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This is a reminder for me (or you) to check back in a week, assuming it is overshadowed by other news:

The JFK Document Dump Could Be a Fiasco

Trump, no stranger to conspiracy theories, including totally unsubstantiated theories about a link between Ted Cruz’s father and JFK’s death, has not yet revealed his plans for the documents. His friend and political adviser Roger Stone, the Republican consultant who is the author of a book claiming that President Lyndon Johnson was the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination, said last week that he has been informed authoritatively that the CIA is urging Trump to delay the release of some of the JFK documents for another 25 years. “They must reflect badly on the CIA even though virtually everyone involved is long dead,” Stone said in a statement on his website.

The CIA has not confirmed or denied reports that it has appealed to Trump to block the release of some of the files on grounds that the documents might still somehow endanger national security if made public. In a cryptic statement last week, the spy agency said only that it “continues to engage in the process to determine the appropriate next steps with respect to any previously unreleased CIA information.”

As it stands now, the document release this month will be a logistical nightmare, with the public suddenly flooded with a huge online library of documents—tens of thousands in total—that will be, at first, mostly incomprehensible even to experienced students of the assassination. The National Archives, abandoning its plans to release the documents in batches over the course of several months, said this week that it will instead release everything at once—all on the same day—sometime between now and the deadline on October 26.

I'd sub but it's pre-news again.

• Donald Trump’s Unseemly Condolence-Call Bragging Game
• The Memo: Gold Star controversy consumes White House
• Five reasons Trump's widow story stings
• Trump’s Condolence Call to Soldier’s Widow Ignites an Imbroglio
• Today in Conservative Media: Trump’s Gold Star Comments Might Be the Stupidest Controversy Yet
• How did consoling Gold Star families become political?
• Trump's Unforced Error
• Gold Star father: Trump's words misconstrued
• Making a military widow cry: that is a classic Trump move
• https://twitter.com/AlyssaMastro44/status/919988497976582144

Some shit you just can't make up. I'd say more but I'm too busy laughing.

Regional Indicator Symbol

I am adding some flag emoji to the Soylent Upgrade extension. It seems to work although they don't render as anything other than letters or boxes on my main system. I'm sure that 95% of them will work on my Chromebook, however.

I don't want to include every possible flag on the list (sorry Lesotho, New Caledonia, Svalbard and Jan Mayen...). I included the ten that were proposed as part of a draft standard in 2007, flags of the ten most populous countries (Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Indonesia OMG), the EU flag, Puerto Rico, and a number of other territories that are in the news often or are amusing.

Fun fact, separate emoji for England, Scotland, and Wales were added to Unicode in 2017. Good timing! I added England to my list below, but it renders very differently from the other symbols, showing up as one box instead of two boxes, "GBENG", or whatever.

Should the flag of Antarctica be orange?

Here's what I have included so far:

🇦🇫 - \uD83C\uDDE6\uD83C\uDDEB - AF / Afghanistan
🇦🇶 - \uD83C\uDDE6\uD83C\uDDF6 - AQ / Antarctica
🇦🇺 - \uD83C\uDDE6\uD83C\uDDFA - AU / Australia
🇧🇩 - \uD83C\uDDE7\uD83C\uDDE9 - BD / Bangladesh
🇧🇷 - \uD83C\uDDE7\uD83C\uDDF7 - BR / Brazil
🇨🇦 - \uD83C\uDDE8\uD83C\uDDE6 - CA / Canada
🇨🇳 - \uD83C\uDDE8\uD83C\uDDF3 - CN / China
🇨🇺 - \uD83C\uDDE8\uD83C\uDDFA - CU / Cuba
🇩🇪 - \uD83C\uDDE9\uD83C\uDDEA - DE / Germany
🇪🇬 - \uD83C\uDDEA\uD83C\uDDEC - EG / Egypt
🇪🇸 - \uD83C\uDDEA\uD83C\uDDF8 - ES / Spain
🇪🇺 - \uD83C\uDDEA\uD83C\uDDFA - EU / European Union
🇫🇷 - \uD83C\uDDEB\uD83C\uDDF7 - FR / France
🇬🇧 - \uD83C\uDDEC\uD83C\uDDE7 - GB / United Kingdom
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 - \uD83C\uDFF4\uDB40\uDC67\uDB40\uDC62\uDB40\uDC65\uDB40\uDC6E\uDB40\uDC67\uDB40\uDC7F - GB-ENG / England
🇮🇩 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDE9 - ID / Indonesia
🇮🇪 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDEA - IE / Ireland
🇮🇱 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDF1 - IL / Israel
🇮🇳 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDF3 - IN / India
🇮🇶 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDF6 - IQ / Iraq
🇮🇷 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDF7 - IR / Iran
🇮🇹 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDF9 - IT / Italy
🇯🇵 - \uD83C\uDDEF\uD83C\uDDF5 - JP / Japan
🇰🇵 - \uD83C\uDDF0\uD83C\uDDF5 - KP / North Korea
🇰🇷 - \uD83C\uDDF0\uD83C\uDDF7 - KR / South Korea
🇲🇽 - \uD83C\uDDF2\uD83C\uDDFD - MX / Mexico
🇳🇬 - \uD83C\uDDF3\uD83C\uDDEC - NG / Nigeria
🇵🇰 - \uD83C\uDDF5\uD83C\uDDF0 - PK / Pakistan
🇵🇷 - \uD83C\uDDF5\uD83C\uDDF7 - PR / Puerto Rico
🇵🇸 - \uD83C\uDDF5\uD83C\uDDF8 - PS / Palestinian Territory
🇷🇺 - \uD83C\uDDF7\uD83C\uDDFA - RU / Russia
🇸🇦 - \uD83C\uDDF8\uD83C\uDDE6 - SA / Saudi Arabia
🇸🇪 - \uD83C\uDDF8\uD83C\uDDEA - SE / Sweden
🇹🇷 - \uD83C\uDDF9\uD83C\uDDF7 - TR / Turkey
🇺🇸 - \uD83C\uDDFA\uD83C\uDDF8 - US / United States
🇻🇦 - \uD83C\uDDFB\uD83C\uDDE6 - VA / Vatican City
🇻🇪 - \uD83C\uDDFB\uD83C\uDDEA - VE / Venezuela
🇿🇦 - \uD83C\uDDFF\uD83C\uDDE6 - ZA / South Africa

If you think a country should be included, comment and make your case.

South American representation is looking particularly bad.

Antarctica, England, and Puerto Rico and others should probably be removed if they just don't render anywhere.

One stupid thing is that there is currently no way for me to add a tooltip that identifies the flag your are hovering over. I will think about the best way to add this.

-----

New ordered list buttons will be added. Now the type attribute can be changed (discussed here). Clicking the "1. List" button will output <ol type="1">. "A. List" adds type="A", and "I. List" adds type="I" (Roman numerals). I could make two more buttons for the lowercase versions, but that seems excessive. Having the two new options should be a good enough reminder that you can change the look of your ordered list.

Too bad we can't access the incredible variety added by CSS3 and later's list-style-type.

Also on the agenda:

• Title case fix(es) such as "IPhone" to "iPhone".
• Fix so the title case button appears even after you have previewed a journal.
• Recognize the poll results/comments page so commenting features are added. The URL in question is https://soylentnews.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=110&aid=-1 where QID is the number of the poll.
• Take a look at *New* comment cycling. The button appears on some individual thread pages where there are no actual new comments (but there were new comments on the overall story).

These are just ideas:

Maybe a "Now" button on admin.pl?op=edit so editors can set the story release time to the current time. Not sure about this, would entertain other ideas about the release time field, such as manipulation of the time using [+60m] and [+90m] buttons (including correct handling of the date change). The only thing the extension currently does with this field is add a check to make sure whether or not you want to post a story in the past (typically because you forgot to add a day).

If I missed anything or you have any ideas, let me know.

Jango Raid.

Made by an AC. Explained here.

Jango is a free online music streaming service that allows users to create and share custom radio stations. Users choose artists to stream, and the station plays music from similar artists. Users can further refine their stations by rating songs and artists in their feed to play less or more frequently.

The Fever (Aye Aye)
Blackout City
Hot Head
Green Onions
Eh
BTTF
RR

McDonald's Rick and Morty Szechuan sauce stunt backfires

The Szechuan sauce fiasco proves Rick and Morty fans don’t understand Rick and Morty (I smell an SJW and Szechuan sauce)

McDonald's Rare Szechuan Sauce Coming Back (Again), 'Rick And Morty' Fans

Thanks, Google.

(This post is unrelated to the ongoing topics of audio, video, networking and electronics. This post is a personal addendum to a SoylentNews book review.)

An unexpected bonus from reading Ignition - An Informal History Of Liquid Rocket Propellants by Dr. John D. Clark was a possible family connection. I could never place "Uncle Dick" in my family tree. Perhaps he was an honorary relative. Perhaps my redneck family crashed a wedding or something. Regardless, I've had a first-hand account of wire-guided missile development and a first-hand explanation of the criteria for a supersonic airframe. Until reading Ignition, I assumed these were unrelated developments. However, I now understand these topics to be part of a Cold War weapon development program.

I may have the details wrong but "Uncle Dick" was a junior member of a team who had access to a military firing range for one week. They had some surplus tanks from World War 2 which were in moderate condition. Someone at the hot end of the range (crazy people) rigged each tank so that it would drive itself across the range while the rest of team fired at it. He said that being paid to destroy tanks with his own design of rocket launcher was one of the best working weeks of his life. Within my family, he had a reputation for being a pyromaniac due to his account of this and other incidences.

When he said to me that the launcher had a spool of wire, I thought that he was another distant relative with a dry sense of humor. Surely, it is best to fire where the tank will be. This would be the shortest and fastest route. However, distance and fuel conservation aren't concerns. Furthermore, a wire-guided missile allows an infantry grunt to trivially adjust the direction of a missile to compensate for changes to the target's speed after the missle has been fired. This is such a useful concept that it was further developed into the laser-guided weapon.

I may have the details wrong but "Uncle Dick" was a more senior member of a team which developed aerospace grade titanium. A supersonic aircraft requires a large block of titanium to be extruded. This eliminates welding. This increases strength. It also provides another essential property. A titanium frame must have zero air bubbles and zero water bubbles. This cannot be guaranteed if there is welding. The problem is quite severe. When an aircraft goes supersonic, friction from the air may cause oxygen in an air or water bubble to catalyze with titanium. A cavity to the exterior would cause a runaway reaction. The end result would be a very large firework and a dead crew.

When I last saw "Uncle Dick", he said that the first person to solve the semiconductor heating problem would be a trillionaire. Since then, I've keenly followed reversible computing and quantum computing.

Harvey Weinstein Accused of Rape in New Yorker Exposé

From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories

Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Others Say Weinstein Harassed Them

Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades

Harvey Weinstein gives first interview after shocking sex harassment claims

Harvey Weinstein

Did somebody say Paltrow?

Popular literary analysis wiki TV Tropes has become a pay site. Please consider using All The Tropes instead.

In this comment, c0lo wrote:

you'll have to admit that forced work camps still fit your wording.

From the linked page:

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Allow ads on TV Tropes | Buy an ad removal pass

I'm not using an ad blocker. I'm using the tracking protection feature built into Firefox. This feature is enabled by default in Private Browsing windows, and there is an about:config setting to enable it throughout Firefox. When I followed the "Allow ads on TV Tropes" link, I got instructions for how to disable Adblock Plus. As I have never used Adblock Plus, I followed the "Don't see the red octagon" link and chose "Firefox Private Browsing" from the menu. This gave the following instructions:

If you are using Firefox Private Browsing with Tracking Protection, a shield icon is displayed to the left of the Firefox address bar. Tracking Protection blocks ads from being displayed.

1. Click the shield icon to the left of the address bar.
2. Select "Disable protection for this session".
3. Click "Done" below to close this window and refresh the page.

This is oversimplified. Tracking Protection doesn't block ads from being displayed if they're hosted on the same domain as the website. It blocks only third-party ads based on tracking each viewer's behavior across websites to infer his or her interests in order to stalk the viewer with creepy "retargeting" ads. And these third-party ads have been associated with malware transmission far more often than self-hosted ads. I'm not disabling antivirus just because a website can't fall back to self-hosted ads.

Fortunately, a backup of TV Tropes was taken in early July 2012, prior to TV Tropes' switch from the free CC BY-SA license to a non-free license in likely violation of its contributors' copyrights and its short-lived experiment with assignment of copyright in contributions. This backup was used to seed a fork, called All The Tropes, which is hosted on Miraheze. Instead of carrying advertising, projects on Miraheze are supported the same way as Wikimedia projects, namely through voluntary donations from readers.

The corresponding article on All The Tropes is Literal Genie.

Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock Lived Like a Vampire: ‘I Don’t Do Sun’

Exclusive: Vegas killer described his unusual habits in 2013 testimony