International NGO Global Witness found that the Taliban earns up to $20m a year from Afghanistan’s lapis mines, lapis lazuli being, as crystal websites explain, one of the best stones for activating psychic abilities. For Wells, the importance of ethical crystal mining is not solely about the impact on the planet, but also on the crystal itself – he believes the mining of a stone affects its healing properties. And rather than directly from mines, or even the factories where the stones are cut and polished, retailers like the Crystal Geode buy from go-betweens, independent traders who sell at touring shows, who, even if they have documentation to prove their supply chain, are disinclined to share it, in part for fear of doing themselves out of a job.

The planned dropping of 32-bit support on Ubuntu saga continues… Well known Valve Linux developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has said they plan to officially stop supporting Ubuntu for Steam on Linux.He tweeted late Friday night, “Ubuntu 19.10 and future releases will not be officially supported by Steam or recommended to our users. I’m hearing that Canonical may revert course and provide limited 32-bit support, but that isn’t yet confirmed. We’ll see if this also leads Valve to renewed efforts around SteamOS / Debian or if they simply decide to shift resources elsewhere.

For example:

We tested mimalloc against many other top allocators over a wide range of benchmarks, ranging from various real world programs to synthetic benchmarks that see how the allocator behaves under more extreme circumstances. In our benchmarks, mimalloc always outperforms all other leading allocators (jemalloc, tcmalloc, Hoard, etc), and usually uses less memory (up to 25% more in the worst case). With a single thread they all perform the same, but when running with multiple threads the potential allocator induced false sharing of the cache lines causes large run-time differences, where mimalloc is more than 18× faster than jemalloc and tcmalloc!

You are also not Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook or one of several other big tech companies I could mention here. A lot of talks you probably hear from these big players are not “things that work” but “things that worked FOR THEM). I think that a lot of these big software companies were shaped by their engineers.

The countries are listed in alphabetical order in their bloc, eg running down from Albania to UK in Europe

Each line of coloured pixels is the temperature record of an individual nation within its region, stacked one atop the other. This global “Climate Stripes” graphic is the work of Prof Ed Hawkins at Reading University who has sought clearer ways to communicate the issues around climate change – and to start conversations that might lead to solutions. Prof Hawkins experimented with different ways of rendering the agencies’ global data and chanced upon the coloured stripes idea.

And because Facebook, and by extension the Facebook-owned Instagram, forbids retailers to run ads that promote the sale or use of firearms, her platform is also a place to market guns that can’t be easily marketed online. Ilana Panich-Linsman for Vox

Clouse says the company’s marketing team members used to post photos of open safes with guns inside, but if they tried to promote them through Instagram’s advertising tool, they were blocked. Influencers can’t use Facebook or Instagram ad platforms to boost posts where a gun is being “brandished” either, but they widen a brand’s audience each

An independent tribunal established to investigate claims of forced organ harvesting in China has determined that a pervasive campaign of human rights abuses bordering on genocide is the primary source of the nation’s lavish stock of body parts for transplant procedures. Despite Chinese assertions that it ceased the practice of removing body parts from executed prisoners years ago, the China Tribunal – led by prominent lawyers, human rights experts, and a transplant surgeon – unanimously determined that widespread organ harvesting from prisoners and dissidents remains an ongoing horror inside China. In its “unavoidable” final conclusion, the China Tribunal found forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale, primarily sourcing body parts from detained Falun Gong practitioners, and possibly also an ethnic minority called the Uyghurs (although other groups are also targeted).

When in 1990 LucasArts instituted a newsletter for their fans in the tradition of Infocom’s old New Zork Times, they asked Purcell to provide a Sam & Max comic strip for each issue. Ironically, the Sam & Max game got the green light just as Purcell himself was pulling back a bit from LucasArts. But thankfully, Clark and Stemmle proved to have a gift of their own for that trademark Sam & Max form of comedic mayhem, while Purcell himself and his soon-to-be wife Collette Michaud — another LucasArts artist, whom he had met on the job — made time to write or at least to edit most of the dialog.

A process is a sequential thread of control and its events model interactions with objects — an invoke event corresponds to the invocation of an operation on an object and a receive event corresponds to the receipt of a response from an object. The difficulty in implementing concurrent objects is that in general, histories are not sequential and operations from different processes can overlap, resulting in a possibility of ill-defined states. Space-time diagram with processes, objects, events and operations.Consensus Objects
A consensus object is a concurrent object with a single operation propose which behaves in accordance with the following sequential specification:
let propose value =
if state = null then
state – value
stateA consensus object must adhere to the following conditions:
Consistency: all processes invoking the consensus object receive the same value.

So when the brothers, Dan and Farris, bought a vast stretch of mountain-studded land in southwest Idaho, it was not just an investment, but a sign of their good fortune. Today, just 100 families own about 42 million acres across the country, a 65,000-mile expanse, according to the Land Report, a magazine that tracks large purchases. Researchers at the magazine have found that the amount of land owned by those 100 families has jumped 50 percent since 2007.