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If you were lucky, you started out in this business writing code because you thought it was fun. You sat down with your first computer ecstatic with all of the possibilities, all of the cool things you could do by programming a computer. It was something to learn and something to master, and you thought, "Wow, this is fun. I can make a great career if I get very good a this."

-- Michael C. Feathers, Working Effectively With Legacy Code, Prentice Hall, 2013.

I suppose they call it a career because you career from disaster to disaster...

The Culture That Created Donald Trump Was Liberal, Not Conservative

EgyptAir hijack: Man surrenders at Larnaca airport

Falkland Islands fears new ruling expanding Argentina's sea control

Can Micro Bit replicate BBC Micro success?

Pet insurance claims hit record number

US pulls Tanzanian aid worth $470m over Zanzibar vote

White House to commit $116m to heroin and opioid abuse epidemic

Iraq dossier looms over lone MI6 Eurosceptic

Debate-Ducking Hillary Clinton in '08: Candidates Should Be Tough Enough to Debate "Anytime, Anywhere"

A Former Nixon Aide Admitted the 'War on Drugs' Was Designed to Screw Over Blacks and Hippies

According to Watergate mastermind and former Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the then-president launched the notorious (and ongoing) war on drugs in 1971 to disrupt that administration's two greatest perceived threats: black people and antiwar leftists.

The brazen quote surfaced in the April cover story of Harper's magazine that was written by Dan Baum and went online Tuesday. The reporter recalls an interview back in 1994 in which Ehrlichman bluntly explained the whole thing.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?" Ehrlichman told Baum. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Obvious? Sure. But it's important to get this kind of history explicitly out in the open so that mistakes can be corrected.

Here's the article at Harper's Magazine.

Too spicy for SoylentNews... not spicy enough for your job:

'Hot Tech Talent' IT job board ads caught up in sexism allegations

Dice, formerly the IT Job Boards, said it intended the images, which feature both men and women, to be light-hearted. Part of the drive behind the campaign was to counter the notion that people working in technology were "nerds".

Democracy is a joke, says China – just look at Donald Trump

“The rise of a racist in the US political area worries the whole world,” the party-controlled Global Times crowed this week ahead of of Trump’s victory in the latest round of primaries. “He has even been called another Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler by some western media.” It added, darkly: “Mussolini and Hitler came to power through elections, a heavy lesson for western democracy.”

Trump, or “Chuanpu” as they call him in China, has been a gift to Communist party spin doctors paid to convince the country’s 1.4 billion citizens that rule of the people is a sure path to chaos and destruction.

“They are relishing this moment,” says Zhou Fengsuo, a US-based democracy activist who fled his native China following the deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. “They are very happy. They are laughing over this. To them [Trump] is a good character to show the deficiencies of the democratic system, that such a person could become president. It is just unbelievable. Beijing is definitely gloating over this.”

[...] Chinese newspapers, which have previously pounced on the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Maidan revolution as evidence of the dangers of democracy, have wasted no time in hyping the potential turmoil that Trump’s rise could bring.

An editorial in the Chinese-language edition of the Global Times noted with glee that fighting had broken out at Trump rallies in what was supposedly one of the world’s “most developed and mature democratic election systems”.

[...] An editorial on another government-run website claimed Trump had “humiliated” the US political system. “He has turned the election into a prank,” it said.

WATCH: Florida Deputy Illegally Arrests PINAC Reporter Protesting At High School
Broadcast by honoryouroath + YouTube

Florida Sheriff’s deputies illegally enforced the “school safety zones” trespassing law against PINAC reporter Jeff Gray, outside of a St. Augustine high school earlier today. Gray complied with law enforcement orders, and is currently being held in the northeastern Florida St. Johns County jail, but oddly no charges are listed with his mugshot, unlike all of the other suspects as you can see below.

The St. Johns Sheriff’s Office has wanted to detain Gray for many months now, after the local schools Superintendent declared him persona non grata, even though Gray has a son currently attending St. Augustine High School and two other children in the system.

Jeff Gray was arrested while protesting with a sign in hand, the SLAPP lawsuit filed against him by St. Johns Schools last December. The legal action was filed along with 38 SLAPP letters sent to his home address by certified mail, one of which invoked Florida Statute 810.0975 and its “school safety zones.”

“How are you doing, Mr. Gray?” asked the Florida deputy as he got out of his patrol car, wearing street clothing, to which Jeff responded, “Pretty good. How are you?” “May I ask you why are you here?” asked the St. Johns sheriff’s deputy. “I am peacefully assembling and peacefully protesting,” replied Gray. “Ok. Do you realize [that] this is a violation of your no trespass order that was issued. Correct?” asked the deputy.

“No, it’s not actually. There’s a provision that that says “shall not infringe on the right to peacefully assemble and protest If you look in the statute, it’s right there,” said Gray, whose HonorYourOath YouTube page is famously filled with instances like these where the reporter very carefully expresses to the officers his statutory or constitutional rights, and he re-iterated for emphasis, “In the statute. That’s why I’m here.”

“This is within the 500 foot safety rule, so i’m putting you under arrest for violation of that trespass order,” replied the Florida deputy who seemed to suddenly remember that Gray is a reporter and would in all likelihood be recording the scene, “If you would, put your sign down, turn your phone off, put your hands behind your back, turn around please. Put your hands together like you’re praying, please.”

Gray surrendered to detainment. “If you look at the statute, there’s a provision…” said Gray as the sheriff’s deputy cuffed him. But Jeff Gray is right. The last sentence of the “School Safety Zones” statute reads: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to abridge or infringe upon the right of any person to peaceably assemble and protest.”

Hillary Clinton Falsely Credits Reagans With Starting ‘National Conversation’ on HIV/AIDS

Edit: BBC picked up on the story.

HyperX Introduces 16 GB DDR4 Impact SODIMM Modules, Kits Up To 64 GB At 2400 MHz

There are a couple 16 GB DDR4 SODIMM memory modules out there, but not very many. However, Kingston is filling the gap with new HyperX modules, which it uses in six new memory kits in its DDR4 Impact line.

The 16 GB DDR4 SODIMM modules will exist in two variants, one with a 2133 MHz frequency and the other at 2400 MHz. The latencies depend on the kit they're in, although the lower-frequency model has slightly quicker timings, as is usually the case.

16 GB modules for consumers are becoming more common, and DDR4 prices are dropping due to the usual industry oversupply. You probably remember a time when 8 GB or 4 GB modules were in this position. What amount of RAM do you want or need for gaming or VM/work computers? Is the requirement of a DDR4-capable motherboard holding you back?

Edit: I didn't realize the story is for SODIMM laptop memory. I don't see a lot of DDR4 laptops because I mainly look at deals which are for older laptops. A typical laptop with removable/replaceable RAM will have 2 slots, so that's 32 GB of memory with this kit.

Older stories:

Price Check: DDR4 Memory Down Nearly 40% in 6 Months, Expected To Continue
G.Skill Introduces 64GB DDR4-3200 Memory Kits
G.Skill Announces 128 GB DDR4 3000 MHz Kit For Content Creation Professionals
Price Check: Price Gap Between DDR3 and DDR4 Memory Almost Gone

Well, it has been a good run. Some people had some principles, and stuck to them. But the end result is catastrophe. We have made, what? 6000 members? We should be orders of magnitude above that by now. Something is wrong. There is trouble right here in River City! (Music Man, for those too young to get the reference)

Just now, in the submission by butthurt, which I have been watching since it was in the queue, we have people defending the KKK. You know, this is silly. It is ridiculous. This is a farce! Why? Everyone knows the KKK is dead. Those claiming to be KKK are either federal agents or seriously mentally ill persons. That is the only reason that I can say the violence against the KKK was wrong. Although I do not think the violence marred the protest: KKK protests are self-marring. If it was me, no head stomping, just head shots, at an appropriate photo studio, with posting to the internet, a la Anonymous, so we do know who these crazy mentally unbalanced people, and can recognize them in our scopes at a later date. Reap the whirlwind, racists!

But you see, my concern is not with these despicable racists, it is with the false equivalency that SoylentNews seems to be granting them. And not only them, but the gamergater-can't-meet-women crowd, and the Sad Puppies-my-fascist-Futurist_fiction-gets-no-traction people. These people are not to be taken seriously, by anyone! Now I am not saying we should ban them, but just letting them in causes problems for the site as a whole. Yeah, Mighty Buzzard, I hear you, but just listen for a bit.

We are getting an online rep. And it is not a good one. Yes, Ethanol_fueled can be entertaining, but the fact that he posts his racist screeds, even when they are modded down (and they are not always!), hurt SoylentNews. Runaway1956 has similar issues. Not as much of an ass as Eth, but not a contributer of material that is likely to encourage the kind of debate on issues that will make SolylentNews the place to be on the Internets. We are failing to be the replacement for the other site, and this is why. Bad money drives out good, and bad posters drive out good ones. I, for one, welcome [no, scratch that] grow tired of constantly responding to fascist, racist, dominionist, libertarian, and other crap here. I may stop entirely, soon. So, you volunteers, give some thought to what we want to be. A lid on the crazy may not be such a bad idea.

Oh, and by the way, that is the other thing that kind of tipped me off! When we have a certifiable homeless crazy person (MDC), that regularly posts more coherent and interesting things than do these racist trolls, I fear for the existence of SoylentNews. Well. I have said enough. It is up to the site whether I and those like me continue to contribute. The irony is, butthurt did this to me! Ha!!

Mediocrity loves company, and the way it leverages the weak-minded is through highly selective compassion. But so long as you have no memory, no power of reason and no experience of life, this selective compassion sounds, well, compassionate.
I have a new favorite word: mediocracy. It means ‘rule by mediocre people’. I like it because it describes one facet of what I call Total Insanity – or that system under which we are, for now, living.

Under a mediocracy there are no objective standards. There are just feelings. It can – and will – use them to justify everything from opening the floodgates to an invasion of Europe, to feeling the pain of a 52-year-old father of seven who abandoned his family so he could live authentically as a six-year-old girl.

By waving the flag of selective compassion, mediocracy is forever misty-eyed at some new reason to undermine real culture, decency, manliness, and discipline.

However, what it hates more than anything is achievement. It talks about achievement, but only in a bland, touchy-feeling sort of way. In reality, its achievements are merely expressions of new ways to facilitate being weak and deluded; or roundabout ways of expressing such things in terms of ‘compassion’.

New no-tackle rugby
When you understand the agenda, it all gets quite dull after a while. But I was amused to see where the guns of compassion have now fixed their sights: school rugby.

The problem with rugby – at least within the context of schools – according to the self-appointed gurus of gush, apparently, is tackling.

In a Guardian piece about a letter – one breathlessly entitled UK health experts call for ban on tackling in school rugby – we are told: “The letter is the first stage of a campaign that will include a petition on the change.org website which, if it receives 100,000 signatures, will trigger the consideration of a debate by MPs on the issue.”

Now the gush police love online petitions. You can get 100,000 people to sign practically anything if you make it sound worthy enough. So long as it doesn’t require any effort or financial input on the part of those whose buttons you are pressing, they will press yours in return to give you the votes you need.

The driver for this new round of tosh is the fact that ‘more than 70 doctors and health experts have called for a ban on tackling in school rugby games.’

Most people who read the article will just scan the list of names featuring the title Doctor and think it must be a good cause. But, in reality, the document has two core signatures: those of two professors in areas which sound more related to social engineering than to anything physical (Sport and Masculinities – whatever that is – and Public Health Research and Policy).

The remaining signatures are ‘supporting’, of which two are actual practicing doctors (i.e. people who receive patients).

The rest are academics in such hard-hitting disciplines as Institute of Human Identity (Dr. Charles Silverstein) and Health Inequalities Group (Robin Ireland). The closest most of these people will have come to a sporting injury will be a paper cut from picking up a dissertation from the wrong angle.

This, clearly, has nothing to do with rugby and everything to do with imposing yet more unreality on the human tribe.

I was not a rugby player myself; I preferred soccer and athletics at school. But I have played rugby, and I am bright enough to understand one of its key features: it is meant to hurt. That’s why boys play it.

Getting punched and kicked when you’re nine is no great tragedy. Living in a hermetically sealed, bubble-wrapped environment without punches and slaps and kicks until you are twenty-something, and having no chance to test yourself, to build up stamina, courage, strength and will: that is a tragedy.

By the time these social engineers finish with school rugby, there will be no goal posts; you’ll just pass the ball around in a big circle making sure everyone gets a turn – being particularly careful to see that people in wheelchairs get two turns. You’ll score a try by explaining how much you feel you deserve one. But it won’t be a try for your side. The points will be shared among the players on the basis of who is most deserving. And when it’s over everyone will get a medal.

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/334733-education-mediocrity-rugby-feelings-compassion/