SoylentNews

Got to say, the green look on the site is actually *really* nice. If it was a few shades darker though, we'd be too close that the site that shall not be named.

Three transients arrested in Atlanta highway bridge collapse (CNBC)

Yes, they do mean that inter-dimensional travelers (persons staying or working in a place dimension for only a short time) are sabotaging America's infrastructure.

Tom Wheeler: Telecom/Cable Industry lobbyist, FCC Commissioner, protector of network privacy.

I always thought he just went with the flow to make sure he was getting a piece of the pie. Now I'm not so sure. In a March 29, 2017 OpEd piece in the New York Times, Wheeler decries the actions of Congress in weakening (some might say destroying) online privacy protections:

On Tuesday afternoon, while most people were focused on the latest news from the House Intelligence Committee, the House quietly voted to undo rules that keep internet service providers — the companies like Comcast, Verizon and Charter that you pay for online access — from selling your personal information.

The Senate already approved the bill, on a party-line vote, last week, which means that in the coming days President Trump will be able to sign legislation that will strike a significant blow against online privacy protection.
[...]
Here’s one perverse result of this action. When you make a voice call on your smartphone, the information is protected: Your phone company can’t sell the fact that you are calling car dealerships to others who want to sell you a car. But if the same device and the same network are used to contact car dealers through the internet, that information — the same information, in fact — can be captured and sold by the network. To add insult to injury, you pay the network a monthly fee for the privilege of having your information sold to the highest bidder.

This bill isn’t the only gift to the industry. The Trump F.C.C. recently voted to stay requirements that internet service providers must take “reasonable measures” to protect confidential information they hold on their customers, such as Social Security numbers and credit card information. This is not a hypothetical risk — in 2015 AT&T was fined $25 million for shoddy practices that allowed employees to steal and sell the private information of 280,000 customers.

I would have thought Wheeler wouldn't want to rock the boat, but apparently is willing to stand up for online consumer privacy.

Did I have him wrong? I don't know. And now I'm not really sure I care.

I have many many online friends but very few meatspace friends.

Monday I felt tired and depressed, today too. But after work both days I visited with a couple of the few IRL friends I've got. And I wasn't so tired anymore, nor depressed.

A while back Anonymous Coward drove down to Vancouver and took me out to lunch. I'm going to email him to suggest I return the favor. He'll still have to drive here - he lived about forty miles away - but now I have the cash that I could buy us both lunch.

I've been sleeping excessively. Time that I could otherwise spend with other people, I spend sleeping. This is bad - excessive sleep makes me depressed, depression makes me sleep excessively. Clearly the solution is to sleep less, but when that alarm clock rings, I am immune.

A new guy moved in across the hall from me, that's in the same housing program I'm in. Chris is a good guy. I'm going to invite him in for coffee.

He said "Do you need any food? I got food". "No I got lots of food" I replied. "I'll get you anything you need - food, girls, you name it."

Just spending a little while having coffee with me would be all I need.

I know waitresses and baristas all over the Pacific Northwest, but there's only one I know well enough to see outside her work. She said she wants to come visit, but she's been very busy. She works a lot of hours, then her troublesome sister keeps her busy. She babysits her sister's kids.

I'm planning to buy a car with the money from my next project. (I've been asked to do a second project!) That should help quite a lot as it will enable me to play Open Mics with my keyboard. Performing live music is a good way to make friends. Musicians are a lot more fun than computer programmers.

Spring is here. It's still cold but many of the trees are covered with blossoms. It gladdens my heart to see them.

I still have to wear a coat but I no longer have to wear a sweater under the coat. Soon it will be warm enough to go out without a coat.

I haven't been singing on the street since I've had this client. I'm thinking seriously that I should resume singing. As my Newfie ex-wife said, it would blow the stink off me.

It's evening twilight as I write this. I like it that the sun is up later and later in the day. When I get off work there's still a couple hours of sunlight left.

With daylight savings time it's hard for me that the sun is still down when my alarm clock rings. It's not quite dark, it's morning twilight but there is very little light at that time. Soon though the sun will rise before my alarm.

Krddit's tdillo suggests that I need a hobby away from the computer. Really my music should be that hobby but my depression leads me not to practice. The crazy thing is that I feel good whenever I do practice, I know that I will, but even so I dread practicing.

The dread I have of doing just about anything is delusional. But just knowing that you're delusional doesn't make the delusion go away.

I'm going to ask my pshrink to change my happy pills. The ones I'm presently on - two different antidepressants - do help but not enough. I don't feel bad exactly but I sleep too much. When I talk to other people I speak very slowly. I have difficulty talking at all.

Well I'll post this and head home. The apartment manager will be replacing one of my light switches tonight - when this switch is turned on, the bulb flickers dimly. I don't know for sure that it's the light switch but it seems a reasonable explanation.

Today Theresa May's letter triggering Article 50, the UK's withdrawal from the EU, was delivered to Donald Tusk. Far-right populism appears to have triumphed over post-WWII cooperation. We live in interesting times. Scotland has voted to have another independence referendum, and Northern Ireland's regional assembly is in limbo as a result of a corruption scandal and republican parties have increased their presence. The UK's days are numbered.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/us/politics/trump-health-care-conservatives-congress.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — Whenever a major conservative plan in Washington has collapsed, blame has usually been fairly easy to pin on the Republican hard-liners who insist on purity over practicality.

But as Republicans sifted through the detritus of their failed effort to replace the Affordable Care Act, they were finding fault almost everywhere they looked.

President Trump, posting on Twitter on Sunday, saw multiple culprits, including the renegade group of small-government conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus and outside groups like the Club for Growth. Those groups, which do not always work placidly together, had aligned against the president and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the ultimate symbol of their dismay with the entrenched ways of the capital. At the same time, some saw the president as pointing a finger at Mr. Ryan when Mr. Trump urged his Twitter followers on Saturday to tune in to a Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, who went on to call for Mr. Ryan’s resignation.

For eight years, those divisions were often masked by Republicans’ shared antipathy toward President Barack Obama. Now, as the party struggles to adjust to the post-Obama political order, it is facing a nagging question: How do you hold together when the man who unified you in opposition is no longer around?

I just taught my four oldest kids how bittorrent works. They are enthralled. We're using it to download a Raspberry Pi operating system.

Hmmmm...

This page was generated by a Throng of Orange Barbarians for Gaaark (41).

Trump REALLY is everywhere these days!

AP link #1
AP link #2
Fox News
The Republic

(all 4 links are the same AP story)

Dell’s 32-inch 8K UP3218K Display Now For Sale: Check Your Wallet

Overall an 8K monitor offers 33.2 megapixels of coverage, which in a 32-inch (31.5-inch) form factor gives 280 pixels per inch. 33.2 megapixels is four times that of UHD, which is 8.3 megapixels. Users wanting to play some AAA titles at 8K on this beast are going to run into walls with memory bandwidth very quickly, however eSports titles should run OK. Using some undocumented tricks, a pair of tests in our new set of gaming benchmarks for CPU reviews can render at 8K or even 16K without needing a monitor, so you might see some numbers in due course showing where we stand with GPU power on this technology. It’s worth noting that Raja Koduri, SVP of AMD’s Radeon Technology Group, has stated that VR needs 16K per-eye at 144 Hz to emulate the human experience, so we're still a way off in the display technology reaching consumer price points at least.

Oh no, that's not enough horrifying detail for me and I think I will wait for 16K.