The workers of Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s on-demand micro-task platform, say they have encountered mutilated bodies, graphic videos of botched surgeries, and what appeared to be child pornography. They say they have been asked to transcribe Social Security numbers and other personal data. Sometimes their temporary…
by Brian Kahn on Earther, shared by Andrew Couts to Gizmodo
Imagine a world fractured into rival factions, countries distrustful of one another and unwilling to cooperate. Nationalism is on the rise with authoritarianism on the horizon. Inequality is also climbing, and the resource curse is alive and well. Rich countries plunder poorer ones, leaving behind a wave of…
In case you hadn’t heard, CES fucks now. That much was evident at this year’s CES Unveiled, where more than one sexual health and wellness company was allowed to show off their wares—a change from last year’s fumbling prudishness. This year includes Morari Medical, the maker of a wearable meant to help solve premature…
Expiration dates for computer drives? That’s what a line of HP solid-state drives are facing as the variable for their uptime counter is running out. When it does, the drive “expires” and, well, no more data storage for you!
There are a series of stages in the evolution of a software developer as they master their art, and one of those stages comes in understanding that while they may have a handle on the abstracted world presented by their development environment they perhaps haven’t considered the moments in which the real computer that lives behind it intrudes. Think of the first time you saw an SQL injection attack on a website, for example, or the moment you realised that a variable type is linked to the physical constraints of the number of memory locations it has reserved for it. So people who write software surround themselves with an armoury of things they watch out for as they code, and thus endeavour to produce software less likely to break. Firmly in that arena is the size of the variables you use and what will happen when that limit is reached.
Your Drive Is Good For About 3 Years And 9 Months
Sometimes though even developers that should know better get it wrong, and this week has brought an unfortunate example for the enterprise wing of the hardware giant HP. Their manufacturer has notified them that certain models of solid-state disk drives supplied in enterprise storage systems contain an unfortunate bug, in which they stop working after 32,768 hours of uptime. That’s a familiar number to anyone working with base-2 numbers and hints at a 16-bit signed integer in use to log the hours of uptime. When it rolls over the value will then be negative and, rather than the drive believing itself to be in a renewed flush of youth, it will instead stop working.
Egg on the faces of the storage company then, and an urgently-released patch. We suspect that if you own a stack of these drives you will already know about the issue and be nervously pacing the racks of your data centre.
Have you ever considered what will happen when this rolls over? Bruce W. Stracener [Public domain]This does raise a question as to how such an issue could manifest itself in 2019. We can forgive developers in the 1960s or 1970s using limited-size variables to store incrementing numbers because there was little experience of rollover bugs and the hardware of their day was often severely constrained. But as we approach the third decade of the 21st century we should have both the experience and the hardware to avoid the trap.
It’s hardly as though there have not been a series of widely publicised rollovers such as the Year 2000 so-called “Millennium bug” which have entered our culture to the extent that they’ve been parodied on the Simpsons and in countless other places. We’ve had jokes about the number of McDonald’s burgers sold rolling over, and on a more serious note we’ve seen space probes crash and as an industry we’ve got an eye towards the UNIX time rollover in 2038. For this still to be a thing today, where have we gone wrong?
How Should We Be Finding Our Firmware Developers?
It’s a question we have to ask ourselves then, does the effect of Moore’s Law breed complacency? When all the computing devices for which you code have effectively limitless resources, do you lose track of the constraints of the hardware?
This is written from a formative computing experience with very limited resources as a Hackaday scribe whose first machine was an 8-bit home computer with only 1k of memory. With that in hand, or perhaps as a more modern equivalent the experience of coding for one of the smaller microcontrollers, developing with a full awareness of the machine behind the code becomes second nature. When a variable requires two bytes, you know it requires two bytes, because you’ve had to make sure that there is a two byte space in memory for it. By comparison, it’s easy when declaring an integer variable in a modern IDE for a high-spec machine to forget that its real-world effect is to reserve two bytes, and thus it can only count up to 32,768 of whatever it is you are counting.
Maybe this will never be a problem that completely goes away. After all, each successive generation must learn about it the hard way, and the old-hands will nod sagely while another satellite crashes or an enterprise server fails. Meanwhile, as always, patch early and patch often.
Mark Zuckerberg is fully prepared to sue the federal government if someone like Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren tries to break up Facebook into smaller companies, according to audio recordings obtained by the Verge. Warren has made breaking up Big Tech a signature promise of her…
Amazon's Audible was sued by some of the top U.S. publishers for copyright infringement on Friday, aiming to block a planned rollout of a feature called 'Audible Captions' that shows the text on screen as a book is narrated. From a report: The lawsuit was filed by seven members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), including HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan Publishers. "Essentially Audible wants to provide the text as well as the sound of books without the authorization of copyright holders, despite only having the right to sell audiobooks," AAP said in a statement.
Settlers of Catan is a staple for boardgaming aficionados. Some fans like to express themselves by building a custom set of their own, and [Maclsk] is no different. Enter 3D Catan!
The models for the various pieces were designed in Blender, a great open source 3D modelling program. They were then printed on an Anycubic i3 Mega, taking about 80 hours and using 700 grams of PLA filament. With 116 game pieces, there was plenty of filing and sanding to do.
With this completed, it was then time for paint. [Maclsk] shows off a strong understanding of model painting fundamentals, from dry brushing to using PVA glue to give water elements a glossy sheen. If you’re new to the techniques, sit down with your local Warhammer players – they’ll be more than able to point you in the right direction.
For once, AMD made NVIDIA sweat. NVIDIA's new RTX Super graphics cards are clearly a response to AMD's new midrange GPUs, the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT. For months, AMD has been hyping how much faster they are than the first RTX cards. The only solu...
Kawhi Leonard’s rainbow arc game-winner in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals over Philadelphia — a buzzer-beating miracle that bounced on the rim four separate times, for 1.8 seconds, before falling through — was historic the second it went down. And that shot will arguably become even more iconic if and when the Toronto Raptors dethrone the Golden State Warriors’ dynasty in the coming days. Few shots have provided that sort of drama while also indirectly ushering in what figures to be a changing of the guard in the sport as we know it.
Because of that shot, it’s been hard not to notice the others that have all but taken up residence on the cylinder at Scotiabank Arena. “Those rims are really soft,” Raptors guard Kyle Lowry said.
But do shots really hang on the rims more in Toronto? Will the Raptors have some hidden advantage when they take their home court and try to close out the NBA Finals in Game 5? As it turns out, yes, the Raptors’ jump shots do roll on and around the rim longer in Toronto than other teams’ jumpers do in their respective arenas. But no, that isn’t somehow evidence of anything underhanded at play.
In an analysis of Second Spectrum shot-tracking data run by Matt Scott of STATS SportVU, we looked at all jumpers of 10 feet or greater, both in the regular season and the playoffs, and pulled the time measured between when the ball hit the rim and when it left the vicinity of the cylinder for a miss or went through the net for a make. The Raptors’ jump-shot attempts at home this postseason have bounced on or around the rim for an average of 0.224 seconds, the longest of any team to advance beyond the first round.19
Are the Raptors getting lucky rolls on their home rims?
How long shots hang on the rim by team in home games, 2019 playoffs
TEAM
BALL IN VICINITY OF RIM
Raptors
0.224s
Trail Blazers
0.220
76ers
0.216
Nuggets
0.208
Celtics
0.210
Bucks
0.206
Warriors
0.214
Rockets
0.181
On jump shots of 10 feet or more, among teams that advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs.
Sources: STATS SportVU, SECOND SPECTRUM
Toronto’s made jumpers throughout the playoffs have been by far the most suspenseful of those of any of the final eight teams, taking an average of 0.117 seconds to fall into the basket. That hang time was 44 percent longer than the average of the other seven clubs. And looking at a larger sample size doesn’t change much about the result: At an average of 0.108 seconds, the Raptors’ successful regular-season jumpers at Scotiabank Arena took longer to fall through the basket than any other team’s makes on their home courts, too, according to the SportVU analysis. You might remember that Leonard hit a game-winner in March against Portland — a fadeaway from Scotiabank’s right baseline, with the shooter’s bounce and all — that looked almost identical to the one he would eventually make against Philadelphia.
To be clear, even though the Raptors have the longest hang time at home, their numbers are far from an outlier in the data set. The arena did have an odd rim-related issue last season, when officials had to delay a game because one of the rims was slightly crooked and required an adjustment. But no one could look at the numbers presented here and realistically suggest that anything about them is crooked, or that the arena’s rims are fundamentally different from others in the NBA.
Still, there’s no doubting the fact that Toronto has gotten a couple of very friendly bounces over the course of the playoffs — not just from Leonard, but also from Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet, who told me somewhat candidly, “I hate our rims.” (While that might sound odd, given his incredible hot streak lately, VanVleet had struggled mightily the last two postseasons from the perimeter.)
There are a number of potential factors to consider with unusual data like this. One counterintuitive example: A team with dead-eye shooters, for instance, often won’t get opportunities for much hang time on the rim because their jumpers will swish through the net, registering a minuscule amount of time around the basket as a result. At the same time, though, players and teams who use considerable arc might be better positioned to get a beneficial bounce or roll, regardless of how soft or tight the rims are.20 And no team has put more air under its 3-pointers this postseason than Golden State.
In fact, while the Raptors’ shots have had the most hang time on the rim during home games, the Warriors have seen the league’s biggest home-road disparity in terms of how much longer the ball has teetered on the basket while playing in familiar confines. Golden State’s jumpers have stayed in the vicinity of the rim 0.02 seconds longer at Oracle Arena this postseason than on the road, by far the biggest gap of any playoff club. By contrast, Toronto’s shots actually hang near the rim slightly longer on the road than they do at home, so it’s hard to claim a soft-rim advantage at home for the Raptors.
The Warriors’ shots survive on the rim longer at Oracle Arena
How long shots hang on the rim at home vs. on the road by team, 2019 playoffs
TEAM
ADDED HANGTIME AT HOME
Warriors
+0.020s
Rockets
+0.006
Bucks
0.000
Trail Blazers
-0.001
Celtics
-0.004
76ers
-0.006
Raptors
-0.008
Nuggets
-0.014
On jump shots of 10 feet or more, among teams that advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs.
Sources: STATS SportVU, SECOND SPECTRUM
The notion of shot arc is where Leonard’s series-ending jumper comes into play. While Kawhi generally doesn’t put much arc on his shots at all, he had to loft the one against Philly over the outstretched hand of 7-footer Joel Embiid to avoid having it blocked. Leonard’s shot reached a peak height of 18.2 feet before bouncing on the rim — a night-and-day difference from the league-average peak height of just 15.1 feet. The extra height almost certainly gave the shot a greater chance of going in from a physics standpoint.
And that shot is the first thing that comes to mind now whenever the Raptors benefit from seemingly lucky bounces. VanVleet, even with his expressed hate for the Toronto rims, has fully leaned into the idea that something magical — with the baskets or otherwise — is happening here.
“I think we’ve got a special thing going. Just kind of the aura, and the magic in the air, you can feel it a little bit,” VanVleet told me. “We have a lot to do with that, our fans have a lot to do with that, and things are just going the right way for us.”
To celebrate the release of wireless VR headset Oculus Quest, Polyarc is releasing new content for Moss, the adorable puzzle adventure that's made waves on the VR gaming landscape. Our swashbuckling mouse heroine Quill will now be able to explore the...
by Brian Kahn on Earther, shared by Maddie Stone to Gizmodo
It’s a foregone conclusion that as long as the world keeps emitting carbon dioxide, we’ll keep setting records for how much ends up in the atmosphere. But that doesn’t make the recent high water mark of carbon dioxide any easier to swallow.
by David Boddiger on Splinter, shared by Tom McKay to Gizmodo
Update, Sunday, 1:19 p.m. ET: The harrowing stories of Saturday’s mass shooting at the Chabad of Poway by a white, neo-Nazi terrorist are now being told as the nation mourns yet another attack fueled by hate.
Scientists have long suspected that, around 100,000 years after the big bang, helium and hydrogen combined to form the first molecule, helium hydride. That helped the universe begin to cool and led to the formation of stars. But, despite decades of s...
When you grow up with something as the constant backdrop to your life, it’s easy to forget as an adult that not everyone else shares your instinctive knowledge of the subject. My dad is a blacksmith, he’s now retired, but as I was growing up his very active forge was in a workshop next to our house. This is the second part of a series based upon that experience, exploring blacksmithing for people who have maybe always fancied a go at the anvil but have little idea where to start.
The Most Obvious Blacksmithing Tool: The Anvil
Having considered the hearth in our previous outing, it’s time to turn our attention to what is the signature piece of blacksmithing equipment: the anvil. This has the function of providing a high-mass hardened working surface against which metal can be forged, and it has a distinctive shape with various parts for particular metalworking tasks. There are many minor and major variations of anvil design depending upon where in the world your anvil hails from, but since my experience comes from the English counties, the anvil I will be describing is the pattern you’ll find in the British Isles.
The various parts of an anvil. Gerald G (CC0 1.0).
A blacksmith’s anvil is a large block of iron, which is to say forged steel or in some much older anvils wrought iron, but sometimes and usually in cheaper anvils, cast iron. It has a flat rectangular top surface for working metal referred to as the face which is made of hardened steel, on many anvils this can be a separate piece welded to the top of the body of the anvil. At one end of the face is a conical tapered point referred to as the horn which is used to form curves, and at the other is as squared-off edge referred to as the heel, which tapers away underneath towards the base of the anvil. In the face towards the heel are usually two holes, a large square opening called the hardie hole which is designed as a receptacle for tooling, and a small round one called the pritchel hole which is designed as a place to use a punch or similar tool on a piece of work without damaging the face of the anvil. You will sometimes see anvils with different shapes, perhaps with protrusions on their sides or with a horn at each end, these will either be of an overseas pattern or designed for a specific task such as shoeing horses.
Your Hammer Will Know the Difference
There is a “feel” to a good quality anvil, if you strike it with a hammer. This is something that you will understand from experience once you have tried it, but on the ideal anvil there would be a ring sound and the hammer would rebound as though bouncing. It’s a good indication of the quality of a surface for use as an anvil, and it’s one you can readily appreciate if you test a few surfaces. Compare the note and feel of a hammer blow to a good anvil with that of hitting a piece of cast iron such as a scrap engine block, or hitting a piece of steel, and what you will learn will help you judge the quality of any anvil you consider.
The RevSpace anvil is significantly different in shape to the British anvils I am used to, I was told that it follows the German pattern.
As a youngster growing up around a forge, the first thing I learned is that the face of the anvil must be treated with care and only used for hammering of hot metal, never for drilling or the use of a punch except when over the pritchel hole. It is possible to excessively wear or even break an anvil by using more force than it can take, thus it is important to use an anvil of appropriate size for the hammering to which you will subject it. You will see plenty of small bench-top anvils, these are too small for all but the lightest of this kind of work. Ideally something a bit larger should be in your sights, perhaps something like the 50 kg (110 lbs) anvil my dad used for portable work.
Where do you find an anvil? Obviously a blacksmith supply company will happily sell you a good-quality new one for a suitably hefty price. It can be tempting to go for a much cheaper alternative that you might see from a mass-market tool retailer, for example. Any anvil is better than no anvil, but I would always counsel the buyer to consider why a new anvil might be cheap, and whether it might be a very low quality piece of cast iron and a poor purchase decision. If you’re considering any anvil, always go for the best you can afford as it will very likely serve you for the rest of your life and your offspring for their lives too if you are lucky enough to be able to pass it on. Our community has few problems considering many hundreds of pounds an acceptable price for an oscilloscope or a laptop computer, an anvil should be considered in the same light but with the added bonus of far less depreciation.
Old Anvils Do Not Retain The Skills Of Their Previous Owners
Of course, it’s not impossible to find neglected second-hand anvils. The problem is as always one of perceived worth, so you may find top dollar demanded for something that is worn or even broken beyond repair. Good quality older anvils are not intrinsically better than their modern quality equivalents simply because of their age, and while it’s cool to own something that’s been worked on for centuries you will not somehow inherit the skills of those who used it before you by doing so. Be careful not to be sucked in by the romance of owning an aged anvil if you are being asked to pay more than a brand-new one of the same or better quality, and especially not if what is on offer is damaged or worn. It’s not uncommon to find something whose face resembles the surface of the Moon on offer for the cost of a trip to the Moon, so be prepared to say no. If the anvil face is not flat, if the face is broken, cracked, or coming away from the body, or if the heel or horn are broken, walk away unless the anvil is very cheap or even free. It is possible to find a bargain for the cost of a repair if you know what you are doing, but you should beware of time and money pits. You are better served in many such cases buying a new one.
Of course, you may just get lucky and find someone who simply sees a large block of iron as a huge removal problem, but it’s more likely you’ll have to hunt for one whose price is fair rather than eye-watering. I’d suggest starting by asking around in hope of that lucky find, and haunting your local machinery auctioneer.
A home-made anvil crafted from a piece of rail. Relvax (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Happily it is not impossible to make your own anvil if you possess a reasonably well-equipped metalwork shop. You may not be able to create something with as much mass as a commercial anvil, but if you are starting out you should certainly be able to come up with something. The classic small home-made anvil is produced from a piece of rail cut to form a horn at one end and usually with a piece of hardened steel forming the face welded on the curved surface where the train wheel would run. At a pinch you can even do work on almost any large piece of steel stock or very thick plate, as long as it has a significant mass it should be able to be pressed into service. If you ask around engineering shops for some of their weightiest offcuts you might be able to find an impromptu anvil for a surprisingly low investment. Avoid cast iron though, it is brittle and can easily shatter when hammered.
If you were expecting this page to dive right in and start with the forge work, then sadly we must disappoint you. Instead it makes sense to keep going through the basics of what you should find in a forge before we take you to the metal. This is by no means the sum of the blacksmith’s equipment, and we’ll continue it in our next installment with a look at some of the other tools in the blacksmith’s arsenal as well as talking about safety equipment. Then we’ll be ready to take you into the forge and show you some work.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., talked to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “several times” about changing the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law that banned interstate betting, he told The Intercept. A 2011 Justice Department analysis of that law effectively legalized online gambling; last month, the department reversed that opinion.
“I’ve been pushing this from the day it came out under the Obama administration,” Graham said. “Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein and myself have been asking for them to change this absurd interpretation because it leads to the Wild Wild West.” Asked whether he’d spoken to then-Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who had recused himself from the issue, about it, Graham, in a brief interview in the Capitol, said, “I don’t know.” (On Thursday, the Senate confirmed William Barr as attorney general, replacing Whitaker.)
In 2011, the Department of Justice issued a legal opinion clarifying that the Wire Act, a federal law passed in 1961 to stop interstate betting, applied only to sports betting and not other forms of gambling. This announcement opened the doors for states to begin legalizing online gambling — now an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Last week, The Intercept reported on the Justice Department’s recent reversal of its 2011 stance, a long-sought cause of Sheldon Adelson, the Republican billionaire casino mogul. The new Justice Department interpretation was released in the middle of the government shutdown, on January 14, the night before U.S. Attorney General nominee William Barr’s confirmation hearing.
Graham himself has been the Senate sponsor for the Restoration of America’s Wire Act, or RAWA, legislation that would effectively ban all forms of online gambling, since 2014. His advocacy on the issue coincided with an increase in political contributions from Adelson. In 2015, when Graham announced that he would run for president, it was widely understood that Adelson’s largess would be key to his campaign strategy.
In 2017, Graham and Feinstein, a California Democrat who had previously co-sponsored Graham’s RAWA legislation, wrote to Rosenstein urging him to overturn the Justice Department’s 2011 opinion.
As The Intercept previously reported, the deputy attorney general had wanted little to do with the gambling brouhaha, according to people close to him. “We’ve checked in over the last two years with Rod Rosenstein, and he’s consistently said he has no interest in this issue, that there’s more important issues going on,” said one gaming industry executive who opposes the ban. The Justice Department did not return a request for comment on Rosenstein’s involvement.
Several hours after The Intercept’s story was published last Friday, Whitaker appeared before the full House Judiciary Committee to testify on Justice Department matters. At the hearing, Whitaker, who had been acting attorney general since November, hotly denied having any influence over his agency’s new Wire Act opinion. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., specifically grilled Whitaker about whether Adelson had influenced the reversal.
“Your inferences on how that process was corrupted or corrupt is absolutely wrong,” Whitaker said. “And the premise of your question, I reject.” He also said that he has never met with Adelson or spoken to any of his lobbyists about online gambling.
Raskin’s line of questioning stood out in a hearing that focused primarily on the Trump-Russia probe. Raskin himself has received more than $38,000 since 2016 from individuals associated with law firms that represent national and international online gambling companies.
Before Whitaker came to the Department of Justice, he directed the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, an organization that formed in 2014 to purportedly hold Democrats accountable for ethics violations. Whitaker was its sole employee, and he earned more than $1.2 million over three years. In November, the Center for Responsive Politics reported that a single six-figure donor “accounted for 100 percent of funding” raised by Whitaker’s old organization.
At Friday’s congressional hearing, Raskin asked Whitaker if he knew the identity of that sole donor and suggested that the money had come from Adelson. Whitaker said it was from Donors Trust, a conservative donor-advised fund, but that he has “no idea” who specifically donated the money.
While Raskin emphatically defended the 2011 Justice Department interpretation of the Wire Act, saying that the statute’s language “plainly prohibits only sports betting,” the 2011 opinion actually has its own set of critics who say that it was issued on corrupted grounds. Eric Holder was the U.S. attorney general at the time, and despite having previously represented companies with ties to the gambling industry, according to a former U.S. attorney who dealt with him on those issues, he did not recuse himself from gambling matters.
Michael Fagan, who served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri for 25 years, told The Intercept that he personally worked with Holder and his Covington & Burling colleague Lanny Breuer in the early 2000s while prosecuting forfeiture cases related to illegal offshore gambling.
“I can’t remember who they represented, some big multinational company, but I would say on at least two different occasions, they came to St. Louis to meet me and work out an agreement, and I had phone calls with both of them about this too,” said Fagan. “In the end, they agreed their client would forfeit a substantial amount of money in the hundreds of thousands or millions, I believe.”
As U.S. attorney general, Holder brought on his old partner Breuer to lead the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. It was Breuer who then asked the Office of Legal Counsel to revisit the agency’s position on the Wire Act, citing inquiries from New York and Illinois about selling online lottery tickets. Like Holder, Breuer did not recuse himself, despite his past involvement with companies tied to the gambling industry. Eventually U.S. Assistant Attorney General Virginia Seitz quietly issued an opinion changing the Justice Department’s long-held stance. Holder, Breuer, and Seitz did not return requests for comment.
Seitz’s Wire Act interpretation hinged on a close reading of the punctuation of the law, as well as the fact that on the same day the Wire Act was originally enacted, Congress passed a separate statute regulating other forms of gambling. She said this suggested that the Wire Act was exclusively targeting sports betting.
Though the Office of Legal Counsel opinion is dated September 20, 2011, it was released on December 23, 2011 — the Friday before Christmas as lawmakers were leaving D.C. and one day after Nevada approved the first-ever state regulations for online poker. (Harry Reid, D-Nev., who was then Senate majority leader, would say later that legalizing online poker on the federal level “may be the most important issue facing Nevada since Yucca Mountain.” Reid’s 2010 re-election campaign was strongly backed by Caesars Entertainment Corp. and MGM, both of which wanted to establish national online poker sites.)
Seitz was an Obama appointee who had previously worked in the president’s old Chicago law firm, Sidley Austin. She returned there after leaving the Justice Department in 2013 and still works there. Newsweek reported in 2014 that Sidley Austin expanded its business operations in the gambling space after the 2011 Justice Department decision came down. Other Obama alumni got involved with the gambling industry too, with 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina joining the American Gambling Association in 2014 to work on “grassroots initiatives” that included online gambling. “Jim is as politically astute as they come and he will be a great resource for us,” AGA President Geoff Freeman told The Hill at the time. Today, Holder works as a partner at a law firm that represents MGM casinos.
The criticisms of online gambling extend beyond Adelson’s vested interest in shutting it down. Les Bernal, the national director of the Washington-based Stop Predatory Gambling, a group that advocates against commercialized gambling, told The Intercept that there is “no grassroots movement” for online gambling. In March 2017, he sent a letter on behalf of his group’s members to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions urging him to reverse the 2011 Wire Act opinion. “The error of the OLC opinion is conclusively established by the carefully-researched, well-reasoned law review article ‘Understanding the Wire Act: Why the Department of Justice Missed the Mark When It Overturned Fifty Years of Interpretation of the Act,’” Bernal wrote in his letter, referencing an article co-authored by Darryl Nirenberg, an attorney and longtime registered lobbyist for Adelson. In April 2017, Nirenberg delivered a legal memo to a top-ranking official at the Justice Department, outlining reasons to reverse the 2011 Wire Act opinion.
Bernal told The Intercept that his organization takes no money “directly or indirectly” from the gambling industry, does not work with Adelson, and opposes all forms of commercialized gambling. “I know Nirenberg is a lobbyist for Adelson, but on that specific law review article, his opinion was correct,” Bernal said.
Fagan, the retired assistant U.S. attorney who now teaches a course on international money laundering and corruption at Washington University School of Law, said he also was quite impressed by the Nirenberg article, despite the author’s ties to Adelson. “It’s quite good and shows very convincingly why the 2011 opinion is wrong,” Fagan said.
In 2015, Fagan spoke before Congress at a hearing for the Restoration of America’s Wire Act and submitted testimony criticizing the 2011 Justice Department opinion in detail. He called it “rushed, biased, and flawed by reliance on intuition rather than careful analysis.” Fagan also argued that Seitz’s opinion was worded to “favo[r] moneyed corporate interests” and that she had taken up this action less than 90 days after having been confirmed for her Justice Department job. He pointed out that Seitz, Breuer, and Holder all had “represented — and, presumably earned substantial fees from — huge clients, either to advocate for increased Internet gambling or to avoid liability for the client’s role in facilitating and promoting Internet gambling” and that none had disclosed those histories beforehand.
Bernal of Stop Predatory Gambling said many people were advocating for the Justice Department to reject its 2011 interpretation, though “certainly” Adelson’s voice helped boost the effort. He noted Americans lost $118 billion in personal wealth to government-sanctioned gambling schemes in 2018, with another trillion dollars projected to be lost over the next eight years. “A lot of people were outraged at how Holder’s Department of Justice acted in 2011,” Bernal said. “I think Adelson’s voice was influential but that he was the lynchpin is a phony narrative that the gambling industries in this country are pushing to try and get the new opinion flipped.”
Democratic women did really well last Tuesday. And many broke new ground: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won a New York U.S. House seat, is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Rashida Tlaib, who won in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, and Ilhan Omar, of the Minnesota 5th, will be the first Muslim women to serve in Congress. Women also flipped districts blue in competitive races — Navy veteran Elaine Luria won in the Virginia 2nd, and former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin, who served in the Obama administration, won in the Michigan 8th.
According to ABC News projections and FiveThirtyEight analysis, 113 women U.S. House and Senate candidates — from both parties — are expected to be winners.32 And there are eight unresolved races with at least one woman candidate.33 The number of women winners is certain to grow to 115, because both of the major-party candidates in two of the unresolved races are women. In the other six races, two of the women candidates are favored to win — Republicans Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi’s Senate runoff and Mia Love in Utah’s 4th District — according to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis.
Regardless, the 116th Congress will feature the largest class of female legislators ever. But there’s a sharp divide across party lines in this historic first. Of the 113 projected women winners, 98 are Democrats, and 15 are Republicans. (They will be joining 10 female senators who weren’t up for election this year: six Democrats and four Republicans.) It’s a sober reminder that this standout year for women is mostly a standout year for Democratic women.
But this is not necessarily a new trend. According to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, the Democratic Party has historically elected more women to Congress than the GOP has. Even though at least 123 women will make up the 116th Congress, only 19 — or 15 percent — will be Republicans.
That’s down from 27 percent in the 115th Congress, according to the center. So why are so few Republican women elected to Congress? We’ve looked at this question in-depth before the 2018 midterm elections, but it’s worth revisiting in the wake of 2018 to better understand the dynamics that have led to fewer Republican women running for office and the underlying reasons as to why.
According to data collected by the Center for American Women and Politics, 63 percent of
the women who ran in Senate and House primaries from 1992 through 2018 were Democrats. In every election during that period, there were more women candidates in Democratic primaries than in Republican ones (although the numbers were fairly close in 2010, when 145 Republican women ran and 153 Democratic women ran). The largest difference was in this election cycle, when 73 percent of the women who ran in the primaries were Democrats. (The gap held in the general election, as well — 77 percent of all women candidates nominated by one of the two major parties were Democrats.)
That said, lower female representation in government is not unique to the Republican Party. There are more men than women in Congress overall and in state legislatures, too. Up until this election, the share of women in Congress had yet to break 20 percent. If the number of women serving in the 116th Congress stays at 123, women will be 23 percent of the total.
But why are fewer Republican women than Democratic women running for office? Political science gives us a few clues.
Being tapped or recruited to run for office matters — especially among potential women candidates. But there is some evidence that Republican women don’t respond to recruitment efforts as positively as Democratic women do. In a survey experiment published in 2016, professors at Brigham Young University found that even if a community leader encouraged Republican women to run for office, they were not any more likely to run. Democratic women were more receptive, however.
There is also some evidence that the pool of potentially successful Democratic women candidates is larger than the pool of Republican ones.
A study published in 2014 in the journal Research and Politics defined the criteria for successful candidates as people who were closely aligned with one of the two political parties, who were highly educated and who held a high-status job, like an attorney or professor. The researchers then looked at data on the adult population of the U.S. to see who fit the criteria. Most of the people who did were men. The women who met the criteria tended to identify as Democrats. As time went on, the gap between the Democratic and Republican female candidate pools grew, the study found: In the 1970s and 1980s, the numbers of Democratic and Republican women considered potentially successful candidates were about the same. But in the 1990s, the Democrats began to pull away, and the gap has only grown since then.
The authors of the 2014 study suggest that one factor behind the partisan gap could be the different beliefs about gender roles that are held by Democrats and Republicans. For example, according to a Pew Research Center survey, in 2012, 88 percent of Republicans said they have “old-fashioned values about family and marriage” compared with 60 percent of Democrats. And 21 percent of Republicans said they agreed that women should return to their traditional roles in society, compared with 16 percent of Democrats. These more conservative attitudes about family and women’s roles in society held by Republicans may have a negative influence on Republican women’s interest in pursuing a path that might lead to a political career.
Major party donors may also be contributing to the gap in Republican and Democratic women elected to office. For example, groups that advocate for greater female representation help women get elected, but new research found that these kinds of groups receive more financial support from donors if they’re associated with the Democratic Party. This means women advocacy groups that are Democratic leaning, like Emily’s List, are more likely to be supported by donors than Republican groups, like Susan B. Anthony’s List. What’s more, these kinds of groups are more likely to be better integrated into the Democratic Party’s political culture. The study found that one possible reason that Republicans don’t give as much to these kinds of groups is because they haven’t heard of them.
If the Republican Party wants more women candidates, one approach might be to expand the candidate pool by reimagining the characteristics that candidates have traditionally had. The GOP could also encourage women to run with a more catered message. If recruiters were to frame running for office by emphasizing the community-related aspects of a career in public service, studies show that women in general would express more interest in it. Finally, elevating the status of groups that focus on electing women could help GOP women receive more money from party insiders.
A study from 2014 found that women are more active in politics when they are represented by women. So if Republicans prioritize women candidates, the GOP could not only increase their female representation in Congress, but also maybe encourage women who are leaving the GOP to stay.
[Kevin] owns a benchtop CNC mill that has proven itself to be a capable tool, but after becoming familiar with some of its shortcomings, he has made a few modifications. In order to more efficiently hold and access workpieces on his custom fixturing table, he designed and made his own toe clamps and they look beautiful.
The usual way to secure a piece of stock to a fixturing table is to use top-down clamps, which hold the workpiece from the top and screw down into the table. However, this method limits how much of the stock can be accessed by the cutting tool, because the clamps are in the way. The most common way around this is to mount a vise to the table and clamp the workpiece in that. This leaves the top surface completely accessible. Unfortunately, [Kevin]’s benchtop Roland MDX-450 has a limited work area and he simply couldn’t spare the room. His solution was toe clamps, which screw down to the table and have little tabs that move inwards and downward. The tabs do the work of clamping and securing a piece of stock while maintaining a very low profile themselves.
The clamp bases are machined from stainless steel and the heads are brass, and the interface between the two is a set screw. Inserting a hex wrench and turning the screw moves the head forward or back, allowing a workpiece to be clamped from the sides with minimal interference. His design was done in Fusion 360 and is shared online.
Brian Krebs is reporting on some new and sophisticated phishing scams over the telephone.
I second his advice: "never give out any information about yourself in response to an unsolicited phone call." Always call them back, and not using the number offered to you by the caller. Always.
When I was growing up, children were commonly taught: "don't talk to strangers." Strangers might be bad, we were told, so it's prudent to steer clear of them.
And yet most people are honest, kind, and generous, especially when someone asks them for help. If a small child is in trouble, the smartest thing he can do is find a nice-looking stranger and talk to him.
These two pieces of advice may seem to contradict each other, but they don't. The difference is that in the second instance, the child is choosing which stranger to talk to. Given that the overwhelming majority of people will help, the child is likely to get help if he chooses a random stranger. But if a stranger comes up to a child and talks to him or her, it's not a random choice. It's more likely, although still unlikely, that the stranger is up to no good.
That advice is generalizable to this instance as well. The problem is that someone claiming to be from your bank asking for personal information. The problem is that they contacted you first.
by David Murphy on Lifehacker, shared by Andrew Couts to Gizmodo
Let’s talk about that elephant in the room: Facebook’s recent disclosure that attackers got their hands on access tokens for an unknown number of Facebook accounts is a big deal, since it’s the kind of hack that you, a happy Facebook user, could not prevent.
A clever competition at a Citi Bike docking station, learning something interesting from a sidewalk vendor and more reader tales from this week’s Metropolitan Diary.
The F.B.I. will interview four witnesses about accusations of sexual assault against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee as part of a background check.
![Have you ever considered what will happen when this rolls over? Bruce W. Stracener [Public domain]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/894px-Pine_Bluff_McDonalds_1962_Sign.jpg)
For once, AMD made NVIDIA sweat. NVIDIA's new RTX Super graphics cards are clearly a response to AMD's new midrange GPUs, the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT. For months, AMD has been hyping how much faster they are than the first RTX cards. The only solu...
To celebrate the release of wireless VR headset Oculus Quest, Polyarc is releasing new content for Moss, the adorable puzzle adventure that's made waves on the VR gaming landscape. Our swashbuckling mouse heroine Quill will now be able to explore the...
Scientists have long suspected that, around 100,000 years after the big bang, helium and hydrogen combined to form the first molecule, helium hydride. That helped the universe begin to cool and led to the formation of stars. But, despite decades of s...
The usual way to secure a piece of stock to a fixturing table is to use top-down clamps, which hold the workpiece from the top and screw down into the table. However, this method limits how much of the stock can be accessed by the cutting tool, because the clamps are in the way. The most common way around this is to mount a vise to the table and clamp the workpiece in that. This leaves the top surface completely accessible. Unfortunately, [Kevin]’s benchtop Roland MDX-450 has a limited work area and he simply couldn’t spare the room. His solution was toe clamps, which screw down to the table and have little tabs that move inwards and downward. The tabs do the work of clamping and securing a piece of stock while maintaining a very low profile themselves.
![Public domain]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pine_Bluff_McDonalds_1962_Sign.jpg){kind=link}
