Last week, Kanye West (aka Ye) was locked out of his Twitter and Instagram accounts following a weekend of antisemitic posts. Now, the saga has taken a sharp turn with news that the hip-hop mogul is acquiring the controversial "free speech" social media app Parler. The deal appears to be happening quickly, with the company behind Parler (Parlement technologies) saying that the parties expect to close the transaction in the fourth quarter of 2022. The price was not revealed.
"The proposed acquisition will assure Parler a future role in creating an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome," said Parlement Technologies CEO Geroge Farmer. "In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves," Kanye added.
Shortly after his return to Twitter, West posted an antisemitic message, which was eventually pulled by Twitter. "The account in question has been locked due to a violation of Twitter’s policies," a spokesperson said at the time. The rapper also shared a screenshot on Instagram with another antisemitic message, and was similarly restricted by that site.
Talked to ye today & expressed my concerns about his recent tweet, which I think he took to heart
According to the Twitter post above, potential future Twitter owner Elon Musk expressed concerns to West about his tweet, saying "I think he took [them] to heart." Apparently, he did so by purchasing a rival service.
Meanwhile, Parler was only recently reinstated to the Google Play after being banned in January 2021 following the US Capitol insurrection. A Google spokesperson said at the time that the removal was due to the app's lack of "moderation policies and enforcement that remove egregious content like posts that incite violence." Apple removed the app for similar reasons, but restored it earlier in May.
As their comments suggest, Parler and West are lauding the acquisition as a boon for free speech. However, if Parler allows racist, sexist or antisemitic posts like the one that got Kanye removed from Twitter and Instagram, it could pulled again from the App Store and Google Play.
Parler launched in 2018 but spiked in popularity after Donald Trump was banned from Twitter and Ted Cruz and others tweeted they were joining the app. Despite declaring itself to be the "free speech social network," however, some Twitter users said they were banned after joining the app to troll conservatives. Parler also competes against Trump's own Truth social media app.
from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics https://ift.tt/Tbv07O8
via IFTTT
The next-generation iPad Pro with Apple's latest M2 processor is set to arrive in "a matter of days," according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. It'll be the first new model since May of last year, and reportedly offer a 20 percent speed boost over the M1 version. Apple will also introduce an iPad dock with an integrated speaker in 2023 and launch new Macs later this year, Gurman wrote in his newsletter.
The new iPad Pro models will keep the same form factors as the current models, with 11-inch and 12.9-inch display versions. While the performance bump isn't enormous, 20 percent is still significant, the M2 chips should bring more efficiency to the iPads Pro. Along with the new high-end models, Apple is about to launch an entry-level iPad soon, Gurman said. It'll reportedly have a USB-C instead of a Lightning port (in line with upcoming European rules), along with 5G support — but will use an A14 Bionic rather than an M-series chip.
Another intriguing piece of news it that Apple is working on an iPad docking accessory with a built-in speaker that's could be announced next year. The idea is that users could attach an iPad to the device and get a full home hub/smart speaker experience. It appears to resemble the Pixel charging speaker dock that Google revealed was coming with the Pixel Tablet going on sale next year.
Along with new iPads, Apple will be launching 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models later in the year. They'll come with more powerful versions of the M2 chip, including the M2 Pro and M2 Max. A Mac Mini with an M2 processor is also coming in the near future.
Finally, Apple is working on the next-generation Apple TV that will use an A14 chip and come with 4GB of RAM, offering a significant boost over the current A12 model. While Gurman is generally accurate about these sort of things, Apple also tends change its mind about products and launch dates — so take the rumors with some salt until they're officially announced.
from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics https://ift.tt/TJVC0Xn
via IFTTT
As part of its ambitious electric vehicle plans, Mercedes has taken the wraps off its latest model, the EQE SUV — along with a bonus high-performance AMG version. Highlights of the new models include slippery aerodynamics, a large 90.6 kWh battery and very quick 0-62MPH times on the AMG model.
Mercedes calls the EQE SUV a "multipurpose variant of the EQE executive sedan" that launched recently. As such it looks very much like an SUV version of the EQE, though it's actually 3.5 inches shorter than the sedan. Size-wise, it's somewhere between the EQ-B and EQS SUVs.
Mercedes-Benz
It's one of the more aerodynamic SUVs out there, with a very slippery 0.26 coefficient of drag — even with the running boards. Along with the large 90.6 kWh battery, that helps contribute to an expected 342 miles of WLTP range (likely less on the EPA scale). Mercedes didn't detail power or performance on the regular EQE model, but instead talks about battery efficiency, thermal cooling, energy recovery, noise and vibration comfort and more in its extremely detailed press release.
The interior has a mix of natural and synthetic materials like NeoTex and leather. Front and center is a curved Hyperscreen that features three separate displays for the infotainment system, vehicle controls and more. The automaker said it has now integrated more streaming services (Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music) into the MBUX infotainment system. There's also a front passenger display that's designed to allow the front passenger to watch TV without distracting the driver.
Mercedes-Benz
The AMG version is Mercedes first performance SUV, and takes everything on the regular EQE to 11. The front and rear motors put out 617HP, or up to 677 from a boost function with the optional AMG Dynamic Plus package. The Race Start feature lets you put full power to the wheels (complete with sound emitted inside and outside the vehicle), getting from 0-62 MPH in 3.5 seconds.
Other performance features on the AMG include an AMG-adapted air suspension, lowered ride height settings for Sport and Sport+ modes, an active anti-roll bar, carbon-ceramic front brakes and rear-axle steering as standard.
Mercedes-Benz
Some exterior touches include digital headlights that project the Mercedes and AMG logos when the vehicle is shut off, large 21 and 22 inch wheels and an AMG logo on the hood in place of the usual Mercedes one. Inside, lucky buyers can choose from four interior options, with leather seating as standard. The Hyperscreen also gets custom AMG graphics, including a performance readout in the center display.
More details for the EQE like powertrain options will be announced closer to launch. Mercedes-Benz didn't detail pricing or availability, but did say that the standard version of the EQE SUV will start production in December at its US facility in Alabama. Unlike the EQS SUV that starts at $100,000, the EQE SUV may have a shot at getting under the $80,000 threshold to quality for a $7,500 federal tax credit.
from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics https://ift.tt/C0eIVjG
via IFTTT
The Moore School stood ready as people began to arrive by train and trolley. John and Pres, as well as the engineers and deans and professors of the university, wore their best suits and Army officers were in dress uniform with their medals gleaming. The six women wore their best professional skirt suits and dresses.
Kay and Fran manned the front door of the Moore School. As the scientists and technologists arrived, some from as far as Boston, the two women welcomed them warmly. They asked everyone to hang up their heavy winter coats on the portable coat racks that Moore School staff had left nearby. Then they directed them down the hall and around the corner to the ENIAC room.
Just before 11:00 a.m., Fran and Kay ran back to be in the ENIAC room when the demonstration began.
As they slid into the back of the room, everything was at the ready. At the front of the great ENIAC U, there was space for some speakers, a few rows of chairs, and plenty of standing room for invited guests and ENIAC team members. Across the room, Marlyn, Betty, and Jean stood in the back and the women smiled to each other. Their big moment was about to begin. Ruth stayed outside, pointing late arrivals in the right direction.
The room was packed and was filled with an air of anticipation and wonder as people saw ENIAC for the first time.
Demonstration Day started with a few introductions. Major General Barnes started with the BRL officers and Moore School deans and then presented John and Pres as the co-inventors. Then Arthur came to the front of the room and introduced himself as the master of ceremonies for the ENIAC events. He would run five programs, all using the remote control box he held in his hand.
The first program was an addition. Arthur hit one of the but-tons and the ENIAC whirled to life. Then he ran a multiplication. His expert audience knew that ENIAC was calculating it many times faster than any other machine in the world. Then he ran the table of squares and cubes, and then sines and cosines. So far, Demonstration Day was the same as the one two weeks earlier, and for this sophisticated audience, the presentation was pretty boring.
But Arthur was just getting started and the drama was about to begin. He told them that now he would run a ballistics trajectory three times on ENIAC.
He pushed the button and ran it once. The trajectory “ran beautifully,” Betty remembered. Then Arthur ran it again, a version of the trajectory without the punched cards printing, and it ran much faster. Punched cards actually slowed things down a little bit.
Then Arthur pointed everyone to the grids of tiny lights at the top of the accumulators and urged his attendees to look closely at them in the moments to come. He nodded to Pres, who stood against the wall, and suddenly Pres turned off the lights. In the black room, only a few small status lights were lit on the units of ENIAC. Everything else was in darkness.
With a click of the button, Arthur brought the ENIAC to life. For a dazzling twenty seconds, the ENIAC lit up. Those watching the accumulators closely saw the 100 tiny lights twinkle as they moved in a flash, first going up as the missile ascended to the sky, and then going down as it sped back to earth, the lights forever changing and twinkling. Those twenty seconds seemed at once an eternity and instantaneous.
Then the ENIAC finished, and darkness filled the room again. Arthur and Pres waited a moment, and then Pres turned on the lights and Arthur announced dramatically that ENIAC had just completed a trajectory faster than it would take a missile to leave the muzzle of artillery and hit its target. “Everybody gasped.”
Less than twenty seconds. This audience of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians knew how many hours it took to calculate a differential calculus equation by hand. They knew that ENIAC had calculated the work of a week in fewer than two dozen seconds. They knew the world had changed.
Climax complete, everyone in the room was beaming. The Army officers knew their risk had paid off. The ENIAC engineers knew their hardware was a success. The Moore School deans knew they no longer had to be worried about being embarrassed. And the ENIAC Programmers knew that their trajectory had worked perfectly. Years of work, effort, ingenuity, and creativity had come together in twenty seconds of pure innovation.
Some would later call this moment the birth of the “Electronic Computing Revolution.” Others would soon call it the birth of the Information Age. After those precious twenty seconds, no one would give a second look to the great Mark I electromechanical computer or the differential analyzer. After Demonstration Day, the country was on a clear path to general- purpose, programmable, all- electronic computing. There was no other direction. There was no other future. John, Pres, Herman, and some of the engineers fielded questions from the guests, and then the formal session finished. But no one wanted to leave. Attendees surrounded John and Pres, Arthur and Harold.
The women circulated. They had taken turns running punched cards through the tabulator and had stacks of trajectory printouts to share. They divided up the sheets and moved around the room to hand them out. Attendees were happy to receive a trajectory, a souvenir of the great moment they had just witnessed.
But no attendee congratulated the women. Because no guest knew what they had done. In the midst of the announcements and the introductions of Army officers, Moore School deans, and ENIAC inventors, the Programmers had been left out. “None of us girls were ever introduced as any part of it” that day, Kay noted later.
Since no one had thought to name the six young women who programmed the ballistics trajectory, the audience did not know of their work: thousands of hours spent learning the units of ENIAC, studying its “direct programming” method, breaking down the ballistics trajectory into discrete steps, writing the detailed pedaling sheets for the trajectory program, setting up their program on ENIAC, and learning ENIAC “down to a vacuum tube.” Later, Jean said, they “did receive a lot of compliments” from the ENIAC team, but at that moment they were unknown to the guests in the room.
And at that moment, it did not matter. They cared about the success of ENIAC and their team, and they knew they had played a role, a critical role, in the success of the day. This was a day that would go down in history, and they had been there and played an invaluable part.
from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics https://ift.tt/jz9SYcw
via IFTTT
18 MIND BLOWING Gadgets On Amazon You Must See! | Best Tech Gadgets
18 Mind Blowing Gadgets On Amazon You Must See | Best Tech Gadgets Welcome Back To WorldWide Tech! As our generation ...
via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBjZnpR-Z5s WorldWideTech
In September, SpaceX sent a letter to the Department of Defense, asking the Pentagon to take over paying for the expenses related to Ukraine's use of its Starlink satellite internet. According to CNN, SpaceX told the department that continuing to provide the Ukranian government with access to Starlink would cost the company over $120 million for the rest of 2022 and almost $400 million over the next 12 months. "We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time," the company wrote. Now, company chief Elon Musk seems to have backtracked on the decision to ask the Pentagon for assistance and wrote on Twitter that SpaceX will "keep funding [the] Ukraine [government] for free" even though Starlink is still losing money.
The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free
Musk confirmed what he said in his tweet to The Financial Times and added that SpaceX will continue funding Ukraine's access to Starlink's satellite internet "indefinitely."
When news about the letter came out, Musk defended his company's position and clarified that SpaceX is not asking the Pentagon to pay for previous expenses. He explained that SpaceX simply can't fund the existing system in Ukraine and regularly send thousands of new terminals to replace the ones routinely destroyed by the Russian forces at the same time. Musk added that the "burn" for keeping the Starlink system running in the country is $20 million a month, since it's had to "defend against cyberattacks and jamming," as well.
Earlier this month, The Times reported that Ukrainian troops grappled with Starlink outages that led to "catastrophic" loss of communication on the frontline. Musk responded that the piece "falsely claims that Starlink terminals [and] service were paid for, when only a small percentage have been." Based on SpaceX's letter that CNN had obtained, though, around 85 percent of the 20,000 terminals in Ukraine at the time were fully or partially funded by the US, the UK, Poland and other outside sources.
The Pentagon confirmed after knowledge of the letter became public that it's been discussing payments with SpaceX but that it's also been looking at potential alternatives. Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon's deputy press secretary, said in a statement: "There's not just SpaceX, there are other entities that we can certainly partner with when it comes to providing Ukraine with what they need on the battlefield."
from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics https://ift.tt/Dte3lO0
via IFTTT
Well it happened again! I made a rookie move and now I have a full Tuesday Bro Tuesday video that sounds just… awful. My most sincere apologies. I promise to double check my mic from now on. Stick with it though, because this could be the best video i’ve ever uploaded!! now then…
Hey everyone! Welcome to Tuesday Bro Tuesday Episode: 23!
TAKE ACTION TO HELP SAVE VAPING FROM THE FDA AND THEIR OVER REGULATION OF VAPOR PRODUCTS! VISIT AUGUST8TH.ORG TO URGE YOUR CONGRESS PEOPLE TO SUPPORT HR1136!
Got a very rad program planned this week. Of course there are some reviews. 4 all new products are joining us this week including the MEDUSA RDA and my adventure with the KYLIN RTA. If there is anything you guys want to see? let me know in the comments down below. Of course we have some viewer mails and some random juice tasting at the end so tuck in, Grab your best vape, and enjoy the program
Got a very rad program planned this week. Of course there are some reviews. The Smoant box goes though some torture testing and we welcome the Goon LP as well as the PURGE mod to the review queue. Of course we have some viewer mails and some random juice tasting at the end so tuck in, Grab your best vape, and enjoy the program
On of my subscribers named Torbjorn ( from Sweden ) sent me this video, It’s not related to vaping, but its still a fantastic video on the subject of Big tobacco
http://ift.tt/2m6tbRn February 17, 2017 at 11:53PM GRIMMGREEN.COM http://ift.tt/177rnJE http://ift.tt/eA8V8J
Striking Balance | Health Canada On Vaping | Part 1
When you want answers the best person to ask is always the one in charge. For vaping in Canada that person is Suzy McDonald, the Director General of the Tobacco Control Directorate at Health Canada.
At this critical moment for vaping, on the cusp of federal regulation, what are the driving priorities at Health Canada on the vaping file? What are the deliberations around flavours, nicotine and the evolving science of vaping? And, what does ‘legal’ truly mean for vapers in Canada?
Find out in part one of this exclusive two-part series—the first television interview granted by the top policy-maker—only on RegulatorWatch.com.
RegulatorWatch.com – February 14, 2017.
http://ift.tt/2kAdIYS February 15, 2017 at 09:21PM GRIMMGREEN.COM http://ift.tt/177rnJE http://ift.tt/eA8V8J
If i’m being honest with myself, I have been really slacking about posting here on GrimmGreen.com , but this video is something I think everyone should watch. Thanks so my subscriber Lloyd for sending this my way
http://ift.tt/2lDQ828 February 13, 2017 at 08:52PM GRIMMGREEN.COM http://ift.tt/177rnJE http://ift.tt/eA8V8J
