Never been one to let the carrier drop

The song most often commented on at Fraud In France shows is Starshine, which is about Voyager I. We finally have a halfway decent take of it, captured at practice #46 and mixed by Bunne Rabb – for the curious, here’s a link: http://pb.sheer.us/bunne/Dec%202013/Star%20shine/SS-46-non-asplodey_mix.mp3

Since I posted a perl one. Note there’s probably some neat way to do this using system libraries that I just don’t know about, but this is what I use

As part of the class (you can have this as a class i.e. Config.cs, or as part of the program:

  static readonly Dictionary argsDict = new Dictionary();

Parser:

 static public void ArgHandler(string[] args)

        {

            foreach (string arg in args)

            {

                Regex quoteRE = new Regex(“\”(.*)\””);

                string[] quoteResults = quoteRE.Split(arg);

                string workarg;

                if (quoteResults.Length > 1)

                {

                    workarg = quoteResults[1];

                }

                else

                {

                    workarg = arg;

                }

                Regex argRE = new Regex(“–(.*)=(.*)”);

                string[] regResults = argRE.Split(workarg);

                if (regResults.Length > 1)

                {

                    Console.WriteLine(string.Format(” — {0} -> {1}”, regResults[1], regResults[2]));

                    argsDict.Add(regResults[1], regResults[2]);

                }

            }

        }

Get a argument:

     static public string GetArg(string arg)

        {

            string result = null;

            argsDict.TryGetValue(arg, out result);

            //if (debug)

            //    Console.WriteLine(“arg ” + arg + ” -> ” + result);

            return result;

        }

At the top of main(), call:

ArgHandler(args);

TL;DR=We should use prisons as a experimental ground to find out what media help broken people heal

I emailed this, and then – while I think it needs rework and expanding on, which I will probably do later – I thought I should paste it into my blog now just to get it out there. It’s a idea that I’ve discussed with various people over the years, that’s slowly grown..

From email:

This actually reminds me of a experiment I want to do. I will never,ever,ever be allowed to do it, but I think it would be truly awesome.

I want to retrofit a bunch of the country’s jails. I want to equip every cell with a very hardened computer console [as in virtually indestructable and also virtually impossible to break into from a hacking point of view]. Then, I want to try a number of different permutations of libraries of videos and books in each jail, and try different amounts of freedom to roam the net / free phone calls / things of that nature. I’d even want to try in some of the jails letting the employees work doing data entry or other remote-control things and potentailly also try having their income partially go to pay back their victims. I’d try anything in the initial seed set – porn, religious texts, movies from the 20s, childrens movies..

The purpose is to see what set of media, what set of communications options, and what set of employment options

a) Reduce recividism the most
b) Result in the happiest population

If we really think about it, what we really want our jails to do is help the people inside become better citizens. Since we don’t execute very many criminals and we don’t keep very many inside forever, we really want to figure out what to do for them that will turn them into people who don’t commit crimes. Ultimately it’s in the best interest of everyone who has to live here for our jails, rather than “punishing” people – often for crimes they committed because of mental illnesses they have – to heal them. And if a particular set of books or movies or whatever encourages that process, let’s give it to ’em free of charge, maybe even find ways beyond that to encourage them to watch & read! I know from my parking meter days that I could make a terminal that would survive anything a inmate could do to it. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it wouldn’t be possible to touch type on it that easily, but it probably wouldn’t cost *that* much either – and utlimately, if one is measuring using value rather than money, it would potentially pay for itself many, many times over. Plus, the value of knowing which, out of the milions of books and movies we have really heal people is almost beyond putting a dollar amount on.

I also talk about commercial prisons and the profit motive encouraging recidivism here and suggest a fix

I also make another suggestion here – that if we must have commercial prisons we only pay them for the prisoners that do not re-offend.

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So, I’m rather unhappy with Sprint at the moment.

A few weeks ago, during a trip to CA, I somehow cracked the display on my 897 LTE. I didn’t do anything unusually abusive to it, I just set it down on a dresser and it spiderwebbed.

I called sprint, who said they could replace the display/digitizer for $150. Since I know the part is about $100, this sounded reasonable, so I took the device to them for repair.

They attempted a repair, and somehow managed to destroy the motherboard. The phone would just reboot cycle endlessly. They also managed to destroy – beyond any repair, not just filesystem damaged but chip totally useless, a 16G SD card with a bunch of useful data on it.

They gave me a refurbished phone in replacement, and I went about my business.

The first thing I discovered about the refurb phone is the camera wouldn’t focus. This suggested to me that it had been exposed to a transient shock of truly large proportions. The second thing I noticed is that every few days, it would hang in a very unusual way. The heartbeat light would continue to pulse green, but the phone would not respond to the power button.. nor, indeed, any other interrupts (i.e. USB, phone calls, etc). Sadly, the phone has no reset button and has a internal battery, so every time it did this, I had to take it to sprint to be power cycled. The first time, I explained to them that A: It was a refurb and likely had experienced a large G-shock at some point and B: they were not equipped to do component-level repairs on phones, as I saw no hot air guns, no magnefiers, no lights, no DSOs, none of the tools one would need to do such things – hence, they could not possibly fix it, so please give me a replacement. They refused, saying they would only replace it if the failure occured in their shop.

Well, after coming in three times to have it power cycled, they finally admitted, yep, we can’t fix it, yep, it’s broken. However, it would take them 1-2 !weeks! to get a replacement.

I asked about buying a identical device. None in stock. They had two floor models, but it’s against sprint policy to sell those. So I bought a vastly less powerful LG to use while they fix my phone. At retail price because I’m not eligable for a discounted device for another two months.

Now, I’ve been a sprint customer for 12.5 years. However, when my contract expires, I will be finding another wireless service provider. I *know* they all suck. But there has to be one that sucks less than this. Their ‘Total equipment protection’ is useless, because they give you refurb phones that have faults with them! I doubt if Sprint has *anywhere* that’s equipped to do repairs on the tiny surface-mount-and-metal-cans assembly of a modern cell-phone, so what they should do whenever a phone shows up with a reported intermittent fault is recycle it, because there’s no way they can fix it. But instead they send it back out the door to some unsuspecting customer who will then have to figure out A: what’s wrong with it and B: whether they can live with that.

P.S. Motorola, shame on you for not putting a reset button on a device powered by a internal battery. Computers crash. It’s a fact. I will admit that prior to sprint destroying my first 897 LTE it had never crashed in a way that I couldn’t get back from, but that’s still no excuse for doing something so boneheaded.
\

In my previous post, I explained a few things about my views surrounding money.. now I’m going to do a stream-of-consciousness on people with a high (>$10 million) net worth.

Please note this is based on my current understanding of the reality model I’m experiencing, which may be flawed.

We have a fixed amount of capitol in the system. We add too it sometimes, but not very much nor very fast, because whenever we add a lot, a bunch of people not in possession of all the facts think it means the capitol is worth less, instead of realizing that it’s because we’re actually generating wealth out of thin air all the time – new ideas, new intellectual property, new ways of getting things done – and new children who will grow up to create and build more wealth. Because we’re becoming more wealthy in real-world things, we need to print more money to match, or things are gonna break.

Because we have a fixed amount of capitol, it’s important to *keep it moving*. If it stops in one computer register (i.e. some billionare’s bank account or a stock in the market), it’s no longer a available resource in the system for facilitating getting things done. People can’t pay wages with money they don’t have. In addition, the value of money sitting in a bank account beyond a person’s conceivable personal needs is *negative*, because the reduced amount of money floating around ‘live’, migrating, making transactions happen will result in less of those transactions occuring and those transactions often generate value. (Think of the inventor who doesn’t have enough money for a lab vs. the one who does). Holding onto money beyond your personal needs *reduces it’s value* by a real-world, food-and-drink-and-housing-and-entertainment definition of value.

TL:DR=People are making decisions based on dollars when they should be considering the real value – concrete and steel and the like – involved.

I’m not really sure how to write this, so I’m just going to do a stream of conciousness writing and hopefully it will capture some of the ideas I have.

First of all, I have concluded that some of what the department of defense does is in essence a entitlement for people who like to hurt people. So, if you are one of those madly anti-entitlement people, you really should be upset about the DoD. There’s no way that we need the level of military technology we have. It’s a gift for the DoD contractors, pure and simple. Nor do we pay the actual people who put their lives on the line very well – so it’s not even a entitlement for the group of people who one could argue deserve it for putting themselves in harm’s way in the interest of implementing the decisions of our government. It’s pork for the people who want to make a bigger bomb, a better rifle, a larger aircraft carrier, even though we already have a vastly larger army than anyone who would conceivably want to pick a fight with us.

Now I must mention in all fairness that the DoD is not all bad. My father worked there for a while, and every project he ever chose to share with me that he had chosen to support was one that generated value for the human race, that made us all richer. But people who make bombs, and guns, are making tools for destroying value.

Beyond that, however, I think that our culture has a very sick idea about money. We think it’s worth something – that it’s more important than people. Money is our tool, but instead of us using it it has come to use us.

Money is not value. Value is what money buys – and what we want. No sane person really wants money – they want value. You can’t eat dollars, and they’d make a lousy house – but dollars buy food and shelter, which you can eat and live in. However, money can’t *accurately* abstract value, for a whole host of reasons:

1) Some types of value are forever and infinite. Once a great book is penned, or a song or movie is laid down on tape, that content is now ours, now and forever. With our current level of technology, distributing and copying it cost fractions of a penny. Using money to try and pay for that content is having a finite resource (dollars) try to chase a infinite one (content). In terms of real value – things like great movies and works of art and automation that works and whatnot – the human race is far, far, far wealthier than it ever has been. In terms of minds and hands to create amazing things, the human race is wealthy indeed. But the amount of money in the world has not kept pace with our wealth, and things in the economic world are coming unglued because of it.

2) Some types of value can be destroyed, but we do not attempt to match that with money. When a war happens, we should really take a bunch of money, and burn it, because we’re destroying the value that it represents. (Although, for some wars – WWII, for example – we also need to mint a bunch more for the scientific discoveries that were made by necessity to cope with the war). In a recent war, we burned one of the oldest libraries on the planet.. that ought to be a huge pile of bills thrown on a bonfire somewhere.

3) Some types of value are multiplicative – that is, they create other value. Automation is a great example. Once discovered, automation is in category #1, but it also enables us to get more resources for less man-hours. This makes us all wealthier, but it can also make that wealth inaccessible to the people who just lost their job to a perl script

We need to make sure we – and especially our children – see money not as value, but as a symbol that represents value – and understand that it can only work properly if it accurately maps to the amount of value our race has. (And probably not even then! ;-)). Deciding not to give health care to people – live minds and hands that create the value money is based on – because of our debt – is in essence increasing our debt. We’re destroying real value by letting those people suffer and die, and we ought to be destroying money to match the loss of value that results.

Whenever a hardworking immigrant walks “illegally” over our borders, our nation becomes wealthier by the value that person can create, be it fixin’ cars or pickin’ strawberries.. and we ought to be printing money to match. Whenever someone leaves, we ought to be burning money to match the loss of their creative power and energy.

What’s most important is that the people making decisions.. the presidents, and kings, and governers, and senators.. understand that money isn’t value, but a symbol that abstracts it. Whenever we make a decision that reduces the amount of value in the world in order to increase the amount of money in it, we are demonstrating stupidity on a colossal scale, and the tool is using us instead of us using the tool.

What scares me is that NO WHERE in the recent government budget discussions did I hear anyone talk about this! And I see many people – mostly conservatives – who seem to be under the delusion that the money *is* the value, and use this argument to justify treating their neighbors and friends horribly for the sake of dollars. This to me is the ultimate in fiscal irresponsibility – letting the tool use you, instead of you using the tool.

Similarly, I see liberals who think that enough money can somehow will a resource that’s scarce into existence, without having to come up with some way to get it. While I talk about giving everyone everything, I do in fact have concrete plans (more on this later) on how we would do that. But I have heard liberals talk about shutting down all oil pipelines – right now – without considering how we would then get food given that our transit network runs on oil.

For some of my evolving thoughts beyond this, read http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?cat=13

For more about this, read http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2346

NOTE: If you got here via http://valuenotmoney.sheer.us, please note that is a series of essays – please follow the link at http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2346 for the next one.

Happy birthday, 8088!

I use this a lot when writing a simple perl script that I want to take args like –flag and –database=this and –comment=”This is a comment with spaces”

while($arg = shift) { 
        if(($s1,$s2) = $arg =~ /–(.*)=(.*)/) {

                $l1 = lc $s1;

                $s2 = $a if(($a) = $s2 =~ /^\”(.*)\”$/);

                $arg{$l1} = $s2;

        } elsif(($s1) = $arg =~ /–(.*)/) {

                $l1 = lc $s1;

                $arg{$l1} = 1;

        }

}

Stick it in the top of the script, and you can then just use

if($arg{‘flag’}) {

}

$comment = $arg{‘comment’};

and so on and so forth.

So, I recently found a fun bug in Windows 2012.

If you are attempting to add features like HTTP Activation, Application Server w/ IIS support, or other web-related features and roles to 2012 and you have shared hosting configuration enabled in IIS, they will fail with the extremely cryptic error code 0x800F0922. What you need to do is DISABLE shared configuration, install your features or roles, and then re-enable shared configuration. The WPI will tell you if you try to install something while shared config is enabled that you can’t do that, but the Add Features / Add Roles bits won’t.