SoylentNews

Every Vote Counts!

RICHMOND, Va. -- Among the holiday hustle and bustle of Carytown, Virginia voters react to what some might call a "Christmas Miracle" for Democrats in the Commonwealth.

"That's sort of amazing," voter Scott Williams said.

"That's pretty amazing," voter Ariel Furler said.

In a stunning turn of events, Democrat Shelly Simonds gained eleven votes in a recount to beat the Republican incumbent in the 94th District by just one vote.

The final tally: 11608 votes to 11607 votes.

UPDATE: Apparently it's a tie now. By state law, the winner of the tie will be determined "by lot."

When Cosplay Crosses the Line

And in other Indonesian news:

Gay Crackdown Continues in Indonesia Despite Court Ruling
Indonesia court jails men for two years over 'gay sex party'

Australian, American, Malaysian arrested in Indonesia's Bali for drugs

Vigilantes Stalk Indonesian Transgender Women

Indonesia is the world's 4th most populous country, behind the United States.

I just ordered an Antminer L3+ so I can mine LiteCoin. When used with an L3+ the APW3++ power supply can be plugged into 110V. The S9 BitCoin miner requires 220V.

I expected the L3+ to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams with its yield of $7000/year. The S9 profit is about the same but it uses 500W more.

But today I read somewhere that Ethereum can't be mined with ASICs. One must - "must" - use the CPU or GPU. It seems that Ethereum's Scrypt proof-of-work is designed to defeat ASICs. Rather than lots of arithmetic as in the case of BitCoin mining Scrypt requires a lot of memory.

I was puzzled by that so I looked into it when I got home this evening - and yes one can use a CPU or GPU.

But to gain the advantage of one's GPU it must have enough memory to fit the entire "DAG File" into video ram. Presently that file is somewhat less than 2 GB but it is slowly growing.

I found a review of the AMD Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 470 that claimed it could perform 2.9 MH/s.

Newegg's page on the 470 recommends a 500W power supply. My Linux box has a 1000W supply. But let's suppose it needs all those 500 watts.

An Ethereum mining profit calculator I discovered by praying to Google, with the 8.16 cents per kilowatt-hour here in the Pacific Northwest with its abundance of hydroelectric dams predict a yearly profit of one hundred thousand dollars per year.

I gotta get me some of that.

I expect that outrageous profit is not yet well-known because BitCoin is getting all the press.

I participated in NAGA's Initial Coin Offering on Friday. I bought 1,400 tokens at one dollar apiece. The company being NAGA is a regular finance firm - so its regulated. I didn't have time to read their whitepaper before the ICO closed but I trust the opinion of the wise old friend who recommended NAGA to me.

Presently I own approximately equal amounts of BitCoin, BitCoin Hash, LiteCoin, Ethereum, Dash and B2B.

The B2B will quite likely turn out to be a mistake because CoinMarketCap's All Cryptocurrencies table said that B2B was going rapidly upward in price.

It was only after I bought some when I looked at the table a second time only to find that B2B had a daily volume of roughly $50k. With such a low volume just one sale or purchase will alter its price by a significant amount.

Really the wise thing would have been to sell it all back but I decided to hold onto it. You know just like my LivePicture stock certificate - it sure is pretty!

LivePicture was the only company whose options have vested for me. That experience led me to avoid startups entirely.

But I'm working part-time for one since a couple weeks ago. Sorry it's in stealth mode so I can't give you a clue but I am convinced its business plan is sound.

Holiday Parties Gone Wrong: Careful Where You Hang The Mistletoe

*Holiday Party #WarOnChristmas

So, I went and saw Episode VIII today at noon. I figured, screw opening night; I'll catch it Saturday in the daytime so I don't have to stand in line, fight for elbow room, or listen to a bunch of shitheads talk through it.

tl;dr: I wish I'd just given up on the franchise.

I'm not going to bore you with a lot of detailed analysis because that's not how you watch a movie for enjoyment. I'm just going to tell you it wasn't good and boil the "why" down to the most crucial bit: the dialogue.

If you ripped out the voice track from the movie, rewrote it, and re-recorded it, VIII could have been about as good as VI. As it stands, the dialogue was worse than I or II. Yes, even considering Jar-Jar. After mostly enjoying VII and the much better Rogue One, this was to me the biggest let-down in franchise history.

I at first planned to get an Antminer S9 bitcoin mining rig but it requires a power supply plugged into 220 volts. The only 220 outlet in my apartment is for the stove.

I came up with what I regard as a practical and safe way to plug the supply into my stove outlet, but then I had a look at the Antminer L3+ LiteCoin mining rig with the APW3++ supply.

The L3+ only requires 800 watts, well within the amount of juice that the APW3++ can provide when plugged into 110 volts.

Here in the Pacific Northwest electricity is only 8.16 per kilowatt-hour.

I consulted both a bitcoin mining profit calculator and a lite coin one. The L3+ lite coin rig was calculated to earn roughly the same profit as an S9 bitcoin rig, a little over $7,000 per year at the current exchange rate.

In other news I followed the advice of a friend to invest in the NAGA Initial Coin Offering. I bought 1,400 NAGA tokens. This particular friend has always given me good advice.

I was buying and selling bitcoin, lite coin and etherium at coinable but was no more successful than if I bought some then held onto it - "hodling" as the 1337 crypto-investors like to post.

My next paycheck was looking quite remote because my driver was totally borked on macOS 10.13 High Sierra. We were surprised because it works really well on 10.12 Sierra and earlier systems.

However one of my client's coders came up with a different approach that involved a userspace LaunchDaemon talking to the driver via an IOUserClient.

He got it mostly working but there was a serious problem - still a showstopper.

Today I fixed the showstopper.

His workaround unfortunately uses too much CPU. Possibly I can fix that by using an x86_64 assembly instruction that disables one line of the memory cache with the expectation that the code is going to write into the entire line.

I could use intrinsics but I once read an article that made a good case for using assembly instead: sometimes intrinsics yield very poor code generation.

When I get that next check I'm going to devote $6,500 to fund my 2017 Individual Retirement Account at eTrade, then use it all to buy an S&P 500 index fund. I'm not going to blow it all on cryptos, just some of it.

And I'll be donating $1,000 to the Right 2 Dream Too homeless shelter, as well as sending my Mom another $1,000. She was paying for my storage while I was homeless.

I'm going to get most of that stuff out of storage when I receive my renewed passport six weeks from now. This because that "most" is in Canada. To have it shipped into the US the truck driver must have a photocopy of my passport.

R2D2 is operated by homeless people. It's particularly forward-thinking in that one can sleep during the day there. Whenever I lost the bed lottery at the Portland Rescue Mission I stayed up all night then slept at R2D2 the following day.

The sausage is made. You may now officially commence the bitching that you prepared long before you knew what was in the bill.

Previously: Another Former Facebook Exec Speaks Out

Palihapitiya's initial remarks included the statement that Facebook "overwhelmingly does good in the world". Maybe that wasn't good enough for somezucky?

Former Facebook Exec Who Suggested Social Media Was Destroying Society: I Love Facebook

He's already rich. He can feed his kids. But can he protect them from the reach of Facebook?

The USA just decided apparently to abolish "Net Neutrality" making the public Internet beholden to large, established corporations. This is bad news for individuals and small businesses.

What we need is a new internet, a grass-roots one, ad-hoc, created by volunteers.

Many years ago when WiFi was new, there was one such attempt I seem to remember called "Consume the Net." I never had the money to buy the hardware at the time, but it sounded like a great idea. The problem in those days was getting any sort of broadband connection was difficult and expensive. You could get a 56kbps POTS modem, sometimes ISDN (64k * 2) or cable (500-600kbps) if you were very lucky and ADSL was just coming out. WiFi was already running at megabits.

Now we have a different set of problems to work around, but the technology is ubiquitous, cheap and mature.

It would we cool to have the equivalent of open access points on this new co-operative internet that you could scan for and join if you promised to behave.

Any ideas?

I don't get my next check until my client's customers sign off on
my production build.

I'm writing the OS X driver for a USB to VGA adapter. Until now my
code was totally broken on High Sierra.

I used an open source virtual frame buffer to obtain the pixels, but
that doesn't work on High Sierra. Display Preferences shows the USB
monitor but the system doesn't draw into the virtual frame buffer's
memory.

One of my client's engineers found that a user space daemon could get
the pixels through a CoreGraphics screen grabbing API. We've both
been working at passing those pixels from user space into the driver,
but trying different approaches.

His approach so far does not work.

I feel bad about my approach working as he is asian and
so likely to lose face. He makes it plainly apparent that he regards
himself as incompetent despite putting me completely to shame with his
productivity.

I didn't merge my new code into the repository's trunk. I kept it on
a branch then suggested he take whatever he needs.

When I get that check I'm going to fund my 2017 Individual Retirement
Account at eTrade. It would still be OK if I don't get that check
until January as the IRS gives us until April 15 2018 to fund a 2017
IRA.

Then I'm going to put the entire IRA into a Standard & Poor's 500 index fund.

I entertained the idea of investing speculating on
cryptocurrency from my IRA but my experience so far is that I'm a
lousy speculator.

I've made two grand so far but I would have made lots more if I hadn't
been attempting to time the market by buying and selling each of the
three cryptos that Coinbase supports. :-(