Pro-Hillary group engages in campaign to suppress black vote in NC primary. Just in case you were wondering whether Democrats also engage in this kind of activity. Listen to the voicemail.

Washington, D.C., Group Accused of High-Tech Dirty Tricks to Suppress Black Vote | Threat Level from Wired.com

There are people out there with these antennas, and they're often seen as wackos, but they're on to something. They see things before the official culture sees it. Throughout the '80s, global warming was an underground, conspiracy-theory thing, and it's still treated as a sort of paranoid idea in "Slacker." But paranoia plus a generation equals pretty much the world we're living in today.

"Slacker": 15 years later | Salon Arts & Entertainment

This is very cool. From way back in 1971 a professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley) wrote a paper describing four basic passive electrical components: resistors, capacitors, inductors, and memristors. Until this year, the last one of these was only theoretical in nature, but some bright folks have finally cracked it.

Basically, its a substrate that exhibits a permanent(?) resistance change due to past current history. You could use them to make extremely fast, dense solid state storage devices.

Memristors, they exist!

"In a free country, the government cannot have unlimited power to read, seize, and store this information without any oversight."

Congress Must Investigate Electronic Searches at U.S. Borders | Electronic Frontier Foundation

The suburban landscape has been marred by foreclosures and half-built communities abandoned in the subprime aftermath. But James Howard Kunstler, author of a dozen books, including The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, thinks there's a bigger threat to those far-flung neighborhoods: the scarcity of oil. As Kunstler sees it, oil wells are running dry and the era of cheap fuel is over. Given the supply constraints, he says the U.S. will have to rethink suburban sprawl, bringing an end to strip malls, big-box stores, and other trappings of the automotive era. Kunstler, 59, predicts a return to towns and cities centered around a retail hub—not unlike his hometown of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. But the shift to this new paradigm, he says, will be painful. (Kunstler could be off the mark; he predicted technological Armageddon after Y2K.) BusinessWeek writer Mara Der Hovanesian spoke with Kunstler about suburbia, which he calls "the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known."

No one rerecommended this similar perspective on the same issue.

Good-Bye, Cheap Oil. So Long, Suburbia?

In the first four months of Murdoch’s stewardship, the Journal’s front page has clearly shifted focus, de-emphasizing business coverage that was the franchise, while placing much more emphasis on domestic politics and devoting more attention to international issues.

Best comment I've read on this:

Does Murdoch have any possible business plan to obtain a 20% return on a 5Billion investment? Without such, this was never about money return for him. When this purchase is mentioned, I remember a nature story about a flock of crows killing cows. They start with one crow having figured out how to land on a cow and peck out the cow's eyes. The value to Murdoch is to blind our society from the reporting of factual information. The money is to be made elsewhere with opaque financing and opaque deals. And if nobody ever really knows what he controls, then all the better for him and his.

Murdoch is breaking the Wall Street Journal

lonew0lf wrote:
So today while speaking with one of my house-mates who mentioned that polar bears are becoming at risk of extinction, she made a plea that they were so cute.

Hilarious!

RE: Mother fucking bears!

The jury appears to have spoken, and clearly the consensus is that Vile should stay. If you don't agree with this consensus this is clearly a time when you should speak up, at least privately.

I did not understand, when I read Gavin's post on my cellphone, that Vile's message to him was a response to Gavin's earlier public question about Vile. I had sent Gavin a message in response to that earlier public question advising him that he shouldn't have made it public (IE don't feed the troll). Vile had a right to respond, having been called out publicly. The fact that Vile's sentiment (that this should have been a private message) echoed my own was probably the reason that Gavin thought that he might not be joking about having been "deputized" by me.

Having said that, I strongly object to those who have accused me of censorship. Vile's action in this instance was not merely expressive. I cannot have people fraudulently claiming to be an authority on this site and asking people to stop posting. That is itself an act of censorship, and its something that we cannot tolerate.

Furthermore, Vile's actions, in general, are not merely expressive. Gavin's message is not the first time that someone has told me that they feel like they have to leave MemeStreams, or that they cannot tell other people to join MemeStreams, because they feel like they are being targeted and harassed by Vile, or they feel like other people would be targeted and harassed by Vile. There is a difference between merely expressing your perspective, and harassing people with the intent of driving them away. What Vile is doing is the later, and it has hurt this community.

The reason that I haven't responded in the past is largely because I haven't had the technological capability to do so. In the past it was easier to generate accounts with full posting rights than it was to delete them. Due to the need to control SPAM, that is no longer the case. We have the capacity to prevent unwanted people from participating, but we do have to delete accounts in order to make that happen.

Could we develop an alternative technology? If we generated a "demerit" system what would the consequence be of accumulating demerits? Who would have the right to issue them? By what process?

Should I create some sort of icon that gets displayed everywhere Vile goes on the site? Something which denotes that "the administrators have determined that this person is a jackass and should be ignored?" There is some value in that idea, as new users who have no reputation can still send messages to threads and memeboxes. Ultimately we need some way to control that or it will turn into MySpace. Our system could differentiate between messages from trusted users versus new untrusted users visually more readily than we could determine with certainty that a new user was a spammer. What sort of visual representation would clearly communicate that? Maybe the color of a user's name should indicate their global reputation?

All of this is an interesting academic exercise, and I'd like feedback on it, but writing code takes time. If Vile becomes a problem that I have to respond to, I'll have to do it with the tools that I have at the time that I have to respond, rather than simply imagining a time in the future when I might have other tools at my disposal that would allow a more just response. Right now the tool that I have involves deleting accounts. I'm willing to use that tool if I have to. I will only do so against established users with the consent of the community.

RE: what?

unmanaged wrote:

For the record. I am the head of the deportment enforcement department of Industrial Memetics, www.memestreams.com chapter. I am similar to a pinkerton for the information superhighway, by trade. I am here to uphold the memestreams community. Your post lacked content. That's the sort of thing you send an email over. You posted a derogatory comment about me in this post. That is one demerit. Keep it up and you will be asked to take a break from your posting with us. Ask Tom and Nick if you have any worthwhile questions.

Tom,

I have to say what the hell is this guy talking about...? (Vile?)
And if this is true please delete my account and and the posts that go along with it. I like the memestreams design and concept but this is total bull if true and I really dont want to feel as if I wasting my time...

Gavin

Of course its not true. I will wipe his account and everything that he has ever posted as soon as I get real internet access. Unfortunately I am on the road right now and I'm posting this from my cellphone. It will probably be 24 hours before I am able to do this. Thanks for letting me know. Unfortunately this is not the last we'll be hearing from this person.

RE: what?

In addition to happily showing off blasphemous images of Christ, Lessig is also known as a digital communist (read the linked article for the substance of why he's called that) Lessig believes there should be no such thing as intellectual property rights -- patents and copyrights should be tossed. Lessig's anti-property theories give businesses and a lot of regular folks the heebie-jeebies. After all, if the government can strip you of your intellectual property, why can't it take away your real property?

This got picked up by Limbaugh. Lessig responds here. Don't miss the comments in his thread. If you've wondered how completely disingenuous the scoring of political points gets its hard to imagine the layers of reasoning getting more twisted up than this.

Republicans attack Obama for associating with Lessig