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Rejected submission by RandomFactor at 2019-03-09 16:32:07 from the or Khan's blood will work too dept.
RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

Kids (not) getting vaccines is all the rage, but lets not neglect the adults in the room.

Just because you are older doesn't mean you are done. There are vaccines you should consider as well.

Summarizing into consumable list form (your welcome)

Flu Vaccine - Annual
    - Influenza kills. The elderly are particularly susceptible.

Tetanus and Diptheria - Booster every 10 years
    - An old country doctor (yes, seriously) once told me as a kid that ~

the only tetanus shot I ever worried about was the one I didn't give.

If you get a deep wound and can't tell a doctor exactly when you got your last booster, they'll probably give you one for Good Bull.

Hepatitis A - various risk groups (e.g. gay men)

Hepatitis B - various risk groups (e.g. gay men)

Pnumococcal conjugate - over 65
    - helps ward off pneumonia

Serogroup B meningococcal - young adults/college students
    - protects against meningitis which is more common on college campuses

human papillomavirus (HPV)- Women below 27, Men below 22
    - protects against some cervical and other cancers (after those ages you likely are already infected...bummer.)

Shingles - adult in 50s/60s
    - Particularly if you ever had Chicken pox, that virus can flare back up in later life and and cause a very painful and debilitating illness called Shingles.

Yellow Fever - traveling to certain areas of the world

Typhoid Fever - traveling to certain areas of the world

Anthrax - Working with certain animals or near a military lab

Of course, you should talk to your doctor if you’re worried about not having gotten all the vaccines and boosters you might need. But really, for most of us, the flu shot is most crucial. It’s dirt cheap, won’t give you the flu, and might even save a life, including yours.

I mean, who DOESN'T love needles?

Rejected submission by RandomFactor at 2019-03-07 15:30:53 from the another day another speculative execution attack dept.
RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

'Spoiler' is the nickname given to a new attack Intel Processors are vulnerable to.

    - AMD processors are not subject to this attack
    - Spoiler can be exploited via javascript on a malicious website
    - There is no fix yet, and one may not be fully possible without architecture changes

Spectre and Meltdown were industry wide problems, so did not provide any particular advantage for AMD or Intel. Not so in this case. If the eventual patch for this turns out to be similarly performance sapping like the other two, this may allow AMD to steal a march on Intel in the market.

researchers are of the opinion that Spoiler cannot be fully fixed with a software patch. They believe changes to Intel's chip architecture will be required.

researchers say Spoiler, “is not something you can patch easily with microcode without losing tremendous performance”.

Advantage AMD

[Intel] is already years behind schedule in moving from 14 nm production lines to 10 nm. In contrast, AMD will soon be making its processors on a 7 nm production line.

If Intel now also needs to redesign their processors to address Spoiler I cannot see how this can be accomplished in less than 5 years. That's enough time for AMD to take significant market share.

Intel has provided an official statement regarding the new vulnerability:

Intel received notice of this research, and we expect that software can be protected against such issues by employing side channel safe software development practices. This includes avoiding control flows that are dependent on the data of interest. We likewise expect that DRAM modules mitigated against Rowhammer style attacks remain protected. Protecting our customers and their data continues to be a critical priority for us and we appreciate the efforts of the security community for their ongoing research.

I'm sure we'll hear more as this develops.

In the meantime - who out there employs 'side channel safe software development practices'?

Dell’s New Precision 7000 Workstations: Dual Xeon, Triple RTX, 3 TB DDR4, 16 TB NVMe

Launching in May, the new Precision 7820 and Precision 7920 machines will be based on one or two Intel Xeon Scalable ‘Cascade Lake-SP’ CPUs thus offering up to 56 physical cores supporting AVX512_VNNI instructions advantageous for workloads that use neural networks, which is why Dell emphasizes AI (and VR) in its announcement. On the graphics and GPGPU side of things, the new Precision 7900-series machines will feature up to three NVIDIA Quadro RTX graphics cards (no word on GV100-based GPUs, but it is highly likely that they will be offered as an option too).

The most hardcore Precision 7920 configurations will be able to carry up to 3 TB of DDR4 DRAM, up to 16 TB of PCI/NVMe solid-state storage (i.e., several M.2 and/or U.2. drives, depending on the configuration), and up to 120/96 TB of storage space enabled by ten 3.5-inch hard drives (i.e., Dell has certified 12 TB HDDs with the new system). Obviously, the workstations will support all kinds of connectivity along with 5.25-inch FlexBays (enabling ODD(s) and/or additional I/O modules for special purposes).

Annie dumped me last night. She did it very kindly, which I appreciate.

We had a date last night. We went to the library to play a board game, but ended up talking for most of it. We always had great conversation. After that, we went to a local pub and had a drink and a snack. I took her home and she said we need to talk. She basically gave me the 'no spark' excuse.

I don't disagree with her. We had a great time together, but the relationship seemed to be having problems transitioning into a physical one. I feel that a large part of that was because it was impossible to have any time alone together. We were always out in public on our dates (My wife an daughter were home, so I couldn't go there, and she has roommates and never invited me to her place). Kinda sucks, but that's life.

Dating two women simultaneously in addition to my home life was quite a bit. It will be nice to have a tiny more time to myself. I missed having time for myself.

... In other news... I received my Soylent News mousepad yesterday. I ordered it from the online store in the sidebar a week or so ago. Shipping was pretty quick to reach me in the Great White North. The mousepad itself is quite nice. The printing quality is pretty good, and the soft top feels nice. One thing that is different than normal mouse pads is that it is thicker. It is twice as thick as my other mousepads which gives a feeling of comfort and security.

The mouse tracking is perfect, and now that I have it installed at my work desk, my job satisfaction has improved ~15%.

All in all, I am happy with my mousepad and would recommend it to anyone who loves this site.

Rejected submission by RandomFactor at 2018-12-02 19:18:14 from the prepare to be drained of all individuality and spirit dept.
RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

Last year he said in an interview

"The reality in China is you never know if you’re going to get into trouble because there are no written rules”

This year, Lu Guang has disappeared from China's remote Xinjiang province.

Lu's work is

known for capturing images of China's environmental damage and the lives of the country's dispossessed

The article infers that Lu has likely disappeared into the same 'reeducation' camps in that province that a million Uighurs have disappeared into.

Rejected submission by RandomFactor at 2018-11-25 19:45:52 from the It's not the crime, it's the coverup dept.
RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

RealClear reports : https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/04/24/did_you_know_the_greatest_two-year_global_cooling_event_just_took_place_103243.html [realclearmarkets.com]

Would it surprise you to learn the greatest global two-year cooling event of the last century just occurred? From February 2016 to February 2018 (the latest month available) global average temperatures dropped 0.56°C. You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop, 0.47°C—also during the global warming era.

While this is interesting, it is a normal statistical variance without significant meaning on its own. What makes it significant is the lack of mention by the same sites reporting similar up spikes. Downs need to be reported along with ups. Failure to do so feeds into climate change denialism.

The public and media case for global warming, unlike the scientific case, depends heavily on short-term observation of actual temperatures. Biased reporting suggests warming is much steadier than it is. If the global temperature really showed half a century of uninterrupted warming—with only warming records, no cooling records—then people with nuanced views of plausible future temperatures could be dismissed as deniers. Annual atmospheric CO2 levels have gone up in pretty much a straight line since 1960, if temperatures did the same thing, the link to CO2 would be direct and obvious. In fact, it is real but complex, and those complexities are important for analyzing policy choices.

Then there is the danger of backlash. Suppose the next five months are similar to the same five months in 2017 and 2016. At some point the news will leak out that all global warming since 1980 has been wiped out in two and a half years, and that record-setting cooling events went unreported—in fact the headlines while they were occurring referenced warming from other times. Some people could go from uncritical acceptance of steadily rising temperatures to uncritical refusal to accept any warming at all.

A US citizen wants to overthrow a US-backed government in Libya. Here's why

At the heart of this is Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, now leading the current move by forces from the east of the country towards the capital Tripoli. Haftar is, to be polite, the ultimate pragmatist. He supported Moammar Gadhafi in his 1969 coup, then found himself in Langley, Virginia in the 90s where he gained US citizenship, before returning to overthrow Gadhafi in the 2011 conflict. Since then, he has been one of many strongmen claiming pre-eminence in the nation's descent into disarray, based in the city of Benghazi and exerting most of his control in eastern Libya.

US pulls troops from Libya amid a surge in violence

The United States military pulled a contingent of its troops from Libya on Sunday amid a surge in violence in the capital city of Tripoli, America's top commander for Africa said.

"The security realities on the ground in Libya are growing increasingly complex and unpredictable," Marine Corps Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, head of US Africa Command, said Sunday in a statement. "Even with an adjustment of the force, we will continue to remain agile in support of existing US strategy."

The American forces, who provide military support for diplomatic missions, counterterrorism activities and improving regional security, have been relocated temporarily in response to "increased unrest."

The person that damn near single-handedly lost the democrats' majority in the US House of Representatives (and senate!) during the 2010 elections (for pushing Romneycare) is going to get an award for, among other things (pushing Romneycare), restoring the democrats' majority in the US House of Representatives during the 2018 elections

Profile in courage?! So insane!

Rejected submission by RandomFactor at 2018-11-16 20:54:45 from the I did tell you they were out to get me dept.
RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

Silicon Angle Reports: https://siliconangle.com/2018/11/14/alex-jones-blames-industrial-political-sabotage-following-hack-infowars-store/ [siliconangle.com]

Per the researcher who uncovered it, the InfoWarsStore was subjected to a Magecart infection based hack, similar to the one that affected Newegg and several other companies a while back. The hack, which exposed details of customers making purchases, was in place for ~24 hours and affected ~1600 customers.

All affected customers have been notified per Alex Jones, however after this perfectly reasonable and appropriate statement the train kept right on rolling:

“This criminal hack is an act of industrial and political sabotage,” Jones said in a statement. “The corporate press is claiming that a Magento plugin to the shopping cart was the point of entry, but that is not true. Infowarsstore.com has never installed that plugin. We use some of the top internet security companies in the nation and they have reported to us that this is a zero-day hack probably carried out by leftist stay-behind networks hiding inside US intelligence agencies.”

So there you have it. It was the deep state.

Rejected submission by RandomFactor at 2018-11-04 23:05:57 from the Doubling down on dumb dept.

RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

Twitter suspended Michael Knowles (a political commentator) three days prior to the election.

The reason was a rehash of one of the oldest election jokes there is, telling the other party to 'remember to vote November 7th!', this was a joke that was already made multiple times by commentators on the other side of the political divide.

There was the usual and predictable uproar from the usual suspects (#freeknowles)

Normally Twitter's playbook in this sort of situation is to ignore or blackhole discussion of it. In very rare cases with lots of visibility it is possible to even get the inappropriate suspension rescinded.
This time Twitter took a new approach, instead doubling down and suspending various prior posters of the same well worn joke, so now both sides of the aisle have been slapped down for a rehash of an antebellum joke.

So where does this leave us? Should we be

    - happy they suspended someone whose claim to fame is writing a book without any words?
    - angry they belatedly suspended multiple people on the the other side to appear unbiased?
    - disgusted that they do this to anyone at all?
    - when is GAB coming back?

More info: https://www.dailywire.com/news/37958/freeknowles-twitter-suspends-daily-wires-michael-emily-zanotti?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=051717-news&utm_campaign=dwtwitter [dailywire.com]