Writing Science Fiction

A couple of years ago while observing the relentless anti-Science diatribe coming from the conservatives. I came up with a Idea for a Science Fiction story, and it went something like this;

Many different Scientist had been ‘blackballed’ by the government in power, and removed from their jobs. Unable to work, they had taken any jobs they could get, pumping gas, fast food, and delivery people. Low pay, no respect, and no Science. While many had offers to work abroad in their fields, they were blocked from leaving the U.S. by being placed on no-fly and no-travel restrictions. The government did not want the brain drain, but they didn’t want the scientist from becoming active again, and casting doubts upon the U.S.

So here we are, science suppressed, and scientist restricted. So a group of Irish (where I currently reside) conspired with the Irish government (covertly) to create passports and travel documents for the scientist being held. Then an Irish person who could pass in appearance to a scientist, would enter the U.S. as a visitor, and assume the identity of the individual, and work their jobs, fill their roles and report to their parole boards. In the mean time, the scientists would use the created Irish identities to flee the U.S. and then sometime later the substitutes themselves would exit. The scientists would then be free, and able to resume their Scientific Research.

The story would then detail this activity for several different scientists…etc, etc, etc

Now, in the present, this is no longer a Science Fiction story, and not even really a Fiction of any sort. It is a sad telling of the near reality.

UPDATE: It’s already beginning – Make our Planet Great!

The next moment, a new World.

Almost all religion speaks of a next world, a heaven if you will. If their followers uphold the values that religion espouses. Christianity, Islam even Norse speaks of Valhalla. But time and space in the real world is a very different place. Each moment a branch in space-time, each moment, a new world. And while in most religions, you must die to enter heaven, in space time that is only a next moment, a new branch. You die, you don’t die, each on it’s own branch. Each a possibility, taken or not.

If you assume that each religion has fundamental elements that provide a moral framework to betterment of society, and the individual. Then each positive action that person betters, improves, does good in the world, betters the next world in the next moment. So each individual, makes the next world a heaven, or a hell of the next world in the next moment. Each branch an upward movement, or a downward one. Good, or not, betterment or not, each leading to a better or worse world for everyones next moment.

Any practitioner, priest, cleric or minister that preaches the worst elements of their religion, calling for any of mankind’s worse traits, they are wishing for the hell, striving for the worst world in the next moment for everyone. And any, who are not religious, who by their actions uplifts, that does good, that betters, are saints, and righteous for they uplift all mankind, in the next moment, in the next world.

ED:Republishing this.

The “INFLUENCER” in social media.

I’ve often been invited to link to the current ‘INFLUENCER-DU-JOUR’ from Social Media sites. And ofttimes is a Successful entrepreneur, or angel investor, someone who has hit it big. And in many cases the success is a one off, and the personality at the center, is now an established ‘Expert’ in all things, even outside of their granted success niche.

I have encountered such people, and with rare exception, the success, their victory, has been more a ‘in the right place, at the right time’ event. Call it one time lucky. Mind you some have been very lucky, and struck big. And either by ego, or genuine desire, seek to do it again, or to help others ‘make it’. More often it’s the former, reveling in Ego, lies at the root. I won’t begrudge their Win, I just won’t listen to them any more than I would the next stranger on the street. I read once, that one of the great brokers before the great crash in the 1930’s, claimed he had received ‘Stock Tips’ from his shoeshine boy, at which point, he got out of the market, and saved his own shirt.

I feel that here, too many shoe shine boys.

Language of computing

I was reminded this Christmas Holiday season that computers do not ‘know‘ any human language, only binary, and that it takes humans to provide the translation from the machine to something human readable. And while most computer programing languages are ‘English’ like, they need not have to be in the English Language. It’s just what’s what happened first, and could be changed into another language at anytime.

This came to me in an inspired way, by listening to Carols, where non-native speakers were singing in latin, and other non-english speakers were singing in English, or German, or French. That you can sing in a language, and not know how to speak in it.

I suspect that is the same method that most non-english speakers program computers in ‘english like’ programing languages. By layering another translation over the programming, or like in singing, which uses another part of the brain, different from the part that provides language skills, another part of the brain is used to converse with computers. Thus making the point that people who program, do think with altered brains.

The end is near, for my Nokia N900

No, the USB connector is not loose, in fact everything is working fine. Well maybe the battery runs down and the tiny magnet on the prop went missing (fixed), It was the dissapearance of the Nokia catalog from the apt repository that has signaled the closing of the timeline of this product. Not of my choosing as the selections of Android, IOS, and others is just getting interesting. Some new and amazing mobile phone are on the verge of release there is almost no time to read about one then another announces something better.

In any case the Nokia N900, is very long in the tooth, being 3 years old this month. Still, I can sill do things with it that are not duplicated on any other phone, when was the last time you were controlling your (IR) Television, of opening an X-Term? Those days are long gone, and maybe not to be missed either, except by some of us geeks.

Now to choose…..

One day of concerted Soldering

This is my Monday effors of concerted soldering my neck is stiff, and I have a nice blister on my right hand index finger from fumbling the soldering pencil, but I managed. I thought I had a power source conector, but my failing memory…. power test today sometime, then searching for any cold solder joints and shorts. Wishfull hoping for a first time success….

UPDATE: It does power up, and works, however I have a loose connection in the power plug I built so I have to build another, better one tomorrow.

The wife needed proof that I do ‘kitchen’ work 🙂

The Banking Crisis is Our Fault!

I heard all the arguments, and if I were in a position to actually have made the decisions, or been allowed to tender an opinion on the actions taken. I know I would have made different choices. But in the end;

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BANKING CRISIS!


We the people of Ireland are personally responsible for the crisis, for WE voted on the corrupt and idiotic government, the bad bureaucracy and bribed banked owned politicians who put us into this position. AS IN PERIOD!

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE!


There is no getting around it, so stop talking about a banking crisis, it’s a crisis of a democratic majority more concerned with trifling personalities, and historical artifacts that have no basis in fact. A Nonsensical political system that reenforces the rich, and dumps the poor and middle classes.

Kindle as the fire of Fahrenheit 451

In the science fiction book Fahrenheit 451 I often wondered what the catalyst was. In the current age, that has become apparent, control, with government leaders demanding ‘controls’ over the Internet, and most other communications media the books presented in the Novel are information. However, there is another aspect of books which in this age of electronic books (eBook) presents itself as a missing element in control.

While experimenting with the Kindle on Android I found that the Android Pad I was using, while reading a Kindle book was in constant communication with Amazon Books. Almost every page turn was being recorded and sent to Amazon, even the location of where I was reading them was a requirement during the reading of the eBook.

I discovered that if you turn off location features in your pad, or Android Phone, the kindle software will prevent you from reading a downloaded book. If you can not communicate with Amazon via WiFI or other wireless channel, you can’t open your books, even if they were previously downloaded.

Sometime back Amazon became embroiled in a controversy over publishing rights to a book, and directly removed it from peoples ebook readers, without the consent of the user.

Amazon/Kindle does not allow the loaning of books to others, even if they have been paid for. The owner just doesn’t have that right anymore.

All of these elements add up to the same thing, printed books are ‘out of control’ they can be read by anyone, loaned to anyone, and their content is not subject to change once printed. These are things that Amazon eBooks can do. Change content, disappear, track readers, prevent distribution and dissemination of content.

Not to get too scary, but fundamentally the loss of printed books marks a point where knowledge has peaked, and the end of freedom of thought. No longer will information be available freely. The internet will be throttled, bottled, canned and banned to suit the requirements of the controlling society. Books will be available, eBooks, with controlled revisable content, restricted to cleared and sanctioned readers from known locations. And every word will be monitored as it is read.

Gaddafi, the better deal for the western world.

If it hasn’t been apparent from the start. The western nations, via their corporate masters have deemed Gaddafi is the better choice to make deals with, regarding Libyan oil. Democratic governments are too, ‘open’ to he public. So in libya, the choice was clear, let the western leaders wring their hands, talk the talk, the let the revolution fail.

Simple, every government can pat themselves on the back for saying the right thing, while declaring that their hands were tied due to a ‘catch 22‘ situation, dammed if they do, dammed if they don’t.

The real question for the United States, what if the French had chosen NOT to intervene in the American Revolution?

Bow down before your corporate (interest) masters folks. Bend over, you are being given another drilling.

The Woe of WiKileaks

George Carlin on the “American dream, outlines why WiKileaks is being assaulted. And why we have such rotten governments around the world.



Additional Material: Amnesia as a Way of Life: WikiLeaks Amid the “Careless People”

Apprenticeships for the unemployed

The future of Irish unemployment, or for that matter, unemployment anywhere, may involve re-establishing a medieval apprenticeship, where students, or other unemployed IT/Scientific/Technical workers live with those in the same industry who ARE working, and learn the business from them, as MASTERS of the craft.

Apprentice – A Medieval Guild Apprentice was sent to work for a ‘Master’ during his early teens. The Apprenticeship lasted between 5 and 9 years depending on the trade. During this time the apprentice received no wages – just his board, lodging and training. An Apprentice was not allowed to marry until he reached the status of a Journeyman.


While all of these requirements need not be followed, it might alleviate homeless students or other tradesmen.

Geeks and their toys

A couple of weeks ago a friend from work was clearing out their place, I assume that his wife was involved, but in any case my collection of computers grew a bit when he offered to gift them to me. So now I own a Sun SPARCstation 5 and a Sun SparcStation IPX along with other bits and bobs. My wife was thrilled, as you can well imagine. Now as a rule I only take systems that work, and they do, however the passwords have been lost in the annals of time.

So I was left with a marginal SparcStation 5 with a missing CD drive, which booted to Solaris 2.7, but no further. But I’m a geek, and undaunted by this minor setback, I set out looking for a workaround. The googling net is full of solutions for password recovery … if you have a bootable cd (yes CD not DVD), Ok, next does eBay still have Solaris stuff that old … not cheaply, so what next.

While googling, OpenBSD presented itself, and I downloaded and burned some generic ISO’s of version 4.8. and then to solve the other hardware issue, the Sun IPX was delivered with a cartridge loading CD, but the IPX drive was housed in an external SCSI 1 case, and the SS5 was wired with a SCSI II system externally. so I dismantled the CD drive and searched for a CD cartridge carrier which as any self-respecting Geek, I had stashed away for a rainy day. Then armed with the hardware I jumpered the SCSI CD drive into the SS5 chassis, and bingo a complete and bootable SS5.

Now attempting to boot the OpenBSD was no problem, which surprised me to no end. But then I attempted a password recovery on the Solaris disk and no joy. but I did manage to mount it, and more or less destroy it (latter I found a way to fix it) and determined to go ahead and install the full OpenBSD system. Which more or less worked, there were issues with the X-Fonts archive but I found the tarball contained another version, which worked. It now booted on the internal disk, but I had to add and modify the XF86Config file to find the display, mouse and keyboard. My result does not match the examples of this file you might find on the net. So if you are interested, contact me, the Sun GB keyboard was hell to make work. but TADA:


And I even now have a browser in the form of Links

However, while it can compile most anything, there isn’t much left on the 1GB disk to compile TO. So unless I find some pre-compiled SMALL binaries, or a very cheap internal SCSI Disk to upgrade with, I’m stuck.

There may be more coming for this toy but just to make a comparison with modern hardware;

SparcStation 5 Nokia N900 smartphone
Screen 1024 x 768 (9 screens) 800 x 480 (4 screens)
Memory 64 MBytes 256 MBytes
CPU Freq 110 Mhz 600 Mhz
Storage 1 GByte 32 Gbyte
Price (new) 8,000.00$ to 10,000.00$ ~500.00$

UPDATE: I found amongst the archives another external 1.2GB SCSI disk, which fits nicely in the same connector that the CD-Drive was in, so now the SS5 is without the CD-Drive but has a massive 2.2GB of disks, Impressive 🙂

Apple’s outrageous share of the mobile industry’s profits

That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?

Pie chart: Apple’s outrageous share of the mobile industry’s profits

In any other businesses this would be called a RIP OFF! by Apple, but with the Apple-Fanboy base, They can do no wrong. I used to be a Apple Evanglista back in Apple’s dark days, and I still use a MacBook. But I use a Nokia N900, because I can do more, with less Apple regulation, and I pay a great deal less than any iPhone ball-and-chain.