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When surrounded by a majority of people that act irrational, lack imagination and are content with sitting in a mental pool of mud. One can have the viewpoint that It's up to everyone what they want to be, but when these people are in numbers and in various positions to mess up things repeatedly, mostly because their own incapability, there's consequences. So what is an efficient way to handle this quite universal phenomena? So they are marginalized in ones own life but still available in other aspects. These people will however always be in majority because that is how probability distribution works.

Ignorance is a bliss but when the mental sharpness will see through the monkey business consistently, one has to figure out something else.

I glanced at yet another smartphone article. The specs table lists support for up to 200 GB of expandable storage for the Samsung Galaxy S7, and 2 TB for the HTC 10 and LG G5. 2 TB SD cards don't exist yet.

2 TB (actually 2 TiB) has been the theoretical maximum capacity for the SD standard for some years now. Although there was an update to the standard recently, it only specified larger block sizes and faster speeds, not capacities greater than 2 TiB. Newer SD cards could hit the limit soon... think 3D QLC (4 bits per cell) NAND, or just the 3D TLC which will become ubiquitous in SSDs soon. Currently, the largest SD card is 512 GB, and the largest MicroSD card is 200 GB. A Falcon 9 Heavy full of 512 GB SD cards would make for some fast data transmission.

All three of the smartphones I mentioned come with a 2560x1440 screen and 4 GB of RAM. Samsung could be the first manufacturer to bump that to 6 GB as soon as next year. With unnecessary specs like these, it's inevitable that they will market smartphones as VR inserts or desktop replacements.

There’s a loud corner of Reddit where millennials look to get rich or die tryin’

“Y-O-F**KING-LO,” the teen wrote, flashing his trading statement. “900 to 55K in 12 days!”

On Reddit, he’s known as “World Chaos,” a Florida high schooler who earlier this year multiplied his money by betting against the S&P 500. His real name is Jeffrey Rozanski, and the 18-year-old’s appetite for risk would make many seasoned market players facepalm.

In one corner of the Internet, though, praise rained down. “You magnificent bastard,” read one reply. “Sailing away on your yacht while the rest of us f**kers who went long are looking for the nearest window.”

That was peak “WallStreetBets,” the Reddit forum where “YOLO” is the war cry, Martin Shkreli is a role model, and irreverent traders trawl for tickets to quick wealth. It has become what one member calls “the beating heart of millennial day traders.”

“It’s tasteless, hilarious and subversive,” said Erik Johnson, a 28-year-old manufacturing worker and forum regular from Boston. “And you definitely need to have a thick skin to partake.”

Why Facebook is a religion. It integrates with your society in many ways, like a power web you can't really shake off (ingrained). There's requirement for believers to logon and confess and be shamed for any imperfection so they can feel bad (confession and shame). Any non-believers will be seen as odd or shunned (obligatory). Money is demanded in various way of which spam is one (offertory). Priests make arbitrary decisions and keep books on you (herd masters and registration). You have to be a repeat customer to be in the loop (presence enforcement). Etc..

Modern population control enforced by social circles and HR.

France prostitution: MPs outlaw paying for sex

French MPs have passed a law that makes it illegal to pay for sex and imposes fines of up to €3,750 (£3,027, $4,274) for those buying sexual acts. Those convicted would also have to attend classes to learn about the conditions faced by prostitutes.

It has taken more than two years to pass the controversial legislation because of differences between the two houses of parliament over the issue.

Some sex workers protested against the law during the final debate. The demonstrators outside parliament in Paris, numbering about 60, carried banners and placards one of which read: "Don't liberate me, I'll take care of myself", the AFP news agency reports.

All this flickering stuff turned on somewhere the last 2 hours just makes the reading the site much harder. Please fix this!
And the colors doesn't make it easier either.

The Culture That Created Donald Trump Was Liberal, Not Conservative

EgyptAir hijack: Man surrenders at Larnaca airport

Falkland Islands fears new ruling expanding Argentina's sea control

Can Micro Bit replicate BBC Micro success?

Pet insurance claims hit record number

US pulls Tanzanian aid worth $470m over Zanzibar vote

White House to commit $116m to heroin and opioid abuse epidemic

Iraq dossier looms over lone MI6 Eurosceptic

Debate-Ducking Hillary Clinton in '08: Candidates Should Be Tough Enough to Debate "Anytime, Anywhere"

According to some sources, now also this camera recording central for CCTV can be taken over easily (p0wn3d):
Remote Code Execution in CCTV-DVR affecting over 70 different vendors
So next time you pass some border wink to the hackers:
Bulgarian Government border control buys the vulnerable Chinese TVT system

The devices you buy even refuse your direct orders:
The stubborn Foscam FI9286P refuses to drop the phone-home. Unless you apply a firmware update plus an additional patch and re-configuration.

And you probably read about "smart-tv", consoles, bios "checks", telemetry in w10, router advert injection hello Belkin, etc. It's all spy on you without real consent.

So I think one can draw some conclusions:
  * Manufacturers can't be trusted on either ability to secure or objective to care for customers
  * Devices will do phone-home by instruction
  * Code quality is so bad it will be hacked eventually
  * Security updates won't happen

So make sure all devices you take ownership of are prevented from any RF links and from unfiltered wired network. Or that you have documentation and the ability to put your own firmware on the device.
Thus if the device isn't friendly for hacking. Avoid it. You won't have any idea what stinking code that exists inside the device.

Any thoughts on this? especially on the options of putting your own firmware on devices and generally doing a good choice of modifiable devices? IoT are useful, you just have to be in control.

A Former Nixon Aide Admitted the 'War on Drugs' Was Designed to Screw Over Blacks and Hippies

According to Watergate mastermind and former Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the then-president launched the notorious (and ongoing) war on drugs in 1971 to disrupt that administration's two greatest perceived threats: black people and antiwar leftists.

The brazen quote surfaced in the April cover story of Harper's magazine that was written by Dan Baum and went online Tuesday. The reporter recalls an interview back in 1994 in which Ehrlichman bluntly explained the whole thing.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?" Ehrlichman told Baum. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Obvious? Sure. But it's important to get this kind of history explicitly out in the open so that mistakes can be corrected.

Here's the article at Harper's Magazine.

Too spicy for SoylentNews... not spicy enough for your job:

'Hot Tech Talent' IT job board ads caught up in sexism allegations

Dice, formerly the IT Job Boards, said it intended the images, which feature both men and women, to be light-hearted. Part of the drive behind the campaign was to counter the notion that people working in technology were "nerds".