Apr 17
Amazon’s running a one-day sale on refurbished HP computers, and while most of the options are decidedly low-end, there are a few options worth checking out.
Apr 17
Easter has come and gone and while celebrating with eggs and candy, you might have missed these awesome eggs painted by artist Barak Hardley. He spent over 150 hours painting them all up with images of celebrities and pop culture icons.
Some of my favorites are the Stranger Things kids, though one is missing. I like the King Tut and the Pokémon Go egg as well. There are also tributes to some of the greats we recently lost, including Carrie Fisher and Gene Wilder.
You can check out the video or Barak’s website and see them all for yourself.
There are a bunch of cool eggs to check out. This guy is impressive. I’d like to see him in the act of painting one of the eggs. Popped out eye Glenn is the best.
[via i09]
Apr 17
2-in-1 tablet/laptop hybrids are in fashion these days. In fact, analysts like IDC tout them as the saviors of the PC industry. But the form factor is also seeing some interest in more than just PCs. They’ve also come to tablets and even e-ink readers. Yes, you heard that right. A company by the name of Onyx International has just … Continue reading
Apr 17
Porsche does not often, if ever, build lackluster vehicles. Rather, its stock in trade are automobiles that catch your eye just before their power makes you stop to catch your breath. Consider, then, the exception that is the new-for-2017 base model Porsche Macan, the entry-level follow-up to the outstanding Macan S, GTS, and Macan Turbo trio that have dazzled since … Continue reading
Apr 17
No Plans For Early Elections After Turkey Referendum, Deputy Prime Minister Says
Posted in: Today's ChiliANKARA, April 17 (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has made it very clear that there are no plans to dissolve parliament and call for an early election before the 2019 vote, Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
A day after Turks narrowly voted to change the constitution and hand Erdogan sweeping new powers, Simsek said relations with the European Union would be on areas of common interest, adding that some of the “noise” between Ankara and Europe should die down after the European elections cycle.
Erdogan declared victory in the referendum on Sunday, after unofficial results showed 51.5 percent of voters had backed the constitutional changes to replace the parliamentary system with an all-powerful presidency and abolish the office of prime minister. The main opposition said the vote as marred by irregularities and they would challenge its result.
There has been some speculation that Erdogan could call a new election so that his new powers could take effect right away, but Simsek dismissed that.
“Yesterday the president made it very clear that elections will be held in November 2019,” Simsek told Reuters in the capital Ankara. “It is very clear. We have work to do.”
Analysts have said the government will now need to focus on harmonizing laws and the legal system with the new executive presidency, an overhaul that could take the rest of the year.
Simsek and others in the ruling AKP have said that victory for the referendum would allow the government to quickly roll out investor-friendly structural reforms – such as to the labor market and the tax code – but investors have been skeptical, seeing the likelihood of more delays and policy gridlock.
“In economic terms this is huge … you have got five years to execute your program,” Simsek said. “Stability on its own is necessary but not sufficient. It has to be complemented with reforms.”
The lira firmed more than 1 percent, and was trading at 3.6680 at 0949 GMT, from 3.7220 on Friday’s close.
EU IN FOCUS
A big focus for investors will be Turkey’s relations with the European Union. In the run-up to the vote, Erdogan had floated the idea of reinstating the death penalty, saying it could be taken to a referendum if need be.
Turkey abandoned capital punishment more than a decade ago as part of its bid to join the European Union. Restoring it would all but end Ankara’s bid to join the EU.
Relations hit a low during the referendum campaign when EU countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, barred Turkish ministers from holding rallies in support of the changes.
Erdogan called the moves “Nazi acts” and said Turkey could reconsider ties with the European Union after many years of seeking EU membership.
Simsek, however, played down the strain in ties.
“Some of the noise will die down as Europe goes through its election cycle,” he said.
“The focus is what is in our common interest… upgrading the customs union is a low-hanging fruit that could double Turkey-EU trade,” he said, referring to the free-trade deal between Turkey and the bloc.
(Additional reporting by Nevzat Devranoglu; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Daren Butler and Alison Williams)
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Apr 17
ANKARA/ISTANBUL, April 17 (Reuters) – Turkey’s main opposition party demanded on Monday that a referendum granting President Tayyip Erdogan sweeping new powers be nullified after a narrow “Yes” vote that exposed bitter divisions and drew concern from European Union leaders.
Erdogan’s supporters took to the streets to cheer, while opponents stayed indoors banging pots and pans in protest over the vote to bring the biggest overhaul in Turkish politics since the founding of the modern republic, abolishing the prime minister’s post and concentrating power in the presidency.
Unofficial results showed a narrow victory with 51.4 percent of votes cast in favor. Official results are due in 12 days.
Erdogan, a populist with a background in once-banned Islamist parties, has ruled since 2003 with no real rival, while his country emerged as one of the fastest-growing industrial powers in both Europe and the Middle East.
He has also been at the center of global affairs, commanding NATO’s second-biggest military on the border of Middle East war zones, taking in millions of Syrian refugees and controlling their further flow into Europe.
Critics accuse him of steering Turkey towards one-man rule and exacerbating divisions that could increase instability. The two largest opposition parties both challenged Sunday’s referendum, saying it was deeply flawed.
The pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party said it presented complaints about unstamped ballots affecting 3 million voters, more than twice the margin of Erdogan’s victory.
The main secularist opposition People’s Republican Party said it was still unclear how many votes were affected.
“This is why the only decision that will end debate about the legitimacy (of the vote) and ease the people’s legal concerns is the annulment of this election,” deputy party chairman Bulent Tezcan said.
Tezcan said he would if necessary go to Turkey’s constitutional court – one of the institutions that Erdogan would gain firm control over under the constitutional changes, through the appointment of its members.
Erdogan has long said the changes were needed to end chronic instability that plagued the country over decades when the military repeatedly tried to seize power from weak civilian governments.
“For the first time in the history of the Republic, we are changing our ruling system through civil politics,” he said in a victory speech.
But the divisions revealed by the narrow referendum result could also herald more unrest to come. The changes won strong backing in conservative rural areas, but were just as strongly opposed in Istanbul and other cities, as well as in the restive Kurdish southeast.
“ERDOGAN’S RESPONSIBILITY”
The president survived a coup attempt last year and responded with a crackdown, jailing 47,000 people and sacking or suspending more than 120,000 from government jobs such as schoolteachers, soldiers, police, judges or other professionals.
The changes could keep him in power until 2029 or beyond, making him easily the most important figure in Turkish history since state founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk built a modern nation from the ashes of the Ottoman empire after World War One.
Response from Europe, which has had increasingly strained ties with Turkey, was cautious, awaiting the judgment of international observers later on Monday. Germany, host to some 4 million Turks, said it was up to Erdogan himself to heal the rifts that the vote had exposed.
“The tight referendum result shows how deeply divided Turkish society is, and that means a big responsibility for the Turkish leadership and for President Erdogan personally,” said Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel in a joint statement.
In a signal of the direction he now plans for his nation, Erdogan said he could call a referendum to restore the death penalty. Such a move would effectively put an end to Turkey’s decades-long bid to join the European Union, which has been the impetus for years of legal, social and economic reforms, and also an important part of how many Turks defined themselves.
Relations with Europe were strained during the referendum campaign when EU countries including Germany and the Netherlands barred Turkish ministers from holding rallies to support the changes. Erdogan provoked a stern German response by comparing those limits on campaigning to the actions of the Nazis.
CELEBRATION
Thousands of Erdogan supporters waved flags and blasted horns into the early hours on Monday in celebration of a man who they say has transformed the quality of life for millions of pious Turks marginalized for decades by the secular elite.
There were scattered protests against the result, but these were more sporadic. In some affluent, secular neighborhoods, opponents stayed indoors, banging pots and pans, a sign of dissent that became widespread during anti-Erdogan protests in 2013, when the police crushed demonstrations against him.
The High Electoral Board (YSK) confirmed late on Sunday the results had shown the “Yes” campaign with 1.25 million more votes than the “No” camp. The official results are expected within 12 days.
The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) demanded a recount of up to 60 percent of the votes. It cited as a potential irregularity a last minute decision by the electoral board to count ballots that had not been stamped by officials.
Erdogan said 25 million people had supported the proposal, which will replace Turkey’s parliamentary system with an all-powerful presidency. That was a smaller mandate than the decisive result for which he and his ruling AK Party had aggressively campaigned.
Nevertheless, by ending uncertainty the result triggered a two percent rally in the Turkish lira from its close last week. It traded at 3.6380 against the U.S. dollar early on Monday, firming from 3.7220 on Friday.
”NO EARLY ELECTIONS”
Under the changes, most of which will only come into effect after the next elections due in 2019, the president will appoint the cabinet and an undefined number of vice-presidents, and be able to select and remove senior civil servants without parliamentary approval.
There has been some speculation that Erdogan could call new elections so that his new powers could take effect right away. However, Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek told Reuters there was no such plan, and the elections would still be held in 2019.
“Yesterday the president made it very clear that elections will be held in November 2019,” he said. “It is very clear. We have work to do.”
Erdogan served as prime minister from 2003 until 2014, when rules were changed to hold direct elections for the office of president, previously a ceremonial role elected by parliament. Since becoming the first directly elected president, he has set about making the post more important, like the executive presidencies of France, Russia or the United States.
In a sign of his authority, he was set to chair a cabinet meeting later on Monday, a role traditionally carried out by the prime minister although he has chaired such meetings before.
Pro-government media painted the result as a victory for the Turkish people, transforming a constitution left over from a 1980 military coup. The Sabah daily hailed “The People’s Revolution.” The Star’s headline was “The People’s Victory.”
However, the opposition daily Cumhuriyet’s headline said “The ballot box is overshadowed,” reporting opposition objections to what they said were irregularities in the voting.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaux in Istanbul and Ankara; Writing by Daren Butler, David Dolan and Dominic Evans; Editing by Peter Graff)
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Apr 17
Eleven months ago, Hillary Clinton was poised to wrap up the Democratic presidential nomination, and feminist writer Lindy West came out with a perfectly timed book.
Both memoir and activist in nature, Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman tackled our societal discomfort with women who speak up, take up space, and fight for their own humanity. West wrote extensively, and hilariously, about her journey to fat acceptance; a comedy writer and long-time fixture in the Seattle comedy scene, she also revisited a very public, painful rupture with much of the stand-up community due to her stance on rape jokes and her ensuing harassment on YouTube, Twitter, and elsewhere. In both cases, she visibly shifted the public conversation in the direction she hoped. Progress was on the move.
Then, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Shrill, which came out in paperback this February, lives on in a very different political moment than the one in which she wrote it. A sober introduction added to the paperback edition captures the newly jaundiced lens her likely feminist, liberal readers might have on the world. “We don’t know if November 8, 2016 was the republic’s last fair election,” she wrote. “We don’t know whether Trump is simply robbing us, or robbing us and seeding a holocaust.”
West wrote the introduction shortly after the election. In January, she wrote a column for the Guardian announcing that she was leaving Twitter; she’s convinced that the abuse she and many others endured on the platform was “a grand-scale normalization project, disseminating libel and disinformation […] and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency.” It was a much darker vision of social media than her ultimately hopeful take on Twitter trolling in Shrill ― in one story, also featured on “This American Life,” she has a long conversation with a troll who felt remorse after impersonating her dead father.
“The book is still true, and I still believe in it,” West told The Huffington Post in a recent phone conversation. She felt the book needed to be reframed for 2017, however. “If you write a book about progress, you have to acknowledge when, suddenly, history grabs you and drags you backwards.”
We chatted with West about how her book would have been different in the Trump era, the power of empathy ― and comedy ― and the value of diverse representation. Check out our interview below:
I’ve always wondered what it’s like to go on tour for a book that was wrapped up and finished a while ago ― and now you’re another year out, for the paperback ― what is it like to keep talking about a book that you finished so long ago, at this point?
I mean, it’s incredible, honestly. It’s really hard to be away from home for so long, it’s grueling, just because travel is grueling, and it’s exhausting and all my clothes are dirty. But it’s also ― what an honor. What a rare honor to get to travel around and meet people and connect with people and hear people’s stories. I think my book is particularly well-suited to touring because it’s so personal and it makes people feel safe and emboldened to tell their own stories.
It’s weird because I wrote it in 2015, and the world is very different now than it was then. It’s an optimistic book … it’s a happy, positive book, basically. There are sad parts, but the overall message is that kindness pays off and that progress is winning and that you do occasionally achieve tangible victories if you just keep fighting. And then, after the election it was just like, oh man. I have to go out again on tour with this book? So I wrote a new introduction for the paperback that’s like, “Sorry … let’s talk about the incident … ”
Did it change how you felt about the book in retrospect?
No, no, not really. All of those things are still true. It’s not like people stopped caring about progress, or kind people stopped caring about other people, or feminists lost. Of course, the establishment … of course they cheat, and lie, and steal, to maintain control. Because that’s essentially what happened. I don’t really honestly understand how an election can be considered legitimate if there’s documented voter suppression, not to mention gerrymandering and who knows what else. Other people cheating to destroy you doesn’t mean that you were wrong, or that you did a bad job even. Not that the left doesn’t … have in-group conversations that need to happen and internal critiques that need to happen.
But no, I don’t think, for example, that Trump’s win was because feminists pushed too hard and were off-putting. Or Black Lives Matter was too divisive. Or all these narratives that were immediately pushed right after the election, that what the Democratic Party needs to do is move to the center and not further left.
Do you think you would have written a different book if you wrote it during a Trump presidency?
Mhm, I think so, probably. It would have been less idealistic or something. But I don’t feel like I was really idealistic. It’s just funny because I feel like I’ve been writing about men being horrible and Republicans being oppressive nightmare people for my whole career, so 12 years. And every day under the Trump administration I understand it afresh. Like, oh, I didn’t realize it could actually be this bad.
So I don’t know what I would have written. I think a lot of it would have felt insignificant. It’s really hard for me to think of anything but politics and the government and the people whose lives are in immediate danger. So I probably wouldn’t have written a book about my butt size. Not that the struggles of fat people aren’t important, or the struggles of feminist bloggers getting threatened on Twitter. Those are still important, and the latter, I think, is deeply entwined with the election.
I think if I were to write a book this year ― and I might, actually, I’m working on a proposal ― it just would have been about Trump. I mean, how can you write about anything else? Not him specifically, but the climate and culture that did this to us.
Is that what your proposal is about?
Yeah, indirectly, yeah. I’m not really talking about it publicly yet. But yeah, basically.
You write a lot about comedy in the book, and right now, a lot of comics seem to be struggling with how to be comics in the Trump era. Does that conversation, and comedy in general, feel at all frivolous to you now, or do you think it’s part of the whole resistance?
It doesn’t feel frivolous. I think it’s really important. I didn’t understand it at the time, but in retrospect those conversations that we were having about comedy and about rape jokes are incredibly relevant to Trump’s election. Not that conversation specifically, but the rhetoric that was used and even maybe developed in that conversation, where any time you critiqued anything a white man did, you were called a censor, and you were told you’re violating the First Amendment, and that criticism is infringing on someone’s right to free speech.
I think that had a lot to do with the disintegration of shared cultural values and standards that social justice movements had fought really hard to put in place. Like, “rape is bad.” Just a couple years ago, it was pretty standard knowledge that Nazis are bad! I think the conversation about comedy was totally relevant to that and was a part of that. I see some of the same people who were harassing me over rape jokes five years ago leading groups of alt-right trolls now. It’s not a coincidence.
On the positive side, comedy has always been really valuable as a tool for social change. You can see it happening in real time, in front of your eyeballs. Trump watches “SNL” every week and then ― you know, he kicked Bannon off the Security Council supposedly because he was embarrassed by the way that “SNL” portrayed their relationship.You could see it as encouraging, or you could also be terrified. Or both. It’s terrifying that he’s so easily manipulated, but great that at least we know how to manipulate him, and we hold the tools to do that.
And beyond that, comedy is a coping mechanism, comedy makes people feel less alone. Just for everyone trying to survive and not explode at this bizarre time in history, it’s important to have funny people recontextualizing our lives for us in a way that makes sense and makes us feel like we’re part of a community. And it’s so satisfying when someone points out an absurdity that you hadn’t quite put together, put your finger on before. When someone points out something that you missed, or makes a connection you hadn’t seen, and makes you laugh and makes bad people look ridiculous. It’s really powerful. I don’t think it’s frivolous at all.
There were so many points in your book that are really emotional, but maybe the most surprising for me was “It’s About Free Speech, It’s Not About Hating Women,” when you realize that comedy has been so unwelcoming to you as a woman that you can’t enjoy it anymore. What effect does it have on people to have to accept a certain measure of pain in order to, in theory, relax and escape themselves?
It’s very alienating, and it’s very unfair, because it’s only certain people that have to do that. To tell people that they have to sacrifice some of their humanity and their self-respect to be part of the club, that excludes people from all the things I listed earlier, from being able to feel like you’re part of a community and like you’re not alone and like you’re not imagining these bizarre experiences that we’re all going through right now.
And then it also has economic implications. It affects who makes money, who gets booked for gigs, who quits because it’s an unpleasant environment. And that goes not just for comedy but any field, basically. That’s why I still don’t go to [stand-up] comedy shows really, unless it’s a friend of mine.
I’m glad that I did that, because I think I contributed in a small way to comedy opening up a little bit. It definitely feels different than it did five years ago. There’s a lot more diversity. It’s not necessarily taboo to be a feminist comedian anymore, and I hope that I helped with that. But I’m not ready to jump back into the comedy club. So in a way, congratulations, you guys won, you chased me away. But I feel like I left at least something as a legacy. I left some small amount of change in my wake, and I’m thrilled about that.
You end up, in the book, circling around this idea of being radically empathetic. Right now, people on the left are asked a lot to empathize with Trump voters, or the white working class. Do you think this kind of empathy can move us forward, or that any kind of empathy can get us out of where we are now?
I think you can have empathy to the extent that people living in poverty need help. People of all races living in poverty need help. I don’t have any interest in developing empathy for people who are racist. The idea that economic hardship made Trump voters racist is ludicrous to me. I’m sorry, black Americans have been experiencing economic hardship for hundreds of years, and they managed to not vote for Trump in massive numbers. It’s just absurd, and to me it feels like an attempt to shift the conversation back to white people and just make everything about fucking white people all the time. Maybe give people some credit for their choices. People chose to vote for Trump. People chose to vote against their own ability to survive. If the Republicans manage to dismantle the health care system, people will die.
You can have empathy for someone without validating every one of their bad decisions. And when we talk about, where was the vacuum here, where was the lack of empathy, it was on the side of people who voted for Trump. People voted for mayhem and death. Those are the people I’m talking to. Maybe think outside of your tiny circle for one second, and outside of your resentment of liberals and outside of your resentment of black people and immigrants for taking part of whatever you think of as your birthright. I think people really do think of this as a white country, for white people. That’s what Make America Great Again means. I’m not even grasping at straws, this is all very surface-level.
I do feel like if we’re going to look ahead to the next elections, the next round of elections, there are people who love Donald Trump and will never change their minds. And that’s fine. But there are a lot of people who just didn’t vote and who think of themselves as apolitical, and those people are reachable. And a way to do that is to find out what’s happening in their communities and what they need and actually speak to those issues. Because the Republicans are not offering anything. All they do is take and steal and destroy, which I understand sounds melodramatic. But I don’t know any other way to put it at this point. It’s like every policy proposal is like, “OK, what if we took everything away from people and gave it to billionaires, and then let everyone die on the streets?” I guess I don’t really feel like being delicate and gentle and euphemistic about that anymore. It’s just a party of chaos and death. Not that the Democrats are perfect, blah blah blah, caveat caveat.
Of course I have empathy for people in rural America who are struggling and barely getting by. Of course I do. But I don’t think that the solution is mindlessly validating those people’s prejudices.
You have this amazing essay in Shrill, “Lady Kluck,” about the fat women role models you had in pop culture growing up. It really made me think about how we act like diversity isn’t important because we should be able to identify with any character. What’s your response to that argument?
That’s easy for people to say who see themselves represented. Oh, just identify with me! I do!
If you can identify with anyone, then why do you care if media is diverse? You always hear video game dudes being like, “Ugh, feminazis want everyone in a video game to be a black lesbian.” Well, if representation doesn’t matter, then why do you care? Somehow they’re making a representation argument that everyone in a video game should be a white man, while also claiming that representation arguments are ludicrous.
Obviously it matters. If it didn’t matter, then straight white people wouldn’t cling so hard to being the only people represented in media. It matters because it makes you feel seen and comfortable and it teaches people how to treat you. It humanizes you. It’s vitally important.
There are just so many ways in which people don’t know how to tell the stories of groups to which they do not belong, so the only logical answer is to hire diverse staff, hire diverse teams, have people telling their own stories or at least consulting and telling you when you do a bad job. It’s not enough to just expect that we can all just relate to any character. Because it’s not like the any character is being written by any person. People are just writing about themselves and then expecting marginalized people to be thrilled to be invisible.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
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— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Apr 17
As we’ve seen in the past, a strong password doesn’t automatically make people safe online. Often, a specially-crafted email is all that it takes for someone to hand over their digital life to a malicious third party. Although email services are doin…
Apr 17
If you’ve ever changed numbers on WhatsApp or if you know someone who has, what usually happens is you send out a mass message to all your contacts (or those you want to stay in contact with) to let them know that you’re changing numbers. This can be tedious and you could miss out a contact or two in the process.
However in a recent sighting by @WABetaInfo, it seems that WhatsApp could be getting a new feature where your contacts will automatically be notified whenever you change your number. That being said we should note that this feature was spotted in the beta for Windows Phone, which means we can’t be sure if it will arrive for iOS or Android, although we guess it makes sense that it would, possibly at a later date.
WhatsApp beta for Windows Phone 2.17.130: new change number feature, to notify your contacts about your new number (DISABLED BY DEFAULT) pic.twitter.com/FpZWHH3MS3
— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) April 15, 2017
Now as you can see in the screenshot to the right, users can choose to notify all of their contacts or only those that they are chatting with. There does not appear to be an option for users to pick and choose which contacts they want to share it with, but maybe those options could be added at a later date.
There is no word on when this particular update will be pushed out, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for more details regarding its availability, especially on other platforms.
WhatsApp Could Get A Feature To Notify When You Change Numbers , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Apr 17
Halo 3 was released back in 2007 where it was made available for the Xbox 360 before it eventually found its way onto the Xbox One. However could it also be making its way to the PC? Nothing official has been announced yet, but it seems that AMD could have given a clue away.
AMD recently held at event in Korea for its new R5 CPUs. During the presentation, the company showed a video that featured several PC games, and it was spotted in the video that there was artwork from Halo 3. This led to speculation that Halo 3 could be arriving for the PC, because after all why else would AMD show Halo 3 if there are no plans to bring it to the PC, right?
One could chalk it up to an accident in the sense that maybe someone used the wrong artwork, but according to DSO Gaming, there has been talk that there might be a Halo 3 Anniversary version of the game that could be revealed by Microsoft at E3 2017 in June, so perhaps the artwork could be hinting at that.
In any case take it with a grain of salt for now, but if you enjoyed Halo 3 and wouldn’t mind playing the game on your PC, then this could be worth looking forward to. However until it is official, maybe try not to get your hopes up.
AMD Might Have Hinted At Halo 3’s Arrival For The PC , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
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