SoylentNews

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34358380

Los Angeles police said Majed Abdulaziz al-Saud, 28, was arrested on Wednesday and released the following day after posting a $300,000 (£197,000) bond. He is scheduled to appear in court on October 19 to face a charge of "forced oral copulation". Al-Saud does not have diplomatic immunity, police said.

Guake, in combination with i3wm, is great: hit alt+enter to open a terminal, type 'guake &', then hit F12 to open and close guake. You can then 'exit' the terminal you first opened to leave your screen empty and ready to use.

F12, palemoon &, F12
F12, cvlc [movie you want to play] &, F12

Very nice!

http://www.cnn.com/ (right on the front page, no Fox BS)
Or an audio stream.

Starts at 5:10 PM PT, 8:10 PM ET.

Wikipedia:

The undercard broadcast took place at 3 PM PDT, while the main card broadcast will occur at 5 PM PDT. The candidates in the main debate are Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. The candidates in the undercard debate are Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum, and George Pataki. Rick Perry suspended his campaign on September 11, effectively ending his candidacy. The two-tiered CNN broadcasts will be consecutive, with the primetime debate planned to immediately follow the second-tier broadcast. The moderator is Jake Tapper of CNN, with side-by-side participation by Hugh Hewitt of Salem Radio.

Other stuff:

• NYT live coverage
• PolitiFact
• Republican Party presidential debates, 2016
• Twitter live

Pushing To Attract Millennials, Taco Bell Will Offer Beer And Wine

[Image]

On Tuesday, Taco Bell announced it is launching a new concept that "redefines fast food experience." The first of these "experiences" will open in Chicago next week, and another one will follow later this month in San Francisco.

In a statement, the company says:

"Taco Bell Cantina restaurants will be the first and only Taco Bell restaurants to serve alcohol to customers who are of legal drinking age. The San Francisco restaurant will serve beer and wine only, while Wicker Park will serve, beer, wine, sangria and twisted Freezes. Cantina restaurants will also feature a new tapas-style menu of sharable appetizers — including nachos and rolled tacos — during designated hours each evening, in addition to the standard Taco Bell Menu."

These new cantinas won't have drive-throughs and will have open kitchens, according to a press release. They will also have digital menu boards, television monitors and an option for customers to use a mobile app to order and pay for their food.

[...] As USA Today reports:

"The company knows that its Millennial customers increasingly are attracted to urban areas, where real estate is pricey. Company officials think that selling a stiffer drink might pad the receipts — the typical Taco Bell receipt is in the $7 range — and in turn help make their urbanization push more doable.

" 'To put in a drive-thru you need land,' Neil Borkan, the Taco Bell franchisee who will operate the Chicago test location, told USA TODAY. 'Can you imagine buying an acre of land in a neighborhood like [Chicago's] Wicker Park? You couldn't afford it. As real estate becomes more and more expensive, this kind of concept makes more sense.'

"Taco Bell is treading carefully into booze. While quick-service rival Starbucks recently announced it would accelerate its push of its beer and wine program and has applied for liquor licenses for hundreds of stores across the USA in recent months, Taco Bell spokesman Rob Poetsch said the company could potentially open 10 locations selling hard drinks next year."

The day I met Rio’s favela master: the drug lord who championed the poor: Misha Glenny tells of his prison meetings with Nem of Rocinha, the slum crime boss who channelled some of his cocaine profits into running a welfare state for 100,000 people

After his arrest, I wrote to Nem in prison and asked if he would speak to me. He agreed. The story that emerged was fascinating: once he reached the top, Nem was, in effect, mayor, police chief and director of the chamber of commerce for a community estimated at 100,000 residents. With the receipts from the cocaine trade, he ran a business that supported nearly 1,000 people. He also channelled some of his profits into a basic welfare state. He could do this because he paid close attention to accounting and budgetary matters.

“The food baskets and the support we gave to extracurricular school activities, such as the Thai boxing or capoeira classes, were all accounted for as part of our business expenses,” he explained. “But the burials, prescription costs or if anyone who couldn’t afford it needed gas, these were all extra payments.”

In the absence of any regular police, law was maintained by 150 armed men, most in their teens and early 20s. But while the man known locally as Mestre, or master, decided over life or death, he usually opted for the former. Under his rule, homicide rates dropped by more than two-thirds.

This was part-calculation, part-intuition. Rocinha was so profitable for the cocaine trade because it is surrounded by the three richest areas of Rio – Leblon, São Conrado and Gávea. By turning Rocinha into the safest and most attractive favela in Rio, business boomed. “He was not a man of violence,” said Detective Bárbara Lomba, who led the three-strong team that patiently investigated the Rocinha drugs operation for four years. “He had a policy of avoiding confrontation wherever possible and of not facing down the police. Rather the opposite, he was in contact with them in a corrupt relationship.”

Nem’s policy paid off. Rocinha became a fixture on the tourist route; Brazil’s biggest pop stars such as Ivete Sangalo and Claudia Leitte were happy to include the favela on their tours, boosting their popularity with Brazil’s poor. Politicians including former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the current incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, were keen to tour, as were members of Brazil’s national football side. Above all, the youngsters from the surrounding middle class areas went to buy coke.

Beltrame knew that he would have to “pacify” Rocinha because of its symbolic power and its location. As the World Cup and the Olympics approached the pressure grew. But by taking Nem out of the equation, Rocinha’s character has changed. The relationship between the police and residents is uneasy at best. In July 2013, a group which included the chief of Rocinha police murdered an innocent bricklayer, and the favela came close to open insurrection.

Since then the drug cartel has been edging its way back and there are sporadic shootouts with the police. Homicides remain at historic low levels but domestic violence, rape, assault and burglary have increased fourfold.

So I just got this message from Aaron Hoag at the DOJ.

It looks like we're fucked.

My original letter to the FTC, which was then forwarded to the DOJ, is here.

Mr. Hopson,

Thank you for your e-mail regarding changes to Microsoft's Secure Boot policies in Windows 10, which was forwarded to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice by the FTC given our history with our cases against Microsoft.

I spent many years working on enforcement of the Division's judgment against Microsoft. As a result, this is an issue that I personally have followed since it initially arose, as you note, in Windows 8. While I appreciate your concerns and those raised by the open source community at large, from an antitrust point of view it is difficult to build a viable case in light of, amongst other factors, Microsoft's willingness to work with the largest Linux vendors to ensure their operating systems will be able to load when Secure Boot is enabled. Without disputing or diminishing the fact that in your own case this solution has not been sufficient to allow you to install your preferred variety of Linux, I can only note that to build an antitrust case, we would be required to show a market-wide effect, which would be exceptionally difficult given the ease with which a user can install Fedora or Ubuntu, to take two of the largest Linux flavors, on a machine even where the OEM has chosen to prevent users from disabling Secure Boot.

We will of course continue to watch this market and will take appropriate action if Microsoft engages in anticompetitive behavior in violation of the antitrust laws.

Thank you again for taking the time to ensure that we were aware of this issue, and do not hesitate to contact us again should future events warrant it.

Yours truly,
Aaron Hoag

-------
Aaron Hoag
Assistant Chief
Networks & Technology Enforcement Section
U.S. Dept. of Justice, Antitrust Division
450 5th St, NW, 7th Floor
Washington, DC 20530
Phone: (202) 307-6153
E-mail: aaron.hoag@usdoj.gov

If you have something to say to him, be civil, rational, and kind. No good will come to our cause by being a dick.

So I converted my /home to btrfs, because I'm quite tight on space and thought the compression would be a benefit.

I had to compile btrfs-progs myself, which also included compiling libext2fs from e2fsprogs. Once I started the conversion, it took 3 hours to convert.

It was successful. I rebooted, logged in, and all my data was intact. The transparent compression I had asked for in my fstab was working.
There was a noticable performance penalty, but that's to be expected with compression.

I use compressed btrfs on my portable SubLinux thumbdrive I keep on my keychain. I've had no problems there,
However, once I started copying data to and from the newly converted filesystem in any size, I noticed a padlock had appeared on everything in Thunar file manager. I suspected a problem, so I went to dmesg. There was a backtrace from btrfs. The kernel's driver had crashed, and it had remounted my new filesystem read-only.

I panicked, fearing the worst. I quickly went to a tty, killed Xorg, unmounted /home, and ran btrfs-convert -r on the partition to undo the conversion.

Thankfully, the un-conversion was successful. I remounted /home and restarted my login manager, logged in, and everything was normal again, running from ext4. No data loss I can see. I ran md5sum on files I suspected might be damaged, they match. No harm done it appears.

Lesson for today: While the filesystem's disk format is indeed stable, the drivers and utilities for managing the filesystem are NOT. Use btrfs at your own peril.

I still like ext4. It's so hard to kill an ext4 filesystem.

https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=8941

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/metamesh/meta-mesh-community-wireless-networks-for-all

Funding Canceled

Funding for this project was canceled by the project creator 1 day ago.

http://www.metamesh.org/blog/2015/08/14/ks-closure

Today we decided to halt our Kickstarter campaign. In the past few weeks, Meta Mesh and its volunteers have had to face a lot of challenges, both in the business and personal realms. We received wide support from many of those we directly asked. For that, we are terrifically grateful.

We have decided to change the direction our company is headed. In no way are we finished. In fact, this Kickstarter experience revealed a lot to us about who we want to be and how to be it.

In the upcoming months we will be expanding PittMesh, launching a webstore where pre-configured routers can be purchased, and will be building a dedicated PittMesh Working Group where people who want to contribute to building a Community Wireless Network can learn about new technology, can gain new skills, and can network with inspired people.

Definitely stay tuned to our website and our social media feeds. In fact, mere moments after closing our Kickstarter campaign something occurred which we will announce shortly that has been months in the making and we are incredibly excited about.

We’re not done. No way. As they say, it’s hard to keep a good man down. We’ll be in touch with you all again shortly.

I've gotten tired of the Secure Boot madness, especially lately with Microsoft's memo to OEMs that they are no longer required to provide an opt-out.

I've written the FTC. Here is the letter I sent to the antitrust division as per their instructions:

Hello, I'm writing to report a possible violation by Microsoft Corporation, who has been abusing their standing with PC manufacturers (who need to comply to get the "Designed for Windows" sticker) to bully them into making it increasingly difficult to install a competitor's operating system on a standard PC.

Around 2011, Microsoft mandated that machines that ship with Windows 8 come with a feature called "Secure Boot" enabled. What this does, is on boot, it checks to see if the operating system was digitally "signed" by a trusted authority, in most cases Microsoft alone, and if not, the system completely refuses to boot. While until Windows 10, Microsoft mandated a feature to disable secure boot in the BIOS, with Windows 10 they have told manufacturers that this is no longer required.

What's important to understand is, that Microsoft has literally positioned themselves as virtually the only trusted 'signer' of all competitors' operating systems. All competitors must either hope that the PC will provide a method to disable this 'secure boot', or *pay* Microsoft, a competitor, to graciously allow them to run on standard PCs.

Prior to the secure boot feature, it was extremely easy to load any competitor's operating system on a standard PC. It took no workarounds or 'hacking' or fiddling with settings. It would simply install.

There are many different operating systems available for the PC, including but not by any means limited to:
Linux (which comes in literally thousands of variations, each requiring to be signed by Microsoft for secure boot), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Haiku OS, Solaris, and even Android.

These systems have no technical limitation preventing them from being installed on these PCs, but rather
are now artificially forced to pay Microsoft to run on any PC with Secure Boot 'locked' on.
I have already encountered a Toshiba laptop that did not have an option to disable secure boot, and it was impossible to boot my preferred homemade Linux operating system on it as a result, since I cannot and will not pay Microsoft to sign it.

Microsoft has made unusually high requirements for them signing an operating system. It even goes as far to state that components they sign must not be of particular free software licenses.
In addition, it contains a threat to revoke certificates for OSes that have known security holes in the boot sequence code, an action Microsoft would surely never do to their own OS. (Windows)

Here is a link to their policies regarding UEFI/Secure Boot "signing":
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows_hardware_certification/archive/2013/12/03/microsoft-uefi-ca-signing-policy-updates.aspx

I await a response and hope that we can continue to keep the operating system running on a PC as the choice of the consumer, not one particular operating system vendor.

You may call me at censored if you wish or need further information.

-Daniel Hopson

I think this song goes well with this entry.

When in 2011 when the OCD hit me for the first time, I had no hope at all. I expected to die soon, because life was such a hell, I couldn't imagine any other scenario. Otherwise, why so much pain? Multiple obsessions hitting me at once, sucking the joy from my soul. This isn't normal OCD. This is stuff that had me screaming for someone to kill me at one point, but I won't get into that. Here's a link that describes it.

I found a spark of light in this pitch black from a youtuber whose whimsical little videos made me feel the first bit of joy in several months. I subscribed to her, HiHiAkafa, then subscribed to her new account HeavenSoulTrance, and finally AkafaXD. She suffers from what appears to be depression, and seems to be a furry. I don't mind of course (how can I, I sometimes think of myself as "the white rat"), and I always found her videos quite adorable. Point is, she posted a video not long ago explaining that depression was preventing her from working on her art. I was one of those who gave her encouraging comments, which she appreciated. It appears that hasn't done any good.

She's erased everything on her last youtube account AkafaXD. The profile picture is glass shattering in a black void.
All that glorious art, lost. All her adorable animations, gone. A piece of me, a piece I integrated into my fondest memories, gone.

I managed to save some of her videos luckily, because I loved her work so much I had downloaded them from YouTube prior to her account wipeout.

I've made an archive of the handful of videos I had on hand, on my secondary server. http://gieba.universe2.us/rememberakafa

I just hope she stays safe.