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New York Times Hires and Fires Writer Within 6 Hours

Posted by takyon on Wednesday February 14 2018, @05:19PM (#2993)
8 Comments

The Difference Time Makes

Posted by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday February 14 2018, @04:28PM (#2992)
146 Comments
/dev/random

I've been thinking about time this morning. How just a little of it can make a world of difference.

When I was a wee little kid, David Allen Coe put out a song called If That Ain't Country. The song's got nothing to do with race but somewhere in it there's the phrase "workin' like a nigger for my room and board". That phrase, and the change in its meaning over the years, is a particularly interesting example.

The song was released in 1977, so forty years and change ago. Back when it was released, there was no question in anyone's minds that "workin' like a nigger" meant working your entire ass off. Say precisely the same words today and (aside from getting screeched at by social justice types, physically attacked by any black folks in earshot, and receiving disgusted looks and head shakes by pretty much everyone else) it's going to convey the exact opposite sentiment. I find that intriguing. And, frankly, quite depressing.

Depressing because of the way the change in meaning came about. Let's talk about that for a bit.

An adult black man black in 1977 expected to have to work his entire ass off if he wanted anything other than ghetto life for his family. Make note of that entire sentence there; every word and clause of it is extremely important.

Essentially not one bit of that applies to an average adult black man in 2018.

The prevailing wisdom in the black community in 2018 is that no matter how hard you work, "institutional racism" will keep you from ever getting ahead in life if you follow the rules. The quotes around that phrase are there because, while it is said on a remarkably frequent basis, it is a fundamentally disingenuous concept. "Institutional <type of discrimination>" essentially means "we need something to blame for <group>'s lack of success but lack any proof of actual <type of discrimination>, so we're going to call it institutional and eliminate the need to back up our claim".

Why do they believe that? Because it's all they've been told since MLK was murdered. Anyone claiming to support the black community and spouting anything except "oppression, oppression, oppression" has been vilified and cast out. Non-black people not toeing the party line are called racists and black people who dare disagree are called Uncle Toms. After several decades of this, the black community has almost entirely lost what MLK was essentially the last one to be allowed to preach: Hope.

Let's be real clear on this, no group or individual is ever going to succeed at anything in life without hope. If you do not have hope, you will not even try, which guarantees that you are not going to succeed. Making no effort to succeed does not go unnoticed by those around you either, thus the change in assumption regarding the work ethic of a generic black man.

Thus also my utter contempt for those who profess the loudest to support the black community while nothing but doom and hopelessness passes their lips when speaking to said community. They have robbed entire generations of a race of the hope of a better life that should be their birthright as Americans. And they've done it while lining their own pockets.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware of a large group of, let's call them fools for kindness's sake, who genuinely believe the black man is oppressed to the point of hopelessness. I have nothing to say to them, because trying to convince a fool that they are foolish is itself foolish. I really wish they could be made to see that taking someone's hope away absolutely ensures their failure though.

That's pretty much all I have to say about the changes in conventional wisdom on their work ethic but do you remember that sentence I told you to remember? I'd like to address another part of it while I'm at it. Specifically the bit that said "if he wanted anything other than ghetto life for his family".

Unfortunately, that desire no longer exists on average. Primarily because it is based on the assumption that he has or even desires a family. This is not in fact the case anymore. Of the black babies that dodge Planned Parenthood's stated anti-black eugenics agenda long enough to be born (and in NYC one year this decade (I forget which and can't be arsed to look it up), that was less than half of them) , over three quarters of them are abandoned by their fathers.

Being raised in a single parent household is the single largest predictor of future poverty in the US. So, unlike imagined oppression, this actually does put future generations of black children at a factual and serious disadvantage in life.

And, no, the absent black fathers are not all victims of the justice system and in prison. Factual, verifiable numbers call you an idiot for even thinking that.

Now, I don't know precisely why most black fathers are not living in a traditional nuclear family with their children and children's mother. I believe that a good chunk of it is their self-destructive culture but I can't honestly say how much. I can say it's a fucking tragedy regardless of why it's occurring though.

What does all of the above boil down to? That the black man was objectively better off when he was actively, openly, and legally discriminated against than he is now. And that there are a whole lot of people in this world that are in desperate need of a good ass-whooping.

Thoughts on init systems, Epoch, the future

Posted by Subsentient on Monday February 12 2018, @06:08PM (#2989)
5 Comments
Code
Oh boy, has it been a while. A lot has changed, much of it not at all for the better.
Life's been hard, but I suppose that's a story for another time.
I've spent the last year or so using Fedora exclusively, as it always has been my favorite distro, other than the systemd quagmire. I've stopped using SubLinux 2, because it's too outdated and I don't have the time or the energy to build another complete system myself with everything that's been going on, much less maintain it.
I used Epoch with it for a while, stumbling through the incompatibility that intermixing systemd and Epoch components caused, before I gave up and essentially said "fuck it". So, I've been using systemd for around a year now.
Here's what I learned from that experience:

* systemd is still terrible. It's unstable, slower than it should be, buggy in critically important places (like unmounting filesystems on shutdown), and still assimilating technologies that it really shouldn't be. (systemd-boot, aka gummiboot, anyone? Now introducing systemd the bootloader.)

* systemd does have some important things that Epoch does not, most importantly a more packager-friendly configuration system as compared to Epoch.

* Epoch is still substantially superior in some ways. Among them is stability, fault tolerance, overall program size, and service management, not to mention the lack of external library dependencies, e.g. dbus. It also has a better feature set for recovering from certain issues, e.g. ctrl-alt-del to kill a stuck service.

* Epoch's codebase is absolutely nauseatingly terrible. It's incredibly hideous. It's "tried and convicted for war crimes" bad. It's unwise for me to attempt to further this codebase as-is, without at least a substantial partial rewrite.

I've had time to do some introspection, and I've realized where Epoch succeeded, and where it failed.

Where Epoch succeeded
* Service management
* Footprint size
* Configuration syntax
* Logging system

Where Epoch failed
* Codebase quality. Like seriously, so disgusting.
* Packager-friendly configuration/service files (A very big one)
* Single threaded design, which created opportunities for lockups and broken applets with misconfigured services, though this was always recoverable.


So, what now? Well, I haven't given up, but I don't have a lot of time right now, due to crippling financial problems.

I do have a plan.

Enter "Monolith"
The new design concept for Epoch's replacement.
The paradigm for it is as follows:

* No dependencies other than the standard library, just like Epoch.

* Multi-threaded, can start multiple services in parallel.

* FIFO file-based interprocess communication, phasing out the incredibly disgusting "MemBus" used by Epoch currently.

* Similar service file keys as to what Epoch uses currently.

* Far better support for multiple configuration files than Epoch

* Minimalist C-based module system and API, for further functionality.

* The biggest thing of all: An optional module for systemd service file compatibility, to make it a true drop-in replacement for systemd. Some things that deal with, eh, stupid stuff from systemd, like its own version of getty etc, will not be supported for obvious reasons.

* GPLv3 license. I've spent considerable time lately being exposed to the proprietary, Tivo-ized Linux systems of today. I've been absolutely disgusted at what I've found. I have no intention of giving them any further resources to lock users in. The GPLv3 should force all modifications to the base code to be published openly, as well as prevent Tivo-ization on those that do use it. With any luck, someone will put it in a set-top box without paying attention and I'll be able to force them to open it up to user code.

I'm thinking I'll write it in C++14, so I can have an easier time eliminating issues like segfaults caused by buggy homebrew linked lists etc.

It'll be a while before I can do this.
Unless someone wants to pay me a livable wage to work on this project, it's going to have to wait until my life stabilizes a bit, which doesn't seem to be coming soon. hint hint.

That's it for now.

Any thoughts?

29-Year-Old Pregnant Virgin

Posted by takyon on Monday February 12 2018, @02:15AM (#2988)
14 Comments
/dev/random

I’m a 29-Year-Old Pregnant Virgin

"This is me giving a middle finger to the people who told me I couldn’t do it because I’m not married yet."

Thoughts &prayers w/the Saratov Airlines&Grand Canyon folks.

Posted by realDonaldTrump on Sunday February 11 2018, @09:00PM (#2987)
3 Comments
Topics

Thoughts and prayers with the families of the 71 Saratov Airlines passengers & crew who died. ✈️💥 No survivors.⚰️⚰️⚰️

And with the survivors, and the families of the victims, of the firey helicopter crash in the Grand Canyon. 🚁🔥

Very sad for me personally. Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. So there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record. 2018, not so great. We must work much harder and get very, very tough on the airlines. Jimmy Carter, President Carter, was a DISASTER for our airlines! Our airlines have been in the shitter since he signed the Airline Deregulation Act.🚽 pic.twitter.com/y8vikN1akP

Russians Mock Their Space Program After Falcon Heavy Launch

Posted by takyon on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:33PM (#2984)
9 Comments
Techonomics

Russians are mocking their space program after the SpaceX launch

Some dove head-first into Russia's rising inequality and the excessive wealth among the country's billionaire elite. One user noted the millions of dollars and years of effort Musk has plowed into pioneering space technology, and lamented the comparison with the kinds of things Russia’s notorious 96 billionaires tend to spend their own money on.

His example: Roman Abramovich, the Russian oil-and-metals magnate who spent some $233 million buying the U.K. soccer team Chelsea.

Abramovich, who’s worth $11 billion according to Forbes magazine, also splashed out some $400 million for the world's second-largest yacht in 2010, which he named Eclipse, ironically enough.

Others used the SpaceX craze to poke fun at Moscow’s standard tit-for-tat diplomatic approach to disputes with Washington, with one user photoshopping a mobile missile launcher flying through the cosmos as Russia’s “symmetrical response.”

How Elon Musk Beat Russia's Space Program

The Soviet Union tried something similar in the 1960s and early 1970s. Sergei Korolev, the rocket designer who launched the first satellite and the first man into space, began the development of what came to be known as the N-1, a 30-engine superheavy rocket capable of taking a 75-ton space station to orbit and perhaps to the Moon, Mars and Venus. Finished after Korolev’s death in 1966, the N-1 was test-launched four times. Each of the launches failed, largely because of the difficulty of running so many engines at the same time.

Now SpaceX has pulled off a similar task, and even though it’s not clear yet who will contract for the Falcon Heavy’s services, SpaceX founder Elon Musk now has the most capable missile in the world: It can deliver up to 64 tons into orbit. Russia’s plans to build such a rocket, capable of flying to the Moon or to Mars, aren’t even complete yet, and certainly not fully funded, though Igor Komarov, head of Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, has promised a first launch in 2028. Even China is likely to have a superheavy launch vehicle before Russia. But it’s the success of upstart Musk that smarts. Roskosmos has the full power of the state behind it, after all. And yet here’s this boyish-looking showman launching his roadster into space, David Bowie blasting from the car’s speakers and “Don’t Panic” -- a quote from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” -- lit up on the central console.

Congress shut down our government again. But we won!

Posted by realDonaldTrump on Friday February 09 2018, @06:26PM (#2980)
4 Comments
Topics

Some very DISLOYAL folks in Congress shut down our government again. Not so you'd notice, you didn't notice did you? They couldn't miss their lunch, the cafeteria was open in time for lunch. No brown bags. ❄️ No Wolfgang Puck Express. Chuck & Nancy looking very foolish again -- still.

Just signed Bill. Our Military will now be stronger than ever before. We love and need our Military and gave them everything -- and more. First time this has happened in a long time. Without more Republicans in Congress, we were forced to increase spending on things we do not like or want in order to finally, after many years of depletion, take care of our Military.

To renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal so it's even more awesome. With very special, very small bombs. So we can take out a bad dude, take out his family, and nobody else gets hurt. And very special missiles that work underwater. We can launch them from a submarine, the submarine doesn't have to come up. It stays hidden. Much nicer than Trident, we'll put very special, very small bombs on the end. On the tip. And maybe sell them to Saudi Arabia, so they can protect themselves. To Japan and the UK, these are islands, surrounded by water, big water, ocean water. That means JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!

And we have parade money now. I want a parade like the one in France, like the one in North Korea. President Macron, Little Rocket Man, they look very strong. Because they put on tremendous parades. They're not so strong, we're much stronger. But we don't do the parades, nobody knows how strong we are. We spend money on our Military, people say, "where did all that money go?" They don't see our Military out there, on the street. President Erdogan, so many other countries, they have guys in the street, we don't. That ends now.

Sadly, we needed some Dem votes for passage. Costs on non-military lines will never come down if we do not elect more Republicans in the 2018 Election, and beyond. Doug Jones, we needed that seat. We could have had Senator Moore or Senator Strange in that seat. But we screwed up. We didn't work as ONE TEAM.

This Bill is a BIG VICTORY for our Military, but much waste in order to get Dem votes. Fortunately, DACA not included in this Bill, negotiations to start now.

John Kelly's standing in Trump admin. hurt; Navalny vs Putin

Posted by takyon on Friday February 09 2018, @02:53PM (#2979)
2 Comments
News

The Memo: Knives come out for Kelly

Kelly’s most vehement critics even suggest the episode could herald his demise within the administration.

“We’ll see this as an inflection point when he is fired,” said one source within President Trump’s orbit. The source, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, blasted Kelly as “tone deaf and politically inept.”

A second source close to the Republican Party complained, regarding Kelly, that “everybody knows he limits access and information flow to POTUS on a daily basis; this could be the beginning of the end of that — and maybe Kelly as chief.”

Trump's self-imposed shackles are coming undone!

Banned From Election, Putin Foe Navalny Pursues Politics By Other Means

He said he doesn't have any doubts that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because similar methods have been deployed against members of the Russian opposition: hacked emails, the publication of false personal information and attacks on social media accounts by armies of bots.

"Putin is conducting a creeping expansion into the Internet — extremely effectively and cheaply," Navalny said. "Of course he had fun hacking those servers and meddling, but it didn't have any significant effect on the elections."

Amid all the hostility between the U.S. and Russia, Navalny said the affinity between Putin and President Trump is inexplicable, especially considering that the Kremlin has based even its domestic policy on anti-Americanism. "This makes no sense, and there is no rational explanation for it. But maybe one day there will be a new Watergate and we'll learn a lot about these amazing ties," he said.

Beyond the personal relationship of presidents, Navalny said that the strategic interests of Washington and Moscow are largely aligned, and that instead of squabbling the countries should be pursuing nuclear non-proliferation and fighting terrorists together. A key move to bettering relations would be for Russia to stop its involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine, he said.

"We're a Western country," Navalny said. "Russia — based on its size, population, nuclear weapons and intellectual potential — should strive to be a leading European country."

Russia should aim to join the European Union and work on participating in a joint security system with NATO members like the U.S., Britain and France, he said.

Navalny's only job is to keep doing what he is doing now without getting assassinated, and eventually mount a real attempt at winning the Presidency after Putin retires from politics.

Announcing PICS, the Presidential Initiative on Cyber Spam!

Posted by realDonaldTrump on Friday February 09 2018, @08:24AM (#2978)
1 Comment
Topics

The administrators have asked for my help with the growing problem of Cyber Spam. Believe me, I'm honored.

We're losing a lot of people because of Spam. And we have to do something. I'm treating it as an emergency, without declaring an emergency. I'm going to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening. The cyber folks at the RNC, we had a very strong cyber defense system. And China, they put a Wall around their Internet. No Cyber Spam in China, folks.

It's time to get very strict. The sentences for spamming are much too short. We’re going to be bringing them up, and bringing them up rapidly. I'm talking death penalty. And the families, with the spammers, you have to take out their families.

All options are on the table, folks. All options.

To my supporters in California, Georgia and Florida.

Posted by realDonaldTrump on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:44PM (#2976)
2 Comments
Topics

Folks, we're having two tremendous rallies today. In the capitals of Florida and California. In Tallahassee, it's so close to Georgia. And in Sacramento. We need to send a very strong message to Governor Moonbeam -- Jerry Brown -- and Governor Rick Scott. They don't understand our Make America Great Again movement. Or they don't agree. Can we call that treason? Why not? I mean, they certainly don’t seem to love our country very much! Because they don't like our oil drilling. I said before, let's knock out Hillary Clinton. And we knocked her out overwhelmingly. Now it's their turn.

Our economy is booming, it's EXPLODING. We need a lot, a lot of energy to keep it running. We need all the energy. Oil. President Bush went into Iraq for the oil. Very expensive, very FOOLISH. And President Obama promised to finish the job. He didn't finish it, he created ISIS. And left a horrible mess for me to clean up.

We don't want to make another big mistake like that one. We want America to be energy independent. For that we need a lot more oil, we need the offshore drilling. But Governor Scott and Governor Brown don't care. They're very selfish, they say "don't drill for the oil." We need that oil. More than we need them.

Let them know! Come to the rallies today -- they call them hearings -- from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Pacific & Eastern time. RALLY FOR OIL! Here are the addresses:

Four Points by Sheraton Tallahassee Downtown
316 West Tennessee Street, Tallahassee, FL 32301
(850) 422-0071

Tsakopoulos Library Galleria
828 I Street, Sacramento, CA 95814
(916) 264-2800

More rallies to come, the ones today are the big ones. Watch my website, we have to change these every time the Dems shut down our government! And you can write in too. I want all my folks from the great MIDDLE of the country to write in! boem.gov/National-Program-Participate