Rationale for the Pengpod (in relation to ThinMan Model)

Given NSA involvement in everything with obvious capitulation to gov't sponsored hacking/cracking by nearly every information corporation (possibly even Microsoft/Windows) PengPod makes huge sense

I have promoted L4 over Linux for a decade now, but L4 needs to roll back a decade. to make it actually free and open as FSU developers have made it purely-proprietary (w/o mentioning..) The microkernel advantage, I believe, is currently security-oriented; not to say Linux is bad in that way, but that OSs need to be able to switch out components depending on how political/financial winds blow around their developers. Further, I support the original GNU model where code is highly-visible so that weaknesses can be easily spotted during implementation efforts: scripting like Korn's shell, but significantly updated.

If Pengpod is going to be real-world useful far beyond Android, it needs drivers, and all drivers are written for Apple (IOkit) and Windows (NDSI), so, in my opinion, the driver tail wags the OS dog.

Comparions w/ my Thinman Model from late-90s / early 2000s
If I may say so, I pretty-well "presaged" this idea in the late-90s during the tech boom but had horrible experiences with F-ll-ps and Caldera. (Caldera went on to the famous own-your-brain nonsense law suits bought with SCO via the Unix purchase from Bell, so you get the idea). My products were basically this and also a set-top box that was educationally-oriented. I initially meant to use a National Semiconductor/Cyrix chip that eventually became the VIA MiniITX with all its fun community stuff (http://www.mini-itx.com/projects). At first glance PengPod meets much of my initial criteria including external keyboards and HDMI.

This idea, the ThinMan, meant to develop a purely-data-centric OS that brought modules to data within a browser window, so that each dataset imitated a unique "app." All developers would code would be modules and libraries. Perl's CPAN was the model for support, but in machine- or byte-code; meshing would be the communication method of sharing and to wire for server support: the Thin/Fat model.

Needless to say, I learned the hard way that individual efforts are nearly a waste of time and hugely demoralizing, and that "angel" investors are anything but. Keep in mind the tech market had just crashed along w/ the WTC towers with a good many associates. The entire US economy would follow in a few years thanks to CDS derivatives, which was actually my last paying tech gig, oops.

L4 now runs fully independently as a "security phone"
I must add OSkit when writing about IOkit and drivers. This effort in the earliest part of the century (in Utah, of all places ;) ) was much like it sounds, and was used by Dresden to create the proprietary L4 that is in nearly every phone. In one case, a "secure" phone system "montes" to pure L4 operation, so fully-certified secure code is out there (but not available to us despite impressions.)

L4 is effectively purely-proprietary
The Dresden effort was largely academic (but still proprietary ironically a descendant of the non-owning socialism of the former GDR), so many PDFs (in typically-horrid empirical-style) are available so one can get a good idea of where free OSs need to go--or, at least, follow.

Re-assembled Linux as the new Android
An area w/in Android that confuses me wrt to Linux and Android is the Linux/Android fork. First, why has Android forked, or, perhaps, delineated?  The explanation seems to be that Linux & Co. are too slow to intake Android mods, and, of course, Android cannot wait. So, Android goes its own way making it effectively a fork, but it continues to be Linux.

If Android is moving ahead so fast and Linux is lagging, and Android is meeting consumer demand and Linux was a server-oriented deception pretending to be a (free) desktop (for the masses) all along, then, logically, Android is the place to be! What I read is that Android is highly-reduced and, thus, no longer POSIX. So, my question is "why hasn't a distro emerged that takes Android released-code and adds back the missing stuff" to make a valid POSIX desktop (and presumably server) for all systems?

Note: I often coredump here: http://www.oddmuse.org/wiki/John_Bessa

FB will delete 10s to 100s of millions of users for "over-friending"

Help end FB's "anti-friending" crisis (though I am at a loss as to how):

• Facebook has and will delete a sizable percentages of its user-base:
  • at least 10's of millions, perhaps 100's of millions from a user-base of a billion
• I may be in the "next round" of "deletions"

Facebook (FB) is deleting, or disabling, accounts to the tune of 100 million accounts, and is, apparently ramping-up, so the numbers banned from FB will reach into the 100's of millions.  FB has about a billion members, though it can be assumed that many, if not most, members use it infrequently, perhaps half or more barely long in at all, judging from my personal observations and experiences on other social sites.

That suggests that FB wants to eliminate a sizable percentage of its actual active "resident population," perhaps 20% to a third; maybe even as much as 50%.  A good question is "why would they do that as it makes no sense?"  FB profits are high, and its tax burden is apparently negligible (thanks to US government generosity to huge corporations), the per-user maintenance cost is negligible, and if it actually figures out how to attract beneficial sellers and link them wifh valid customers, there is no reason "non-clickers" such as me, will not buy into its commercialism.  Seriously, makes no sense from the business standpoint, and is dangerous to the world psychology.

Typical current "friending" experience
I put my workplace as “please friend me as I can’t because I am blocked” and a gallery-owner just “friended” me, probably as a result. When I confirmed, FB asked me if I knew this person, so I responded “yes,” of course. Also, I get continual requests for more personal information, such as “where did I go to school,” or “where did I work.” Frankly, as an early promoter of a social internet (in the late 80s), I think you would have to be very trusting or stupid to use your real name on the Internet, let alone make personal information available everywhere.

General anger with FB and Zuckerman
There are many people angry enough with FB (to organize boycotts) for many, many reasons, whcih makes FB's founder, Zuckerburg, a seriously-hated person.  Many express serious ill-will towards Zuckerberg, which may even go to homicidal desires (but not from me). 

No "happy ending"
I don't see a happy ending to situation that I think is extremely damaging to the World's psychology for many reasons, including maladatpive behaviors express in FB's film biography, Social Network, as well as the intents of its controlling "angel investors."

Reversing original intent of the social Internet's founders (such as me)
My complaint is that FB is reversing the meaning of the Internet, which is to make create world communication as a form of digital empathy.  In retrospect, the concept of "digital empathy" seems like seriously wishful-thinking because it is contradictory (digital personalities are non-empathic) and the capital structures that funded the Interment's "tech boom" of the 1990s have since shown a clear desire to destroy the planet for quick profit.  Nonetheless, I have a good many long-term friends (hundreds) from the Internet whom I only know from the Internet and with whom I have excellent relationships, perhaps because of the Internet's digital nature. 

The only way to get kicked-off FaceBook is "friending" people whom you don't know in real life
Important to me is the method of "weeding" undesirable members: the method is described "anti-friending" campaign being implemented as part of the "terms of service" agreement that everybody clicks "yes" to but no one comprehends.  Because of the way computer-related laws are written, website "terms of service" are actually law, though you have to break actual law to get prosecuted, as Aaron Schwartz was.  Still, no matter what, FB's terms of service are the final word, and, contact with actual, potentially feeling humans at FB is nearly impossible.  The intractable nature of FB is described in psychological personality order of "concrete thinking," which is a serious problem.  After watching the movie about him, Social Network, I think I am within my rights by wondering if he was/is using.

Rationale
The "rationale" for new-friend-blocking that FB gives to me is that I am somehow abusing people who don't know me by asking to be their friends.  In real life, normal people talk to strangers and potentially spark up a friendship.  Normal people who are rebuffed by others who think that they are being abused by an extension of friendship invariably think to themselves something like "what an asshole!" 

Patronizing "assholes"
It would appear that FB is specifically patronizing this kind of unusually hostile and perhaps paranoid person.  (This is not to say such hostility makes a person "bad" as many people are simply extending negative worldviews of others--are are necessarily bad--and can recover through therapy.)  Nonetheless, given FB's size of a billion users, FB's promotion of this maladaptive approach to life significantly adds to the "contagion effect"

Does, or did,  Zuckerberg use cocaine?
Further cause for concern is that I sense from photographs of Zuckerberg at work and play is that he is some kind of user, and the movie about him, Social Network, emphatically stresses cocaine use during its "start up" --cocaine is highly addiction.  My concern here is not Zuckerberg's well-being, but the personality-disorder effects of cocaine, it causes concrete thinking (which halts possible change) and narcissism, which can only compound the situation.  But then, if he is the way he is portrayed in the movie, which seems accurate, doe he really run FB, or is it run by the "angel investors" that hold controlling stock (and attempted to rob its other founders).

A Dialectical explanation of my concern
A different dialectical issue to personally affect me is constant threat to block my account for using it to do what the Internet, and before it, the Information Society, was meant to do: make friends with the World. This is, of course, is the ultimate extension of Empathy, as everyone knows, but it is just about the only way to get kicked-off FaceBook--why? There is no doubt in my mind that a major reason is FaceBook’s “business model,” that focuses on family and community (as consumers), but I “sense” there is something more. I think of it in terms of “divide and conquer,” rational reduction to the family/work level where incompetent matriarchs/patriarchs prevent any talent from evolving to higher level incompetence to threaten the incompetents of the “power elite” (Bush/Obama). This inquiry into FaceBook (followed, I hope, by empathic action) is (in my opinion) the best critical direction for information society studies because it seems obvious to most what is going on with it: information control society. The scope and depth of the problem affects all information (like bacterium) making comprehension of it difficult for most which is why we need abstraction skills, abstraction being antithetical to the thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis of the current dialectic, but the way serious information science is accomplished, such as with the Internet Protocol communication stack (and the Empathy Model).

Dehumanization by FB and other dangerous "tech effects"This looks like an ongoing-process, and is important for the dual reasons that FB has such a big audience that it will continue the process of metacognitive de-humanization through human isolation, and that the purely “unfeeling types” will continue their seamless bond with computer networks to bring implement metacognitive control, such as BF Skinner modeled it in Walden II. Sad truth is that all community websites have similar controlling business models as the “angel investors” dictated the commercial nature of the Internet early on (in the mid-90s), and even open source and non-commercial sites such as Wikipedia and supporting components such as Wikipedia and Ubuntu openly support intellectual property protection either by narrowly defining or controlling free information so as to make “their own.” Ubuntu, for instance, will force users to unload file sharing tools such as Handbrake during upgrades, and Wikipedia forces all material to confirm to its particular “free” approach so as to actually confound society’s generous laws allowing “fair use.”

How does one fight this?
Seriously, how do you fight this? Government supports “business freedom” giving “terms of service” as a weapon for rabid prosecutors (Aaron Schwartz), the average person seeks to “stay off the radar” for safety’s sake, and the Internet “media” is purely positivist, that is to say that it metacognitively paints a pretty picture of everything often by suggesting (Socratic) alternatives--so as not to impact the “buying mania” of its advertised products (by family). When it offers alternatives to FB, they go in the direction of private interconnections between people who can just as easily talk on the phone (or text) or, preferably, meet in person.

Not good, it makes "cyber thuggery” (hacking) the only available option to “save the world,” which actually serves the oligarchic “meme’s” (or selfish-gene’s) maladaptive purpose by thwarting democracy’s evolution of freedom of speech through the information society. Democracy is what the Internet is meant to enhance, and why it has a free and open nature --not to create a information control society.

Reintroducing (wiki-style) anonymity
In the end, internet anonymity (as practiced by the Wikipedia) is not to protect one form the individual predator (as originally conceived) but from the information collector:

FaceBook defines, more than the others--even the NSA, the Information Society predator

Simplified Model

Wallet-sized abstraction to access people and situations psychologically on the fly

My empathy model is a clean-room abstraction that specifically looks  mutually-beneficial interrelations for organismic success, and is easily accepted by the vast majority of people, that is to say, those who normally interrelate.  It is fundamentally based on Dariwn's second important writing that attributes human morailty to the evolution of the "natural affection" of higher animals.  It is designed almost as a manual to apply empathy ideas to situations where normal interrelation is problematic or impossible--perhaps to design an avoidance strategy, or, possibly, to fight back as in activism.  It strongly suggests that the root problems attacking otherwise normal, happy society are rooted in "anti-complex" organic dysfunction.

With the start of my psych masters, the established empirical model that leverages the ancient Socratic method, the dialectic, introduced to me an entirely new language to describe mental problems that is not accessible to, or easily-used by, the average, normal people.  Further, the use of common psychological words from the dictionary such as psychotic and schizophrenic may be considered "unethical" to use with "proper training" (ie, a PhD and a license).

However, there are big changes happening in the study of the mind with the introduction of digital imaging.   This change is very popular; more accurate fMRI-evidenced material is being produced now than empirically-evidenced material using the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of empirical science.

Now, mental brain activity as it surfaces as human activity can be seen accurately in images.  Maladaptive activity can be directly related to parts of the brain that are failing.  That is to say activity (or behavior) that results from an inability to adapt to an internal problem, such as those that are organically-caused by DNA failures, or traumatic resulting from unfortunate events often deliberately caused by others, can be viewed, or seen to be absent, in images on a screen.  An important example  is in this article about signalling errors (in this blog) caused by DNA problems where the protein that is supposed to instruct neural function is broken and thus cannot do its job.  In this study, patients with the broken signalling process suffer from schizophrenia, psychosis, and bipolar disorder.

This study points us in the right direction.  It encourages us to create hypotheses that can suggest that specific major mental illnesses can be caused by specific signalling errors, and that maladaptive activity can be predicted by testing for these errors.  

Initially a problem surfaced with an early attempt.  If you attempt to tease apart illnesses based signalling errors, this does not help as it accounts for three separate diseases.  Psychologists who have been consulted are adamant that schizophrenia and psychosis are completely different illnesses especially in the empathy context--schizophrenics are easy to get along with.  When looked at closely, psychosis seems to result in problems in networks (including psychotic depression) that causes "out of control" behavior, and schizophrenia comes from false information signalling in the analytic, executive function, working memory part of the mind, the pre-frontal cortex.  It should be noted that the protein signalling errors were correlated with diagnoses made using the DSM, which predates fMRI evidence; the DSM may be (or probably is) dragging fMRI research backwards.  Further, one of the very first discoveries while building the empathy model, is that most of those interviewed in the empathy working group who had had problems, had had on average no less that five separate diagnoses; diagnostics are problematic--probably because the DSM is so horribly convoluted.

One component of the cited signalling study could easily be correlated with observed reality.  Family members carrying the same hereditary-and-genetic defect had similar fMRI scans as positively-diagnosed participants, but abnormalities were to lesser-degrees.  One of my early observed subjects was done in a family setting with me absorbing far more data than I cared for.  Family members were higher-functioning but less moral; as described in the empathy model, they applied their dysfunctions as controlling strategies for secondary gain: greed.  This goes to the obsessive-compulsive-impulsive continuum that historically links to addictive behaviors that disregard effects on others--money and possessions being two of them along with substances.  This puts uncontrolled impulse in the psychotic category.

Modeling

So, to create a workable model that is in line with the empathy model, psychosis (being "out of control") and schizophrenia (hallucinations) are pulled apart and the third important "empathy model" problem, aspergers, is added as it is generally linked with the inability to feel others' emotions, and thus act with respect to them--morally.  Since the empathy model is made for the common person (that is to say it is democratic), and since there may be peril in using these terms (because of ethical perversions), the definitions, or descriptions, for the diseases are used rather than the disease names themselves.   This is a wallet card that should provide one with a map to avoid the maladaptive behaviors of those whose maladaptions to sickness make them immoral, and thus dangerous.  If it is a successful model, it should save the average person a great deal of grief.  The purpose of a model is almost the direct opposite of the purpose of an empirical study; a model (such as a business model, or the highly-successful weather models) is to predict phenomena and provide benefits.  This model has been doing both for a year, and is thus tested--just not correlated to genetic-fMRI-assessment sicence (yet).

Metacognition

The final item, that is not directly related to signalling errors, is the idea of metacognition that appears in the empathy model as "painting a pretty picture" of poor events to make them more palatable.   This is often the basis of cognitive therapy which suggests looking finding an "alternative" way to look at things to relieve troubling symptomatic such as anxiety or depression.  The problem is, of course, that the underlying problem is ignored and that only symptoms are addressed.  A person could spend their entire life feeling better about a person with dangerous signalling errors, say, to save a marriage, without realizing that their life has been stolen.  

In this model's view, the adaption of humanity to signalling errors as they manifest as psychosis, aspergers, and the combination of the two, socio-psychopathy, is at the crux of humanity's failure; it is an alternative to what is natural in that it empowers dangerous people in the traditional sense, it gives them control.  In the empathy model sense, the maladaptive are given power to take resources from others through coercion.  This is necessary for the emphatically maladaptive because they cannot use empathic abilities and facilities to work with others to create resources.  

In this view, psychology (historically with the dialectic and currently with the DSM) have provided an alternative to what is natural using what is called the Socratic method.  We normal humans are expected to view maladaption from an alternative perspective, that is to paint a pretty picture in place of reality to make life less anxious and depressing.  This, in this view, is the "method" of civilization, the dialectic, and deception.  

Normal human success depends on shining a light on it, which is the purpose of this "simplified model wallet card."

---

Mediated Citations:
this section is an implementation of annotated bibliography that (eventually) hopes to blend referential support, footnotes, and (most important) forum discussion with the idea that it is our differing influences that define our points of view, and that by combining these influences we should come to agreed-upon explanations for phenomena

Protein signalling from McIntosh, 2009
A look back on this research shows how abstracted this simplified model is, and the size of the gap between pure science and everyday reality.  Initially I intended to directly apply the research which links many diseases to a single signalling error, but resistance from experts in the field forced me to reduce this one error to a single disorder, psychosis, because (as they say) psychosis is functionally related to bipolar, but not to schizophrenia.  In defense of the pure scientists, the signalling goes to "maintenance" cells such as the astrocyte in the background. (I think of these cells as relatives of neurons).

A though that occurred to me as I first read the studies, is that I had once hypothesized that the fat on the cells, mylein, gets burned off when the mind is over active, such as in the term "burned out."  This occurred to me in the mid-90s when I was fixing an expensive desktop computer and noticed that the CPU chip got much hotter when it was running a "batch job" than when it was still.  Given the many abstracted similarities between computers and humans, I also assumed human intellectual matter will get hotter in similar proportions, and hence "burn off" the insulation causing dysfunction--in any part of the brain.  This implicates both dopamine-exciting meth, and extreme overactivity caused by, say, terror-level fear resulting in trauma, sometimes called an insult.

APA-style citations:

Chong, V., Thompson, M., Beltaifa, S., Webster, M., Law A., and Weickertad, S. (2007). Elevated Neuregulin-1 and ErbB4 protein in the prefrontal cortex of schizophrenic patients: Schizophr Res. 2008 March ; 100(1-3): 270–280. doi:10.1016/j.schres.2007.12.474.

Fazzari, P., Paternain, A., Valiente, M., Pla, R., Luján, R., Lloyd, K., et al. (2010). Control of cortical GABA circuitry development by Nrg1 and ErbB4 signalling. Nature, 464(7293), 1376-1380. doi:10.1038/nature08928.

Homayoun, H., & Moghaddam, B. (2008). Orbitofrontal cortex neurons as a common target for classic and glutamatergic antipsychotic drugs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(46), 18041-18046. doi:10.1073/pnas0806669105.

Li, B., Woo, R., Mei L., Malinow, R., (2007, May 24). The neuregulin-1 receptor ErbB4 controls glutamatergic synapse maturation and plasticity. Neuron, 54(4), 583-597.

McIntosh, A., Hall, J., Lymer, G., Sussmann, J., and Lawrie, S. (2009). Genetic risk for white matter abnormalities in bipolar disorder. International Review of Psychiatry, 21(4), 387-393. doi:10.1080/09540260902962180.

McIntosh, A., Hall, J., Lymer, G., Sussmann, J., and Lawrie, S. (2009). Genetic loading for psychosis and the internal capsule disorder. International Review of Psychiatry, 21(4), 387-393.

Stone, J., Morrison, P., and Pilowski, L. (2007, January 26). Review: Glutamate and dopamine dysregulation in schizophrenia — a synthesis and selective review. Journal of Psychopharmacology. 21(4), 440-452

Saving your contacts from the Verizon / LG Cosmos phone to a micro sd card

Most of us are upgrading (this was a particularly awkward phone).  Mass storage showed everything except phone numbers, and Verizon attempted to harvest this by pulling me into their "cloud" --something I would avoid at all costs.

Unfortunately, the phone hacking tool bitpim does not cover this phone, even after getting the drivers loaded from LG.  Drivers don't allow mass storage, and the default mass storage from the phone does not allow access to contacts, as I mentioned.

Finding no other options from the Web, I just started pushing buttons at near-random, and found success!

This is what I ultimately did: 

I put in a 

1. micro sd card (be careful, buggers are easy to misplace), pressed the
2. center button, went to
3. settings and tools then 
4. memory (option 0, where 10 should be) then
5. phone memory, picked
6. mycontacts, then
7. move to the left and
8. mark all to the right and
9. done to the left
10. and the numbers loaded to the micro sd card as vcards, the rest was simple.

I might mention that there are buttons that can erase the memory as options, so be careful.  I ran this procedure on two phones and checked it again as I wrote, so I feel confident it is correct.