Try this on for size

Wow...sometimes words fail me.

Money is stored labor.  Labor is part of human life.  To devalue money is to debase life itself.

This little quote is part of a greater article.  If you wish, you may read it here

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-29/exceptional-economic-energy-elation 

Some fucked up shit my friends.  Golden Calves are nothing to some folks, just the way things should be.

I may be getting over it

For years, I was a full-on nerd.  Had to buy the latest and greatest box at the first blush of new tech.

Now....I have been noticing that hings have been changing.  My seven year old Compaq is currently back in use (fried hard drive) and so I brought this old dog out and updated my linux.

cat /proc/meminfo
cat /proc/cpuinfo

gave me these screens:

and 

So a seven year old computer with dual pentiums, 2gb of RAM, running LinuxMint Quiana, a mail client (evolution) a big spreadsheet (LibreOffice) and five or six pages worth of Chromium is loafing along at around 50% memory use and maybe 25% CPU.

There is plenty of there there.  Granted, the beastie has a SSD drive to speed things up, but it really cruises enough for any task.  Around thirty seconds to fully boot from power-off.  Not a crash or a hiccup all week.

What do you use your computer for?  I think that you will find that for most purposes, you can make things last a lot longer than you think.

How much of your computer purchases are driven by the words "new" or "more powerful" instead of "fully functional.

Tell me you aren't a little stoked!

Been a while

My life is proceeding without my incessant worries taking over.

Anyway, that is why I haven't been posting much lately.

Just went in and filled up the spreadsheet on ebola and it is still going up in a linear manner.

Still going up, bad.  Still linear, good.

The public health folks are still screaming, but looks like things aren't going south in a big way yet

Busy Boy

Sorry about the lack of posts.

I am getting the boyos grown up and out of the house.  Lots of work to be done, lots of time spent.

Maybe I'll start writing again soon

respondeat superior

So, there was recently a little hissy fit over at the Electronic Freedom Foundation about how ISP's were dicking around with the encryption of e-mail.

Really.

Now, let's get a couple of things straight.  If you want privacy, you by god have the right to keeping your business your own.   But it is your responsibility.  It is not the default.

The idea that the internet is a good place to do shit you want to keep private is a foolish pipe dream.  Nothing more, nothing less.  The actual structure of the internet is such that it appears to be custom made for open and public communication.  Secrecy is not how it was designed.

My favorite line in this little bit of hand wringing is

In 1991, Phil Zimmerman implemented PGP, an end-to-end email encryption protocol that is still in use today. Adoption of PGP has been slow because of its highly technical interface and difficult key management. 

 So, there is a good, publicly available system for keeping your secrets secret.  The reason that you don't use it is that it is hard.

Well, keep relying on others to keep your secrets.  I'm certain that just complaining about how others don't do it for you will soon be working.

Ebola cases up to 11-05-14

Now it is just looking stupid.

Looks to me like someone is cooking.