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It's wonderful when someone says what I want to say and says it better than I can say it. Enjoy:
By Charlotte Wood @The Guardian
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Saturday, August 18, 2018
This Person Speaks My Mind
It's wonderful when someone says what I want to say and says it better than I can say it. Enjoy:
Friday, July 27, 2018
I Hate My ISP: Good Riddance Charter / Spectrum / Time Warner Cable
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I've been ranting about the crap quality of Time Warner Cable for many years. I thought Charter buying them would improve the service. It has not. Instead, the user-abuse has intensified in the form of further outrageously inflated prices in return for poor service and bad attitude.
Therefore, despite the as-yet unknown repercussions, I am DELIGHTED that my state government is booting abusive Spectrum / Time Warner Cable / Charter OUT of NEW YORK! This is We The People sticking it to asinine corporatocracy. At this time, Charter has 60 days to provide the state with a plan to hand over their business to another provider.
Below is a chronological set of links regarding the dirty doings of Time Warner Cable and subsequently Spectrum / Charter. Some of them route back to articles in this blog. Do not be alarmed. They provide further links to relevant timely articles:
2010 - 2018:
2012:
2013:
2014:
2015:
2016:
2017:
2018:
As this last article points out, Speculum could attempt to appeal and turn this into a dragged out court battle, and of course lose. We shall see.
Meanwhile...
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Wednesday, July 25, 2018
Destroyers of Our Future: Part 1 - Protecting The Last Straw
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Introduction:
Destroyers of Our Future
Q: What is mankind's worst enemy?
A: Deceptive 'Truth'.
As a 13 year old, I dreamed the phrase was 'xunipus stargo', which I interpreted when I woke up as 'deceptive truth'. I'm an elaborate dreamer. What that's worth, I don't know. But within my personal life, I've had dreams that have been spot on regarding what I want to understand about myself and this world we live in on miracle planet Earth, our only home.
Part I: Protecting The Last Straw
Knowing that we humans never know everything about anything, what is the point of having an opinion? I realized, immediately after understanding deceptive 'truth', that opinion is critical. We're going to be wrong in some way at all times. But thrashing through all the wrong and rubbish is how we clear our way to what is closer to the 'truths' we seek to find. If we don't dare our opinions, it means we don't care. No caring is the point of this first part of my series here on the subject of 'Destroyers of our Future'. The last straw in the process of our own contribution to destroying our future is: Caring.
I'm starting at the end, in the first part of this essay series.
Q: When will life on Earth end?
A: When we humans don't care any more.
That's when we, as a mass of species Homo sapiens sapiens, give up our 'sapiens' or wisdom and let those we allow to be in power to Push The Button, as we commonly call it.
To let loose one nuclear weapon on an enemy is to let loose all nuclear weapons on the entire earth. Escalation isn't a probability. Escalation to finality is ineluctable. (Word of the day!) It's what happens. It's human behavior. It's negative reinforcement enacted as the result of a mindless, unthinking state that is human desperation.
How would we humans allow the end to happen? Because we don't care. We lost our morale.
Because we are fundamentally a social species, we act in groups. When all the news is bad, when we have lost any reason to respect ourselves as individuals and as a species on Earth, we as a mass of Homo sapiens sapiens lose our wisdom by losing our morale as a group.
How do we protect our morale? How do we provide ourselves with morale? How do we separate ourselves from group thinking, tribalism, sheeple behavior, following the leader, doing the lemming leap?
We think as individuals. We act as individuals. We do positive reinforcement because we stay out of a state of desperation. We support ourselves as individuals and we turn our supportive behavior outward toward the others within our local scope, our closes social group. We share. We give without worrying about reward from others. We reward ourselves. We do good to and for ourselves and extend ourselves by doing good to and for others.
We designate for ourselves, individually, what are the factors that lead us to feel desperation and act out of desperation? We negate desperation with what we value within ourselves and others. We speak positive to all, we are honest about what we find to be positive. We offer to assist others in finding, obtaining and keeping what they individually find to be positive.
The air raid sirens go off and maybe that means the actual end is here. But we maintain our morale toward ourselves as individuals. We share our morale with others and help them keep their morale. We have been good, done good, shared good, enabled good, engendered good, expressed good. We are good as spirits, come what may.
It's a path. We smile in the face of adversity. We feel inevitable fear. We stand as our strongest, our best selves amidst all consuming fear. We are good to ourselves and others now and always. We care. Learning how is what we do.
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Thursday, March 13, 2014
Time Warner Cable: More Of
The Same Old Customer Abuse Strategy
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'Screw thy customer' is their mantra.
Time Warner Cable is back at it again!
And again the customers have told TWC to take their abuse and stuff it:
$5 discount to give up unlimited data? Time Warner Cable customers say “no”
30GB data meters not appealing, nearly all customers reject them.
by Jon Brodkin - Mar 13 2014, 2:05pm EDT, Ars Technica
Time Warner Cable has been offering customers $5 monthly discounts in exchange for giving up unlimited data for the last couple of years, but almost no one has taken the company up on its offer.IOW: If at first you don't succeed, screw, screw again.
. . .
"I guess about two years ago we rolled out a 5GB-a-month service. Since then, roughly six months ago, we rolled out a 30GB-a-month service across the entire footprint, and if you buy that service you can save about five bucks a month off the unlimited product," Marcus said.
. . .
The good news, Marcus said, is "we plan to offer unlimited for as far out as we can possibly see. I think that the concept of 'use more pay more, use less pay less,' is an important principle to establish. So notwithstanding the low uptake of usage-based tiers, I think it's a very important component of our overall pricing philosophy."
If the Comcast purchase of worthless Time Warner Cable succeeds, I see NO improvements on the horizon. Instead, everyone expects THROTTLING of bandwidth, without customer consent, to be the next big step in CUSTOMER ABUSE.
And #MyStupidGovernment won't do a thing to stop it. (In case you didn't know, Mr. Obama appointed at lobbyist for the media industry to head the FCC. It's all out war against We The People).
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Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Hope For Lousy Time Warner Cable?
Please buy them Charter Communications,
and fix their wagon good!
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Here's one of the relevant articles:
Charter calls TW Cable a 'turnaround project'
… Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC) is rapidly losing customers for key services such as video, voice and even Internet.
"This negative momentum isn't simply the result of their operating plan over the last year. It is the failed plan over the past half-decade," said Charter's chief operating officer, John Bickham, in a conference call with analysts.Not just the past half-decade! I'd estimate the last FULL decade.
Charter Communications has plans to actually make TWC all digital, as opposed to the vaporware TWC promise to go all digital in 2013. CC also plans on providing wider Internet bandwidth. Hopefully, my friends in Denmark won't taunt me any more over their incredibly better bandwidth relative to the the crap TWC offers for exorbitant prices.
In this case I'd estimate that CHANGE is indeed GOOD, as in For The Better. It couldn't get much worse than the lousy service TWC foists on us now. What an awful, customer-abusing, self-destructive company.
[Oh and PSSST, Charter Communications! A hint: Fire ALL of TWC's management. You'll be glad you did. I know I will!]
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Thursday, August 08, 2013
Ars Technica Falls On Its Arse:
Attack Of The Vehemently Ignorant Trolls
And Authors
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This is a documentation of a troll-job by people insistent upon making certain that other people are as ignorant of science as they are. As such, I think it's rather boring. But I'm posting it specifically because this is nothing new on at Ars Technica or the Internet as a whole. Ignorance is the new status quo. Bad science is tolerated as acceptable science. People like myself who seek to help those interested in learning factual information are attacked by the outright stupid, then called 'trolls' for defending fact. IASSOTS. Therefore:
With three science degrees and decades of expertise in imaging, I've reached my wit's end with decaying Ars Technica. Here is the article and forum discussion that has me fed up with Ars Technica:
X-Ray pulsars boil “nuclear pasta” to keep spinning
Now we know why neutron stars just won't slow down.
The author, Chris Lee, mistakenly used the term 'light' to refer to microwave electromagnetic radiation in paragraph 4 (emphasis mine):
Most pulsars emit light in the microwave region, and they spin extremely fast, with periods ranging from a few seconds down to 100 ms.One correct way to make this statement would be: "Most pulsars emit EM radiation in the microwave region...."
It's a simple replacement of a wrong and poorly chosen word, 'light', with correct terminology, such as "EM radiation" which refers to electromagnetic radiation. Therefore, I posted the following in the comment forum:
Terminology Correction:Enough said.
Chris Lee said: "Most pulsars emit light in the microwave region."
The term 'light' makes no sense here. The correct term is 'electromagnetic radiation'. 'Light' refers only to that portion of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum that is visible to the human eye. Obviously, microwave radiation is invisible to our eye.
Here is an article about the distinction between 'light' and the rest of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
I certainly am human and therefore blunder on a regular basis. I am always grateful to those willing to teach me what I don't understand. I enjoy providing the same, which is the point of my three blogs.
~~~~~~
But then this happened: A barrage of vehemently insistent ignorance from both trolls AND the author himself in reply to my cited correction at the Ars Technica forum:
Bengie25 Ars Tribunus Militum
“One word is much smaller and works when exact terms matter. He could have said photons, which most people make synonymous with "light".”
Chuckstar Ars Praefectus et Subscriptor
LOL... just stop. Astronomers often refer to all wavelengths as light.
Maybe they just haven't read enough wikipedia entries? Google around if you don't believe me. I think you'll be surprised who is the one being ignorant and nonsensical.
Wheels Of Confusion Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Except nobody's done that yet, dipshit. For future reference, if you don't want to be accused of trolling, don't engage in it. The part I highlighted indicates that you may not know this yet.
So it was pointless and ignorant of you to try and "compete" with the author about the usage of light? I suppose you'll likewise think it's useless to argue with the physicists and astronomers who routinely and professionally use the term "light" to mean EM radiation in general rather than the visible wavelengths. Good to know!
Chuckstar Ars Praefectus et Subscriptor
ha ha ha ha
The only one in this conversation that this describes is YOU.
srhode Wise, Aged Ars Veteran et Subscriptor
Zunipus,
The article you point to on Wikipedia refers to Infrared as Infrared light, even though it is not visible to the human eye. Even that article can't seem to agree on what is "light" and what is EM radiation. In fact, I don't see anything in that article that specifically says that the word "light" is only intended to be used in reference to visible light and shouldn't be used for any other wavelength of the EM spectrum.
Shawn
Chris Lee [initially using the nick laserboy] Associate writer [AUTHOR of the source article being discussed]
I think its time we all get a grip. Wikipedia is not the fount of all knowledge, and strict definitions for loose terms like "light" are stupid.
In my professional life, I have worked with light with wavelengths ranging from 13 nm through to ~1 mm. It is, depending on the occasion (and not the wavelength): radiation, light, electromagnetic radiation, photons, light fields, light, X-Rays, soft X-Rays, infrared radiation, heat, and probably some more that don't spring to mind immediately.
The term is correct, and, in this case, it is even precise.
Peter Bright Microsoft Editor [Ars Staff]
If light is always visible, why does the term "visible light" exist?
I replied to the first couple troll attack posts with added information and opinion, but then decided to stay out of the attack fray. However, I reported all the troll comments to the Ars Technica's staff, including the insistently wrong post by the author, Chris Lee. I can't help but think either Chris Lee is not a 'physicist' at all, or that he is determined to make his readers ignorant of correct science terminology. I suggested to the Ars Staff that he correct the error he made in his article.
I also replied to Chris Lee directly:
I've stated to Ars Technica that I was not going to reply to the troll attack. But I have to point out: Shame on you Chris Lee. I have pointed out correct terminology. You have, instead of correcting your error, vehemently insisted upon wrong terminology. Obviously that is a disservice to everyone reading your article. Please correct your error. That is the simple solution. A troll war is never any solution. It's only pointless contention, as I have already pointed out above.
I add here that I hope Chris Lee will be removed from the Ars Technica associate writing staff.
~~~~~~~
A: Because I can no longer accept being called a troll myself when all I am doing is attempting to help others at Ars Technica.
Simply by replying to someone who insists that x = y, proving them wrong with provided citations, I have been reported as a "troll" on at least three occasions. Huh?! Cognitive dissonance is the result, never a good time.
I've watched this happen MANY times to other commentators at Ars Technica. Recently, I got so fed up with the vehement misinformation that I gave up bothering with the site for a couple weeks. Then today I read an article with a wrong term, provided a cited correction, and got ATTACKED!
This is Ars Technica in decay.
Oh yes it is! Do some self-evaluation Ars Technica. I'm not pointing out anything new or unique. Heal thyself Ars Technica. I don't pretend to know the depths of your decay or how to solve it. That's your job. I'm only pointing out that you have the problem.
Obviously, if the members of the Ars Technica forum insist upon being ignorant, I'm not going to be bothering to lend them my hand to pull themselves out of their mire of self-imposed stupidity. Trolls deserve the consequences of their ignorance. Enjoy your karma.
What's a shame is that MOST people at Ars Technica forums are NOT trolling assholes. Most people there WANT to learn. But because of the deliberate evil of the few, the majority must suffer.
This is the classic outcome of a sociopath infestation within any human system.
And I have no interest in playing with sociopaths.
BTW: If this reminds you of why my US government is a failure, good on you. Who in their sane mind would want to work with sociopathic politicians?
~~~~~~~
UPDATE!
Check this out, received from Ars Technica via email August 8, 2013 6:07:48 PM EDT:
You have been banned from this board until Thu Aug 15, 2013 5:34 pm.Exactly as I stated:
Please contact the Board Administrator for more information.
Reason given for ban: 3rd OW = 1-week temp ban
A ban has been issued on your username.
Ars Technica In Decay
Under the circumstances, being banned from Ars Technica's forums is a Badge Of Honor.
Ars Technica: It's your reputation on the line. I've just established mine: A crusader for factual science and science terminology, no matter how much intimidation your bad writers and forum trolls can throw at me. I like that. (^_^)
~~~~~~~
And just to be extra boring and tedious, here is my direct reply to Ars Technica regarding their banning. I might as well make everything public! I like it that way:
Ars Technica:
Regarding http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?[blahblah banning announcement URL]
My reply:
Ars Technica Falls On Its Arse: Attack Of The Vehemently Ignorant Trolls And Authors- By Derek Currie, 2013-08-08
http://zunipus.blogspot.com/2013/08/ars-technica-falls-on-its-arse-attack.html
My terminology correction stands, as any 11th grade physics student can verify, but Chris Lee cannot.
I suggest you fire Chris Lee from your writing staff for vehemently defending his WRONG information. All he had to do was look it up and correct his error. Instead, all THIS had to happen.
This has is easily the most despicable tirade of nonsense I have ever experienced from a 'professional' website. But colleagues have pointed out to me today that none of this is new at your website. It's apparently been going on for 15 years. I will continue to monitor Ars Technica's forums because the trolls there ARE a detriment to your reader's learning and knowledge. I will also continue to monitor your article authors for authenticity and factual information. I will be encouraging other trained scientists to do the same.
Consider this my small cattle prod to encourage Ars Technica to wake up, teach and write about real science, while behaving with real professionalism. Are you up to it? I cynically doubt it. I now look on you as a gang of deceitful, lazy little children, incapable of comprehending actual science. Prove me wrong.
Disgusted.
~~~~~~~
I look forward to further prodding of Ars Technica into professionalism.
I look forward to further prodding of Ars Technica into professionalism.
Now get back to doing something fun and interesting. You must be hyped on coffee if you've managed to read through this dull horror of a story.
:-Derek
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Wednesday, August 07, 2013
The Age of Trivia
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Much as I feel incapable of solving, let alone understanding my specie's self-destructive imperative, apparently I have some useful concepts as we watch the history of this phenomenon unfold.
'The Age of Trivia' is a concept for our current transition into what I call 'The Last Dark Age'. My country, the USA, has already clearly demonstrated exactly why it will become entirely irrelevant in the world. We are now in desperation mode and that isn't going to stop, certainly from what little insight I have into the future. Desperation is actually being used as a tool by our increasingly sociopathic culture. Letting go of desperation as a weapon is outside of any sociopathic culture's comprehension.
With desperation a constant source of loud, screaming noise in the background, the world human culture has already begun to dig its head deep into the dirt to shut it out. To pass the time, to conjure some sort of sense of personal usefulness in the world, to entertain and distract ourselves, we are now specializing in trivial pursuits. It's a classic case of fiddling while our modern 'Rome' burns and shouts at us to make it stop. We have real problems to solve, real human survival, Earth survival at stake. But instead we're off in the ozone playing with trivial garbage. It's classic desperation behavior.
For me, this 'Age of Trivia' began with claims by both scientists and cult loonies to have cloned a human. There is no more dire trivial pursuit amidst my specie's determination to destroy itself and its only home planet, than humans bothering to clone themselves. This trivia began in 2001. Here is a detailed article about the subject from that year:
Baby, It's You! And You, And You...
By Nancy Gibbs Sunday, Feb. 11, 2001, Time Magazine
Last month a well-known infertility specialist, Panayiotis Zavos of the University of Kentucky, announced that he and Italian researcher Severino Antinori, the man who almost seven years ago helped a 62-year-old woman give birth using donor eggs, were forming a consortium to produce the first human clone. Researchers in South Korea claim they have already created a cloned human embryo, though they destroyed it rather than implanting it in a surrogate mother to develop. . . .
And, as usual, once a dire subject is being discussed in public based upon verified factual information, the loonies come out of the cracks and spew their abstract craziness on the scene, muddying the water. In this case, in 2003 it was a space alien worshiping 'religious' cult called the Raelians who claimed they were the first to birth a human clone. (o_0)It was the entertainment topic of the week, even more diverting than news about the horror of the real thing. Here is one article from 2003 on the subject:Cult 'clones' a baby! Read (and read) all about it
Regarding Media
Los Angeles Times/January 1, 2003
By Tim Rutten
Take, for example, the coverage given last Friday's assertion by the Raelian religious cult that a company founded by its adherents had cloned the first human baby. Consider, for one moment, the objective circumstances: a crackpot cult, whose French founder says he got his marching orders from a space alien, calls a press conference in Miami to announce that a cloned child has been born to an unidentified woman in an unspecified place the day after Christmas. . . .What inspired me to make this blog post was this new bit of what I consider to be classic Age of Trivia news. Mad scientists on the loose creating something more deadly than what nature can devise. Awesomeness. Total trivia in the face of real ongoing crises:
Scientists plan controversial lab-made bird flu
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
Aug 7, 2:54 PM (ET)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press)
Scientists who sparked an outcry by creating easier-to-spread versions of the bird flu for research purposes want to try such experiments again using a worrisome new strain. This time around, the U.S. government is promising extra scrutiny of such high-stakes research up front. . . .Right. My government, that has destroyed the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution via blanket surveillance of US citizens on US soil, wants me to believe it can sanely scrutinize anything. Instead I entirely expect this bit of trivial pursuit to only add to our ongoing crises. Brilliant stuff, this desperation behavior.
For years I've been attempting to get a handle on the subject of desperation behavior. I've found exactly nothing about it as a formal subject of study. Instead, I've found bits and pieces here and there, mainly within the thought realm of psychology. Some time I expect I'll dare to post a summary of what I have found so far. For now, the best source of learning is simply the daily news.
As ever, when I write about this depressing rubbish, I am lead to remind us that the best cure for all these trivial horrors is humor and offensive positive push against the subject. Living has never been about suffering. Living is about growing. So the simple cure for The Age of Trivia and all the other crap inflicted on us by our own species is to laugh and laugh at it while learning how to be our best selves. That's anti-desperation behavior. I like it!
:-Derek
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