2015 — 29 March: Sunday
I've chosen to ignore the well-meaning advice of a chum to put my clocks back this morning. Even though the dashboard clock in my Yaris can fool better men than me, he can't :-)
Besides, my morning tea...
... goes down just as nicely at 07:10 or so on 'Summer' Time. Not that you'd know, on the miserable evidence of the grey drizzle out there, that we were now basking (as it were) in that Season. [Pause] Editing yesterday's jotting (to point to this one) I re-read the fatuous quote I lifted from the guvmint's "PensionWise" advice website. One of my OCD-related bits of financial tidying-up had me totting up the 61 invoices mother received while she was so enjoying her last four-plus years of "life" in her care-home.
I very much doubt...
... she sat down as a fresh-faced 58-year-old widow1 in 1975 (in her now massively too big house in Penn whose mortgage she could not begin to afford) and thought to herself "You know what? Since I'm going to live another 40 years I'd better take great care to set aside £266,375.43 for my care-home fees!" All the promises I've heard from politicians of "capping" expenditure on care for the elderly at £72,000 (so that no-one has to sell their home to go into care!) ring very hollow since the great bulk of the cost of that care comes, not from the nursing that people imagine, but just from the simple "room and board" side of things.
The Primary Care Trust side of the NHS eventually started kicking in just over £110 per week, by the way, towards the "care" component of her bills. I can still hear Dad saying "Ev'ry little helps, son."
Had the sweet old thing not been a "saver" by inclination, John and I would have been on this particular hook. So, very well done, mother! If I ever get Probate sorted I should be able to raise a small glass of something mildly alcoholic to your memory. And I will do so happily. Hic.
The recently-departed...
... was a great disparager of technology, all computers (and my job) in particular, and most manifestations of modern UK society, latterly tending to see no point in any of it. (A stance sometimes hard to argue2 against, I admit.) What, I wonder, would she have made of this?
...we find that traditional offences such as tax and welfare fraud cost the typical citizen in the low hundreds of pounds/Euros/dollars a year; transitional frauds cost a few pounds/Euros/dollars; while the new computer crimes cost in the tens of pence/cents. However, the indirect costs and defence costs are much higher for transitional and new crimes. For the former they may be roughly comparable to what the criminals earn, while for the latter they may be an order of magnitude more. As a striking example, the botnet behind a third of the spam sent in 2010 earned its owners around US$2.7m, while worldwide expenditures on spam prevention probably exceeded a billion dollars. We are extremely inefficient at fighting cybercrime;
The report achieves the neat trick of being simultaneously fascinating and depressing. Oh, good grief. The 9 o'clock news reader "Dominic" on BBC Radio 3 has just managed both "nucular" and "electorial" in the same bulletin. Yikes!
How's this...
... for an idea? Active SETI:
Even assuming that active SETI provokes a reply, it won't be breezy conversation. Simple back-and-forth exchanges would take decades. This suggests
that we should abandon the "greeting card" format of previous signaling schemes, and offer the aliens Big Data.
For example, we could transmit the contents of the Internet. Such a large corpus — with its text, pictures, videos and sounds — would
allow clever extraterrestrials to decipher much about our society, and even formulate questions that could be answered with the material in hand.
That should certainly deter any but the most foolhardy of aliens. "Here be dragons."
I may not know what time it is, but the tum says it's time for lunch. Always listen to the tum.
Enlightenment?
I last looked at "Elive" eight years ago. Its installer seems to have settled down :-)
Some opinions here. The scope for me getting into mischief is (obviously) still pretty unlimited, but it looks gorgeous.
Point Break?
Reading around, it seems pretty clear that Bodhi is likely to be more promising for one of my demonstrable inexperience.
The inner man is satiated, evening-meal-wise, but I don't think I'll be booting my Bodhi USB ISO image-on-a-stick until I'm just a little more confident of digging past the NOMODESET stumbling block that remains a distinct possibility. Cautious Cuthbert, that's me. Besides, you don't get nowhere if you're too 'asty.
I've noticed that an email reply I've just sent off to my pal Val in Sweden is going over in "Western (Windows 1252)" character set. I'd thought everything on this new Linux incarnation of BlackBeast was entirely in "UTF-8". After all, it's never been besmirched by the Hand of Gates. Probably just as well I made no attempt to put accents on two of my words.