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Alec Baldwin Will Keep Playing Trump on S.N.L. After All http://vntyfr.com/2NDs526

looking out

Is Jailbreaking your iPhone illegal? #iphone #tips #apple

Untitled

Dale Earnhardt Jr is making his return at Richmond Raceway this weekend https://racingnews.co/2018/09/21/richmond-xfinity-practice-times-september-21-2018/

Tags: #richmondraceway #nascar #daleearnhardtjr

Taken By The Mothership -- San Francisco, California
“You are not your job, you are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. ... The things you own end up owning you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Looking straight up the main atrium at Nordstrom's San Francisco... I gave myself a pretty bad case of vertigo trying to align this shot just right. ;)

Florida Police Framed Three Black Men for Burglaries. One of Them Claims the U.S. Won’t Let Him Back in the Country https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/biscayne-park-police-burglary-framing-deportation.html -via Flynx

Why Is Uranus Colder Than Neptune Despite Neptune Being Farther From The Sun? : http://sciabc.us/oCb59 #science

Trump’s callous tweet about Kavanaugh accuser sparks Senate turmoil https://nyp.st/2I3YpoD

Apple iPhone XS and XS Max review: Pricey but future-proof https://engt.co/2I6aWIf

But she's still going to vote for confirmation, right?

People would rather talk about death than money. One in five people in the U.S. doesn't know what their partner earns. But money is the source of most of our anxieties, and the cause of most breakups. Ten years since the Great Recession, we have new reasons to hate money conversations, and even more reasons to have them.

Is it possible that my home state of Texas might turn at least purple? Well, it seems Democrat Beto O'Rourke is giving Republican Sen. Ted Cruz a run for the money (literally). I can't think of a more important election for the US 2018 Midterms and specifically in Texas in recent memory than this. I will be surprised if O'Rourke wins, but he actually seems to have a fighting chance.

Earlier this week, the Linux community got an unusual message from Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds. “This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions,” wrote Torvalds in a Linux update email. He apologized for “flippant” and sometimes personal attacks on community members, and announced that he would be temporarily stepping away from Linux.
I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development.
It was a major about-face from Torvalds, who’s known for his blunt, furious emails and has said before that I simply don’t believe in being polite or politically correct.
And in another surprising move, the Linux Foundation changed its short “code of conflict” to a new, more traditional code of conduct based on the widely adopted Contributor Covenant. But while there’s been plenty of support for the change, it’s also drawn criticism both from people who think it’s an ominous step toward over-policing Linux developers’ behavior, and from people who worry it’s just empty talk.

The revamped Linux code of conduct encourages behaviors like accepting constructive criticism gracefully, using inclusive language, and being respectful of “differing viewpoints and experiences.” It bars “sexualized language or imagery,” derogatory comments and personal or political attacks, and “public or private harassment,” among other behaviors.
Community members can report violations to the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board or TAB, a 10-person committee that fosters communication between the community and the official Linux Foundation.
The code is longer and more specific than the old version, which primarily advised people to be excellent to each other a reference to the film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The old code also placed particular emphasis on the idea that developers should be ready to face harsh criticism. That’s consistent with Torvalds’ communication style, which, according to his critics, created an environment where vicious personal attacks and verbal abuse were justified as honest feedback.
Some developers quickly raised concerns about the new language. They worried about ambiguity over terms like “harassment,” as well as whether the rules could create collisions between different communication styles. Linux kernel maintainer Willy Tarreau suggested that American community members might find European members’ communication styles brusque and unwelcoming, for instance, although he tentatively endorsed the code itself.

But a lot of the outcry, especially on external forums like Reddit, has little to do with the code’s language. It’s focused on the Contributor Covenant’s original creator Coraline Ada Ehmke who has vocally criticized the open source software movement with speeches and articles like the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto, which calls on the community to change how it evaluates “pure” technical skill. That’s spurred claims that the code of conduct is a Trojan horse for Ehmke’s political views, or even suggestions that Linus Torvalds’ daughter, who signed the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto, manipulated Torvalds into adopting the Covenant.
Ehmke emphasizes to The Verge that the Linux Foundation’s advisory board hasn’t been in touch with her at all, which isn’t unusual for an organization adopting her code.
The Contributor Covenant is already in broad use, it’s been adapted for Google’s open source operations and Apple’s Swift programming language community, along with around 40,000 other open source projects by Ehmke’s count.
I am very happy that they selected a code of conduct, and I’m happy that they selected my code of conduct, but people seem to have this impression that it was forced on them or that I had something to do with it she says.
Ehmke notes that “a lot of people are skeptical” that Linux and Torvalds will stick to a new, more inclusive policy. “The real test is going to be, now that there is a code of conduct, will it be enforced fairly, and will it be enforced in good faith? And I think a lot of people are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward that,” she says. The Verge contacted the Linux Foundation to ask for more detail about how the code would be enforced, but didn’t receive a response.

One of the new code’s most prominent skeptics is Sage Sharp, a former Linux developer and TAB member who publicly left the community in 2015, expressing frustration with senior developers who refused to deliver technical criticism with “basic human decency.”
Sharp wrote yesterday that unless TAB commits to releasing transparency reports, they “have no faith” in the advisory board’s ability to handle complaints effectively. They also argued that the code had been rushed out the door in advance of a critical New Yorker article about Torvalds’ abusive communication style, which likely helped motivate his decision to step away.
Sharp and Ehmke both criticized the diversity of the current all-male advisory board, whose members Ehmke worried wouldn’t have a strong understanding of “the dark side of open source.” Sharp also pointed out that TAB members, who are longtime community leaders, could easily end up mediating cases where they had a conflict of interest.
On the Linux message boards, meanwhile, TAB member Olof Johansson has asked community members to trust that the board will act in good faith. “It doesn’t particularly matter to me personally who wrote the text, as much as what is in it, and how we apply it,” he wrote.
There is a lot of focus in several discussions right now on punishment and what will be done to those who violate the code of conduct. I’m much more interested in figuring out what we can do to help mediate in case of disagreements such that all parties can get along and work together. That’s the end goal for me.
Even if TAB makes a point of transparency and Torvalds returns to the project, it will be a while before the results of this week’s changes become visible.
But Ehmke is hopeful. If that project does manage to turn around, then I think it’s a major coup for diversity and inclusivity and welcoming in the open source world,” she says. “A lot of people look up to Linus, and a lot of people emulate his behavior.

With More Than 200 L.G.B.T. Candidates, Advocates Hope for a ‘Rainbow Wave’ in the Midterms https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/us/politics/gay-candidates-midterms.html -via Flynx

As part of our continuing commitment to realise cutting-edge satellite missions to advance scientific understanding of our planet and to show how new technologies can be used in space, three new ideas have been chosen to compete as the tenth #EarthExplorer mission.

Three NASA missions return first-light data - NASA's continued quest to explore our solar system and beyond received a boost of new information this week with three key missions proving not only that they are up and running, but that their science potential is exceptional. On Sept. 17, 2018, TESS—the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite—shared its first science observations. Later in the week, the latest two missions to join NASA's heliophysics fleet returned first light data: Parker Solar...

Japan has Just Landed Two Rovers on the Surface of the 3000-foot-wide Ryugu Asteroid

A Japanese space probe Friday released a pair of exploring rovers towards an egg-shaped asteroid to collect mineral samples that may shed light on the origin of the solar system.

The country is the first to successfully land rovers on an asteroid’s surface.

The Hayabusa-2 spacecraft set out on its mission to the 3,000-foot-wide Ryugu asteroid in 2014 and finaly arrived in June this year.

Two of the the mission’s four rovers were deployed from the Hayabusa-2, touching down on the asteroid today. The seven-inch-wide devices will be hopping around the space rock to take photos and temperature readings of Ryugu.

Next month, Hayabusa2 will deploy an "impactor" that will explode above the asteroid, shooting a two-kilo (four-pound) copper object into the surface to blast a crater a few metres in diameter.

Over the next year, two larger landers will also be released onto the asteroid to collect data and rock samples. The Hayabusa-2 will then depart in December 2019, bringing the rocks back to Earth for researchers to study. “If we find water and organics are similar to that on Earth, it will be evidence that space rocks like Ryugu are how we all began,” Elizabeth Tasker of Japan’s aerospace agency told New Scientist.

Read more at: https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612182/japan-is-about-to-land-two-rovers-on-the-surface-of-an-asteroid/
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-japan-space-probe-rovers-asteroid.html#jCp

Clips, images credit: JAXA, NASA/JPL

Music credit: YouTube Audio Library

Why is this not hard to believe Rosenstein denies that but I'll bet you a damn dollar that he did think about it and he probably is the one that advised people to wear a wire