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Since the Great British Public voted by a narrow margin to show its un-wiped bare backsides to our closest, friendliest, most valuable trading partners (Brexit) in order to pursue potential trade deals with the economic powerhouse that is Australia, and to make TTIP easier to get done, I've had much less time and inclination to be interested in technology, unfortunately. Instead, I've been incubating a nervous breakdown playing at slapping the Kipper on the web sites of some national newspapers. My country (the UK) may be on the brink of disintegrating, after all.

We've suffered from simplistic right-wing ideology in government, and our social care systems and National Health Service (you know, that filthy commie thing we have where we pay money to have a free-at-the-point-of-use medical service for the benefit of us plebs and everyone else with no profit motive for corporations and the aristocracy) are. perhaps deliberately, being allowed to atrophy due to mismanagement and under-investment, so that they can be turned over to for-profit companies...

So here's my paranoid-delusional discourse. It applies to PHBs as well, so is relevant to the technology sector.

You have to think like a Tory (Conservative or UKIP) to understand the predicament the NHS and social care organisations are in.

To a Tory, the only thing with value is material wealth and anything that distracts from the maximisation of realising wealth is at best frivolous and at worst evil.

Little People (those not wealthy enough to live off their capital) are a danger to that if they are not work-producing units operating at maximum efficiency. So we have the phenomenon of the Useless Eaters. IDS, Gove and Osborne did their level best to reduce the number of Useless Eaters to protect the wealth.

However, sociopathic the Tory may be, he or she is not entirely stupid. They realise that amongst the population there are bleeding hearts and wooly-minded liberals who have an intrinsic irrepressible compulsion to value their fellow human being for no "rational" (wealth-related) reason.

Two things are implied here. The Tory realises that the "lefty" has a vote and influence on the political process and direction of society and, in order to maintain power, must pay lip-service to this. Hence, the NHS and welfare state is not quite dead yet, and is given almost enough money to limp along.

Secondly, the Tory knows that the "lefty" values the Useless Eater above wealth and so is intrinsically motivated (no money necessary) to provide assistance to said Useless Eater. Therefore the Tory knows that funding can be cut continually because the "lefty" will work itself to death out of this empathy for the Useless Eater.

Your PHB and its superiors may frequently say things like, "You're all professionals, so I know you'll be on board with this. We have to tighten our belts and redouble our efforts. We have to be grown-up about this. The market may be going through some difficulties, but we have to look after our investors." The PHB knows that your Little Person brain that feels intrinsic responsibility to your fellow human being can be used to produce more wealth for Righty with less expense.

Two cheeks of the same behind, as it were.

I don't fit in here. In fact, I don't fit in anywhere. Life's more fun that way. Wouldn't it be boring if we were all god-fearing, gun-toting "free-market" corporate lackey Libertarians?

Something amusing has turned up in my messages today. Someone called Coniptor has made me his/her/its foe. It's quite a list.

Let the games begin.

I've got the article nearly written up (working on the last sections now), and it weighs in close to 3k words. If you're a ham radio operator or have soldering skills, there's also a plea for help as I'm interesting in using AX.25 for future examples but I don't have the necessary equipment or resources to acquire it at this moment.

Feel free to look at the code here: https://github.com/SoylentNews/retromalware

So, 9/11 day was too much for Hillary, even with her excellent health.

Will this be the straw that breaks her Camel toe, errr, back?

Man, if only Jill Stein was the third runner......

Question: if Hillary is elected and dies quickly (totally by natural causes, though, nudge nudge), does Pence finish her term or does it spark another election run?

Let me walk you through the basics of Frustration and Mortification, ehem, I mean Fan and Mortar Geysers. These two erupt together and when active, the intervals typically fall every 3-7 days. Here's a labeled photo for reference.

Normally, Fan goes through cycles in which its vents turn on in a certain order. After a quiet period (during which Mortar may splash lightly from Bottom or Lower), River Vent turns on. River actually erupts horizontally, away from your perspective in the photo above - so figuring out when River is on either involves using heavy steam as a proxy or walking 100 meters up the path to the bridge where you can get a clear view of it. High and Gold begin to splash and are considered on when the splashing becomes nearly constant. Finally, Angle turns on with a swishing sound. The cycle ends when River turns off again - a single cycle can be anywhere from 20 to 70 minutes, typically.

Every once and a while, an event cycle occurs, simply meaning something different happens. Here's where things get complicated. Main Vent is not a friend to Fan's other vents, and splashing in Main Vent often leads to pauses in activity from the other event. Here's a timeline for what we might consider an "ideal" event cycle:

Main Vent splashing.....River Vent on.....River Vent pause.....River Vent on.....River Vent pause.....River Vent on.....no more Main Vent splashing.....High/Gold Vents on.....Angle Vent on

The final component needed for an eruption is called lock. In lock, High Vent erupts steadily to a height of 1.5-2 meters (5-6 feet), and Gold/Angle Vents splash continuously. An eruption may be initiated from East or Main Vent, or in Upper Mortar. Soon all the vents take off. Upper Mortar reaches 23 meters (80 feet), Main Vent hits over 30 meters (100 feet), and East Vent shows off an impressive horizontal throw that will absolutely get you wet. The following photos are from a particularly strong eruption on August 12th, 2014. Note the drenched people and the beautiful jets from Upper Mortar.

Anyway, back to my story. I came as an event cycle petered out and say on a bench. About 9am after watching nearby Riverside go off, we noticed a pause with almost all activity, particularly that of the River Vent on Fan Geyser, going quiet. One of my cowatchers stated that the pause was rather long, meaning it might just lead to an eruption later that day. He advised I stick around. Despite getting hungry, I decided to heed his advice. Just before 10am, one of the observers saw a bit of water splash in the Main Vent. I was thinking, dude, it was just a little splash. About 15 minutes later it did it again.

Now, you might ask yourself, what's the draw in watching a pile of rock emit steam and water for three hours? Even when the geysers aren't doing the real thing, there's a lot of interplay and activity. It's always doing something. Fan is the main performer here with six major vents running in a line across its mound. River Vent faces the Firehole River, of course, and provides the main indicator of the "event cycle" described above. The three vents across the top, Top, Gold, and Angle Vent all spurt steaming water and often rob power from one another. Then opposite the river are Main and finally East Vent which are the main soakers of the audience when a major eruption happens.

Meanwhile Mortar Geyser groans and hisses ominously. You could always tell when the Upper Mortar Vent was steaming because of the deep growl it emitted while nearby Bottom Mortar Vent would near continuously hiss even during the quiet periods.

So there was always something going on. After 10am, the Fan Geyser vents on the top (Top, Gold, and Angle) resumed activity and soon, we spotted the second singular splash in Fan's Main. That was faithfully radioed in at 10:15am. By this time, I noticed that we were building up a small crowd. Soon after, Top started erupting continually indicating considerable activity. But the other two by it, Gold and Angle would only erupt fitfully with Angle having very little activity. As noted above, we were now looking for "lock" all three vents going simultaneously and continually. The crowd kept building up to I'd guess around 100 people.

Some point after 10:30am, we got a key escalation with water splashing out of the Upper Mortar cone. Shortly after that, lock happened. That's about when the build up of the video above started. You can see Mortar Geyser on the left side with sporadic splashing and the mound of Fan Geyser behind and to the right with steam shooting into the river from the River Vent and the three vents on top steadily erupting to a few feet (the "lock" of course). Then there are larger spurts from the Upper Mortar Vent which shortly cascade into a full-blown eruption from every vent in the video (at 10:48). I was between the spot of the video and the main brunt of the East Fan Vent so I got wet, but didn't get a face full of water. People cleared out of that space quickly.

In addition to my parka, I also wore a hat. That turned out to be a great idea since I would have gotten completely soaked otherwise. The eruptions are hard to video because they generate a huge cloud of steam (and silica rich spray too, hard on lens!) quickly, hiding the details. But moving around, I could see the vents and where the water eventually fell.

Just as with the build up, there was some weird dynamics with power shifting between the two geysers. One geyser would surge with its vents and the other fade a little, back and forth.

I think the build up and eruptive dynamics make this one of the most spectacular geysers in the world though you have to be very lucky to see it erupt, if you don't have the time to sit around to wait on it. The local Old Faithful Visitors Center would have information on recent Fan and Mortar activity and they would be good to consult, if you're just traveling through.

After about ten minutes, the eruption stopped and the geysers entered a heavy steam phase. At that point, I headed off to bed.

Related: check out this awesome video.

I was most active at Kuro5hin but its server's entire data center was decommissioned. Lawrence Calvin Foster III promised to put up a read-only archive of the site but it's been long enough that we are all convinced that he had no off-site backups.

https://dontsuemebro.com/section/Diary

dontsuemebro is intended to replace kuro5hin but so far it's just a few of us diehards.

http://advogato.org/person/MichaelCrawford/

I journal only rarely at Advogato these days but I was quite active during the zeroes.

http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/

I was intending to publish a dead-tree book of these when Bonita finished school and moved out West to join me. What I actually got was informed that she was divorcing me on my second visit home.

That refers to the Canadian Vancouver but it includes some of my time in Sunnyvale and San Jose, California.

I didn't know this about Gary Johnson. Sure, maybe some of it is skewed but there's plenty in this video that just couldn't be any more damning even without the commentary pointing it out.

I'm actually a bit shocked. It's just another Bernie :(

And that's why I would implore people to watch it, even if they don't agree with me now or afterwards. Disagreement is good, it can challenge us to think, maybe not straight away but later on after the dust settles.

This all makes me wonder about two things in particular:

1. Why is Jill Stein polling worse than Gary Johnson? I take the people who previously supported Bernie at their word which means that roughly half the Democrat voters are looking to vote for someone who is not Clinton. Maybe what makes me recoil at that video of Johnson has attracted them to him but the thought makes me shudder; the guy behaves like the typical fascist.

2. What happened to that oddball interesting Libertarian (a real one?) who was first out in announcing his run for the presidency? The ex-CIA guy who wrote a lot about Open Intelligence? At least he seemed like he was actually Libertarian although tarnished by his previous job.

I personally don't care about Gary Johnsons stance on climate change one way or the other (I don't regard it as science and would like people to understand why and why that is important even if the guess about consequences turns out to be a correct guess but that's about it) and to the extent I have a beef with Black Lives Matter it's not about Marxism but about the choice of a self-defeating strategy on an important issue (unacceptable murders and other gross abuses of power by police against all), but I care a lot about other parts of the video.

In particular his support of the TPP (see note below) and the way that Gary Johnson blows up at the reporter, it is everything I would not want at all. He's like a male and healthy Hillary. Johnson stinks of Bernie & Clinton & Kaine, it's awful :3

I don't have a vote but if I did I could never use it for Gary Johnson.

TPP: there's probably a lot more sources/confirmation (a glance at a search indicates so) but the Wikipedia page on Gary Johnson sources the article "Think You’ve Got It Locked, Hillary? Meet Jill Stein." where the following quote can be found about Gary Johnson:

"And while Johnson sounded critical of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in an earlier Politico interview, in this later one he appeared to support it. “It is my understanding that the TPP does advance free trade,” he said. “Is it a perfect document? Probably not. But based on my understanding of the document, I would be supporting it [though] in a perfect world there wouldn’t be a document like that, there would just be free trade.” The statement makes him the only candidate in the four-person field indicating he would ratify the pact, which may raise his stock with anti-Trump free trade Republicans but muddles his case for the Bernie camp."

And of course TPP is not over, the powers that be will just try again as they always do. Slap on a new acronym and do some cosmetics and run the same shit once again. So it does matter.

Gary Johnson and his running mate Weld also support NAFTA as can be seen here (please note that the latest stance is listed first and is pro-TPP).

They're simply globalists, not Libertarians, there's nothing Free about their "free trade" instead it's economic enslavement and servitude, exactly the kind the EU is so "good" at and which tilts the tables vertically in favor of big business and against small business aka what's usually called crony capitalism (or in the original Marxist definition simply capitalism) and nowhere close to what ordinary people usually think of when they say free trade or capitalism: mutually beneficial and mutually voluntary transactions in non-monopolies.

What does everyone else think about these things regarding Gary Johnson and Weld? Please don't attack the messengers, look beyond style and at Gary Johnson.

P.s. I'm not a libertarian but I leaned that way before I decided all ideologies are bad. Later I discovered I'm in good company.

So about a month ago, I put in a submission regarding the documentary 'A Very Heavy Agenda'. The submission didn't make the cut, and the reason was no one picked it up in the month it was in the queue.

I chose to make this submission to highlight the pundits and think-tanks that have been shaping foreign policy and the military interventions in recent years. These people are going to remain in positions of influence and will continue to be talking heads shaping the debate regarding the role of the US in the world, regardless of who wins the pending presidential election.

An excerpt from a WaPo article on the same subject:

Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, a husband-and-wife team of hawkish military analysts, put their jobs at influential Washington think tanks on hold for almost a year to work for Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Provided desks, e-mail accounts and top-level security clearances in Kabul, they pored through classified intelligence reports, participated in senior-level strategy sessions and probed the assessments of field officers in order to advise Petraeus about how to fight the war differently.

[...] When they returned in September 2010, the Kagans’ writ no longer resembled the traditional think-tank visit or an assessment mission intended to inform an incoming commander.

They were given desks in the office of the Strategic Initiatives Group, the commander’s in-house think tank, which typically is staffed with military officers and civilian government employees. The general’s staff helped upgrade their security clearances from “Secret” to “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information,” the highest-level of U.S. government classification.

The new clearances allowed the Kagans to visit “the pit,” the high-security lower level of the Combined Joint Intelligence Operations Center on the headquarters. There, they could read transcripts of Taliban phone and radio conversations monitored by the National Security Agency.

Another day, another 500 miles, and another round of hacking. I'm dedicating an hour to this on and off over the weekend.

Right now, I've got an accurate int to hex function written in assembler for printing values of registers, an interrupt handler + installation, and some test code. Right now, I ran into a snag with calling the TSR function on int 21h, but I think its due to lack of sleep. Last few days has been very very stressful and I'm only picking at this as I go. I think I'm going to have to add a section to the next article talking about position-dependent vs. position-independent code as it will become important when we go to install into RAM.

Wish some of the documentation though on the specifics of how TSRs work internally survived; a lot say you have to use small memory model even though I have example code of tiny model TSRs.

By request, these are our top resident wiseasses, clowns, and wit smiths:

By count: Nick Funny Mods %Funny wonkey_monkey60635% aristarchus59625% c0lo58522% Ethanol-fueled43113% VLM3809% bob_super35624% maxwell demon35520% Tork29720% frojack2574% Bot25337%

By percent: Nick Funny Mods %Funny Anne Nonymous16960% Buck Feta19755% Bot25337% DECbot12137% skullz10137% Gaaark21536% wonkey_monkey60635% JeanCroix9232% jimshatt9530% davester66624129%

A tip of the hat to @wonkey_monkey: and @Bot: for being the only ones to make both lists. Their asses are indeed wise.

Looks like I'm going to have to up my game if I want to make the list next time.