Thursday, April 30, 2015

Jack of All Trades: US Military Self-guided Bullet

REBLOG=>Jack Omnitrade

The U.S. military had made great progress in developing a self-steering bullet. The .50-caliber bullets are fitted with optical sensors at the tip to follow moving targets. The bullet’s system is name EXACTO (Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance) and is develop by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The "smart bullets" passed their most successful round of live-fire tests to date, the CNN reported on 29 April 2015.


self-guided bullet

Videos supplied by DARPA show the bullets making sharp turns in mid-air as they pursue their targets. "This live-fire demonstration from a standard rifle showed that EXACTO is able to hit moving and evading targets with extreme accuracy at sniper ranges unachievable with traditional rounds. Fitting EXACTO's guidance capabilities into a small .50-caliber size is a major breakthrough and opens the door to what could be possible in future guided projectiles across all calibers," said Jerome Dunn, DARPA program manager. Exacto can help shooters compensate for high winds. Give shooters greater range and accuracy makes American troops safer.



My Comments

There is no free lunch. Good things usually cut both ways. There is no doubt that the accuracy makes American troops safer but there will be no difference if the enemy had the same ammo. Good but dangerous products are like double edge swords. In due time psychopath killers will get hold of this bullets. With the 9/11 incident, I would not be exaggerating to put forth the idea of a coordinated attack. All Bin Laden’s successor or ISIS needs to do is to put a few guns on the key people and a nation would be in turmoil. Let’s say a gun is aimed at Barack Obama (president), Joe Biden (vice president) and Ashton Carter (defense secretary) at the same time. There is a price for everything and there will leakage somewhere. So, I won’t boast about this invention.

Anything Under the Sun: America's 9 Best Entry-level Jobs

REBLOG=>SavySeph

Job hunters need to be mindful that there is always compromise between job security, career development or high pay in the job process. High paying jobs are usually at high risk for being automated or offers little growth potential over the next few years. Based on a study from WalletHub, the top 9 entry-level jobs scores well in all the three categories mentioned. CBS News had compiled their findings on 28 April 2015 to guide college students and high school seniors to consider which field to major in.




Job Starting Pay Median Pay Qualification Growth
9. Financial analyst $51,848 $76,950 bachelor's degree in business, finance or related -
8. Information security analyst $55,310 $86,170 - 37%
7. Web designer $53,041 $62,500 know programming and graphic design 20%
6. Software engineers $62,522 $90,374 bachelor's degree in computer science -
5. Environmental engineer $57,266 $86,340 bachelor's degree in environmental engineering or related 15%
4 Attorney $83,907 $133,470 law degree and pass a state's written bar exam 10%
3 Network Engineer $61,744 $91,982 degrees in computer science or related 12%
2. Web applications designer $54,586 $59,000 know developer languages such as PHP and HTML 12%
1. Training specialist $47,621 $55,930 college degree and strong communication skills 15%

The starting annual salary and the median pay for all workers in the field are based on the latest information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The salary for software engineers were based on information on the employment site Glassdoor.com. Figures for network engineer and web applications designer were derived from the employment site Payscale.com. The job growth rate is projected from 2012 to 2022 by the BLS. A growth of 10 percent or higher is deemed as normal. A growth rate of 15 percent and above is consider rapid growth.


Job Hunting

The information security analyst had the greatest potential growth of 37 percent. Their job entails a simple maintenance routine but once the system gets hacked, they will have to work round the clock to restore the system, pronto. I believe being a hacker is the best qualification for this job but there is no such thing as a certified hacker at the present moment. This may be the reason WalletHub did not list down the qualification for this job. The reason growth is not projected for financial analyst is unclear.


Growth rate for software engineers were not projected as this profession is a bit unusual. While the jobs in this field are plentiful, careers in the field may be short-lived. According to Bloomberg News, most software developers have left the profession by the time they're 40. The industry tend to favor younger engineers because of the impression that they will be more up-to-date with the latest trends.


Although the training specialist had a low income, it top because of job openings and growth potential. About one-quarter of Web designers were self-employed in 2012 but it is forecasted that employment in this field will grow by 20 percent. I believe the forecaster is expecting these self-employed individuals would grow and had the need for expansion.



My Comments

You get what you paid for. Training specialist starts with $47,621 but it only requires a college degree. You would have saved time and money compared to a bachelor degree. This would be my choice if I had this information and could turn back the time. I would reached median salary, by the time others get a bachelor and start on other jobs with about the same amount of pay. The difference is I had tugged the ropes while a fresh graduate is just getting acquainted with the ropes.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Anything Under the Sun: Google’s Mobile Friendly Test

REBLOG=>SavySeph

My Casino Gambling Tip is now a mobile friendly website. My next task would be to get XingCai Gambling Tales to be mobile friendly too. I had outlined the step involved to get it mobile friendly in my previous blog and will use the same procedure. The wave of mobile suffers had got Google to cater to them or lose page ranking. This would be a concern for webmasters until they fix the problem.


Google Mobile Friendly Certification

While Google had written to webmasters with some links to make a mobile friendly website, they provided no link to test the mobile-friendliness of the site. Using W3C tidy up could provide some additional help on the meta tags. After much surfing, I found certification from Google themselves. Visit this link and type in your website’s URL.



My Comments

I read somewhere that there is a April 21 deadline for this. Would Gambling Tales miss this deadline?

Monday, April 20, 2015

FBI Ruse Violated Paul Phua Rights

"Law enforcement can't break something in your house and pose as repair people to get inside," David Chesnoff, defence attorney for Paul Phua Wei-seng's, said. Paul Phua was charged with illegally accepting bets on the World Cup Soccer. US District Judge Andrew Gordon said in a bluntly worded decision that "the government violated the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights" against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Paul Phua

Gordon called the evidence collected last July from Paul Phua's high-security luxury villa at Caesars Palace "fruits of an unconstitutional search", and said it cannot be used if the government pressed forward with charges that Phua operated an illegal gambling business and transmitted wagering information. Chesnoff hailed the decision as a victory for freedom. The two charges each carry a penalty of up to seven years in prison.

Prosecutors said some US$13 million in bets had been wagered before the FBI, working with Nevada gambling regulators, raided three Caesars Palace villas where Phua, his son and several other people were staying. Agents seized computers, cellphones and cash. Phua, 50, was the last remaining defendant among eight people arrested in the case, including his son Darren Wai Kit Phua, 23. Darren Phua was the last of six defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges, forfeit large amounts of money and return to Asia under plea deals the Las Veags Sun reported on 17 April 2015.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Anything Under the Sun: Think Small to Design Websites for Mobile

REBLOG=>SavySeph

Deciding on picture size is my next task in getting my website to be mobile friendly. In my previous blog on this topic, I figured that reducing the size of navigation menu is a good place to start to design a website to fit mobile device. I used single word for title and double word for subtitle. This seems to work out some of the problem. I figure the next step would be to have a universal width for all pictures. Ideally the picture could be stretch or shrunk to fit across the multiple platforms without losing too much picture quality.


Given the size of webpages, stretching and shrinking a picture is not the real problem. Pictures who are magnify twice or reduce by half are never too shabby when it comes to quality. This should be enough do the trick to fit an image into a website. The bigger concern is manipulated images sometimes take a longer time to load. The 4G phones are great for speed but as the best for the current technology they are a minority user. Most people would have the lower 3G speed on their phones. The loyalist to old phone will still surf with 2G and there are still a number of these mobile surfers out there. These people will favor sites who were sufficiently fast for their devices.


I went window shopping for mobile phones using google and decided that I have 3 categories to please. Based on their minimum screen width, I simply name them mini (80 pixels), midi (321 pixels) and maxi (481). After throwing some math around, I decided that all images on my website will be 240 pixels wide. Shrinking 240 to 80 (the lower end of the mini) is one-third reduction. This will likely cause some problem in loading speed. For the higher end of the mini (320 pixels), the image is stretch less than 50% which is acceptable. For the 481 pixels width, there is no stretching of image. The image with text displayed by the side will be at least half of the screen.


Terminologies in Casino Gambling Tips

I now had all my pictures resize to 240 pixels width. Going through the pictures one by one had been a tedious exercise. Some of my image were name by their sizes. A cat image, for example, had been named cat330x250. The 330 represent the width and 250 is for the height. I still maintain the old name of the image. It would sound silly but once something is publish it is not advisable to make changes. Keeping the old name will ensure that people who link my pictures will not get a blank image. I actually have three manga pages outstanding. These three cartoons are at least 600 pixels wide. The task will be to break them down to smaller pictures who are 240 pixels wide. The main picture that will adopt the old name while new pictures will carry the old name with a sequential numbering suffix.


Going through image by image can also make you see things from a different angle. I redraw two images. I hope the people who had link the old pictures prefer the new pictures. I had also came up with 5 new pictures. These are for the pages which previously did not have a picture. The remaining task, unless new development crops up, I will drop the navigation menu for the mini users.


My Comments

We reserve the right to change the terms and conditions of service without your consent. If you don’t like it – too bad. This is the policy of most arrogant big corporations. I am glad you don’t change your image’s name. In the interest of developing a gambling fraternal, I have blog all your web pages. I have also thrown links to your pictures at my forum. I will be disappointed to find them turn into blank pictures. I commend your policy to maintain the name of your pictures.

Light and Easy Talk: 3-Year-Old Shoots, Kills Baby Brother

REBLOG=>Veronica Glowsome

A one-year-old boy was shot dead by his three-year-old brother on 12 April 2015. Chief Calvin Williams said, "It's a sad day for Cleveland. This fascination that we have with handguns, not just in this city but in this country, has to stop. This is a senseless loss of life." Investigation had not determined where the shooting came from and how it was left within reach of a child. Braylon Robinson was taken to a nearby hospital and later pronounced dead, the CBS News reported.


My Comments

Guns give a false sense of security. It gives more trouble than aids. The people who are entrusted with it finds it a burden. My uncle who was plain-clothes detective is always paranoid about where he kept his gun the moment he gets home. Whenever I visit him he keeps check where he stored his gun. In contrast my friends who were patrol police don’t have that problem. Patrol police, in my country Malaysia, don’t keep their guns when they are off duty.

Friday, April 10, 2015

Anything Under the Sun: Paedophiles Lurks in Dark Net

REBLOG=>SavySeph

Hardcore pedophiles can evade detection by hiding their identity using dark net. It is accessible via a browser that masks users' identities by encryption. It has millions of users and thousands of websites. It operates on a network of more than 6,000 computer servers spread around the world that reroute signals to hide users' locations.


Dark net was originally developed by the U.S. military. To help dissidents in China, Russia and Iran evade censorship, it is still partly funded by the U.S. government but pedophiles had abused this facility. A recent British study found that 80 percent of traffic to sites located only on the dark net were related to child pornography.


Hans Guijt and his colleagues at Terre des Hommes Netherlands, a child protection organization, attempted to trap pedophiles. The created digital puppet called Sweetie that looks and sounds like a 10-year-old girl from the Philippines. "In the 10 weeks' time that we were active on the Internet we were hit by more than 20,000 people, 20,000 men mainly, who were trying to get in contact with us to engage us in sexual activities," Guijt told CBS News. He added that they can't be so easily caught because they're using the dark net the CBS News reported on 9 April 2015.


10-year-old digital puppet, Sweetie

Greg Virgin, a former NSA employee turned cyber security consultant, who's now helping U.S. child protection groups is trouble by this awful realization. "We found one site where users openly advertised the ages of the children they were interested in," Virgin said. "The average youngest age they were seeking for girls was zero years old. And the average age for boys was one."



My Comments

Pedophiles targeting one-year-old male and less than one-year-old females are beyond redemption.