SoylentNews

In case anyone has not been paying attention, the events in Charlottesville have revealed the true nature of SoylentNews. SN sides with the Nazis. Now, like the TMB, this is done under the cover of "free speech", so that, I guess, Nazis can express their side of the violence they do against Jews, homosexuals, Roma, Communists, the developmentally disabled, and jmorris.

Aristarchus has been extraordinarily targeted. After submitting a HUGE number of submissions, I have been pilloried, and subject to at least four unjustified spam mods, and now my karma is so low that I cannot even come back as Runaway1955! Truly a sad state of affairs! And, I also did not realize that after a certain level of karma, one can no longer mod negatively, only positively, and certainly not spam mod in retaliation. Neat system. To suppress free speech!!!

Well, I said long ago that if we did not control the alt-right influence, the promise that was SoylentNews would be lost. Now, I am quite convinced that it is. I have started a "no comment" campaign, so that when the editors fed us stories that do not reflect the true interests of Soylentils, we can register our objection by making note of the fact that we will not comment. And comments are what could have made this site. And I said, I will not leave, but, I also will no longer comment.

Not sure what this all means, but we have gone from BuckFeta to SuckOylent, for sure.

Redefining 'Drug Bust': German Police Seize 5,000 Pills In Shape Of Trump's Head

'Donald Trump-shaped' ecstasy pills seized by German police

German Police Seize Thousands of 'Trump' Ecstasy Tablets

Germany’s orange ecstasy pills have Trump’s name — and face — all over them

Molly!

Joss Whedon fan site shuts down after ex-wife's critical essay

Joss Whedon's Ex-Wife Warns He's A Hypocrite 'Preaching Feminist Ideals'

Joss Whedon Is a 'Hypocrite Preaching Feminist Ideals,' Ex-Wife Kai Cole Says (Guest Blog)

Five times Joss Whedon, self-proclaimed 'woke bae', blew his feminist credentials

So farewell then.

An external SSD has become Samsung's first drive to hit the market with 64-layer V-NAND. It includes a 10 Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C connection and capacities ranging from 250GB to 2TB:

Moving on to the pricing aspect, it must be remembered that the Portable SSD T5 is a pilot vehicle for Samsung's 64-layer V-NAND as its production ramps up. Samsung naturally expects this to be a low-volume, high-margin part. Therefore, despite the higher density, consumers should not expect much difference in the cost per GB compared to other external SSDs in the market. The 2TB variant will have a MSRP of $800 and the 500GB will retail at $200. At 40 cents/GB, it is priced close to other such products currently in the market.

Also at Samsung, PCWorld, The Verge, PCMag, and YouTube.

Not a submission because: Intel First to Market With 64-Layer 3D NAND SSDs

You’ll Never Be as Radical as This 18th-Century Quaker Dwarf

Last of Secret JFK Files Slated for Release This Fall

Fresh Air interview with Philip Shenon, author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, airing now. Will edit link in later.

Walmart is apologizing after a display seemed to market guns as back-to-school items

Walmart apologizes for sign marketing guns as back-to-school items

Did Walmart Place a Sign Over a Gun Display Urging Kids to 'Own the School Year Like a Hero'?

The official Kek cult attire is now a trenchcoat.

FBI agents raided Manafort's home in July

Model says she was freed after 'deep web' kidnapping in Italy: Police

The alleged abductors used encrypted accounts to ask the model’s agent for $300,000 to stop the auction from taking place, claiming to work on behalf of something called the "Black Death Group," which operates within the so-called deep web, police said.

The deep web, or "dark web," is a network of websites that cannot typically be found by search engines, and are often protected through encryption. Billions of dollars in drugs, weapons and other items have been illegally traded on the sites.

Investigators discovered evidence that the suspect, Herba, may have previously organized several online auctions of abducted women, through ads he allegedly described the women and set starting prices. Police said it is unclear whether he actually abducted the women or whether they had ever really been for sale.

Italian police described Herba as a "dangerous subject with aspects of mythomania," which is a pathological inclination to exaggerate.

"It is unclear ... whether the young people were really kidnapped or whether the man invented everything," Deputy Prosecutor Paolo Storari said at a press conference. "The man also presented himself as a professional killer."

Mythomania, they say.

Update: Milan kidnap case: Chloe Ayling 'held to pay for cancer treatment'

Is There a Giant Planet Lurking Beyond Pluto?

Not much new here, but this looks promising:

Michael Medford and Danny Goldstein, graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, think they have a solution to that problem. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of images covering the search area for Planet Nine—all shot from 2009 to 2016 using a 1.2-meter telescope in the mountains north of San Diego—their system will combine multiple images in an ingenious way that should brighten the faint flickers of light from Planet Nine enough to distinguish them from background noise.

“Because the planet is moving with respect to the background stars, you can’t just add overlapping images together,” Medford points out. Instead, their software selects each of the many distinct plausible orbits for Planet Nine, projects the planet’s movement onto the relevant patch of sky, and then offsets successive images to superimpose—and brighten—any pixels corresponding to the planet. A pipeline of software written with Peter Nugent, their faculty advisor, performs the overlapping and subtracts known objects such as stars.

The computational task is enormous because the planet’s orbit is still so uncertain. To do a 98 percent complete search, Medford estimates, they will need to perform 10 billion image comparisons. Fortunately, Nugent has time allocated on the Cori supercomputer, a new Cray XC40 system that recently ranked as the fifth most powerful in the world.

False positives are unavoidable. “Even if we get only one false hit for every million searches, we’ll still get 10,000 fake planets,” Goldstein says. “So we will be passing all detections through a machine-learning system trained to catch and reject artifacts: satellite trails, hot pixels, cosmic rays, and other spurious sources.”

With the data already in hand, the two expect the system, running in parallel on hundreds of Cori’s CPU nodes and 278 hyperthreads per node, to finish the work in just a few days when they flip the switch in August. “We’ll be sitting on the edge of our seats,” Goldstein says. “And whether we find P9 or not, this method can be used to detect other TNOs.”