SoylentNews

Zoom suspends U.S.-based activist's account after Tiananmen Square commemoration event

Zoom shut down the account of an activist who was holding an event on the video conferencing platform to commemorate China's Tiananmen Square crackdown.

The move has prompted accusations that Zoom, a U.S. company, has bowed to pressure from Beijing.

U.S.-based rights group Humanitarian China held an event on Zoom on May 31 to commemorate those who lost their lives in the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in China's Tiananmen Square in 1989. The topic is taboo in China and references to it online are heavily censored.

The account that hosted the event was shut down on June 7, according to Zhou Fengsuo, who founded Humanitarian China and took part in the 1989 protests as a student. The account has since been reinstated.

Also at The Guardian.

North Korean leader's sister emerges as policymaker in spat with South Korea

The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is taking a leading role in a new, more hard-line pressure campaign against South Korea, highlighting what analysts say is a substantive policy role that goes beyond being her brother’s assistant.

[...] this year, Kim has taken on a more public policy role, cementing her status as an influential political player in her own right.

“Prior to this, Kim Yo Jong was portrayed in state media as Kim Jong Un’s sister, his protocol officer, or one of his accompanying officials,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a former North Korea open source intelligence analyst in the U.S. government. “Now, North Koreans know for sure there is more to her than that.”

Kim has worked behind the scenes in North Korea’s propaganda agencies, a role that led the United States to add her to a list of sanctioned senior officials in 2017 because of human rights abuses and censorship.

In March, state media carried the first ever statement by Kim, in which she criticised South Korean authorities. That was followed by several more, including a response to comments by Trump, and last week, a warning that the North would cut communications with South Korea.

Lee said Kim’s statements have a unique style, showcasing her wit and underscoring her powerful position.

“In addition to the harsh words and sarcasm, they can be bitingly witty in ways that the other statements are not,” Lee said. “She seems to have more leeway in crafting her statements, which of course is not surprising.”

Kim Yo-jong

Democratic leaders clash with Black Lives Matter activists over 'defund the police'

As Trump seizes on the slogan to paint his opponents as radicals who envision a world of lawlessness and anarchy, Biden and most other Democrats are resisting the left's calls and floating more modest measures to curtail bad police behavior.

“No, I don't support defunding the police," Biden told CBS Evening News on Monday. "I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness and, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community."

Johnetta Elzie, a civil rights activist and organizer, said Biden's calls for "reform" sound stale, mealy-mouthed and out of touch as "black people are still dying behind these antiquated ideas and policies."

"It's not enough. Joe Biden knows it's not enough. Joe Biden's team knows it's not enough. It's not at all answering the calls of the moment," Elzie said. "People have been saying to anyone who's f---ing up in this moment: Read the room. People are calling for defunding the police.

"People in power — politicians and policymakers — are still talking about reform. We're beyond that. We're over that," she said. "If they wanted reform, they would have done it six years ago when we actually had the chance to. But that's not what happened."

The clash pits an ideological movement aiming to transform the national debate against a Democratic electoral apparatus whose overriding goal is to defeat Trump. While activists say they believe the need for radical change is worth taking political risks, party leaders say they worry about alienating moderate white voters who sympathize with the protesters' cause but still support police.

[...] Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, was loudly booed and forced to retreat from a gathering of demonstrators Saturday after he responded to a question about whether he would commit to defunding the police by saying, "I do not support the full abolition of the police."

When pressed to explain what the slogan means in policy terms, activists say "defund the police" is not actually a call for a country with no cops.

"It does not mean a world where we do not have safety and justice. It does not mean a world where we do not have order," Robinson said. "But what it does mean is that right now we seem to try to solve all of our society's problems by increasing the role and responsibility of law enforcement, and it has not worked."

Elzie said "defund the police" means "reducing police budgets, to me, down to the bare minimum."

[...] "It's not the job of activists to present poll-tested ideas," said Sean McElwee, a left-wing organizer and data scientist who popularized #AbolishICE. "It's the job of activists to demand we imagine a world built on fundamentally different assumptions. We've already seen a number of concrete and actionable policies that can fundamentally change the way we understand policing in this country."

I don't like that SpaceX named their big project "starship". For decades starship has been understood to mean a ship that can travel between stars -- even though this is only science fiction at present.

Such a misuse of a name can only be the work of a marketing department somewhere.

Other terms that lost their meaning.

"Relational" database, in the late 80's early 90's. Suddenly any indexed record system was a "relational" database.

Megabyte / Gigabyte, etc. Once long ago it was clear that
KiloByte = 1024
MegaByte = 1024 * 1024
GigaByte = 1024 * 1024 * 1024
It's funny that this fuzzy contamination of measurement didn't happen to main memory. We all know exactly how many bytes are addressable in a stick of memory.

Another one: 5G
I'm sure it has / had some technical meaning. But ruined by marketing.

There are other technical terms similarly ruined, I'm sure.

AMD Hints at More Than 4 GB Graphics Memory As Standard on Next-Gen Radeon RX Graphics Card

In a recent blog post, AMD might have hinted at the end of the 4 GB entry-level graphics cards era as we get closer to the launch of the first RDNA 2 powered Radeon RX graphics cards. The blog post that is cleverly titled 'Game Beyond 4GB' compares AMD's most entry-level Navi based Radeon RX graphics card, the 5500 XT, in both 4 GB and 8 GB flavors and shows how the increased VRAM size not only delivers better performance but has become crucial from a support point of view in next-generation AAA titles.

Currently, AMD's entry-level Radeon RX graphics card lineup consists of the Radeon RX 5500 XT which has two variants, one with 4 GB GDDR6 memory and a second variant with 8 GB GDDR6 memory. In addition to its Navi based cards, AMD's older Polaris based options continue to sell large volumes and have several options to select from with the majority being 8 GB variants that we saw become a standard in the last generation of Polaris offerings.

AMD in its own testing reports up to 24% performance improvement in AAA titles using an 8 GB Radeon RX 5500 XT versus a 4 GB variant. Modern titles such as Borderlands 3, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Forza Horizon 4, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Doom Eternal, and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus were tested, all of which showed marked improvement over the 4 GB option.

Also at Guru3D.

Frankly speaking, neither is 8.

laughs (cries?) in heavily modified 8K textures Skyrim Mods

I see six lights!

NO! You see two lights!

How many lights do you see?

I see twelve lights?!

BZZZT! You see two lights!

In 2009 I bought a Xerox Phaser 6125N colour laser printer for only £120, with a second set of toner cartridges included in the price. It's a WinPrinter (the driver has to do more work) and there was no official Linux support for it, but a bit of googling revealed that it was in fact a re-engineered FujiXerox printer and that the FujiXerox Linux driver worked with it (Fuji_Xerox-DocuPrint_C525_A_AP-1.0-1.i386.tar.gz).

The driver was supplied as a 32-bit binary (several, in fact) and I have been running and old 32-bit machine, with CUPS, as my printer server. I want to get rid of the old machine. I came up with all sorts of ideas, I discovered on the FujiXerox website that you could also get the source for the filter (driver) for that particular model, so I tried to compile it myself in the CUPS 2.3.3 source tree for 64-bit. It didn't work.

Anyway, the solution was to use Alien Bob's Slackware multilib packages to run the 32-bit binaries on the 64-bit machine. Alien Bob's instructions were very clear and it only took a few minutes to install his packages, reboot, rebuild my nVidia driver and get the printer going.

The BBC reports that Tony Hall, a member of Glastonbury (of music festival fame) Town Council's 5G Advisory Committee, which has called for an investigation into 5G, is recommending the 5GBioShield.

The 5GBioShield is a USB stick, costing £339.60 including VAT, allegedly "provides protection for your home and family, thanks to the wearable holographic nano-layer catalyser, which can be worn or placed near to a smartphone or any other electrical, radiation or EMF [electromagnetic field] emitting device".

"Through a process of quantum oscillation, the 5GBioShield USB key balances and re-harmonises the disturbing frequencies arising from the electric fog induced by devices, such as laptops, cordless phones, wi-fi, tablets, et cetera,"

The only difference between this USB stick and an identical 'crystal' USB stick available from many suppliers in Shenzhen, China, is a circular sticker. Inside, there is a circuit board and an LED.

Mr Hall said that he had no regrets about buying the device and since plugging it in had felt beneficial effects, including being able to sleep through the night and having more dreams. There was also apparently a "calmer" feel to his home.

London Trading Standards has launched a probe.

There is only one reason for a stock or bond prices to go up. And that’s because of the flow of funds into the stock market. What had been supporting the stock market for the last 12 years was very largely stock buybacks by companies using their revenue to sort of close down their business, disinvest and buy their own stocks to at least keep the prices up. Well, what’s flowing into the market right now? Obviously, it’s not corporate profits buying their own stocks, and it’s certainly not popular money coming into the market by small investors thinking that stocks are going to earn more. All this money is coming into the market from the 10 trillion dollar bailout via the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is going out directly and is buying stocks, bonds, junk bonds, mortgages, junk mortgages, all to prop up the value of assets.

Now, when it’s putting this money into the stock market, it’s buying stocks that are already issued and have long since —the proceeds have been spent on building factories or enterprises or as means of making money. So none of this bailout money, none of this 10 trillion going into the stock market has any effect at all on the real economy of production and consumption. It’s solely to support the assets that are held almost eighty five percent by the wealthiest 10 percent of the economy.
--
Let’s, for the sake of arguments, say they [democrats] actually take the White House and both houses of Congress. What should they do?

...I would say now this time when Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo become insolvent, wiping out its net worth as they did in 2008, this time take them into the public sector, make them public banks, and as a public banks, let's not lend for corporate takeover loans. Let’s not lend money to corporate raiders to outsource and downsize companies. Let’s make lend for actual for loans that will actually rebuild the economy with tangible means of production, tangible infrastructure and back to the real economy instead. I think Mr. Biden would say, "Well, how much money did you contribute to my campaign? Oh, I see, well, thank you very much, sir."

Cue the psychos

"George is looking down right now and saying 'this is a great thing happening for our country. It's great day for him, a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality. It’s really what our Constitution requires and what our country is about."

"...And tomorrow... tomorrow's gonna be a... real good day!"