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UC Berkeley was where the free speech era ended, in the Berkeley Anti-Speech Riots of 2017. The whole world saw it happen. So did the grandparent poster. So did you.

Berkeley's stand on free speech today?

"If your perceived definition of violence is limited to the confines of physical contact, that's probably because you've never had to experience the psychological trauma that comes along with being a Black person in America," declares Shelby Mayes, who serves as Membership Development Director for the BSU, in an op-ed for The Daily Californian. "I didn't need to be physically harmed to feel violated by my school [on September 14]."

Source: The Daily Cal, "Campus stance on free speech facilitates trauma against Black students"

Unions sometimes have weird affiliations. For instance, when graduate students at the University of California organized, they formed a local of the United Auto Workers.

Student workers reach agreement with UC

If you enjoy watching a big liberal-on-liberal cat fight, there is nothing better than Union vs. University.

A lot of people use the word "liberal" when they really mean "leftist". There's a big difference. Liberals believe in free speech. They might disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it. http://liberalismunrelinquished.net

Leftists will happily censor you and will engage in violence should you persist in speaking. See Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor who wrote in the New York Times defending the idea of speech as violence.

Speech that offends campus activists is actually violence, and we've seen activists use actual violence to stop it - and to defend this as self-defense - when administrators fail to do so. http://www.dailycal.org/2017/02/07/violence-self-defense/

Try again

http://www.dailycal.org/2017/1...

And the ACLU *used to* fight legal battles on their behalf, arguing that they had a right to march just as much as anyone else. How times have changed, eh?

See, for example, a statement made by a protester at UC Berkeley in January 2017 at a protest event that turned into a violent riot: "Your free speech is raping and killing us."

The smashing, violence, and beatings is overwhelmingly coming from the left. That's how it's been for many years.

I have to agree. My personal theory is that many of the violent people have convinced themselves that their political enemies are in fact bad people and "fair game" for anything. It goes like this: It's okay to punch a Nazi; conservatives are all Nazis... and then comes the punching.

Here is a web page linking multiple articles arguing that the violence used to prevent Milo Yiannopolous from speaking at Berkeley was justified. "Violence helped ensure safety of students" is a real headline. There was also this quote: "...some white nationalists got their ***** beat." (Just like the Nazi thing above, only this time using "white nationalist".
  Someone who wanted to hear Milo speak --> white nationalist --> someone it's okay to send to the hospital.)

http://www.dailycal.org/2017/02/07/violence-self-defense/

Also, the media coverage may tend to embolden these people. The people who smash things, light things on fire, and send people to the hospital are described as "protesters". The people who wanted to hear Milo speak are described as "alt-Right extremists". I don't want to overstate the contribution of the media but I think it's a part.

Personally I think that the correct remedy for bad speech is counter-speech. Violence isn't acceptable to prevent speech, even if you really disagree.

Look what happens on the college campuses - no one gets arrested for the violence

False. http://www.dailycal.org/2017/0...

https://www.insidehighered.com...

http://komonews.com/news/local...

Liberal media pretty much ignoring the violent left protests

Also false. See prior links.

Politicians regularly using heated rhetoric

Like how Trump endorsed violence throughout his campaign?

It was a thing at the time to blame the riots on secret right-wingers who came to campus to make Berkeley look bad. LOL no. It as another thing to say that the students didn't support the riots. LOL no. Here's a bunch of op eds in the school newspaper from students condoning the Berkeley violence. They call it "self-defense". A direct quote: "Your free speech is raping and killing us."

Funny how the police can reasonably make that determination when they didn't bother to arrest anyone.

What you are saying is a lie. You can use google to search these things; you simply don't do so.

This person (allegedly) killed one woman and wounded another, but Berkeley is mad because the media keeps using the "wrong" pronoun for "they"?

http://www.berkeleyside.com/20...

http://www.dailycal.org/2017/0...

Criticizing Sharia is 'hate speech,' Georgetown students say "My critique of these speakers is not an effort to silence free speech," but only that "these speakers are not exercising free speech, they are exercising hate speech, a speech of the kind that no organization, especially at Georgetown, should endorse or give a platform to."

http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=8842
http://georgetownvoice.com/2017/02/25/upcoming-campus-speakers-fuel-anti-muslim-rhetoric/
"I for one, reject and condemn any organization that hides behind the righteous principles of free speech,"

Here's a bunch of op eds from students supporting the Berkeley Anti-Free Speech Riot of 2017: http://www.dailycal.org/2017/02/07/violence-self-defense/

We need to ramp up reverse retaliation on stupid people 100x fold to stop shit like this

It's not stupid people .. it's fearful people.

Just look at the number of people in the US who have been kicked off a flight or pulled up for interrogation just because they spoke Arabic or "looked like a certain way".

This is the last one that I heard about UC Berkeley student questioned, refused service after speaking Arabic on flight

What do you mean by "further subsidized education". At least in California we've seen a massive de-subsidization of public education.

http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/1...
"The mitochondrial dysfunction identified in the JAMA study I've been talking about is ultimately only one downstream symptom of many upstream causes. Other researchers have found systemic inflammation,(ix) brain inflammation,(x) gut inflammation,(xi) elevated levels of toxins and metals, gluten and casein antibodies,(xii) nutrient deficiencies including omega-3 fats,(xiii) vitamin D,(xiv) zinc, and magnesium, and collections of metabolic dysfunction related to quirky genes that make it difficult to perform chemical reactions essential for health in the body such as methylation and sulfation.(xv)
    The take home message here is that the answer to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders will not be found in one of these factors, but in all of them taken together in varying degrees in each individual. There is no such thing as "autism." Rather there are "autisms"--different patterns of biological dysfunction unique to each child that result in multiple insults to the brain that all manifest with symptoms we call autism."

Also:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://www.dailycal.org/2014/0...
"To further validate their theories, the researchers cited a study involving Somali mothers, who naturally absorb less sunlight due to their dark skin pigmentation. When they moved north to Stockholm, a less-sunny region, they were found to be 4.5 times more likely to have autistic children, compared to the the country's lighter-skinned natives."

Also may help:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/chil...

Good luck!

same guy sent a COP over to a REPORTERS house at MIDNIGHT because he was worried about a story which was about to run.

http://www.dailycal.org/2012/03/10/berkeley-police-chief-sends-officer-to-reporters-home/

Berkeley Police Chief Michael Meehan ordered a sergeant to the home of a reporter around 12:45 a.m. Friday to request changes to a story that Meehan felt inaccurately portrayed him, media outlets reported this weekend.

From the article

Meehan has since apologized for his actions Thursday night...

Probably by sending a SWAT team to the editor's house.

And this went down about 2 months ago. One fuckup we can forgive as long as they learn their lesson. Two blatant abuses of power in 2 months. Of course the City Manager takes the chief of police to task over something like this, she doesn't want to get shot during a routine traffic investigation. How the fuck do we let assholes like them run our cities?

same guy sent a COP over to a REPORTERS house at MIDNIGHT because he was worried about a story which was about to run.

http://www.dailycal.org/2012/03/10/berkeley-police-chief-sends-officer-to-reporters-home/

Berkeley Police Chief Michael Meehan ordered a sergeant to the home of a reporter around 12:45 a.m. Friday to request changes to a story that Meehan felt inaccurately portrayed him, media outlets reported this weekend.

Yep - and we can burn our official flag, too. Although nobody does it anymore - once it was declared legal the act lost all of its shock value.

People still do it. The news just doesn't have an orgasm about it.

http://blog.dailycal.org/photo/2009/09/14/flag-burning/
http://www.inlandnewstoday.com/story.php?s=10259
http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2009/09/flag_burning_at_westlake.php

Well, there are clear laws in place stating that no person is to be owned by another. That includes, but is not limited to, the government owning the people. Self-ownership may not be the perfect term to refer to my refusal to be apart of mandatory flu vaccines (Which many in government now support, including Obama, in the wake of the over-hyped H1N1 flu), but it's a lot clearer what I mean than when I say self-determination.

Los Angeles has been discussing banning fast food restaurants for a few years. Here's an older article. And here's some push back. The only reason I chose that as an example is I recently saw an article about the ban's latest progress. (I thought it was on Opposing Views, but I can't find it.) And it illustrates how the cost of American health care is turning into a battle over what I personally choose to consume -- my two points being mandatory (potentially deadly, poorly tested) vaccines, and a potential for mandatory abstinence from trans-fat, which I do choose to consume lightly.

Health freedom is almost as popular as freedom itself. Maybe I'll make this my sig.

Too true. The guy responsible had nothing on the stuff college folks do.

I heard it on NPR months ago. And Here is a link to an article in the Daily Californian from August 12, 2004 (which I will admit says the search may be in vain).

Uh, the Delta-32 variant of the CCR5 receptor is believed to have become fixed in the population about 700 years ago. The common wisdom is that the mutation became fixed in European populations as a result of the Black Death--against which it also confers immunity. Some are now arguing that the mutation became widespread in Europe not because of the plague but because of smallpox.

What is interesting about the Chinese woman isn't that she is unique, but that she is the one of the few non-Europeans known to possess the mutation.

BTW, individuals don't evolve, populations do. Individuals mutate.

Now how is this really different from IBM's project?

A skeptic might think that IBM simply want to have a foot in the door of these big anarchic distributed projects.

Despite the stunning power available to this kind of distributed computing, it is less useful than it appears. In my research area (computational biology), the effort of parallelizing an algorithm and collating the results is seldom worth the dividend in speedup. Supercomputers generally run idle at most universities, for this very reason.

Folding@home was a nice success story, and there are further applications of those models, e.g. simulations of prion aggregation (mad cow disease, Alzheimer's, etc). But (IMO) this is the exception, rather than the rule. Anyone who thinks that parallelization is a quick & easy panacea to difficult computational problems in general is living in a dream world (and I say that as a proud owner of several Macs with parallelized RISC CPUs *and* go-faster stripes).

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard these cheap parallelization ideas floated (another example is building cheap clusters out of console hardware which I reckon I first heard in 1996!). And every other month someone offers me supercomputer time... the problem is in redesigning the algorithm to work in parallel. Certain algorithms, such as MCMC, are better suited to this treatment than others.

Of course, then you have to persuade a bunch of other scientists that Your Algorithm is the most deserving, which is a political issue (but hey, if it saves those CPUs from being used for the eminently futile task of looking for bug-eyed aliens, maybe it's a good thing...)

Actually, there's some new technology out here that will automate the rendering, or so they say:

linky

I thought the majority of mass was getting us up to orbital velocity? Going straight up and back down is a lot easier

Well, ya, but the purpose of the velocity to begin with is to get beyond the majority of gravity. 25k footpounds I believe. If you want to get a satalite to orbital velocity, it is much cheaper to do so once it is in orbit, free of 98% of the earth's gravity than it is to do this along the way.

Haul it up to 36k feet, and then it takes a relatively trivial amount of energy to get it to a speed for orbit, since it isn't fighting a stronger force (gravity) at the same time. Also, if you are patient, and can take a week or a month to get the unit up to speed, it will take a very small engine (ie: efficient) to build up the necessary speed.

Also, for probes headed toward the moon/mars/space, orbital speed may not be a factor, except as needed to 'slingshot' the unit. IAMARS (i am not a rocket scientist) but it seems to me that you would have to save 70% of the energy needed by going to 36k km slowly, then positioning. The most important feature is that not only do you save the weight of the extra fuel, but you also the save the extra fuel needed to move that extra fuel. It may actually be more than 70% of the fuel.

Another interesting question: What fuel is used for getting the unit into space (36k km) to begin with: To power the elevator? Obviously it will not be rocket fuel. The cool thing is, if they used technology that harnesses ocean waves then they would not need oil generation units :D Since they talked about putting this platform deep in the pacific ocean, this would be a perfect place to test and perfect this technology.

The secondary benefits of this space elevator could eventually be greater than just cheaper satalite launches.

Not so fast. I'm willing to bet that an overwhelming majority of the artists that the RIAA "represents" are against this whole "let's sue our fans" thing. Michael Jackson spoke out and denounced the RIAA's actions, yet I remember seeing several of his songs listed in a subpoena. Dashboard Confessional also thanked their fans for sharing their music, but I don't know what label they're on (I have heard them on Clear Channel and MTV). Remember, this is a fight against the LABELS, not the artists, and NOT the RIAA (without the labels there would be no RIAA, but there would still be artists.)

I wrote a story about this 18 months ago here.

Producing ethanol from corn requires burning double the amount of gasoline already used in cars, according to a study conducted by UC Berkeley professor Tad Patzek and his freshman seminar of nine students. Source Daily California 6/10/2003

An engineering professor at UC Berkeley created a project that uses video cameras to track the position of fish in a tank, then a projector projects onto a nearby wall what the view looks like from one of the fish.

Pretty slick combination of engineering and art.

I had the opportunity to meet and interview Clarke when he came to my school last year to give a speech as part of a post-9/11 outreach program to CS faculties around the nation. (In fact, I wrote an article about it for our school newspaper, if you're interested.) He really handled himself well. The crowd was more or less 100% engineering and CS faculty, grad students, and the type of smart undergrads that would actually care about such a thing, in other words a tough crowd to play to. And I think everyone was a pretty skeptical at the outset that any government official would know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to IT policy, so-called "cybersecurity" (blech), and such. But he did! After he spoke he gave about a 40 minute Q&A where people asked him all sorts of tough and sometimes really esoteric questions concerning software patents, the DMCA, network security, hell, something about quantum computing even came up. His knowledge was impressive and, even more heartening, when he didn't know the answer he just said so rather than bullshitting. All in all I left with a good feeling that this guy was the White House's go-to man for IT policy and would be protecting our computers from the terrorists. Now it sounds like he got fired because he wasn't quite fascist enough for the Bushies, which is really depressing. Guess I should have seen it coming all along.

According to Rabaey, each node in the picoradio network will draw no more than 100 microwatts of power, three orders of magnitude less than 802.11b's 300 milliwatts. The benefits of such a low power network are obvious: no batteries are needed because each node can harvest all the energy it needs from its environment.

As a current student in Professor Rabaey's classes, I can say that his ideas are pretty damn cool when he explains it in his own way.

Sure, it's neat that his nodes will need no energy because it "harvests" energy from it's environment.

Development is actually going on so that the "harvesting" actually comes from the natural vibration of a wall! [site: dailycal.org]

So what do you get, a bunch of folks each developing their own thing:
nodes the size of a button that you just stick on the wall and it just works.

Pin-and-Play anyone?

(infomercial voice)Set it and forget it!

I just got out of a libel workshop on Friday for the newspaper I write for with our libel lawyer and ... let me tell you ... /. is going to get absolutely nailed sooner or later if they continue to print what are essentially lies accusing other entities of breaking the law.

Next time you are reading the newspaper or watching television news, take notice of how criminals are described. No one ever committed a crime, he was "alleged to have ..." If a man is convicted, sentenced to die, and executed, he did not "murder his wife," he "was convicted of murdering his wife" (actually, for dead people the rules are much more lax, but you get the point.) You never state as fact something which is not absolutely, completely, 100% provable; if you do, you've just opened yourself up to huge liability. And printing a correction/"Update: 03/03 05:10 GMT by T:" does emphatically not get you out of the doghouse. This is basic knowledge of libel law that every journalist should know and /. apparently does not. BTW tabloids are in no way exempt from this law, so don't say /. is acting like a tabloid. All the stories that tabloids are running are more or less factual if they are being written about other people. The art of gossip tabloid writing, actually, is in really pushing the edge of the law without actually being libelous/slanderous. They are very good at it. Also, you get a little more leeway when it comes to public figures, politicians, rock stars, etc. You do not get more leeway when it comes to "Joe Blow, co-developer on the Morpheus project".

With that in mind, I think a story entitled "MusicCity's Morpheus violating GPL" speaks for itself. I am surprised that the council for /.'s parent company really hasn't come down harder on them for these shenanigans, which appear to be occuring with increasing frequency.

ha ha... I think they're swamped because Drudgereport.com is pointing everyone to read this article!! : U.C. Berkeley students watched as instructor had sex at strip club, participated in orgy...

As I mentioned yesterday, there's an updated Daily Cal article here.

Kevin Fox

See the article in Berkeley's Daily Cal rag. Sounds like they're just following the precedent set by the original announcements from MIT, etc.

Breaking news today: Regents of the University of California refuse to block Napster at any of the nine UC campuses.

Kevin Fox

UC Berkeley will announce whether or not it will ban Napster sometime today (Friday)

Check www.dailycal.org for details

-Iso aka solaar

Labels which imply a value judgement must be completely avoided: the definition of "obscene" depends entirely on who you are. Definitions of Mild, Explicit etc. need to be commonly understood from an openly published and clearly precise set of guidelines.

My point is that even fairly reasonable people may honestly believe they are applying objective criteria, when in fact, different people will see things differently. To use the racism example, a recent article in the Daily Cal quoted a black high school student saying something derogatory about the "white kids" at her school. It was mild, but a reader wrote in to comment on the fact that this was accepted but if the races had been reversed, it would have been labeled as racist.

I'm not saying that the lines are vague. I'm saying that there are many categories where one person will be 100% sure something should be labeled one way, and another person, also fairly rational, will be 100% sure it should be labeled otherwise. And these are frequently the criteria that would be most relevant to blocking. Everyone will have similar opinions about whether a page is about cars or computers. People will not have similar ideas about whether a page is "explicit", whether a given JPEG is art or pornography, or whether a page promotes drugs. Is Naked Lunch literature or pornography? How about Anne Rice's Exit to Eden with content as explicit as what you would find on the newsgroups, but also literary value as commentary on the impossibility of finding real gratification in debauchery (but much more so the former than the latter)?

This is why we need many moderators, and the ability to define your own effective moderation as a function of all the moderations.

--Kevin