Hasta La Gadget!

Manli has just unveiled a new graphics card ‘GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gallardo’ to its range. Coming with RGB illuminated lights, this VR-ready graphics card is packed with 3584 CUDA Cores, a 352-bit memory interface, a core base/boost clock of 1544MHz/1657MHz, a core base/boost clock of 1594MHz/1708MHz and an 11GB GDDR5X memory set @ 11010MHz/11264MHz.

Utilizing a PCI-Express 3.0 (x16) bus interface, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gallardo comes equipped with a triple 9cm fan cooling system and provides 1x dual-link DVI-D, 1x HDMI 2.0b and 3x DisplayPort 1.4 output ports. Unfortunately, there’s no word on pricing yet. [Product Page]

The post Manli GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gallardo Graphics Card With RGB Illuminated Lights appeared first on TechFresh, Consumer Electronics Guide.

Most computer users, be it on traditional desktops or mobile devices, mostly live in their web browsers. Almost all interactivity with the outside world happens through their favorite browser, from email to social networking to watching videos to plain old browsing. So it stands that the browser should also be one of the most reliable pieces of software on your … Continue reading

If you want to play retro Atari 2600 games, you’re not short of options. There’s eBay for the original console of course. You can play some on mobile, or buy one of those “Flashback” all-in-ones, or splurge on the ultimate man/woman-cave table. But f…

WASHINGTON ― Attorney General Jeff Sessions repeatedly dodged questions on Tuesday about his conversations with President Donald Trump, broadly claiming at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that his talks with Trump were shielded by ill-defined protections. He argued that it would be inappropriate to speak publicly about confidential discussions with his boss, but struggled to explain the legal backing for his stance since Trump has not formally invoked executive privilege.

“I am protecting the right of the president to assert it if he chooses,” Sessions told members of the intelligence committee, adding that there may be other privileges the White House could invoke in the future. Conversations with the president are inherently confidential, he said, and it would be improper for him to waive that confidentiality without “clear approval” from Trump.

Executive privilege is a loosely defined concept meant to protect private communications between the president and his aides so that they can deliberate policy without fear that anything they said will later be made public. As-yet-unrevealed conversations between Sessions and Trump about firing then-FBI Director James Comey could fit under this description, although the president has not yet asserted executive privilege to shield those discussions. It would be harder to claim the protection for conversations that Trump has already tweeted or publicly spoken about.

The attorney general is not the first administration official to struggle with how to answer sensitive questions about talks with Trump. Senators berated Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers last week when they deflected questions about whether the president had asked them to intervene to block the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign team and Russian government officials. Rogers told lawmakers that he had asked the White House in advance if it was asserting executive privilege, but never received a response. That left him stumbling to avoid answering questions that could be embarrassing for the White House without any clear legal authority to do so.  

Sessions appeared to be in the same position on Tuesday, forced to argue that he was protecting the president’s right to assert executive privilege in the future. That claim might hold up if the attorney general had been “ambushed by some unexpected question about internal conversations,” Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, said. “It rings a bit false when it’s been obvious for some time that Sessions would be asked these questions.”

Senators from both parties appeared visibly frustrated with Sessions’ unwillingness to respond to their queries about conversations with Trump about Comey’s ouster and Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) accused the attorney general of “obstructing” the intelligence committee’s probe into Russian election interference. Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) asked Sessions to confer with the White House to see if he could provide follow-up responses.

“Declining to answer questions at a congressional hearing about confidential conversations with the president is a long-standing executive-branch-wide practice,” a Justice Department spokesman told HuffPost. “The basis for this historical practice is laid out in the 1982 memos from President Reagan and then-Assistant Attorney General [Theodore] Olson.”

Reagan’s 1982 memo appears to partially support Sessions’ argument argument that he is protecting Trump’s right to invoke privilege in the future. 

“Pending a final Presidential decision on the matter, the Department Head shall request the Congressional body to hold its request for the information in abeyance,” Reagan wrote. “The Department Head shall expressly indicate that the purpose of this request is to protect the privilege pending a Presidential decision, and that the request itself does not constitute a claim of privilege.”

But Olson, who was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel at the time, made clear in his memo that executive privilege was intended to be applied narrowly rather than to serve as a blanket shield against public disclosure. 

“Factual, nonsensitive materials — communications from the Attorney General which do not contain advice, recommendations, tentative legal judgements, drafts of documents, or other material reflecting deliberative or policymaking process — do not fall within the scope of materials for which executive privilege may be claimed as a basis of nondisclosure,” Olson wrote.

Part of the reason the Trump White House has avoided formally invoking executive privilege could be the optics of the situation. As a private citizen and a presidential candidate, Trump frequently criticized the Obama administration for invoking executive privilege and aides to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for invoking their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination.

Invoking executive privilege is also a politically unpopular move because it conjures up President Richard Nixon’s attempt to use it to conceal wrongdoing. When the Obama administration rejected a congressional request for then-deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes to testify publicly about the Iran nuclear deal negotiations, then-White House Counsel W. Neil Eggleston argued that such testimony would threaten “the independence and the autonomy of the president, as well as his ability to receive candid advice and counsel.” But Eggleston still stopped short of explicitly mentioning executive privilege.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the Justice Department’s Russia investigation as “fake news.” Asserting executive privilege and blocking government officials from publicly testifying on conversations related to the probe risks suggesting that the White House has something to hide.

“The obvious rationale for [not invoking executive privilege] would be that Trump doesn’t want his unfiltered remarks about the Russia probe repeated publicly, but doesn’t want to accept responsibility for concealing them,” Sanchez told HuffPost. “Because that raises the obvious question: If Trump is so insistent that he’s never asked anyone to back off the investigation, why would he block his subordinates from clarifying whether that’s true?”

The White House did not respond to a question about whether Trump plans to invoke executive privilege.

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There are several criteria that could be used to evaluate President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, but all lead to the same conclusion: This decision constitutes a serious offense against our planet and against humanity. 

The first criterion for judgement is the concrete impact on the fight against global warming. Some say that Trump may have involuntarily and ironically given this fight a boost. But irony does not always lead to the truth. The United States is the world’s first leading economic power and the second biggest polluter. The U.S. had committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent by 2025, as compared to 2005. They were to contribute financially to scientific research and to national and international actions against global warming. Turning their back on this commitment and creating the risk of a domino effect is and will remain a grave error.

This is all the more true because the Agreement of 12 December 2015 is a starting point and not a final point. Limiting temperature increases to 2°C, or even 1.5 °C, can only be achieved if today’s national contributions are made even more ambitious and implemented. From this point of view, the immediate reaction of governments, regions, cities, private and public businesses, and civil society around the world is extremely encouraging. Many willing partners of good faith in the United States have also been magnificent in their response. But, concretely, we will have to compensate and even overcompensate for the U.S. government’s withdrawal, in particular regarding the finances and technologies for Africa and developing countries. We will have to ensure transparency and follow-up for the Agreement, develop carbon pricing, coordinate the many initiatives of the “Friends of the Paris Agreement”: it is necessary but it will not be easy.

Another criterion for evaluation is the measurement of truth and falsehoods accompanying the presidential decision. Untrue: the environmental situation in the United States is a model for others. Untrue: withdrawal from the Agreement would create many jobs in the United States; in fact it intends to shut the door on green growth and the most promising sectors for the future. Untrue again: the supposed advantage the Paris Agreement gives China and India, to the detriment of the United States; the financial contributions that only the U.S. would be asked to bear. This is completely untrue, as is the so-called immediacy of implementation: Article 28 of the Agreement provides a possible effective withdrawal date of 5 November 2020 at the earliest, which is to say two days after… the next presidential election.

The third criterion is the political impact of this withdrawal. It is not up to me to judge internal American affairs, even if there is a whiff of election politics floating in the air. In any event, on the international level the damage is obvious. The United States is losing influence, and stands as the only opponent of the Agreement – alongside Bashar al-Assad’s Syria –, sending friends of the American people the sad image of unilateral policy-making, devoid of moral values and long-term vision. In addition, growing poverty and migration will have negative consequences on security.

A final argument is Trump’s campaign promise. Indeed, as a candidate he asserted that global warming was “a hoax created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive”, and that if he were elected he would pull out of the agreement. An election victory does not transform demagoguery into a positive decision. The Paris Agreement, which it was my honor to prepare and negotiate with all the countries and then to preside, is no doubt a compromise agreement, but it represents the best compromise one could find. No, the sky is not a waste bin. No, we cannot move backwards. The spirit of Paris must prevail.

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