SoylentNews

Here's another rejected submission, which in retrospect shows the submitter's bias a bit, and isn't really tech-related enough for the site. There are probably better examples of the impact of social media, although I don't think any are quite as sustained as these folks. It is interesting that the advocate for the child has only been recently appointed.

GungnirSniper [soylentnews.org] writes:

In one of the stranger stories that shows the effects of social media, a judge issued an arrest order Tuesday for a Florida woman, Heather Hironimus, who fled with her son to prevent his childhood circumcision. The unmarried parents of the boy, now 4, had previously signed a court-approved "parenting plan" that included the boy's circumcision. Potential surgeons have backed out after the mother's refuses consent or becoming the target of anti-circumcision protesters who side with her. [charlotteobserver.com]

An army of special interest groups opposed to circumcision has rallied behind the mom. With websites and local demonstrations, these so-called "intactivists" have closely followed the parents' yearlong battle over the boy, named Chase. [sun-sentinel.com] Neither the boy's mother nor father, Dennis Nebus, are Jewish. He has said he believes circumcision is "just the normal thing to do."

The intactivists have a website [chasesguardians.org] and a Facebook page [facebook.com] dedicated to their cause which allows them to coordinate messaging to doctors considering taking part. As one writer experienced, an intactivist followed her in the supermarket to question her opinions about the topic. [time.com]

The Centers for Disease Control recently came out in favor of circumcision [drugs.com] despite efforts by the Internet activists.

The attorney for the mother said he filed a motion to have a court-appointed guardian ad litem for the boy [local10.com] and is seeking to have a mental health professional evaluate the boy's "emotional state" to determine if circumcision is "something that would be advisable." He said the goal is to make sure the child "has an independent voice" and isn't caught up in his parents' squabble." "It's the boy who's really going to have to live the rest of his life with the decision."

Here's a recent rejected submission that I thought this was weekend-worthy, although in retrospect it's not particularly well written. It's a good sign it got rejected, since it means the editors are getting enough stuff to work with. :)

GungnirSniper [soylentnews.org] writes:

DNAinfo is reporting the elementary (typically ages 5-11) Public School 116 in the Manhattan neighborhood of Kips Bay is "abolishing traditional homework assignments and telling kids to play instead." [dnainfo.com] Jane Hsu, the school's principal, sent a letter to parents that states:

"The topic of homework has received a lot of attention lately, and the negative effects of homework have been well established."

"They include: children’s frustration and exhaustion, lack of time for other activities and family time and, sadly for many, loss of interest in learning."

"In fact, you may be surprised to learn that there have been a variety of studies conducted on the effects of homework in the elementary grades and not one of them could provide any evidence that directly links traditional homework practices with current, or even future, academic success."

Instead of traditional homework such as math problems, they are giving the students menus of ideas that such as visiting a park with a friend, playing chess with a parent, conversations with relatives, unstructured reading, writing a poem about snow, or measuring the perimeter of a household object. The activities have a time requirement of only 20 minutes, and do not require a successful completion, only an attempt.

As one may guess, the concept was not universally embraced. [dnainfo.com] Joe Fiordaliso, president of Community Education Council for District 3 said:

"Here's an analogy: my kids are taking piano lessons," Fiordaliso said. "If they don't practice in between lessons, how are they going to advance beyond Yankee Doodle and ever think about playing something by Chopin?"

Some parents have started spending time fill out their child's education by creating their own assignments. Another parent notes:

"I give him extra work, though. I go to Barnes & Nobles and give him my own homework."

Perhaps getting the parents more involved was part of the idea all along. A further statement from the principal said:

"We are creating opportunities for students and their families to engage in activities that research has proven to benefit academic and social-emotional success in the elementary grades. We look forward to seeing the positive impact our newly-designed homework options will have on our students and their families."

No word if "Hello World" was part of the assignment menus.

I have a friend named Jamie. She's in her 40s, and she might go to prison for four years on the 23rd of this month.
She had a DUI from 2012, which she was guilty of, and one from 2014, which she was not. Because of her prior conviction, she's getting a much harder time by the courts. She's been offered the choice of signing for four years of prison, or taking it to trial and possibly getting 10 years if found guilty. She's a mother with two sweet, young little girls. She won't get to see them for four years. They're going to end up with her mother in Idaho.

She let a friend drive her truck, who was sober, but because she was next to the truck drinking shortly after it parked, she was hit with another DUI when the cops pulled up over a domestic disturbance, which is common here. Her friend already told that she was not the one behind the wheel, but it doesn't seem to make much difference.

Here's where it bothers me. She is innocent, and she's being given the choice of admitting to a crime she didn't commit and getting four years, or fighting it, possibly losing, and getting ten years.

This is disgusting to me.

I'm writing this, I suppose, to ask for advice. How can I help her?

Time is of the essence.

There was a provocative SoylentNews' Michael Brown Shooting Discussions: Six Months Later story that showed up earlier today.

I've been reading through the comments, and I've noticed that a lot of perfectly fine comments have been incorrectly modded down.

For the good of the community and for freedom of expression, the comments linked to below should be modded up:

• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154929 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154988 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=155015 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154907 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=155043 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154871 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154900 [soylentnews.org]

We really need to find a way to better avoid abusive mis-moderation like that. Even with the recent changes, we still have people severely abusing the "Troll" mod, as evident from how those comments were incorrectly moderated.

There needs to be some way to prevent such mis-moderation from happening in the first place. When that fails, there needs to be some way of correcting them faster, as well as punishing those who engaged in such abuse.

I've started work (and nearing completion) on a new Linux distro for i586 and up with 64MB of RAM. It's called Night Linux. The origin of the name is a topic for another day.

Night Linux is a small, ~20MB CLI only distro intended for system rescue/utility purposes.
It's the kind of thing you make bootable on your MP3 player to keep with you in a pinch.

Among its features are: Epoch Init System, elinks browser, ircii IRC client, support for mounting and creating/repairing EXT2/3/4, BTRFS, NTFS, and FAT12/16/32 filesystems, ms-sys to repair Windows boot records, GNU parted, syslinux/extlinux along with MBRs in /usr/lib/syslinux for bootloaders, Bricktick brick breaker game, busybox userland, bash 4.3.x, nano editor, OpenSSH, squashfs tools, and more.

Night Linux is based on bleeding edge code with a 3.19 kernel and glibc 2.21.
I haven't published source yet, (waiting to create a project page) but if you want it, I'll provide it upon request.

Get the first alpha here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9h3wa5ylczjrrt7/NightLinux-Alpha1.i586.iso?dl=1

Feedback welcome.

been mucking around with a little website thing intended to be sort of similar to SoylentNews/Pipedot/etc

it's written in php and is intended to be very simple

site (not yet fully functional) is here: http://news.my.to/

sample story with a bunch of nested test comments here: http://news.my.to/story/1

code for site is here: https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/tree/master/website/news.my.to

so far it has basic rewrite rules, templating for html, uses pdo, no classes (procedural only)

code is unlicensed (https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/blob/master/unlicense.txt)

"Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party"

Corynne McSherry, an IP lawyer for EFF, told The DailyBeast that the "third party" was probably the company providing speech-to-text conversion for Samsung. They also said: "If I were the customer, I might like to know who that third party was, and I’d definitely like to know whether my words were being transmitted in a secure form."

As of late I've spent some time making improvements to my tiny C string library called SubStrings. There are other string solutions, but those either involve a language such as C++, or they try and create a new string type with a struct or something. In many of my programs, there is a huge amount of text processing. One might say more than you should generally attempt in C. It's not a big problem for me actually. It's becoming even less of a problem since I made my pet projects use SubStrings. As I said, I've recently updated it, but I've added a ton of new functions and features. I've updated aqu4bot to make use of these improvements where available.

Take this example of trying to iterate through lines of text stored in a string in memory
This was extracted from aqu4bot BEFORE I updated to use the new SubStrings functions.
It iterates through each line and forwards them to an IRC user.

Worker = InBuf;
do
{
    while (*Worker == '\r' || *Worker == '\n') ++Worker;

    if (*Worker == '\0') break;

    for (TInc = 0; Worker[TInc] != '\n' && Worker[TInc] != '\r' && Worker[TInc] != '\0' && TInc < sizeof LineBuf - 1; ++TInc)
    {
        LineBuf[TInc] = Worker[TInc];
    }
    LineBuf[TInc] = '\0';

    IRC_Message(SendTo, LineBuf);
} while ((Worker = strpbrk(Worker, "\r\n")));

Hideous, yes?

Thanks to SubStrings, I can shorten it to this:

Worker = InBuf;

while (SubStrings.Line.GetLine(LineBuf, sizeof LineBuf, (const char**)&Worker))
{
    IRC_Message(SendTo, LineBuf);
}

I'll be sifting through aqu4bot's code and updating other components that rely on deranged gerbil magic to get strings to work properly. I'll also be working on SubStrings more.

So far, SubStrings is:
* C89/ANSI with no extensions/platform specific stuff
* Doesn't use ANY library functions, meaning you could build it into your bootloader to make text processing easier.
* Uses a pseudo-OOP function pointer based system for getting functions.
* Is small enough to painlessly be embedded in larger source trees.
* Is public domain (unlicense) software, making it pretty much license neutral.

This should encourage me to add new features to aqu4bot, including making good on my threat of using libcurl to build in email support. Why? Because fuck you.

had a go at making a simple pastebin. nothing fancy (no context highlighting, line numbers, etc)

http://paste.my.to/

similarish workings to the url shortener

How deeply unfortunate that it's given such an easily misunderstood ‘name’.

Want to sum up most or maybe all of humanity's problems in two words?

The specific meaning of ‘Moral hazard’ should be shouted from the rooftops. Every single human being ought to be taught what the concept means and the fact that it does not just apply as a term in economics. It describes every major problem inherent to politics I can think of. The fallacies of ideology and ideals or principles, the limits to society, the inescapable “death” from complexity, automatic corruption and institutionalized cronyism, the pressures towards groupthink, secrecy, pressure groups and lobbying, and everything else, it's all there, it touches everything.

If someone wants to make a truly better society and/or if they have to rebuild from the ground then they should focus on removing and inhibiting as much moral hazard as possible. Maybe it's all it takes but the amount of work it requires is enormous.

The first step towards that would be to identify all of it in anything new or old.