federal judge has overturned an Oregon law that criminalizes the recording of someone without their consent on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment.

In a 2-1 ruling by a Ninth Circuit panel, Judge Sandra Ikuta declared Oregon law 165.540 unconstitutional because the state does not have an obligation to protect people’s privacy in public places.

First passed in 1955, the law was later expanded to include the secret recording of conversations. It does, however, contain exceptions for law enforcement and other specific interest groups.

The observed and predicted ​Solar Cycle is depicted in Sunspot Number in the top graph and F10.7cm Radio Flux in the bottom graph.

In both plots, the black line represents the monthly averaged data and the purple line represents a 13-month weighted, smoothed version of the monthly averaged data. The slider bars below each plot provide the ability to display the sunspot data back to solar cycle 1 and F10.7 data back to 2004.

The mean forecast for the current solar cycle (Cycle 25) is given by the red line. This is based on an international panel that was convened in 2019 for this purpose. In February, 2023 the plot was modified to show the full range of the 2019 Panel prediction as the gray shaded region (similarly for the F10.7 cm plot). This takes into account expected uncertainties in the cycle start time and amplitude. Use the drop-down menu below each plot to display specific curves within this range.

When uranium was discovered in 1789 by Martin Heinrich Klaproth, it’s likely the German chemist didn’t know how important the element would become to human life.

Used minimally in glazing and ceramics, uranium was originally mined as a byproduct of producing radium until the late 1930s. However, the discovery of nuclear fission, and the potential promise of nuclear power, changed everything.

Greg Boulden Host of America Emboldened
·
Jul 2, 2023
@RealGregBoulden
·
Replying to @RealGregBoulden
When democrats talk about the support for their candidates, and create bots as influencers, this is path modeling. It’s a scientific method to change the hearts and minds of people to peddle influence over the masses.

This IS the election interference we have been warned about.
Greg Boulden Host of America Emboldened
@RealGregBoulden
·
It’s also important to note, they are hiring firms to create the divide. This is not exclusive to democrats. You should question all divisive content that aims to manufacture outrage with no balance.
11:26 AM · Jul 2, 2023

The Supreme Court’s Thursday decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College dealt an overdue blow to race-based college admissions, and some of the best punches were thrown by Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurrence. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

The court ruled that so-called “affirmative action” at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were in violation of the 14th Amendment and its application via the Civil Rights Act. Policies that discriminate based on race without demonstrating a compelling public interest, the six justices in the majority agreed, are not compatible with our founding principles of equal rights under the law for every American.

In addition to signing on to the majority opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, Thomas wrote a nearly 60-page concurrence to express his horror at the idea of institutionalized racial discrimination in 21st-century America. Here are 15 of his best lines.

1. The best way to fix discrimination is not more discrimination.

Three mosquitoes collected near Sarasota, Florida, have tested positive for malaria amid an unusual cluster of locally acquired cases. It is the first time in two decades that US mosquitoes have tested positive for malaria in connection to US-based cases.

Four cases have so far been confirmed in Florida, all in close geographic proximity, health officials reported on Monday. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported Wednesday that officials are investigating a possible fifth case. //

The mosquitoes that transmit the malaria parasite are of the Anopheles genus. There are multiple species of Anopheles mosquitoes in the US, which have been found in at least 32 states. //

The cluster of locally acquired malaria cases around Sarasota—as well as an unrelated case in Texas—marks the first time the parasite is known to have spread in the US since 2003, when there was a cluster of cases in Palm Beach, Florida. In that outbreak, no captured mosquitoes were found to be positive for malaria.

However, an investigation around a cluster of locally acquired cases in Loudon County, Virginia, in 2002 turned up malaria-positive mosquitoes. It was the first time since 1957 that US mosquitoes linked to locally acquired cases had tested positive for a malaria parasite.

An esteemed army officer in the ancient Roman Republic, Horatius Cocles lived in a legendary period of Rome during the late sixth century. Horatius was known for defending one of Rome's most famous bridges, the Pons Sublicius, during the war between Rome and Clusium. The heroic leader was known for fighting against Etruscan invaders such as Lars Porsena and his invading army. Horatius was known as a courageous and brave leader of the Roman army. //

Macaulay's Horatius at the Bridge
The following poem by Thomas Babington Macaulay is a memorable ballad that recounts the courage of Horatius Cocles in his battle with the Roman army against the Etruscans.

One of the biggest computing inventions of all time, courtesy of Xerox PARC. //

Although watching TV shows from the 1970s suggests otherwise, the era wasn't completely devoid of all things resembling modern communication systems. Sure, the 50Kbps modems that the ARPANET ran on were the size of refrigerators, and the widely used Bell 103 modems only transferred 300 bits per second. But long-distance digital communication was common enough, relative to the number of computers deployed. Terminals could also be hooked up to mainframe and minicomputers over relatively short distances with simple serial lines or with more complex multidrop systems. This was all well known; what was new in the '70s was the local area network (LAN). But how to connect all these machines? //

A token network's complexity makes it vulnerable to a number of failure modes, but such networks do have the advantage that performance is deterministic; it can be calculated precisely in advance, which is important in certain applications.

But in the end it was Ethernet that won the battle for LAN standardization through a combination of standards body politics and a clever, minimalist—and thus cheap to implement—design. It went on to obliterate the competition by seeking out and assimilating higher bitrate protocols and adding their technological distinctiveness to its own. Decades later, it had become ubiquitous.

If you've ever looked at the network cable protruding from your computer and wondered how Ethernet got started, how it has lasted so long, and how it works, wonder no more: here's the story. //

Other LAN technologies use extensive mechanisms to arbitrate access to the shared communication medium. Not Ethernet. I'm tempted to use the expression "the lunatics run the asylum," but that would be unfair to the clever distributed control mechanism developed at PARC. I'm sure that the mainframe and minicomputer makers of the era thought the asylum analogy wasn't far off, though. //

in their paper from 1976 describing the experimental 3Mbps Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs showed that for packets of 500 bytes and larger, more than 95 percent of the network's capacity is used for successful transmissions, even if 256 computers all continuously have data to transmit. Pretty clever. //

It's hard to believe now, but in the early 1980s, 10Mbps Ethernet was very fast. Think about it: is there any other 30-year-old technology still present in current computers? 300 baud modems? 500 ns memory? Daisy wheel printers? But even today, 10Mbps is not an entirely unusable speed, and it's still part of the 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet interfaces in our computers. //

It's truly mindboggling that Ethernet managed to survive 30 years in production, increasing its speed by no less than four orders of magnitude. This means that a 100GE system sends an entire packet (well, if it's 1212 bytes long) in the time that the original 10Mbps Ethernet sends a single bit. In those 30 years, all aspects of Ethernet were changed: its MAC procedure, the bit encoding, the wiring... only the packet format has remained the same—which ironically is the part of the IEEE standard that's widely ignored in favor of the slightly different DIX 2.0 standard.

DCRoss
Ars Scholae Palatinae
11y
960
Yesterday at 11:36 AM
#24

MTSkibum said:
Somewhere a web developer chose an arbitrary nvarchar length for the password and is storing it unencrypted in a sql database.

That is how you ended up with the maximum password length.

There's more to the story, but the relevant part is that way back in 1976 UNIX systems hashed passwords with a DES based algorithm which was limited to two characters of salt and eight characters of password. It wasn't until 1994 that Paul Henning-Kemp replaced this with a more advanced hash based on MD5 for FreeBSD, and this was adopted by just about everybody. However, not only did applications keep using the old crypt(3) implementation long after that, they also stuck with the idea that having an eight character limit on your password was reasonable, and even that if you used a more secure algorithm that sixteen was fair.

With this in mind, setting fixed length fields for passwords or password hashes was considered acceptable for far longer than it should have been.

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/usenix99/full_papers/provos/provos_html/node9.html

http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/ieee.software.pdf

"Clever, yet defeated" came rushing back to me as I marched through The Password Game, a web-based text box of tears from Neal Agarwal. The game has been trending its way through social media since its official release yesterday, and understandably so. We only get so many of these "Pure enjoyment on the web" moments each year, so I recommend you avail yourself of it as soon as you can.

You'll grasp the theme and genre immediately, as you've been playing it for years. You'll see "Please choose a password," a text box, and then rules. Your password must be at least five characters. It must include a number, an uppercase letter, and a special character. But the digits in the password must add up to 25. And now you have to include a month of the year. And then way more.

https://neal.fun/password-game/

Steve Milloy @JunkScience
·
14,000 panel, 5.2 MW community solar array in Nebraska destroyed by hail storm last night.

This doesn't happen to baseload power plants.

https://notrickszone.com/2023/06/28/huge-nebraska-solar-park-completely-smashed-to-pieces-by-one-single-hail-storm/
9:42 PM · Jun 28, 2023

Shanghai @thinking_panda
·
In China, in the Shanxi province, there is a huge solar energy farm right on the mountain. Solar panels stretch for 80 kilometers. It looks as if the mountain was covered with a blanket.
(Shanxi is on the Loess Plateau which has nothing but silt and dust. Nothing grows there.)
4:23 AM · May 31, 2023 //

A professor of Geochemistry explained that solar isn’t all that “green.” Solar releases nitrogen trifluoride. What’s NF3’s impact on the environment? It is 17,000 times worse for the atmosphere than the dreaded CO2.

https://www.chemservice.com/news/learn-which-chemicals-make-solar-power-possible/

American Deplorable ™
7 hours ago
Working in Texas I saw a solar array that covered hundreds of acres that was located on the edge of the desert.

The dust storms there are legendary and have been for millennia.

I was told that the dust reduces the panels ability to create power by as much as 70% at times so the utility decided to hire a full time cleaning crew to keep the panels working.

A dozen two man crews equipped with a side by side vehicle, squeegees and spray bottles spend 12 hours a day, seven days a week cleaning the panels.

Absolutely insane. //

bintexas
6 hours ago

1. Climate change hail takes out a field of solar power panels

2. Double the number of fields to combat climate change

3. Climate change hail (aka springtime in the midwest) busts up two fields of panels.

I am detecting the makings of a perfect grift

The New York Times
@nytimes
·
Follow
Breaking News: The Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at Harvard and UNC. The major ruling curtails race-conscious college admissions in the U.S., all but ensuring that elite institutions become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.
https://nyti.ms/4347Xrx
10:21 AM · Jun 29, 2023

The claim, of course, was made without evidence because there is none.

There is, however, fresh and real-time evidence that the unapologetically woke New York Times newsroom is packed full of the very types of disreputable people they claim to abhor, as lawyer/YouTuber Viva Frei explained:

The @nytimes explicitly stating they believe blacks & latinos are intellectually inferior to whites & asians such that they cannot succeed on their own merit.

This is the face of true racism. The not-so-soft bigotry of low expectations.

Congrats, NYTimes. You are the racists you warn others about.

"The solution to our Nation’s racial problems thus cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity," Thomas writes. "Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism. Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is incorporated in our Constitution: that we are all equal, and should be treated equally before the law without regard to our race," he adds. "Only that promise can allow us to look past our differing skin colors."

Elsewhere in his concurring opinion, Thomas lays bare the left's flawed — and quite racist — beliefs about different races.

"In fact, all racial categories are little more than stereotypes, suggesting that immutable characteristics somehow conclusively determine a person’s ideology, beliefs, and abilities. Of course, that is false," Thomas notes. "Members of the same race do not all share the exact same experiences and viewpoints; far from it," he explains. "A black person from rural Alabama surely has different experiences than a black person from Manhattan or a black first-generation immigrant from Nigeria, in the same way that a white person from rural Vermont has a different perspective than a white person from Houston, Texas."

Despite this obvious reality, Thomas reminds that "universities’ racial policies suggest that racial identity 'alone constitutes the being of the race or the man.'"

"That is the same naked racism upon which segregation itself was built," Thomas rightly concludes. "Small wonder, then, that these policies are leading to increasing racial polarization and friction." //

Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims. Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me. I cannot deny the great accomplishments of black Americans, including those who succeeded despite long odds.

Nor do Justice Jackson's statistics regarding a correlation between levels of health, wealth, and well-being between selected racial groups prove anything. Of course, none of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race—rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor—and individual outcomes. So Justice Jackson supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.

"Justice Jackson’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step," Thomas declares. "Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them," he notes. "And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism," Thomas adds. //

The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.

The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional. See Brown II, 349 U. S., at 298 (noting that the Brown case one year earlier had “declare[d] the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional”).

While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.

Some listeners prefer to listen to our live streams using their PC or Macbook-based players or on internet radios (iTunes, VLC, Sonos, etc). Check out our secure MP3 and AAC direct stream links for our six live stream channels.

There are an awful lot of people who feel that simply because this is Linux, they have some kind of right to get it for free. Unfortunately, they don't.

That is not what the "free" in Free Software means, and it never was. Red Hat puts an enormous amount of work into developing Free Software, into making sure its code makes its way back upstream, and into producing safe, secure, and long-term stable supported versions of inherently rapidly changing FOSS software, aimed primarily at large enterprise customers. //

And perhaps the clearest sign that it's not really interested in dealing with small users and small customers is that it continues to make the product available free of charge for those who only want up to 16 servers. //

There are a host – pun intended – of other distros out there if you don't want to pay for your Linux. If you are happy to pay but you feel aggrieved with IBM or Red Hat, both Canonical and SUSE will be happy to take your money and provide you with enterprise-level support, and both of them let you get and use a version of their enterprise OS entirely free of charge.

What you need to do is create a shortcut. Right-click a blank area on the desktop and go to New > Shortcut.

In the wizard that opens, click in the box underneath Type the location of the item, and enter the following:

Shutdown /r /fw /t 1

If you’re not familiar with these commands, /r means restart, /fw means boot to firmware (aka the BIOS) and /t introduces a delay in seconds before the restart begins. In our example above, that’s one second.

Call this new shortcut Restart to BIOS. Right-click your new shortcut on the desktop and select Properties. Click the Advanced button.

In the Properties box, tick the Run as administrator box and click on OK a couple of times to close the windows.

Use Google Voice voicemail instead of your phone's voicemail

Most mobile phone carriers provide a feature called Conditional Call Forwarding (CCF) or No answer/busy transfer. To send busy or unanswered calls to your Google Voice voicemail, set up this feature on your mobile number.

Each mobile phone carrier uses a set of star (*) commands to turn conditional call forwarding on or off. These commands may vary by carrier. For the most accurate information, contact your mobile carrier and ask for their conditional call forwarding commands.

Conditional Call Forwarding (CCF)

Verizon Wireless has 2 methods to control conditional call forwarding: star (*) commands, or a menu on their customer website. You can use either method.

To turn on conditional call forwarding, enter *711234567890 on your phone’s keypad, wait for the confirmation stutter tone, then hang up.

To turn off conditional call forwarding, enter *73 on your phone’s keypad, wait for the confirmation stutter tone, then hang up.

Forward calls only when busy or on another line

1. On your phone's dial pad, enter *71
2. Enter the phone number (including area code) where you want your calls to be forwarded to
   (e.g., *71-908-123-4567)
3. Tap the Call button and wait for confirmation. You should hear a confirmation tone or message
4. End your call

Cancel Call Forwarding

1. On your phone's dial pad, enter *73
2. Tap the Call button and wait for confirmation. You should hear a confirmation tone or message
3. End your call

https://instapundit.substack.com/p/run-silent-run-very-very-deep

Most cutting edge technology starts out as a rich man’s toy. Automobiles, passenger airplanes, VCRs, etc. all started out that way. Letting rich people buy the tech drives the technology and pushes prices down over time so that ordinary people can afford it.

I don’t think ordinary people will ever be interested in doing miles-deep dives, but improved subsea technology is a very big deal. We often hear about how unexplored the deep ocean depths are, and there’s a reason for that – we aren’t very good at it yet. We get better at it by doing it. We can do it more if people are willing and able to pay for it.

The same is true with the various space tourism efforts. Sure, it’s mostly rich people buying a thrill. But by doing so they open up the technology for the rest of us. Unlike the test pilots, they aren’t doing it for a living; they’re doing it out of love, and even paying for the privilege. That seems commendable to me. //

Cleetus | June 29, 2023 at 7:37 am
There is a disease of arrogance that seems to infect virtually everything today. Everybody is an expert while true experts and experience are treated with disdain. People claim expertise based simply on their race or gender when, in reality, they know little. Rigor in education and training is longer valued lest we hurt people’s feelings.. In this case, people with this attitude were rewarded with death. This should be a wake up call. How much longer are we going to allow this disrespect for reality interfere with just about every aspect of our lives?

Rickover was an absolute beast about safety, yet took military necessity into account when necessary, in ways that I can’t discuss but that are a major reason why the U.S. Navy’s submarine force is such a force to be reckoned with. As Wikipedia says about the Cold War, “U.S. submarines far outperformed the Soviet ones in the crucial area of stealth, and Rickover’s obsessive fixation on safety and quality control gave the U.S. nuclear Navy a vastly superior safety record to the Soviet one.” Of note: Rickover had seven rules that seem mostly applicable to OceanGate. They are:

Rule 1: You must have a rising standard of quality over time, and well beyond what is required by any minimum standard.

Rule 2: People running complex systems should be highly capable.

Rule 3: Supervisors have to face bad news when it comes and take problems to a level high enough to fix those problems.

Rule 4: You must have a healthy respect for the dangers and risks of your particular job.

Rule 5: Training must be constant and rigorous.

Rule 6: All the functions of repair, quality control, and technical support must fit together.

Rule 7: The organization and members thereof must have the ability and willingness to learn from mistakes of the past. //

During my time, which was mostly after Rickover’s passing, another feature that became embedded in submarine culture was the concept of “forceful backup,” meaning that junior members of a watch team were empowered, encouraged, and required to speak up when something didn’t seem right, even if they were the newest person on the ship and the action being taken was the Captain’s. //

Reading the dozens of stories about the OceanGate disaster, the things that stand out to me are that Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s CEO, employed personnel not based on merit, refused to have the Titan inspected by a third-party, and did not like to hear bad news. None of those are good. //

A submarine pilot hired to assess the now-missing Titanic submersible warned in 2018 that its hull monitoring system would only detect failure “often milliseconds before an implosion.”

David Lochridge, a submarine pilot and inspector from Scotland, said in court filings that he was fired after expressing concerns about the safety of the Titan — a 22-foot submersible that disappeared on Sunday while carrying five people to see the wreck of the Titanic.