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San Francisco board labels NRA a 'domestic terrorist organization'

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors has passed a resolution declaring the National Rifle Association (NRA) a "domestic terrorist organization" following the shooting in Gilroy, Calif., where four people, including the gunman, were killed.

The resolution, which local Fox affiliate KTVU reported passed on Tuesday, declares the gun rights group to be a terrorist organization and calls on other cities and government entities to make similar declarations. The resolution itself has no legal weight.

The resolution argues that the group "musters its considerable wealth and organizational strength to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence."

I think I may just have earned my RYA Dinghy Sailing Level 2 badge. Can I call myself Captain now?

Update: I have in my hand a piece of paper.

Conversion therapy group founder comes out as gay, apologizes

The founder of one of the nation’s largest conversion therapy programs, who spent decades leading the organization, now says he is gay, apologizing for his role in the practice.

McKrae Game, who founded and led Hope for Wholeness in South Carolina, publicly announced he was gay in early June, more than two years after the organization’s board of directors abruptly fired him.

In a Facebook post last week, Game, 51, said he was “wrong,” adding: “Please forgive me.”

“I certainly regret where I caused harm,” he wrote. “Promoting the triadic model that blamed parents and conversion or prayer therapy, that made many people believe that their orientation was wrong, bad, sinful, evil, and worse that they could change was absolutely harmful."

Also at NBC.

I think I understand now why some people are very keen on open water swimming (wild swimming). I've just been on holiday and spent a lot of time swimming in the sea (yes, in the UK, with a wetsuit) and doing a spot of body boarding. It's very relaxing. You can spend hours in the water. It's quite fun when the waves are breaking over you, but it's also good when they're smooth and you bob over the top.

There's a bit of a knack to body boarding, catching the wave at the right point, and adjusting the attitude of the board so it stays on the leading edge of the wave for longer. I don't think I'll ever get around to trying proper surfing. I think that would take some lessons and quite a bit of time. It's fun to watch though.

Evatec’s next-generation CLUSTERLINE supporting SkyWater’s 3DSoC and carbon nanotube custom foundry programs

Evatec AG of Trübbach, Switzerland (which makes thin-film production equipment for advanced packaging, power device, MEMS, optoelectronics, wireless communication and photonics applications) has delivered the latest generation of its CLUSTERLINE thin-film deposition tool (including evaporation capability) to SkyWater of Bloomington, MN, USA – a US-owned DMEA-accredited technology foundry that manufactures integrated circuits for markets including aerospace & defense, automotive, cloud & computing, consumer, industrial, the Internet of Things (IoT) and medical.

The tool is said to bring new levels of thin-film performance, key to the production of carbon nanotubes and other emerging technologies. CLUSTERLINE is an industry-proven, high-volume single-wafer processing production solution enabling integration of PVD (physical vapor deposition), highly ionized PVD, soft etch and PECVD (plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition) process technologies, along with extensive pre- and post-treatment steps. The open system architecture allows easy tool configuration.

The latest tool from Evatec provides SkyWater new capabilities in processing of metals and dielectrics, and is important in its 3DSoC (system-on-chip) work, providing unconventional processing capabilities for a CMOS-based foundry. This new tooling supports SkyWater’s business model as a technology foundry by giving innovators additional processing options to establish manufacturable process flows for emerging technologies. This capability supports on-going process development at SkyWater not only for carbon nanotubes but also for photonics and MEMS device types as well as where conventional PVD processes do not provide flexibility or the precision that these applications require.

Previously: DARPA's 3DSoC Becoming a Reality

We are knee-deep in wharrgarrrbling white-supremacist bullshit. I don't think this site's going to last much longer as anything but Stormfront 2.0 at the rate things are going. Nevertheless, I'm the kind of person who can't just walk past a giant gibbering clusterfuck of wrong without snarking on it, so here goes.

Have you ever noticed that none of these people can give you a straight answer about what it is precisely to be "white?" I'd like to know when micks, dagos, polacks, and krauts...oops, pardon me, Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans, and basically anyone not a WASP began to qualify as "white." What caused this sudden shift in the definition of whiteness, when did it happen, and why?

Also, scratch these cowardly little whiners a bit, and something interesting emerges. It's not white skin they seem to be after so much as "white culture." This, if anything, is even more ill-defined than simple "whiteness." Requests for clarification from, as a pertinent example, our very own XivLacuna, have proven to be...less than enlightening, shall we say. Apparently "white culture" is what raises property values and is more or less synonymous with being a good neighbor? But also apparently, very poor and extremely dysfunctional areas with majority or entirely white populations are *not* examples of "white culture" despite their demography, because something something hurrrarghl Jews and liberals and banning coal?

I don't even know what the fuck. This kind of incoherent blather is par for the course from white supremacists. Bunch of idiot historically-illiterate rebels without a clue, let alone without a cause. Sounds like a load of maladaptive, resentful little manchildren who think the world owes them a living and are looking for something, or someone, to break when it doesn't fall into their laps. Boo-stupid-hoo. How about you use that supposedly superior white-with-a-capital-W intellect and pull yourselves up by your bootstraps?

I'm not even going to touch on the complete avalanche of non-sequiturs, half-truths, whataboutisms, false dichotomies, or outright *lies* these people attempt to bury opposition under. I do notice, though, that when you counter them properly, they simply stop responding to you, as if that somehow means they won. And, holy god damn, I don't think I've ever seen goalposts move that fast; I'm pretty sure some of these boys are breaking the sound barrier here!

What it all boils down to is this: white supremacists are incoherent, ignorant, cowardly whiners, scared of their own shadows for being dark. I will never comprehend how empty, how gullible, how utterly suggestible, how completely in the grip of total moral and cognitive surrender someone would have to be to fall for a supremacy movement that can't even define itself internally!

In case any of this crowd of upstanding, rational, well-spoken pillars of society (ye gods...) would like to attempt to explain their agenda so that it makes something approaching coherent sense, I'm all ears :) I'm also prepared to be completely let down on that front, though will probably at least get some cheap laughs out of it.

SpaceX's Next Starship Prototype Launch Will Be a 12-Mile-High Test Flight, Elon Musk Says

"Aiming for 20km flight in Oct & orbit attempt shortly thereafter," Musk said on Twitter before making another promise to his followers. "Starship update will be on Sept. 28th, anniversary of SpaceX reaching orbit. Starship Mk 1 will be fully assembled by that time."

[...] SpaceX's current plans for Starship call for a 100-passenger spacecraft powered by six of the company's Raptor rocket engines. Starhopper, for comparison, used a single Raptor engine, while the Mark 1 Starship will apparently use three Raptors for early tests. When Starship and the Super Heavy are on the launchpad, they'll stand 387 feet (118 meters) tall, Musk has said.

Those details may change on Sept. 28, when Musk rolls out his Starship and Super Heavy update. He has said the presentation will he held at SpaceX's Boca Chica test site in South Texas, home of the Starhopper and the first Starship prototype, the Mark 1. (A second, the Mark 2, is being built at SpaceX's facility in near Cape Canaveral, Florida.)

Starship construction in Florida is halted due to the incoming Hurricane Dorian.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 CPUs To Feature Support on TRX40, TRX80 & WRX80 Series Motherboards – ASUS TRX40 Motherboards Leak Out

1 channel per chiplet?

President Donald Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars' worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

Mexico border wall: Trump orders aides to seize private land and disregard environmental rules

AI Learns To Animate Your Face in VR (4m2s)

VR Facial Animation via Multiview Image Translation