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Google's .bro file format changed to .br after gender politics worries

In late September, Google released a compression algorithm called Brotli and gave files it makes the extension “.bro”.

But last week the extension was changed to “.br”.

The reason for the change is threads like this one, in which posters suggest that “'bro' has a gender problem” and “comes of[f] misogynistic and unprofessional due to the world it lives in.”

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Wikipedia

It was the only life-bearing planet in the entire universe; the very first planet to have life. It was the only planet in existence to have the conditions necessary for biogenesis, including being a double planet, each orbiting each other. The double planet was one of the keys of biogenesis, because of the tides. The timing of orbits and gravities had to be perfect, as well as chemical and photonic conditions.

        Life has a hard time getting started. This was the first planet on which it was possible. It would be billions of years before any other planet had these conditions.

        In time, its rotation slowed as its sister planet Theia went farther away and took up an eccentric orbit around the star.

        It was a very rich planet. Rich in metals, rich in diversity of vegetation once life had evolved that far, vast riches of water, and very rich in hydrocarbons. It was rich in chemicals and conditions conducive to abiogenesis. One of the planet's fauna evolved to the point of sentience, then the arts, than the sciences, until their technologies were very advanced. By the time this had come about, though, the slightly smaller sister had wandered away. The Vulcans never knew of it.

        The Vulcans were a very religious people who worshiped Plutus, a god everyone could see and love. When the heretic prophet Ragnarok was twenty three, he warned them that Plutus had told him to inform everyone that he was commanding them to explore outer space, that there were vast riches there, and their very existence depended on it.

        But space exploration isn't cheap, and the Vulcans couldn't see any monetary payback, only expense. Space travel wasn't started.

        Fifty years later Ragnarok spoke of an evil that only Plutus could save them from, and said it was on its way, and called it Theia. He spoke before a crowd one day, saying Plutus had spoken to him in a dream. As they listened intently, he informed them that their god was angry because they had never left Vulcan and was going to destroy the Vulcans, and Ragnarok and his family were the only ones who would survive the cataclysm unless he told anyone of his dream, in which case he would die instantly and his family would perish as well. His blasphemy was met with a storm of stones, and he died there broken and bloody. The mob then murdered his family and set his house on fire.

        But Ragnarok was right. The rich are never satisfied with their riches, so poured more and more of their seemingly limitless hydrocarbon riches into industry and commerce, all worshiping Plutus with all their hearts. Technology brought wealth, and was developed to a very high degree.

        A century after the would-be savior Ragnarok was stoned to death, the Vulcan culture was already in decline. They developed space travel, but they never saw the signs of the decline. The denizens of a declining civilization never do. But space travel was developed despite its seemingly nonexistent to meager payoff, and a colony was planted on the next planet out from theirs, the third, and another on the fourth. The third planet was uninhabitable because of its almost completely nitrogen atmosphere, and space men and women had to wear oxygen masks and very heavy clothing outside. It was very cold there, having very low concentrations of greenhouse gasses. The planet was called “Schnee”.

        Schnee was the reason space travel was actually developed on Vulcan. Vulcan had been much like Raj a few centuries earlier, but had gradually warmed, becoming hotter and drier. The area near the equator become a desert with fewer and fewer forms of life, and its oceans started shrinking, the water entering the atmosphere as vapor and staying there. Collecting this water was very expensive, so they started looking at Schnee for water. It was a hard life for the scientists and ice miners there, many of whom froze to death.

        The fourth planet, Raj, was much nicer. It had a nitrogen atmosphere with plenty of oxygen for animals to breathe, and carbon dioxide for plants to breathe and warm the planet, so had very comfortable temperatures near its equator. Scientists were there before too long, followed by rich tourists, followed by rich immigrants who went for its beautiful weather and the wonderful Marineris Ocean's seashores. As Vulcan became hotter, Raj became the star's ruling planet. All still worshiped Plutus.

        Vulcan was dying, but wasn't yet dead when Theia returned. It had been in its eccentric orbit for billions of years, its orbits often changed drastically by a gas giant and a ringed planet.

        Theia seemed to be headed directly to Raj! It came very close, its gravity from its larger mass than Raj's and its nearly all iron composition tearing away almost all of Raj's atmosphere. Animals, including the sentient Rajians whose ancestors had immigrated from Vulcan died in hours. Flora came to its end shortly later.

        Raj's gravity altered Theia's course, and it was now headed directly to Schnee. Vulcan had fallen so far that its meager population of Vulcans had no idea of the destruction that had hit Raj, now dead, and what awaited Schnee. It mattered not to them, for they knew that they were doomed. Ragnarok's prophesy was well on its way to being true -- but no one would be left alive to tell tales of the blasphemous prophet.

        The Vulcans on Schnee saw Theia coming, but were helpless to do anything about it. There were few of them left, as well.

        At first it was a white dot in the night sky that got brighter and brighter every evening, then bigger and bigger. Before long it was a huge circle. It hit Schnee with tremendous force, releasing tremendous energies. It made a giant splash of molten rock and metal, and steam from the suddenly boiled ice. Vulcans who still had binoculars could see rings around Schnee, but there were few Vulcans, let alone binoculars. They, the few animals, meager vegetation, and microbes in Schnee's atmosphere that had ridden to Schnee with the Vulcans were the only life in the entire universe.

        Plutus had his revenge, making Vulcan so hot anything combustible burned, and soon there were rivers of flowing lead. Schnee was covered in an ocean of magma, and Raj was hit by so many meteors that all traces of Vulcan activity were erased completely. Plutus had not only destroyed the Vulcans, but all evidence of their very existence.

        It was finally only the microbes in Schnee's atmosphere that lived, who had no way of appreciating the beauty of Schnee's rings. Which was a pity, as they were very beautiful rings indeed.

BBC Trending: Is this manga cartoon of a six-year-old Syrian girl racist?

"I want to live a safe and clean life, eat gourmet food, go out, wear pretty things, and live a luxurious life… all at the expense of someone else," reads the text on the illustration above. "I have an idea. I'll become a refugee."

The image and caption were posted by a right-wing Japanese artist last month. Now, more than 10,000 people have signed a Change.org petition in Japanese urging Facebook to take it down. The petition, posted by an account calling itself the "Don't Allow Racism Group", claims that several people have reported the illustration and demands that "Facebook must recognize an illustration insulting Syrian refugees as racism."

Although the Japan Times reported that Facebook did not take the picture down, saying it did not go against community guidelines, the artist herself removed the picture. But she remains defiant about her motivations for posting it in the first place. Toshiko Hasumi told BBC Trending that she believed the people signing the petition were left-wing activists. "I draw many political mangas [Japanese comics] which are not favourable to them," she said. "This is why they targeted me."

I don't believe it any more than any other campaign promise, but I don't think anyone else is even aiming at this.

Lately I've been working on some goofy projects like WZBlue, my gtk+ lobby monitor for Warzone 2100. But there's other projects I'm having trouble getting any momentum going again. Two good examples are my packrat package manager, which has stalled, and NEXUS, which I want to add ignore support to, but haven't had the drive to actually complete that work. I simply seem to not give a flying fuck.

I don't seem to care much about my normal projects anymore. I enjoy working with GTK, my latest pet, but I'm in the process of learning C++, which knocks the steam out of any C-based GTK+ projects I might envision. I already know C very well, so I'm expanding to be able to read and write C++ as well.

I'm always tired from the still-untreated chronic exhaustion, and coupled with this severe lack of motivation, I find myself watching south park all day and sleeping constantly. I haven't done much coding beyond my little WZBlue project in the last two months.

A couple months back, I wrote a crude AI in Javascript for "High Oil" Warzone 2100, called RatBot, but it's not done and has some strange and rather severe bugs I need to work out. For one, it performs far better in non-networked skirmish than multiplayer, which really, are the same thing, except skirmish has no networking. I've ran into such severe bugs, I kinda stopped working on it altogether for a while. I think of all the projects on the table, that's the one most likely to get me working again.

I'm not a depressed person, I've never been diagnosed with depression, and it usually takes a decent sized reason for me to get all depressed. They've tested my thyroid, it came back normal. No anemia, or sleep apnea.

What am I going to do...

The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison: Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels

Another fun piece written by Barrett Brown from federal prison, this time about Purity.

Here are some older articles along similar lines.

Right-thinking Tory Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Freudian-Slip has announced today that the decent, honest, noble, compassionate Conservative Party would like to encourage the poor to work as hard as the Chinese and Americans.

How they'll achieve this is novel and exciting.

A previous Labour government introduced a system of Tax Credits for people in work with families (i.e. children to feed) but on low incomes which, without the tax credits, would mean that they were in poverty. So, the idea is it pays to work hard.

Note that we are talking about tax credits - a rebate of some of your Income Tax (a tax discount) - not a hand-out for "scroungers."

This is the good part. Those intellectual giants of the Conservative Party reason that, if they abolish Tax Credits (which are only paid to those on a gross annual income of under £16,500 or $25,000) those people will be so motivated and empowered that they will move into better-paid jobs!

“There’s a pretty difficult question that we have to answer, which is essentially: are we going to be a country which is prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard, in the way that Americans are prepared to work hard? And that is about creating a culture where work is at the heart of our success.”

Hunt also suggested in the interview that those reliant on tax credits and benefits lacked self-respect. “Dignity is not just about how much money you have got ... officially children are growing up in poverty if there is an income in that family of less than £16,500. What the Conservatives say is how that £16,500 is earned matters.

Meanwhile, in this brave, new, flexible and empowered labour market of short-term and zero-hours contracts, hard-working Britons are so scared of being off sick at places like Sports Direct that they're being taken away by emergency ambulance.

Work harder for your crumbs, plebs.

Disclaimer: I've never voted Labour (or Tory) in my life. But I do always vote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_orOT3Prwg#t=4m54s

A Japanese man is seen sitting at his computer, attempting to light his cigarette with an oil lighter while chatting with another person who is apparently using vocaloid software. He adds more lighter fluid to the lighter. Some of it spills. When he finally ignites the match, the lighter itself ignites, causing him to drop it. He puts down the match. As he fumbles around, the flames spread, and a girly computer voice warns: "behind you, behind you"

It's all down hill from there.

This is a reposted submission with editing.

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Anonymous Coward-28 writes:

Incomplete list.

Overlord. (13 episodes) Too short. Ending yelled "our production budget is too small". Really, felt like an advertisement to learn WRITTEN japanese, and buy the raw manga from amazon.co.jp; to find out what happens next.

Chaos Dragon. (12 episodes) Beautifully dark; at least for the first few episodes. The "happily ever after" ending felt tasteless and disgusting. Doesn't anybody know how to write a good tragedy anymore ?

Normally, I wouldn't submit trash like this; but the queue's empty, so . . .

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AniChart Summer 2015 anime

LiveChart Summer 2015 anime

Original Submission

A little meta-moderating would be nice, regarding submissions. Just thought of it, a minute ago. There is a submission regarding the Zumwalt destroyers. I have things to say on that subject, so if I were able to meta-moderate the submission, I would definitely give it an up-vote.

One person's moderation in that respect might not mean much - but if a number of people took the time to moderate, it could be useful.

Some people may not even look at that queue, but I've gotten used to it now. If something looks very interesting, there is time to do some modest research before the discussion starts. Or, if it only looks moderately interesting, you can at least click the links in the submission. Voting a submission up or down though. Sounds good anyway.