Chat GPT

 I have been having to deal with AI recently, and thought I would post this Dry Bones Cartoon from 2023, just for some light comic relief for a change.  Wishing you a great day, from Sali, the LSW

Wishing you health and happiness, prosperity and peace.

Thank you so much to all of you who have donated! And thank you to all who have written me beautiful notes.

  I am so very thankful for so much!

Please consider donating to Dry Bones

Link for donating in IL shekels here:

https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=2BEWEZ3DGEJJ8

And link for donating in US Dollars below

Much love and joyful New Year of 2026. Blessings to you and your families and loved ones.

Please donate to Dry Bones in order to help me, the LSW, to keep up the expenses of the Blog and the postings, and pay the rent. 

You can donate with this link. It works with your credit card or with PayPal.

  Donate to Dry Bones denominated in US dollars here  

 https://tinyurl.com/3xmbc4mp 

ALSO PLEASE NOTE:

TO DONATE $50 or MORE BY CHECK (and is U.S. Tax DEDUCTIBLE)

1. Write a check to “REPORT, Inc.”

2. Write a cover note stating that these funds are to be directed to Dry Bones Project. Mail the Check and the accompanying cover letter to:

REPORT, Inc.

PO Box 1670

Southampton, PA 18966, U.S.A. 

Intel in Israel

Click for the full story

* * *

Let's be reasonable!

We are not asking for$25 Billion.

But you could give us SOME support, either by PayPal or by using your Credit Card by just clicking on the link below:
Donate

ALSO PLEASE NOTE:
TO DONATE $50 or MORE BY CHECK (U.S. Tax DEDUCTIBLE)
1. Write a check to “REPORT, Inc.”
2. Write a cover note stating that these funds are to be directed to Dry Bones Project. Mail the Check and the accompanying cover letter to:
REPORT, Inc.
PO Box 1670
Southampton, PA 18966
U.S.A. ************

Coming Thru the Windows

Remember when Windows 10 was the LAST Windows? * * * Please Don't forget us. We are two real people who really need your help.

Please support Dry Bones by donating through PayPal or by using your Credit Card.
Just click on the link below:
Donate

ALSO PLEASE NOTE:
TO DONATE $50 or MORE BY CHECK (U.S. Tax DEDUCTIBLE)
1. Write a check to “REPORT, Inc.”
2. Write a cover note stating that these funds are to be directed to Dry Bones Project. Mail the Check and the accompanying cover letter to:
REPORT, Inc.
 PMB 225 1121 N. Bethlehem Pike, Ste 60
Spring House, PA 19477
U.S.A.

Computer Crash

I'm writing with hope for the rebuilding of our main computer. Stay tuned for further developments. Love from the LSW (Long Suffering Wife) who has to put up with my freaking out about the computer crash! (and my worrying about how to pay for this major expense) * * * We need your help. Please support Dry Bones.
To donate through PayPal or by using your Credit Card, just click on the link below:
Donate

Children (2003)

May 11, 2003

A cartoon from ten years ago which seems much stronger now, I think.

Crowd Frenzy

The Dry Bones Kickstarter Haggadah campaign really is turning into a crowd frenzy, and for this I want to thank all the friends and fans who are forwarding, sharing, liking, and emailing ...and making this so popular. More folks are coming on board every day ...and we have to express a special word of thanks to the bloggers who are bringing the story to their readers. * * * If you don't know what I'm ta;ling about, click on Dry Bones Kickstarter Campaign. and watch the video of me in my studio explaining the details. An alternative is to click on the kickstarter link at DryBones.com
But Remember! On Friday November 16th the Kickstarter Haggadah Campaign will end, and becomes history.

New Computer Gadgets

According to the Associated Press:

Big week for gadgets ahead of new Apple iPhone, as rival product makers jockey for edge
NEW YORK — It was a big week for gadget announcements as Amazon, Nokia and Motorola all tried to generate interest in their products before Apple’s expected announcement of a new iPhone next Wednesday.

Amazon announced four new Kindle Fire models and a new line of stand-alone e-readers on Thursday, a day after Nokia and Motorola unveiled five new smartphones between them.

Makers of consumer electronics are refreshing their products for the holiday shopping season. Apple’s rivals are hoping that a head start on the buzz will translate into stronger sales." -more

Banking Bloopers

I've come to believe that more damage has been done in more areas by human stupidity than by conspiracy.

Likes and Links

I love Mr. History.
He gives me a chance to look objectively at the bizarre age in which we live.

So do YOU like him?

Latest Technology

Am I missing something? Or am I right?

the Iranian Goliath

I really enjoyed drawing this cartoon!

Technology in the Fast Lane

Yup. You guessed it. I'm agonizing about whether and when to buy a tablet. And about which tablet to buy. And trying to restrain myself. Back in the early days of home computers there was a funny sales line: "Buy now before the price goes down again!"
These days the problem is that when I buy equipment I think that I'm buying equipment ...rather than something that'll be hopelessly out of date in a few years.

CAPTCHA

The annoying "prove you are a human being by showing that you can read messed-up letters" is called a CAPTCHA, which is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".

The "Turing test" is a fascinating test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, and important to computer scientists, theorists, and dabblers in Artificial Intelligence. You can read about it at Wikipedia's entry about Turing test

Cyberwar

Latest Report:

Cyberwar report: Israel, Finland best prepared for conflict
31st January 2012 16:01 GMT

Analysis: Israel, Finland and Sweden are more prepared than larger nations to fight a conflict in cyberspace, according to a McAfee-backed cyber-defence study.

The study, Cyber-security: The Vexed Question of Global Rules, is based on interviews with experts in the nascent field by by McAfee and Security & Defence Agenda, a defence think-tank. No metrics are involved in the study, which even McAfee admits is largely subjective. Brussels-based SDA based its conclusions on "in-depth interviews with some 80 world-leading policy-makers and cyber-security experts" in government, business and academia in 27 countries as well as an anonymous survey of 250 world leaders in 35 countries.

For the record, among the key findings of the report are the contention that the state of cyber-readiness of the US, Australia, UK, China and Germany all rank behind that of smaller countries such as Israel, Sweden and Finland. -more

What the ?

In the digital world in which we all are now forced to live, the old rule "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" is no longer honored.

Your thoughts?

In a Pub in London

When the mass demonstrations in North Africa were organized and coordinated through the use of social media and mobile phones, folks in the West were enthralled by the refreshing empowering of the formerly powerless.

The same techniques were then used to organize mass assaults on Israel's borders, and now the looter riots in the U.K.

And from California we're hearing about organized cellphone-coordinated attacks on San Fransisco's BART train system:

Officials block cellphones in San Francisco train stations

SAN FRANCISCO — "An illegal, Orwellian violation of free-speech rights? Or just a smart tactic to protect train passengers' safety from rowdy would-be demonstrators during a busy evening commute?

The question resonated Saturday in San Francisco and beyond as details emerged of Bay Area Rapid Transit officials' decision to cut off underground cellphone service for a few hours at some stations Thursday. Commuters at stations from downtown to the city's main airport were affected as BART officials sought to tactically thwart a planned protest over the recent fatal shooting of a 45-year-old man by transit police." -more

The Cloud

I just got a new computer. The super powerful, cutting edge workhorse I bought just a few years ago is now a slow outdated model with something wonky in its motherboard. So now I have a brand new computer. It's a super powerful, cutting edge workhorse.

But the new machine runs Windows7 and the latest version of Word ...so I'm dealing with a learning curve.

The last machine had oodles of gigabytes but the new one has a terabyte of memory. "So", says I to the computer guy "Ï'll have tons of space to save my data."

To which the computer guy asks "Have you considered keeping your data in the cloud?"

Keeping my data in the "cloud" sounds cool. What it really means is keeping my data on somebody else's computer instead of on my own. Which sounds less cool.

While I'm at it, permit me to rant about tablets. Tablets are the latest "cool" device, but I'm haunted by the idea that had tablets been invented first, then everybody would now be rushing to buy the latest cool advance ...the laptop! It's just like a tablet but it has a real keyboard attached!

I write and sketch all my cartoon "roughs" in little spiral-bound notebooks. Over the years I've gone through hundreds of notebooks. All now sitting on shelves and packed into boxes. I often think of scanning them, but the truth is that long after my hard drives have lost their magnetism (and my saved data) those notebooks will remain stable. They'll keep their data for hundreds of years longer than any digital memory will.

Here's a thought, suppose they'd invented the computer first... would we all now be rushing to buy the latest cool advance ...the spiral notebook?!

Computer Worm

The story as reported by Technology Blog Red Herring:

New, Super Virus Worms through Iran Government Databases

How much havoc can a super computer virus wreck on Iran's data centers, and how much damage will it leave in its wake?

"Iran has confirmed that at least 30,000 computers have been infected by the Stuxnet computer worm, a very sophisticated computer virus aimed at SCADA, or “supervisory control or data acquisition,” which run everything from power plants and factories to oil pipelines and military operations. Nearly 60 percent of all contaminated computers in the first wave of the infection were in Iran. Some experts have hypothesized that the virus is actually aimed at Iran, seeking to cripple Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor, suspected by many in the world to be a mask for Iran's ambitions for a nuclear bomb, though the government claims the reactor is for energy purposes only." -more

And here's some interesting info from the story in the Tamil Daily Mirror:

"The sophistication of the Stuxnet virus is such that experts believe it could not have been created by one hacker. It is the work of a group with vast resources or a nation state. The worm they created tells an industrial equipment to behave in a manner contrary to its programming.

For instance, if a nuclear missile of country A is programmed to hit country B, Stuxnet could either neutralize the command or reverse the path of the projectile to hit the country A itself. The day is not far away when thousands of computer experts will have the knowledge to hack computers that control nuclear weapons. The nuclear holocaust is at the fingertip of a hacker. The world is on the brink of an apocalypse. When a cyber-attack happens, it is difficult to know from where the attack originated. It could be from an enemy country, or from a ship in international waters, or from atop the Himalayas, or from within one's country itself." -the full newspaper piece

Your thoughts?

One Bad Apple

According to CNN:

Handset world: Don't speak for us, Steve Jobs
"It may be true that no cell phone is perfect, but the handset world isn't taking too kindly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' public assertion that other smartphones suffer from the same antenna and signal problems that have been widely reported regarding the iPhone 4.

And, in what's turned into an ugly back-and-forth PR mud fight, Apple is firing back by making its internal signal test results public to insist that it's not just pulling rivals' flaws out of thin air.

Hui-Meng Cheng, chief financial officer at HTC, told The Wall Street Journal on Monday that "the reception problems are certainly not common among smartphones," and a representative from Samsung said that it "hasn't received significant customer feedback on any signal reduction issue for the Omnia 2," one of the phones that Apple singled out as suffering from similar reception issues if held in a way that blocks the antenna.

The two Asia-based companies are by no means the only ones to come out swinging against Jobs' remarks that "every phone has weak spots" at the press conference that addressed the reports of poor reception."-more

Future Shock

Today's Dry Bones cartoon is called Future Shock. Future Shock was a concept and a book published back in 1970 by Alvin Toffler.

The term refers to the confusion and disorientation which, he claimed, we would all suffer in the future. It would occur when technological advances would come faster than we, as individuals or as societies, could handle. Back then. Toffler was called a "futurist" (as opposed to a sociologist). His simplest definition of future shock was "too much change in too short a period of time".

* * * So welcome to the future.
Are you paying attention?
or are you off some place twittering? Hello? Hello? Are you there?
Yikes?! * * * Oh, and there's now a website called "Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook"