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🔗 Law

In the United States, a heckler's veto is a situation in which a party who disagrees with a speaker's message is able to unilaterally trigger events that result in the speaker being silenced. For example, a heckler can disrupt a speech to the point that the speech is canceled.

In the legal sense, a heckler's veto occurs when the speaker's right is curtailed or restricted by the government in order to prevent a reacting party's behavior. The common example is the termination of a speech or demonstration in the interest of maintaining the public peace based on the anticipated negative reaction of someone opposed to that speech or demonstration.

The term heckler's veto was coined by University of Chicago professor of law Harry Kalven. Colloquially, the concept is invoked in situations where hecklers or demonstrators silence a speaker without intervention of the law.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Microsoft Windows 🔗 Microsoft Windows/Computing 🔗 Microsoft

Resilient File System (ReFS), codenamed "Protogon", is a Microsoft proprietary file system introduced with Windows Server 2012 with the intent of becoming the "next generation" file system after NTFS.

ReFS was designed to overcome problems that had become significant over the years since NTFS was conceived, which are related to how data storage requirements had changed. The key design advantages of ReFS include automatic integrity checking and data scrubbing, removal of the need for running chkdsk, protection against data degradation, built-in handling of hard disk drive failure and redundancy, integration of RAID functionality, a switch to copy/allocate on write for data and metadata updates, handling of very long paths and filenames, and storage virtualization and pooling, including almost arbitrarily sized logical volumes (unrelated to the physical sizes of the used drives).

These requirements arose from two major changes in storage systems and usage – the size of storage in use (large or massive arrays of multi-terabyte drives now being fairly common), and the need for continual reliability. As a result, the file system needs to be self-repairing (to prevent disk checking from being impractically slow or disruptive), along with abstraction or virtualization between physical disks and logical volumes.

ReFS was initially added to Windows Server 2012 only, with the aim of gradual migration to consumer systems in future versions; this was achieved as of Windows 8.1. The initial versions removed some NTFS features, such as disk quotas, alternate data streams, and extended attributes. Some of these were re-implemented in later versions of ReFS.

In early versions (2012–2013), ReFS was similar to or slightly faster than NTFS in most tests, but far slower when full integrity checking was enabled, a result attributed to the relative newness of ReFS. Pre-release concerns were also voiced by one blogger over Storage Spaces, the storage system designed to underpin ReFS, which reportedly could fail in a manner that prevented ReFS from recovering automatically.

The ability to create ReFS volumes was removed in Windows 10's 2017 Fall Creators Update for all editions except Enterprise and Pro for Workstations.

The cluster size of a ReFS volume is either 4 KiB or 64 KiB.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Energy

Thorium-based nuclear power generation is fueled primarily by the nuclear fission of the isotope uranium-233 produced from the fertile element thorium. According to proponents, a thorium fuel cycle offers several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle—including much greater abundance of thorium found on Earth, superior physical and nuclear fuel properties, and reduced nuclear waste production. However, development of thorium power has significant start-up costs. Proponents also cite the low weaponization potential as an advantage of thorium due to how difficult it is to weaponize the specific uranium-233/232 and plutonium-238 isotopes produced by thorium reactors, while critics say that development of breeder reactors in general (including thorium reactors, which are breeders by nature) increases proliferation concerns. As of 2020, there are no operational thorium reactors in the world.

A nuclear reactor consumes certain specific fissile isotopes to produce energy. Currently, the most common types of nuclear reactor fuel are:

• Uranium-235, purified (i.e. "enriched") by reducing the amount of uranium-238 in natural mined uranium. Most nuclear power has been generated using low-enriched uranium (LEU), whereas high-enriched uranium (HEU) is necessary for weapons.
• Plutonium-239, transmuted from uranium-238 obtained from natural mined uranium.

Some believe thorium is key to developing a new generation of cleaner, safer nuclear power. According to a 2011 opinion piece by a group of scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, considering its overall potential, thorium-based power "can mean a 1000+ year solution or a quality low-carbon bridge to truly sustainable energy sources solving a huge portion of mankind’s negative environmental impact."

After studying the feasibility of using thorium, nuclear scientists Ralph W. Moir and Edward Teller suggested that thorium nuclear research should be restarted after a three-decade shutdown and that a small prototype plant should be built.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

The syntax of the Python programming language is the set of rules that defines how a Python program will be written and interpreted (by both the runtime system and by human readers). The Python language has many similarities to Perl, C, and Java. However, there are some definite differences between the languages.

🔗 Radio 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Women 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Home Living 🔗 Gender Studies 🔗 Feminism

Wife acceptance factor, wife approval factor, or wife appeal factor (WAF) is an assessment of design elements that either increase or diminish the likelihood a wife will approve the purchase of expensive consumer electronics products such as high-fidelity loudspeakers, home theater systems and personal computers. Stylish, compact forms and appealing colors are commonly considered to have a high WAF. The term is a tongue-in-cheek play on electronics jargon such as "form factor" and "power factor" and derives from the idea that men are predisposed to appreciate gadgetry and performance criteria whereas women must be wooed by visual and aesthetic factors.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Linux

Wim Odilia Georges Taymans is a Belgian software developer based in Malaga, Spain. He is the original developer behind GStreamer and Pipewire technologies, which provide core multimedia processing capabilities to many modern operating systems.

Taymans started his career in multimedia development on the Commodore 64 and the Amiga writing various games and demos. In 1994 he installed the Linux operating system on his Amiga and has since been involved with the development of various multimedia technologies for the Linux platform. His first efforts on Linux were some assembly optimizations for the rtjpeg library; later, he worked on the Trinity video editor before teaming up with Erik Walthinsen to create the GStreamer multimedia framework.

In 2004 he started working for Fluendo in Spain as employee number 3. While working for Fluendo he designed and wrote most of the 0.10 release series of GStreamer. In July 2007 he left Fluendo and joined with Collabora. As part of his job at Collabora he maintained and developed GStreamer further. In November 2013, Taymans started as a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat spending most of his time working on upstream GStreamer.

Taymans was the main architect and developer behind the GStreamer 1.0 release which came out on September 24, 2012.

In July 2015, Taymans announced that he was designing Pinos, which became PipeWire, from his position as Principal Engineer at Red Hat. PipeWire is a server for handling audio and video streams on Linux.

🔗 Novels

The 480 is a political fiction novel by Eugene Burdick (1964).

The plot evolves around the political turmoil after John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963. In the novel, a fictitious charismatic character, John Thatch, an engineer, is seeking nomination for the Republican Party candidate at 1964 presidential elections. He is described as being contaminated with the "political virus". A handful of political professionals are promoting his nomination, in confrontation with the Party establishment. There exist apparent parallels between Thatch and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a write-in hero at New Hampshire primary.

The novel criticizes the socio-political effects on society at large from the use of computers to run massive simulations, which predict the public reaction to certain (proposed) political moves before implementing them. Such simulations make it easy to manipulate the public consciousness.

The "480" in the title denotes the number of groups (by party affiliation, socioeconomic status, location, origin, etc.) that the computer simulation uses to classify the American electorate. The full list of these is reproduced in the Appendix, claimed by the author to be the true list used by the Simulmatics Corporation (real name) in Senator John F. Kennedy's Presidential campaign in 1960. The cover features an IBM 5081 punched card.

The Simulmatics Corporation was created by MIT Professor Ithiel de Sola Pool, who provided a non-fiction backup to "The 480" in "Candidates, Issues, and Strategies: A Computer Simulation of the 1960 Presidential Election," MIT Press, 1964 (with co-authors Robert P. Abelson and Samuel L. Popkin). They built their model from 130,000 archived interviews in Gallup and Roper polls over a ten-year period. Based on its output, they advised Kennedy that he would benefit from a strong civil rights stand and that he had nothing to lose, and much to gain, by attacking religious bigotry and dealing frankly with his Catholicism.

The 480 has been cited as prefiguring the effect of modern social media and data gathering on politics.

🔗 Computing

The law of conservation of complexity, also known as Tesler's Law, or Waterbed Theory, is an adage in human–computer interaction stating that every application has an inherent amount of complexity that cannot be removed or hidden. Instead, it must be dealt with, either in product development or in user interaction.

This poses the question of who should be exposed to the complexity. For example, should a software developer add complexity to the software code to make the interaction simpler for the user or should the user deal with a complex interface so that the software code can be simple?

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Disability

Clanging (or clang associations) is a symptom of mental disorders, primarily found in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. This symptom is also referred to as association chaining, and sometimes, glossomania.

Steuber defines it as "repeating chains of words that are associated semantically or phonetically with no relevant context". This may include compulsive rhyming or alliteration without apparent logical connection between words.

Clanging refers specifically to behavior that is situationally inappropriate. While a poet rhyming is not evidence of mental illness, disorganized speech that impedes the patient's ability to communicate is a disorder in itself, often seen in schizophrenia.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Perl

The WikiWikiWeb is the first-ever wiki, or user-editable website. It was launched on 25 March 1995 by its inventor, programmer Ward Cunningham, to accompany the Portland Pattern Repository website discussing software design patterns. The name WikiWikiWeb originally also applied to the wiki software that operated the website, written in the Perl programming language and later renamed to "WikiBase". The site is frequently referred to by its users as simply "Wiki", and a convention established among users of the early network of wiki sites that followed was that using the word with a capitalized W referred exclusively to the original site.