2016 — 3 November: Thursday
Another nice thing about lighter mornings?1 Listening to early-to-work neighbours scraping windscreens while thinking to myself "Glad that's not me!" thoughts.
Today somehow marks the start of my eleventh year as a pensioner-of-leisure. That, at least, is what the "day number" (3,653) suggests. And I have a lunch date treat, though it will probably have to be preceded by some foodie supplies shopping if I want any fresh stuff this weekend.
I see...
... Glyn Moody hasn't lost his idealism:
Manufacturers might also be required to place the keys used for signing snaps in escrow in order to deal with situations where they go out of business. In that case, third parties could be authorised by the authorities to issue updates to critical vulnerabilities and prevent
abandoned IoT devices turning into a massive botnet — and de-fanging those that have already been subverted.
These aren't unreasonable requirements — they are the digital equivalent of requiring that a device passes basic electrical safety tests before it can be sold to the public.
"Plangent"?
Now that's not a word I see every day!
Far from being Pollyannaish and anything but plangent, psychoanalysis communed with an age of crisis. Instead of believing that pathologies could be described or drugged away, Freudians wanted us to work through them. There was no going back to earlier beliefs that humans could regard themselves as rational animals.
Almost enough...
... to deter me from breakfast:
It now seems to me that fundamental aspects of our experiences of conscious selfhood might depend on control-oriented predictive perception of our messy physiology, of our animal blood and guts. We are conscious selves because we too are beast machines — self-sustaining flesh-bags that care about their own persistence.
Francis Bacon, anyone?
There's an interesting...
... set of security-related opinions expressed here. Only faintly depressing, too. (Link.)
I derived...
... sufficient entertainment from this morning's (post-shopping expotition) Wikipedia-scouring down rabbit-holes of info relating to axions that I had no objection to lobbing another fiver into their coffers. I blame El Reg and one of yesterday's walk'n'chat topics.
Back in mid-October...
... I was "Whingeing. Contemptuous. Unpatriotic." And plotting to subvert the will of the British people. So roared the nasty bucket of bile who edits the "Daily Mail". Mind you, I'm in jolly good company, and share these characteristics with 48% of my fellow-subjects. That's quite a club. I wonder what pearls of wisdom will drip from his honeyed pages tomorrow in light of today's entirely sensible and rational High Court ruling?
It's a bit ironic to demand our UK Parliament must be sovereign and then pretend that the PM can trigger our exit from the EU without Parliament having any say in this fatuous decision, surely? What are these people smoking, I wonder?