff-woman-pointed-gun-at-officer-before-she-was/article_effd4f0c-22da-11ea-b92c-97a70d44e2ba.html
True RNG for the Orange Pi Zero, Part 5, Tiamat Version 0.0
And so here's the first prototype of my RNG hat based on the Lampert circuit: Tiamat Version 0.0, named for the ancient Babylonian goddess of chaos. Yeah, I know it's very crude. The protoboard I'm using there is this one. I had Elecrow (a Shenzhen-based electronics manufacturer) build those protoboards for me, mainly because the Github project recommended them, but their service, shall we say, leaves something to be desired. They made me wait more than two weeks for the boards, mainly because they broke many of the boards on their first attempt and somehow misplaced the boards they made on the second attempt, and it was the third try before they finally got things right. Anyway that left me with nearly a hundred of these protoboards (the original order called for 60, but they included the remaining unbroken boards from the first run), at a cost to me of $5 for the boards and $20 for shipping. Maybe I was just unlucky.
This Electronic Eel protoboard let me solder most of the surface mount components easily enough, with the exception of the TLV3202, which I stupidly ordered in MSOP8 (0.65 mm lead pitch), too fine for the board. I should have checked the package type before ordering it, as it appears to also be available in SOIC8, or maybe I should have just gotten a TLV3201 in SOT23-5 since the circuit really uses only one comparator stage. So I had to use an adapter, and it was rather hard to get it properly mounted (though I'd done that before). The protoboard actually has a ground plane so it was not too hard to get all of the ground connections done properly, though one needs to be careful with through hole components because the outer edge of the holes links to the ground plane. Anyway, I eventually succeeded in building it. Just tested it and it seems to work well enough. The raw circuit makes something like 6.8 bits of entropy per byte without debiasing, just as in my earlier breadboard tests, so only fairly modest debiasing is sufficient to provide reasonably good randomness.
Now I'm learning how to use KiCad and we'll see about making a real custom circuit board for this. It's a fairly small circuit so I'm kinda hesitant to order another production run from Elecrow or some other PCB manufacturing company since it's only around 33 mm × 33 mm, so for a 100 mm × 100 mm panel each one would have nine boards, so a ten-panel run would get me ninety boards, way too many for my purposes... Maybe I'll have them make several other boards on the same panel, perhaps more of the Electronic Eel protoboards, or something similarly useful. Might cost a bit more but my costs are already dominated by shipping. I really wish there were a local manufacturer so I'd not have to pay so much for shipping. I'll have to make very sure about the board dimensions and holes this time because I probably won't be able to cut these boards if they don't fit in the case.
Impeachment
Party 1: Yay, impeachment!
Party 2: Boo, impeachment!
Me: Mmmm, peach cobbler...
