SoylentNews

Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City

'Creepy' Chick-fil-A slammed by 'New Yorker' writer from Brooklyn

Chick-fil-A is known for being closed on Sundays and its involvement in the culture wars - against gay marriage (briefly). It is apparently close to becoming the third largest fast food franchise in the U.S., leads the industry in average sales per location, and requires a very small initial investment ($10,000) to open a franchise.

Do I have to do everything around here?

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FDA Launches Criminal Investigation Into Unauthorized Herpes Vaccine Research

By Marisa Taylor, Kaiser Health News

The Food and Drug Administration has launched a criminal investigation into research by a Southern Illinois University professor who injected people with his unauthorized herpes vaccine, Kaiser Health News has learned. SIU professor William Halford, who died in June, injected participants with his experimental herpes vaccine in St. Kitts and Nevis in 2016 and in Illinois hotel rooms in 2013 without safety oversight that is routinely performed by the FDA or an institutional review board.

According to four people with knowledge about the inquiry, the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations is looking into whether anyone from SIU or Halford’s former company, Rational Vaccines, violated FDA regulations by helping Halford conduct unauthorized research. The probe is also looking at anyone else outside the company or university who might have been complicit, according to the sources who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The FDA rarely prosecutes research violations, usually choosing to administratively sanction or ban researchers or companies from future clinical trials, legal experts said. Even so, the agency is empowered to pursue as a crime the unauthorized development of vaccines and drugs—and sometimes goes after such cases to send a message.

[...] Rational Vaccines was co-founded with Hollywood filmmaker Agustín Fernández III, and the company received millions of dollars in private investment from investors after the Caribbean trial, including from billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel, who for months has refused to respond to questions from KHN, contributed to President Donald Trump’s campaign and is a high-profile critic of the FDA. Thiel is part of a larger libertarian movement to roll back FDA regulations to speed up medical innovation.

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Full article licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Three people have sued Rational Vaccines over the experimental injections.

Also at STLtoday.com.

Previously: University Could Lose Millions From “Unethical” Research Backed by Peter Thiel

I've been tinkering with various B vitamins recently since discovering what seems to be an MTHFR polymorphism or six in my genome. It's just a guess, as I can't spare the money for testing, but the immediate positive effects I've felt from certain forms of certain vitamins all but confirms a) MTHFR SNPs and b) an over-methylation pattern. Which *sounds* paradoxical at first, but really isn't.

People tend to be a little flippant with vitamin C and the B-family since they're water-soluble, reasoning "eh, if I overdose all it means is I get really expensive and really yellow pee." Nooooot...exactly. That's not wrong, but the little buggers will do plenty else before they exit via the kidneys. Here's what I've noticed:

Niacin/B3 - Produces the famous "niacin flush," though much less pronounced than in the first week of taking. About 100-200mg daily. Supposedly there's no harm in taking small (10) integer multiples of this dose, even though 200mg is supposedly almost 2 weeks' worth. Calms me down immensely and helps me sleep. It's also supposed to be good for lowering cholesterol, which is well within normal limits for me, but every little bit helps. Overall definitely a positive.

Pyridoxine/B6 (as pyridoxal-5-phosphate) - Holy crap, this is bad for me. It makes me sleepy and weak and ravenously hungry, then incredibly angry after I eat. How angry? I scared off an almost seven foot tall, 300-pound-plus man at work today. He actually decided not to order because, and this is a direct quote, "Your body language. You're angry and it's scaring me." Now yes, I look pretty much like a six-foot, Caucasian version of my namesake in glasses, and yes, I've been nicknamed "Grumpy Cat" by three separate co-workers at three separate jobs, but that is *bad.* Not touching this one again, at least not before work. Seems to be amping up my metabolism and producing (a lot) more catecholamines such as adrenaline, which would explain the effects.

Folate (as 6(S)-5-methylfolate) - This is the big tell that I've got an MTHFR problem. I felt immediate relief within half an hour after my first dose. Makes me feel, somehow, wet and cool and "fluffy" inside. Not as calming as niacin but still helps, just in a different way. Good synergy. I'm taking this once every few days now, after having spent 2 weeks repleting myself with a daily dose. I don't seem to need anywhere near as much caffeine since starting this one either.

Cobalamin/B12 (as adenosylcobalamin) - Another one for the "nope" column, at least no more than once every two weeks. Has similar effects to B6, though produces more anxiety than outright hostility. I am guessing it's causing either too much glutamate in the brain or, like B6, possibly upregulating stress hormones.

Vitamin C (as ascorbic acid with bioflavanoids, e.g., rutin and quercetin) - I can't tell if this is having any effects, but it doesn't seem to hurt and is important for iron processing, which in turn is necessary during Shark Week. Taking daily seems not to hurt anything, and might have helped me fight off the last two incipient colds I got.

People need to treat these things with more respect. We get people saying "oh supplements don't work," but if that were the case, there's no way they'd be having such pronounced and immediate effects. And, it seems everyone's body is different and even their metabolisms differ from day to day, so in the end, everyone needs to tailor their supplements and the doses thereof to their own physiology. Overall this is a net positive for me, but I'm probably going to avoid the B6...

AMD Ryzen 2nd Gen Details: Four CPUs, Pre-Order Today, Reviews on the 19th

These are not the 3rd-gen "Zen 2" 7nm Ryzen parts you are looking for, but 2nd-gen "Zen+" 12nm Ryzen.

No submission yet since there is no review.

President Trump, in a stunning reversal, told a gathering of farm state lawmakers and governors on Thursday morning that he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal he pulled out of within days of assuming the presidency.

Trump Reverses Course and Proposes Rejoining Trans-Pacific Partnership

Now your poor aristarchus is approaching 12% acceptance. Through no fault of his own, let me assure you! It mostly seems to the the Head Editor, Janirorok, or, jANINORAK, or, jannirock, something like that. Anyone can look him up in the appropriate venue. But the real nub of the matter is, Janirakor is controlling what solylents see as news!!!

Yeah, so what, big deal. Same as it ever was. Except, for one brief instant in the history of the Universe, an idea arose, an idea whose time had come, and idea that could have TMB, Fricking Runaway, the Original gweg_, and that nasty woman, Hazumi, all come together for a common purpose. And that purpose was TRUTH! Do you hear me, eds?
Why are you here, if not for truth? Why are we here, except for EF, who is evidently not here, except for truth? Do you want an alt-right incest Traditional Workers Racist website, or do you want the obverse, a site that bans any mention of the total idiocy of the Right, because the Right, traditional or alt-right, is so dumb as to defy description.

Of course, denying and rejecting, and not accepting, and deep-sixing submissions that point out exactly this will not avail SoylentNews. We already have a rep as an alt-right site, and members like myself are only entertainment, I guess. But, if any aristarchus submissions were to make it past the Iron-ass, retired military, totally brain-washed but not as much as the Runway, gateway of the JR . . . . Janirok, or janrinok, ::: Remember. Back before you applied to MI6. can, you? Did they wipe your mind, your memory, you very basic human sense of decency? Well, maybe, but that is no reason to reject aristarchus submissions. I mean, the dude is a philosopher, a "lover of Wisdom", dedicated to the pursuit of truth, and you take it upon yourself to reject his submissions? Oh, JR, if you actually are retired military, you should know better than this!
What is the first rule of intelligence? Yes, exactly, and you deprive Soylentils of the truth.
When Brexit cuts your pension, expect no sympathy from any other soylentils, except turgid, who never was MI6, or even MI5! What the hell is an MI, anyway?

update, **** New shit has come to light, man, and there's a beverage involved, man!

So, seriously, how could anyone make the case that Soylentils are not interested, only peripherally, of course, in a submission about Furries? Alt-furries just kinda simulates certain instincts, but still. How can the eds justify depriving the SoylentNews readership of such interesting, and entertaining, news? Aristarchus really wants to know!

And, does this just work? If I post a link to my submissions, everyone can peruse a better SoylentNews, such as it might have been ?
https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl
Hmm, looks like just me. Let me know what you see, my fellow soylentils!

*****
A friend has pointed out that rejected submissions are not publically viewable, so here they are:

Democratic Senate Judiciary report claims Russia ‘used’ the NRA to help Trump’s campaign Wednesday May 16, @10:15AM Pending
Janrinok rejects all aristarchus' submissions! Tuesday May 15, @10:53PM Rejected
Organiser of white supremacist march in Charlottesville planning second rally, nobody wants to come Tuesday May 15, @07:01PM Rejected
Alt-Right Trolls Are Using An Argument About Pit Bulls To Justify Racism Tuesday May 15, @04:08PM Rejected
The Intellectual Dark Web, Brought to You by Your Snowflake Tweets Tuesday May 15, @03:54PM Rejected
A Jewish investor linked to the Russia probe bought alt-right domain names Monday May 14, @01:10PM Pending
Alt-right in Montreal: How Charlottesville exposed key players in local white nationalist movement Monday May 14, @02:17AM Rejected
The real reason tech billionaires are prepping for doomsday Sunday May 13, @03:43PM Rejected
Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House review – in search of a rightwing rabble Sunday May 13, @12:15PM Rejected
Russia-linked company that hired Michael Cohen registered alt-right websites during election Sunday May 13, @11:59AM Rejected
Birth of a “Troll Nation”: Amanda Marcotte on how and why conservatives embraced the dark side Friday May 11, @05:23PM Accepted
The “Intellectual Dark Web,” explained: what Jordan Peterson has in common with the alt-right Friday May 11, @05:16PM Accepted
Alt-right web domain names registered to company that paid Cohen Friday May 11, @02:56PM Rejected
Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, ‘alt-right’ to rally at White House if banned from Charlottesville Friday May 11, @01:53PM Rejected
Birth of a “Troll Nation”: Amanda Marcotte on how and why conservatives embraced the dark side Wednesday May 09, @11:08PM Rejected
Birth of a “Troll Nation”: Amanda Marcotte on how and why conservatives embraced the dark side Wednesday May 09, @12:58PM Rejected
Stop trusting the self-mythology of the worst people on the internet Monday May 07, @11:44PM Rejected
Neo-Nazi California Senate Candidate Barred From State Republican Party Convention Monday May 07, @11:30PM Rejected
Melt-down: Alt-Right Grifter ‘Baked Alaska’ Is Plotting A Comeback On YouTube Saturday May 05, @03:09PM Rejected
Debating the Intellectual Leader of the French New Right Friday May 04, @08:31PM Rejected
Police investigating neo-Nazi recruiting in Montreal, Mayor Plante says Thursday May 03, @11:27PM Rejected
Alt-Right Bible ‘Camp of The Saints’ Proves Everyone’s Still Insane Thursday May 03, @01:02PM Rejected
GoDaddy to Alt-Right Leader Richard Spencer: Find an Alt Web Host Thursday May 03, @12:41PM Accepted
I Watched an Entire Flat Earth Convention for My Research – Here's What I Learnt Wednesday May 02, @05:36PM Accepted
Alt-Right Ding-Dong Defeated By Sign Wednesday May 02, @03:29PM Rejected
Texas Town Terrified by alt-right gun Toting Tyrones Wednesday May 02, @12:32PM Rejected
White supremacist found guilty of beating a black man in a police garage during Charlottesville rall Tuesday May 01, @08:36PM Rejected
Trump: Viele „neue Rechte“ sind nun von ihm enttäuscht Tuesday May 01, @12:44PM Rejected
Η θεωρία της Νέας Δεξιάς - Ταιριάζει στην περίπτωση της Αυστρίας και της Ιταλίας; Tuesday May 01, @12:14AM Rejected
Πρωτομαγιά 1944: Η εκτέλεση των 200 από τους Ναζί -Ενα drone πάνω από την Καισαριανή [βίντεο] Monday April 30, @11:19PM Rejected
Alt-right spread vile libel about Michelle Wolf Monday April 30, @10:46PM Rejected
How to Fight Alt-Right Terrorism Monday April 30, @03:28PM Rejected
De Alt-Right: te vrezen of te bestrijden? Monday April 30, @12:31PM Rejected
Soylentil commanded to stop submitting submissions! Sunday April 29, @10:31PM Rejected
Seeing Through the Rhetoric of the Alt-Right Sunday April 29, @09:22PM Rejected
Alt-right leader Richard Spencer begs for money to pay his legal bills Saturday April 28, @11:35PM Rejected
Alt-right provocateur James Allsup makes WSU appearance, advocates for Identity Evropa Saturday April 28, @10:53AM Rejected
Foreign and 'alt-right' activists target Irish voters on Facebook ahead of abortion referendum Friday April 27, @08:44PM Rejected
NRA Gathers Documents Amid Scrutiny Over Ties to Kremlin-Linked Banker Friday April 27, @02:15PM Accepted
UPDATE: White nationalist Chris Cantwell, known for Charlottesville riots, arrested in Leesburg. Friday April 27, @12:35PM Rejected
UVa has issued a no trespass warning to Jason Kessler Friday April 27, @12:28PM Rejected
Here's why the alt-right loves Kanye West Thursday April 26, @03:32PM Rejected
Alt-Right Down But Not Out Thursday April 26, @10:45AM Rejected
How the alt-right uses milk to promote white supremacy Thursday April 26, @10:14AM Rejected
Looking Ahead to the Alt-Right's Second Act Tuesday April 24, @10:09PM Rejected
Neo-Nazi 'Tyrone' exposed as US marine Tuesday April 24, @01:02PM Rejected
The mysticism of the alt-right Monday April 23, @04:36PM Rejected
Laura Ingraham meets the Afrocentric “alt-right” — and it’s every bit as weird as it sounds Monday April 23, @02:30PM Rejected
Waffle House suspect Travis Reinking deemed himself a 'sovereign citizen,' a right-wing nut-job. Sunday April 22, @07:47PM Rejected
‘Nazi scum get out!’: Watch entire New York bar chant at Milo Yiannopoulos until he leaves Sunday April 22, @07:36PM Rejected
The rise of fascist fashion: Clothing helps the far right sell their violent message Sunday April 22, @12:01PM Rejected
How the U.S. became Troll Nation: From Gamergate to the rise of Trump Sunday April 22, @11:48AM Rejected
The class conflict dividing America’s race warriors Sunday April 22, @12:37AM Rejected
Analyzing Kevin MacDonald's 'Culture of Critique' & the alt-right's embrace of anti-Jewish ideology Saturday April 21, @10:32PM Rejected
Militarized Cops At Tiny Georgia Neo-Nazi Rally Arrest Counterprotesters For Wearing Masks Saturday April 21, @08:32PM Rejected
Missoula judge advances suit against neo-Nazi who attacked Whitefish real estate agent Friday April 20, @10:46PM Rejected
Right-Wing Media Promote An Anti-Semitic Extremist To Mock Starbucks Controversy Friday April 20, @09:14PM Rejected
German neo-Nazis mass for festival on Hitler’s birthday Friday April 20, @04:04PM Rejected
Die Postergirls der neuen Rechten Friday April 20, @12:55PM Rejected
‘Imploding’: Financial troubles. Lawsuits. Trailer park brawls. Has the alt-right peaked? Friday April 20, @12:45PM Rejected
Fant nyfascist-ideolog i hyllene Friday April 20, @12:05PM Rejected
Violent alt-right members consider Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh a hero — 23 years after. Friday April 20, @01:38AM Rejected
Seeing Through the Rhetoric of the Alt-Right: Spotting White Supremacist Propaganda in W.Va. Thursday April 19, @07:34PM Rejected
McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan: Investigating pathways to the alt-right Thursday April 19, @04:31PM Rejected
Right-winger? Not me, says alt-right darling Jordan Peterson Wednesday April 18, @11:25PM Rejected
Why white nationalists are spreading conspiracy theories that Trump is being controlled by the “deep Wednesday April 18, @02:47PM Rejected
Gravitas Acquires ‘Alt-Right: Age of Rage’ Documentary Wednesday April 18, @02:36PM Rejected
Chat Site for Gamers Got Overrun by the Alt-Right. Now It’s Fighting Back. Wednesday April 18, @12:51PM Rejected
Paul Gottfried: Don’t call me the ‘godfather’ of those alt-right neo-Nazis. I’m Jewish. Tuesday April 17, @11:43PM Rejected
Paul Krugman: Unicorns of the Intellectual Right Tuesday April 17, @03:37PM Rejected
‘Dear White People’ Season 2 Targets Alt-Right Trolls Tuesday April 17, @11:46AM Rejected
Ann Coulter is retweeting a white nationalist Monday April 16, @02:52PM Rejected
Paul Nehlen, the alt-right candidate running for Paul Ryan’s seat, explained Saturday April 14, @04:12PM Rejected
Graham Linehan on the art of the risky joke – and why the alt-right get it wrong Saturday April 14, @04:01PM Rejected
This Is Stupid Watergate. Wonkagenda For Fri., April 13, 2018 Friday April 13, @11:55PM Rejected
Alt-Right Activist On State Of The Movement: ‘We Are Fucked’ Friday April 13, @04:29PM Rejected
Facebook Deletes Richard Spencer's Accounts in Hate Speech Crackdown Friday April 13, @04:24PM Accepted
Alt-right speaker cancels appearance in Grand Junction Friday April 13, @04:19PM Rejected
Alt-right magnifies hyopcrisy Friday April 13, @01:24AM Rejected
Dakota Johnson's Boobs Nominated for Best Actress in Fifty Shades Freed Friday April 13, @01:17AM Rejected
Why the idea that the English have a common Anglo-Saxon origin is a myth Wednesday April 11, @11:26PM Rejected
Professors Are Targets In Online Culture Wars; Some Fight Back Wednesday April 11, @05:26PM Rejected
Top Florida GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Spoke at Event With Bannon, Yiannopoulos in 2017 Wednesday April 11, @03:14PM Rejected
Controversial alt-right speaker Milo Yiannopoulos' LSU talk canceled, organizers say Wednesday April 11, @03:06PM Rejected
Paul Ryan’s Retirement Gives a Big Boost to the Most Prominent White Nationalist in U.S. Politics Wednesday April 11, @12:48PM Rejected
Chelsea Manning reflects on her mistaken attempt to reach out to the alt-lite Tuesday April 10, @01:11PM Rejected
Does Unleashing a Neo-Nazi 'Troll Army' Count as Free Speech? Tuesday April 10, @12:53PM Rejected
Nazi From ‘Sieg Heil Taylor Swift’ Vid Arrested on Weapons Charge Tuesday April 10, @12:47PM Rejected
Less Than a Year After Charlottesville, the Alt-Right Is Self-Destructing Monday April 09, @05:54PM Rejected
Alt-Right Furries Are Raging Online, And Leftist Furries Wonder What Is To Be Done Monday April 09, @03:49PM Rejected
R/THE_DONALD Opinion: Reddit’s advertising strategies still hide hate speech Monday April 09, @03:42PM Rejected
The Alt-Right Media Bubble Is in Trouble Monday April 09, @01:46AM Rejected
Is Dutch Bad Boy Thierry Baudet the New Face of the European Alt-Right? Monday April 09, @01:04AM Rejected
Poet went undercover in the alt-right now talks about healing Monday April 09, @12:13AM Rejected
The Fall of the "Alt-Right" Came From Anti-Fascism Sunday April 08, @11:58PM Rejected
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: Bannon wanted data for alt-right candidates Sunday April 08, @11:45PM Rejected
The Alt-Right Is a Subculture Without a Culture Sunday April 08, @11:39PM Rejected
A Political Movement, Defining Itself by What It Hates Saturday April 07, @06:56PM Rejected
Gab Is the Alt-Right Social Network Racists Are Moving to Friday April 06, @03:12PM Rejected
Stormfront.org restricts access to donors, shuts down main server Thursday April 05, @03:41PM Rejected
Atheist Alt-Right? Wednesday April 04, @04:15PM Rejected
30% of World’s Electricity Consumption Will Be Spent Explaining Bitcoin Tuesday April 03, @03:00PM Rejected
Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science Sunday April 01, @03:38PM Rejected
The ‘crying Nazi’ from Charlottesville now says he’s an FBI informant Wednesday March 28, @05:40PM Rejected
With Kisses, from Russia, NRA is compromat!! Tuesday March 27, @11:32PM Rejected
Alt-Right: Age of Rage, SXSW 2018 Review Monday March 26, @12:58PM Rejected
Exposing Alt-Right Anti-Semitism and Its Enablers Monday March 26, @12:26AM Rejected
Lessons from the Left: The alt-right’s history in America Monday March 26, @12:14AM Rejected
Baked_Alaska or Baked in terms of Marijuana Racism Monday March 26, @12:00AM Rejected
The Hate Report: The alt-right is a mess Sunday March 25, @11:08AM Rejected
"Alt-Right News" is no more! Sunday March 25, @10:42AM Rejected
Looking Under the Alt-Right Rock Thursday March 22, @03:40PM Rejected
Alt-fight: Jason Jorjani, leaving the alt-right? Wednesday March 21, @10:50AM Rejected
Readership plummets for alt-right Breitbart without Bannon Wednesday March 21, @10:17AM Rejected
"White Wakanda!" Alt-right takes on yet another film. Tuesday March 20, @01:28PM Rejected
Free Speech! Except for Muslims. Alt-right Civil Liberties. Tuesday March 20, @01:07PM Rejected
The alt-right is in decline. Has antifascist activism worked? Tuesday March 20, @12:45PM Rejected
Everything We Think about the Political Correctness Debate is Wrong Tuesday March 20, @11:26AM Accepted
Heimbach Monday March 19, @04:17PM Rejected
Israel’s Alt-Right Is Now Mainstream—Are Lawmakers Doing Enough to Stop It? Sunday March 18, @10:54PM Rejected
Prominent US neo-Nazi arrested on domestic violence charge Sunday March 18, @01:15PM Rejected
What the Alt-Right Gets Wrong About Jews Saturday March 17, @04:41PM Rejected
How a white nationalist’s family came to blows over a trailer tryst Saturday March 17, @02:04AM Rejected
Before Heimbach was a Mother-in-law _cucker, he was excommunicated Saturday March 17, @01:36AM Rejected
White nationalist leader Matthew Heimbach arrested for domestic battery Saturday March 17, @01:19AM Rejected
Behold the incestuous master race: Neo-Nazi leader Matthew Heimbach has affair with mother-in-law Saturday March 17, @01:12AM Rejected
White Supremacist Assault and Adultery Scandal Ends in Jilted Neo-Nazi Web Admin Deleting Site Friday March 16, @09:55PM Rejected
Alt-Right: Age of Rage is a snapshot of one of 2017’s darkest moments Friday March 16, @10:50AM Rejected
‘Alt-Right’ Ringleader Richard Spencer: We Attract the Mentally Ill Thursday March 15, @03:59PM Rejected
White Nationalist Leader Heimbach Arrested On Domestic Violence Charges Wednesday March 14, @09:13PM Rejected
Matt Heimbach arrested! Wednesday March 14, @12:31PM Rejected
Does Richard Spencer’s Disastrous College Tour Mean The ‘Alt-Right’ Is Fizzling Out? Saturday March 10, @12:30AM Rejected
German Far-Right ‘Terrorists’ Jailed for Series of Attacks on Refugees Wednesday March 07, @11:34PM Accepted
Awkward! All of Oculus's Rift Headsets Have Stopped Working Due to an Expired Certificate Wednesday March 07, @11:04PM Accepted
Iconic Stellar Debris Ring Much Stranger Than Previously Thought Wednesday March 07, @12:34AM Accepted
Alt-Moonie Gun Blessing, with Robes and Crowns of Ammo! Sunday March 04, @02:00PM Rejected
The "Alt-Right" Is Building a White Nationalist Mass Movement With "Operation Homeland" Saturday March 03, @01:45PM Rejected
Here’s How an Alt-Right Troll Auditions for Survivor Saturday March 03, @01:20PM Rejected
Alt-right attorney defends racism, homophobia, Richard Spencer: but that is not the point. Friday March 02, @12:09AM Rejected
Stereotypes About College Students And Free Speech Are False Tuesday February 27, @05:45PM Rejected
These Companies Are Sticking By The NRA Saturday February 24, @12:23AM Accepted
Mind control or gun control Friday February 23, @12:34AM Rejected
It’s time for conservatives to retire the term ‘alt-right’ Thursday February 22, @09:40PM Rejected
Twitter “Bot” Purge Causes Outcry as Follower Counts Fall Wednesday February 21, @03:40PM Accepted
‘Fire this ammosexual’: Viewers demand CNN boot Kingston after he calls Parkland students left-wing Tuesday February 20, @09:20PM Rejected
Jordan Peterson, darling of the Alt-right, publishes a book Tuesday February 20, @03:41PM Rejected
‘Alt-right’ Oregon State student-government member ousted in overwhelming recall vote Sunday February 18, @08:27PM Rejected
James Damore's Labor Complaint Against Google Was Completely Shut Down Friday February 16, @03:43PM Accepted
Total: 148

Topless Protester Arrested at First Day of Cosby Retrial Used to Be on The Cosby Show

Legalize it.

Vatican police arrest ex-diplomat over 'child pornography'

Police at the Vatican have arrested a priest who previously worked at the Holy See's US embassy on suspicion of possessing child pornography.

Carlo Alberto Capella was taken into custody after an investigation.

Monsignor Capella was recalled from the US in September 2017 after US authorities told the Vatican about a possible violation of child pornography laws by one of its diplomats.

He was ordained in 1993 and joined the Vatican's diplomatic corps in 2004.

The arrest could draw fresh attention to Pope Francis's efforts to snuff out child abuse in the Catholic Church. He has pledged zero tolerance but critics say he has not done enough to hold to account bishops who allegedly covered up abuse.

Also at NYT and The Guardian.

Are Water Worlds Habitable?

Rehash of this article. But here is a detail that may have been overlooked:

Take the fifth planet within the TRAPPIST-1 system as an example. Cayman Unterborn, an exogeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, and his colleagues think that the liquid water here extends down about 200 kilometers—roughly 20 times deeper than Earth’s Mariana Trench. That much water would create a large ice layer at the bottom of the ocean which would seal the ocean from the land and effectively shut down a geochemical cycle that plays a crucial role in Earth’s habitability.

I might get funding for a de-duplicated filing system. I took the opportunity to send this to a friend with a background in physics, accounting, video editing, COBOL, Java and Windows:-

I'm feeling flush so I'm sending you a letter. Don't complain that you only receive demands for money. You also get the occasional note from a nutjob.

I won't mention health because it can be extremely frustrating to read about such matters. However, I assume that we're both ambling along to some extent. I made moderate progress with electronics and processor design but nothing of particular merit. Gardening is also progressing. I'm growing some parsley for when we next have fish.

I think that I stopped my ex-boss from bidding on chunks of old super-computer clusters. Even if GPUs weren't cheaper, we'd soon get caught by the horrendous cost of electricity. Due to Moore's law, a 10 year computer is likely to require at least 30 times more energy per unit of computation. I think this also stopped various cryptographic currency schemes which would presumably run on said hardware.

I presume that my ex-boss continues to seek funding from investors diversifying out of minerals. That would explain continued focus on hardware and high finance. My ex-boss recently suggested a scheme involving file storage. The unstated assumption would be storage is not out-sourced to a third-party. In particular, this would avoid the dumb-ass case of out-sourcing storage to a direct competitor.

I was initially hostile to this idea due to previous research. The technology is viable but the market invariably has one party which accidentally or deliberately prices storage below cost. It only takes one idiot (or genius) to skew the market for everyone. There are also periods when one party freely hosts illicit content and flames out. MegaUpload and RapidShare are two examples.

Anyhow, there is an outside chance that the third iteration of my de-duplicating filing system may gain significant funding and widespread deployment. We had a long discussion about de-duplication during a two hour walk. I'm not sure if you followed all of the details. Aplogies if you followed very closely.

The first iteration of my work was prototyped inside a database. It used fixed length records and implemented block de-duplication. Deployed systems systems typically use anything from 1KB blocks to 4MB blocks (with alarming variation in the checks for unique data). Larger block sizes are better for databases and video. Unexpectedly, 4KB works particularly well with legacy Microsoft Office documents and you can confirm for yourself that these files are exact multiples of 4KB. However, block de-duplication fails horribly with PKZip files. This is important because PKZip is the basis for numerous contemporary file formats, including Java Archives and .docx

The second iteration of my work was attempt to migrate to variable length blocks. The implementation split files at markers typically found within JPEGs and PKZip files. However, I never found a general case for this process and work was slowed because performance was awful. Compression improved the best case at the expense of the worst case. It also led to the problem of how to efficiently store thousands of different lengths of compressed blocks. When prototyping in a database, this can be delegated to the database but how would this be implemented efficiently in a file of raw disk partition? A solution must exist because it was widely used on desktop computers via DoubleSpace's Stacker and MSDOS6. The computer scientist, Donald Knuth, possibly in 1964, described Fibonacci lengths for memory allocation. This is more efficient than the obvious powers of two because the ratio grows by 1.6 and therefore waste is reduced. With some concessions for powers of two, this is implemented in Sun Microsystems' Arena memory allocator. The same principle applies to storage. For prototyping, a crude arrangement is a de-normalised database with one fixed length database table for each Fibonacci length. There is an analogous arrangement for raw disk.

None of these prototypes handled random access or full-text indexing, like EMC's systems. I was also concerned that, in the most pessimistic case, 3/8 of storage was wasted and, in the typical case, 3/16 is wasted. Waste can be reduced by tweaking figures. However, it should be apparent that there are diminishing returns that cannot be eliminated - unless the uncompressed data is stored in blocks of Fibonacci length.

That's the basis for the third iteration. Although it overcomes previous limitations, it has not been prototyped because it is expected to require far more work than the previous iterations. This is particularly true after a similar number of iterations prototyping full-text indexing. Someone sensible and numerate should ensure that talk of Fibonacci numbers, golden ratios, factorials, random walks, birthday paradoxes and Poisson distributions are not a numeralogical fringe lunatic heading towards a third educational but uncompetitive implementation. (If you're mad enough, there may also be opportunity to define your own rôle in this venture.)

I've been surprised how far prototypes scale. 1KB blocks with a 32 bit primary key allow 2⁴² bytes (4TB) to be stored - and this was never a limitation when it only transfered 11 blocks per second. Search engines are similar. It is ridiculously easy to spread search terms over 4096 hash elements and compress the data to increase retrevial speed by a factor of four. This works for millions of web pages without difficulty. However, at scale, a comprehensive query syntax requires at least six tiers of application servers.

For Fibonacci file de-duplication, the base case is a one byte block. Or perhaps a one bit block. That's obviously ridiculous but it is feasible to map 13 byte sequences to an 8 byte reference and 21 byte sequences to a different set of 8 byte references. You may be incredulous that such a system works. If you are able to refute this assertion then you would save me considerable work. However, if I am correct then we may have the basis of a venture where units historically sold for US$20000 and clusters up to US$3 million. These figures are optimistic but managed systems generally sold for about 20 times more than the cost of the hardware.

I still like your idea of putting a weedy computer into a 4U box primarily so that it may display a huge logo on the front. Unfortunately, implementation is likely to require substantial quantities of RAM. Rules of thumb indicate that ISAM databases typically scale about 10 times further than cache RAM. More advanced schemes, such as InnoDB, typically scale about 100 further than cache RAM. ZFS scales about 1000 times further than cache RAM. Given the proposed structure, it is extremely optimistic to allocate one byte of RAM per kilobyte of storage. Systems which fail to observe this ratio may encounter a sudden performance wall. This precludes the use of very small computers without RAM expansion. In particular, a Raspberry Pi is not suitable to control a dozen hard-disks. A Raspberry Pi is not sufficiently reliable but it should give an indication that proper server hardware is required with all of the associated costs.

I hope to convince you that such a system would work. I would achieve this by defining a huge number of cases and mostly showing that cases can be reduced to previous cases. The most trivial case is opening an uncompressed text file, inserting one comma and saving the file with a different name. In this case, blocks (of any size) prior to the change may be shared among both versions of the file. If the block size is large then the tail of any file has minimal opportunity to obtain the benefits of block de-duplication. However, if the blocks are 21 bytes or smaller then then common blocks are likely to occur among five versions or so. In the worst case, the probability of 21 files having no common tail is the inverse of the factorial of 21. This is less than 1/(5×10¹⁹). And for the 22nd case, there is zero probability that savings do not occur.

From empirical testing, formal names, common phrases and URLs a easily de-duplicated. Likewise, the boilerplate of database websites has common sequences. Take 1000 web pages from any forum or encyclopedia and it is trivial to reduce the sequences by a factor of three. You may be concerned that this scheme fails when it encounters the first binary file. This is not the case. Identical files are trivial to de-duplicate. Identical files with staggered offsets (as is typical within email attachments) have a strict upper bound on duplication. Compressed files are similarly ameniable. For example, within PKZip archives, compression re-starts for each file within the archive. THerefore, for each unchanged file file within an archive, there is also a strict upper bound for duplication. Of particular note, this overcomes all of the shortcomings of implemented prototypes.

The most interesting cases occur with remote desktops and video. From discussions about the shortcomings of Citrix, I argued that video in a web page blurs the distinction between desktops and video. However, it remains common practice to use distinct techniques to maintain the crispness and responsiveness of each while reducing bandwidth, memory and processing power. De-duplicating video greatly reduces the value of streaming quadtree video but it does not eliminate it. Therefore, the numerous cases of video compression should be regarded as one case within this proposal.

In the trivial case, consider a desktop with one byte per pixel and each window (or screen) being a grid of 64×64 pixel tiles. Previously, each tile was divided into ragged quadtrees and each leaf used different encoding under various non-obvious quality metrics. (This is why I was using pictures and video of Elysium, Iron Man and Avril Lavigne as test data.) The current proposal works more like your suggestion to use RLE [Run-Length Encoding]. SPecifically, on a Fibonacci length boundary, of 13 pixels or more, contiguous pixels (plain or patterned) may be shared within one tile, between tiles and across unlimited application window redraws. Most curiously, contiguous pixels may be shared by unlimited users within an office. This allows screen decoration, window decoration and application interface to have references to common sequences of pixels across desktops. This can be achieved in a relatively secure manner by assigning references randomly and dis-connecting clients which attempt to probe for unauthorised chunks of screen.

In the general case, each user has access to zero or more transient storage pools and zero or more persistent storage pools. Each pool may be shared within one trust domain. This includes public read-only or read/write access. Each pool may be encrypted. Each pool may be accessed via 8 byte references and/or file name. Each pool may have a full-text index. And pools may be used in a union because this allows text, HTML, archives and multi-media to be indexed and searched in a useful manner.

However, the feature that I think will interest you the most is the ability shoot, edit and distribute video without using lossy compression. This arrangement has a passing ressemblance to Avid proxy format which stores 16×16 pixel tiles as a 32 bit lossy texture. Instead, 64×64 pixel tiles (or similar) are stored as 64 bit lossless references and no proxy is required. You may think that pixel dance would prevent de-duplication but you are not thinking on a large enough scale. Four variations of brightness across 13 samples is a maximum of 2²⁶ (64 million) variations. However, these variations are not restricted to local matches. Variations may be matched almost anywhere across any frame of video. Or, indeed, any data in the same storage pool. Admittedly, savings for the first million videos or so will be dismal but returns are increasingly likely as the volume of data increases. A well known result from search engines is that unique search terms grow proportionately to the square root of the number of documents. This applies to a corpus of documents of any language and any average length. I'm applying the same result to byte sequences within multi-media. For 13 bytes (104 bits), the square root is 2⁵² permutations. Longer sequences occur less frequently but retain an essential supporting rôle.

Lossy compression of audio and video provides better than average matching because pixel dance is smoothed and the remaining data has correlation. Data may be locally compressed with some efficiency but the remaining data is skewed towards some permutations. Any skew improves the probability of matches beyond chance. This becomes ridiculously common when there are exabytes of data within the system. This may seem like an article of faith with shades of network effects and dot com economics but there is an upper bound to this lunacy.

Sun Microsystems found that 2¹²⁸ bytes is the maximum useful size for a contiguous filing system. In classical physics, the minimum energy required to store or transmit one bit of information is one Planck unit of energy (or the absence of one Planck unit of energy). Very approximately, 2⁶⁴ Planck units of energy is sufficient to boil a kettle and 2¹²⁸ Planck units of energy is sufficient to boil all of the water in all of the world's oceans. Therefore, operations on a sufficiently large filing system are sufficient to cause environmental havoc. My insight is to take this bound, apply well known results from search engines and resource allocation, and reduce everything successively down to references of 64 bits. If that isn't sufficient then it may not be possible for any solar system to support requirements. In this case, the filing system may be installed adjacent to, inside, or using a black hole. No known vendor supports this option.

I suggested that I work on a presentation while my ex-boss worked on a business plan which explained how to avoid obvious problems. I reduced a market overview and USP [Unique Selling Point] to 23 slides. I haven't seen any business plan but I optimisitically assume that slides have been shown to investors. As a contingency, I am now working on a business plan. This is an extremely competitive market with an alarming number of failures. I prefer to offer on-site storage to the private sector. We may have to offer off-site storage. In the worst case, we may allow one instance to be used as a dumping ground. Sale of apparel is definitely unviable. Advertising is also unlikely to work. Ignore the intrusiveness of advertising; to the extent that it is a security problem. As advertising has become more targetted, the signalling power of an expensive advert is lost. This is why adverts on the web are somewhere between tacky and payola.

In a public storage pool, each sequence of bytes requires an owner and access count. Each owner would be billed periodically for storage and would receive a proportion of retrieval fees. However, an owner may receive a charge-back if fees have been received for trademarks, copyright and public domain. This would be at a punative rate for the purpose of discouraging abuse. Ideally, illegal content would be assigned to a locked account and this would prevent copies being distributed. Unfortunately, retaining a reference version of illegal content is invariably illegal.

In this arrangement, it is expected that the most popular accounts would receive payment, a mid tier would obtain indefinite free use and a bottom tier would pay a nominal fee to access data. Anti-social use would be met with contractual and economic penalty. However, persistent trolls have been known to collectively raise US$12000 or more. So, penalty may have to be very steep.

Illegal content varies with jurisdiction. By different chains of reasoning, it may be illegal to depict almost anyone. In some jurisdictions, depiction of women is illegal. In other jurisdictions (including the ones in which we are most likely to incorporate), equality applies. Therefore, it would be illegal to block depictions of women without also blocking depictions of men. By a different chain, if people are created in God's image, if Allah is God and if depiction of Allah is illegal blasphemy then it is obviously illegal to depict anyone. By another chain, identity and self-identity may also make depiction illegal. Unfortunately, this cannot be resolved by asking someone what they want to view because profiling nationality is illegal in Sweden and profiling religion is illegal in Germany.

However, I have yet to mention the most ludicrous case. In some jurisdictions, such as the UK, illegal child pornography extends to the depiction of cartoons and text files. In the most absurd case, a sequence of punctuation may be illegal. In the case of a de-duplicated filing system, some sequences of punctuation, possibly by the same author, may appear in multiple files. In some files, a sequence of punctuation may be legal. In other files, the same instance of punctuation may be illegal. A similar situation may occur with medical information. A sentence recorded by a doctor may require "secure" storage. The same text may be published by someone else. Some content may be licensed on a discriminatory basis; most commonly this involves separate cases for private sector and/or public sector and/or individuals. This can be resolved contractually by defining all access as commercial. Oddly, this doesn't affect GNU Public License Version 2 but excludes a large amount of photography and music. See previous cases for photography. There is no technological solution for these problems. Indeed, it should be apparent that almost everyone has files which would be illegal in one jurisdiction or another.

Competitor analysis has been more fruitful. One competitor has so much correct and so much completely wrong. TarSnap.Com can be concisely described as a progression of my second prototype. Data is split in a manner which covers all cases. This was achieved with a mathematical proof which leads to the use of a rolling hash. This sequentially splits a file into variable lengths with a skewed Poisson distribution. However, throughput (and compression) is probably terrible because it uses the same zlib compression algorithm and, entertaining, a defensive architecture due to historical buffer overflows in zlib. Marketing and encryption are good but this is all wasted by out-sourcing storage to a direct competitor. Indeed, the system is only viable because the sub-contractor does not charge for the extensive internal bandwidth required to perform integrity checks. So, data is encrypted and the only copy is sent directly to a rival where it is mixed with two tiers of other clients' data. That'll be spectacular when it fails. Unfortunately, that's the competent end of the off-site storage market.

I investigated implementation of a general purpose de-duplicating filing system. It has become accepted practice to develop and deploy filing systems outside a kernel by using FUSE, PUFFS or similar. This increases security, isolation and monitoring. It also allows filing systems to be implemented, in any language, using any existing filing system, database or network interface. In the manner that it is possible to mount a read-only CDROM image and view the contents, it is possible to mount a de-duplicated storage pool if it has a defined format within any other filing system. With suitable hashing and caching, a really dumb implementation would have considerable merit. For my immediate purposes, I could use it as a local cache of current and historical web sites.

Anyhow, please back-check my figures. Optionally, tell me that it is an impractical idea or consider defining your own rôle writing monitoring software, accounting software, video editing software or whatever you'd like to do.

Yours De-Dupididly

Evil Doctor Compressor

I didn't include the slides but the collated text is as follows:-

Fibonacci Filing System

The Problem

• The volume of digital data is growing exponentially.
• Per hour, scientific data which is synthesized and extrapolated is greater than all scientific observations from the 20th century.

Moore's Law

• Components on a silicon chip double every two years.
• Digital camera quality doubles every 17 months.
• Computer network capacity doubles every nine months.
• We are drowning in data!

Coping Strategy: Compression

• Techniques to reduce volume of data include:-
• • Content-aware compression.
  • Content-oblivious compression.
• If content is known then compression may be lossy or lossless.
• Lossy compression is typically applied to audio and video.

Code-Book Compression

• Succession of compression techniques are increasingly effective but require increasing amount of working memory:-
• • PKZip - Uses tiers of small code-books.
  • GZip - Refinement of PKZip.
  • BZip2 - Burrows-Wheeler Transform.
  • LZMA - Uses code-book with millions of entries but requires up to 900MB RAM.

File De-Duplication

• A filing system may eliminate storage of redundant data.
• Covers all cases because it applies to all data handled by all applications.
• Techniques work at different levels of granularity:-
• • Hash de-duplication applies to checksum of file.
  • Block de-duplication works on fixed-size chunks.
  • Byte de-duplication provides tightest compression.

Hash De-Duplication

• Used in closed systems to provide a modicum of tamper-proofing.
• • Used in legal and medical systems.
• Used in open systems to provide a document reference.
• • Root cause of Dropbox and MegaUpload's privacy and copyright problems.
• Does not work with changing data.

Block De-Duplication

• Implemented by LLVM, ZFS and other systems.
• Commonly used to provide daily, rolling snapshots of live systems.
• Block size is mostly immaterial.

Byte De-Duplication

• Most effective scheme.
• Most fragile scheme.
• Most energy intensive scheme.
• Candidates for compression may require up to 0.5 million comparison operations.
• May be implemented with custom hardware to reduce time and energy.

The Unique Selling Point

• General trend is towards larger block sizes.
• This provides an approximate fit for the throughput of hard-disks and solid-state storage.
• However, unconventional block sizes approximate optimal efficiency without the processing overheads.

Fibonacci Numbers

• Common sequence in mathematics.
• Discovered by X in X when studying breeding of rabbits but occurs throughout nature:-
• • Flower petals.
  • Pine-cones.
  • Snail shells.
• Used by humans in Greek architecture and computer memory allocation.

Counting Theorem

• Fibonacci numbers may be used in compression schemes if the counting theroem is not violated. Specifically, there must be a unique mapping:-
• • From data to code-word.
  • From code-word to data.
• We propose:-
• • Mapping 13 byte data to eight byte code-word.
  • Mapping 21 byte data to eight byte code-word.

System Capacity

• LZ compression schemes, such as PKZip, use tiers of code-books with thousands of entries.
• LZMA compression schemes use one code-book with millions of entries.
• Proposed scheme use two code-books each with 16 billion billion entries.
• This is sufficient to hold a maximum of 557056 exabytes of unique data and any multiple of duplicate data.

Theoretical Upper Bound

• ZFS uses 128 bit addressing on the basis that:-
• ℏ × 2¹²⁸ is vast.
• Where:-
• • ℏ is the minimum detectable quantity of energy
  • and "vast" is enough energy to boil all of the water in all of the world's oceans.

Infinite Monkey Test

• Can an infinite number of monkeys hitting keys on an infinite number typewriters exhaust storage? Yes but with difficulty.
• Historical text files used 96 symbols.
• For 13 byte sequence, this is a maximum of 0.0029% of the possible input permutations but it exceeds the capacity of the code-book by more than factor of three billion.

Infinite Monkey Test

• Capacity is exceeded if input occurs without duplication.
• This becomes increasingly difficult as data accumulates within a system.
• Can be achieved maliciously if pseudo-random is designed such that it never repeats.
• This case can be countered with a traditional file quota arrangement.
• It is also trivial to identify anomalous use.

Birthday Paradox

• Why is it increasingly difficult to exhaust storage capacity?
• This is due to the counter-intuitive birthday paradox where it is more likely than not that 21 people share a birthday.
• Worst case for matching is approximately the square of the number of candidates.
• This bridges the gap between a code-book with 2⁶⁴ entries and upper bound of 2¹²⁸ (or less).

Video De-Duplication

• Standard video encoding may greatly reduce volume of data. However:-
• • Compression between adjacent pixels may occur due to reduction in contrast.
  • Compression is unlikely to involve more than 16 frames of video.
• A global code-book provides additional opportunities for processing lossless or lossy video.

Audio De-Duplication

• Trivial to share silence in uncompressed audio.
• De-duplication of near silence increases as examples become more common.
• Easier to de-duplicate compressed audio.
• AMR (used in cell phones) uses scheme which minimizes latency and survives high loss and corruption. Data is also fixed-length.
• Duplicates become increasingly common with duration of conversation.

Clustering

• An unlimited number of computers may participate in one storage pool.
• Each node is allocated a unique numeric range within each code-book.
• New code-words are replicated and distributed using standard techniques.
• Duplicate mappings may occur within a concurrent system. Normally, this is inconsequential.

Full-Text Indexing

• Where block size is smaller than an average sentence (and smaller than a long word):-
• • There is an upper bound for the quantity of search-terms within a fragment of text.
  • There is an upper bound for search-term length within a fragment of text.
  • There is strictly zero or one search-terms between adjacent fragments of text.
• Reduced size and scope means that a search engine is almost a corollary of de-duplication.

Applications

• Traditional applications include:-
• • Enterprise document and mailbox storage.
  • File versioning and database snapshots.
  • Media distribution.
  • Clustered web caching.

Applications

• Novel applications include any permutation of Project Xanadu, search engine, media broadcast, remote desktop and virtual reality:-
• • Distributed storage and caching with full-text index.
  • Hyper-text and hyper-media with robust citations and micro-payment.
  • Multi-cast, lossless, live, streaming surround sound and/or high-definition video.