Black Protest Has Lost Its Power - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-protest-has-lost-its-power-1515800438 <comment><AUTHOR> By Shelby Steele

The recent protests by black players in the National Football League were rather sad for their fruitlessness. They may point to the end of an era for black America, and for the country generally—an era in which protest has been the primary means of black advancement in American life.

There was a forced and unconvincing solemnity on the faces of these players as they refused to stand for the national anthem. They seemed more dutiful than passionate, as if they were mimicking the courage of earlier black athletes who had protested: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, fists in the air at the 1968 Olympics; Muhammad Ali, fearlessly raging against the Vietnam War; Jackie Robinson, defiantly running the bases in the face of racist taunts. The NFL protesters seemed to hope for a little ennoblement by association.

And protest has long been an ennobling tradition in black American life. From the Montgomery bus boycott to the march on Selma, from lunch-counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides to the 1963 March on Washington, only protest could open the way to freedom and the acknowledgment of full humanity. So it was a high calling in black life. It required great sacrifice and entailed great risk. Martin Luther King Jr. , the archetypal black protester, made his sacrifices, ennobled all of America, and was then shot dead.

For the NFL players there was no real sacrifice, no risk and no achievement. Still, in black America there remains a great reverence for protest. Through protest—especially in the 1950s and '60s—we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.

It is not surprising, then, that these black football players would don the mantle of protest. The surprise was that it didn't work. They had misread the historic moment. They were not speaking truth to power. Rather, they were figures of pathos, mindlessly loyal to a black identity that had run its course.

What they missed is a simple truth that is both obvious and unutterable: The oppression of black people is over with. This is politically incorrect news, but it is true nonetheless. We blacks are, today, a free people. It is as if freedom sneaked up and caught us by surprise.

Of course this does not mean there is no racism left in American life. Racism is endemic to the human condition, just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it. But now it is recognized as a scourge, as the crowning immorality of our age and our history.

Protest always tries to make a point. But what happens when that point already has been made—when, in this case, racism has become anathema and freedom has expanded?

What happened was that black America was confronted with a new problem: the shock of freedom. This is what replaced racism as our primary difficulty. Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self- reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.

Watch out that you get what you ask for, the saying goes. Freedom came to blacks with an overlay of cruelty because it meant we had to look at ourselves without the excuse of oppression. Four centuries of dehumanization had left us underdeveloped in many ways, and within the world's most highly developed society. When freedom expanded, we became more accountable for that underdevelopment. So freedom put blacks at risk of being judged inferior, the very libel that had always been used against us.

To hear, for example, that more than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2016 embarrasses us because this level of largely black-on-black crime cannot be blamed simply on white racism.

We can say that past oppression left us unprepared for freedom. This is certainly true. But it is no consolation. Freedom is just freedom. It is a condition, not an agent of change. It does not develop or uplift those who win it. Freedom holds us accountable no matter the disadvantages we inherit from the past. The tragedy in Chicago—rightly or wrongly—reflects on black America.

That's why, in the face of freedom's unsparing judgmentalism, we reflexively claim that freedom is a lie. We conjure elaborate narratives that give white racism new life in the present: "systemic" and "structural" racism, racist "microaggressions," "white privilege," and so on. All these narratives insist that blacks are still victims of racism, and that freedom's accountability is an injustice.

We end up giving victimization the charisma of black authenticity. Suffering, poverty and underdevelopment are the things that make you "truly black." Success and achievement throw your authenticity into question.

The NFL protests were not really about injustice. Instead such protests are usually genuflections to today's victim-focused black identity. Protest is the action arm of this identity. It is not seeking a new and better world; it merely wants documentation that the old racist world still exists. It wants an excuse.

For any formerly oppressed group, there will be an expectation that the past will somehow be an excuse for difficulties in the present. This is the expectation behind the NFL protests and the many protests of groups like Black Lives Matter. The near-hysteria around the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others is also a hunger for the excuse of racial victimization, a determination to keep it alive. To a degree, black America's self-esteem is invested in the illusion that we live under a cloud of continuing injustice.

When you don't know how to go forward, you never just sit there; you go backward into what you know, into what is familiar and comfortable and, most of all, exonerating. You rebuild in your own mind the oppression that is fading from the world. And you feel this abstract, fabricated oppression as if it were your personal truth, the truth around which your character is formed. Watching the antics of Black Lives Matter is like watching people literally aspiring to black victimization, longing for it as for a consummation.

But the NFL protests may be a harbinger of change. They elicited considerable resentment. There have been counterprotests. TV viewership has gone down. Ticket sales have dropped. What is remarkable about this response is that it may foretell a new fearlessness in white America—a new willingness in whites (and blacks outside the victim-focused identity) to say to blacks what they really think and feel, to judge blacks fairly by standards that are universal.

We blacks have lived in a bubble since the 1960s because whites have been deferential for fear of being seen as racist. The NFL protests reveal the fundamental obsolescence—for both blacks and whites—of a victim-focused approach to racial inequality. It causes whites to retreat into deference and blacks to become nothing more than victims. It makes engaging as human beings and as citizens impermissible, a betrayal of the sacred group identity. Black victimization is not much with us any more as a reality, but it remains all too powerful as a hegemony.

Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is author of "Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country" (Basic Books, 2015).

Appeared in the January 13, 2018, print edition.</comment>


Scientists discover smartphone which can detect parasite in the blood - <AUTHOR> A smartphone has been used to automatically detect wriggling parasites in blood samples, BBC reports. The CellScope system films a drop of blood and an app then automatically analyses any movement in the sample to detect the parasites. According to results obtained from trials in Cameroon, which were published in Science Translational Medicine, the device was successful in making detections and experts lauded it saying it marked a fundamental advance in tropical diseases. Previous efforts to eradicate 2 parasitic diseases, river blindness and elephantiasis, have been suspended because the treatment can become fatal in some people. One treatment, the drug ivermectin, is risky in people with high levels of Loa loaworm, so people need to be screened first. But testing is time-consuming and requires laboratory equipment. However this new process solves this problem as shown by a team at the University of California, Berkeley, and the US National Institutes of Health, which used a modified smartphone to automate the process. A pindrop of blood was collected and loaded into a handheld box. The phone on top then kicked in. One of the researchers, Prof Daniel Fletcher explained that "with one touch of the screen, the device moves the sample, captures video and automatically analyses the images". The new process means very little training is required, while current screening procedures require someone to be skilled in analysing blood samples by eye. It also means that diseases such as as TB, malaria can be much more conveniently be detected, even as there are now plans to test it on 40,000 people. Source: http://www.fusiongists.com/2015/10/scientists-discover-smartphone-which.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10596381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10596381)</comment>


Ban Leafblowers - <AUTHOR> http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/id/ART02059 When it comes to really bad ideas, the leafblower ranks right up there with adding lead to gasoline and using CFCs in aerosols. Leafblowers are diabolical machines. Even if the claims their promoters make for them were true, the damage leafblowers do outweighs such meager benefits by many, many orders of magnitude.
Thanks to decades of relentless lobbying by their manufacturers, the two-cylinder engines that drive leafblowers have never been regulated by any Federal or State agency. The engines, as a result, are crude, cheap, and inefficient, as well as harmful to the environment and everything living in it. Because they are designed to be air-cooled, the engines release 100% of their tailgate emissions directly into the environment, and since they also burn fuel very inefficiently, a leafblower running for one hour emits as many hydrocarbons and other pollutants into the atmosphere as a car driven at 55 mph for 110 miles.
The noise leafblowers make is hideous. Although they operate on only two cylinders, these machines run at at speeds roughly three times faster than a car's. In the process lots of energy is released in the form of high frequency sound waves with decibel levels that far exceed acceptable limits. The incessant, high-pitched whine of a single leafblower in the distance is enough to set peoples' teeth on edge; a couple of blowers going nearby can push almost anyone to the brink of homicide. The idea that leafblowers save time - which is the one and only argument for using them - is outrageous, since it implies that the time stolen from the rest of us is worthless.
Using these hideously noisy, highly polluting machines on sidewalks and driveways is bad enough. Turning them on lawns and gardens, beneath shrubs, between hedges, and around the trunks of trees - as everyone is obviously doing these days - is irrational. Unless, that is, the people who are doing it are landscape professionals, in which case it is negligent, almost to the point of criminal.
If that seems extreme, consider that wind blows from the nozzles of these machines at speeds in the range of 180 mph. Winds of that force do not occur naturally on Earth, except inside hurricanes and tornadoes. Worse, still, because the wind is carrying away large quantities of heat from the hyperactive engine, it is also very hot and exceedingly dry.
Subjecting everything at ground level to blasts of hot, dry, hurricane-force winds would be ill-advised at any time, since it cannot fail to injure plants and open pathways for pests and disease, while at the same time aiding and abetting the pathogens by distributing them over the widest possible area. In the summer, though, when the air is hot and the ground is dry and the plants are dehydrated and badly stressed to begin with, subjecting them to tornadic blasts of hot, dry air is, nonsensical, to put it kindly.
Leafblowers literally scour the earth: stripping off topsoil, desiccating roots, and killing vital soil-dwelling organisms, while, at the same time, propelling into the air clouds of dirt, dust and dangerous contaminants: volatile compounds, mold and fungal spores, weed seeds, insect eggs, pollen, molecules of the myriads of toxic chemicals people spray and sprinkle on their gardens, trees, and lawns, not to mention bird and rodent feces, and more.
It goes without saying (but must be said anyway), that leafblowers pose the greatest threat to the health and hearing of the untold numbers of landscape workers who use them on a daily basis, in most cases without adequate protective equipment, for intervals that far exceed OSHA guidelines. Unfortunately, the workers themselves tend to exaggerate the benefits and deny the risks of blowing leaves with machines, which they strongly favor over rakes, for reasons that probably have more to do with symbolism than practicality.
Ironically, leafblowers were not invented to blow leaves; they were originally designed as crop dusters. In other words, they didn't come about in response to a genuine need for a mechanized solution to the leaf-removal problem. Because there wasn't any problem. Now we do have a problem, but it isn't leaves, it's these infernal machines.
Gasoline-driven leafblowers have been banned in scores of California counties, including Los Angeles and hundreds of municipalitiesacross the U.S. and Canada, and none of the horrors that were predicted by landscapers - untidy lawns, escalating costs, declining property values - has ever come to pass.
The phenomenal proliferation of leafblowers has far more to do with marketing than efficiency; indeed, when all the real costs are factored in their alleged benefits don't even begin to justify their penalties and risks. Cheap to produce, priced to sell, and aggressively marketed, the real function of leafblowers is to rake in money for the huge corporations that manufacture them.
By Winifred Rosen, Guest Commentator DrWeil.com News
Winifred Rosen is co-author with Dr. Weil of "Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs." <comment><USER2> I can't imagine how you'd define "leafblower".

</comment><comment><USER3> 2-stroke. Not 2-cylinder. Hope that helps.</comment>


Larry Smith TEDxUW - Why you will fail to have a great career - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKHTawgyKWQ Throughout his three-decade career here at the University of Waterloo, Larry Smith has inspired legions of students to take up the mantle of economics with his passionate and homespun tales of economic wizardry. A renowned story-teller, teacher and youth leadership champion, Larry has also coached and mentored countless numbers of students on start-up business management and career development strategies.
Having taught introductory microeconomics, macroeconomics and entrepreneurship classes, he recently celebrated assigning his 29,000th grade earlier this year.
Recipient of the Distinguished Teacher Award, Larry has also coached several of his former students to help them position and develop their businesses, the most famous of which is Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the revolutionary BlackBerry wireless mobile smartphone. Larry also sits on the advisory panels of start-ups to provide his guidance on financing and negotiation with investors and venture capitalists.
http://www.tedxuw.com/speakers/larry-smith/
---
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations) <comment><AUTHOR> One of the greats of UW. Love the delivery...</comment>


Warren Buffett's encouraging words for America - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mikeyanderson/warren-buffetts-encouraging-words-for-america-404815e323b8 <comment><AUTHOR> One word sums up our country's achievements: miraculous. From a standing start 240 years ago – a span of time less than triple my days on earth – Americans have combined human ingenuity, a market system, a tide of talented and ambitious immigrants, and the rule of law to deliver abundance beyond any dreams of our forefathers. You need not be an economist to understand how well our system has worked. Just look around you. See the 75 million owner-occupied homes, the bountiful farmland, the 260 million vehicles, the hyper-productive factories, the great medical centers, the talent-filled universities, you name it – they all represent a net gain for Americans from the barren lands, primitive structures and meager output of 1776. Starting from scratch, America has amassed wealth totaling $90 trillion. It's true, of course, that American owners of homes, autos and other assets have often borrowed heavily to finance their purchases. If an owner defaults, however, his or her asset does not disappear or lose its usefulness. Rather, ownership customarily passes to an American lending institution that then disposes of it to an American buyer. Our nation's wealth remains intact. As Gertrude Stein put it, "Money is always there, but the pockets change." Above all, it's our market system – an economic traffic cop ably directing capital, brains and labor – that has created America's abundance. This system has also been the primary factor in allocating rewards. Governmental redirection, through federal, state and local taxation, has in addition determined the distribution of a significant portion of the bounty. America has, for example, decided that those citizens in their productive years should help both the old and the young. Such forms of aid – sometimes enshrined as "entitlements" – are generally thought of as applying to the aged. But don't forget that four million American babies are born each year with an entitlement to a public education. That societal commitment, largely financed at the local level, costs about $150,000 per baby. The annual cost totals more than $600 billion, which is about 31⁄2% of GDP. However our wealth may be divided, the mind-boggling amounts you see around you belong almost exclusively to Americans. Foreigners, of course, own or have claims on a modest portion of our wealth. Those holdings, however, are of little importance to our national balance sheet: Our citizens own assets abroad that are roughly comparable in value. Early Americans, we should emphasize, were neither smarter nor more hard working than those people who toiled century after century before them. But those venturesome pioneers crafted a system that unleashed human potential, and their successors built upon it. This economic creation will deliver increasing wealth to our progeny far into the future. Yes, the build-up of wealth will be interrupted for short periods from time to time. It will not, however, be stopped. I'll repeat what I've both said in the past and expect to say in future years: Babies born in America today are the luckiest crop in history. ____________America's economic achievements have led to staggering profits for stockholders. During the 20th century the Dow-Jones Industrials advanced from 66 to 11,497, a 17,320% capital gain that was materially boosted by steadily increasing dividends. The trend continues: By yearend 2016, the index had advanced a further 72%, to 19,763. American business – and consequently a basket of stocks – is virtually certain to be worth far more in the years ahead. Innovation, productivity gains, entrepreneurial spirit and an abundance of capital will see to that. Ever-present naysayers may prosper by marketing their gloomy forecasts. But heaven help them if they act on the nonsense they peddle. Many companies, of course, will fall behind, and some will fail. Winnowing of that sort is a product of market dynamism. Moreover, the years ahead will occasionally deliver major market declines – even panics – that will affect virtually all stocks. No one can tell you when these traumas will occur – not me, not Charlie, not economists, not the media. Meg McConnell of the New York Fed aptly described the reality of panics: "We spend a lot of time looking for systemic risk; in truth, however, it tends to find us." During such scary periods, you should never forget two things: First, widespread fear is your friend as an investor, because it serves up bargain purchases. Second, personal fear is your enemy. It will also be unwarranted. Investors who avoid high and unnecessary costs and simply sit for an extended period with a collection of large, conservatively-financed American businesses will almost certainly do well. As for Berkshire, our size precludes a brilliant result: Prospective returns fall as assets increase. Nonetheless, Berkshire's collection of good businesses, along with the company's impregnable financial strength and owner-oriented culture, should deliver decent results. We won't be satisfied with less.</comment>


Splitting the unsplittable - <AUTHOR> http://esciencenews.com/articles/2012/06/05/splitting.unsplittable

<comment><AUTHOR> Summary: Researchers from the University of Bonn have just shown how a single atom can be split into its two halves, pulled apart and put back together again. While the word "atom" literally means "indivisible," the laws of quantum mechanics allow dividing atoms -- similarly to light rays -- and reuniting them. The researchers want to build quantum mechanics bridges by letting the atom touch adjacent atoms while it is being pulled apart so that it works like a bridge span between two pillars. The results have just been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.</comment>


HIDDEN FIGURES - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK8xHq6dfAo <comment><AUTHOR> HIDDEN FIGURES is the incredible untold story of Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe)—brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation's confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.</comment>


Apple is systematically erasing our stories - <AUTHOR> https://www.flicktype.com/ResolutionKit/ <comment><AUTHOR> I admire Apple, and I believe the world is a better place because of them. As a developer, I've made my career on their platform and I'm grateful for it. But I have some criticism. I'm _not_ here to talk about my story, the 30% Apple developer cut, the App Review process, or to challenge any of their guidelines. I want to talk about _transparency_ , and _accountability_.

For far too long, developers have been discouraged from being able to share their rejection stories with the world. "If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps", used to be the official guidance. The risk too great for most, the fear of retribution overwhelming. And so the stories have largely remained in the shadows, with only a few exceptions. But there's another, critical reason why such stories rarely see the light of day, one that hasn't received enough attention:

 _Apple is systematically erasing our stories._

Unless we're talking about your most recent submission, all communication you have _ever_ sent or received through the "Resolution Center" is inaccessible to you. Rejection notices, appeal results, anything you might want to reference to better understand previous about your product - it's all gone. Unless you have meticulously and manually kept copies of all correspondence, what happened in the past will forever stay in the past. But why should it?

It's not hard to see why Apple is doing this. It _is_ hard, however, to see a reason that benefits anyone but Apple. In doing so, they gain more peace of mind, less worry about consistency and correctness in applying the public guidelines. The appeal mechanism helps them improve, but only to the extent that Apple deems necessary. If we ever wanted to know how well Apple is enforcing the guidelines, we have to take their word for it. But who guards the guardians, when App Review's accountability to the world has been intentionally reduced to the bare minimum?

Transparency is not always the solution. We can't expect Apple to be open about their future product plans, for example. But when they communicate with developers, they should do so like everyone is watching - every time. And to get there, the _possibility_ that everyone might find out needs to always be on the table.

So Apple, please help us see App Review as a reliable ally. Let us access our past communications with you - including phone call records if we choose to. Show us that you want to be accountable for what you communicate to developers. There may be some legal challenges, but transparency is a prerequisite to accountability. It's only then that we can begin to have a fair and honest discussion with you about the actual process and guidelines. Because until then, we're in the shadows.

Sign the petition: [https://www.change.org/p/apple-let-us-browse-all-our-past- re...](https://www.change.org/p/apple-let-us-browse-all-our-past-resolution- center-communications)</comment>


Harrison Bergeron (& Activity) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron <comment><AUTHOR> HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year- old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.</comment>


Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://fc20.ifca.ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> > Financial Cryptography and Data Security is a major international forum for > research, advanced development, education, exploration, and debate regarding > information assurance, with a specific focus on commercial contexts. The > conference covers all aspects of securing transactions and systems. Original > works focusing on both fundamental and applied real-world deployments on all > aspects surrounding commerce security are solicited. Submissions need not be > exclusively concerned with cryptography. Systems security and > interdisciplinary works are particularly encouraged.</comment>


Supreme Court Justice John Roberts' Speech to His Son's Graduating Class - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/4845150/chief-justice-john-roberts-commencement-speech-transcript/ <comment><AUTHOR> From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don't take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you'll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they're going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.</comment>


33C3  Dreaming Machines - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7aB2khRKWY <comment><AUTHOR> The yearly cross-neuro-science stroll of yoscha.

Artificial Intelligence provides a conceptual framework to understand mind and universe in new ways, clearing the obstacles that hindered the progress of philosophy and psychology. Let us see how AI can help us to understand how our minds create the experience of a universe.

Unlike the machine learning systems of the past, minds are not just classifiers or policy optimizers. Minds are not accumulators of knowledge about the world. Minds are generative systems: they actively produce the world that we subjectively experience. Ordinary day-time experiences are in fact dreams constrained by sensory data. This simple insight of contemporary cognitive science turns realist notions of embodiment on their head. The idea of the brain as a dreaming machine opens a way to understand the nature of our experiences.

This is the proposed fourth installment of a series of presentations about using AI perspectives to understand minds and their relationship to the universe. "How to build a mind" (30c3) suggested specifications for an architecture of cognition; "From computation to consciousness" (31c3) explored the mind's computational foundations; "Computational metapsychology" (32c3) discussed the individual and social construction of meaning. "Machine dreams" sketches how the computational machinery of our brains leads to our experience a subjective world. We will look at the conductor theory of consciousness, some of the mental structures contributing to our models of self and world, and the unreasonable effectiveness of neural processes in modeling physics.</comment>


ARM1 Gate-level Simulation - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/28/arm1_visualized/ <comment><USER2> The actual simulation is at [http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html](http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html)

<comment><USER3> A (extremely terse, partial) description can be found at [http://www.righto.com/2016/02/reverse-engineering- arm1-proce...](http://www.righto.com/2016/02/reverse-engineering- arm1-processors.html)

<comment><USER4> I wrote several articles about the ARM1 when this simulator was released in 2015. A better article to start with is: [http://www.righto.com/2015/12/reverse-engineering- arm1-ances...](http://www.righto.com/2015/12/reverse-engineering- arm1-ancestor-of.html)

Dave Mugridge also wrote some articles about the ARM1, focusing more on the ALU and registers: [https://daveshacks.blogspot.com/2015/12/inside-alu-of- armv1-...](https://daveshacks.blogspot.com/2015/12/inside-alu-of-armv1-first- arm.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Within my lifetime, we went from CPUs that were simple enough we can now simulate them at the logic-gate level in ____ing Javascript to CPUs complex and powerful enough to emulate yesterday's mainstream CPUs at the ____ing logic-gate level in ____ing Javascript. I would not even be _that_ surprised if the result outperformed the the original hardware.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice! One thing though:

For [http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html](http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html), would be much nicer that dragging would pan rather than "3D rotate" the view. The panning with wasd is too slow and not compatible with some keyboard layouts.

And of course zooming around mouse cursor rather than around center of screen would also help to zoom towards the part you want.

The 3D rotation is gimmicky but not actually useful to see the gates, and the current UI just doesn't let me zoom to gates I want without spending too much effort fighting the slow panning and the zooming target.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER7> I had a question, the article states the following:

>"One very nice thing about the 32-bit instruction set is its pervasive conditional execution, which helps one avoid branching over code. For example, this sequence of instructions resets the register r0 to 0 if its value is equal to or less than zero, or forces its value to 1 if its value is greater than zero:

CMP r0, #0 ; if (r0 <= 0) MOVLE r0, #0 ; r0 = 0; MOVGT r0, #1 ; else r0 = 1

Without the conditional moves (MOVLE and MOVGT) after the compare (CMP), you'd have to branch after the compare, which is wasteful."

How are those those two conditional moves after the CMP operation more efficient than branching? Aren't they kind of branches themselves? What would the alternative "branching" sequence look like then?

<comment><USER8> It'd look something like

        cmp  r0,#0
        bgt  .1f
        mov  r0,#0
        b    .2f
      1:
        mov  r0,#1
      2:

The big deal is the conditional branch (the bgt). If the processor gets it wrong it's a pipeline flush. And best case you still have extra instructions for the branches. The conditional mov example is a fixed cost of a single "wasted" cycle, which matches the best case of the branching example (branch correctly predicted to mov r0,#1 and fall through). The worst case for the branching version is probably somewhere ~15 cycles depending on the uArch, but is still 1 cycle for the conditional move.

All of that being said, the branching version tends to be nicer for OoO cores since there aren't data dependencies on the flag registers any more, hence why you see RISC ISAs designed for OoO cores removing conditional execution for most instructions (AArch64 and RISC-V standout here).

<comment><USER9> In the ARM2 era (probably the same for ARM1?) a basic ALU instruction such as MOV took 1 cycle, and a branch took 4 (if taken) or 1 (if not). (There were extra DRAM page cycles every 4 words too)

So for a simple if/else, it was usually both less code and faster to use a straight line of conditional instructions. In more complicated cases, if the programmer was feeling clever, it was possible to update the status flags to get three-way (or more!) conditionals in straight-line branchless code. Fun!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article states:

>"The ARM2 had pretty much the same instruction set as the ARM1, although featured new multiplication and (later) atomic swap instructions."

Does this mean that the ARM1 didn't support any atomic operations or were they using something else besides "compare and swap"?

<comment><USER10> The ARM1 did not have any atomic operation. You only need those if you have more than one processor. It also lacked the multiply and multiply-accumulate instructions, as stated above. These took multiple cycles, which is not very RISC-like. That is also true of the load multiple and store multiple instructions of the ARM2 (I don't remember if the ARM1 had them). The ARM2 also added the coprocessor interface.

<comment><USER10> Oops - in the analysis of the PLA2 in the ARM1 there are both the load/store multiple instructions and the coprocessor stuff. In fact, together they take up about half of the logic. So I was remembering it wrong, then. [http://daveshacks.blogspot.com/2016/01/inside- armv1-instruct...](http://daveshacks.blogspot.com/2016/01/inside- armv1-instruction-decoding-and.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone else find it slightly entertaining that this is an article from a news outlet titled "The Register"?

<comment><USER5> I never thought about it, but now that you mention it, it _is_ a great name for an IT news site. ;-)</comment></comment>


Why Generation Y Is Unhappy? - <AUTHOR> http://brightside.me/article/why-generation-y-is-unhappy-11105/ <comment><USER2> I thought the last bit of the article had some useful advice:

1\. Stay wildly ambitious. The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success. The specific direction may be unclear, but it'll work itself out—just dive in somewhere.

2\. Stop thinking that you're special. The fact is, right now, you're not special. You're another completely inexperienced young person who doesn't have all that much to offer yet. You can become special by working really hard for a long time.

3\. Ignore everyone else. Other people's grass seeming greener is no new concept, but in today's image crafting world, other people's grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you'll never have any reason to envy others.</comment>


Google advances AI with 'one model to learn them all' - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/19/google-advances-ai-with-one-model-to-learn-them-all/ <comment><AUTHOR> One Model To Learn Them All

Deep learning yields great results across many fields, from speech recognition, image classification, to translation. But for each problem, getting a deep model to work well involves research into the architecture and a long period of tuning. We present a single model that yields good results on a number of problems spanning multiple domains. In particular, this single model is trained concurrently on ImageNet, multiple translation tasks, image captioning (COCO dataset), a speech recognition corpus, and an English parsing task. Our model architecture incorporates building blocks from multiple domains. It contains convolutional layers, an attention mechanism, and sparsely-gated layers. Each of these computational blocks is crucial for a subset of the tasks we train on. Interestingly, even if a block is not crucial for a task, we observe that adding it never hurts performance and in most cases improves it on all tasks. We also show that tasks with less data benefit largely from joint training with other tasks, while performance on large tasks degrades only slightly if at all.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.05137](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.05137)

EDIT:

And code:

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensor2tensor](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensor2tensor)</comment>


Why Sony did not invent the iPod (excerpt in comments) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7558a99e-f5ed-11e1-a6c2-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

"...Established companies in an industry are naturally resistant to disruptive innovation, which threatens their existing capabilities and cannibalises their existing products. A collection of all the businesses which might be transformed by disruptive innovation might at first sight appear to be a means of assembling the capabilities needed to manage change. In practice, it is a means of gathering together everyone who has an incentive to resist change.

"The executives of music companies, film studios and book publishers did not rush to embrace the opportunities offered by new channels of distribution. They saw these technological developments as threats to well established business models in which they had large personal and corporate investments. And they were right to think this. So convergence was accomplished by groups such as Apple and Amazon, which had no similar vested interests to oppose change, These companies succeeded precisely because they were outsiders.

"Economic growth is held back by industries where established interests are so powerful that disruptive innovation can be staved off for ever. Financial services is probably one. And education another. I think often of the contrast between the power of information technology to transform the process of learning, and the little progress that has been made towards actually doing so."</comment>


How "GPS data as a Service" will change the way location data is handled - <AUTHOR> As IOT and location based apps proliferate, the challenge of managing and utilising GPS data in a meaningful way assumes a lot of importance. The advent of API accessed mapping software such as Open Street, Google, MapQuest, etc., has revolutionized the way we use maps. A similar change is on its way as it relates to location based data.
Currently, app developers whether they be individuals or corporations manage GPS data generated by their solutions themselves. GPS data adds up very quickly. Indexing, storage, retrieval and real-time analytics and decisioning consume a lot of resources and require considerable expertise to manage the impact on system performance. Performance optimizations and scaling are huge challenges. The costs can really add up. This offers an opportunity for a specialized "GPS data as a Service" provider who can handle the large volumes of GPS data, index, store and allow for optimal retrieval, provide real-time analytics that can be used within apps (after all it's the analytics that matters not the data itself) and who offers value adds such as scheduling, queuing, auto-dispatch etc., based on the data analyzed.
Logistrics Services (www.logistricsservices.com) is the first of this kind of service and offers API's, libraries and tools to integrate location data and obtain insights and analytics in real-time that can help drive decisions within your apps.
We offer a free 14-day trial. Discover the power of "GPS data as a Service" today! <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.logistricsservices.com](http://www.logistricsservices.com)</comment>


Air pollution is sending tiny magnetic particles into your brain - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2104654-air-pollution-is-sending-tiny-magnetic-particles-into-your-brain/ <comment><AUTHOR> 'Traffic fumes go to your head. Tiny specks of metal in exhaust gases seem to fly up our noses and travel into our brains, where they may contribute to Alzheimer's disease. Iron nanoparticles were already known to be present in the brain – but they were thought to come from the iron naturally found in our bodies, derived from food. Now a closer look at their structure suggests the particles mostly come from air pollution sources, like traffic fumes and coal burning. The findings are a smoking gun, says Barbara Maher of Lancaster University in the UK.'</comment>


COCO – Common Objects in Context - <AUTHOR> http://cocodataset.org <comment><USER2> From "Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context" (2014) [https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0312](https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0312)

"We present a new dataset with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in object recognition by placing the question of object recognition in the context of the broader question of scene understanding.

This is achieved by gathering images of complex everyday scenes containing common objects in their natural context. Objects are labeled using per- instance segmentations to aid in precise object localization.

Our dataset contains photos of 91 objects types that would be easily recognizable by a 4 year old. With a total of 2.5 million labeled instances in 328k images, the creation of our dataset drew upon extensive crowd worker involvement via novel user interfaces for category detection, instance spotting and instance segmentation."</comment>


Bulk Collection of Signals Intelligence: Technical Options - <AUTHOR> http://www.nap.edu/catalog/19414/bulk-collection-of-signals-intelligence-technical-options

<comment><AUTHOR> _The Bulk Collection of Signals Intelligence: Technical Options study is a result of an activity called for in Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD-28), issued by President Obama in January 2014, to evaluate U.S. signals intelligence practices. The directive instructed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to produce a report within one year "assessing the feasibility of creating software that would allow the intelligence community more easily to conduct targeted information acquisition rather than bulk collection." ODNI asked the National Research Council (NRC) -- the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering -- to conduct a study, which began in June 2014, to assist in preparing a response to the President. Over the ensuing months, a committee of experts appointed by the Research Council produced the report._</comment>


Spamcop retiring webmail service - <AUTHOR> http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=14271

<comment><AUTHOR> Subject: Important Announcement about SpamCop Email Service Changes - <USER2> Required Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2014 21:46:21 -0400 (EDT) From: SpamCop Email <firstname.lastname@example.com> To: undisclosed-recipients:;

First of all, thank you for using SpamCop Email! We want to announce some important changes that will affect how you use your SpamCop Email account.

For over 12 years, Corporate Email Services has been partnering with SpamCop to provide webmail service with spam filtering via the SpamCop Email System for our users. Back then, spam filtering was rare. We heard story after story about how our service rescued people from unfiltered email. Nowadays, webmail service with spam filtering has become the norm in the general public. As such, the need for the webmail service with SpamCop filtered email has decreased.

Due to these reasons, we have decided to retire the SpamCop Email System and its webmail service; while SpamCop will continue to focus on providing the World's best spam reporting platform and blacklist for the community.

As of September 30, 2014 (Tuesday) 6pm ET, the current SpamCop Email service will be converted to email forwarding-only with spam filtered by SpamCop for all existing SpamCop Email users. Namely, all email received at a spamcop.net, cesmail.net, or cqmail.net address will be forwarded to your specified email address after spam filtering by SpamCop. You will be able to continue to use your email addresses like before, but you will need to read the email on your designated email account, instead of the SpamCop Email System webmail interface ([https://webmail.spamcop.net](https://webmail.spamcop.net)). If you are already forwarding your email elsewhere, it will continue to work just like before. If your email program is set to download your email from the SpamCop system, after you start forwarding your email elsewhere, you will need to update your email program to download from there. SpamCop will no longer provide IMAP or POP service.

Please be informed that you will continue to be able to submit spam to SpamCop via the "Report Spam" feature on spamcop.net, or forward your spam using your dedicated spam submission address shown on your SpamCop reporting account. Indeed, you are highly encouraged to do so as your spam report will not only help improve spam filtering for your email; it also helps SpamCop to fight spam for the World!

In the meantime, it is important for you to set up a forwarding address on your SpamCop Email account by September 30, 2014 (Tuesday) 6pm ET. Otherwise, any email sent to your spamcop.net, cesmail.net, or cqmail.net address will be dropped and not be delivered. To register a forwarding address, please login via [https://webmail.spamcop.net;](https://webmail.spamcop.net;) click "Options" > "SpamCop Tools".

If you have any further questions or concerns, please send them to email@example.com</comment>


YouView Internet TV service launches in UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18699924 <comment><USER2> They have spent $100Million (£70M) on this platform and while it is probably better than Google TV but its not going to have a major market impact (even in the UK) as a whole but it might have some nice features worth borrowing.

The main thing preventing it having an impact is that is essentially the wrong product. The market for >£200 digital boxes is just too small and completely dwarfed by the TV market. Samsung, LG, Sony and Panasonic will each sell many more TVs each year than the total size of the >£200 PVR market and even if only 30% connect to their Internet platforms they will all still be bigger platforms and more attractive to content than Youview (despite its greater flexibility).

The other problem is that Youview is two and half years late (originally named Project Canvas and planned for November 2009) and it has missed virtually the entire country completing the Digital Switchover (analogue switch off), 3 Christmas sales peaks, 1 World Cup (soccer) sales peak, 1 Euro Cup (soccer) sales peak and now will be going on sale at the exact time the Olmypics starts without the retailers having time to get ready. Also gadget spend is increasingly moving to tablets rather than TV boxes at the moment.

I also have very serious doubts about UK retailers ability to sell this. Most can't get TV aerial signals OR even Internet connections into the TV areas of their stores. Most PVR type products sit on shelves not connected to TVs and can't be demonstrated.

It has two chances of any traction: BT and Talk Talk, (significant Telcos) will use it for their TV platforms. Talk Talk hasn't even entered the market yet and BT has been trying for years almost giving away boxes with phone service but has little over half a million subs(may be slightly old figure) compared with 10M using Freeview (OTA), 10M using Sky (pay satellite) and 5M using Virgin (cable). If they make a competent go at the market and heavily subsidise it the total Youview platform could conceivably reach 1M.

The other chance it has is if a profile can be developed suitable for TVs (without HDD) and a major player in the TV market can be persuaded to include across their range they could really ramp up the numbers.</comment>


Early Facebook Employees Disavow Zuckerberg's Stance on Trump Posts - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/technology/facebook-trump-employees-letter.html <comment><USER2> Facebook's leadership must reconsider their policies regarding political speech, beginning by fact-checking politicians and explicitly labeling harmful posts.

As early employees on teams across the company, we authored the original Community Standards, contributed code to products that gave voice to people and public figures, and helped to create a company culture around connection and freedom of expression.

We grew up at Facebook, but it is no longer ours.

The Facebook we joined designed products to empower people and policies to protect them. The goal was to allow as much expression as possible unless it would explicitly do harm. We disagreed often, but we all understood that keeping people safe was the right thing to do. Now, it seems, that commitment has changed.

We no longer work at Facebook, but we do not disclaim it. We also no longer recognize it. We remain proud of what we built, grateful for the opportunity, and hopeful for the positive force it can become. But none of that means we have to be quiet. In fact, we have a responsibility to speak up.

Today, Facebook's leadership interprets freedom of expression to mean that they should do nothing — or very nearly nothing — to interfere in political discourse. They have decided that elected officials should be held to a lower standard than those they govern. One set of rules for you, and another for any politician, from your local mayor to the President of the United States. This exposes two fundamental problems:

First, Facebook's behavior doesn't match the stated goal of avoiding any political censorship. Facebook already is acting, as Mark Zuckerberg put it on Friday, as the "arbiter of truth." It monitors speech all the time when it adds warnings to links, downranks content to reduce its spread, and fact checks political speech from non-politicians.

This is a betrayal of the ideals Facebook claims. The company we joined valued giving individuals a voice as loud as their government's — protecting the powerless rather than the powerful.

Facebook now turns that goal on its head. It claims that providing warnings about a politician's speech is inappropriate, but removing content from citizens is acceptable, even if both are saying the same thing. That is not a noble stand for freedom. It is incoherent, and worse, it is cowardly. Facebook should be holding politicians to a higher standard than their constituents.

Second, since Facebook's inception, researchers have learned a lot more about group psychology and the dynamics of mass persuasion. Thanks to work done by the Dangerous Speech Project and many others, we understand the power words have to increase the likelihood of violence. We know the speech of the powerful matters most of all. It establishes norms, creates a permission structure, and implicitly authorizes violence, all of which is made worse by algorithmic amplification. Facebook's leadership has spoken with these experts, with advocates, and with organizers, yet they still seem committed to granting the powerful free rein.

So what do we make of this? If all speech by politicians is newsworthy and all newsworthy speech is inviolable, then there is no line the most powerful people in the world cannot cross on the largest platform in the world — or at least none that the platform is willing to enforce.

President Trump's post on Friday not only threatens violence by the state against its citizens, it also sends a signal to millions who take cues from the President. Facebook's policy allows that post to stand alone. In an age of live-streamed shootings, Facebook should know the danger of this better than most. Trump's rhetoric, steeped in the history of American racism, targeted people whom Facebook would not allow to repeat his words back to him.

It is our shared heartbreak that motivates this letter. We are devastated to see something we built and something we believed would make the world a better place lose its way so profoundly. We understand it is hard to answer these questions at scale, but it was also hard to build the platform that created these problems. There is a responsibility to solve them, and solving hard problems is what Facebook is good at.

To current employees who are speaking up: we see you, we support you, and we want to help. We hope you will continue to ask yourselves the question that hangs on posters in each of Facebook's offices: "What would you do if you weren't afraid?"

To Mark: we know that you think deeply about these issues, but we also know that Facebook must work to regain the public's trust. Facebook isn't neutral, and it never has been. Making the world more open and connected, strengthening communities, giving everyone a voice — these are not neutral ideas. Fact- checking is not censorship. Labeling a call to violence is not authoritarianism. Please reconsider your position.

Proceed and be bold.

Sincerely, some of your earliest employees:

Meredith Chin, Adam Conner, Natalie Ponte, Jon Warman, Dave Willner, on behalf of Ezra Callahan, Chris Putnam, Bob Trahan, Natalie Trahan, Ben Blumenrose, Jocelyn Blumenrose, Bobby Goodlatte, Simon Axten, Brandee Barker, Doug Fraser, Krista Kobeski, Warren Hanes, Caitlin O'Farrell Gallagher, Jake Brill, Carolyn Abram, Jamie Patterson, Abdus-Salam DeVaul, Scott Fortin, Bobby Kellogg, Tanja Balde, Alex Vichinsky, Matt Fernandez, Elizabeth Linder, Mike Ferrier, Jamie Patterson, Brian Sutorius, Amy Karasavas, Kathleen Estreich, Claudia Park</comment>


Short Film: Find my Phone – tracking down a thief - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpN9NzO4Mo8 <comment><USER2> Video Description:

>> "After my phone got stolen, I quickly realized just how much of my personal information and data the thief had instantly obtained. So, I let another phone get stolen. This time my phone was pre-programmed with spyware so I could keep tabs on the thief in order to get to know him. However, to what extent is it possible to truly get to know someone by going through the content of their phone?

In the Netherlands, 300 police reports a week are filed for smartphone-theft. Besides losing your expensive device, a stranger has access to all of your photos, videos, e-mails, messages and contacts.

Yet, what kind of person steals a phone? And where do stolen phones eventually end up?

The short documentary 'Find My Phone' follows a stolen phone's second life by means of using spyware.

Although you'll meet the person behind the theft up close and personal, the question remains: how well can you actually get to know someone when you base yourself on the information retrieved from their phone?"

</comment><comment><USER3> This is extremely interesting. I hope there will be a follow up soon, unless they already tore the phone in pieces.</comment>


Miracle Digital Hong Kong – Website Development - <AUTHOR> https://www.miracles.com.hk/ <comment><AUTHOR> At Miracle, Digital Marketing and Transformation Agency in Hong Kong, we help our clients improve digital services to make them simple, clear and fast. We help our client transform, create and improve their product in a digital way such as branding, web & app design, e-commerce solution, Digital Marketing strategy, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality(AR), SEO. We are experts in their fields and enjoy challenging work. We work together to share knowledge and build our capability to improve user experiences. This helps us work smarter and more effectively. We are confident, capable and committed. We nurture curiosity and encourage our people to keep learning. We have flexible work arrangements and a supportive environment. We help our people balance their whole life and be the best version of themselves. [https://www.miracles.com.hk/](https://www.miracles.com.hk/)</comment>


Possible universal cancer biomarker discovered (simple 10 minute test) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07214-w <comment><AUTHOR> TLDR: 10 Minute Cancer test

[https://www.natureasia.com/en/research/highlight/12801](https://www.natureasia.com/en/research/highlight/12801)

"Cancer: Detecting the presence of cancer cells Nature Communications

December 5, 2018 A test to detect cancerous cells, which can be performed in ten minutes, is presented in Nature Communications this week. The assay exploits the differences between the DNA in cancerous and healthy cells to allow for a quick, initial diagnosis.

The attachment of methyl groups to DNA (in a process called methylation) is genetically programmed. In all 'mature' human cells, DNA carries these modifications. The genomic information in cancer cells is significantly different from healthy cells, resulting in a different methylation level and pattern in most types of cancer cells.

Matt Trau and colleagues found that the different methylation landscape in cancer cells affects the physical and chemical properties of DNA. Amongst other features, it binds more strongly to gold nanoparticles and the authors used this behaviour to develop a test to detect cancer. The assay requires a tiny amount of purified genomic DNA from a patient and takes about ten minutes. The outcome of the test can be assessed with the naked eye. They tested their approach on over 100 human samples (genomic DNA from patients with cancer (72) and healthy individuals (31)) representing various cancer types.

At this stage, the assay can only detect the presence of cancer cells, not their type or the stage of the disease. Moving forward, the approach needs further testing with more samples and - possibly - refinement to allow for a more detailed analysis."</comment>


Ask HN: What you need to know to become a CTO? - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17eBWH-n4-Ap8_S59gpTKnWPLJDinbdw5Z1mFnkUcZSo/edit#gid=0 <comment><AUTHOR> Of course, there is nothing more valuable than real experience, but there is a ton of useful resources over the internet to help to become a CTO. Let's create together an amazing list of resources (blog posts, books, presentations, videos etc.) to help others to become a CTO/Technical Leader in a startup/company.

Please add your resources in comments or directly in google sheet ---> [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17eBWH-n4-Ap8_S59gpTK...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17eBWH-n4-Ap8_S59gpTKnWPLJDinbdw5Z1mFnkUcZSo/edit#gid=0)</comment>


Google says it fixed a lot of the security holes the CIA exploited - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2017/3/8/14864186/google-security-wikileaks-cia <comment><USER2> This is your father talking!

</comment><comment><USER2> Everybody's got something to say about poetry because rhymes peak in meaning shedding light on our unspeakables. For an ample example, take the other day when I sat not knowing how to write a poem and assuming I was fruitlessly booming the thin air, I yelled and spat my frustration: "How do I start?" And my dog looks up from her water dish and says, "I hate to encroach on your 'artistic space' 'cuz I know you're like 'in-the-zone' or whatever, but if you really want my advice, here it is," and then my dog says, "Poet, breathe now – because it's the last thing you'll ever do for yourself. Poet, breathe now because there's a fire inside you that needs oxygen to burn, and if you don't run out of breath, you're gonna run out of time. Poet, breathe now because once the spot gets packed you gotta save that air for screamin, your -- inhalation takes saviorisms to sky-highs you gotta go with the flowin' of your own voice. Poet, breathe now because once you spit, you won't even need air, you'll be rockin' rhymes respiratory, you'll breathe poetry, baby. You breathe now, and you'll never forget that breath. You got -- pulsasive passages passing the mic and hot hallelujahs when verses you write and your sin is your savior your song is your life and your words are like wonders to wandering fifes pipin' ceremony: poets, you're man, words your wife and your honeymoon orbits around your love like metronomic metros keepin' time to the heartbeat of your heavenly drums – Poet, breathe now because you might have something to say because peace might depend on your piece because you breathe and that air might help your brain tell your heart to keep pumping one more cycle and that blood might help your lips form one last word that hits the audience hard – because we are all made from the same elements and we all breathe the same air so celebrate our mutual recipes of existence by persisting to stay alive ducking sageless luckless ages like intellectual hippies! When you take a breath the universe rings out like circular beats – landing planets are seraphim storms are spit – stars are soulcandles! and you breathe like chest rebounds even when all hope seems lost our sounds pound mics like hope-stars like "we're still here" hollas! we make angels of our nightclubs, bards of our bums, outlooks of our outcasts and infinity of our sums, we are the children of empathy, the pathos of slums, we heal like helios like cyclical drums we enlist life from listless and sometimes even get things done Poet, breathe now because once you start your piece you can die behind that microphone and death may be breathless but poetry's deathless so breath be our savior eternal. Poets, breathe once with me now. That's one poem we all wrote.</comment>


FBI says a mysterious hacking group has had access to US govt files for years - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/fbi-flash-alert-hacking-group-has-had-access-to-us-govt-files-for-years <comment><AUTHOR> > The feds warned that "a group of malicious cyber actors," whom security > experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, > "have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government > and commercial networks" since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert > obtained by Motherboard.

> The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government > hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US > government's servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes > months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely > believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for more than a year > infiltrated the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management, or > OPM. In the process, they stole highly sensitive data about several millions > of government workers and even spies.</comment>


The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (1966) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ubu.com/film/duchamp_rebel.html <comment><USER2> For those interested, there's a book (which I haven't read yet) by Larry Witham titled Picasso and the Chess Player: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and the Battle for the Soul of Modern Art.

Editorial blurb:

"""

In the fateful year of 1913, events in New York and Paris launched a great public rivalry between the two most consequential artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The New York Armory Show art exhibition unveiled Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, a "sensation of sensations" that prompted Americans to declare Duchamp the leader of cubism, the voice of modern art.

In Paris, however, the cubist revolution was reaching its peak around Picasso. In retrospect, these events form a crossroads in art history, a moment when two young bohemians adopted entirely opposite views of the artist, giving birth to the two opposing agendas that would shape all of modern art.

Today, the museum-going public views Pablo Picasso as the greatest figure in modern art. Over his long lifetime, Picasso pioneered several new styles as the last great painter in the Western tradition. In the rarefied world of artists, critics, and collectors, however, the most influential artist of the last century was not Picasso, but Marcel Duchamp: chess player, prankster, and a forefather of idea-driven dada, surrealism, and pop art.

Picasso and the Chess Player is the story of how Picasso and Duchamp came to define the epochal debate between modern and conceptual art―a drama that features a who's who of twentieth-century art and culture, including Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol. In telling the story, Larry Witham weaves two great art biographies into one tumultuous century.

"""

</comment><comment><USER3> Sublime

</comment><comment><USER4> ubu is a great resource, thanks.</comment>


Anonymous' Letter to Westboro Church - <AUTHOR>

We, the collective super-consciousness known as ANONYMOUS - the Voice of Free Speech & the Advocate of the People - have long heard you issue your venomous statements of hatred, and we have witnessed your flagrant and absurd displays of inimitable bigotry and intolerant fanaticism. We have always regarded you and your ilk as an assembly of graceless sociopaths and maniacal chauvinists & religious zealots, however benign, who act out for the sake of attention & in the name of religion.
Being such aggressive proponents for the Freedom of Speech & Freedom of Information as we are, we have hitherto allowed you to continue preaching your benighted gospel of hatred and your theatrical exhibitions of, not only your fascist views, but your utter lack of Christ-like attributes. You have condemned the men and women who serve, fight, and perish in the armed forces of your nation; you have prayed for and celebrated the deaths of young children, who are without fault; you have stood outside the United States National Holocaust Museum, condemning the men, women, and children who, despite their innocence, were annihilated by a tyrannical embodiment of fascism and unsubstantiated repugnance. Rather than allowing the deceased some degree of peace and respect, you instead choose to torment, harass, and assault those who grieve.
Your demonstrations and your unrelenting cascade of disparaging slurs, unfounded judgments, and prejudicial innuendos, which apparently apply to every individual numbered amongst the race of Man - except for yourselves - has frequently crossed the line which separates Freedom of Speech from deliberately utilizing the same tactics and methods of intimidation and mental & emotional abuse that have been previously exploited and employed by tyrants and dictators, fascists and terrorist organizations throughout history.
ANONYMOUS cannot abide this behavior any longer. The time for us to be idle spectators in your inhumane treatment of fellow Man has reached its apex, and we shall now be moved to action. Thus, we give you a warning: Cease & desist your protest campaign in the year 2011, return to your homes in Kansas, & close your public Web sites. Should you ignore this warning, you will meet with the vicious retaliatory arm of ANONYMOUS: We will target your public Websites, and the propaganda & detestable doctrine that you promote will be eradicated; the damage incurred will be irreversible, and neither your institution nor your congregation will ever be able to fully recover. It is in your best interest to comply now, while the option to do so is still being offered, because we will not relent until you cease the conduction & promotion of all your bigoted operations & doctrines. The warning has been given. What happens from here shall be determined by you. <comment><USER2> Cool, but this won't stop these fanatics.</comment>


Here Are Twitter's Latest Rules for Fighting Hate and Abuse - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/here-are-twitters-latest-rules-for-fighting-hate-and-abuse <comment><AUTHOR> Techmeme summary: _Erin Griffith / Wired: Internal email details Twitter's plans to update rules on abuse, including expanding reporting options, hiding hate symbols behind warnings, more_

The email in full from the article:

        Dear Trust & Safety Council members,

        I'd like to follow up on Jack's Friday night Tweetstorm about upcoming policy and enforcement changes. Some of these have already been discussed with you via previous conversations about the Twitter Rules update. Others are the result of internal conversations that we had throughout last week.

        Here's some more information about the policies Jack mentioned as well as a few other updates that we'll be rolling out in the weeks ahead.

        Non-consensual nudity

            Current approach *We treat people who are the original, malicious posters of non-consensual nudity the same as we do people who may unknowingly Tweet the content. In both instances, people are required to delete the Tweet(s) in question and are temporarily locked out of their accounts. They are permanently suspended if they post non-consensual nudity again.
            Updated approach *We will immediately and permanently suspend any account we identify as the original poster/source of non-consensual nudity and/or if a user makes it clear they are intentionally posting said content to harass their target. We will do a full account review whenever we receive a Tweet-level report about non-consensual nudity. If the account appears to be dedicated to posting non-consensual nudity then we will suspend the entire account immediately.

        *Our definition of "non-consensual nudity" is expanding to more broadly include content like upskirt imagery, "creep shots," and hidden camera content. Given that people appearing in this content often do not know the material exists, we will not require a report from a target in order to remove it.

        *While we recognize there's an entire genre of pornography dedicated to this type of content, it's nearly impossible for us to distinguish when this content may/may not have been produced and distributed consensually. We would rather error on the side of protecting victims and removing this type of content when we become aware of it.

        Unwanted sexual advances

            Current approach *Pornographic content is generally permitted on Twitter, and it's challenging to know whether or not sexually charged conversations and/or the exchange of sexual media may be wanted. To help infer whether or not a conversation is consensual, we currently rely on and take enforcement action only if/when we receive a report from a participant in the conversation.
            Updated approach *We are going to update the Twitter Rules to make it clear that this type of behavior is unacceptable. We will continue taking enforcement action when we receive a report from someone directly involved in the conversation. Once our improvements to bystander reporting go live, we will also leverage past interaction signals (eg things like block, mute, etc) to help determine whether something may be unwanted and action the content accordingly.

        Hate symbols and imagery (new)*We are still defining the exact scope of what will be covered by this policy. At a high level, hateful imagery, hate symbols, etc will now be considered sensitive media (similar to how we handle and enforce adult content and graphic violence). More details to come.

        Violent groups (new)*We are still defining the exact scope of what will be covered by this policy. At a high level, we will take enforcement action against organizations that use/have historically used violence as a means to advance their cause. More details to come here as well (including insight into the factors we will consider to identify such groups).

        Tweets that glorify violence (new)*We already take enforcement action against direct violent threats ("I'm going to kill you"), vague violent threats ("Someone should kill you") and wishes/hopes of serious physical harm, death, or disease ("I hope someone kills you"). Moving forward, we will also take action against content that glorifies ("Praise be to for shooting up. He's a hero!") and/or condones ("Murdering makes sense. That way they won't be a drain on social services"). More details to come.

        We realize that a more aggressive policy and enforcement approach will result in the removal of more content from our service. We are comfortable making this decision, assuming that we will only be removing abusive content that violates our Rules. To help ensure this is the case, our product and operational teams will be investing heavily in improving our appeals process and turnaround times for their reviews.

        In addition to launching new policies, updating enforcement processes and improving our appeals process, we have to do a better job explaining our policies and setting expectations for acceptable behavior on our service. In the coming weeks, we will be:

            updating the Twitter Rules as we previously discussed (+ adding in these new policies)
            updating the Twitter media policy to explain what we consider to be adult content, graphic violence, and hate symbols.
            launching a standalone Help Center page to explain the factors we consider when making enforcement decisions and describe our range of enforcement options launching new policy-specific Help Center pages to describe each policy in greater detail, provide examples of what crosses the line, and set expectations for enforcement consequences
            Updating outbound language to people who violate our policies (what we say when accounts are locked, suspended, appealed, etc).

        We have a lot of work ahead of us and will definitely be turning to you all for guidance in the weeks ahead. We will do our best to keep you looped in on our progress.

        All the best,

        Head of Safety Policy</comment>


History of the browser user-agent string - <AUTHOR> https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ <comment><AUTHOR> And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en- US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.</comment>


PROPagate – a new code injection trick - <AUTHOR> http://www.hexacorn.com/blog/2017/10/26/propagate-a-new-code-injection-trick/ <comment><AUTHOR> PROPagate Code Injection Seen in the Wild Last year, researchers wrote about a new Windows code injection technique called PROPagate. Last week, it was first seen in malware:

This technique abuses the SetWindowsSubclass function -- a process used to install or update subclass windows running on the system -- and can be used to modify the properties of windows running in the same session. This can be used to inject code and drop files while also hiding the fact it has happened, making it a useful, stealthy attack.

It's likely that the attackers have observed publically available posts on PROPagate in order to recreate the technique for their own malicious ends.</comment>


CD-ROMs and iPads - <AUTHOR> http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2010/04/01/cd-roms-and-ipads/ <comment><USER2> Since the site is down:

cd-roms and ipads

Watching that $14 Elements demo for the iPad reminded me again of the throwaway line that geeks of a certain age make of the iPad — that it all seems a bit CD-ROM.

For those of you blessed with senile amnesia or youth, CD-ROMs were the first wave of "interactive media" in the mid-eighties, and the great hope for publishing houses struggling to understand what they might be doing in the 21st century. Companies from Dorling-Kindersley to News Corp threw millions into CD-ROM publishing, with very little ultimate return. They'd do some fancy-schmancy David Bowie joint project, or an incredibly complex animated re-working of their existing bestsellers. Each one won more awards than it sold copies, and eventually those "interactive divisions" were rolled into the "online media" departments, where their designers would get drunk and bitter, until one night they were sacked after uploading 640MB Adobe Director files onto the website front page.

look before you jump Back then, geeks were unused to other industry sectors barging into our little rustic byte farmyards with their fancy suits and corporate expense accounts, braying triumphantly about digital convergence, and then, seconds later, striding into the business-model threshing machine that thrummed in the corner. We did not know then that there was a queue of people like this, waiting to dance past us into the bloody knives. We watched their cockiness with alarm, not with the disdain that would come later (and definitely not with own brand of hubristic Internet rockstar smugness, the smugness that tempts us all to look a bit less closely at ourselves, and a bit more closely at that thresher).

No, back then it was all a bit shocking. We assumed these people knew what they were doing. God knows we knew we didn't have a clue. The only way we knew how to fill a CD-ROM was burning a complete archive of Fred Fish Amiga Freeware on it. Seven hundred megabytes just seemed an insanely large amount to want to fill with professional product.

Subsequent to the threshing, people muttered about how it was the Internet that killed the CD-ROM, but I think that, as ever, the real murderer was economics. A "professional" CD-ROM was just too expensive to produce, relative to the format it was generally parasitical upon.

The classic example for me was the brief phase of magazines including a free CD-ROM on the front of their mag. Dave and I would marvel at the incredible lopsided nature of this venture. The CD-ROM could hold close to a gigabyte of data, including programs, movies and graphics; all of which had to be commissioned, collated, edited, integrated together, checked for viruses, cleared for copyright, tested, mastered, and burned. If done welll, a front- mounted CD-ROM was clearly a far more complex and expensive venture than actually putting out a magazine — and yet they usually paid a single person to do it all, didn't charge for the CD, and probably got little advertising revenue from it.

The ultimate portrayal of this problem was when, in a desperate attempt to include some unique content, they'd include on the CD-ROM a PDF file of the magazine it was sellotaped to. The PDF would usually take 50MB, if they were lucky. All that unique content that it had taken the rest of the editorial team a month to create — and there was still 650MB to go.

Most started attempting to bridge that gap with incredibly fancy interactive environments that would quickly consumer their annual budget. The ones that survived would ultimately collapse into padding the CD-ROM out with… well, the Fred Fish Amiga Archive, generally. Professional product got thrown out of the window in an attempt to feed the ever-hungry maw of interactive content.

This, to me, is the flipside of the "digital technology makes everything cheaper" argument. It makes a lot of work cheaper, but it can also professional media fantastically more expensive than its analogue equivalents.

In some ways, the equivalent to a newspaper is just a README HTML file, full of plaintext with a few images — but no-one is going to pay a quid for a README file. So what will you pay a quid for? Maybe some other super-awesome interactive newspaper with 3D pictures and audio interviews and in-depth statistical analysis and a 30 minute vodcast with the most famous writers, and, and, and… how much editorial budget do you want to throw on this again?

Elements is going to do fantastically, because it benefits from that "fresh platform" smell that exudes from the iPad. But can you re-gear a newspaper or a publishing house to produce the level of interactive complexity that a $5 app is going to demand, when it is competing with games and films in the same app niche?

Honestly, it might be possible. We're not in the age of CD-ROMs now. Our price-points are all over the shop, and a sealed environment like the iPad permits all kinds of unnatural pricing inversions. We'll pay more for a ringtone than a full MP3. We pay $10 for a README file on our Amazon Kindle, and a dollar for a pocket application that plays farts.

But if you want to play that game, you're running against the clock. Other applications are going to make yours look ridiculously clumsy in a matter of months (honestly, in a year people will be amazed anyone paid $14 for a bunch of text, a rotating picture of a rock, and a quick Wolfram Alpha search). Plus the seals on that environment get corroded by open competition every day.

Often the solution to this problem really is to run away and hide. Don't listen to those "interactive media" gurus: stick with what you know. No-one demands now to know why their magazines don't have DVDs on the cover. When books have CD-ROMs or allied websites these days, they're usually buried at the back, hardly updated, and just contained the original text and some errata. We don't really care. It's okay. We just wanted a book. We love you as you are.

I know that publishing companies will be tempted to go for the all-singing, all-dancing iPad application. But what they're doing that, my suspicion is that what they're aiming for is a product which exudes credibility, status — an aura of a professional media product. And when you're spending the kind of money that a professional application requires, solely to improves your status in the world, you're not selling a product, you're buying the love of your audience. That may be an investment in credibility, but it's not an incoming revenue stream.

The goldrush economics of the iPad will hide this for a little while, because everything will be briefly profitable. But to be sustainable, you need to either be producing something that consistently costs you less than it earns, or will produce regular super-hits among a string of drabber products, or just makes you so much money in its first few months that you never need work again. You can't just make some single wonderful shiny demo product. You need to keep producing them; you need some way of economizing that process. And you need to stop others from making their shiny thing cheaper than, yet interchangeable with, yours. Otherwise you're just throwing nice fancy gee- gaws into the thresher's hungry mouth.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the transcript. I remember back in the early 90s reading an interview of some Sci-Fi author (William Gibson I think, but I'm not 100% sure) where he derided the Internet for not being up to par with CD-ROM's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the best argument I've read for why the iPad simply can't succeed as (and wasn't designed to be) a consumption-only device. Indeed, content that exists only as an update of the "multimedia book" CD-ROM is going to face the same problems now as it did then.

The sustainable successes on the iPad will be apps that enable users to organize, create, record, learn, practice, share, and play.</comment>


U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government Made News To Americans - <AUTHOR> http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/12/us_backs_off_propaganda_ban_spreads_government_made_news_to_americans

<comment><USER2> > In Somalia, for instance, VOA serves as counterprogramming to outlets > peddling anti-American or jihadist sentiment. "Somalis have three options > for news," the source said, "word of mouth, Al-Shabaab or VOA Somalia."

Wow. Just wow.

As a Somali, living in Somaliland, I'm calling them out. That's a lie.

First of all, the BBC Somali broadcast is far more popular than the VOA. The VOA's Somali broadcast comes out an hour ahead of the BBC and people still wait for the BBC to hear the news.

Secondly, there are other sources of news than word of mouth and Al-Shabab, unless you consider local newspapers, internet news sites, radio station and T.V. stations either word of mouth or outlets of Al-Shabab news.

Makes me want to tell people to not listen to the VOA ever again.

</comment><comment><USER3> I need to make a note not to click on ForeignPolicy links. Their page-blocking sign-in is so massively annoying.

<comment><USER4> Very annoying. They sometimes have interesting content, though. You can just disable javascript, or remove the layer with Firebug.

Also, here's the copy for anyone else fighting with it:

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?

Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It's viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran; self-immolation in Tibet; human trafficking across Asia; and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.

The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 70s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they "should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics." Fulbright's amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky who argued that such "propaganda" should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. "from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity."

Zorinsky and Fulbright sold their amendments on sensible rhetoric: American taxpayers shouldn't be funding propaganda for American audiences. So did Congress just tear down the American public's last defense against domestic propaganda?

BBG spokeswoman Lynne Weil insists BBG is not a propaganda outlet, and its flagship services such as VOA "present fair and accurate news."

"They don't shy away from stories that don't shed the best light on the United States," she told The Cable. She pointed to the charters of VOA and RFE: "Our journalists provide what many people cannot get locally: uncensored news, responsible, discussion, and open debate."

A former U.S. government source with knowledge of the BBG says the organization is no Pravda, but it does advance U.S. interests in more subtle ways. In Somalia, for instance, VOA serves as counterprogramming to outlets peddling anti-American or jihadist sentiment. "Somalis have three options for news," the source said, "word of mouth, Al-Shabaab or VOA Somalia."

This partially explains the push to allow BBG broadcasts on local radio stations in the United States. The agency wants to reach diaspora communities, such as St. Paul Minnesota's significant Somali expat community. "Those people can get Al-Shabaab, they can get Russia Today, but they couldn't get access to their taxpayer-funded news sources like VOA Somalia," the source said. "It was silly."

Lynne added that the reform has a transparency benefit as well. "Now Americans will be able to know more about what they are paying for with their tax dollars - greater transparency is a win-win for all involved," she said. And so with that we have the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which passed as part of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, and went into effect this month.

But if anyone needed a reminder of the dangers of domestic propaganda efforts, the past 12 months provided ample reasons. Last year, two USA Today journalists were ensnared in a propaganda campaign after reporting about millions of dollars in back taxes owed by the Pentagon's top propaganda contractor in Afghanistan. Eventually, one of the co-owners of the firm confessed to creating phony websites and Twitter accounts to smear the journalists anonymously. Additionally, just this month, The Washington Post exposed a counter propaganda program by the Pentagon that recommended posting comments on a U.S. website run by a Somali expat with readers opposing Al- Shabaab. "Today, the military is more focused on manipulating news and commentary on the Internet, especially social media, by posting material and images without necessarily claiming ownership," reported The Post.

But for BBG officials, the references to Pentagon propaganda efforts are nauseating, particularly because the Smith-Mundt Act never had anything to do with regulating the Pentagon, a fact that was misunderstood in media reports in the run-up to the passage of new Smith-Mundt reforms in January.

One example included a report by the late Buzzfeed reporter Michael Hastings, who suggested that the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act would open the door to Pentagon propaganda of U.S. audiences. In fact, as amended in 1987, the act only covers portions of the State Department engaged in public diplomacy abroad (i.e. the public diplomacy section of the "R" bureau, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors.)

But the news circulated regardless, much to the displeasure of Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), a sponsor of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. "To me, it's a fascinating case study in how one blogger was pretty sloppy, not understanding the issue and then it got picked up by Politico's Playbook, and you had one level of sloppiness on top of another," Thornberry told The Cable last May. "And once something sensational gets out there, it just spreads like wildfire."

That of course doesn't leave the BBG off the hook if its content smacks of agitprop. But now that its materials are allowed to be broadcast by local radio stations and TV networks, they won't be a complete mystery to Americans. "Previously, the legislation had the effect of clouding and hiding this stuff," the former U.S. official told The Cable. "Now we'll have a better sense: Gee some of this stuff is really good. Or gee some of this stuff is really bad. At least we'll know now."</comment>


New Apple Privacy Policy - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-requests/

<comment><AUTHOR> "On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8."</comment>


Made in NY Fellowships for Media Tech Startups - <AUTHOR> http://nymediacenter.com/2015/08/apply-for-the-made-in-ny-fellowships/

<comment><AUTHOR> The Made in NY Media Center by IFP partnered with The Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment to offer TEN one-year Made in NY Fellowships to NYC based individuals, small businesses, and non-profit organizations from varied Media + Tech backgrounds in order to recognize that different experiences, perspectives, and cultures are critical to advancements in innovation and creativity.

Made in NY Fellows will receive a 12 month Incubator Membership at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP, mentorship by industry leaders and knowledgeable IFP staff, access to IFP classes, networking events, facilities and more.</comment>


SlashdotMedia/SourceForge.net issues fair processing notice - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashdotmedia.com/privacy-statement/ <comment><AUTHOR> The body of the email sent to me:

2016-03-14

Dear Site User,

Fair processing notice - Data Protection Act 1998

We are writing to let you know that with effect from 27 January 2016, the Slashdot Media business, which provides online services through various web sites including Slashdot.org and SourceForge.net (the "Slashdot Media Services") has been purchased by SourceForge Media LLC of 1660 Logan Avenue, San Diego, California, 92113, USA ("we" or "us").

As a result your personal data have been transferred to us and will be used in connection with the continued provision of the Slashdot Media Services to you. Your personal data will continue to be processed fairly and lawfully in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 for the same purposes as those it was originally collected by Dice Career Solutions Inc and/or eFinancialCareers Limited including to:

* continue to provide you with information (by electronic means or otherwise) about other services we offer that are similar to those that you have already received or enquired about; * carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us; * provide you with the information and services you request from us; * tell you about changes to the Slashdot Media Services; and * ensure that the content made available through the Slashdot Media Services is presented in the most effective manner for you and your device.

Further information on how your personal data may be processed, who it may be disclosed to and how it will be stored can be found in the Slashdot Media Services privacy policy available at: [http://www.slashdotmedia.com/privacy- statement/](http://www.slashdotmedia.com/privacy-statement/)

You can ask us to remove all your account data, stop processing your personal data and to stop contacting you for marketing purposes at any time. * For SourceForge.net, please contact us at firstname.lastname@example.com * For Slashdot, please contact us at email@example.com * For FreeCode, please contact us at firstname.lastname@example.com * For SlashdotMedia.com, please contact us at email@example.com

Please let us know if you have any queries. Yours sincerely, Logan Abbott The team at SourceForge Media LLC</comment>


ShowHN: LoveThisSong, insta-share your songs from iPhone to Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://lab.welaika.com/post/36658905097/a-matter-of-love When it comes to music, it's always a matter of love. Some songs speak so perfectly about what we are and what we feel, that we are bound to them as if we were their authors.
The iPod changed the way we listen to music. Its shuffle mode surprises us with the right song at the right time, and it often seems like magic.
In those moments, you want to share your feelings with friends you care about the most, but sometimes it can be hard.
You are probably hung in a crowded train and you are using your iPhone with just one hand. You want your friends to listen to the whole song you're listening to, and the best way to do this is by sharing the YouTube video on Facebook. This can be hard. You need to type, to scroll and a read a list on a small screen, to tap, and tap, and tap again.
Or you can use Love This Song!.
Screenshot of Love This Song!
Love This Song! is an iPhone app that makes this all simpler and more beautiful. As soon as you open it, you see the videos of the song you're listening to. Each video is shown full screen, so you don't have to squint to read the title or to see the thumbnail. You can play the videos, and when you decide to share one of them, you just have to double tap the Love This Song! huge magenta button (patent pending) and you're done.
If you feel like doing it, you can write a message and publish it with the video, by just tapping once the button.
Try it now: it's simple, it's beautiful, it's free. <comment><USER2> It's a cool iPhone app for music lover and for people used to share music on Facebook.

Worth a try.</comment>