SoylentNews

No, Octopuses Don't Come From Outer Space

Disputed study:

Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic? (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2018.03.004) (DX)

June 6th Update: We have two people who have submitted proof of subs, good for you! Only a few more days.
June 9th Update: We have three people who have submitted proof of subs, good for you! Only a few more days.

* This Giveaway** is not endorsed by Soylentnews PBC (SN) and is being put on by user Sulla and an AC friend of his
** Whatever legal definitions of giveaway that might exist do not apply to this. Only what you read below applies to this

By reading the following you agree to not pursue any legal action against SN nor Sulla nor his AC friend as related to this "giveaway". This "giveaway" is intended for entertainment purposes only and is not intended as investment or legally binding in any way.

The gist
Enter confirmations of bought SN subscriptions during an allotted time period then of those people seven will be randomly selected to receive a used Blackberry Q10s (good condition). Sulla will cover the shipping, quality of shipping is whatever is most reasonable at the post office.

How to enter
Pics or it didn't happen. Send a screenshot of your SN subscription confirmation to sullasacfriend@protonmail.com and link to the subscribed account. Email account will later be used for the exchanging of addresses for the winners. Screenshot will need to contain the date that the subscription was purchased.

Timeframe
Goes from now until June 30, 2018 as that appears to be the end of this six month period.

Why the q10
The q10 is a quality keyboard phone with a removable battery - literally everything you could ever want or need in a phone. Designed in Canada by top notch engineers to suit the needs of people who need keyboards and running Blackberry 10 to 10.2. These phones were purchased at the top dollar price of ~$20 USD on ebay. They are all ATT branded and presumably locked, they all seem to have clean IMEIs. All have been wiped but you should probably do that yourself too. There is also an eighth phone if anyone wants it but it doesn't have a battery (about ~10 on Amazon). The q10 has an HDMI mini port instead of the dumb slimport coming out of the micro USB.

Number of phones
There are seven phones plus the one without a battery

Reason
We bought some phone on the ebay and thought it would be fun to give them out because more people need glorious keyboard phones. This is totally not a scam to get technically adept SN users to get hooked to the BB10 platform and continue to develop for it. Oh hey look at this https://github.com/mordak/playbook-dev-tools

Additional
If this is well received and fun will do it with other random crap quality products in the future. Saw some z10s on ebay that looked fun. We won't make any money on this as we are giving phones away and shipping and are not associated with SN. In fact it would probably have been better all around to just buy ten or so subscriptions, but whatever. If at the end of this seven or less people entered then those people will get q10s.

You may now resume your legally afforded rights or whatever.

Such a script would ease the burden of implementing a few site-wide changes to The Global Computer Index.

As it stands 319 HTML files need to be revised in one or more of four separate ways.

Simply to contemplate such laborious and tedious work gets down so I focus on the smaller countries first, as well as the countries of whose cities I list only a very few.

I use find to produce a list of all the files that require revision. What I'd like is a script that sorts that into countries - or into US states - that have the fewest cities that require revision.

That won't save me any effort but it will make me far more productive. It's much easier for me to initiate a task if it at least appears to be a small task.

Here's some sample data:

$ find . -name index.html -exec grep -l 'Computer Job' {} \; | grep -v united | tail
./pakistan/rawalpindi/index.html
./philippines/manila/index.html
./poland/gdansk/index.html
./poland/warsaw/index.html
./russia/moscow/index.html
./russia/novosibirsk/novosibirsk/index.html
./russia/tomsk/index.html
./russia/tomsk-oblast/index.html
./serbia/belgrade/index.html
./singapore/index.html

In this list I would start with Singapore then go on to Serbia and the Philippines.

If I only needed to change "Computer Job" to "Computer Industry Job" I would use sed. But sed alone won't do it because I often have to break long lines into smaller chunks so as to make iFone Fanbois happy.

I'm also migrating my entire site to HTML 5 - but many of my as-yet-unrevised pages are _already_ HTML 5 but some get warnings when I validate them.

Some have spelling errors. Some have errors that doubtlessly would lead foreign patriots to undertake a vendetta against me, my male children and all their male children.

So really I do need to at least inspect all 319 candidate files.

I thank you, and your future managers thank you.

Nine-year-old Instagram star Lil Tay’s ‘flexing’ got her mom fired — that’s only the beginning of her reign of terror

"flex" = show off wealth

Jake Paul’s influencer circle begins to crumble as his dad comes aboard

U.S. Embassy opening in Jerusalem will be covered live on @FoxNews & @FoxBusiness. Lead up to 9:00 A.M. (eastern) event has already begun. A great day for Israel! youtu.be/7H7Hh5tn2wQ

I'll get right to the point: libertarianism's fatal flaw is that it commits a fallacy, the name of which I do not know, in assuming that the fewest up-front restrictions on personal freedoms necessarily and inevitably translates into the most freedom for the most people into the indefinite future.

The BSD vs GPL licensing example is perhaps the single best illustration of this I've seen in the tech world to date. Debate, and I use the term charitably, rages on still about the merits of each license, with the BSD partisans making almost verbatim the exact same argument just laid out above: that the BSD license is morally, ethically, and pragmatically superior because it places fewer restrictions on who may do what with the code.

By contrast, they say, the GPL is infectious, inserting itself like a retrovirus into the replication machinery of any code licensed with it and forcing certain behaviors (redistribution of source) the BSD types disagree with. As I understand it, the reason they give explicitly for disliking this is that it means fewer people will use the GPL compared to the BSD license, which theoretically therefore translates into BSD-licensed code both proliferating and persisting more than its GPL'd siblings.

What this *actually* means, on the psychological and perhaps subconscious level, is "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." Sorry guys, but it's the truth: dress it up however you like, but the underlying principle here is "I don't wanna share."

It also betrays an almost stunning naivete about human nature, the very same one that small-L-libertarianism itself seems predicated on. There is a sort of ceteris paribus assumption at work here, one which assumes that the wide world of coding is meritocratic (it is not), equal-access (it is not), and measures worth solely on quality, correctness, usefulness, etc., of code (it does not). It is the Just World Fallacy writ small and in C, you might say.

It *completely* fails to take into account human nature, and such wholly non-technical yet pervasive and powerful human engines of corruption as the corporation. Witness Theo de Raadt's anger, entirely justified morally but also entirely his own fault, over the lack of gratitude from corporations who took OpenSSH and OpenBSD itself for their own use and contributed back, perhaps, a single laptop, which took over a year to arrive.

From the outside, this makes perfect sense. I mean, if you leave a plate of cookies out with a sign that says "free cookies," you don't have a right to complain when someone comes by and takes the entire plate for him/herself. But somehow this simple and obvious line of thought seems to elude the BSD-license partisans, or maybe they quash it for ideological reasons, such as faith (and it *is* a faith position...) in the idea that their code will conquer by virtue of spreading far and wide and continuing to evolve.

In addition to being an oddly r-type strategy for the kind of people who, well, think in terms of r-type and K-type to begin with, they neglect to reckon with the fact that entities with larger resource bases than they do can close the source. Oh, yes, you still have the original code and can fork it, but de facto, the original code *becomes* the fork, due to lack of reach and distribution. Hobbyist coders, who are mostly the ones who use the license, simply cannot compete with BigCorp Inc's programmers, not on time, not on money, and in some cases not on talent, at least not collectively. The world does not work like a cartoon (there's that Just World Fallacy again!); the plucky underdog usually gets beaten nine ways from Sunday and loses everything.

Far from being the unwashed moon-unit closet Communists they are accused of being, the GPL's partisans understand human nature all too well, and in particular have come to grips with the fact that we are not angels. They understand that sometimes a couple of well-placed extra regulations can end up preventing a lot of real restrictions on freedom later on.

Mandating that the source be redistributed while allowing charge for the distribution of binaries is actually much more free-market in the long term, in that it ensures that should the distributing entity get greedy and stupid, current, relevant source is available for immediate forkage. Now this doesn't solve the problem with the gap in power and reach between the underdog and BigCorp Inc, but it *does* mean that the value and hard work put into the original code is not lost to the greater community, i.e., the barrier to entry is *lower* in this case since one need not attempt to reverse-engineer everything that happened since BigCorp Inc acquired and closed the source after forking it.

The real point to all this is that this BSD/GPL dust-up is a microcosm of small-L-libertarian thinking and the central fallacy therein. In life, as in coding, the smallest up-front number of restrictions on personal freedom does *not* translate into the most freedom for the most people for the greatest amount of time. In fact, it doesn't take too much brainwork even from a purely deductive standpoint, with no empirical observation whatsoever needing to be done, to see that this is so: game theory and the iterated prisoners' dilemma, for example.

We have a number of such posters on this board who are frankly completely round the twist on this, as religious as any suicide bomber, and I'm *not* just talking about the "violently-imposed monopoly" spammer. Worse still, they consider themselves some sort of original, enlightened, superior thinkers, as if they're the first ones to do the ideological equivalent of dropping trou and pissing an Anarchy symbol into the snow, reality and human nature and empirical observation be damned. Dunning-Krugeritis affects this crowd badly, and prevents them from having the humility to examine their beliefs critically. Worse still, they act as if they're morally as well as intellectually superior.

Well, libertarians, I leave you this thought: two wrongs might not make a right, but sometimes they can prevent a third, fourth, fifth, or hundredth wrong, or much worse wrongs. Your misplaced purity obsession leads to far worse in the medium and long term, and you're too full of yourselves to see it, or even open your eyes to look. The world is not just, humans are not angels, there are other shades besides #000000 and #FFFFFF, and emergent behavior is a thing.

For the love of Stallman, THINK. As the point of code is not code for code's sake, the point of the economy is not making money for money's sake. Do not let the tools become the masters of the craftsmen (and women) using them. Remember than money was made for humans, not humans for money. The root of all evil is treating people like things and things like people.

Mexico says round-the-world cyclists were murdered

Mexican investigators say two European cyclists did not die in an accident as first claimed - they were murdered. The bodies of Holger Hagenbusch, from Germany, and Krzysztof Chmielewski, from Poland, were found at the bottom of a cliff in Chiapas state.

Local authorities had said the pair appeared to have fallen after losing control. However, relatives and fellow cyclists suspected it was more sinister, and had called for a deeper investigation.

The newly appointed special prosecutor, Luis Alberto Sánchez, said, on Friday, that they were killed in what appears to have been a robbery. "Our investigations up to now indicate this was an intentional homicide," he said.

[...] After travelling to Mexico to identify his brother's body, [Reiner] also found out information about the Polish biker. "The Polish cyclist was decapitated and had a foot missing," he wrote on Facebook.

[...] Chmielewski sustained a head injury that may be a gunshot wound, said Mr Sánchez. His body was found next to a bike - but it was not his own. It belonged to his German companion, which aroused suspicions.

So far in May 2018 I'm averaging 2400 hits per day, 350 of which are for http://soggy.jobs/.

I'm going to set up a Tor Hidden Service for Soggy Jobs just so the Gestapo your boss figures your just hanging out on a pr0n throughout your workdays.

Those figures include both live humans and robots. I have some code at home that will remove most of the bots. I expect to sell the code but supporting IE log files just makes my head spin.

So I'm going to release it as Free Software, with the ReadMe.txt file advising the user to change their log file format to Apache's "LogFormat combined". That's a popular format; it would be straightforward to configure other servers to use it, and whadda ya expect? It will be Free As In Freedom!

Real Soon Now I'm going to write some Python code that informs me when a Soggy Jobs listing needs revision.

"Real Soon Now".

To my great delight, someone from a company that I list requested that I hyphenate their domain name. I just did.

I speculated that she didn't know about HTTP Permanent Redirects so I advised her to install one in their old domain's Apache config file - or perhaps an .htaccess file in their website's top level directory:

      Redirect permanent / http://ex-ample.com

The folks at WebmasterWord were leery of losing their PageRank this way so "Google Guy" redirected his entire domain, let it sit there for a while then verified that his SEO was unaffected.

I don't know how to configure redirects for the other HTTP servers.

The HIGHLY anticipated meeting between Kim Jong Un and myself will take place in Singapore on June 12th. We will both try to make it a VERY SPECIAL moment for World Peace! #TrumpNobel

Folks, we lost one of our greatest politicians yesterday. George Deukmejian of California, very very tough on crime. He was in the Legislature, he brought back the death penalty even when Governor Moonbeam said "no." Then he became Governor. Believe me, we're going to have more and more Republicans in power in California. Because we're BUILDING THE WALL!!! foxnews.com/politics/2018/05/08/george-deukmejian-ex-governor-california-dies1.html