RedBeard’s Curious Life

I’ve seen a proliferation of commercials and ads lately for gold-peddling merchants. Some want to buy your unwanted gold jewelry, some want to sell you pure gold coins. They try to pull you in with some simple hook, but the market of precious metals is hardly simple. We are currently experiencing the highest unit price of gold in history – over $1100 per troy ounce – which is good if you bought a bunch of gold 5+ years ago and would prefer to have cash now, but who knows where the price will go from here. This also raises a question as to why the price has skyrocketed recently and why it’s being pushed so hard by the aforementioned merchants.

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The essential foundation of our entire economy is energy. Some other support is provided by material property, time, and intelligence, but those are worthless without energy. In the face of a dwindling energy supply, changing climate, and increasing population, strain on our economy will likely increase.

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I don’t do a ton of driving, as I live quite close to my office and try to avoid rush-hour traffic. Despite this relative lack of exposure, I encounter many incidents that are… less than optimal while driving on the public roads around here. Some straddle the line of legality, some are just annoying habits, and some are shortcomings of the traffic infrastructure. Without further ado:
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Immortality is a concept that crosses the mind of most people from time to time, whether it be in the form of the Highlander, the timeless literature of Shakespeare, the heinous acts of Hitler, or simply spreading their essence via offspring. Indeed, as all life struggles against the universal entropy to preserve a semblance of order, humans take it to the next level by trying to preserve individuality, especially that of notable specimens. While all of the above approaches to immortality are held in similar esteem, modern medicine continues to make effective steps towards the significant extension of individual lifespan. Since this approach is hardly exclusive of the others and can be explored in a scientific manner, I shall present some material on the topic.

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I’d like to announce my candidacy for the 2020 presidential election. You might think it a little premature, but this country needs a serious kick back into gear before it becomes totally derailed, and I see no reason to wait until I’m of legal age to begin spreading the word. Our national self-image is so disjointed from reality that it’s become a comedic target, and this rift is only serving to increase our complacency and widen the gap between our peak potential and our current state of affairs.

My platform? Elementary, dear reader. This country needs an engineer to properly address our political and societal machinery that has become rusted and inefficient. Many areas need to be modified, and nothing is safe from reform. Among the areas that need the most work:
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We’ve had devices called PDAs for a while now, purporting to be “personal digital assistants”, but in reality they’re more like digital address books. A real assistant doesn’t just file your notes and remind you of appointments and force you to do most of the work involved in such tasks; a real assistant does useful work, such as taking notes, fleshing out dictations, compiling information into reports, and arranging appointments around the schedules of all involved. Some argue that with modern organizational software (think MS Office, Outlook/Exchange in particular), the effort of performing assistive tasks is diminished to the level that someone can do the work themselves just as quickly and effectively as telling a human assistant to do it.

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I have a number of things that I’d like to say about energy, but I’m going to split them into multiple blogposts. Today I’ll cover my take on the relationship between energy and life.

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United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: “[The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”

Towards this goal, our Congress has implemented a number of laws and offices with the intention of protecting the production of intellectual property. The primary areas of interest are summarized as follows:

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Attention people who make software, particularly games:
DO NOT RUN AS ADMIN.

If I have a security policy in effect on my machine that prevents your installer from futzing around with system-wide settings, there’s probably a good reason for it. Windows might not have the most robust and user-friendly security system in the world, but the concept of a game failing to install because it can’t write to the system registry or the “program files” folder is pretty pathetic. Granted, by default all Windows users are administrators, but that’s no excuse to make a few simple changes that will vastly increase the usability and decrease the annoyance factor of your product for those who have smarter sysadmins. If you simply have to run as admin, at least run your installer and game through AppVerifier with limited-user testing enabled, and you’ll get a big fat load of warnings and errors about silly little things that will break your program unless you take a few minutes to correct them. But seriously, you can and should write and run all your code as a limited user.

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Another post where I jotted an outline and then didn’t feel like fleshing it out:

*number of computing devices used by a person burgeoning (home, work, e-cafe, phone, library, car, tv, fridge, …)
*management of information becomes exponentially complex across geography and hardware/software boundaries
*hardware failure/loss often results in irreparable damages, and backups are rarely complete and up-to-date

*virtualized data solves these problems…
*information lives on numerous devices with on-demand access for more devices
*universal system failure much less likely

problems…
*memory availability across devices (1TB PC vs 1MB phone)
*network transfer sometimes unreliable or lethargic (cable upstream icky)
*privacy, authentication, information poisoning
*network disconnection

concessions:
*not all data needs to be universally accessible, only “unique” data: personal settings & documents – configurations, bookmarks, photos, spreadsheets, savegames, logs
*needs at least 2*workingset total system storage to mirror everything
*avoids transfer of huge amounts of data, and large documents can be previewed before committing to full transfer
*compression and versioning can trade CPU work for network bandwidth
*device peering can avoid complete network disconnection (cellphone<->notebook while on plane)