It's because iOS 11 has "Smart Punctuation" enabled by default. That replaces ' and " with the curly versions. Since the curly versions are unicode chars above U+0080 Slashdot displays them incorrectly.
"And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip and shall cry, 'Unclean, unclean.'
Maybe Apple are so patriotic that They feel their users ought to imitate the US Constitution's seemingly Random capitalisation of Diverse and Sundry words.
Normally these edge cases would be socially isolated and unable to cause trouble, but when they find each other online they can form a mob, and a motivated mob (whether rational or not) is a force. It's a case of the organised and passionate minority overpowering the disorganised and ambivalent majority.
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.
"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."
As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. "In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks."
The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled "Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities."
An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.
You can imagine this being the mechanism that totalitarian movements - Communists, Nazis, Islamists etc - take over once they hit 10% of the population. Well that, and violence or threats of violence against their critics.
If I do a search for "How Podesta got hacked" every article I find says it was because he clicked that bit.ly link to the.tk address controlled by the spearfishers. And then typed his password into a page that looked like Google.
To the IT team's credit, they did send along a legitimate Google link - not the original phishing email's bit.ly link - to change Podesta's password and instructed him to add two factor-authentication to his account for an added level of password security. But the legitimate Google link didn't seem to make it to Podesta, and instead he must have used the "poisoned link," giving his password to hackers and opening up his personal email to unwelcomed eyes.
They didn't spot the bit.ly link or if they did they didn't mention. They did send a legitimate Google link, but they didn't point out the link in the original email - a bit.ly link that went to a.tk address - was obviously a phishing attempt. That's not a typo, it's a massive fuck up.
Why you think the location of the server being in a datacenter vs a basement is a tell for how stupid you are. It comes down to who is administrating it, not it's fucking Internet pipe or power failure resiliency.
Well if you've worked in a big organisation, you'd know that running your own server at home is verboten because people who run their own servers take shortcuts administering them and risk getting hacked. Organisations have policy on security and as soon as you run a server at home with your own admins you run the risk of screwing up because those admins don't know what that policy is. Plus of course you've got data the rest of the organisation doesn't have access to. You might not comply with laws. Though of course in HRC's case having private data and not complying with laws was the reason she did it.
She had a server when she was at the State Department for example and some of the emails were 'born classified' according to Reuters.
In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department's own "Classified" stamps now identify as so-called 'foreign government information.' The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.
This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be "presumed" classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters.
"It's born classified," said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House's National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
"If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it's in U.S. channels and U.S. possession," he said in a telephone interview, adding that for the State Department to say otherwise was "blowing smoke."
Reuters' findings may add to questions that Clinton has been facing over her adherence to rules concerning sensitive government information. Spokesmen for Clinton declined to answer questions, but Clinton and her staff maintain she did not mishandle any information.
"I did not send classified material, and I did not receive any material th
Being forced to leave your home and your family and live in a forced labor camp in exceptionally cold temperatures with poor medical care
That's not what happened to Sakharov though. He was sent into internal exile in Gorky and his phone was taken away. He didn't get sent to a labour camp. They wanted to move him out of the Overton Window, but were a bit more subtle about it than they were in the 30's.
I do acknowledge that in theory there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in terms of discovering that the content is filtered in the first place, but in practice, any action that prevents people from hearing about other social networks would be a *blatant* anti-trust violation, which is already solidly covered by existing laws.
"Don't you know what Facebook is?" a woman said. No interrobang, you notice. It wasn't a rebuke. It was worse than that - she was trying to be kind. It was as if I'd confided in her about my literacy problems or asked her to feel a lump. I can't forgive Facebook for that pang of humiliation and consequently have never signed up - which I'm perfectly happy about and my friends even happier because it's a great way for them not to invite me to parties. I'd only eat all the crisps and ask stupid questions anyway.
But is this a sustainable position? Is joining Facebook becoming mandatory if you wish to remain part of the modern world? I'm sure it feels like that for teenagers and I think it probably does for most people in their 20s. I know I'm not on the technological cutting edge - I don't want to be - but neither do I want to be a modern-day equivalent of those who refused to have TVs in the 80s, a self-absorbed, neo-Amish anachronism flinging a judgmental glance behind me as I stomp out of society in a strop.
Initially, I assumed Facebook was just a fad like its predecessors and, when Twitter became popular and fashionable, it seemed that the MySpace trajectory was once again being observed. Having joined Twitter, I smugly waited for Facebook's inevitable demise, congratulating myself for having skipped a whole technological chapter and saved myself a lot of hassle, very much as would have happened with the fax machine if I hadn't made the eccentric last-minute decision to buy one in 1999. Then something nasty and unexpected happened: the zeitgeist left Facebook and yet somehow it survived. It was like the moment in Outbreak when the virus goes airborne.
It gets worse. Facebook is much more than an internet brand that's managing to ride the fad wave. It's becoming a monopoly. I know this because it's been mentioned in The Archers. A trade name in Ambridge! The place where old-school BBC rules about "sticky-backed plastic" and "a proprietary brand of spreadable yeast extract" still obtain to a ludicrous extent. No iPods, Walkmans, BlackBerrys or Kindles are ever mentioned but, in the last few weeks, the programme has started to call Facebook and Twitter by name. RIP Bebo. You only ever existed to demonstrate that "other social networking sites are available". Now there might as well not be. Everyone else is on Facebook and, if you update your status in the forest and there's no one there to read it...
I'm sure Facebook would claim it's not a monopoly - strictly speaking it isn't - but it clearly wants to be and, if there are whole sections of society who feel obliged to sign up in order to be able to communicate with one another, then its dreams a
Justice Kennedy's majority opinion found that the BCRA section 203 prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech.[28] The majority wrote, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."[29]
Justice Kennedy's opinion also noted that because the First Amendment does not distinguish between media and other corporations, the BCRA restrictions improperly allowed Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, books, television, and blogs.[7] The Court overruled Austin, which had held that a state law that prohibited corporations from using treasury money to support or oppose candidates in elections did not violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court also overruled that portion of McConnell that upheld BCRA's restriction of corporate spending on "electioneering communications". The Court's ruling effectively freed corporations and unions to spend money both on "electioneering communications" and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates (although not to contribute directly to candidates or political parties).
The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals therefore, have free speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, as established in Buckley v. Valeo, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money is unconstitutional because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.
I.e. the First Amendment gives individuals a right to speech. It also gives them a right to speak when organized into a corporation.
If you look at the background SCOTUS decision you find
Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (known as BCRA or McCain-Feingold Act) modified the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, 2 U.S.C. section 441b to prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury to fund "electioneering communications" (broadcast advertisements mentioning a candidate in any context) within 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. During the 2004 presidential campaign, a conservative nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization, Citizens United, filed a complaint before the Federal Election Commission (FEC) charging that advertisements for Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, a docudrama critical of the Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and produced and marketed by a variety of corporate entities, constituted political advertising and thus could not be aired within the 30 days before a primary election or 60 days before a general election. The FEC dismissed the complaint after finding no evidence that broadcast advertisements featuring a candidate within the proscribed time limits had actually been made.[11] The FEC later dismissed a second complaint which argued that the movie itself constituted illegal corporate spending advocating the election or defeat of a candidate, which was illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974. In dismissing that complaint, the FEC found that:
The complainant alleged that the release and distribution of FAHRENHEIT 9/11 constituted an independent expenditure because the film expressly advocated the defeat of President Bush and that by being fully or partially responsible for the film's release, Michael Moore a
Win32 makes me feel like I'm stuck trying to converse with some kind of Janus-faced Gogolian bureaucrat monster while filling out endless government forms consisting mostly of unmarked boxes scattered on the page.
One face of the beast barks terse orders in a fictitious Eastern European language. The other face keeps shouting useless information fragments, like a dementic who reads packaging labels aloud in a futile attempt to remember them for longer than a minute. It sounds like this:
"CARTONSIZE fgd, Cch! PWSZ lb, HUGEBOXDESCRIPTOR plwd... Plexy_gladsz, LONG LONG pssccht! CANE_SUGAR dwFlag PIKEFISH lodz HALT PWZ_MILK_WHITE_WHITER_EX, da, wctombs."
The only result is the non controversial "How to have s*x without getting pregnant". As soon as you add a space to get "how to have s*x with " it stops trying to autocomplete.
Several users are reporting that they found YouTube autocompleting search queries starting with 'how to have' with disturbing suggestions, including 's*x with your kids' over the weekend. From a report:
A YouTube spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the matter is still under investigation. "Earlier today our teams were alerted to this awful autocomplete result and we worked to quickly remove it," the company said. "We are investigating this matter to determine what was behind the appearance of this autocompletion."
We tried the same query on YouTube less than an hour before publication of this story, and we found "how to have s*x in school," and "how to have s*x with kids" were still surfacing in the results.
Not for me it does. If I type "how to have" I get innocuous suggestions
How bad is it going to be? Nobody really knows. If you go to the IPCC report, you'll find lots of predictions carefully assigned levels of confidence. Anything that's labeled "very high confidence" is almost certainly going to happen, and anything labeled "more likely than not" could easily not happen. We do know it's going to be bad, just not how bad.
Matt Ridley points out that the IPCC itself say that most models have over estimated warming here
The climate models have failed to get global warming right. As the IPCC has confirmed, for the period since 1998,
"111 of the 114 available climate-model simulations show a surface warming trend larger than the observations". [IPCC Synthesis report 2014, p 43]
That is to say there is a consensus that the models are exaggerating the rate of global warming.
The warming has so far resulted in no significant or consistent change in the frequency or intensity of storms, tornadoes, floods, droughts or winter snow cover.
As two climate scientists, Richard McNider and John Christy, have put it,
"We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate."
In 1990, the first IPCC assessment included this statement, forecasting a temperature increase of 0.3 degree C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 degree C to 0.5 degree C)
In fact in the two and half decades since, even though emissions have risen faster than in the business-as-usual scenario, the temperature has risen at an average rate of about 0.15 degree C per decade based on surface measurements, or 0.12 degree C per decade based on satellite data; that is, less than half as fast as expected and below the bottom of the uncertainty range!
What about 2015 and 2016 both being record hot years? Well, because of the massive El Nino, the HADCRUT4 surface temperature line just about inched up briefly in early 2016 into respectable territory in among the lower half of the model runs for a few months before dropping back out again [Clive Best chart]. That's all.
Changing to a new search engine or social network requires merely typing a different address at the top of your browser window. The two situations are simply not comparable.
Yeah, if I get banned from Youtube or FB I can go to Minds or Gab.ai. Where no one will see my post.
It's like saying if you get banned from Moscow you can go and live in Siberia where you're not allowed to have a phone. Which the Soviet Union did to Sakharov when he said things they didn't like.
What it meant is they could control what the Overton Windows was in Moscow, where they cared about politics but exiling people to Siberia where they didn't. Meanwhile pro government media in Moscow would run all sorts of stories to discredit exiled people. E.g.
Without any advance warning, Sakharov is paid a surprise visit in Gorky by Nikolai Yakovlev, one of the sleazy, corrupted writers used by the KGB to slander its targets. Yakovlev had written an especially foul book attacking Sakharov and making vile anti-Semitic insinuations about his wife, Elena Bonner, yet here he comes and offers to interview Sakharov.
Here's how Sakharov describes what happens next: "I'd realized right away that I was going to end up hitting him."
And sure enough, Sakharov abruptly interrupts the conversation and says, "I'd rather take care of this matter by slapÂping you.
"I dodged around the table. He flinched and avoided the blow, but I surprised him with an unexpected left-handed slap on his flabby cheek. 'Now get out of here,' I yelled, pushing the door open."
Rather like people in the pro left media refer to gab as 'a social network for neo Nazis'. I.e. they want to control the dominant network, force anyone who disagrees with their narrative off that network off it and then refer to where they go as 'alt right' or neo Nazi networks.
And of course even if you run your own website the ISP might decide to pull it and stop you registering another domain name as happened to Daily Stormer. Daily Stormer really are Neo Nazis of course but Brendan O'Neill makes the case for free speech for Neo Nazis pretty well here
And of course Kipness and people like her regularly call people like Milo or Ben Shapiro Neo Nazis, white supremacists, transphobic and so on and condone AntiFa thuggery to disrupt their talks. Hell Kipness says one of the reasons for banning them from universities is that 'AntiFa will stay home' and that banning them is like banning Goebbels. I'm sure once she's got rid of the Nazis and then trolls like Milo she'd come after Shapiro and eventually even libertarians like O'Neill who criticise her authoritarian nonsense too.
And I'm sure if they got the same treatment that the Daily Stormer got, the left would say 'well their ISP is a private company, screw 'em'.
Of course if a private company discriminates against someone the left approves of, they demand legal action (gay wedding cakes) or regulation (net neutrality)
To paraphrase Niemoller 'Once the came for the Nazis and it did nothing because I was not a Nazi. Then they came for the trolls and I did nothing because I was not a troll. Then they came for the conservatives and I didn't nothing because I was not a conservative. Then they came for me, and there was no one to speak for me'.
Fuck the US left basically, they're a bunch of authoritarians and more dangerous than the Neo Nazi kooks like Anglin who are basically trolls at this point with no real chance to implement their ideas. The left by contrast is completely dominant culturally in the old and new media and already has its own Brownshirts in the form of AntiFa. Even losing an election hasn't really affected their grasp on culture.
Yeah, the Democrats basically outsourced their IT to a family of scam artists who were incompetent and probably blackmailing them.
Still that was the Democrats in Congress. The Clinton campaign had a completely separate set of IT people who were dumb enough to not realise that a Google email containing a link to a bit.ly page that goes to myaccount.google.com-securitysettingspage.tk is a scam. My parents would have spotted that! You'd think the front runner for POTUS in the US would have ex NSA types working in IT who'd realise that a spearphishing attack on key personnel was almost a certainty.
I mean I get the purpose was to be able to delete emails if they in case they were subject to a subpoena, but it still seems like a really amateurish way to do things. The problem is once you start segregating your campaign's IT from the Establishment's infrastructure and legal reach, you also don't have Establishment people warning you about things like spearphishing attacks.
So ironically an obsession with keeping HRC emails out of the hands of anyone but campaign insiders caused Podesta's to end up on Wikileaks. Then again maybe stopping them get subpoenaed might have kept her from prosecution or impeachment an alternative scenario. I'm not convinced though - I think she got away with the destruction of evidence because she lost the election and Trump quietly dropped his 'lock her up' rhetoric. If she'd have won, people like Trey Gowdy would have got her over that.
The other option is satellite downloading or ADSL/DSL via various ISP's. But all of these companies have to rent lines from British Telecom "OpenReach", who in turn have the final say when an exchange will be upgraded to high-speed internet. Anyone living in rural areas is at the mercy of the "London First" policy of always upgrading London exchanges first, then gradually moving out to the other cities, towns and villages (usually about 20 years later)..
Well it's subtle. The Blair government forced BT to provide broadband and for that matter phones in rural areas where un unregulated company would just not bother to operate. BT of course makes excess profits in other areas due to regulation - the government basically forces them to use some of them to subsidise rural areas and has always done so.
The government does force them to allow other ISPs to resell their DSL connections. So even though BT has a monopoly on the actual DSL exchanges in an area, they're forced to sell DSL at a wholesale price to competitor companies. Which means consumers have a choice of DSL providers. So in a rural are you at least have that.
Of course if you're out the country you'll get a 1Mbit connection tops and in a city you'll get a much faster one. But like, like I say, in an unregulated market you'd be stuck on a modem in a rural area because there aren't enough customers to make replacing the exchange a viable commercial proposition - BT only did it because the government forced them. It's true the government doesn't force them to upgrade all the exchanges in lock step, but then I'm not sure it should.
I know some people who lived out in the country in the UK. Theoretically there's a mechanism where enough local people sign a petition BT will upgrade the exchange. The problem being that in a sparsely populated rural area where a lot of people don't care about the Internet that might be hard to do. Eventually they moved a couple of miles into a city area and got a much faster connection. At that point they could choose between fast DSL, fast cable and so on. This was not in a major city.
Probably people out in the country will be stuck with 1Mbit DSL unless some future UK government forces BT to upgrade again in future. People in towns or a city will get much faster connections and a choice of cable or DSL connections - i.e. not just the slightly artificial choice of DSL reseller. This is mainly because there's a business case for digging up the streets to install cable or fibre once population density reaches town or city levels but there isn't if you have isolated houses in a city. Arguably something like WiMax and a microwave link is the way around this - you'd have a microwave link to the nearest town and WiMax to connect to all the houses in a village. If I was still based in the UK, I'd look into this. Of course it's a overregulated place - getting the permission to run the microwave link and the WiMax network would probably be a complete bureaucratic nightmare.
UK Regulation is basically a double edged sword. Regulation means people in a rural area get DSL and a choice of providers. On the other hand it probably makes it very hard to run a company which does point to point microwave links and a WiMax network which would be a commercially viable way of giving people in that area a choice of ways to connect to the Internet.
Of course if you're really lucky you'll have a decent HSPA, HSPA+ or LTE connection even out in the countryside. I suspect that's pretty rare though. If you do there are some MVNOs in the UK which offer unlimited data
tl;dr - both ISPs and telcos concentrate on upgrading their equipment in the city because high population density gives them best return on their investment. The government forces BT to provide at least DSL in the countryside. It also forces BT to allow third parti
Essentially the Democrats want one set of unpopular companies regulated. Bannon wants another set regulated. Right now the mainstream GOP is sticking to principle - ie that regulating either is bad and the status quo should stay. As US politics becomes more about shafting the other tribe and less about principles that might change though. I think it's fair to assume Trump is not overly concerned with abstract principles.
Of course neither the Democrats or the GOP will confront the fact that telco monopolies were created by regulation. The reason people worry about Comcast abusing its position is because in many places in the US there is only one ISP option. Which is not true for most customers in the UK for example. UK regulations are not perfect but living in the UK I always had a choice of ISP. Hell even in corporatist Sweden that was true. Ericsson was powerful enough to avoid taxes but it wasn't powerful enough to manipulate regulations so it was a monopoly ISP.
And the Net Neutrality advocates won't confront the fact that their argument for net neutrality should apply to Google and FB which are decidedly non neutral for political content. Then they say "It's a private company, they can do what they want" and link to that xkcd cartoon about being shown the door.
It's hard to sympathize much with either side really. The GOP don't really oppose regulation because they want to keep the regulations that create monopolies. And the Net Neutrality folks don't really believe in Net Neutrality. If Google and FB violate Net Neutrality in ways that hurt their political opponents and help their political allies they don't care.
And it's more likely that both the Democrats and Republicans decide on regulation based on whether it helps companies that donate to them and hurts ones who don't than that they're acting out of anything resembling principle.
People that met him claim he has halitosis too. That's what happens to people who oppose the C/C++ binarchy. Their heresy festers inside them, causes severe halitosis and they are driven out of society to live in the mountains. Where, from the look of him, ESR is headed.
Praise Kernighan, Ritchie and Stroustrup! Death to the heretic ESR!
Funny how The Science Is Settled when someone points out an effect that would imply climate change is not as bad as conventional wisdom says. However when someone points out an effect that would imply climate change is worse than conventional wisdom says, it's trumpeted as a sign that Things Are Worse Than Thought.
I.e. a bunch of armchair environmental activists doing the reporting are selective in what they report in order to push their agenda. Any story that makes things look better than they are is denounced and the scientists involved are called Deniers. Any story that makes things seem worse than they are is posted all over the media.
Well I'm guessing being CEO of a company sending rockets into space means you're a lot busier than I was in the projects I've worked on trying to find bugs in customer code so they could release. But even on those projects I didn't have time to do something like BitCoin on the side.
When we sent these out I was saying to Dmitry 'No one is going to be dumb enough to click on that. He'll call his IT guy and they'll tell him not to click it'. And he said to me 'Volodya, these Americans have heads full of post modernism and spirit cooking. Their precious bodily essences have been contaminated with soy milk. They'll fall for it, like traitor drinking polonium!'.
And, Hail Great Leader Putin, it worked! KGB Deep Cover Agent Donaldovich Trumpovski was successfully installed as US President.
No doubt he'll call off the confrontational 'Red Line' policies of the former accursed Imperialist administration in Syria any day now and allow our pilots to operate their unmolested.
Slashdot Mirror
It's because iOS 11 has "Smart Punctuation" enabled by default. That replaces ' and " with the curly versions. Since the curly versions are unicode chars above U+0080 Slashdot displays them incorrectly.
https://www.jordanmerrick.com/...
Anyone who disagrees with this statement should be shot.
Apple users are allowed to post here but they are marked to warn others of their uncleanliness. This is in accordance with Leviticus 13:45
https://www.biblegateway.com/v...
"And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip and shall cry, 'Unclean, unclean.'
Don't be a moron, DontBeAMoran.
Maybe Apple are so patriotic that They feel their users ought to imitate the US Constitution's seemingly Random capitalisation of Diverse and Sundry words.
I'm using an iPhone and I.T.â(TM)s working fine.
Normally these edge cases would be socially isolated and unable to cause trouble, but when they find each other online they can form a mob, and a motivated mob (whether rational or not) is a force. It's a case of the organised and passionate minority overpowering the disorganised and ambivalent majority.
https://phys.org/news/2011-07-...
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.
"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."
As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. "In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks."
The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled "Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities."
An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.
You can imagine this being the mechanism that totalitarian movements - Communists, Nazis, Islamists etc - take over once they hit 10% of the population. Well that, and violence or threats of violence against their critics.
Rather than banning phones how about mandating an official Trump admin phone, like the Dethklok's Dethphone
http://dethklok.wikia.com/wiki...
It'd be pretty brütal
If I do a search for "How Podesta got hacked" every article I find says it was because he clicked that bit.ly link to the .tk address controlled by the spearfishers. And then typed his password into a page that looked like Google.
E.g.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and...
To the IT team's credit, they did send along a legitimate Google link - not the original phishing email's bit.ly link - to change Podesta's password and instructed him to add two factor-authentication to his account for an added level of password security. But the legitimate Google link didn't seem to make it to Podesta, and instead he must have used the "poisoned link," giving his password to hackers and opening up his personal email to unwelcomed eyes.
They didn't spot the bit.ly link or if they did they didn't mention. They did send a legitimate Google link, but they didn't point out the link in the original email - a bit.ly link that went to a .tk address - was obviously a phishing attempt. That's not a typo, it's a massive fuck up.
Why you think the location of the server being in a datacenter vs a basement is a tell for how stupid you are. It comes down to who is administrating it, not it's fucking Internet pipe or power failure resiliency.
Well if you've worked in a big organisation, you'd know that running your own server at home is verboten because people who run their own servers take shortcuts administering them and risk getting hacked. Organisations have policy on security and as soon as you run a server at home with your own admins you run the risk of screwing up because those admins don't know what that policy is. Plus of course you've got data the rest of the organisation doesn't have access to. You might not comply with laws. Though of course in HRC's case having private data and not complying with laws was the reason she did it.
She had a server when she was at the State Department for example and some of the emails were 'born classified' according to Reuters.
http://www.newsweek.com/questi...
In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department's own "Classified" stamps now identify as so-called 'foreign government information.' The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.
This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be "presumed" classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters.
"It's born classified," said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House's National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
"If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it's in U.S. channels and U.S. possession," he said in a telephone interview, adding that for the State Department to say otherwise was "blowing smoke."
Reuters' findings may add to questions that Clinton has been facing over her adherence to rules concerning sensitive government information. Spokesmen for Clinton declined to answer questions, but Clinton and her staff maintain she did not mishandle any information.
"I did not send classified material, and I did not receive any material th
Being forced to leave your home and your family and live in a forced labor camp in exceptionally cold temperatures with poor medical care
That's not what happened to Sakharov though. He was sent into internal exile in Gorky and his phone was taken away. He didn't get sent to a labour camp. They wanted to move him out of the Overton Window, but were a bit more subtle about it than they were in the 30's.
I do acknowledge that in theory there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in terms of discovering that the content is filtered in the first place, but in practice, any action that prevents people from hearing about other social networks would be a *blatant* anti-trust violation, which is already solidly covered by existing laws.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
https://www.whaleoil.co.nz/201...
Antitrust only kicks in if FB is declared a monopoly, which it has not been.
As the left wing Guardian observed
https://www.theguardian.com/co...
"Don't you know what Facebook is?" a woman said. No interrobang, you notice. It wasn't a rebuke. It was worse than that - she was trying to be kind. It was as if I'd confided in her about my literacy problems or asked her to feel a lump. I can't forgive Facebook for that pang of humiliation and consequently have never signed up - which I'm perfectly happy about and my friends even happier because it's a great way for them not to invite me to parties. I'd only eat all the crisps and ask stupid questions anyway.
But is this a sustainable position? Is joining Facebook becoming mandatory if you wish to remain part of the modern world? I'm sure it feels like that for teenagers and I think it probably does for most people in their 20s. I know I'm not on the technological cutting edge - I don't want to be - but neither do I want to be a modern-day equivalent of those who refused to have TVs in the 80s, a self-absorbed, neo-Amish anachronism flinging a judgmental glance behind me as I stomp out of society in a strop.
Initially, I assumed Facebook was just a fad like its predecessors and, when Twitter became popular and fashionable, it seemed that the MySpace trajectory was once again being observed. Having joined Twitter, I smugly waited for Facebook's inevitable demise, congratulating myself for having skipped a whole technological chapter and saved myself a lot of hassle, very much as would have happened with the fax machine if I hadn't made the eccentric last-minute decision to buy one in 1999. Then something nasty and unexpected happened: the zeitgeist left Facebook and yet somehow it survived. It was like the moment in Outbreak when the virus goes airborne.
It gets worse. Facebook is much more than an internet brand that's managing to ride the fad wave. It's becoming a monopoly. I know this because it's been mentioned in The Archers. A trade name in Ambridge! The place where old-school BBC rules about "sticky-backed plastic" and "a proprietary brand of spreadable yeast extract" still obtain to a ludicrous extent. No iPods, Walkmans, BlackBerrys or Kindles are ever mentioned but, in the last few weeks, the programme has started to call Facebook and Twitter by name. RIP Bebo. You only ever existed to demonstrate that "other social networking sites are available". Now there might as well not be. Everyone else is on Facebook and, if you update your status in the forest and there's no one there to read it...
I'm sure Facebook would claim it's not a monopoly - strictly speaking it isn't - but it clearly wants to be and, if there are whole sections of society who feel obliged to sign up in order to be able to communicate with one another, then its dreams a
That's not what CU is about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Justice Kennedy's majority opinion found that the BCRA section 203 prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech.[28] The majority wrote, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."[29]
Justice Kennedy's opinion also noted that because the First Amendment does not distinguish between media and other corporations, the BCRA restrictions improperly allowed Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, books, television, and blogs.[7] The Court overruled Austin, which had held that a state law that prohibited corporations from using treasury money to support or oppose candidates in elections did not violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court also overruled that portion of McConnell that upheld BCRA's restriction of corporate spending on "electioneering communications". The Court's ruling effectively freed corporations and unions to spend money both on "electioneering communications" and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates (although not to contribute directly to candidates or political parties).
The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals therefore, have free speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, as established in Buckley v. Valeo, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money is unconstitutional because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.
I.e. the First Amendment gives individuals a right to speech. It also gives them a right to speak when organized into a corporation.
If you look at the background SCOTUS decision you find
Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (known as BCRA or McCain-Feingold Act) modified the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, 2 U.S.C. section 441b to prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury to fund "electioneering communications" (broadcast advertisements mentioning a candidate in any context) within 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. During the 2004 presidential campaign, a conservative nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization, Citizens United, filed a complaint before the Federal Election Commission (FEC) charging that advertisements for Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, a docudrama critical of the Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and produced and marketed by a variety of corporate entities, constituted political advertising and thus could not be aired within the 30 days before a primary election or 60 days before a general election. The FEC dismissed the complaint after finding no evidence that broadcast advertisements featuring a candidate within the proscribed time limits had actually been made.[11] The FEC later dismissed a second complaint which argued that the movie itself constituted illegal corporate spending advocating the election or defeat of a candidate, which was illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974. In dismissing that complaint, the FEC found that:
The complainant alleged that the release and distribution of FAHRENHEIT 9/11 constituted an independent expenditure because the film expressly advocated the defeat of President Bush and that by being fully or partially responsible for the film's release, Michael Moore a
It's drifting off topic, but having written a lot of Win32 code and enjoyed how twisted Win32 is this is funny as fuck
https://arstechnica.com/civis/...
Win32 makes me feel like I'm stuck trying to converse with some kind of Janus-faced Gogolian bureaucrat monster while filling out endless government forms consisting mostly of unmarked boxes scattered on the page.
One face of the beast barks terse orders in a fictitious Eastern European language. The other face keeps shouting useless information fragments, like a dementic who reads packaging labels aloud in a futile attempt to remember them for longer than a minute. It sounds like this:
"CARTONSIZE fgd, Cch! PWSZ lb, HUGEBOXDESCRIPTOR plwd... Plexy_gladsz, LONG LONG pssccht! CANE_SUGAR dwFlag PIKEFISH lodz HALT PWZ_MILK_WHITE_WHITER_EX, da, wctombs."
Same with s*x
"How to have s*x"
https://i.imgur.com/HhATu5P.pn...
"How to have s*x with"
https://i.imgur.com/viw0qC9.pn...
The only result is the non controversial "How to have s*x without getting pregnant". As soon as you add a space to get "how to have s*x with " it stops trying to autocomplete.
Several users are reporting that they found YouTube autocompleting search queries starting with 'how to have' with disturbing suggestions, including 's*x with your kids' over the weekend. From a report:
A YouTube spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the matter is still under investigation. "Earlier today our teams were alerted to this awful autocomplete result and we worked to quickly remove it," the company said. "We are investigating this matter to determine what was behind the appearance of this autocompletion."
We tried the same query on YouTube less than an hour before publication of this story, and we found "how to have s*x in school," and "how to have s*x with kids" were still surfacing in the results.
Not for me it does. If I type "how to have" I get innocuous suggestions
https://i.imgur.com/lkatvJV.pn...
Interesting if you type "how to have sex" you get suggestions
https://i.imgur.com/5DryMlR.pn...
but as soon as you hit space and get to "how to have sex " it stops
https://i.imgur.com/nYqdcVU.pn...
There are three options here. It runs off what you've searched for before, and the Buzzfeed guy had done a search for "sex with kids".
Or Youtube have fixed it so that as soon as you get to "how to have sex " it stops giving you suggestions.
Or Buzzfeed are lying.
All of those seem pretty plausible to me.
How bad is it going to be? Nobody really knows. If you go to the IPCC report, you'll find lots of predictions carefully assigned levels of confidence. Anything that's labeled "very high confidence" is almost certainly going to happen, and anything labeled "more likely than not" could easily not happen. We do know it's going to be bad, just not how bad.
Matt Ridley points out that the IPCC itself say that most models have over estimated warming here
https://www.thegwpf.org/matt-r...
The climate models have failed to get global warming right. As the IPCC has confirmed, for the period since 1998,
"111 of the 114 available climate-model simulations show a surface warming trend larger than the observations". [IPCC Synthesis report 2014, p 43]
That is to say there is a consensus that the models are exaggerating the rate of global warming.
The warming has so far resulted in no significant or consistent change in the frequency or intensity of storms, tornadoes, floods, droughts or winter snow cover.
As two climate scientists, Richard McNider and John Christy, have put it,
"We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate."
In 1990, the first IPCC assessment included this statement, forecasting a temperature increase of 0.3 degree C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 degree C to 0.5 degree C)
In fact in the two and half decades since, even though emissions have risen faster than in the business-as-usual scenario, the temperature has risen at an average rate of about 0.15 degree C per decade based on surface measurements, or 0.12 degree C per decade based on satellite data; that is, less than half as fast as expected and below the bottom of the uncertainty range!
What about 2015 and 2016 both being record hot years? Well, because of the massive El Nino, the HADCRUT4 surface temperature line just about inched up briefly in early 2016 into respectable territory in among the lower half of the model runs for a few months before dropping back out again [Clive Best chart]. That's all.
Changing to a new search engine or social network requires merely typing a different address at the top of your browser window. The two situations are simply not comparable.
Yeah, if I get banned from Youtube or FB I can go to Minds or Gab.ai. Where no one will see my post.
It's like saying if you get banned from Moscow you can go and live in Siberia where you're not allowed to have a phone. Which the Soviet Union did to Sakharov when he said things they didn't like.
What it meant is they could control what the Overton Windows was in Moscow, where they cared about politics but exiling people to Siberia where they didn't. Meanwhile pro government media in Moscow would run all sorts of stories to discredit exiled people. E.g.
https://www.hoover.org/researc...
Without any advance warning, Sakharov is paid a surprise visit in Gorky by Nikolai Yakovlev, one of the sleazy, corrupted writers used by the KGB to slander its targets. Yakovlev had written an especially foul book attacking Sakharov and making vile anti-Semitic insinuations about his wife, Elena Bonner, yet here he comes and offers to interview Sakharov.
Here's how Sakharov describes what happens next: "I'd realized right away that I was going to end up hitting him."
And sure enough, Sakharov abruptly interrupts the conversation and says, "I'd rather take care of this matter by slapÂping you.
"I dodged around the table. He flinched and avoided the blow, but I surprised him with an unexpected left-handed slap on his flabby cheek. 'Now get out of here,' I yelled, pushing the door open."
Rather like people in the pro left media refer to gab as 'a social network for neo Nazis'. I.e. they want to control the dominant network, force anyone who disagrees with their narrative off that network off it and then refer to where they go as 'alt right' or neo Nazi networks.
And of course even if you run your own website the ISP might decide to pull it and stop you registering another domain name as happened to Daily Stormer. Daily Stormer really are Neo Nazis of course but Brendan O'Neill makes the case for free speech for Neo Nazis pretty well here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And of course Kipness and people like her regularly call people like Milo or Ben Shapiro Neo Nazis, white supremacists, transphobic and so on and condone AntiFa thuggery to disrupt their talks. Hell Kipness says one of the reasons for banning them from universities is that 'AntiFa will stay home' and that banning them is like banning Goebbels. I'm sure once she's got rid of the Nazis and then trolls like Milo she'd come after Shapiro and eventually even libertarians like O'Neill who criticise her authoritarian nonsense too.
And I'm sure if they got the same treatment that the Daily Stormer got, the left would say 'well their ISP is a private company, screw 'em'.
Of course if a private company discriminates against someone the left approves of, they demand legal action (gay wedding cakes) or regulation (net neutrality)
To paraphrase Niemoller 'Once the came for the Nazis and it did nothing because I was not a Nazi. Then they came for the trolls and I did nothing because I was not a troll. Then they came for the conservatives and I didn't nothing because I was not a conservative. Then they came for me, and there was no one to speak for me'.
Fuck the US left basically, they're a bunch of authoritarians and more dangerous than the Neo Nazi kooks like Anglin who are basically trolls at this point with no real chance to implement their ideas. The left by contrast is completely dominant culturally in the old and new media and already has its own Brownshirts in the form of AntiFa. Even losing an election hasn't really affected their grasp on culture.
Yeah, the Democrats basically outsourced their IT to a family of scam artists who were incompetent and probably blackmailing them.
Still that was the Democrats in Congress. The Clinton campaign had a completely separate set of IT people who were dumb enough to not realise that a Google email containing a link to a bit.ly page that goes to myaccount.google.com-securitysettingspage.tk is a scam. My parents would have spotted that! You'd think the front runner for POTUS in the US would have ex NSA types working in IT who'd realise that a spearphishing attack on key personnel was almost a certainty.
But then HRC always seemed to do everything in a half assed way, like that email server in the basement of Clinton's house in Chappaqua instead of in a data centre or the campaign headquartes
I mean I get the purpose was to be able to delete emails if they in case they were subject to a subpoena, but it still seems like a really amateurish way to do things. The problem is once you start segregating your campaign's IT from the Establishment's infrastructure and legal reach, you also don't have Establishment people warning you about things like spearphishing attacks.
So ironically an obsession with keeping HRC emails out of the hands of anyone but campaign insiders caused Podesta's to end up on Wikileaks. Then again maybe stopping them get subpoenaed might have kept her from prosecution or impeachment an alternative scenario. I'm not convinced though - I think she got away with the destruction of evidence because she lost the election and Trump quietly dropped his 'lock her up' rhetoric. If she'd have won, people like Trey Gowdy would have got her over that.
The other option is satellite downloading or ADSL/DSL via various ISP's. But all of these companies have to rent lines from British Telecom "OpenReach", who in turn have the final say when an exchange will be upgraded to high-speed internet. Anyone living in rural areas is at the mercy of the "London First" policy of always upgrading London exchanges first, then gradually moving out to the other cities, towns and villages (usually about 20 years later)..
Well it's subtle. The Blair government forced BT to provide broadband and for that matter phones in rural areas where un unregulated company would just not bother to operate. BT of course makes excess profits in other areas due to regulation - the government basically forces them to use some of them to subsidise rural areas and has always done so.
The government does force them to allow other ISPs to resell their DSL connections. So even though BT has a monopoly on the actual DSL exchanges in an area, they're forced to sell DSL at a wholesale price to competitor companies. Which means consumers have a choice of DSL providers. So in a rural are you at least have that.
Of course if you're out the country you'll get a 1Mbit connection tops and in a city you'll get a much faster one. But like, like I say, in an unregulated market you'd be stuck on a modem in a rural area because there aren't enough customers to make replacing the exchange a viable commercial proposition - BT only did it because the government forced them. It's true the government doesn't force them to upgrade all the exchanges in lock step, but then I'm not sure it should.
I know some people who lived out in the country in the UK. Theoretically there's a mechanism where enough local people sign a petition BT will upgrade the exchange. The problem being that in a sparsely populated rural area where a lot of people don't care about the Internet that might be hard to do. Eventually they moved a couple of miles into a city area and got a much faster connection. At that point they could choose between fast DSL, fast cable and so on. This was not in a major city.
Probably people out in the country will be stuck with 1Mbit DSL unless some future UK government forces BT to upgrade again in future. People in towns or a city will get much faster connections and a choice of cable or DSL connections - i.e. not just the slightly artificial choice of DSL reseller. This is mainly because there's a business case for digging up the streets to install cable or fibre once population density reaches town or city levels but there isn't if you have isolated houses in a city. Arguably something like WiMax and a microwave link is the way around this - you'd have a microwave link to the nearest town and WiMax to connect to all the houses in a village. If I was still based in the UK, I'd look into this. Of course it's a overregulated place - getting the permission to run the microwave link and the WiMax network would probably be a complete bureaucratic nightmare.
UK Regulation is basically a double edged sword. Regulation means people in a rural area get DSL and a choice of providers. On the other hand it probably makes it very hard to run a company which does point to point microwave links and a WiMax network which would be a commercially viable way of giving people in that area a choice of ways to connect to the Internet.
Of course if you're really lucky you'll have a decent HSPA, HSPA+ or LTE connection even out in the countryside. I suspect that's pretty rare though. If you do there are some MVNOs in the UK which offer unlimited data
https://recombu.com/mobile/art...
tl;dr - both ISPs and telcos concentrate on upgrading their equipment in the city because high population density gives them best return on their investment. The government forces BT to provide at least DSL in the countryside. It also forces BT to allow third parti
Steve Bannon has already suggested regulating them as utilities
https://www.google.com/amp/s/s...
Essentially the Democrats want one set of unpopular companies regulated. Bannon wants another set regulated. Right now the mainstream GOP is sticking to principle - ie that regulating either is bad and the status quo should stay. As US politics becomes more about shafting the other tribe and less about principles that might change though. I think it's fair to assume Trump is not overly concerned with abstract principles.
Of course neither the Democrats or the GOP will confront the fact that telco monopolies were created by regulation. The reason people worry about Comcast abusing its position is because in many places in the US there is only one ISP option. Which is not true for most customers in the UK for example. UK regulations are not perfect but living in the UK I always had a choice of ISP. Hell even in corporatist Sweden that was true. Ericsson was powerful enough to avoid taxes but it wasn't powerful enough to manipulate regulations so it was a monopoly ISP.
And the Net Neutrality advocates won't confront the fact that their argument for net neutrality should apply to Google and FB which are decidedly non neutral for political content. Then they say "It's a private company, they can do what they want" and link to that xkcd cartoon about being shown the door.
It's hard to sympathize much with either side really. The GOP don't really oppose regulation because they want to keep the regulations that create monopolies. And the Net Neutrality folks don't really believe in Net Neutrality. If Google and FB violate Net Neutrality in ways that hurt their political opponents and help their political allies they don't care.
And it's more likely that both the Democrats and Republicans decide on regulation based on whether it helps companies that donate to them and hurts ones who don't than that they're acting out of anything resembling principle.
People that met him claim he has halitosis too. That's what happens to people who oppose the C/C++ binarchy. Their heresy festers inside them, causes severe halitosis and they are driven out of society to live in the mountains. Where, from the look of him, ESR is headed.
Praise Kernighan, Ritchie and Stroustrup! Death to the heretic ESR!
Funny how The Science Is Settled when someone points out an effect that would imply climate change is not as bad as conventional wisdom says. However when someone points out an effect that would imply climate change is worse than conventional wisdom says, it's trumpeted as a sign that Things Are Worse Than Thought.
I.e. a bunch of armchair environmental activists doing the reporting are selective in what they report in order to push their agenda. Any story that makes things look better than they are is denounced and the scientists involved are called Deniers. Any story that makes things seem worse than they are is posted all over the media.
Well I'm guessing being CEO of a company sending rockets into space means you're a lot busier than I was in the projects I've worked on trying to find bugs in customer code so they could release. But even on those projects I didn't have time to do something like BitCoin on the side.
Exactly. Anyone who's run a business knows how little time you have when you're in a situation like that.
As if he's got enough free time to do this as a side project.
Yup, and his IT guy didn't notice the bit.ly link for change password.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-...
https://motherboard.vice.com/e...
When we sent these out I was saying to Dmitry 'No one is going to be dumb enough to click on that. He'll call his IT guy and they'll tell him not to click it'. And he said to me 'Volodya, these Americans have heads full of post modernism and spirit cooking. Their precious bodily essences have been contaminated with soy milk. They'll fall for it, like traitor drinking polonium!'.
And, Hail Great Leader Putin, it worked! KGB Deep Cover Agent Donaldovich Trumpovski was successfully installed as US President.
No doubt he'll call off the confrontational 'Red Line' policies of the former accursed Imperialist administration in Syria any day now and allow our pilots to operate their unmolested.