• We live in a strange world. There is so much information at our fingertips that it is almost impossible to comprehend just how much of an information age we live in.

    I’ve talked about this in the past, my mother was a telephone operator, as was her sister. They worked in a large town in Wisconsin.

    There were two T1 trunks heading towards Chicago and two T1 trunks headed west towards Minneapolis. This means they could have a grand total of 96 long-distance calls going at any one time.

    The grand total of the bandwidth for the town was 6.176 Mbit/second. That was it.

    In the early 90s, we were mostly using 10base2 and 10baseT connections. That is, 10 Mb/s. The actual throughput was closer to 5 Mbps. So, about the same bandwidth as the entire town.

    We were pleased when we upgraded to 100baseT. We were also using 125Mbps fiber connections. We actually had more network bandwidth than disk bandwidth.

    Today, most of my boxes, at the office/house, are 1000baseT. I’m in the process of upgrading the infrastructure to 10Gbit/second. This isn’t for the servers, most of them will continue to be 1Gbps connections, but the inter-switch connections will upgrade to 10Gbps.

    Why is this of any interest? Why am I doing this? Simple, I currently have 70 TB of storage at the home. This is about to get to nearly 100 TB. There will be 5 servers with 24 TB of disk each, 2 servers with 12 TB of disk. Those servers need to be able to move data very rapidly. The bottleneck has become the network, again.

    This storage is for every movie I ever purchased plus daily backups, plus more software than I can shake a stick at.

    Each of the primary servers cost $300 to stand up. $100 for the computer, $200 for disk drives. The other servers are multipurpose, so they have more CPU and more memory.

    For you, old folks, you might remember the encyclopedias of your youth. This was the single largest collection of knowledge we knew. The Encyclopedia Britannica was 32 volumes in size. It was released on a two CD version. Each CD held 750 Mbytes of data.

    1.5 GB total.

    That encyclopedia would consume 0.00101725% of my storage. And I’m small compared to the bigger boys out there.

    All of this is to say, there is nothing that has ever been digitized that doesn’t now exist somewhere on the Internet. Storage is cheap.

    If you have ever sent a “dick pic”, it is on the Internet, somewhere. If you have ever sent a “bra pic”, it exists. It doesn’t go away.

    If you have ever written a comment or posted an article, it exists, somewhere.

    There are entities whose entire business model is to scarf every last byte from the internet.

    To quote a great philosopher, quoting some stranger:

    Dance like nobody is watching, Post like one day your tweets will be read in court.
            

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  • Wait, don’t leave! They are REALLY good! And not as odd as they sound.

    I really love burgers, but I also am trying to lose weight. Those buns are not great for me, but a plain hamburger patty on a plate is boring. I went looking for something new, and found this recipe, and we tried it out recently. It was delicious! The fat from the ground beef infuses the cabbage with a lot of flavor, but doesn’t leave it feeling overly greasy. I walked away from the table quite pleased with myself!

    hamburger patties on slices of cabbage
    Ingredients:

    • 1 lb ground beef
    • 1 egg, whisked
    • 2 to 3 tbsp panko or breadcrumbs
    • green onions and parsley, minced
    • 1 head cabbage, cut into thick “steak” slices
    • olive oil, drizzles
    • spices – oregano, thyme, salt, pepper to taste
    • cheese slices (optional)
    • 1/4 cup tomato or pizza sauce (optional)

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  • A First Principle is that two things can be true at the same time.

    I can be fat and I can be old. Both are true, at the same time.

    Next, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

    50 years ago, a picture was worth a thousand words, and it could communicate truth where words could lie.

    This was never “true”, it was just believed. Photographers have been doing “touch up” of photos since the earliest days. Some of that involved painting directly on the plates, other times it was more extensive.

    It got to the point where people were building composite photographs, showing things that did not exist.

    A flatboat with eight light-skinned men floats toward us down a wide river in this horizontal painting. The boat nearly spans the width of the composition and has low sides and a shallowly arched, low cabin upon which the men gather. At the center, a man with dark hair and wearing light blue trousers and a pink shirt dances with one foot and both arms raised. To our right a seated musician plays a fiddle, and to our left a smiling man holds up a metal pot and strikes the flat bottom with the back of his fingers. The remaining men sit or recline around the musicians and dancing man, some looking toward the dancer and two looking out at us. Bedrolls and animal skins are stored in the cabin below. The olive-green surface of the river is streaked with pale blue. The horizon line comes about a third of the way up the composition. The trees and riverbanks in the distance are hazy beneath a watery blue sky.
    Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

    This painting caught my eye when I saw it in the National Gallery. I took a picture of it, then had a correspondence with the Gallery because I could not find it in their gallery.

    The reason is that the painting doesn’t belong to the Gallery, so it is not in their gallery. This was explained to me, and then the very nice lady explained that this painting was a “fake”.

    It was fake in that this particular scene never took place. This is not the artist adjusting the setting or anything like that. The artist was known to make quick sketches of interesting people doing interesting things. Or just interesting things. He would then create a composite image from those sketches and, from that image, paint something that wasn’t “real” but it wasn’t truly fake, either.

    I expressed it as “The Photoshop of 1846”, to which she agreed.

    We have become much more sophisticated. We even have a word for those manipulated and faked images, they are “Photoshopped”.

    We see, and most of us recognize, the manipulations that are used on the cover of magazines. We notice it when things “just don’t look right”.

    One famous example was the Vogue cover featuring Cindy Crawford. The magazine had “erased” her mole. She got upset and said that her mole was part of who she was.

    I spent years working on Computer Graphics, making very high-quality renderings with no real images involved. At one point, one of my teammates was giving a presentation to some brass. He was talking about how we had managed to make our trees look more realistic.

    As he was speaking, he was clicking through different images of a real place. Well, the digital elevation map, as we rendered it, with our fake trees planted where the trees were in the real location.

    Not a single pixel of the images shown was real. It was all computer-generated images.

    After about 15 minutes of the talk, somebody with brass on his shoulders stood up and said something like: Enough, I’ve been to there, I know what it looks like, I want to see your images.

    Our fake images looked enough like the real thing that an intelligent guy, with stars on his shoulders, that he was looking at real images.

    Those images took days to model, weeks of programming, hours per image to render.

    Today, you can ask an “AI” to create an image for you, refine it, then push it out as real. The image will often be a composite of many real images or sub-images.

    Photoshop actually has “smart fill” and “smart erase” that are designed to use AI to “seamlessly” fill areas of an image or erase areas of an image.

    What 20 years ago took a team months to accomplish, a troll on a media team can accomplish in minutes.

    It has gotten to the point where people can create an AI movie by creating the proper prompts.

    Some AI-generated images are easy to detect. A Tuesday Tune I posted had visuals created by AI. Not my doing. Some guns were absolutely mind-blowing. The cylinders with 8 chambers, each chamber looking like a keyhole. It was fun, in its obvious errors.

    We had the period of time when people were getting multiple rows of teeth, or hands with six fingers, or a dozen other “standard” errors. It was fun to pick out, or down right terrifying, depending on your view point.

    Can we trust our eyes when we watch a video? We know some ways that things are faked. But this new technology is going to get better, harder to detect. We are already long past, “Pictures, or it didn’t happen”. We are rapidly moving past, “Video, or it didn’t happen.”

            

  • Dad is in long-term care. He will never return to the home he shared with his wife, my mother, for the last 20+ years.

    Last week was a hard trip to say goodbye. He was in good spirits and doing “ok”. He is not nearly as sharp as he was a couple of years ago. He has had one major cardio event, and they think he is having mini-strokes.

    He remembers that his wife is dead, then 5 minutes later starts asking if we have talked to her recently and know how she is doing.

    He remembers her going into the basement at our family goodbye to mom. That was about 6 months ago. He does not remember her ever coming back upstairs.

    He has conflated an event with my eldest daughter and his wife to think mom borrowed some money from him to buy a car and left him.

    It is easier for him to believe that she left him, than that she is dead. I wish I could believe she was still alive.

    But that is boring stuff.

    The more interesting part was that we were tasked with helping to clear the house. My youngest coordinated with “The Cousins” to make sure all the grandchildren got a fair share and what they wanted. When we arrived on Wed., they were there.

    They went into a search and divide mission, which was cool to see. What was even better was the lack of anxiety or conflict between any of them.

    After the work was done, I had the pleasure of working with one of my nephews. He is interested in picking up his first EDC pistol. He is very down on “small” pistols. That was until I showed him the P398 to show him that it works very well as a pocket pistol.

    That started to change his mind, but then he got to try the 1911 for size. That he liked, even though he felt it was a bit heavier.

    He got to look over and handle the AR15 platform.

    The conversation then turned to Mom and Dad’s views on guns.

    Dad was never “anti-gun”. After he was exposed to CNN and the constant Republican’s are bad rhetoric, he changed his opinion from “2A” to “you don’t need a …”. At the end, he was no longer pro-2A and felt that universal background checks, LCM, and “assault weapon” bans were ok.

    He never pushed back on me about my very PRO 2A opinions. It was something we didn’t discuss when he was able to discuss.

    One of my tasks is to evaluate and rescue every piece of data he has on his computer. This meant collecting all the external drives, the main desktop computer, the two husks, the external drives, the USB cards. I think I have all of that.

    In the process, I was down under his desk taking things apart, and I turned and looked at the mid-shelf of his desk.

    I’m looking at the back strap of a Glock like pistol.

    To say I was a bit surprised would be a serious understatement.

    I take the pistol and bring it out to inspect, automaticity going through the clearing operation.

    The slide doesn’t run. There is no safety keeping the slide from moving. The weight is wrong.

    I drop the mag and only then realize it is a BB gun.

    0.177 steel balls.

    Mom hated the squirrels in the bird feeders. She must have gotten tired of the lack of results from airsoft and upgraded to this thing.

    The next time somebody says, “It was only a BB gun.”, I will remember this instant. There is no way in hell I would have let a bad guy point that thing at me. There was no way to know it was “just a BB gun” from the muzzle end at 5 feet.

            

  • An interesting thing is happening within the circuit courts, those judges who are tired of seeing the majority rubber stamp any infringement a state wants, are speaking out.

    They are taking their lead from Thomas, Van Dyke and others who have spoken up to shed light on just how badly these rogue judges are behaving.

    This unorthodox procedural posture bears some explanation. After hearing the case in December 2022, the initial panel majority reached a decision and promptly circulated a draft opinion. Yet for more than a year, no dissent was circulated. The panel thus held the proposed opinion in accordance with our custom that majority and dissenting opinions be published together. A year later—as the proposed opinion sat idle—a different panel heard arguments in United States v. Price (No. 22-4609), which also involved interpreting and applying Bruen. The Price panel quickly circulated a unanimous opinion that reached a conclusion at odds with the Bianchi majority’s year-old proposed opinion. Facing two competing proposed published opinions, the Court declined to let the earlier circulated opinion control. Rather, in January 2024, we “invoked the once-extraordinary mechanism of initial-en-banc review.” Mayor of Balt. v. Azar, 799 F. App’x 193, 195–96 (4th Cir. 2020) (Richardson, J., dissenting). I hope that we will not find ourselves in this posture again soon. Cf. United States v. Gibbs, 905 F.3d 768, 770 (4th Cir. 2018) (Wynn, J., voting separately) (suggesting that majority opinions may be issued without awaiting dissenting opinions to prohibit those dissenting opinions from exercising a “pocket veto” to “deny or delay fairness and justice”).
    —No. 114 Dominic Bianchi v. Anthony Brown, No. 21-1255, slip op., n. 2 (4th Cir.) Richardson, dissenting.

    This explains the game. The majority of the Bianchi merits panel found for The People. The minority refused to write his dissent. Because of “traditions”, the merits panel did not issue their opinion, instead waiting for the dissent.

    Meanwhile, the Fourth was waiting for another 2A case to show up. That would be Price.

    The Price panel decided the “plain text” question was worthy of considerable attention. Since Mr. Price was charged with a criminal act, the panel decided he wasn’t a part of The People. To use their words:

    Again, Bruen’s first step requires us to evaluate whether “the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct.” Bruen, 597 U.S. at 24. The Bruen Court asked three questions to resolve this inquiry: (1) whether the petitioners were “part of the people whom the Second Amendment protects”; (2) whether the weapons regulated by the challenged regulation were “in common use” for a lawful purpose, in that case, “self-defense”; and (3) whether the Second Amendment protected the petitioners’ “proposed course of conduct.” Id. at 31–32 (cleaned up).
    —United States v. Price, No. 22-4609, slip op. at 11,12 (4th Cir.)

    Boy is it cleaned up.

    1) It is undisputed that petitioners Koch and Nash—two ordinary, law-abiding, adult citizens—are part of “the people” whom the Second Amendment protects. —New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. V. Bruen, 142 S.Ct. 2111 (U.S. 2022) So the fourth is going down the path that the definition of “The People” in the Second Amendment is a subset of The People as used in the rest of the Constitution.

    2) In common use, was not part of “plain text”. It was a reference to Heller‘s work, which states that the state cannot ban weapons in common use.

    This is essential to note and understand. A weapon that is in common use cannot be banned. This does not mean that weapons that are NOT in common use may be banned. If a weapon is not in common use, then the government bears the burden of proving that there are firearms regulation in this Nation’s history which match the modern-day infringement.

    3) “Shall not be infringed?” That appears to be pretty clear-cut.

    There are 84 pages of this twisting of language in Price all to get to the point where they say “The plain text of the Second Amendment does not encompass the proposed conduct.”

    The gist of this argument is the self-centered arrogance of the Fourth Circuit and the Seventh Circuit. When Justice Thomas wrote: Despite the popularity of this two-step approach, it is one step too many. Step one of the predominant framework is broadly consistent with Heller, which demands a test rooted in the Second Amendment’s text, as informed by history. …—id. at 10 he did not claim that any of the Circuit Courts got it right, just nearly so.

    Nevertheless, the Fourth circuit believes that Justice Thomas was speaking about them as having been “broadly consistent” with Heller in the past. Since they are the exception, they must have gotten it right the last time. Thus, they are correct in thinking that “plain text” has anything to do with common use.

    In common use is only of use to The People. If an arm is in common use, it cannot be banned.

    In Bianchi, the Fourth issued Price first, used that to justify their “We were broadly consistent before, we still are.”

    So, in the minds of the Fourth circuit court, “plain text” is a sophisticated problem requiring detail examination of the etymological meaning of each word and phrase, ignoring the Heller Court doing exactly that, for them.

            

  • We talk a lot about SHTF and how we’ll bug out or in, what foods we have, how to make fire. All these things are important, definitely. But I want to talk medications.

    There are categories of medications that need attention. First, we have “first aid” meds, things taken to help with an emergent medical situation. Then we have daily meds, things taken to help with physical problems that are long term. After that, we have what I’ll call helper meds, things we take because we can, but that aren’t necessarily on a daily basis.

    When it comes to first aid meds, the most common ones are:

    • pain relievers (ibuprofen, acetaminophen, aspirin, etc.)
    • cough medicines (dextromethorphan, guaifenesin, etc.)
    • antihistamines (benadryl, Allegra, etc.)
    • decongestants (sudafed and the like)
    • tummy upset meds (tums, laxatives, motion sickness meds, and Imodium)

    I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but those are the common ones I can think of. I tend to keep a rotating store of these meds, so that if an emergency were to happen, I could use them sparingly for a long time. I might not be able to take them as often as I currently do, but I’d have them as back up. Because these aren’t meant to be taken all the time, you can live without them. It might be uncomfortable (literally, in the case of the pain meds) but you’d survive.

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  • Olympic “trans” controversy where we lost. The boxer in question isn’t trans. She might be cheating. But we lost because the facts are not in our favor.

    We had a great opinion from an east coast federal judge. The gist? “I hate Bruen, I’ve worked hard to find something that would allow me to find for the state. I couldn’t. AR-15s in particular can’t be banned. This doesn’t apply to other ‘assault weapons’ nor does it apply to magazine bans.”

    Rahimi is being used by the state as an “everything goes” but the courts aren’t really buying it unless they were already in the anti-gun camp.

    Thanks again for my grammar checkers. I don’t take offense and I will continue to attempt to do better.

            

  • Right now, there are literally hundreds of women on FaceBook and other social media that are telling “all women” that we are being treated like livestock. I can’t make this shit up, folks.

    Yes, absolutely. As a female human being in America, I am currently:

    • being held in a cage
    • restricted from movement
    • bred against my will
    • used in breeding programs
    • abused and neglected
    • being used for someone else’s profit
    • living in windowless sheds
    • being denied normal behaviors
    • being used for meat and milk, and perhaps eggs

    Seriously? What the hell. In what way is any woman in this country being treated like livestock? For fuck’s sake. Yes, I’m ranting.

    I have MAJOR problems with statements like this. So many problems. Let me innumerate them.

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  • I started caring about computer infrastructure in the early 1980s. We feed our computer via punch cards, 9 track tape, and a few dozen hardwired terminals at 4800 baud.

    We upgraded our network. We got our IBM 3090 on BITNET. I learned more about networking.

    We upgraded to 10base2 when our Sun 360s arrived. More and more of campus had Ethernet.

    When I arrived in Maryland, I was babysitting some Super Computers. There were nearly 1000 computers hooked up to the network. Most of those were running some variation of Unix.

    To keep all of those machines up-to-date took a highly skilled team of system administrators. They handled all the machines on campus except for the Super Computers, which my team took care of.

    If they needed help, the team could call on my Mentor’s team. His team was part of the group of people that defined the Internet. Yes, really.

    That support team spent about 25% of their time caring for around 800 Unix machines. They spent the other 75% trying to care for the Apple’s and Microsoft machines. The workload was getting greater and greater as more and more Microsoft and Apple machines came on campus.

    By the time I left, they had to increase the size of that support team from two skilled workers, to four skilled workers. 2 of them did nothing but Microsoft support.

    The number of Unix boxes increased and still was taking less than 20% of the teams efforts.

    I wish that was still the case.

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