MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

test please ignore.

Checking to see if I'm still shadowbanned.

11 yıl öncediscuss

I understand that Chinese parents are sending their parents to school in the US specifically so Chinese kids can learn to innovate.

At some point this will pay off, but I expect that we have not yet educated enough Chinese students to make a real difference to their economy.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

I have Mint 17.1 LTS Cinnamon.

In your own opinion, am I better off with 17.2 Cinnamon or 17.1 LTS?

(LTS == Long Term Support)

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

There is quite a lot of work in the life sciences that is completely unregulated.

The Salmon are dying of asphyxiation and heatstroke in the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. I can come up with many technical measures to mitigate that problem but some of them require a lot of money.

Lots of fish hatcheries closer to the Pacific so the salmon don't swim so far inland when they return to their birthplaces to make bacon with the attracive gender.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

While Microsoft is content to merely fuck its own W-2 permanent employs, it tears out the spleens of its contract programmers with rusty entrenching tools.

I thought I would have a really nice office with a door I could shut.

Instead I was required to sit in - I Swear I'm Not Making This Up - "The Boiler Room" with some other contract programmers.

I haven't had the headspace to deal with it yet but I'm going to drop a dime to the Redmond Fire Marshall and King County Code Inspector to have a lot at The Boiler Room.

The Mind Simply Reels.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

The Portland/Vancouver Metropolitan Area is heavily into mobile devices. When I ride the bus or TriMet MAX light rail, roughly half of my fellow passengers are using an iOS, Android or Windows phone device.

Uber has limited penetration here because of the Portland taxi drivers. Many of the people around here regard the taxi companies as Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations because there are far too many drunk people and far too few taxis on Friday and Saturday nights.

One can ride the MAX Red Line non-stop to the airport from Hillsboro, Beaverton, and Portland for I think $2.50.

One takes the Blue line from Gresham then transfers to the Red at the 99th Avenue Transit Center.

One takes the Green from Clackamas then transfers to the Red.

One takes the Yellow Line from Portland State University just South of Downtown then transfers to the Red at the Rose Quarter (ie. Moda Center) as well as from North Portland South to the Rose Quarter.

There are two C-Tran express busses that will get you to the Light Rail for $3.50, or you can take any of a half-dozen bus lines to the Westfield Vancouver Mall Transit Center, transfer to the #4 Delta Park / Vanport MAX bus then transfer to the Yellow Line.

When the Yellow arrives at Delta Park / Vanport, just about always the #4 into Downtown Vancouver then most of the way across Vancouver to the mall Transit center is waiting right there.

Amtrack goes from Vancouver to Portland and back. I find it hard to understand the controversy over running the Yellow line over the recently-cancelled Columbia River Crossing. Oregon insisted on light rail into Vancouver, Washington now has to repay the Feds $500,000.00 because its refusal to fund light rail led to a desperately needed new Interstate 5 bridge being cancelled. Washington and Oregon each spent $250,000.00 before Washington withdrew.

There are no busses to the Vancouver Amtrack Station. Nor is it ever advertised. Ticket prices at brick-and-mortar Amtrack stations are significantly cheaper than online at Amtrack's website.

You can reserve a ticket at a significant discount without actually paying for it until you board the train, but only at the stations.

This leads me to believe Amtrack commuter rail into Portland, which meets the Yellow and Green line as well as lots of busses is quite cheap if one reserves fares ahead of time for every day one expects to work on the other side of the River.

There are 4,000 homeless people in Portland. The city is carefully constructed so as to keep all the homeless in Oldtown and Chinatown; that's where the soup kitchens, rescue missions, shelters and subsidized housing are to be found also the Portland Police Bureau and private security guards are completely cool about sleeping on the sidewalk in Oldtown and Chinatown.

But not in the Pearl District, Downtown or PSU neighborhoods.

All over the wealthier parts of Portland's central core are solar-powered trash compactors, with a few recycling bins that permit one to recycle a can or bottle but not remove it from the bin so one can claim the five-cent deposit.

But there are very large conventional trash cans in China Town and Oldtown that the homeless dig through to get their five cents. However there is nowhere to actually claim the deposit anywhere in Oldtown or Chinatown.

Some of the larger grocery stores have automated recycling machines. Rather than dispensing cash they issue a ticket that one can exchange for cash at the checkout stands.

One can only obtain that cash while the grocery store is open. Despite that some of the grocery stores open at 5:00 AM and all the rest at 6:00, the recycling machines are down until 9:00 each morning. I don't know when they shut off for the night but the grocery stores close anywhere from 9:0 PM to 1:00 AM.

None of those grocery stores are anywhere near Oldtown or Chinatown. Oregon's bottle bill limits one to recycling no more than 200 cans at any one merchant. At five cents per beverage container, that means you make ten dollars then you have to go find another supermarket.

Most homeless people as well as the vast majority of mentally ill are reluctant ever to stray far from their homes. I just love to roam all over Creation but I know lots of people who spend decades in Oldtown without ever setting foot in Chinatown let alone riding MAX to a supermarket for recycling.

Back in the day Portland rent was quite cheap and there was lots of it.

What with all the startups, the VCs, the highly paid engineers, web designers, graphic designers, sales and marketing people as well as Oregon's No-Fault Eviction Law rents are skyrocketing. An apartment that rented for $600.00 ten years ago is now $3,500.00.

I personally prefer to rent a room in a shared house. Not because it's less expensive but because I regard any more than one room as wasteful, also I prefer living with other Bohemians.

But AirBNB saw through my Evil Plan.

Many cities are passing ordinances to outlaw short-term rentals. Portland requires a hotel license but the Portland Police Bureau don't enforce it.

So were I to rent one single room in a shared house anywhere in Portland, the very instant my landlord clued into AirBNB I'd be out on the street.

Parking for those who commute to Downtown Portland is quite expensive, also there is a traffic jam from six in the morning until nine in the evening on all the highways.

Then there are your car payments, scheduled maintenance, replacing worn-out tired, unexpected major repairs, insurance, traffic citations, sales tax if one purchases one's car in Washington as well as the higher price of one's home if one has a garage and a driveway.

That's why the Clark County Council as well as the Vancouver City Council are so adamantly opposed to public transit. Someone actually wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Columbian.

"You don't want light rail into Vancouver. Everyone knows what happens when light rail goes in."

What? Economic prosperity all along the railbed and for several miles on other side?

The cafes I like to hang out? Restaurants? Pubs that serve Oregon's world-reknowned craft beer? Ethnic cuisine?

I would far far far prefer to live in Portland I regard Vancouver as a total shithole but among the reasons I am here is that I was born in Spokane and so regard Washington as my family's ancient homeland.

I am determined to reside inside Vancouver's herpes-ridden anal fissures because I have a duty to fix my ancient homeland's cluelessly asinine clusterfuck problems.

That's why I don't live in Canada any more because War on Terror, Surveillance State, hatred of immigrants even legal ones and the occasional unarmed black man.

               Is This the America I Love?

     I learned in the Boy Scouts that upside-down flag signals an emergency

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/11/25/641/18793

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

Google ate the seed corn a year or two ago:

http://www.google.com/search?q=hacker+news

  Fox News
  www.fox.com
  missing: <strike>hacker</strike>

I could eat Google's lunch while waiting for my morning coffee to brew but I've got a lot on my plate right now.

Do Yer Worst.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

Child Pornographers Agree: http://lix.in/ is the Best Link Protection Service.

Kiddieporn links are often posted on dead sites, as well as live sites that are poorly moderated. The actual entertainment media is commonly posted on such image hosts as PicsToPin.

Without link protection, it would not be hard to find the original forum threads.

I have even seen explicit pedophilia at Last.fm.

Link protection as well as filesharing hosts such as rapidshare, depositfiles and oron, as well as image hosts such as imgchili all use multilevel marketing. Imgchili pays five dollars for 1,000 pageviews. You don't even need to create your own content - just repost someone else's. It's better that way because the collectors will already know the relevant search queries.

This wont go away unless you take it out all at once. I am studying some technical measures that hold promise of accomplishingng that. One such technical measure would be to mail snail mail every registered sex offender on the planet some suggested queries for bing image search.

That would result in imgchili's insolvency as well as microsoft's failure to meet its revenue projections.

    Child Pornography on the Internet

http://www.warplife.com/jonathan-swift/books/software-proble...

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

   Startup Weekend entrepreneurial event on alert after man threatens explosions, guns

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/04/startup...

In reality I was lecturing the Starup Weekend corporation on Engineering Ethics. I'll explain in more detail some other time on my own site, then submit the link.

I do not want to be specific about the bug I referred to when I tweeted that anyone with a basic understanding of computers could detonate a large industrial facility from the comfort of their own home, but I will say that the actual detonate is Trihedral Engineer's VTS HMI/SCADA industrial control systems product.

It has since been renamed "VTScada". I expect that's because I BCCed one of Trihedral's three partners, the one who does all their sales and marketing, on my eMail to New Orleans industrial control systems engineer Roger Williams in which I requested he forward my Kuro5hin diary about Glenn Wadden's Deep Insight Into The Nature Of Reality to his colleagues in the Gulf offshore oil industry.

http://localroger.com/

Roger's ROFFLECOPTER arrived in my Inbox twenty minutes later. He knew very well I had BCCed someone at Trihedral but he had no clue who it was. In his reply, Roger complimented me for my persuasive rhetoric, as well as pointed out that I was an even more effective troll than he was.

My bunker buster bug is easily patched but Trihedral has no way to verify that their users have actually installed their patches. Were I to point out how to exploit it, a great many large industrial facilities would detonate. You don't want to do that.

However I will point out some other, far less likel yet deadly bugs that, given VTS' steaming pile of C++ source, would be quite intractible to fix. Trihedral has no hope whatsover of fixing all of them without a complete rewrite:

    Jonathan Swift Sticks It To The Man

http://www.warplife.com/ethics/safety.html

> If the single installation of a Human Machine Interface / Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition product used to control a Giant Robotic Automobile Assembly Plant is not Exception-Safe...

            You Will Drop a Pickup Truck
           On One of Your Plant's Workers
     Thereby Making a Widow of His Wife Instantly.

I don't actually know that it's related, but not long after I published Stick It To The Man, CERT issued an advisory regarding VTS.

I don't actually know but assertively speculate that VTScada is that complete rewrite. I will give them credit for VTScada's far-richer user interface.

Insightfully well-designed and implemented UI is of vital importance to Human Machine Interface / Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition Products. Consider that Three Mile Island was the result in part of all the knobs in its control room being identical.

I once saw a photo of a reactor control panel where someone had replace all the knobs with beer keg tap handles. :-D

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

   "Everyone I know masturbates at work."
    -- Beth Shreve

FTFY

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

Are you familiar with the term "Fellow Traveler"?

Open Source and Free Software are Fellow Travelers:

Just after the Communist victory in Vietnam, the People's Republic China invaded its southern border with North Vietnam.

The Soviet Union and the PRC repeatedly duked it out over Mongolia.

While not an actual member state, Yugoslavia had a mutual defense pact with NATO so as to keep a lid on Stalin's long-unfulfilled dream of a warm water fault.

The Russian Federation's invasion of Crimea is because warm water port.

Yugoslavians could travel freely to Italy. To assert its neutrality, Tito permitted precisely two port of call visits each from United States and Soviet Naval vessels.

My father was the antiaircraft missile fire control officer on the USS Springfield on one such call. Mom got to fly over to hang with Dad behind the Iron Curtain but strangely me and Jeannie weren't invited along.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

My advisor Clem Heusch once took me hiking from France to Switzerland, right by an unoccupied border post.

Its construction suggested it was built either by Napoleon or by the Swiss to defend itself from him. It was just big enough that one soldier with his Nutcracker Suite hat could stand in it.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

Come back to me after you've experienced a surgical abortion.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/d...

When I suffered from Solipsism, it wasn't that I felt _I_ didn't exist, but that I felt _you_ didn't exist.

You might think that as quite cool but it is soul-crushingly lonely.

Four other Solipsists mailed me after they stumbled upon Living with Schizoaffective Disorder, to thank me for curing their own soul-crushing loneliness.

Perhaps really I did not.

Perhaps we are not alone in the Universe.

Perhaps there is just us five.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

I believe life _continues_ at conception but began about one billion years ago.

I am pro choice.

I know very well that abortion stops a beating heart.

I know very well the foetus cries out in pain, desperately struggles to survive.

But even so I am pro-choice because the alternative is far worse: women will have abortions.

That has been the case since the Dawn of Humanity.

UCSC Anthropologist Stuard Schlegel was told be a Tiruray woman - Mindanao rainforest village dwellers in the Philippines - that there was a certain herb that the Tiruray women use to induce miscarriage.

Dr. Schlegel of course wanted to know what that herb was as it would be of huge benefit to women in the industrialized world, but she refused to identify it was doing so could lead all the men to murder all the women.

That's known as a "Pessary". The Hippocratic Oath forbids the administration of Pessaries.

Hippocrates was an Ancient Greek.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

A close friend of mine once asked me to accompany her to an abortion clinic.

She and I prepared for the experience for a couple weeks. I spent quite a lot of time talking it over with some of my coworkers.

At the very last instant I realize I screwed up; while she was in with the doctor I raced out, purchased a miniature teddy bear then raced back.

That made all the difference to her but even so she was completely overcome with grief.

All the women at the clinic were overcome with grief.

I was the only male in the place other than the staff.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

Drop a dime to Tom Cumming, [email protected]

Tell him Mike Crawford sent you.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

I know all about fulfillment as I was once in direct mail. Drop a line to our Direct Mail broker, Jim Johnson.

[email protected] or [email protected] would know how to reach him.

I am contemplating an eCommerce / Direct Mail business that will require fulfillment if it works out.

That is I can drop list tests then fulfill them myself, but once I have an offer that works well, while I would still fulfill myself at the beginning, because I would already have tested I would already know I need fulfillment.

The eCommerce site will come first but mostly to prevent a competitor from eating my lunch. The real marketing will be direct mail. Over time the direct mail will drive the website.

I expect I would do radio ads as well.

However I am uncertain that I will actually pursue this. I have approached two potential co-founders, they both think its a great idea but they don't want to give up their present work.

I don't really require a full-time co-founder, I just don't want to go this alone. It's nice to have someone else to talk to in my place of work.

I am dead certain this idea is huge, but were I to tell you then I would have to kill you.

My mail is [email protected], http://www.warplife.com/mdc/

I will reply to your eMail with my phone number but for the most part eMail works best for me.

Thanks!

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

I expect that's the specific reason "The Hot Zone" and "The Coming Plague" name the victims.

That is, rather than "An African man had Ebola" they would say "Arthur Obama had Ebola".

There's a whole world of difference between the two.

MichaelCrawford

11 yıl öncediscuss

Lori Schiller, "The Common Plague"

"The Hot Zone" whose author I don't recall, points out that "The human races is a trillion pounds of meat just waiting for a virus."

Outbreak was very, very loosely adapted from The Coming Plague.

What concerns me most right now is antibiotic resistance.

It thought I had diabetes, it runs in my family. I figured that's why I had open sores all over my feed and lower legs, so I worked hard to manage my diet but the sores did not clear up, eventually grew quite painful.

Told my optometrist, she inspected my retinas, no your fine.

I had digital retinal photographs taken in 2007 then put on file for use as a baseline.

Requested a fasting blood sugar test, not you're perfectly normal, that's odd.

Then why do I have these sores all over my legs?

Here let me look.

I am going to drive you to the Urgent Care Clinic RIGHT NOW!

So it's not diabetes?

Well she was a nurse she knew what it was but was not permitted to diagnose so she referred me to someone who was.

Doctor said no that's a Staph infection, here take these, rub this on the sores them come back in three weeks if they don't clear up.

Well they did I am very fortunate but I once met a woman who had the antibiotic resistant kind of Staff it was like a veloceraptor noshed on both her calves.

Some hospitals will not permit their patients to shave with razors as doing so - in those specific hospitals - promotes MRSA infection.

American public health is mostly on top of antibiotic resistant tuberculosis but in many parts of the world they aren't on top of any form of tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis is the one remaining infectious disease that can kill you at a distance; at least with Ebola you have to touch an infected person's Precious Bodily Fluids.

MichaelCrawford

Submissions

Tell HN: I Got Out of the Nuthouse This Afternoon

How to Light a Fire Under a Solicitor

Ask HN: Should I Apply for the YC Fellowship?

I Was Interview by CBC Radio Today (2009)

On Creativity, an Interview of Yours Truly by Matt Buice (2003)

Frontier suffers big cable TV outage (Portland Fiber Cut)

Tell HN: The “You are submitting to fast” timeout doesn't make sense

HOWTO Win a Cold War When It Suddenly Grows Hot

Tell HN: I Can't Login to HN with Tor

Tell HN: $ echo 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Find a Computer Job in New York City

Tell HN: Why I Don't Supply My GitHub in Job Applications

Tell HN: I'm Not the Same Michael David Crawford Who Died in a Police Shootout

Ask HN: I'm Busted, Out of Work. How to Visit a Friend Who Needs Me?

Remind HN: The Mother of Your Children Is a Mother Too

Ask HN: What Code That We Write Today Will Still Be Used in Ten Thousand Years?

The Sinking of the USS Guitarro (1994)

Zoomingo's iOS Jobs Page Hijacked by Pr0nsite; Can't Contact Their Admin

Living with Schizoaffective Disorder (2003)

Tell HN: The Creepiness Factor – Why I Won't Apply for Analytics Jobs

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