Category Archives: Technology

Culture, Technology

How Awesome Is Facebook?

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Anyone who knows me, knows I’m a Luddite.  I have no social media presence. No Tweety, no Facepaging, no Instascope, no Snapblab, no Linkedup, nothing.

The latest hubbub from the fake news media is about how Cambridge Analytica captured “personal” information of 87 million Facebook users, parsed the information, and using that information, coerced the gullible public into electing Donald Trump as President of The United States.

Now if we actually believe the hysteria, what does that mean?

It means you should invest your money into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica because they have obtained the holy grail of the advertising world!

Since caveman Og had extra wheels that he wanted to sell to his fellow Neanderthals, people have been trying to figure out the “best” way to get others to “buy” their goods.  Obviously Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have figured this out, according the the talking heads in the fake news media as well as those of the liberal left.

According to the Federal Election Commission, the “Donald Trump for President” campaign paid $5,912,500 to Cambridge Analytica.  For some perspective, a 30 second Superbowl ad this year cost an advertiser $5,000,000, about the same price

An investment equivalent to a single 30 second spot during the Superbowl, overcame the will of the people to elect Hillybob and forced the zombie voters to elect Donald Trump.  Damn that was money well spent compared to the $1.4 BILLION spent by Hillybob, to lose.

Of course if we take the flip side to the “common sense” reasoning and conclude that the collected data had little or no influence on the election, the implication is that you should get your money out of Facebook.  This would indicate that their business model is flawed.  Facebook’s value is all of that personal data AND the linkages between users AND the links they maintain between the users and stores they shop at.  Facebook sells this information to advertisers to generate revenue.  The personal data and its utility to advertisers is the whole reason for the company’s billions in valuation.

No matter which side you care to believe, Facebook will be reviewing its image but little else will change.  Mark Zuckerberg will testify to Congress in just a few days.  My guess is that he will give a well scripted and moving mea culpa and say how naive they were and didn’t see the evil in the world and that they only had a vision of how they were bringing the world together.  Blah, blah, blah.  Zuckerberg will say that he would welcome regulation.  Blah, blah, blah.  Mark will give a list of how they will protect the public going forward.  More blah, blah, blah.  What will happen in the end is nothing.  No new regulations will be written.

If Facebook implemented or was forced to implement stringent privacy rules then the treasure trove of data has little value.  If advertisers can’t use the personal data to target ads, Facebook can’t charge as much for placements.  You can’t make money just letting people post vacation pictures and cat videos, for free.

I suspect that Congress (and the fake news media) will have short-term theatrical outrage over the current hysteria de jour  but will soon move on to the more pressing 2018 election cycle and Facebook will go back to business as usual.  Anyone remember the huge stink about Russians planting fake ads on Facebook just a few months ago?  Anyone still have outrage over that?  Were any new laws written?  As I said, back to business as usual.

I think I wasted too much time writing about this topic.  “Move along nothing to see here”

Culture, Politics, Technology

Judged By Experts. The Verdict MUST Be True.

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Lefty Lunatics are at it again. Calling them LUNATICS is somewhat IRONIC and SEXIST which I will explain later.

A Yale trained psychiatrist, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, has just released a book titled, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” where she presents her findings that President Trump is mentally unfit to serve as President of the United States. Doc Lee has taken her new found 15 minutes of fame and has briefed a small group of fellow LOONS in congress, as to her conclusion that President Trump is mentally unfit.  She claims that this is her duty to sound the alarm about President Trump just as someone should have raised the alarm about the rise of Adolf Hitler.

It has been reported that Doc Lee herself has said that diagnosing a patient without ever seeing him or interacting with him in any way is against the “ethics” of her profession. I guess the CANONS of ETHICS for psychiatrists isn’t worth the toilet paper that they obviously must be written on. I haven’t heard that her medical license to practice has been revoked or that she has been censured in any manner.  Makes one wonder how ethical the profession actually is.

I’ve heard the LOONS on the left yelling that it’s not one, not two, not three, but 27 psychiatrists who believe President Trump is unfit for office. Once more let’s look at some numbers. These 27 lunatic psychiatrists with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” make up only 6/100ths of a percent of the 49,000 psychiatrists in the United States.

“But 27 is a big number”, the LOONY LEFT argues. “There MUST be some validity to their conclusions”. Once again let’s revisit some recent history to assess the accuracy of a “BANDWAGON” conclusion.

In 1989 TWO physicists, Marty Fleischman, one of the world’s leading electrochemists, and Stanley Pons released finding of HISTORIC proportions. Similar to Doc Lee releasing her findings in a non-peer reviewed book, Pons and Fleischman released their finding, not in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but in a press release to the general public. What was this history finding? Unlimited energy production through COLD FUSION. It has become know as the Fleischman-Pons Experiment. As soon as the experiment was described almost immediately MANY physicists around the world said that they duplicated the results, VALIDATING the EXPERIMENT. The Russians claimed they were getting higher yields of energy than the original experiment. The mass media was reporting this discovery as “Greater than the Pennsylvania Oil Rush” as to energy production. What happened to this great source of FREE energy? Within months of the announcement of COLD FUSION and physicists world wide showing POSITIVE results, other physicist were starting to report that they could not replicate the results.  More negative results poured in.  The majority of physicists were concluding that the results of the Fleischman-Pons experiment were flawed.

A conference was held on COLD FUSION where Steven Koonin of Caltech stated that the results were simply a matter of “the INCOMPETENCE and DELUSION of Pons and Fleischmann,” In less than a year after its announcement, COLD FUSION was DECLARED DEAD.

NEVER FORGET, just because a group of EXPERTS declare something as TRUE, doesn’t make it TRUE.

Oh yeah, I’m being quite sexist when I call them LUNATICS. The term LUNATIC comes from the 28 day (Lunar) cycle of the moon which was thought in times of old to reflect the 28 day menstrual cycle of WOMEN, where they believed that women lost their minds for a period of time.

Business, Culture, General Information, Government, Technology

This Picture Should Scare The Hell Out Of Everyone

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THIS PICTURE SCARES the HELL out of me! 

Forget about the blather de jour that the media puts forth on a nightly basis.  There has been almost NO  media coverage of this REAL EMERGING THREAT.

What are we looking at?  Well it’s a commercially available quadcopter or “drone”, with an explosive attached to it.

I found that you can buy this exact drone online for $199 with free shipping.  I suspect that the Mexican cartels used this particular drone as they are manufactured in Tijuana, Mexico.  Oddly it was designed in Berkeley California, the hub of “free speech”.  There are numerous OTHER quadcopters made in China which are available for retail purchase for a few hundred dollars and they all have similar capabilities.  And it’s the CAPABILITIES that are worrisome.

As an alternative to buying a completed drone, you can buy all the parts and pieces from many sources, foreign and domestic, to put one together.  In fact if one were sneaky, one would probably source the parts through a number of different vendors to cover one’s tracks and not raise any red flags.  Notice I say “one” which has significance that I’ll clarify below.

The picture shows what Mexican drug cartel operatives were caught with.  The report said it is carrying what they call a “potato bomb”.  It’s 1 pound of explosives wrapped in shrapnel (nails and ball bearing) to enhance its killing capabilities.

Here’s what i find disturbing about this.  A drone like this can fly at 30 mph or more.  It has a flight time of at least 10 minutes before the batteries die.  It may be able to travel faster and have a flight time of possibly up to 20 minutes.  Using the conservative numbers of 30 mph for 10 minutes, that’s a range of AT LEAST 5 MILES, possibly more than 10 miles.  With the built-in GPS it can travel those 5 to 10 or more miles and arrive at a target within about 10 feet, possibly even closer.  There are ways to get it within INCHES or factions of an INCH of a target.  There is a possibility to fly it through a window or doorway just to give some additional food for thought.

A drone like this is capable of completely autonomous operation.  What does that mean?  Well an evil doer can program in the GPS coordinates for the target and set it loose to cause mayhem.  It does not require any further human interaction once the target location has been programmed in.  Virtual waypoints (locations to define the drone’s flight path) can be programmed to allow the drone to skirt around buildings and other obstacles which would make it harder to detect.  You’ll hear some naive “experts” saying that you can “jam” the drone.  That is patently FALSE!.  Again, it flies all by itself.  Once the drone is in flight there is NOTHING to jam.  Keep in mind that NO training or experience is required to get the drone flying.  Technology has made it that simple.

It gets worse.

Now here’s where it can get even scarier.  At a cost of $200 a bad actor could buy 100 of them for less than the price of a nice used car ($20,000).  They could be released miles away from a target and the flock of killer drones could approach the destination from multiple directions.  Recall above that the flight path can be programmed in.  The bad guy could also “sequence” them so they arrive in “waves”, staggered a few seconds apart from each other, again coming in from all directions.  The odds of stopping  ALL 100 drones coming in from multiple direction in “waves” would most likely be near ZERO.  An attack in an urban setting would make detection and interception virtually impossible by any means.  I don’t think the military, law enforcement, or any government agency has the capability to stop such an attack.  And again, some food for thought.  100 drones means 100 pounds of explosives.  That’s a heck of a big boom.

The press likes to use the term “lone wolf“.  Well one bad guy could easily load 100 drones into a van and let them loose miles away from the intended target, ALL BY HIMSELF!  One EVIL man.  No vast network of terrorists required.

This is why I said, this should scare the hell out of everyone.