Looking for Amie Slate

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If anyone reading this happens to know how to contact Amie Slate, could they please get in touch?

A documentary is being done on Mike Gribble (of Mike & Spike Animation fame) and they are hoping that Amie might have or know where there is archival footage of the Electronic Theatre of Siggraph in 1988.

Thank you.

Notes on Installing Windows 10 and Google Tensorflow (CPU only)

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This is the third time I have installed Windows 10.  These are my notes from the experience.

1. Based on previous disaster, all other disks were unpowered when installing this OS.  The only disk it could get to was the one that it was to be installed on.

2. Based on previous disaster, this disk is connected by SATA because the poor little piece of shit, Windows, cant install on  USB (a marketing decision we are sure).

3. You need a Microsoft account to do this.

4. You sign an agreement which says in so many words that you are stupid for running MS software and if anything goes wrong you should go fuck yourself.

5. It reboots itself without telling you to remove the USB boot disk.

6. You must give it a device PIN.  

7. You do have the option of turning off Windows Cloud, Cortina and weird non-privacy options.

8. It does not let you change the resolution on your screen.

9. When you install Firefox, it complains and tries to make you use its own stupid browser because of course it does.  This is Microsoft.

10. Even though you turned Cortina and MS Cloud off it is still running, because of course it is.

11. When you download the Nvidia driver you have no choice but to load the "GEFORCE Experience" and wait 20 minutes while it downloads. The driver itself is at most a 1 minute download.   Hey dont worry, my time doesnt matter.

12. One of the things I find fascinating is how slow it is.  It is running on 8/16 fairly fast processors and essentially infinite memory, on an SSD drive at SATA 3 speeds and it is still slow.

13. Installing the NVIDIA driver was trivial, but ... here I am waiting for it to reboot.  Will it reboot?  Will it ever leave the SETUP screen?  Oh Oh.  Second reboot and it comes up just fine on the Nvidia card.

14. Must sign in with PIN.  Weird.  No way to turn it off that is obvious.  Whatever they think they are doing with their control panel settings, it isnt helping.  I cant find anything.

15. Now to install VLC for Windows (my preferred video player) and then we get to the good stuff.  Tensorflow and Unity.  OK VLC worked but forgot to turn off metadata download.  Later.

16. Tensorflow ... two versions... CPU only and w/GPU.  It says that beginners should only do CPU.  So I install pip, virtual env, follow instructions for virtual env (one mistake in doc), run virtual env, load tensorflow via pip, run it and it fails!  But wait, it fails because I skipped a step, the "MS Visual Development blahdy blahdy blahdy".

17. So I sign up for visual developer, which means a c/c++ compiler I think, and it also has a python development system and it tries to download 2 GBs.  So I pause it, cut off everything but what I need the core and python, and that is a mere 380 MBs.  Fine.  Installed.

18. Reboot.  Need to reboot twice to get Windows to run. Second time this has happened weird.

19.  But now when I run tensorflow (cpu only) in python, in virtual environment, it works!  Yay!

20. Installed matplotlib.

21. OK we are almost where we were a month ago.

22. Science Marches On!

Buddhist vs Ultra Reform Jewish Response to Trump

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A Buddhist friend of a friend on Facebook says we must not be angry about Trump and his stupid followers but must follow a path of non-engagement.  Or something like that.

My response was:

I am a former wanna-be Buddhist (never really a buddhist, but aspired to be as a youth, read books, you know the usual jewish white boy contrarian shtick...), but now I have returned to my Virginian ultra-reform assimilated Democratic nonJewish Jewish roots, and I call for the Tetragrammatron to smite them with a lightning bolt of patriarchal vigor!

Tensorflow on Hold After Weeks of Wasted Effort

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Time that could have been spent learning machine learning has instead been spent trying to get Tensorflow to work on Centos 7.5.  Its been a neverending nightmare, a labyrinth of conflicting requirements, installation programs, neurotic programs that require specific versions, complications of using a GPU and so forth.  I feel like I am living the Reagan "Star Wars" nightmare of software that is one bridge too far.

Let there be no doubt I made this worse for myself in a variety of ways.  This computer has to serve a lot of purposes, not just one.  Google Tensorflow makes a precompiled version for Ubuntu, which I despise, and makes the source available for other Linux's including Centos (Centos == Redhat for those of you outside that world).

Without doubt, the biggest problem here involves Python and its wacky Pip installer.  Look, I know that if you are immersed in the Python culture that this all works for you kids.  But I am not immerse, I want to use Keras and Tensorflow, Python is just along for the ride.

I had it working for normal CPU work and it was painful but not impossible.  When I went to use it with a GPU, though, it all fell apart and now I can not get back.

The good news is that I do have CUDA working, which is a non trivial accomplishment.  Of course, X is broken.

This nightmare has to end.

The Supreme Court Crushes Freedom

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Any question you may have about whether or not the Supreme Court is just a right-wing tool of oppression should now have been answered.

1. Roberts has said that the Secretary of the Commerce does not have to answer questions about whether he lied to congress (perjured himself) during his nomination process.  

2. Gorsuch is planning to assist the destruction of the census.  The census feeds into everything else this country does when it comes to helping people.  It is far, far more than a census in a simple sense of that word.

3. Roberts has stayed the progress of the children's crusade on global warming.

4. The supreme court has refused to act to end the insanely illegal violation of voting rights in Georgia, N. Dakota and other states.  This means that the upcoming midterm elections will be invalid.

5. And of course, the right wing thug Kavanaugh lied to congress, is a complete shit, and was confirmed for the supreme court.

That is the end of the matter.  Do what you will with this information, this is not new, this is just overt.  There is no valid justice system in this country.

What I Dont Understand

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I do not understand why, after the last two years of hell, the Democrats are not crushing the Republicans at the polls.  I do not understand why they are not expected to win the Senate back. This is causing me to lose my faith in the American people.

Constitutional Failure, What Changes Should We Make?

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Since the constitution has obviously failed and we are living in semi-dictatorship, or moving in that direction, (see note), it seems reasonable to discuss how we can change the constitution to improve it and prevent such things in the future.  But since our elected leaders and political elite have failed to step up to this challenge, I will do it for them.  For those of you who say I am completely unqualified, my response is "too f*cking bad".  I have endured two illegal presidents in my lifetime and now we have a bunch of right wing thugs in the judiciary and while that is obviously OK with you it is not OK with me.

You want a country?  You want a democracy?  You failed to do anything and your opportunity is over. Now lets see what someone else can do.

As Putin has said, paraphrasing here, "America has made too many mistakes" and he is right.  Our first mistake was to allow the Republicans and Fox News to exist.

Note: OK, if it were a true dictatorship, it wouldnt matter what I said, and of course it doesnt matter what I say, now does it? See!  But seriously folks, we have one fucked up country here and I am not seeing our political elite responding in a coherent and holistic way.

Roberts Claims the Supreme Court will be Independent

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Roberts claims that the supreme court will be independent of politics and just do the right thing. See for example see this article in Politico.

But he is, of course, lying.  Remember, it was Roberts who voted to put their right wing thug, George W. Bush into office over the obviously elected Al Gore.  The ostensible reason, if you recall, is that there can not be bad delays in determining this vote.  Oh, really?  No voting rights for this court, I suppose.

But now today when we have overt voting rights suppression in at least Georgia, Florida and N. Dakota, notice that the Supreme Court does nothing.  The legitimacy of the election system is being challenged in a very real and overt fashion, but the Supreme Court does not act.  Why not?

Could it be because this suppression helps the right wing Republican Party exert their control over the majority?  Could it be that the right wing thugs on the Supreme Court are just playing the partisan game and just paying lipservice to the idea of doing the right thing?

As of Kavanaugh and the huge number of right wing thugs put at all levels of the Federal Judiciary, justice is over in this country until these people are impeached. Let me repeat that, in case I was vague. There is no justice in this country until further notice.

Which leads to my first platform promise: if elected, I will work to impeach all the right wing thugs put on the judiciary by the Republicans and replace them by honest lawyers who have the country's interests at heart.

In Response to a Post by Mary Lou Jepson

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Mary Lou Jepson asked if there was something you could tell your younger self that might change your degree choice or your path, what would it be.

So I said:

"Right now, people are treating you well in spite of your lack of credentials, but that is a temporary phenomenon, sadly. There will be a time when people will judge you based on what is on paper, and by then there will be those who like you and those who dont. Therefore, you are encouraged to get the best credentials you can now, while you have the cachet and while the various advantages society makes available to those in this stage of their career are available. If anything goes wrong, you will wish you had those credentials".

A Suggestion for the Justice System

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You see, here is the problem.  When you destroy the justice system with your right wing goons, like Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Roberts, Thomas and a whole slew of nutty boys in the Federal system whose names we may not even know, then when a judgment happens that is obviously unjust, such as the one that just happened against Stormy Daniels, then we assume that the fix is in. We cant assume that justice was done because we dont trust the justice system.

You leave us no choice but to put as many of our partisans on the court as we can, as a countermeasure.  Yes, you fucked it up.

Dont complain when it comes back to bite you in the ass.

Footnote: The day after the defamation suit against Daniels is dismissed, Trump calls her "Horseface".  Dont you love justice in America?