wait isn't this the dude that was like, doing ecstasy and then had a panic attack on live tv?
Meditation is a simple exercise with all sorts of productivity and health benefits. If you’ve never done it before, this video does an excellent job of breaking down the basics.
The fact that they look like Q-tips sticking out of your ears is just the beginning: There are other reasons you might want to think twice about buying Apple's wireless, weird-looking AirPods. For the money -- $159 -- these earbuds offer audio qualit...
In September of 2016, a talented programmer released his own cooked update to a major company’s legacy operating system, purely because it needed to be done. A raft of new features, wrap-in programs, and bugfixes were included in this release, which I stress was done as a hobby project.
The project is understatement itself, simply called Prodos 2.4. It updates ProDOS, the last version of which, 2.0.3, was released in 1993.
You can download it, or boot it in an emulator on the webpage, here.
As an update unto itself, this item is a wonder – compatibility has been repaired for the entire Apple II line, from the first Apple II through to the Apple IIgs, as well as cases of various versions of 6502 CPUs (like the 65C02) or cases where newer cards have been installed in the Apple IIs for USB-connected/emulated drives. Important utilities related to disk transfer, disk inspection, and program selection have joined the image. The footprint is smaller, and it runs faster than its predecessor (a wonder in any case of OS upgrades).
The reason I call this the most important operating system update of the year is multi-fold.
First, the pure unique experience of a 23-year-gap between upgradesmeans that you can see a rare example of what happens when a computer environment just sits tight for decades, with many eyes on it and many notes about how the experience can be improved, followed by someone driven enough to go through methodically and implement all those requests. The inclusion of the utilities on the disk means we also have the benefit of all the after-market improvements in functionality that the continuing users of the environment needed, all time-tested, and all wrapped in without disturbing the size of the operating system programs itself. It’s like a gold-star hall of fame of Apple II utilities packed into the OS they were inspired by.
This choreographed waltz of new and old is unique in itself.
Next is that this is an operating system upgrade free of commercial and marketing constraints and drives. Compared with, say, an iOS upgrade that trumpets the addition of a search function or blares out a proud announcement that they broke maps because Google kissed another boy at recess. Or Windows 10, the 1968 Democratic Convention Riot of Operating Systems, which was designed from the ground up to be compatible with a variety of mobile/tablet products that are on the way out, and which were shoved down the throats of current users with a cajoling, insulting methodology with misleading opt-out routes and freakier and freakier fake-countdowns.
The current mainstream OS environment is, frankly, horrifying, and to see a pure note, a trumpet of clear-minded attention to efficiency, functionality and improvement, stands in testament to the fact that it is still possible to achieve this, albeit a smaller, slower-moving target. Either way, it’s an inspiration.
Last of all, this upgrade is a valentine not just to the community who makes use of this platform, but to the ideas of hacker improvement calling back decades before 1993. The amount of people this upgrade benefits is relatively small in the world – the number of folks still using Apple IIs is tiny enough that nearly everybody doing so either knows each other, or knows someone who knows everyone else. It is not a route to fame, or a resume point to get snapped up by a start-up, or a game of one-upsmanship shoddily slapped together to prove a point or drop a “beta” onto the end as a fig leaf against what could best be called a lab experiment gone off in the fridge. It is done for the sake of what it is – a tool that has been polished and made anew, so the near-extinct audience for it works to the best of their ability with a machine that, itself, is thought of as the last mass-marketed computer designed by a single individual.
That’s a very special day indeed, and I doubt the remainder of 2016 will top it, any more than I think the first 9 months have.
Thanks to John Brooks for the inspiration this release provides.
About Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace: Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, a satiric vision largely set in a post-apocalyptic world. The popular sketch group is comprised of Sam Hyde, Charls Carroll, and Nick Rochefort.
This isn't 2009. Your phone doesn't have a floppy drive, and it shouldn't have a headphone connector either. When we made iPhone 6 and 6s, the world wasn't ready for the future. Now, it is. Apple Plug is the perfect solution. Fill in your archaic headphone connector with beautiful aluminium and plug yourself into the future.
Perfect Fit
Innovation isn't always obvious to the eye, but look a little closer at Apple Plug. You'll find it is designed to fit seamlessly into the outdated headphone connector, transforming last year's phone into a modern masterpiece as beautifully as you'd expect from Apple. Once in place, Apple Plug cannot be removed. But why would you want to? Would you want to downgrade? We didn't think so.
Pure Invention
Innovation questions everything you know. We removed the floppy drive, and people said we were wrong. We weren't. We removed the CD drive, and again people said we were wrong. We weren't. We never are. Apple Plug isn't just a pristine product. It's an essential part of showing others who you are.
Washington’s so-called “humanitarian” military intervention policy dates to its demonization of Yugoslavian socialist leader Slobodan Milosevic, who has since been judged innocent of war crimes. The corporate media is a tool of the War Party. “It is they who dispense the propaganda and videos that becomes news in the US and Europe, guarantee a one-sided ‘coverage’ of Syria,” and create a climate for war with Russia and China.
“If war with Russia breaks out, by design or by accident, journalists will bear much of the responsibility.”
The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.
The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ITFY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.
Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually “condemned ethnic cleansing,” opposed Karadzic and tried to stop the war that dismembered Yugoslavia. Buried near the end of a 2,590-page judgment on Karadzic last February, this truth further demolishes the propaganda that justified Nato’s illegal onslaught on Serbia in 1999.
Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006, alone in his cell in The Hague, during what amounted to a bogus trial by an American-invented “international tribunal.” Denied heart surgery that might have saved his life, his condition worsened and was monitored and kept secret by US officials, as WikiLeaks has since revealed.
Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the western media as the “butcher of the Balkans” who was responsible for “genocide,” especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against “this new Hitler.” David Scheffer, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], declared that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” may have been murdered by Milocevic’s forces.
“Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all.”
This was the justification for Nato’s bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia’s economic infrastructure. It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious “peace conference” in Rambouillet in France, Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it.”
Albright delivered an “offer” to Milosevic that no national leader could accept. Unless he agreed to the foreign military occupation of his country, with the occupying forces “outside the legal process,” and to the imposition of a neo-liberal “free market,” Serbia would be bombed. This was contained in an “Appendix B,” which the media failed to read or suppressed. The aim was to crush Europe’s last independent “socialist” state.
Once Nato began bombing, there was a stampede of Kosovar refugees “fleeing a holocaust.” When it was over, international police teams descended on Kosovo to exhume the victims of the “holocaust.” The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.” The final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the pro-Nato Kosovo Liberation Front. There was no genocide. The Nato attack was both a fraud and a war crime.
All but a fraction of America’s vaunted “precision guided” missiles hit not military but civilian targets, including the news studios of Radio Television Serbia in Belgrade. Sixteen people were killed, including cameramen, producers and a make-up artist. Blair described the dead, profanely, as part of Serbia’s “command and control.” In 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, revealed that she had been pressured not to investigate Nato’s crimes.
“The aim was to crush Europe’s last independent ‘socialist’ state.”
This was the model for Washington’s subsequent invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, by stealth, Syria. All qualify as “paramount crimes” under the Nuremberg standard; all depended on media propaganda. While tabloid journalism played its traditional part, it was serious, credible, often liberal journalism that was the most effective -- the evangelical promotion of Blair and his wars by the Guardian, the incessant lies about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the Observer and the New York Times, and the unerring drumbeat of government propaganda by the BBC in the silence of its omissions.
At the height of the bombing, the BBC’s Kirsty Wark interviewed General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander. The Serbian city of Nis had just been sprayed with American cluster bombs, killing women, old people and children in an open market and a hospital. Wark asked not a single question about this, or about any other civilian deaths.
Others were more brazen. In February 2003, the day after Blair and Bush had set fire to Iraq, the BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr, stood in Downing Street and made what amounted to a victory speech. He excitedly told his viewers that Blair had “said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.” Today, with a million dead and a society in ruins, Marr’s BBC interviews are recommended by the US embassy in London.
Marr’s colleagues lined up to pronounce Blair “vindicated.” The BBC’s Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, said, “There’s no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially to the Middle East … is now increasingly tied up with military power.”
This obeisance to the United States and its collaborators as a benign force “bringing good” runs deep in western establishment journalism. It ensures that the present-day catastrophe in Syria is blamed exclusively on Bashar al-Assad, whom the West and Israel have long conspired to overthrow, not for any humanitarian concerns, but to consolidate Israel’s aggressive power in the region. The jihadist forces unleashed and armed by the US, Britain, France, Turkey and their “coalition” proxies serve this end. It is they who dispense the propaganda and videos that becomes news in the US and Europe, and provide access to journalists and guarantee a one-sided “coverage” of Syria.
“Like the Afghan Mujahideen, the Syrian ‘rebels’ are America’s and Britain’s foot soldiers.”
The city of Aleppo is in the news. Most readers and viewers will be unaware that the majority of the population of Aleppo lives in the government-controlled western part of the city. That they suffer daily artillery bombardment from western-sponsored al-Qaida is not news. On 21 July, French and American bombers attacked a government village in Aleppo province, killing up to 125 civilians. This was reported on page 22 of the Guardian; there were no photographs.
Having created and underwritten jihadism in Afghanistan in the 1980s as Operation Cyclone -- a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union -- the US is doing something similar in Syria. Like the Afghan Mujahideen, the Syrian “rebels” are America’s and Britain’s foot soldiers. Many fight for al-Qaida and its variants; some, like the Nusra Front, have rebranded themselves to comply with American sensitivities over 9/11. The CIA runs them, with difficulty, as it runs jihadists all over the world.
The immediate aim is to destroy the government in Damascus, which, according to the most credible poll (YouGov Siraj), the majority of Syrians support, or at least look to for protection, regardless of the barbarism in its shadows. The long-term aim is to deny Russia a key Middle Eastern ally as part of a Nato war of attrition against the Russian Federation that eventually destroys it.
The nuclear risk is obvious, though suppressed by the media across “the free world”. The editorial writers of the Washington Post, having promoted the fiction of WMD in Iraq, demand that Obama attack Syria. Hillary Clinton, who publicly rejoiced at her executioner’s role during the destruction of Libya, has repeatedly indicated that, as president, she will “go further” than Obama.
Gareth Porter, a samidzat journalist reporting from Washington, recently revealed the names of those likely to make up a Clinton cabinet, who plan an attack on Syria. All have belligerent cold war histories; the former CIA director, Leon Panetta, says that “the next president is gonna have to consider adding additional special forces on the ground.”
What is most remarkable about the war propaganda now in floodtide is its patent absurdity and familiarity. I have been looking through archive film from Washington in the 1950s when diplomats, civil servants and journalists were witch-hunted and ruined by Senator Joe McCarthy for challenging the lies and paranoia about the Soviet Union and China. Like a resurgent tumor, the anti-Russia cult has returned.
In Britain, the Guardian’s Luke Harding leads his newspaper’s Russia-haters in a stream of journalistic parodies that assign to Vladimir Putin every earthly iniquity. When the Panama Papers leak was published, the front page said Putin, and there was a picture of Putin; never mind that Putin was not mentioned anywhere in the leaks.
“Hillary Clinton, who publicly rejoiced at her executioner’s role during the destruction of Libya, has repeatedly indicated that, as president, she will ‘go further’ than Obama.”
Like Milosevic, Putin is Demon Number One. It was Putin who shot down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. Headline: “As far as I’m concerned, Putin killed my son.” No evidence required. It was Putin who was responsible for Washington’s documented (and paid for) overthrow of the elected government in Kiev in 2014. The subsequent terror campaign by fascist militias against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine was the result of Putin’s “aggression.” Preventing Crimea from becoming a Nato missile base and protecting the mostly Russian population who had voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia -- from which Crimea had been annexed -- were more examples of Putin’s “aggression.” Smear by media inevitably becomes war by media. If war with Russia breaks out, by design or by accident, journalists will bear much of the responsibility.
In the US, the anti-Russia campaign has been elevated to virtual reality. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, an economist with a Nobel Prize, has called Donald Trump the “Siberian Candidate” because Trump is Putin’s man, he says. Trump had dared to suggest, in a rare lucid moment, that war with Russia might be a bad idea. In fact, he has gone further and removed American arms shipments to Ukraine from the Republican platform. “Wouldn’t it be great if we got along with Russia,” he said.
This is why America’s warmongering liberal establishment hates him. Trump’s racism and ranting demagoguery have nothing to do with it. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s record of racism and extremism can out-trump Trump’s any day. (This week is the 20th anniversary of the Clinton welfare “reform” that launched a war on African-Americans). As for Obama: while American police gun down his fellow African-Americans the great hope in the White House has done nothing to protect them, nothing to relieve their impoverishment, while running four rapacious wars and an assassination campaign without precedent.
The CIA has demanded Trump is not elected. Pentagon generals have demanded he is not elected. The pro-war New York Times -- taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears -- demands that he is not elected. Something is up. These tribunes of “perpetual war” are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Putin, then with China’s Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace -- however unlikely -- would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire.
“Trump would have loved Stalin!” bellowed Vice-President Joe Biden at a rally for Hillary Clinton. With Clinton nodding, he shouted, “We never bow. We never bend. We never kneel. We never yield. We own the finish line. That’s who we are. We are America!”
“Like a resurgent tumor, the anti-Russia cult has returned.”
In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn has also excited hysteria from the war-makers in the Labour Party and from a media devoted to trashing him. Lord West, a former admiral and Labour minister, put it well. Corbyn was taking an “outrageous” anti-war position “because it gets the unthinking masses to vote for him.”
In a debate with leadership challenger Owen Smith, Corbyn was asked by the moderator: “How would you act on a violation by Vladimir Putin of a fellow Nato state?”
Corbyn replied: “You would want to avoid that happening in the first place. You would build up a good dialogue with Russia … We would try to introduce a de-militarization of the borders between Russia, the Ukraine and the other countries on the border between Russia and Eastern Europe. What we cannot allow is a series of calamitous build-ups of troops on both sides which can only lead to great danger.”
Pressed to say if he would authorize war against Russia “if you had to,” Corbyn replied: “I don’t wish to go to war -- what I want to do is achieve a world that we don’t need to go to war.”
The line of questioning owes much to the rise of Britain’s liberal war-makers. The Labour Party and the media have long offered them career opportunities. For a while the moral tsunami of the great crime of Iraq left them floundering, their inversions of the truth a temporary embarrassment. Regardless of Chilcot and the mountain of incriminating facts, Blair remains their inspiration, because he was a “winner.”
Dissenting journalism and scholarship have since been systematically banished or appropriated, and democratic ideas emptied and refilled with “identity politics” that confuse gender with feminism and public angst with liberation and willfully ignore the state violence and weapons profiteering that destroys countless lives in faraway places, like Yemen and Syria, and beckon nuclear war in Europe and across the world.
The stirring of people of all ages around the spectacular rise of Jeremy Corbyn counters this to some extent. His life has been spent illuminating the horror of war. The problem for Corbyn and his supporters is the Labour Party. In America, the problem for the thousands of followers of Bernie Sanders was the Democratic Party, not to mention their ultimate betrayal by their great white hope. In the US, home of the great civil rights and anti-war movements, it is Black Lives Matter and the likes of Codepink that lay the roots of a modern version.
For only a movement that swells into every street and across borders and does not give up can stop the warmongers. Next year, it will be a century since Wilfred Owen wrote the following. Every journalist should read it and remember it.
Overlawyered - “Melody Stoops admits she was in the ‘business’ of bringing lawsuits against companies over calls they made to her cell phones without her permission.” Storing the prepaid-service phones in a shoebox when not in use, she waited for robocalls from solvent companies, which are mostly banned under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. “She has filed at least 11 TCPA cases in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania and has sent at least 25 pre-litigation demand letters.” A judge has now disallowed her standing to sue on one of the cases, saying she cannot claim that the calls were a nuisance, invasion of privacy, or economic injury given that she obtained the phones with the goal of suffering legal injury.Overlawyered - “Melody Stoops admits she was in the ‘business’ of bringing lawsuits against companies over calls they made to her cell phones without her permission.” Storing the prepaid-service phones in a shoebox when not in use, she waited for robocalls from solvent companies, which are mostly banned under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. “She has filed at least 11 TCPA cases in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania and has sent at least 25 pre-litigation demand letters.” A judge has now disallowed her standing to sue on one of the cases, saying she cannot claim that the calls were a nuisance, invasion of privacy, or economic injury given that she obtained the phones with the goal of suffering legal injury.
I f there were a Nobel prize for hypocrisy, then its first recipient ought to be Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss. On 23 August, all his 1.7 billion users were greeted by this message: "Celebrating 25 years of connecting people. The web opened up to the world 25 years ago today! We thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other internet pioneers for making the world more open and connected."
Aw, isn't that nice? From one "pioneer" to another. What a pity, then, that it is a combination of bullshit and hypocrisy. [...]
It's not the inaccuracy that grates, however, but the hypocrisy. Zuckerberg thanks Berners-Lee for "making the world more open and connected". So do I. What Zuck conveniently omits to mention, though, is that he is embarked upon a commercial project whose sole aim is to make the world more "connected" but less open. Facebook is what we used to call a "walled garden" and now call a silo: a controlled space in which people are allowed to do things that will amuse them while enabling Facebook to monetise their data trails. One network to rule them all. If you wanted a vision of the opposite of the open web, then Facebook is it.
The thing that makes the web distinctive is also what made the internet special, namely that it was designed as an open platform. It was designed to facilitate "permissionless innovation". If you had a good idea that could be realised using data packets, and possessed the programming skills to write the necessary software, then the internet -- and the web -- would do it for you, no questions asked. And you didn't need much in the way of financial resources -- or to ask anyone for permission -- in order to realise your dream.
An open platform is one on which anyone can build whatever they like. It's what enabled a young Harvard sophomore, name of Zuckerberg, to take an idea lifted from two nice-but-dim oarsmen, translate it into computer code and launch it on an unsuspecting world. And in the process create an empire of 1.7 billion subjects with apparently limitless revenues. That's what permissionless innovation is like.
The open web enabled Zuckerberg to do this. But -- guess what? -- the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval. Having profited mightily from the openness of the web, in other words, he has kicked away the ladder that elevated him to his current eminence. And the whole thrust of his company's strategy is to persuade billions of future users that Facebook is the only bit of the internet they really need.
If you work for Facebook, quit. It is morally indefensible for you to use your skills to make that company more powerful. By working there, you are making the world an objectively worse place. I'm sure you can find a job working for a company that you don't have to apologize for all the time.
"Al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria refused to grant The Electronic Intifada an interview, accusing the publication of “unprofessional” journalism. This rejection comes as the group is reaching out to other English-language media outlets as part of a slick marketing effort."
While torrents will work without them, trackers are very handy for quickly finding other BitTorrent peers with the same content. They’re also essential for those who have DHT and PEX disabled in their clients.
Often run by people with an interest in the technology, public trackers are incapable of generating funds in their own right. This means that from a financial perspective there’s almost no incentive to run one.
The important thing to remember about trackers is that they carry no infringing content whatsoever, they merely direct torrent client traffic to a particular torrent hash. Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop tracker operators from getting copyright-related headaches.
In early 2016, a new stand-alone tracker was born. Operating from zer0day.ch, the tracker grew quite quickly in the first few days of life after ETRG (ExtraTorrent’s release group) added the tracker to its releases.
But with its first 10,000 torrents tracked, the problems began. The tracker was hosted in Germany and soon its host ran out of patience with mounting copyright infringement claims. After moving to Romania, history repeated itself when the tracker’s host suspended its server.
“They didn’t want to hear that running a tracker is not illegal,” zer0day’s admin informs TF.
Late April, the tracker moved again, this time to a Latvia/Sweden setup. From there the tracker’s popularity went through the roof after an important development. Unknown to the tracker’s admin, The Pirate Bay began adding zer0day as one of the default trackers in its magnet links.
Now coordinating millions of peers, zer0day became an important player but in August the site had yet more trouble. The tracker’s server went offline again, this time without any prior notice and despite the fact that in eight months of operation not a single DMCA notice had ever been directly filed with the tracker.
With a fourth server secured elsewhere, zer0day continued with its business but more aggravation was on the horizon. Early this month, Swiss domain registry Switch told the site’s operator that his .CH domain was in trouble.
According to Switch, someone had tried to send some documents to the domain owner by snail mail and the documents had not reached the address mentioned in the WHOIS. Zer0day’s admin was given 30 days to prove his identity (with residency papers, for example) or face his domain being deleted.
While keeping the .CH domain would have been preferable, Switch didn’t make anything easy. They blocked the domain from being transferred to a third party and refused to say which agency had tried to contact the tracker’s operator.
Frustrated, the tracker’s admin decided to jump ship after a friend donated a server and a new .to (Tonga) based domain. At the time of writing the tracker is doing well, reporting 1.21m torrents and 4.44m peers (3.04 M seeders + 1.40 M leechers) on its main page.
Speaking with TF, the tracker owner says that while the ride has been a bumpy one, things got much worse after Pirate Bay began adding his tracker URL by default, something he had no control over.
“Things went from bad to worse after TPB added the tracker to their magnet links. [That knowledge] might help ease someone’s efforts to run a torrent tracker in the future,” he concludes.
As mentioned earlier, trackers aren’t absolutely essential for the functioning of BitTorrent transfers. However, their existence certainly improves matters and sites like zer0day are happy to contribute, even if their work mainly flies under the radar.
You like music? You would like to turn your hobby into a job opportunity? Once again, we've got you covered! After watching this video, fans will literally rip clothes off your rockstar body!
"The United States spent millions printing textbooks for Afghan children and adults that encouraged violence against non-Muslim “infidels” like Soviet troops, as in this excerpt from a book for Pashto-speaking first graders."
First mixed in World War II, it is made from pineapple juice and the 180-proof grain alcohol fuel used in United States Navy torpedo motors. Various poisonous additives were mixed into the fuel alcohol by Navy authorities to render the alcohol undrinkable, and various methods were employed by the U.S. sailors to separate the alcohol from the poison. Aside from the expected alcohol intoxication and subsequent hangover, the effects of drinking torpedo juice sometimes included mild or severe reactions to the poison, and the drink's reputation developed an early element of risk.
In the first part of the Pacific War, U.S. torpedoes were powered by a miniature steam engine burning 180- or higher-proof ethyl alcohol as fuel. The ethyl alcohol was denatured by the addition of 5 -- 10% "pink lady", a blend of dye, methanol and possibly other ingredients. Methanol causes blindness when ingested, and cannot be made non-poisonous. The methanol was said to be (largely) removed by filtering the fuel mix through a compressed loaf of bread.
Later, a small amount of Croton oil was added to the neutral grain spirits which powered U.S. torpedoes. Drinking alcohol with the oil additive caused painful cramps, internal bleeding and a violent emptying of the bowels. It was intended as a replacement for methanol which had caused blindness in some sailors. To avoid the Croton oil, sailors devised crude stills to slowly separate the alcohol from the poison, as alcohol evaporated at a lower temperature than Croton oil.
Survey time!
Let's say you had a device that used sugar for fuel. And you found that your employees were putting some of that sugar in their coffee instead. Would you:
Implement better inventory control; or
Cut the sugar with rat poison?
And if you chose B -- and you were not the government of a country descended from religious fundamentalists and run by moralistic prohibitionists -- how many consecutive life sentences do you think you would serve in prison for attempted murder?
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination." [...]
Industrial alcohol is basically grain alcohol with some unpleasant chemicals mixed in to render it undrinkable. The U.S. government started requiring this "denaturing" process in 1906 for manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable spirits. [...] By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons -- kerosene and brucine (closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added -- up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.
A new version of the IRC bridge has been released onto NPM and the matrix.org bridges!
The IRC bridge has undergone quite a number of modifications since its original inception over a year ago. Version 0.4 introduces a number of additional features and improvements, which can be found in the changelog. These include automatically linkifying large blocks of text and mirroring kicks/bans to and from Matrix.
With a plethora of protocol gotchas and non-standard features on well-known IRC networks, IRC is a challenging protocol to work with. It’s inevitable that some corner cases are not handled well by the bridge. Over time, the bridge has been hardened by edge cases which we have encountered and patched. These releases signify the continual improvement in the robustness of the bridge, which we aim to continue with into the foreseeable future.
Performance wise, our busiest bridge which we host is the bridge to Freenode. We now have over 1300 active connections to it and have a steady rate of about 240 messages per minute going through to Matrix. We expect to see this number increase significantly over the next few months. Let’s see what the next year will bring!
The fact that they look like Q-tips sticking out of your ears is just the beginning: There are other reasons you might want to think twice about buying Apple's wireless, weird-looking AirPods. For the money -- $159 -- these earbuds offer audio qualit...
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It's hypocritical of Mark Zuckerberg to sing the praises of the web's founder when he's trying to monopolise the internet
While torrents will work without them, trackers are very handy for quickly finding other BitTorrent peers with the same content. They’re also essential for those who have DHT and PEX disabled in their clients.
"The United States spent millions printing textbooks for Afghan children and adults that encouraged violence against non-Muslim “infidels” like Soviet troops, as in this excerpt from a book for Pashto-speaking first graders."
Torpedo juice:
This week we have three newcomers in our chart.