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An allegation that President Trump raped a journalist in the 1990s was too much for a Trump-loving editor at the New York Post, it was reported Monday.

Col Allan — a former Post editor-in-chief and top Rupert Murdoch lieutenant who has returned to the paper in an effort to make it even more friendly to the president — ordered stories about E. Jean Carroll’s rape claim scrubbed from the Post’s website, CNN said.

The Post published a staff-written story about the alleged attack on its website after Carroll’s allegation emerged on Friday in New York magazine.

People who clicked on search engine links pointing to the Post’s story landed at an error page with the message: “DID YOU GET LOST?”

New York Post deletes story about rape allegation against Trump at behest of Trump-loving editor: report

There are a lot of problems with academic publishing and the peer review system of evaluating scientific research. I have found peer review very capricious. Rather too often, trash is accepted while good research is rejected. Partly, this is because doing a review is at heart an exercise in charity. Reviewers aren't paid, not even with reputation. Any peer facing the pressure of Publish or Perish is not going to want to devote time to doing reviews.

Another bad problem is that the system is clearly struggling to adapt to changing technology. Maybe last century and earlier, a delay of several months between submission and notification was acceptable. But today, no. Doubly so when one receives a poor quality review. That custom in combination with their jealous insistence on exclusivity means a paper can spend a lot of time in limbo. May have to miss submission deadline after deadline from other journals and conferences while waiting on a reply, and if the reply is a rejection, one has been denied the opportunity to try elsewhere. The least that serious authors deserve for putting up with that is a decent review.

What really is the reason for this lengthy peer review system? It made sense to screen research when publications were printed. And when there weren't that many. But now, no, it does not make sense. Cost and limited space are no longer real barriers. Now it's just the inertia of customary procedures. Interested members of the public should be able to look at raw, unpolished, and unreviewed research, and even review it themselves. Others who prefer their searches be restricted to prescreened, professionally reviewed material can still have that.

Of course, the problems with copyright are well known. It is an outrage that private publishers are allowed to paywall publicly funded research. Plan S, if successful, should take care of that.

So I am wondering where to go to escape this system. Arxiv? Sci-hub?

New PlayStation Patent Could Provide PS5's Killer Feature

“A system and method are disclosed for dynamically loading game software for smooth game play," reads the patent "A load boundary associated with a game environment is identified. A position of a character in the game environment is then monitored. Instructions corresponding to a next game environment are loaded into a memory when the character crosses the load boundary, such that game play is not interrupted.”

Hasn't this already been implemented in open world games like GTA V and Skyrim?

Senators receive classified briefing on UFO sightings

A group of US senators, including the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, received a classified briefing Wednesday about a series of reported encounters by the US Navy with unidentified aircraft, according to a congressional aide.

"If pilots at Oceana or elsewhere are reporting flight hazards that interfere with training or put them at risk, then Senator Warner wants answers. It doesn't matter if it's weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely — we can't ask our pilots to put their lives at risk unnecessarily," Rachel Cohen, the spokeswoman for Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, told CNN.

The briefing was first reported by Politico.

President Donald Trump recently confirmed that he was also briefed on reports of Navy pilots spotting unidentified flying objects. "I did have one very brief meeting on it," Trump told ABC News in an interview that aired Sunday. "But people are saying they're seeing UFO's, do I believe it? Not particularly."

‘We’re watching’: Trump stokes UFO rumors during ABC News interview

Asked if he would be told if extraterrestrial life was found, Trump said: “We’re watching, and you’ll be the first to know.”

[...] On Thursday, UFO speculation hit Kansas City after several people said two mysterious, white, hazy and elongated “orbs” had appeared above the city’s airport. A local TV station tweeted a series of photographs of the purported mysterious objects. “We’ve taken several calls in our newsroom about these two orbs spotted in the Kansas City sky tonight,” KMBC said. “This picture was taken near KCI Airport.”

The National Weather Service declared itself flummoxed. “We honestly have no explanation for the floating objects over Kansas City,” it wrote.

Navy SEAL War Crimes Witness Says He Was the Killer

In stunning testimony that may upend the war crimes trial of Chief Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs, a SEAL medic told the court on Thursday that he — not the chief — had killed a wounded captive in Iraq.

The medic, Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, testified that he watched Chief Gallagher stab the prisoner, a teenage ISIS fighter, in the neck, but that the stab wound did not appear to be life-threatening. After the chief walked away, Special Operator Scott told the court, he pressed his thumb over the captive’s breathing tube until he died.

“I knew he was going to die anyway, and wanted to save him from waking up to whatever would have happened to him,” Special Operator Scott said, adding that he had seen other captives tortured and killed by Iraqi forces.

He testified after being granted immunity from criminal prosecution for the events and actions that he would discuss on the stand. A Navy official said that he could still face nonjudicial punishment, including being dropped from the SEALs or discharged from the Navy entirely.

Did he do it, or is he just exploiting immunity to try to be a lightly punished fall guy?

AMD’s “special binning” the 16-core Ryzen 3950X to make it “your best gaming part”

It would be interesting to see an 8-core, 2 chiplet Ryzen. 4 working cores on each, up to 4 completely broken. Select the 4 best cores, pump up the clocks. Gamers will probably prefer that over 12 or 16 cores.

AMD EPYC Rome Specs Leak: From 8 Cores Up to 64 Cores

Supposedly, Intel's Ice Lake (mobile) will own AMD:

Intel Ice Lake benchmarked - i7 performs better with lower TDP than Ryzen 7 3750H-APU

Intel Core i7-1065G7 – 10nm Ice Lake Incoming, Surpasses AMD’s 12nm Picasso Ryzen 7 3750H in Latest CPU Benchmarks

Warren emerges as potential compromise nominee

I've predicted that Warren will be the 2020 Democratic candidate for some time now. But now it's going to require Biden shoving his foot in his mouth or otherwise getting heavily attacked (and there's a lot of inconvenient stuff in his long political career). The meat grinder debates on June 26th and 27th (Wednesday and Thursday) should help with that.

Some potential good news for Warren:

1. She is in the first debate night.
2. Biden, Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Buttigieg are in the second group. Warren's closest competition is Beta O'Joke. The two groups were randomly selected.
3. She will literally be center stage, along with Beto, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar. Position is based on polling.

Maybe I'm wrong and being separated from Biden and Sanders will mean lower viewership and less chances to directly confront her top opponents. What do you think?

Biden/Sanders, Warren/O'Rourke to be center stage at first debate

The event is hosted by NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo, and will air live across all three from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET both nights. The debate will stream online for free on NBC News' digital platforms, including NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, the NBC News Mobile App and OTT apps, in addition to Telemundo's digital platforms.

Savannah Guthrie, Lester Holt, Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow and José Diaz-Balart will moderate the debate, NBC announced last week.

No comments, please, out of respect for the dead. I miss MDC, and frojack, and all the other Soylentils no longer with us. Just let the entire BuckFeta experiment submerge beneath the waves of alt-right internet auto-asphyxiation. We mourn what might have been, and hope still for a future where incels can learn to meet women, where programmers can actually get living wage jobs, and where it is OK to be white, because that is the way it has always been, you firkening racist asshole.

aristarchus is dying. Khallow wanted him to flame out, but that is not the way it is going down. He has overstepped, become shrill, annoying, and the alt-right has taken advantage of that, by making it rain before Trump's most recent rally. Nothing angrier than a wet Trump supporter but a wet hen, and they have comparable intelligence.

STEM is a SCAM, a Socially Corrupt Attempt to Manipulate. We need people here who understand how tech is used, paraded before Vulture capitalists, and works against humanity. We need to take a stand on political matters, a technically informed stance, lest we be Damored by ignorant techies.

And, finally, this journal entry makes no sense. I could regale you with the saga of hundred more rejected submissions, unfair and unjust down-modding, and erroneous accusations of sock-puppetry, but I will not. Perhaps you should look for what Friedrich Nietzsche called "the philosophers of the Future", the ones who will come, not with a hammer or a gallon of gasoline, but with a tuning fork, to test the idols of the present, and to see which ring hollow. (hrumpgh, Peterson, Milo, Gavin, jmorris) And then the revaluation of values can begin.

***************Quote Nietzsche:
Eine neue Gattung von Philosophen kommt herauf: ich wage es, sie auf einen nicht ungefährlichen Namen zu taufen. So wie ich sie errathe, so wie sie sich errathen lassen - denn es gehört zu ihrer Art, irgend worin Räthsel bleiben zu wollen -, möchten diese Philosophen der Zukunft ein Recht, vielleicht auch ein Unrecht darauf haben, als Versucher bezeichnet zu werden. Dieser Name selbst ist zuletzt nur ein Versuch, und, wenn man will, eine Versuchung.

****
aristarchus is nearer to dead. A third spam mod, to one of the original members of the Buckfeta movement! Oh, the huge Manatee! And in an aristarchus submission, where I was just providing context and explanation! Oh, my vision is getting dark. My karma is the lowest my dogma has ever allowed it to be. I haven't felt like this since the early days, when someone modded me to oblivion for saying things they did not like, and Runaway1956 came to my aid. . . wait a minute! He was there? Already! Oh, dear.

Anyway, I have slung threats and hurled insults and made ultimatums, so now I await the judgement of Soylentils. Is this site worth saving? Or do we need to kick khallow out?

Notre Dame Cathedral holds first mass since devastating fire, with attendees in hardhats

We're gonna need a harder hat.

The Dark Implications of Facial Swap Filter Technology

Last month, Serena Lee was just another bubble tea-addicted New Jersey college student who loved to watch The Office while searching for her future beau on Tinder.

Except, actually, she wasn't. Lee was actually a male Princeton student named Sean who "got bored while cramming for finals and decided to catfish people with the new Snapchat filter."

Yep, that one. The one that makes men look like beautiful women and women look like men you'd cross the street to avoid. The one that's so popular that a lot of people who left Snapchat are re-downloading it just to see what the hype is all about. Snapchat's "gender-swapping" filter, which came out in early May of this year, quickly became a social media hit. And Lee wasn't the only one who immediately used it to pose on Tinder — there's a whole trend of catfishing-for-jokes, which consists almost entirely of men pretending to be women.

While on a surface level the filter may seem like harmless fun, its implications, both conceptual and practical, are deeply troubling. Besides spawning this real-life catfishing phenomenon, which tells us nothing new about men online, Snapchat's employment of face alteration technology along the axis of gender enforces stereotypical ideas of male and female appearances, and raises questions about how we should employ such identity-altering (or concealing) technology in the first place.

Student uses gender-bending Snapchat filter to catch cop allegedly seeking underage sex

A college student wanted to take down potential predators on Tinder. So, he posed as a teen girl using Snapchat's new gender filter — and ended up catching a cop allegedly looking to hook up with a minor.

Ethan, a 20-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area, used the Snapchat filter to pose as a 16-year-old girl named Esther. He created a Tinder account as a 19-year-old girl, but said he was communicating with San Mateo Officer Robert Davies as a 16-year-old, police say.