Blog – Page 87 – Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord

Grendel’s mother

This indeed a repost. As matters in global politics made this material utmost relevant again, a couple of weeks ago. Has the news since addressed the below already, or will we learn from history that we don’t learn from history ..?

When the short summary doesn’t do justice to the core of the problem… Where the core is both a misreading of the depth and a misreading of its intentions.
As this here few little paragraphs have.
There’s no light way of putting this: Go read the … thing in its entirety and then, do understand it in all of its cultural superiority to today’s news accounts.

Yes, for the simplest of minds it may read like just a story. Hero, this, that, done. But to the slightest of more careful reader, it is overwhelmingly clear: The book contains so much profundity on the core of politics, societies, and clashes of war. Then you see that it’s not about slaying Grendel and some afterthought. It is about slaying the symptom, the fed, and only then can you get to fighting the real cause that (literally) both birthed and feeds the symptoms, the Mother of Evil. Pointing, too, at the continuity through generations of that concept.

Oh and did it mention anything about brothers or (maybe even worse ..?) sisters ..? Opening up all sorts of options for prolongation through the ages of this tension between what one (sic) could regard as Good and another (sic) as Evil? Mother doesn’t see Evil, she sees her pride, her son displaying the most beautiful (s)he can imagine. Yo don’t even know which side you’re on! Etc.

Yes indeed. It is simply not simple. It is The World As We Know It, and Man cannot change much about it…

For the latter, see how Western ‘powers’ led by the one, try to meekly and halfheartedly subdue Grendel in the Middle East; just enough to safeguard their own interests. Where they don’t see the full depth of mother’s lair, nor her issues. For those less ‘sues’, read this and see the eternity of the problem.

For now, this:

[A museum. Hence, still very relevant; Edinburg.[Earth isn’t flat, you know…]] ]]]] ]

Hard coating emaille

If you’re well-seasoned, you may have turned a bit sour by all the silver bullet news even when that was targeted at point problems/solutions. And, you may even be old enough to recall Why Johnny Can’t.
Seems there’s a new version of the latter, with a similar conclusion. Too bad for all of us.

Oh well…:
DSCN0414
[Also ‘old’, also of a ‘no photo allowed inside’ site. Guess which]

Repeat mode: The definitive Top 2000 of 2015

Just to be sure you’re not led off the Right(eous) path by all those DJs out there playing songs from or candidate for some “Top 2000”, herewith a repost of the real deal.

Which of course isn’t; it’s the Top 2266 for one thing and Definitive is slightly understating it.
And yes, it is downloadable in plain Excel, for your own tinker and play, in this file; checked and clean (no subversive content).
Next, a few little notes (repeated from last year):

“That’s odd! The usual numbers 1 to 50 aren’t where they’re ‘supposed’ to be by common standards!” Correct. Because I‘m ‘Rekt. The list is mine; why put the Mehhh songs high up there? They’re in there somewhere, but its my list, my preferences..! yes I do like some almost-forgotten songs better, sometimes much, much better, than the expired old hands.
Especially.. see the notes, when the clip (much) enhances the song(s). Wouldn’t that mean the song in itself isn’t fully complete ..? No, it means in (since) the age of video, songs with clips (‘integrated’) can much surpass mere songs by themselves, for a cubed sensory experience.
There’s more than 2000 yes. Because, already after the first 500 or so, determining the relative rankings becomes awkward. Hence, the cut-off would be random …! (why not 2048, that would make more sense in this digital (i.e., binary) age).
If you would still have some (preferably wacky) songs you miss, please do comment them to me. I’ll see whether I’d want to include them still, or not. Hey, it’s my list so I decide, geddid?
The actual end result order is far from definitive (sic). It depends heavily on one’s momentary temper and the memories that spring to mind like Proustian madeleines. And on one’s ability to hear quality. Such is life.
When dabbling with the Excel file yourself, feel free to play around with the ranking mechanism. What worked for me, was to first split the songs into bins of about 250 size (designate some song to be in the first bin that will end up being ranks 1-250, another song to bin 5, which is around the 1000-1250 mark, etc.), then sizing down bin 1 etc. to 8 smaller bins. Then, numbers 1-50 get a personal treatment one by one to their end rank, the rest gets (got) a random allocation within their bracket. After this, sort and re-apply number 1-whatever. Through this, actual intermediate bin sizes aren’t too important.

Then, as a long, very long list. With a Moar tag otherwise it would be ridiculous… [i.e., for the complete list in the post, follow the link:]

Continue reading “Repeat mode: The definitive Top 2000 of 2015”

C’est arrivé près de chez vous; LoRaWAN

Yet another major building block of the Future … in place. [And, not a ref to some City of Light atrocities]
Where’s the Privacy and (OR) Security experts …? For certainly, though almost out of public view, the undercurrents develop fast, into a maelstrom — I’d like it even more in this form — of possibilities; to be abused before being controlled, as has always been the case throughout history.

Oh well, can’t stop Progress, certainly not of the Technology kind… But one can hope we (sic or huh?) the Concerned will be in sufficient numbers to be able to and to be allowed to insert the appropriate controls into the whole shazam.
Like, you know,

[Or is this an Tocqueville’ian opposite ..?]

The Good Bad and Bureaucrats

Musing with the distinction between Bad and Evil (as here), and how Anger of the right kind (good to be bad b/c without/opposing evil intent) would be neither but the diametrical opposite of the former two’s effects in bureaucracy.

Noting that praxis makes the things get mixed up, as in:

[Supreme distort; DC]

The Internot Diploma

In an attempt to pre-empt all 2016 April fool’s jokes by a mile (in time and ridicule value) some Dutch Board on Cyber Security (notice the joke starts there, with ‘cyber’ since #ditchcyber) proposed to ensure all kids would get some ‘Safe Internet use diploma’.
When you know the kids regularly fail for (very, very!) basic math skill tests, can hardly write comprehensible sentences over … [fill in some number comfortably below ten] words let alone know anything about bits and bytes (but do know about birds and bees far ahead of practicing any of that — we hope) or even the most basic things about what programming is, hence are at levels of education about four or five years below their age, you can see the enormity of what’s proposed.

So, to be on such a Board, one shouldn’t know the very first thing about the subject one babbles about or one would be overqualified ..!? What an insult to all the professionals out there that try hardest.

This all stupidity tires me enormously. I’ll stop now. And:

[Continuous renewal — at least that’s something ..!]

Biased news

Demonstrating that … when it comes to InfoSec news … the general press may be biased… Otherwise, why wouldn’t this news have been spread much, much more ..? Since it may look unserious on the surface, but definitely is True.

Just sayin’. And just showin’:

[Similar to Ottawa, but qua size, compensated by the loudest barrels all around; DC]

Schrödinger’s accountant

After all the news about accountancy being a sector where all sorts of changes would have to be imminent or happening in order to save anything of the trade (sic, more than it would be a profession that it isn’t!) as in the main news if you noticed and also in yesterday’s post and before on this here blog, this sentence is generally considered to be too long.
So, whether change would Happen or not, I’d wanted to add just a little thingy:

Pretty sure that Schrödinger based his theory that a cat can be dead and alive at the same time on his own experience working in a cubicle. — the dead author (@thedeadauthor) October 26, 2015

Which triggered me to think how this relates to an (‘any unparticular’) accountant. Would the CPA be a cat, hypothetically capable to change (be alive) but when asked, immediately not ..? Would asking over and over again, just be kicking against …

Similar to, as posted before, a long long time ago in a faraway land:

NFChipknip

Long live innovation! Of the in some respects backward kind.
Yes we did have the chipknip, a stored-value debit card system that for small amounts (e.g., parking in Amsterdam though that hardly counts as ‘small’). And yes, of course it was abolished because nobody wanted it. For one, because the stored value had to be loaded onto the card, at ever (sic) less available separate ATM-like holes in the wall. For a second, because losing the card meant losing the stored value.

For a third, because given this functionality, people much preferred to stick to cash money that was more easy to get, much more widespread usable (think C2C payments…), quite similar if not same in risk, and anonymous obviously vis-a-vis anonymity promised by, hold it, banks, of all the crooks one could imagine. If you don’t see the latter, consider whom Jesus threw out of the temple as prime example of choice of all that was rotten in society back then already, and banks have ‘developed’ ever since.
This to the chagrin of banks that, as usual, packed their most devious of actions in the thinnest of transparent films of customer-servicing arguments and licked their, expensive is an understatement, wounds.

But now we have the triumphant return of the idea in the form of NFC payments off one’s debit card. Which comes with one improvement (not having to preload) but with all the other risks aggrevated:
The ‘preload’ is, relatively, limitless or to one’s credit (sic) limit. Compared to the user-controllable stored value of yesterday.
Skimming doesn’t even require the card to be physically put into a physical reader anymore. The still physical NFC reader devices are just as susceptible to plants of skimming devices as before. Maybe the customer can check the debitable amount but the displayed can be spoofed easily, obviously [or you are foolishly considering yourself competent when not seeing that risk]. But passers-by can skip just as easily (and ‘approve’ without any your notice).

Yes, even with small amounts payments, every now and then one will be required to enter one’s PIN as verification of holdership. But that hinders, and was a measure previously implementable easily so why not then already? And for larger amounts the PIN is required always, turning the actions into a simple debit card payment as we (in the developed world so maybe excluding North America) have grown accustomed to for decades already, but now need not enter the card into the chip reading slot anymore. Wow, the improvement! And all this while maintaining the latter debit card systems.

So, we have to trade security for convenience. While banks trade simplicity for … complexity. And savings, nowhere near. How to prevent some to consider banks to be full of i… ..?

Anyway…:

[The back side of subsequent developments may be pretty or not; Dunedin]

Oh, of course: DACcountantcy

Was reminded by this seer peer (no typos) in a casual remark that DAOs (DACs) may change quite a bit about the world as we know it. “DAOs are a game changing invention enabling a new model for human collaboration. #blockchain #C4ACC” (© him) — but apart from human collaboration (note the pejorative weight of the early ’40s this stil carries with it even today, in continental Europe), also the value of Trust in singular persons may shift.
DAOs then being of course, of course, the element I forgot to mention in my roboccountant post.

So, with this one linked in, now all the elements of that post make sense. In which the ensemble may have surpassed me. Or:

[Materially a circle, to any human accountant and dress codes displayed, are of the apparent relaxed Big4 dc’s of today; DC]