The End of the Internet

Saturday 0205hrs

Some French sounding people (Canadians I think) talk about the end of the internet.
They are not blowing hot air here and if enough lethargic devils don’t get off their arses and out of their chairs and actually actively DO something, the hard reality of corporate control over what is quite probably the 8th wonder of the world will come to pass.

http://ipower.ning.com/netneutrality2

The mentality of people who say “Ahh it’ll never happen” is the same one shared by the people who sat back and watched Kristellnacht.

In the words of the great Immortal Technique (From Poverty of Philosophy),

You cannot change the past but you can make the future, and anyone who tells you different is a Fucking lethargic devil.

Amen that man.

The 4th Realm

Thursday 1350hrs

I bring you possibly the sanest member of the UK parliament. So sane, he resigned.

David Davis Resignation Speech

Listen to his speech, it’s only a couple of minutes. You’ll most likely end up wishing, like I did, that everyone else except David Davis had resigned. Why is it that the people capable of forseeing the facist Orwellian mess that this nation is decending into are compelled to make their point by resigning, leaving the bloody minded idiots to man the ship whilst they condemn themselves to martyrdom and positions of impotence? I only hope the chap gets re-elected in the by-election and comes back to the house to do some good.

Knowing the average, constantly terrified and ever-suspicious-of-non-white-Britons Sun readership, though, I don’t much fancy his chances.

When the sky is bright and the weather is warm, not necessarily dry but warm, I walk around barefoot. Not just the house, but the garden and the town too. I go for groceries, plod round sainsburys, wander to the butchers and so forth with my pinkies out proud. Admittedly this all started because there was a period where I had no workably comfortable shoes, but thankfully someone with some publishing power has added creedence to my cause.

Check out this article on why I am right and why you are wrong about footwear: Shoes are Bad For You.

More after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

I draw your attention to this article on Plans to Allow Corporate Theft of Personal Works. I’m sure the bill has another name but this one will do just fine for me.

Please read the article, but for those with short attention spans or tight time constraints I’ll sum it up. Essentially it plans to make any work not registered for copyright “orphan”, whereby its copyright can be collected by someone else, or simply used without permission or financial compensation. How do you register something for copyright, I hear you cry? Well, you do so through a new, private and untested agency which, you will no doubt be completely shocked and surprised to discovered, has financial strings attaching it directly to those pushing this bill through. Conspiracy? Nooooo, of course not. Just business and, as with 99.9% of all big business, designed only with profit in mind.

Anyone out there from the US reading this, please shake down your local congressman. This is something that we do NOT want to see used as a role model in the rest of the civilised world. Political apathy is allowing those with the bankrolls to tighten their grip on the politic and that surely has to give out soon. One should have to choose to release a work into the public domain and be protected by default. Any other system is just completely insane. It gets even better in that anyone at all could register your work and, unless you respond to contest it within a defined period of time, wham, now it’s theirs.

It is so ridiculous at first I thought it was a joke. Honestly, if the government here try to pull this kind of stunt I’m moving to Canada.

Flow3 – PHP Framework

Saturday 0103hrs

If you’re interested in web development, like myself, and whether or not you’re involved with PHP or any projects involving or supported by it, you might find the new application development framework fresh out of the Typo3.org bakery, the Flow3 PHP Application Framework. Typo3 is a CMS that I’m rather fond of and, for the next iteration of CMS goodness the developers in their wisdom thought it’d be nice to have a solid framework to build the application on top of.

So they wrote one.

Rather than regurgitate their website for you, just head along and take a look but, I warn you, Aspect Oriented Programming is not a topic you want to take headlong if your last thought before reading this was “I might go to be soon”…

UK Health Ministers are acting beyond their stations this week, calling for powers to mass-medicate the UK population with Fluoride. I can’t help thinking that depriving people of a choice and pumping (more) chemicals into the water supply is a bit, what’s the word… crazy? Yes, I’m well aware that it’s been going on in certain regions of the UK for a long time now, but I’m fortunately living in one of those areas where it doesn’t. If I want fluoride, I’ll go get some. Oddly enough, it’s the same approach I otake with antibiotics. Or chocolate. Or anything else I decide to consume. Furthermore there’s increasing evidence, trotting out of China no less, that is particularly damning when it comes to fluride in water supplies. We’re not talking dodgy tooth enamel and swiss cheese bones here people, no, we’re talking about fluoride causing brain damage. In truth, it’s lowering IQ’s, but the link text is king and I fancied some sensationalism.

The gist of the study is that, in two villages distinguished only by the flouride content in their water supply, children from the high fluoride areas were found to have test-provably lower IQ’s than the children from the low flouride village. Most of the safety studies performed in the past, you see, were performed on rats and, judging from the results of those trials it seems to me that they were only watching to see if the rats dropped dead. They weren’t tasking them with calculus, or even basic addition. Had they done so they’d have long ago realised that it was indeed making the rats more stupid. Or less intelligent (If the glass is half full for you. Of low-flouride water, of course.)

So this study may be flawed, but the fact is that there isn’t any damning evidence to the contrary and, in that condition, it’s alarming that the government is considering a mass medication programme of this nature. Perhaps they haven’t read this report out of China, or perhaps they’ve just taken another fat bung from British Aluminium.

See, Fluoride is what happens when you electrolyse sodium-aluminium-fluoride. Gory details toward the end of this little PR page on aluminium production. So what happens to the waste product?

Fluoride was originally pursued as a rat poison but, faced with having to get rid of huge quantities of the stuff, far more than RentoKill could chew through in a decade, the aluminium industry turned to local legislators and convinced them dumping the stuff into the water supply would be good for childrens teeth. Everyone knows that Britons have bad teeth, so the move was considered genius and approved. Everyone wins. Governments get a kickback from the Aluminium producers, the Aluminium producers get rid of their waste and the children of the UK grow up with shiney teeth and an IQ so low that they are unable to question the system.

Bravo.

The absurdity of all this is compounded by the fact that the only positive reason cited for adding toxins to the water supply is that it helps your teeth by hardening them. Well, excuse me, but isn’t brushing your damn teeth a simpler alternative? If your child is too stupid or too lazy to brush its own teeth then you’re either a bad parent or natural selection is guiding your kid toward a soft food diet.

Image Thieves Update

Saturday 1426hrs

After a brief exchange of emails and original full-resolution JPG’s to prove authenticity, the outstanding case of one of my images being displayed without attribution has been sorted out amicably. As it turns out, the chap (Mr Roux) who used the image came by it on a CD of images bought at a car-boot sale. Turns out to be more a case of innocent possesion of stolen goods than direct bank robbery so an apology to Mr Roux for that one.
As for the stealing bandits authoring the CD’s I can only wonder what other knocked off clobber they’re writing to disc and flogging for 20p a pop at carboot sales. The location in question is “D’Auvergne School La Pouquelaye” in Jersey, so all I need now is a friend over there who feels up for having a couple of polite words. Heavy wooden stick shaped words… :) I doubt it’s piracy on a scale that FACT would have any interest in, though, no matter how grass-roots they attempt to appear with their Don’t Copy That Floppy adverts and the like.

A common problem experienced by 8800 owners in BF2 is that if they have their lighting and shaders set to “high” or “medium”, after a short while they get the dreaded Yellow Texture Bug, where things appear in flat yellow, then it gets worse and worse until it looks like a bad accident at the Birds factory, then the game will crash.

Turns out the same fix that sorts out the OS Page Pool Memory error in TF2 also alleviates the problem with BF2. Looks like the yellow textures might be proxies for when the game can’t pull the required textures out of swap fast enough. Or something…

Anyhow, the fix works as follows (The following was scoured off a TF2 help thread)

First load regedit. Remeber to back up your registry first, I take NO responsibility for any damage you may cause at all. Ever.

Start Menu > Run > regedit

Head down to this branch:
HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management

Then find this key on the right hand side: REG_DWORD “PagedPoolSize”

Double click on “PagedPoolSize”. Hexadecimal is listed first.
Change the “Value Data” to one of these below:
Note: You only need to enter EITHER Hexadecimal or Decimal.

Code:

Megabytes Hexadecimal Decimal
192Mb 0c000000 201326592
256Mb 10000000 268435456
384Mb 18000000 402653184

As I’ve got 4gb of system memory, I set mine to 384mb and left it at that. Apparently it’s not wise to go above 400mb, though I’m unsure of the technical implications.

If this doesn’t work for you, try the 169.04 beta drivers from Nvidia, as I’m running those also. Now to find out if this fixes the Jinx in Bioshock…

Update:
Yes, indeed this also fixed the high-detail-shader issue on Bioshock. Whoo-hoo!