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Intel Cascade Lake-X 10th Generation X-Series HEDT CPUs Reportedly Delayed, New Launch Scheduled For 25th November

According to the latest rumors, Intel has reportedly delayed its 10th Gen X-series processors that are part of the Cascade Lake X family. The report comes from PCDIY who has revealed that the X series lineup was originally planned to launch in the coming week but the launch has now been pushed back to the last week of November.

AORUS Teases Their Flagship TRX40 XTREME Motherboard For AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper CPUs – 16 Power Phases

Gigabyte publishes teaser of Threadripper 3 motherboard

Threadripper 3 announcement/launch is expected on November 5.

Halloween dregs:

People Are Deliberately 'Horror-Tripping' on Mushrooms

Related item: How the UK Fell Back in Love with Magic Mushrooms

Spooky.

Give credit where it's due. Vice has good coverage of drugs.

Previously: Oakland Follows Denver in Decriminalizing Magic Mushrooms (and Peyote), 2020 Measures Considered
Johns Hopkins Launches Center for Psychedelic Research

What Handing Out Full Size Candy Bars on Halloween Says About You, According to Behavioral Economists

For all but one of the last eight years, Zillow has named San Francisco as the best city for trick-or-treating and the tony northern neighborhoods of Presidio Heights and Seacliff as the top ranked to visit on Halloween. There’s a reason for this. Zillow’s economists base their rankings on things like walkability scores and number of children under the age of 10. But even the littlest Jedi knights and Hermiones know that the most important indicator in their investment of the night is yield.

There is one can't miss house that has become legendary for their largesse: they hand out full-size candy, specifically Toblerone bars. When the prominent family moved in some twenty years ago, Halloween was a sleepy and underwhelming evening and the parents decided to up the ante to foster a sense of community and festivity amongst their neighbors. They now stock boxes of the triangular Swiss chocolate, as well as a changing variety of Sour Patch Kids, full-size Snickers and sometimes even small plush toys for the sugar-averse.

Growing up, many of us knew of that "one house" that gave out full size treats. But with more stores than ever pushing full-size treats this year, and many residents who go fun-size feeling pressure to give not just one bar but several to each trick or treater, this year Halloween is raising some interesting economic quandaries.

My last journal entry, exposing the bias and hypocrisy right here on SoylentNews, has been updated with even more rejected submissions. Some of them, no doubt, could have changed the course of the world, but now we will never know, since they have been repressed by SN Editores.

(Oh, and everyone think good thoughts for martyb, so that he can get well soon.)

'Extreme haunted' house is 'torture chamber' in disguise, says petition to close it

A haunted house that requires participants to get a doctor's note and sign a 40-page waiver before they enter is facing some pushback online with more than 31,000 people signing a petition calling for it to be shut down.

A Change.org petition calls on Tennessee and Alabama state officials to "shut down McKamey Manor," which it says is a "torture chamber under disguise."

"They do screenings to find the weakest, most easily manipulated people to do the 'haunt'. ... Mckamey Manor is a shame to all haunted houses, and needs to be shut down," the petition started by a person named Frankie Towery reads.

Towery claims participants have been waterboarded, "forced to eat things" and have had duct tape wrapped around their heads. The petition calls for both locations of the haunted house — in Summertown, Tennessee and Huntsville, Alabama — closed.

Forget poisoned candy and razor blades. Here’s the real Halloween horror

Rep. Katie Hill announces resignation amid allegations of improper relationships with staffers

Democratic Rep. Katie Hill of California on Sunday announced her resignation from Congress days after she admitted to having an inappropriate relationship with a campaign staffer before coming into office.

"It is with a broken heart that today I announce my resignation from Congress," Hill said in a statement Sunday. "This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do, but I believe it is the best thing for my constituents, my community, and our country."

News of Hill's resignation comes after the House Committee on Ethics announced Wednesday it was opening an investigation into allegations Hill engaged in an improper relationship with a congressional staffer in possible violation of House rules.

[...] Earlier this month a conservative blog released intimate photos of Hill, alleging she and her husband had a separate relationship with an unnamed female campaign staffer. That report included three photos of the congresswoman, including an explicit photo. CNN has reached out to Hill's husband for comment but has not heard back. Hill offered no evidence linking her husband to the distribution of the photos.

Revenge porn is being used to smear and discredit a sitting congresswoman

Katie Hill, of California’s 25th district, found the naked picture of herself published online while she is in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. In an email to supporters, Hill, who was elected as a freshman Democrat in the 2018 midterms, acknowledged a consensual relationship with an aide during her congressional campaign. But she denied another alleged relationship with a different aide, on Capitol Hill, that her ex-husband claims she had.

[...] What Hill admits to – an extramarital affair with a campaign staffer during what she calls “the final tumultuous years” of an “abusive marriage” – isn’t great.

It’s worth pointing out the distinct ethical position of a woman’s abuse of power in this way from a man’s: when Hill engaged in an affair with a campaign aide, she did not do so in the context of millennia of men’s sexual violence against women, and she did not do so with the reasonable ability to threaten force. But acknowledging this does not mean that we must understand such affairs as acceptable.

JK Rowling urges students not to volunteer at orphanages

Author highlights evidence suggesting that ‘orphanage tourism’ drives families apart and makes children vulnerable to abuse

JK Rowling has called on students around the world not to volunteer at orphanages, pointing to emerging evidence that “orphanage tourism” drives family separation and child trafficking.

Speaking at the One Young World summit in London, the global forum for young leaders, the Harry Potter author and founder and president of children’s charity Lumos, said orphanages do “irreparable harm” and “perpetuate the abuse” of children and communities.

“Despite the best of intentions, the sad truth is that visiting and volunteering in orphanages drives an industry that separates children from their families and puts them at risk of neglect and abuse,” she said.

[...] Rowling was launching a three-year global campaign to challenge attitudes toward orphanage tourism and volunteering, #HelpingNotHelping. The campaign is backed by recently revised travel advice from the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office warning of the potential harm of orphanage tourism and volunteering.

[...] Children in institutions are 500 times more likely to take their own lives, 40 times more likely to have a criminal record and 10 times more likely to be involved in prostitution, the charity claims.

[...] “Most children in orphanages are not even ‘orphans’ – they are placed there due to reasons such as poverty, disability, or to receive an education, and many have a family who could care for them, given the right support,” said Alex Christopoulos, deputy CEO of Lumos.

My First Time Playing Minecraft, Ever: Testing The Ray Tracing Beta

Article contains nice slider comparison screenshots.

Next up: OpenMW.

Just as I've begun experimenting on Aaron Logue's circuit, some further research has shown that such circuits using the base-emitter junctions of transistors in that way are not stable in the long run. After about three months of being electrically stressed in a configuration like that, the oxide in the emitter-base junction of the transistor will begin to degrade, and the circuit will begin to be less and less effective at producing randomness. Rob Seward has a variant circuit that tries to compensate for this effect, but the fact is, the manufacturers of 2N3904s and other transistors which are (ab)used in this way can't make any kind of assurance that their components will remain stable in the long term. This kind of makes me a little bit concerned, because there are many commercial hardware RNGs out there (e.g. ChaosKey, OneRNG, and many others) that use transistor junctions in exactly the same way as the Logue circuit, and if this is true, they will all become unreliable when used for extended periods.

I did some further research and found that noise from Zener diodes is another good way to produce randomness, and Zener diodes at least are intended to be biased in that way, so they should be more stable. The big problem is that while the transistor B-E junction circuits need at least 12 volt supplies, the Zener circuits need even higher voltages, because it seems that the 12 volt Zeners are those which produce most noise. The circuit from betrusted.io is of this type, however, it uses a load of really weird surface mount devices. The power supply in particular uses a TPS61158, which annoyingly comes only in a ridiculously tiny WSON package with no exposed leads that is basically impossible to solder by hand. I'm not investing in a heat gun or other specialised equipment just for that...

Fortunately, I did find a few more designs out there, one of which was actually described in a conference paper. The bill of materials there looks like it uses only stuff I can realistically work with given the equipment that I am likely to have. The TPS61040 it calls for is available in SOT23, which is comparable in size to the ATECC508a (SOIC8). Soldering that by hand is possible: I've done it a few times. There are a few more components out there that I couldn't find in the electronics stores we've got here though, like the 1N759 Zeners that it uses, so I had to order those online.

And so at first I tried to go to RS Online, which I've used before to get some components (as well as my first Raspberry Pi) but they didn't have a lot of the key components I needed. So next I tried to go to DigiKey. They had everything I needed, but they wanted something like $16 to ship the stuff internationally. For a bill of materials that isn't much more than that, it's a pain. But then someone from corporate HQ in Denver is coming by to my part of the world to meet with us in a couple weeks so I asked them to ship it to the company address in Denver instead. $4 shipping, not too bad. But then a few hours later they suddenly tell me that they failed to authorise my payment with PayPal. When I asked what the hell was going on their clueless customer service kept giving me cryptic and unhelpful one-sentence replies to all of my questions, so I told them screw you, cancel my order. And I wound up at Mouser. Seems they would ship it all to me for free if I bought $40 or more from them, so I got a few more items to fill it up and now I'm waiting for my order to get here, which it should by around next week.

In the meantime, I tried to build something like the circuit from that above paper, which they call the Lampert circuit (shown on page 8 of that PDF). I was able to get LM358s from my friendly neighbourhood electronics shops, but I substituted a different 12V 0.5W Zener for the 1N759, a 1N5242. I don't have any diodes equivalent to the MBR0530 (D5) so I substituted a 1N4148. I also don't have a TLV3202 comparator (more's the pity I forgot to order it!), so I substituted an LM319. With a laptop power supply brick to feed 19V into the circuit, it seems to actually work. I've tried feeding the random circuit into an Arduino first and it does seem to be generating good random data based on some of the simple statistical tests I've applied. It mostly passes the FIPS tests and ent, but the random data it produced crashed the OPERM5 test from Diehard (this is known to be unstable though). Longer term testing for the design is warranted, but I'll wait until I get the rest of the components before I start soldering anything.

I'll get all the rest of the components within the next few weeks and then we'll see about building the boost converter into the circuit as well, and then I can build a new RNG hat.

Hillary Clinton called me a 'Russian asset'. The establishment is losing its grip - Jill Stein

The McCarthyist smear against the Green party shows the lengths to which Clinton will go to blame others for her 2016 defeat

Ralph Nader did nothing wrong.