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More VRAM and cores, less memory bandwidth:

NVIDIA Officially Launches GeForce GTX 1050 With 3 GB VRAM – Improved Core Specifications Along With A Cut Down Memory Interface

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 (3GB) has a 96-bit memory bus

Lars von Trier's 'gross' and 'torturous' film prompts walkout

Provocateur Lars von Trier is under fire again after a screening of his film, The House That Jack Built, prompted dozens to walk out.

Starring Matt Dillon as a serial killer, one reporter, Roger Friedman said it was a "vile movie. Should not have been made. Actors also culpable". Another tweeted: "Gross. Pretentious. Vomitive. Torturous. Pathetic."

Dillon plays an architect who kills several women and children in gruesome fashion. Uma Thurman also stars.

Von Trier had been banned from the festival for seven years for comments he made in a press conference for his sci-fi film Melancholia. The Danish film-maker pushed organisers too far when he said (as a joke it was later assumed) he was a Nazi.

Now, with The House That Jack Built, the offence has gone further - into the throng of the gathered press. In one scene, as the killer Jack mutilates a girlfriend, he says: "Why is it always the man's fault... If you are born male you are born to be guilty. Think of the injustice of that."

IMDB. Film is 2h35m. It doesn't appear to have been widely released, so streaming/downloading it isn't possible yet.

No, Octopuses Don't Come From Outer Space

Disputed study:

Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic? (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2018.03.004) (DX)

https://www.rt.com/news/426774-crimea-bridge-opening-ceremony/

Europe’s longest: Putin leads column of trucks at Crimean bridge opening ceremony (VIDEO)
Published time: 15 May, 2018 11:36
Edited time: 16 May, 2018 12:31

  A new 19km bridge connecting the mainland with the Crimean Peninsula has been officially opened, making Russia the host of Europe’s longest bridge. President Vladimir Putin personally drove a truck across it to mark the occasion.

The opening of the bridge was all about the people, who created the massive construction in record time. A column of dozens of heavy-duty vehicles including hauler trucks, construction cranes and cement-mixers buzzed along, occasionally tooting their horns. Putin, who showed up for the ceremonial trip unusually dressed in casual style, drove one of the two Kamaz trucks in the front of the motorcade. His usual entourage was literally sidelined, keeping at a distance on the other half of the road.

The column arrived to the Crimean side of the bridge, where Putin spoke a few 'thank you' words to the thousands of people who contributed to the project – from underwater explosives specialists, who helped sweep the seabed for bombs left from World War II, and archeologists to the many construction workers who made the bridge possible.

“10,000 people work at this construction site, 15,000 during peak load. Almost 220 companies were involved. In fact, the entire country worked on it. The result is wonderful. It makes Crimea and the legendary Sevastopol stronger and brings us all closer together,” he said.

The bridge has two parts – one for automobile traffic, which is opening this week, and one for trains – which is to be finished next year. For several more months, trucks will not be allowed through, giving extra time to check all the safety measures and engineering quality. The parade of heavy vehicles on Tuesday apparently aims at dispersing any speculation about the strength of the bridge.

A direct path connecting the Crimean Peninsula to the Krasnodar region on mainland Russia is a significant achievement. Building one was considered as early as the late 19th century. The invading Nazi Germany started constructing a bridge, but the project was cut short by advancing Soviet Union.

The soviets went as far as erecting a bridge themselves, but it quickly failed due to difficult seabed terrain and harsh winter weather. Eventually a ferry connection was deemed a more viable alternative. In modern times Russia and Ukraine were trying to negotiate a joint project to create a bridge with modern technology, but it didn’t take off.

Tables turned in 2014, when an armed coup in Kiev put a fiercely anti-Russian government in power in Ukraine. Frightened by threats of nationalist pogroms and a rollback of autonomy, the predominantly Russian population of Crimea voted in a referendum to break up from Ukraine and ask Russia to take the peninsula back as part of the country, which Moscow did. Kiev responded by trying to isolate the region, disrupting supplies of freshwater and electricity and restricting travel to Crimea.

The Crimean bridge project was Russia’s response to the situation – a permanent overland link between the peninsula and the rest of the country. The work on the project started in 2015 in parallel with creating necessary infrastructure on both sides of the Kerch Strait.

In 2016, the actual work on the bridge started in earnest, with workers building temporary constructions and driving pillars into the seabed. Year 2017 was marked by arguably the trickiest part of the construction – towing, rising and putting in place two arches under which ships can pass. The steel constructions weighted 6,000 tons and 5,500 tons for the railroad and automobile parts of the bridge respectively.

Previously the title of Europe’s longest bridge was held by the Vasco da Gama Bridge in Portugal, which has a total length of over 12km. Trailing shortly behind it is the Lezíria Bridge located in the same country. European bridges however pale before their Asian counterparts. The world’s longest bridge is a 164.8km monster connecting China’s cities of Danyang and Kunshan, which opened in 2010.

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        Europe’s longest: Putin leads column of trucks at Crimean bridge opening ceremony (VIDEO)

Such a script would ease the burden of implementing a few site-wide changes to The Global Computer Index.

As it stands 319 HTML files need to be revised in one or more of four separate ways.

Simply to contemplate such laborious and tedious work gets down so I focus on the smaller countries first, as well as the countries of whose cities I list only a very few.

I use find to produce a list of all the files that require revision. What I'd like is a script that sorts that into countries - or into US states - that have the fewest cities that require revision.

That won't save me any effort but it will make me far more productive. It's much easier for me to initiate a task if it at least appears to be a small task.

Here's some sample data:

$ find . -name index.html -exec grep -l 'Computer Job' {} \; | grep -v united | tail
./pakistan/rawalpindi/index.html
./philippines/manila/index.html
./poland/gdansk/index.html
./poland/warsaw/index.html
./russia/moscow/index.html
./russia/novosibirsk/novosibirsk/index.html
./russia/tomsk/index.html
./russia/tomsk-oblast/index.html
./serbia/belgrade/index.html
./singapore/index.html

In this list I would start with Singapore then go on to Serbia and the Philippines.

If I only needed to change "Computer Job" to "Computer Industry Job" I would use sed. But sed alone won't do it because I often have to break long lines into smaller chunks so as to make iFone Fanbois happy.

I'm also migrating my entire site to HTML 5 - but many of my as-yet-unrevised pages are _already_ HTML 5 but some get warnings when I validate them.

Some have spelling errors. Some have errors that doubtlessly would lead foreign patriots to undertake a vendetta against me, my male children and all their male children.

So really I do need to at least inspect all 319 candidate files.

I thank you, and your future managers thank you.

Nine-year-old Instagram star Lil Tay’s ‘flexing’ got her mom fired — that’s only the beginning of her reign of terror

"flex" = show off wealth

Jake Paul’s influencer circle begins to crumble as his dad comes aboard

China is slick, there's no getting around that. They have a maturity that all Western nations lack. It comes with their 5000 years of history.

http://www.apfn.org/THEWINDS/1997/05/favored_china.html

Most Favored Nation (MFN) status was granted to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1979 and has been renewed on a yearly basis ever since. MFN allows the PRC access to U.S. markets at tariff rates that average six percent. Nations without the designation face a forty-four percent tariff. Most nations have MFN with the exception of six including Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea. Clinton has until June 3 to formally notify Congress of his decision. From that point, Congress has 90 days to reverse his decision. (The Washington Post, 5-20-97).

"I am moving, therefore, to de-link human rights from the annual extension of Most Favored Nation trading status for China." --President Bill Clinton, announcing MFN status for China, White House, 5-26-94.

I have wondered, from to time, where that term came from. "Most Favored Nation". What does that even mean?

I stumbled over an explanation, in a seemingly unrelated article.

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/opium-war-1857.htm

The agreements reached between the Western powers and China following the Opium Wars came to be known as the "unequal treaties" because in practice they gave foreigners privileged status and extracted concessions from the Chinese. Ironically, the Qing Government had fully supported the clauses on extraterritoriality and most-favored nation status in the first treaties in order to keep the foreigners in line.

WTF? MFN, or Most Favored Nation was forced upon China, by the US and UK, almost 150 years ago. We fought the First Opium War, and then the Second Opium War to establish that we can trade wherever we want, in whatever manner suits us. China was required to grant MFN status to the US and the UK, and then later, to any European nation requesting said status.

So - a status that was forced down China's throat, at the point of a sword, we grant to China more than a hundred years later.

For such an intelligent son of a bitch, Clinton was pretty damned stupid. Not only did he give military tech to China, for free, but he kowtowed to the Chinese leadership with the choice of terms. Most Favored Nation.

I wonder if Clinton and Obama are related? Both like to grovel at the feet of foreign rulers . . .

In effect, that title validates any demands, any claims, that China might make upon the US. We GAVE a foreign power privileged status, and we GAVE them concessions, repeatedly. And, they didn't even have to bring a sword to the negotiations, because Bill Clinton was so eager to betray the United States of America.

I'll get right to the point: libertarianism's fatal flaw is that it commits a fallacy, the name of which I do not know, in assuming that the fewest up-front restrictions on personal freedoms necessarily and inevitably translates into the most freedom for the most people into the indefinite future.

The BSD vs GPL licensing example is perhaps the single best illustration of this I've seen in the tech world to date. Debate, and I use the term charitably, rages on still about the merits of each license, with the BSD partisans making almost verbatim the exact same argument just laid out above: that the BSD license is morally, ethically, and pragmatically superior because it places fewer restrictions on who may do what with the code.

By contrast, they say, the GPL is infectious, inserting itself like a retrovirus into the replication machinery of any code licensed with it and forcing certain behaviors (redistribution of source) the BSD types disagree with. As I understand it, the reason they give explicitly for disliking this is that it means fewer people will use the GPL compared to the BSD license, which theoretically therefore translates into BSD-licensed code both proliferating and persisting more than its GPL'd siblings.

What this *actually* means, on the psychological and perhaps subconscious level, is "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." Sorry guys, but it's the truth: dress it up however you like, but the underlying principle here is "I don't wanna share."

It also betrays an almost stunning naivete about human nature, the very same one that small-L-libertarianism itself seems predicated on. There is a sort of ceteris paribus assumption at work here, one which assumes that the wide world of coding is meritocratic (it is not), equal-access (it is not), and measures worth solely on quality, correctness, usefulness, etc., of code (it does not). It is the Just World Fallacy writ small and in C, you might say.

It *completely* fails to take into account human nature, and such wholly non-technical yet pervasive and powerful human engines of corruption as the corporation. Witness Theo de Raadt's anger, entirely justified morally but also entirely his own fault, over the lack of gratitude from corporations who took OpenSSH and OpenBSD itself for their own use and contributed back, perhaps, a single laptop, which took over a year to arrive.

From the outside, this makes perfect sense. I mean, if you leave a plate of cookies out with a sign that says "free cookies," you don't have a right to complain when someone comes by and takes the entire plate for him/herself. But somehow this simple and obvious line of thought seems to elude the BSD-license partisans, or maybe they quash it for ideological reasons, such as faith (and it *is* a faith position...) in the idea that their code will conquer by virtue of spreading far and wide and continuing to evolve.

In addition to being an oddly r-type strategy for the kind of people who, well, think in terms of r-type and K-type to begin with, they neglect to reckon with the fact that entities with larger resource bases than they do can close the source. Oh, yes, you still have the original code and can fork it, but de facto, the original code *becomes* the fork, due to lack of reach and distribution. Hobbyist coders, who are mostly the ones who use the license, simply cannot compete with BigCorp Inc's programmers, not on time, not on money, and in some cases not on talent, at least not collectively. The world does not work like a cartoon (there's that Just World Fallacy again!); the plucky underdog usually gets beaten nine ways from Sunday and loses everything.

Far from being the unwashed moon-unit closet Communists they are accused of being, the GPL's partisans understand human nature all too well, and in particular have come to grips with the fact that we are not angels. They understand that sometimes a couple of well-placed extra regulations can end up preventing a lot of real restrictions on freedom later on.

Mandating that the source be redistributed while allowing charge for the distribution of binaries is actually much more free-market in the long term, in that it ensures that should the distributing entity get greedy and stupid, current, relevant source is available for immediate forkage. Now this doesn't solve the problem with the gap in power and reach between the underdog and BigCorp Inc, but it *does* mean that the value and hard work put into the original code is not lost to the greater community, i.e., the barrier to entry is *lower* in this case since one need not attempt to reverse-engineer everything that happened since BigCorp Inc acquired and closed the source after forking it.

The real point to all this is that this BSD/GPL dust-up is a microcosm of small-L-libertarian thinking and the central fallacy therein. In life, as in coding, the smallest up-front number of restrictions on personal freedom does *not* translate into the most freedom for the most people for the greatest amount of time. In fact, it doesn't take too much brainwork even from a purely deductive standpoint, with no empirical observation whatsoever needing to be done, to see that this is so: game theory and the iterated prisoners' dilemma, for example.

We have a number of such posters on this board who are frankly completely round the twist on this, as religious as any suicide bomber, and I'm *not* just talking about the "violently-imposed monopoly" spammer. Worse still, they consider themselves some sort of original, enlightened, superior thinkers, as if they're the first ones to do the ideological equivalent of dropping trou and pissing an Anarchy symbol into the snow, reality and human nature and empirical observation be damned. Dunning-Krugeritis affects this crowd badly, and prevents them from having the humility to examine their beliefs critically. Worse still, they act as if they're morally as well as intellectually superior.

Well, libertarians, I leave you this thought: two wrongs might not make a right, but sometimes they can prevent a third, fourth, fifth, or hundredth wrong, or much worse wrongs. Your misplaced purity obsession leads to far worse in the medium and long term, and you're too full of yourselves to see it, or even open your eyes to look. The world is not just, humans are not angels, there are other shades besides #000000 and #FFFFFF, and emergent behavior is a thing.

For the love of Stallman, THINK. As the point of code is not code for code's sake, the point of the economy is not making money for money's sake. Do not let the tools become the masters of the craftsmen (and women) using them. Remember than money was made for humans, not humans for money. The root of all evil is treating people like things and things like people.

Mexico says round-the-world cyclists were murdered

Mexican investigators say two European cyclists did not die in an accident as first claimed - they were murdered. The bodies of Holger Hagenbusch, from Germany, and Krzysztof Chmielewski, from Poland, were found at the bottom of a cliff in Chiapas state.

Local authorities had said the pair appeared to have fallen after losing control. However, relatives and fellow cyclists suspected it was more sinister, and had called for a deeper investigation.

The newly appointed special prosecutor, Luis Alberto Sánchez, said, on Friday, that they were killed in what appears to have been a robbery. "Our investigations up to now indicate this was an intentional homicide," he said.

[...] After travelling to Mexico to identify his brother's body, [Reiner] also found out information about the Polish biker. "The Polish cyclist was decapitated and had a foot missing," he wrote on Facebook.

[...] Chmielewski sustained a head injury that may be a gunshot wound, said Mr Sánchez. His body was found next to a bike - but it was not his own. It belonged to his German companion, which aroused suspicions.

So far in May 2018 I'm averaging 2400 hits per day, 350 of which are for http://soggy.jobs/.

I'm going to set up a Tor Hidden Service for Soggy Jobs just so the Gestapo your boss figures your just hanging out on a pr0n throughout your workdays.

Those figures include both live humans and robots. I have some code at home that will remove most of the bots. I expect to sell the code but supporting IE log files just makes my head spin.

So I'm going to release it as Free Software, with the ReadMe.txt file advising the user to change their log file format to Apache's "LogFormat combined". That's a popular format; it would be straightforward to configure other servers to use it, and whadda ya expect? It will be Free As In Freedom!

Real Soon Now I'm going to write some Python code that informs me when a Soggy Jobs listing needs revision.

"Real Soon Now".

To my great delight, someone from a company that I list requested that I hyphenate their domain name. I just did.

I speculated that she didn't know about HTTP Permanent Redirects so I advised her to install one in their old domain's Apache config file - or perhaps an .htaccess file in their website's top level directory:

      Redirect permanent / http://ex-ample.com

The folks at WebmasterWord were leery of losing their PageRank this way so "Google Guy" redirected his entire domain, let it sit there for a while then verified that his SEO was unaffected.

I don't know how to configure redirects for the other HTTP servers.