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US News Website Forbids European Visitors

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 23 2018, @05:19AM (#3692)
78 Comments
News

While using Tor Browser through an Exit Node that I expect is in Europe:

451: Unavailable for legal reasons

We recognise you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore cannot grant you access at this time. For any issues, e-mail us at webmaster@thepostnewspapers.com or call us at 330-721-7678.

=======

Beats The Hell Out Of Clicking Away A "We Use Cookies, So There!" Notification.

Hillary Clinton Hates Migrants

Posted by takyon on Thursday November 22 2018, @10:58PM (#3691)
14 Comments
Career & Education

Hillary Clinton calls on Europe to curb migration to halt populists

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is calling on European leaders to enact stricter immigration policies in order to counter the growing threat of right-wing populism on the continent.

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton told The Guardian in an interview published Thursday, referring to the rise of anti-immigrant politicians across Europe.

“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel," she said, "but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message — ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ — because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”

#HillaryGraduatedFromBeingAnNPCBoss :^)

I've Got Another Facebook Romance Scammer On The Line

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday November 22 2018, @09:27AM (#3687)
22 Comments
Career & Education

I have a great many African friends who are all nice people, except for those who live in Ghana.

I have some reason to believe that all the Ghana residents to be found on Facebook are really Just One Guy who I expect really _does_ live in Ghana. Most commonly his profile photo is Blue-Eyed Cass wearing a sexy white dress with red polka-dots.

If you do an image search for Blue-Eyed Cass, be advised that most of the hits will be NSFW.

Eventually the time comes when "she" wants to come to America to Love Me Long Time. She'll need money to obtain a passport, money to bribe some public officials, round trip plane fare and so on.

The last time I got a Facebook Romance Scammer, she had me hook, line and sinker however she was very very insistent on me sending her cash for the plane fare so she could get a really good deal from a close friend who was a travel agent. "She" was far more patient than are most scammers, one of whom went from "I work as a nanny" to "Send me an iTunes Card" in less than ten minutes. Her profile photo was a SFW photo of a generally NSFW lady.

In the end, I reported this last "lady" as well as Emmanuel Olusoji Ishola to the FBI, the Secret Service - because they handle financial crimes, not just Presidential security - and to the Bank Of America's Security people.

It was not at all long before the above-linked page as well as this one were Google's top two hits for "Emmanuel Olusoji Ishola".

I mentioned that to my shrink, who replied, "He should have known better than to mess with a computer person".

Those two pages together were getting FIFTY GOOGLE REFERRALS PER MONTH for several months. I grew concerned he'd take out a hit on my life and so planned to move out of my apartment and back under a certain bridge - in a tent, with a sleeping bag and a camp stove - but in the end didn't actually do so.

However I _will_ report that I'm quite happy with my purchase of an MSR Whisperlite International multi-fuel stove. It can take White Gas (highly refined Naptha), Unleaded Gasoline, Kerosene and Propane.

Just now my Ghanian "lady" just told me that she's "looking for a healthy relationship" so I replied that I was once married, but that Bonita and I divorced in 2008.

The very instant "she" requests an iTunes card, I'll report her to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. I do that rather than report them to Facebook because all Facebook will do is delete their account.

American Killed by Bow and Arrow on Remote Indian Island

Posted by takyon on Wednesday November 21 2018, @09:43PM (#3684)
24 Comments
Career & Education

American Is Killed by Bow and Arrow on Remote Indian Island

John Allen Chau had dreamed of returning to the Andaman Islands.

Mr. Chau, an American thought to be in his 20s, was fulfilling that dream last week when he set off by kayak for a remote island inhabited by a tribe whose members have killed outsiders for simply stepping on their shore.

Fishermen warned him not to go. Few outsiders had ever been there. And Indian government regulations clearly prohibited any interaction with people on the island, called North Sentinel.

But Mr. Chau pushed ahead in his kayak, which he had packed with a Bible. After that, it is a bit of a mystery what happened.

But the police say one thing is clear: Mr. Chau did not survive.

Also at NPR.

I at First Thought I Sat in Someone's Stale Urine

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:17AM (#3682)
12 Comments
Career & Education

But soon realized it was a severely mentally ill woman who was hurling epithets at an imaginary enemy.

This just about always works:

"Hi! My name is Mike. What's yours?"

I am often - but not always - able to make Schizophrenics stop hallucinating. But my new friend turned away then refused to speak.

"Who's that that you're talking to? You seem pretty angry with them." But she steadfastly tightened up her irritated pout.

"It's OK to be angry when someone mistreats us."

At times during our one-sided conversation she would curse at her enemy again, but not at all at me.

Having just now gotten up from my seat on the train - actually light rail, but to actually spell out "light rail" feels burdensome - I'm pretty sure I really did sit in that woman's piss.

She and I went back and forth this way until I heard someone say "Have a good evening". Without looking away from my new friend I replied the same.

"Hey Sir!" I heard them say again, then looked up to see a young man smiling broadly while giving me a thumbs up. "Have a good evening!"

I smiled as well then returned his thumbs up.

Now I have a question for you lot:

I recently mentioned to an emergency room nurse that I do this kind of thing. "I could never do that," she replied, quite astonished.

That nurse deals on a regular basis with the ground up "Tastes Like Pork" that the Emergency Medical Technicians deliver to her ER. Surely people die in her care because they are ground up far too severely for her and her coworkers to save them.

Mom's father was a doctor she always wanted me to be one too, but I could never watch my patients die.

Yet chatting up the totally demented is no problem for me, none at all.

I am unable to reconcile that ER nurse's reaction to what I do just as easy as writing "Hello World".

What's your take?

There is a Bad Pain where My Kidney Used to Be

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday November 19 2018, @08:16AM (#3678)
17 Comments
Career & Education

Tylenol doesn't help. I had avoided the oxycodone because a close friend ODed. Today specifically I wanted to work, but just now I gave up on that and took 5 mg of the oxy.

My prescription says I can take up to 10 but even at my pain's very worst I never had to take that muc

It will put me to sleep within the hour. That is, as in snoozing; I don't mean to say that it will euthanize me.

Good Times.

Here's another idea for Soylent

Posted by fyngyrz on Sunday November 18 2018, @04:26PM (#3677)
16 Comments
Soylent

So I open Soylent this morning, and I'm greeted with a story where TFS started with:

I'm thinking "WTF is ASUS???"

We're deluged with acronyms. It's difficult to know if one cares about something when TFS is more opaque than it really needs to be, unless you go digging deeper — and I generally don't go digging deeper unless I'm already interested.

So I thought it would be cool if there was a collapsed-by-default region at the bottom of the article that contained the apparent acronyms found in the article, if any were present. The detection would be simply catch all-caps "words" and look them up in a Soylent-local acronym dictionary.

One of the things in the article edit / update would be to catch any that exist, and list any that aren't in the dictionary with a place to define them when the article is submitted / edited /updated.

If the reader sees an acronym they aren't familiar with, they just open the collapsed-by-default region, learn what it means, and experience a "TIL" TFS instead of a "WTF" TFS.

It doesn't seem like it'd be that big of a pushup to code, and it would serve a reasonable purpose.

Example (faked with <spoiler>):


ASUS - 華碩電腦股份有限公司 — ASUSTEK COMPUTER INC
 TIL - Today I Learned
 TFS - The Fucking Summary
 WTF - What The Fuck

Or:

As a (poor) substitute, if the <spoiler> tag could have an optional text field, for example...

<spoiler "Acronyms">

...so that it wouldn't show as "spoiler" but instead as...

*Acronyms* (click to show)

...but perform the same function, then the author of the article or the editor could populate it on a per-TFS basis. It would result in considerable duplication of effort to constantly redefine such things (and that's why I suggested an automated process) but it would still provide a means to make TFSs (and comments) better, and it has the merit of probably being a lot easier to do, which would likely appeal to those who would have to implement it.

Vitamin B12 Injections Would Have Saved My Ancestor's Life

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday November 18 2018, @02:10AM (#3676)
10 Comments
Code

I am mildly anemic. I expect this particular occurrence of anemia is due to blood loss during my kidney removal surgery.

My most-recent blood test leads me to believe I need more Vitamin C, Iron, and Vitamin B12. Vitamin C increases the bioavailability of certain iron-containing compounds; looking into these suggests that one orange each meal would be sufficient.

I emailed my relatives about this, and mentioned that the 1934 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared by George Hoyt Whipple, George Richards Minot and William Parry Murphy "for their discoveries concerning liver therapy in cases of anaemia."

It seems that eating large amounts of raw liver was an effective treatment for Pernicious Anemia. This was later found to be caused by the victims being unable to absorb Vitamin B12 in their food - Methylcobalamin - because they had a lack of something called Intrinsic Factor, a protein produced in the stomach that binds to Methylcobalamin in the small intestine.

The lining small intestine has receptors for Intrinsic Factor but not directly for B12.

My great grandfather, the father of my maternal grandfather Estel Rex Speelmon, died of Pernicious Anemia. Just eating lots of raw liver would have saved his life.

I've had a vague idea for an essay for a year or so, that will discuss the crucial importance of simple kinds of information: just knowing that eating liver treats pernicious anemia is all that was needed to save a great many lives.

Methylcobalamin is required for the production of red blood cells. The Cyanocobalamin that's labeled as "B12" in most vitamin pills and fortified foods isn't actually B12, rather the liver processes Cyanocobalamin with a small fraction being transformed into the Methyl kind.

I also mentioned to these relatives that I was going to eat a whole lot more red meat, because the only human-edible food that B12 is found in is blood. That led one of my relatives to protest vigorously, he advised me to adopt a Vegan Diet - but gradually - and to get my B12 from Vitamin Pills.

I was a vegan for six months. Most of that time I exercised vigorously every day. At the end of that I'd lost forty pounds, was in great physical shape, looked really good and had boundless energy.

Then I started eating meat, eggs and dairy again. The result is that I gained all that weigh back and more, and when I start to sing on the street, after I put my Tip Jar on the ground, stand back up then walk a few steps away from it, I have to stop and breathe deeply for thirty seconds or so before I can start singing.

Because standing back up from putting something on the ground leaves me short of breath.

I'm determined to lose all that weight again, not at all for a better physical appearance but for my blood pressure, as well as to prevent heart attack, stroke or diabetes. Diabetics often die of heart attacks, they go blind or their feet rot off because their poor blood circulation leads excess blood sugar to cause open sources.

I've not yet been prescribed blood pressure medicine but if it goes any higher I surely will. My pressure has been creeping gradually up the last year, with the highest I've seen it being 170 over 110. (It's generally not that high, but still too high.)

High blood pressure is called "The Silent Killer" because there are no noticeable symptoms until it's too late to save one's life: it will destroy your kidneys, one will need a transplant but I expect one wouldn't qualify for a new kidney until one's blood pressure is back down to normal. That would totally suck to try to get in shape while on Dialysis.

I've only got one kidney left. My surgeon advised me to take good care of it.

PS: "certain seizure medicines" prevent one's body from absorbing B12. Does the Trileptal (oxcarbazapine) that I take do so? No. How about the Depakote (valproate) that I took from 1994 through 2014? No as well.

(I was taking Depakote just for Bipolar Mania, however many anti-seizure (anti-epileptic) drugs are effective for mania as well. This leads to speculation that Mania is some form of seizure.)

I Will Sign for the First Time Since My Surgery

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday November 17 2018, @02:26AM (#3675)
8 Comments
Career & Education

In about 45 minutes. I just got downtown and want to chill in my office for a little bit.

This page is about my singing. There's a free instrumental piano EP that you can download or stream. Please drop it right in your shared folder.

I haven't posted any of my singing yet because I'm unhappy with the ways I've tried to mix it so far. When I sing in a quiet place, my recordings sound like I'm in interstellar space. Those are called "Dry" recordings. They're "Wet" once mixed. I've got some good dry recordings but it needs a modest amount of reverb. I'll keep working on it.

I'm planning a vocal album that I will sell: Michael David Crawford LIVE! On Broadway (... and Morrison, Portland, Oregon).

Later tonight I'll visit a friend who is a waitress at a 24-hour restaurant. We are close friends however after we met for coffee a couple times she told me that she didn't want anything romantic. Even so, we remain close friends.

She is anxious to hear about the pathologist's report from my cancerous kidney. I've got the printed report with me now. Most of the text is about the analytic methods they used - the type of microscope stain and so on - but the key words are "Negative margins of excision" which means there were no cancerous cells in the normal tissue surrounding my tumour, so it is exceedingly unlikely to have spread.

That bad boy was 5.6 cm across. His own observations during my surgery as well as my pathologist's report led my surgeon to unequivocally state:

  • "Your cancer is cured!"

I pointed out to him that "I'm a computer programmer. When I screw up on the job, you'll lose your document. I'm very, very happy that you are willing to bear such a weighty responsibility and that you use it so well".

Emacs n00b

Posted by urza9814 on Friday November 16 2018, @06:39PM (#3674)
21 Comments
Software

My editor of choice (Brackets) has decided to break without explanation -- again. And I've realized that this more or less happens *every single goddamn time I run updates*. And I just went through trying a dozen or so editors about a year ago when I switched to Brackets from Kate, and all of them sucked, Brackets was merely the least awful choice.

So I finally decided...fuck it all, let's try emacs.

It's been going alright so far, but I could use some advice for managing multiple files/buffers/frames/windows/panes/whatever and I figured some of you might have some suggestions. I've played with elscreen, speedbar, sr-speedbar...and a few others I looked at but didn't install because they didn't seem quite right. I like how elscreen manages the screens, but not how it displays the menu; I like how sr-speedbar displays the menu, but not how it manages screens. I specifically don't want something like workspaces which, as I understand it, would require me to type out a name every time I want to create or change tabs. I want to either scroll through them and select one, or just tap M-<right> to open the next item in the list.

I like elscreen because I can easily load up a number of tabs, I can save that session when I close emacs, and I can easily switch files with hotkeys. I also like that I can have one tab with multiple panes, so I could group together files that I need to use together. The problem is that it seems to have a ten tab limit, which isn't going to be enough, and also I'd prefer the "tabs" to be in a sidebar rather than along the top of the window.

sr-speedbar gives me the sidebar I want -- sort of -- but it lacks a lot of the other functionality I like from elscreen. Firstly, I have to swap over to the sr-speedbar frame before I can do anything, and I don't see any options so far to bind a key sequence to next/previous buffer or anything like that. And once I select a file, it opens in a pane below whatever file I'm currently working on, when I'd rather have it occupy the entire editor window. It's also not great that sr-speedbar will leave buffer mode every time I select a file, so then I have to go reset it. And it would also be nice to get a bit of the path in the sidebar, not just the filename -- I might want to open both "~/bin/script.sh" and also "~/git/project/bin/script.sh" and it'd be nice to know which script.sh I'm looking at...

I'm sure I can change some of this by modifying the code, and I'm not opposed to that, I just want to find the best place to start so I'm not reinventing the wheel twenty times over. Or maybe there's just a few lines I need to drop in my .emacs that I haven't found yet. I'm also open to any other fun emacs tools or tips anyone would like to share...been reading through docs and manuals and such a bit, but since my existing editor is no longer functional I'm in a bit of a hurry to get something usable up and running before I start screwing it all up by playing with email and web browsers and all that other fun stuff :)