142948978
submission
Frosty Piss writes:
The Apache Software Foundation has canceled Marko Rodriguez from the TinkerPop project he co-founded because his provocative Twitter posts were said to have violated the ASF Code of Conduct.
"I was removed from the project I started 11 years ago for 'publishing offensive humor that borders on hate speech,'" Rodriguez explained in an email to The Register. "However, now that Big Tech has secured the ASF board, it is a way to 'shut me up' about the monopolistic practices of Big Tech."
Rodriguez argues that "woke culture" is a creation of "Big Tech," and that it serves to protect the industry's economic monopoly "by monopolizing the ideology of the people." Asked whether he sees the problem in light of the content-moderation challenge faced by social media services, which police speech without clear, consistent rules or due process, he said not at all. "I like to tweet, so I tweet. If Apache likes to police tweets, then may they police tweets," Rodriguez replied.
Apache TinkerPop is an open source, vendor-agnostic, graph computing framework.
101040774
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Frosty Piss writes:
The Stanford prison experiment was conducted in 1971 by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo using college students to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power by focusing on the struggle between prisoners and prison officers. In the study, volunteers were randomly assigned to be either "guards" or "prisoners" in a mock prison, with Zimbardo serving as the superintendent. The results seemed to show that the students quickly embraced their assigned roles, with some guards enforcing authoritarian measures and ultimately subjecting some prisoners to psychological torture, while many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, by the officers' request, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it. After Berkeley graduate Douglas Korpi appeared to have a nervous breakdown while playing the role of an inmate, the experiment was shut down. There’s just one problem: Korpi’s breakdown was a sham.
92403247
submission
Frosty Piss writes:
Microsoft will bypass Puget Sound Energy to secure carbon-free power on wholesale markets under an agreement with state regulators. The agreement calls for Microsoft to pay a $23.6million transition fee to Puget Sound Energy, which the utility will pass on to its Western Washington customers. In 2015, 60 percent of PSE electricity came from coal and natural-gas plants, according to company statistics. State regulators and Puget Sound Energy determined that Microsoft is legally responsible for a share of the Colstrip, Montana coal-fired generating plant costs. Microsoft seeks to secure its power from sources that emit no carbon emissions.
91479515
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Frosty Piss writes:
The huge Stratolaunch finally rolled out of its hangar in Mojave, Calif., Wednesdayfor the first time. Built by Paul Allen's Scaled Composites, the twin hulled monster will go through months of ground tests before a first flight. Jean Floyd, chief executive at Stratolaunch Systems, said in a statement that the empty airplane, powered by six used 747 engines, weighs approximately 500,000 pounds. The jet will have a three-person crew: pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer in the flight deck of the starboard fuselage, while the port fuselage cockpit is empty and unpressurized. Stratolaunch is intended to carry a rocket slung beneath the central part of the wing, between the two fuselages, and release it at 35,000 feet. The concept is that the rocket will then launch into space and deliver satellites into orbit.
90775715
submission
Frosty Piss writes:
Images of Tinder users posting their sexiest selfies were swept up in a massive grab of some 40,000 photos from the dating app by a dataset collector who plans to use the selfies in artificial intelligence training, reports TechCrunch. Tinder said in a statement that the photo sweeper “violated the terms of our service” and “we are taking appropriate action and investigating further.” The creator of the data set, Stuart Colianni, has released it under a CC0: Public Domain License and also uploaded his scraper script to GitHub. He describes it as a “simple script to scrape Tinder profile photos for the purpose of creating a facial dataset,” saying his inspiration for creating the scraper was disappointment working with other facial data sets. He also describes Tinder as offering “near unlimited access to create a facial data set” and says scraping the app offers “an extremely efficient way to collect such data.”
89623447
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Frosty Piss writes:
Soon after ex-President Obama ordered the secret program three years ago, North Korean missiles began exploding, veering off course or crashing into the sea, according to the New York Times. By most accounts, the North Korean missile failures were caused by US sabotage, the Times says. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un may have been rattled by the US cyber effort. Last fall, he was widely reported to have ordered an investigation into whether the US was sabotaging his country’s missiles. Obama’s effort is now left to President Trump and his administration. According to a senior administration official, the White House is looking at pre-emptive military strike options, the Times said.
84163201
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Frosty Piss writes:
A small asteroid has been found circling Earth. Scientists say it looks like the asteroid, named 2016 HO3, has been out there for about 50 years. Calculations indicate 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth's companion for centuries to come. Scientists think the asteroid is between 120 and 300 feet (37 to 91 meters) in diameter, and NASA says it never gets closer than 9 million miles (14 million kilometers) from Earth. It was found on April 27, 2016 by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope in Haleakala, Hawaii. So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years? Probably the same way we've missed all the flying saucers!
82657665
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Frosty Piss writes:
Seattle police raided the home of two outspoken privacy activists early on May 30th. Jan Bultmann and David Robinson, a married couple and co-founders of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, were awakened at 6:15 a.m. by a team of six detectives from the Seattle Police Department who had a search warrant to examined their equipment. They claimed to be looking for child pornography, however Bultmann and Robinson believe the raid is because they run a Tor exit node out of their home. They said they operated the node as a service to dissidents in repressive countries, knowing full well that criminals might use it as well, much like any other communication tool. The SPD acknowledged this morning that no child porn was found, no assets were seized, and no arrests were made.
76032949
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Frosty Piss writes:
Brewer chairs the geography program at Penn State, and has devoted much of her career to helping other people make better maps. By bringing research on visual perception to bear on design, she says cartographers can make maps that are more effective and more intuitive to understand. Many of the same lessons apply equally well to other types of data visualization. A big reason people run into trouble with their color schemes, Brewer says, is the way color picking is done in many software programs. Take the RGB cube (or sliders) many programs use to display colors along red, green, and blue axes, for example. 'That's not the least bit perceptually scaled,' Brewer said. 'In some parts of the cube a tiny step gives you a huge perceptual difference. In other parts it all looks the same.' Brewer’s best-known invention is a website called Color Brewer, which helps mapmakers pick a color scheme that’s well-suited for communicating the particular type of data they’re mapping.
73647497
submission
Frosty Piss writes:
BMI claims Amici III in Linden, New York didn't have a license when it played four tunes in its eatery one night last year, including the beloved “Bennie and the Jets” and “Brown Sugar,” winning a $24,000 judgment earlier this year, as well as more than $8,200 in attorney’s fees. Giovanni Lavorato, who has been in business for 25 years, says the disc jockey DJ brought into the eatery paid a fee to play tunes. 'It’s ridiculous for me to pay somebody also,' he said. 'This is not a nightclub. This is not a disco joint . . . How many times do they want to get paid for the stupid music?'
71553167
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Frosty Piss writes:
Kevin Christopher Bollaert, who operated a 'revenge porn' web site was been found guilty in February of six counts of extortion and 21 counts of identity theft. He faced a maximum of 23 years in prison. On Friday, April 3rd, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The extortion charges stem from a second web site he ran that solicited payments of $250 to $350 from people who wanted to have the photographs deleted. Bollaert made about $30,000 on that site.
66933963
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Frosty Piss writes:
'Get Me Off Your F**king Mailing List' is an actual science paper accepted by the journal International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. As reported at Vox and other web sites, the journal, despite its distinguished name, is a predatory open-access journal. These sorts of low-quality journals spam thousands of scientists, offering to publish their work for a fee. In 2005, computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler created this highly profane ten-page paper as a joke, to send in replying to unwanted conference invitations. It literally just contains that seven-word phrase over and over, along with a nice flow chart and scatter-plot graph. More recently, computer scientist Peter Vamplew sent it to the IJACT in response to spam from the journal, and the paper was automatically accepted with an anonymous reviewer rating it as 'excellent', and requested a fee of $150. Over the years, the number of these predatory journals has exploded. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, keeps an up-to-date list of them to help researchers avoid being taken in; it currently has 550 publishers and journals on it.
64040867
submission
Frosty Piss writes:
The LA County District Attorney’s Office declined to press charges against a sheriff’s deputy who was apparently distracted by his mobile digital computer when he fatally struck cyclist and former Napster COO Milton Olin Jr. in Calabasas last December. The deputy was responding to routine work email when he drifted into the bike lane and struck and killed Mr. Olin. As with a lot of Law Enforcement behavior, let's see a "regular" citizen get away with that.
58539253
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Frosty Piss writes:
The ACLU and others have long suspected that the National Security Agency has gone far beyond its mandate of gathering information for counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence purposes. Many Those suspicions were confirmed when, on June 5, 2013, The Guardian released the first in a series of documents provided by Edward Snowden detailing the NSA's unlawful spying activities. All of the documents released since that day, both by the media and the government, are housed in a database maintained by the ACLU and accessible by the public on-line.
52214881
submission
Frosty Piss writes:
Elon Musk is unafraid to speak his mind. Whether he's talking about other players in the electric vehicle space or sub-par reporting from The New York Times, this is a man with few filters. Musk ays that fuel cells are not part of the solution that electric vehicles offer for giving up the hydrocarbon addiction. After commenting that the only reason some automakers are pursuing hydrogen technology is for marketing purposes, that lithium batteries are superior mass and volume-wise for a given range, and that fuel cells are too expensive, Musk capped it all off with the safety issue. "Oh god, a fuel cell is so bullshit", Musk said. "Hydrogen is quite a dangerous gas. you know, it's suitable for the upper stage of rockets, but not for cars," he said.
