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One year in as of today and still averaging over ~10K hits of the hashtag on slow days. Dead? The gaming press and SJWs should be so lucky. Gamers, we just don't quit until we win.

sic semper umbilicus

So, it's Women's Equality Day. Lot of you probably think about this time I'd be busting out with a sexist rant. Hate to disappoint but I'm all about equality. Actual equality though not this bullshit third-gen feminist version of equality where they think equality means special treatment for their tragic victimhood.

No, equality always has and always will mean equal treatment. Every single time. No exceptions for past mistreatment. No white-knighting up if someone with tits comes crying on your shoulder that people are mean to her just because she calls them misogynists, shitlords, tools of the patriarchy, etc...

In fact, no calling yourself a feminist period. If you do it as a woman it's saying you feel your entire gender has been victimized and should be given special treatment because it is incapable of taking care of itself. If you do it as a man you're saying an entire gender is in need of your protection.

You either treat a woman as if she's an adult and as capable of taking care of her own shit as you are, or you don't. There is no "yes, but" to it. Equal treatment or sexism, there are no other choices.

So I log on to SN after a busy weekend and find a story about the Hugo Awards, only it's a strange kind of story. It's biased, it's inflammatory, it's racist, it's sexist, and it links to the Urban Dictionary definition of the acronym "SJW". It simply isn't an appropriate piece for the front page of a respectable news aggregation site - it's biased, it mis-represents the proceedings, it's blatantly offensive towards innocent players and it's quite obviously a GamerGate propaganda piece.

The comments on the "article" were equally appalling, consisting primarily of GamerGate supporters shouting down their opponents, selectively redefining words to fit their purpose, conflating criticism with censorship and generally acting like a bunch of immature, angry, self-important morons who are incapable of holding an intelligent conversation without villifying and twisting the word of anyone who shows even the slightest disagreement with their party line.

I've been a supporter and submitter (and trainee editor) for SoylentNews since it's inception. I've submitted news stories about politics, economics, armed conflicts, espionage, upcoming technology, controversial trade agreements, video games, elections, terrorism and hackers. To be told by a senior member of Soylentnews staff that they can do without me because I don't support GamerGate...

Takyon, you should be ashamed of yourself for accepting that story in it's submitted form. Until yourself and The Mighty Buzzard have been entirely disassociated from SoylentNews, the site is dead to me.

I've gotten tired of the Secure Boot madness, especially lately with Microsoft's memo to OEMs that they are no longer required to provide an opt-out.

I've written the FTC. Here is the letter I sent to the antitrust division as per their instructions:

Hello, I'm writing to report a possible violation by Microsoft Corporation, who has been abusing their standing with PC manufacturers (who need to comply to get the "Designed for Windows" sticker) to bully them into making it increasingly difficult to install a competitor's operating system on a standard PC.

Around 2011, Microsoft mandated that machines that ship with Windows 8 come with a feature called "Secure Boot" enabled. What this does, is on boot, it checks to see if the operating system was digitally "signed" by a trusted authority, in most cases Microsoft alone, and if not, the system completely refuses to boot. While until Windows 10, Microsoft mandated a feature to disable secure boot in the BIOS, with Windows 10 they have told manufacturers that this is no longer required.

What's important to understand is, that Microsoft has literally positioned themselves as virtually the only trusted 'signer' of all competitors' operating systems. All competitors must either hope that the PC will provide a method to disable this 'secure boot', or *pay* Microsoft, a competitor, to graciously allow them to run on standard PCs.

Prior to the secure boot feature, it was extremely easy to load any competitor's operating system on a standard PC. It took no workarounds or 'hacking' or fiddling with settings. It would simply install.

There are many different operating systems available for the PC, including but not by any means limited to:
Linux (which comes in literally thousands of variations, each requiring to be signed by Microsoft for secure boot), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Haiku OS, Solaris, and even Android.

These systems have no technical limitation preventing them from being installed on these PCs, but rather
are now artificially forced to pay Microsoft to run on any PC with Secure Boot 'locked' on.
I have already encountered a Toshiba laptop that did not have an option to disable secure boot, and it was impossible to boot my preferred homemade Linux operating system on it as a result, since I cannot and will not pay Microsoft to sign it.

Microsoft has made unusually high requirements for them signing an operating system. It even goes as far to state that components they sign must not be of particular free software licenses.
In addition, it contains a threat to revoke certificates for OSes that have known security holes in the boot sequence code, an action Microsoft would surely never do to their own OS. (Windows)

Here is a link to their policies regarding UEFI/Secure Boot "signing":
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows_hardware_certification/archive/2013/12/03/microsoft-uefi-ca-signing-policy-updates.aspx

I await a response and hope that we can continue to keep the operating system running on a PC as the choice of the consumer, not one particular operating system vendor.

You may call me at censored if you wish or need further information.

-Daniel Hopson

I think this song goes well with this entry.

When in 2011 when the OCD hit me for the first time, I had no hope at all. I expected to die soon, because life was such a hell, I couldn't imagine any other scenario. Otherwise, why so much pain? Multiple obsessions hitting me at once, sucking the joy from my soul. This isn't normal OCD. This is stuff that had me screaming for someone to kill me at one point, but I won't get into that. Here's a link that describes it.

I found a spark of light in this pitch black from a youtuber whose whimsical little videos made me feel the first bit of joy in several months. I subscribed to her, HiHiAkafa, then subscribed to her new account HeavenSoulTrance, and finally AkafaXD. She suffers from what appears to be depression, and seems to be a furry. I don't mind of course (how can I, I sometimes think of myself as "the white rat"), and I always found her videos quite adorable. Point is, she posted a video not long ago explaining that depression was preventing her from working on her art. I was one of those who gave her encouraging comments, which she appreciated. It appears that hasn't done any good.

She's erased everything on her last youtube account AkafaXD. The profile picture is glass shattering in a black void.
All that glorious art, lost. All her adorable animations, gone. A piece of me, a piece I integrated into my fondest memories, gone.

I managed to save some of her videos luckily, because I loved her work so much I had downloaded them from YouTube prior to her account wipeout.

I've made an archive of the handful of videos I had on hand, on my secondary server. http://gieba.universe2.us/rememberakafa

I just hope she stays safe.

Working with arch (through the antergos installer) is pretty nice so far (and learning the i3wm is nice: educating with cool, lol)(actually, it's reminding me of the days of installing macmillan red hat 5.2, where i had to mess extensively with config files, especially to get X working).

Got my i3status bar to correctly show that my VPN is working (had to do some googling, as well as finally seeing i'd left off double quotes, to make it work).
Pacman is quick (VERY quick) and easy, and pamac-manager makes it easy to include AUR packages without adding it into your config file.

So far, really enjoying i3, but have included plasma (for k3b) and the default gnome just as fall-backs in case i need to do something that i don't know the command for (yet).
Am pleased with my set up, and with deja-dup to backup, i may keep this setup as my stable, and use my other partition to play with distro-hopping.

Currently watching Black Sails (episode 1, so far) while playing minecraft... (sad that it was bought by Microsoft, though). Will not be installing windows 10 to try my 'free' minecraft win10, lol. That kind of free is too expensive! :)

The other day, I had the opportunity to take a 5 hour tour of the Hanford Site in Washington State. I figured I’d do a write up of my experience for the curious. I’m not a great writer and mainly going off memory here, so apologies if I make any factual errors.

First, a little background. The Hanford site is located near Richland in South East Washington. During World War 2 and throughout the cold war, they were responsible for enriching Uranium into Plutonium for our nuclear weapons program. Plutonium from Hanford was used in the first atomic bomb detonated in the Trinity test, and in the “Fat Man” atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It is also home of the “B” reactor, the world’s first plutonium production reactor. These days Hanford is known as being the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States.

After getting up at 2 AM in order to reach in Richland in time for the 7:30 AM tour start, we arrived in a nondescript business park in the industrial section of the city. Our IDs were checked, we were given badges, and forced to surrender phones, cameras, and other recording devices (sorry! no pictures). We were then ushered into a small conference room with a television. Our tour guide, a retired nuclear engineer, introduced himself and we watched a cheesy video. Then we boarded a bus and began the drive to the site.

During the journey, we passed by the fuel processing facility for the Columbia Generating Station which is near the Hanford site. The Columbia Generating Station is the only operating nuclear power plant in Washington State and produces 1,170 megawatts of electricity.

Shortly before leaving Richland, we took a brief stop at the HAMMER training area. This is where workers at the Hanford Site train to deal with radiation and other hazards they may encounter. That facility was quite extensive, but we only got to see an above-ground replica of the tanks that were used to dispose of liquid nuclear waste. There are around 200 of these tanks buried on the site, and each tank can hold 500,000 to 1,000,000 gallons of waste. The main purpose of the facility at Hammer is to attempt to develop new tools and technology to remove the remaining waste from the older (and leaking) single walled tanks into newer and safer double walled tanks for storage until the Vitrification plant is completed. Our guide explained that all of the liquid that could be pumped out of the old tanks had already been removed. The trouble is that over time, the waste in the tanks settled at the bottom of the tanks. It’s an interesting engineering problem because this “sludge” is highly toxic, often corrosive, and radioactive. Some of the remaining material has a consistency like peanut butter and some is more like a hard salt cake. The current strategy seems to be lowering robots down the 1 foot wide access tube and breaking up the waste with high pressure water.

We left the HAMMER facility and began our journey to the actual site. We passed the Columbia Generating Station run by Energy Northwest on the way. It sits right on the edge of the Columbia river. We didn’t get very close to it, but it didn’t look like what most people imagine a Nuclear Power plant looks like. It’s a newer version of the infamous Fukushima reactor in Japan. An unremarkable industrial building with several short cooling towers giving off steam. The plant is a closed loop plant, which means that the water that is heated by the reactor to drive the steam turbines never makes contact with the outside world. After it goes through the turbines, it is pumped into the cooling towers where the pipes are cooled evaporatively with water from the Columbia River, which is returned to the river after being allowed to cool off.

After about a 10 minute drive, we hit the security gate. An armed guard in a military-style uniform waved us on the site. I don’t know if they actually use the military to guard the facility, and I saw many private security guards around some of the construction sites.

Now we were on the site itself. It’s worth mentioning that the vast majority of Hanford is just empty desert. If you ignore the lack of farms, suspicious number of high tension power lines, and little yellow “Danger: Radiation” signs you see everywhere, you’d have little indication that you are on a nuclear site. Most of the facilities have been torn down or cocooned. Occasionally you’ll see a flat spot or a concrete pad where a building used to be. I even saw an old road running through the road we were on at a 45 degree angle. It looked like they’d just added a 2 foot layer of dirt and paved the road we were traveling on right over it.

The part we were currently in was where the reactors were built. Most of these have been completely shut down and closed off, and there was very little activity in this area. It’s also the old site of the towns of Hanford and White Bluffs, which were reclaimed when the site was founded. Very little remained of the towns. Hanford High School and the White Bluffs Bank are the only structures that are still standing. The only other evidence of the towns are the old trees planted by the residents. Trees in that part of the state are pretty rare. You could usually get a good idea of where the old buildings are by looking for them. For instance, near where the Hanford railroad station used to be are a row of trees planted neatly next to the railroad tracks.

The first building we passed that was part of the actual facility was the fuel processing plant, where fuel would be prepared for the reactors. This building hadn’t been torn down yet because the ground under it was highly contaminated. The building itself is blocking the radiation in the ground. They are currently trying to figure out a way to remove the contaminated soil without collapsing the building on top of it. One idea was to remove the soil underneath the building slowly and backfill it as they went.

The reactors themselves were mostly shrouded in concrete, de-fueled, and closed off. Unfortunately, they weren’t very exciting to look at. Basically just three to four story tall windowless concrete buildings. The first two we saw were involved in the generation of enriched uranium for our nuclear weapons program. There were another two smaller reactors that were used as research reactors. These had the classic concrete domed structures you’d expect to see. Only one of the reactors at Hanford was actually used for power generation. Although safer than the Chernobyl reactor, it was shut down shortly after the disaster because it had a similar design. The reactors were given letter names roughly alphabetically. The “K” reactors are an interesting exception. During the construction of the first K reactor, a problem was found with the design, so they built a re-designed version only yards away. Eventually they were able to fix the problem with the first reactor and they now stand side by side.

The “B” reactor was our first time off the bus. It’s about 4 stories tall and the first production reactor in the world. Fuel produced at the plant was used in the Trinity test device, and the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki. We were led inside the plant, and after a short hallway we were standing feet from the face of the reactor. The reactor itself was about 3 stories tall, and had hundreds of high-pressure water pipes and countless valves leading to the pipes. There were several cranes and gantries that were used to make adjustments, add fuel, and preform maintenance. After watching a short video, we were allowed to explore the building for about a half hour. A lot of the building was roped off, but apparently you can explore more of it during the specific reactor tours.

The control room might be of particular interest to the folks here. It’s remarkable how sophisticated the all-analog equipment was. Instead of CRTs or LCD displays, spools of paper unwound behind glass panels while arms tracked performance of the reactor by drawing on the paper. There was an entire wall of gauges monitoring the water pressure of all the previously mentioned pipes going into the face of the reactor. These were plumbed directly into the reactor. Behind the panel was a small access hallway with a dizzying array of pipes and valves servicing the gauges. I imagine it was rather loud in the control room when it was operating.

All these pipes and valves were serviced by a pumphouse (a separate building) that would filter and pump millions of gallons of water through the reactor directly from the Columbia river. The water would emerge moments later nearly boiling (not bad for a pile of rocks) and be pumped off to a cooling pit, then pumped directly back into the Columbia river.

This area of the site had quite a bit more activity than where the other reactors were. Once we boarded the bus again, dump trucks carrying loads of contaminated dirt were a common sight. Our guide also pointed out some of the areas where the tanks were buried. The tank sites were all roped off and there were little yellow radiation signs every 5 feet or so in a grid. There wasn’t much to see aboveground. Just shallow hills with pipes sticking out of the ground, some electrical boxes, fire hydrants, and concrete blocks to protect them from vehicles.

We continued on to the area where the irradiated uranium from the reactors was refined and processed into plutonium for the nuclear weapons. I suspect this was the main reason for the tight security as the next set of buildings would create diplomatic incidents if discovered in the wrong countries. Here things were very busy. Most of the processing plants were in the process of being entombed or decommissioned, and there were lots of construction vehicles and trailers surrounding the plants. The plants themselves were pretty generic looking. Five story tall windowless concrete buildings, probably about 200 meters long with a single smokestack at one end. Most of them had loading docks for trucks, and one of them even had a door over railroad tracks so the material could be unloaded directly inside.

For obvious reasons, we couldn’t get very close to the processing plants. We did watch a short video about them on the bus. This told the story of the “McCluskey Room” in the Plutonium Finishing Plant. While Harold McCluskey was extracting Americium in a glove box, there was an explosion and the entire room was covered in radioactive material and nitric acid. McCluskey was exposed to the highest dose of radiation from americium ever recorded, and the room was sealed off. Only recently have workers been able to re-enter the room and begin decontaminating it. The Plutonium Finishing plant still stands, but is likely to be demolished within the next year or two. If you’re interested in seeing it, you’d better sign up for a tour soon! McCluskey died of natural causes in 1987 at age 75.

The Plutonium Finishing Plant (“Z plant”) was the last step in plutonium construction at the site. It was also one of the most heavily guarded sites at Hanford. After the plutonium “buttons” were produced, they were stored in a heavily guarded vault on the site. The last plutonium stored there left the facility in 2009, along with the armed guards and heavy restrictions on the employees of the facility.

The tour shifted gears here. Now the focus was much heavier on the decontamination efforts and the purposes of some of the new buildings and the ones under construction. Our next stop was the “Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility” err, landfill. This was where low level nuclear waste and hazardous materials such as asbestos and lead were buried. If you’ve ever been to a conventional landfill you have a pretty good idea of what this looked like. The waste is sealed in large plastic bags and dumped into pits. Water trucks and workers spraying the smooth, sandy ground with hoses were everywhere, giving the site an appearance eerily similar to a beach. The air quality is heavily monitored in the area.

We had two stops left on our tour. The first stop was a water treatment plant specializing in treating groundwater in the area. As you’d expect, it’s a dizzying array of shiny pipes and tanks. Water is pumped up from the contaminated aquifer, treated with microbes that absorb the radiation, then returned to the aquifer in strategic locations in an attempt to flush out the contamination. The water that leaves the plant is safe enough to drink. The radioactive microbe slurry is deposited into dump trucks, then ferried off for further processing, or to be put in the landfill.

Our final stop on the site was the vitrification plant. Along the way we passed a large pit containing the spent reactors from nuclear submarines and ships. The vitrification plant has been under construction since the early 2000s and is expected (provided funding doesn’t dry up) to be completed sometime around 2030. It’s a massive facility that will separate and process the high-level nuclear waste located in the tank farms and elsewhere into a glasslike substance. The glass is very stable, and will be put in steel canisters until the radiation decays. The original plan was to ship the canisters to Yucca mountain, but with that project on hold, it is uncertain what the fate of the nuclear waste will be.

As we drove out of the site, we also passed the LIGO Hanford observatory. It is unrelated to the Hanford site, but it was pretty neat to see anyway. Apparently scientists are firing lasers down 4KM long tubes to attempt to detect gravity waves. There is a sister site in Louisiana to rule out any false readings from local interference. I don’t know much more about it, but the facility was very impressive.

Hanford offers tours of the site to the public. The 5 hour tour that we went on was focused more the decontamination efforts and requires that participants have US citizenship and ID. There were also no cameras, phones, or recording devices allowed on the 5 hour tour. If you are more interested in the Historic B Reactor, they also offer a shorter tour of that, and you can bring your cell phones and cameras. I’d recommend the B reactor tour if you’re more interested in the historical and technology side. The B reactor also looks like a multiplayer map in Half-Life, so it’d probably fun if you’re into industrial/nuclear porn.

So I just got a new laptop. It's an Acer Aspire E5-521. It was manufactured in April. It has 4GB of RAM and a 1TB HDD, and an AMD E2-6110 processor. Now, I know a lot of people don't like Acer, but since around 2009 they've cleaned up their act and I actually prefer their stuff. It tends to be of good build quality nowadays without being too pricey.

So, for the OS, I first tried to load my SubLinux with XFCE on it. It worked, but the kernel, which was a 4.0.0, mind you, didn't see the touchpad. I also couldn't get sound working, and 3D acceleration wouldn't work.

After fiddling with it and building a 4.1.3 kernel, I got sound and the touchpad working. Turns out it was using the HDMI as the default sound output, which is why it wouldn't work. That left me still without 3D acceleration. So I got tired of the fuss and decided to load Fedora 22 x64 on it. Went smoothly, everything worked out of the box.

But it didn't feel like home, and having to install all those -devel packages for my work was a massive irritation. Eventually I got fed up (no pun intended) and switched back to SubLinux, determined to get my video working. Finally, after compiling a new Xorg ATI driver (which required compiling a new version of LLVM and installing libglamor (needed for new ATI cards)), I got 3D going, and now I'm happy.

The machine is very responsive, and always seems to stay very cool no matter what work load I'm giving it and whether or not I have it sitting on a soft surface that would be really bad for most machines. The only pet peeve I have left is that the hard disk spins down on idle *constantly*. Give it 10 secs of no reads or writes and it spins down. Starts up quick so only a minor irritant, but it appears my kernel doesn't know how to talk to the damn drive and get it to stop ignoring 'hdparm'.

Display quality is alright, but a little too pixellated. I can see the pixels. Runs at 1366x768.
Seems to run Warzone 2100 quite well now that I got 3D going. The system ignores my commands to dim backlight. Did that in Fedora too. Suspend works fantastic however.

Battery life is around 4.5 hours on a full charge. Takes about 2 hours to charge.

Comes with a wireless n WiFi card. Works fine out of the box on both Fedora and SubLinux.
Keyboard is a chiclet keyboard, but it's strangely comfortable to type on.
Touchpad is one of those Macbook Air style things where the whole thing clicks. I enabled tap-to-click and that made me happy. I don't much care for the big clicky-button.

Has a webcam, but I don't have much use for that right now.

1 USB 3.0, 2 USB 2.0.

This should do just fine for quite a while. Excuse me, I just heard my drive spin down again. Dammit.

Law enforcement’s surveillance in America—and particularly its ever-increasing use of wiretaps—have been primarily driven for the last 25 years by drug cases. And as the chart above shows, that’s now truer than ever before.

Earlier this month the US court system released its annual report of every wiretap over the last year for which it granted law enforcement a warrant. And of those 3,554 wiretaps in 2014, fully 89 percent were for narcotics cases. That’s the highest percentage of wiretaps focused on drugs in the report’s history, and it continues a steady increase in the proportion of drug-focused spying. Twenty-five years ago, just 62 percent of wiretaps were for drug cases.

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/drug-war-driving-us-domestic-spying/

From the Millennium Falcon to the USS Enterprise, science fiction has shown us a vast array of out-of-this-world spaceships that defy our rules of physics. We’ve rounded up some of your favorite intergalactic crafts from television, film and video games, along with real NASA spacecraft, to compare and speculate who has the fastest ship in the universe.

https://www.fatwallet.com/blog/fastest-ship-in-the-universe/