It seems that a load of chickens have been diagnosed as having bird 'flu, and I understand that it has also been discovered in Europe. That's probably where we contracted it, as Europe has lower animal husbandry standards than the UK. So they are going to burn tens of thousands of chickens as a result. One can't help wondering if this is another orchestrated epidemic to try to persuade us to import sub-standard chlorinated chickens from the US. I wonder how they are going to add this to the Covid lock down nonsense. I wonder if they are going to discover mad cow disease as well - Oh wait, we already have that in Scotland with Nicola Sturgeon.  |
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It seems that Boots ( a UK retail pharma chain) is going to offer fast testing for Covid infections. Now I can't see the point of this, as there seem to be a number of results from the tests.
Your test is negative. Now you don't know if that is a false negative, or if you have long term immunity and no recent infections. The other alternative is that you have no immunity, and you are at risk of infection.
Your test is positive. Now this has a variety of possibilities, assuming that you have no serious symptoms ( in which case you wouldn't be walking into a shop for testing).
- It is a false positive, and some other virus has triggered the result.
- You have no idea of the live load of the virus, so you don't really know what to worry about.
- You have a load of dead viral particles, but no active viruses.
- You have antibodies resulting from the activity of your immune system.
- If it is a mucosal test, you don't know if the virus is active in any serious organs in your body.
So it seems to me that if you do test positive, it is an indication that your immune system is working, and you should not do anything to try to reduce it potency. Of course a retail chemist will try to sell you products to suppress symptoms and thus prolong the recovery process.
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As my readers will be aware, my belief is the the number of reported infections doesn't matter - well it does, but only because it gives an indication of the increase in natural immunity to the virus. However, all of the mass media reports are obsessed with dramatising any apparent increase in the number of infections, and they don't consider increases in the number of test, or variations in the testing procedures. The Government is now ramping up the fear and the restrictions with a whole load of new rules and guidelines. It seems that pub landlords will have to record customer details, and ask for proof that there are no contacts between different family units. What is the point of going to the pub if there is no social interaction allowed.I wonder how long it will take them to rule that only one family is allowed to attend debates in the House of Commons? Sainsbury's have had to close the stairs up to their supermarket ( it is above a large car park). This is because people are passing each other on the steps. They now have to use the escalators, and get less exercise as a result. They also have to travel in the exhalation cloud of the person in front of them. There is a report of a 50 stone (700 pounds) man having to be winched out of his house to be taken to hospital. It seems he is addicted to ordering fast food via his phone apps during the lockdown. He can't be working, so we have to suffer because of parasites like him. It seems there are guidelines that suggest that customers can't stay in cafes for more than 90 minutes, so if you want to use the WiFi for longer, then you have to drive to a different cafe. That's a good way to reduce the spread of immunity. We are also being warned that the unhealthy face masks have to be worn over both the nose and the mouth. If this isn't done, there is a chance that you won't re-inhale the virus if your body is getting rid of it. However, I shouldn't worry too much, as most healthy people must have developed natural immunity by now. |
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I was waiting in a supermarket queue yesterday, and I was a couple of positions behind a woman wearing a strong perfume. There were plastic barriers on either side of the line. The perfume was very noticeable, and it made me realise the stupidity of the restrictions being imposed over the banker's pandemic. We know that the virus spreads via aerosol as well as droplets, so there was obviously a cloud following the woman as she moved around the store. If she was infected, then that would include viral particles. and these would be settling on clothing and store produce, as well as being breathed in by staff and shoppers. We were all obeying social mistancing rules as well. Wouldn't it make more sense to leave the area open to allow the airborne infections to disperse, rather than leaving them hanging around. It would also be useful if they added humidifiers to the air conditioning. Covid thrives in dry conditions.
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So Boris Johnson promised to shut down Brexit negotiations if there wasn't a deal by yesterday. I always felt unconfotable about him as Prime Minister. He is a graduate of Eton and Oxford, and comes from a banking family. All of his family are remainers with affiliations to the Bilderberg dynasties. We voted to come of the EU five years ago, and the process was specified in great detail Basically, it ended all EU political and legal control and trading was to be done under WTO rules. The details were intended to panic us, but the British voters were not intimidated, and went for the restoration of independence that had been stolen from us by the Eton/Oxford civil servants. That shocked the elite pirates, and they prompt;y appointed a banking remainer and Oxford graduate to try to reverse the will of the people. This has cost the UK billions of pounds, and lost an enormous quantity of trade, as well as lower our food standards, and bankrupting or exporting thousands of businesses. It seems that Boris was appointed to pretend to implement the bankers' version of Brexit, whilst pretending to obey the will of the people.
It is now time to escape the control of the Eton/Oxford elite across the world, and don't forget that Clinton is one of them - he received a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Their influence is expanded by associations with Harvard, The Dorbonne and Sandhurst amongst other education institutions that are used to groom recruits to the elite dynasties war room. You will never get a free country whilst they control the appointment of politicians, military commanders, judges, and other government officials.
ps. it is no coincidence that Oxford University is the major player in the research into pharmaceuticals and vaccines which are used to hijack human immune systems.
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I thought it was time for asnother project that might help members who are new(ish) to Bitcoin. One of the best ways to learn about Bitcoin, and its associated blockchain is to run a node. However, the blockchain is getting pretty large now, and many members may not want to dedicate a large chunk of their hard drive to storing a ccomplete chain. A pruned node allows you to maintain a fully functional node, but it only requires a fraction of the storage space. Of course you can use part of your system memory for the storage, but there are a few reasons for using an external drive. One is security, you can keep the drive away from your main computer, and if it is stiolen or compromised, then you may not lose your wallet. Another advantage is the ability to move your wallet between computers - maybe you use one machine at work, and another at home. Yet another consideration is the amount of spare space on your computer, and you may want to keep this free for daily tasks.
If there is sufficient interst, I will use a salvaged 320Gb Hitachi drive, which was taken from a scrap PS3 gaming machine. I have purchased a Sabient USB hard drive enclosure for £8, and this is the only additional expenditure for this project. I will use a low spec Celeron Netbook to run the system, and the drive will be connected through a USB3 port. I will start the blockchain from scratch using public WiFi for the synchronisation, so it will probably take a few weeks to get up to speed. I have installed openSUSE Linux on the Netbook, and it recognises the drive, and reports the correct capacity. However it describes it as having an unknown file system, so I will repartition it, and format and test it before I start the core software. I plan to use EXT4 for the file system, and just hasve a single partition. Please comment if you don't believe this is the best option.
Please let me know if you think this is a project worth reporting, and if the associated discussion will be of interest to members of this board
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They have ripped us off by taking our fish, and selling them back to us, as they have stripped our fishing grounds. This resulted in the loss of a lot of jobs for our fishermen. It's time to rebuild the fish stocks for the benefit of the eco system as well as the UK. I think all foreign fishing vessels should be banned for at least 5 years, as they don't respect the sustainability of the marine life.
We voted for a clean break from the EU. Now after 5 years, it time that we got it.
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Coin Telegraph reports that the hackers who stole 120,000 BTC back in 2016 have just moved another $30million of Bitcoin into unknown wallets. This follows a number of other transactions executed earlier this year. Read the full report here - https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitfinex-hackers-move-another-30m-in-stolen-bitcoin-from-2016It would apper that they are managing to realise some of the profits from this hack. This is despite the public records of all Bitcoin transactions. Do you think that they will eventually be able to realise all of the stolen gains? There is a substantial reward for anyone who aids in the recovery of these funds, but nobody seems to be able to trace the perpetrators. |
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There is one obvious failing in the current system, and that is the decaying of unawarded smerits given to sources. There are three reasons that sources award merits, and these are - to encourage members who are beneficial to the forum, to indicate approval of a good post or thread, and to help new members and alts to rank up. When there is a paucity of good posts or good posters, then it is harder to award merits, and this can lead to fewer merits being available in the future. Alternatively, if you are awarding merits for ranking purposes, then it is far easier to find suitable posts, and this can lead to an expansion of the merits available for this section of the forum. Bearing in mind that each source smerit can generate an extra merit in the rewarded community, then this can lead to future distortions in the quality of posting and thread topics.
Does anyone else believe that this is an issue we should be considering?
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I'm slowly putting together a system to run a Bitcoin node on an old HP Netbook. The machine spec is
Intel Celeron N3060 @ 1.60 GHz with 2Gb of Ram - the ram is not expandable, and the chip can't be changed.
The OS is the latest openSUSE Leap with Gnome. WiFi and Bluetooth are available, but no Ethernet
USB 2 and 3 and SD cards are available for extra storage. The internal drive only has about 28Gb available after software installation.
Proposed external drive - 2Tb Samsung EVO 860 in a Sabrient case to allow connection via USB 3
I propose to repartition the external drive and change the file system. At the moment I am considering a single EXT4 partition. The current OS uses BTRFS as its default, but I suspect that the older EXT4 system will place fewer demands on the netbook, and hopefully I can use it for surfing whilst sync'ing the blockchain. Net connection will be via public WiFi, and the system will often have to rely on the Netbook battery for power.
Whilst many may not consider this as an optimum setup, it is useful as part of my experiments as a digital nomad.
My question is - Do you think that a single EXT4 partition is the best choice under the circumstances?
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I gather that Coinbase has had to release trading details for UK residents who have withdrawn over £5,000 in the last year. This seems to be in line with the demands of revenue departments in other countries. One result of this is that P2P transactions are likely to increase in the future, and details of these do not appear in the price movement stats.
How do you think this will affect statistical analysis of price movements, and should we be worried about this? I can see some large players recording losses on the exchanges to drive down the price, and then buying at a lower price in private transactions.
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I've managed to sort out the problems with my latest installation of Ubuntu, and I re-installed it to make life easier. I clicked on the Install Bitcoin Core image in the Ubuntu software library, and it has installed a working version of Core. My concern is that it used a service called Snap to do the installation, and I can't find out much about this service. It seems to have done a bit of customising to make the installation simpler.
I haven't connected any iof ny wallets with coins in them yet. Is it safe to use this installation, or should I go through the apparently more involved process?
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I was going to post this in the beginners section, but it seems to be the mid ranking members that do this. It is against the forum rules to beg for merit, and not all members are as lenient as I am. If I receive these begging PMs then I just put the member on ignore, so he won't get any merit from me, no matter how good his posting may be. I don't get very many, but I have had a couple recently, so I thought it was time to remind members about merit begging. I don't sell merit either, but it must be over a year since I have had a request to sell merit.
If you want me to award you with merit, apart from the standard awards, then persuade me to revive one of my old projects, so that members can earn merit ,and be of benefit to the forum.
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It is mandatory to fill in a form or to register using the NHS app when entering a cafe. There was a fair bit of stress because people were using false names to fill in the forms. Now I've noticed that when using the app correctly, you get a big green tick when you are logged. However, I have seen several people pretend to use the app, and get no reaction from their phone. The supermarket doesn't bother to check that the app was used.
The whole track and trace system in the UK has been a massive waste of money, and it appears to be completely useless, as there aren't any staff to follow up any positive results. I reckon it is just another way to get inside people's phones, and doesn't have anything to do with the virus.
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First off, as far as I know there is no such thing as a USB node. So I had better explain what I mean by it. I have a full node on a 2Tb HDD which connects via a USB port. The drive contains all the blockchain and wallet data associated with the node, but not the program. The program is installed on a variety of notebook computers, and the same version is installed on each of the computers. Operating systems used include Mint, Ubuntu and Kali, and I'm considering using open SuSe. I just swop the drive around, and continue to sync the blockchain. The software seems to handle this without any trouble, as I always shut down the node and "eject" the drive. I'm still about 2 years behind, but this is due to slow WiFi speeds ans shorter periods in the cafes.
So fat I haven't seen any problems, but I wonder if there are any additional precautions I should be taking to ensure trouble free switching between machines.
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I'm constantly seeing posts by new members asking for help because they have been banned for breaking the rules here. Now i shouldn't really have to start a thread like this, but please read the rules before you get chucked out of the forum. You should also know that you shouldn't plagiarise other people's work. That included images as well as text. I know it is tempting to post a startling revelation that you have read, but don't just copy it. Provide a link, and add a comment to explain why the concept is so interesting. This rule is common to most forums on the net.
Moving up through the ranks is like climbing a greasy pole, and there is far more grease at the beginning. Keep your hands clean, and you will find that there is far less grease to make things difficult as you move out of the tub. Read the rules, and you will soon discover the safe hand holds. As you move up the pole, you will be able to see the bright landscape of the crypto world. It is an amazing view, and it is well worth the effort you make to realise it.
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For some instinctive reason I decided to check my entry on BPIP, and I was disappointed to see that I had dropped from DT1 to DT2, and I'm not sure what caused this. I know that TMAN was, deservedly in my opinion, a DT1, and he put me in his list, but as he has left the forum, I guess his opinion no longer counts. I've been pretty active and controversial in the covid threads, and I am saddened by the fact that most people don't seem to bother with the observable facts, and just accept the pharmaceutical narrative, and I wonder if this has affected my trust ranking in some way. I have also been having difficulty in awarding merits, and I don't want to compromise my ( possibly unpopular ) standards by just awarding them to empty my merit chest.
I believe that trust should be related to trading and honesty, but it is difficult to trade in this forum. My only relevant trading is the buying and selling of domain names, and there is not a usable board here, despite the interest of many members in web site construction. My other interest is the purchase of small quantities of Bitcoin for Sterling, and apart from JackG, I have not managed to find any such trades. I have advertised in my signature, and on a couple of the boards here, but with no success.
So my question is - how can members improve their trust ratings if there are no business trading opportunities in the forum?
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Last century, when newspapers were broadsheets, the paper was folded horizontally for display. This is not done with modern tabloid papers. The top part of the front page, ie, the section above the fold, was important to attract potential readers. Obviously the headline covered the main story of the day, and was the equivalent of "click bait". I sometimes use the term to describe the initial screen display that surfer sees when he links to a site. Does anyone else use this term, and do you think it is self-explanatory? If it is misleading, what alternative term could I use?
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The back up power bank for my mobile has just packed up, and I have bought a replacement on Amazon. It has 3 ways ro recharge itself. and one is a solar panel. It has just occurred to me that this could work under the light in a cafe. If this is possible, what would be the best lights to recharge it.
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