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May God be with the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI and Law Enforcement has arrived. pic.twitter.com/LtJ0D29Hsv

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)

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

****should have a 'Politics' section for Journal Topics!

There is an election coming in Ontario, June 7th (though I usually try to vote in the early polls in case I'm sick on election Day (and lines are non-existent!)

The Liberal party in power, currently, have pretty much blown their welcome for a lot of people but the Conservative party looks like Trump 2.0 (Doug Ford won't give interviews because he's afraid to blow his lead by opening his mouth).

With our voting system, I may be 'wasting' a vote by voting green but it's not a wasted vote for $$$ (each vote brings the party $$$), so my vote will matter $wise.

I'm just tired of status quo, corruption and favouring big business because of money (although parties in Ontario (Canada too???? Not sure) aren't allowed to accept donations from companies, only individuals and up to $1000ish per person WHICH IS AMAZING!!!)

So, I'm going green and Gaaark is becoming Kermit.

Hoping the conservatives don't get a majority, but I want to keep helping the green numbers grow.
The more they grow, the more people may see them as an option.

If you don't know Doug Ford, you may remember his brother Rob Ford...made a scene on (Letterman???) a few years back, lol. Our loveable bum-fuck Rob. :)

U.S. Embassy opening in Jerusalem will be covered live on @FoxNews & @FoxBusiness. Lead up to 9:00 A.M. (eastern) event has already begun. A great day for Israel! youtu.be/7H7Hh5tn2wQ

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.

The HIGHLY anticipated meeting between Kim Jong Un and myself will take place in Singapore on June 12th. We will both try to make it a VERY SPECIAL moment for World Peace! #TrumpNobel

Folks, we lost one of our greatest politicians yesterday. George Deukmejian of California, very very tough on crime. He was in the Legislature, he brought back the death penalty even when Governor Moonbeam said "no." Then he became Governor. Believe me, we're going to have more and more Republicans in power in California. Because we're BUILDING THE WALL!!! foxnews.com/politics/2018/05/08/george-deukmejian-ex-governor-california-dies1.html