Gay gun activists: Growing LGBT push to support the Second Amendment

LOS ANGELES Two years ago Chris Cheng came out of nowhere to beat seasoned marksmen, police officers and veterans to win History Channels reality shooting competition show Top Shot.

When I auditioned, I was openly gay. But I was surprised as nobody cared. They only cared how well I could shoot and represent our season, said Cheng, who quit his job at Google after the show and is now an NRA news commentator and is releasing his first book Shoot to Win. There is this stereotypical view of the gun community as anti-gay rednecks, but nothing could be further from the truth. It was interesting as the History Channel never outed me on the show even though they had hours of footage. I asked why and they said simply that it just wasnt relevant.

Indeed gay rights and gun rights often go hand in hand says Gwen Patton, the rep for gay gun rights organizationPink Pistols National.

We dont want people to hurt us, we want people to run away from us, and the best way we have found to do that is to be armed, Patton said. Now if someone tries to attack us, we can defend ourselves. Ideally we dont want any altercation at all, but if there is a perception that the gay person on the street could have a concealed gun, it might make the perpetrator think twice.

According to FBI Hate Crime Statistics, sexual orientation is the second largest motivator for bias crimes in the United States, second to racial bias, and far exceeding the number of religious or ethnically-spurred hate crimes.

Patton said while she has never had to use her firearm in defense, another gay member of a local Philadelphia chapter recently did.

All he had to do was display it, no bullets were fired, she said. Guns can be a very useful tool, but society has turned them into something they are not. They arent the boogeyman.

There are now more than 45 Pink Pistols chapters nationwide. With its slogan pick on someone your own caliber, members get together at least once a month at local ranges to practice their shooting skills, share self-defense tips and talk about gun safety. According to Cheng, bringing gays and guns together serves as an important conversation starter.

Many in the LGBT community simply have never seriously entertained the notion of owning a firearm, or thought whether they want to be a victim or if they want to survive an attack, he said, while Patton says it's false that the right is all about keeping firearms, while the left pushes gay rights.

So some think of us as traitors, she explained. But at the end of the day, its about recognizing that the government shouldnt be taking our rights away our rights to be armed, and our rights to be happy and with the person we love.

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Gay gun activists: Growing LGBT push to support the Second Amendment

Big payday for ex-college sports stars?

Posted Wed, October 1st, 2014 8:40 pm by Lyle Denniston

Two significant First Amendment cases that have been awaiting the Supreme Courts reaction for a year are on the way to beingsettled, with the real prospect that former stars in big-time college football and basketball will get a share of a $60 million fund. Of that, $40 million would be put up by the maker of video games about college sports, and $20 million by the National Collegiate Athletic Association the group that makes policy for competition in collegiate athletics.

The proposed settlements, which will be circulated among collegians who previously played in the NCAAs Division I (its major league for football and basketball competition), are due for a federal district court hearing next May on whether the deal is a fair one. In the meantime, the two sides agreed to end attempts (see hereand here) to get the Supreme Court to rule on a claimed clash between the First Amendment and the right under state law giving people of some renowna legal right to exploit financially their own fame (the so-called right of publicity).

The NCAA and Electronic Arts Inc. a video-game developer that has gained its own fame with games under the label EA Sports have been in a running, years-long legal battle with former Division I athletes who gained fame for their playing feats. At issue were television broadcasts of the games in which the athletes had played, and video games using near-lifelike avatars of the collegians, with their feats opento manipulation by the players. The NCAA made deals for the broadcasts and the development of the video games.

The settlements that have won a California judges preliminary approval involve the class-action lawsuits against the NCAA and Electronic Arts over the video games.

The legal battle is not over yet, at least for the NCAA, because an ongoing lawsuit, now developing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, grows out of the athletes claim that the NCAA violated federal antitrust law by stifling competition for publicity about the stars performances on gridirons and basketball arenas.

The same judge who gave at least initial approval in early September to the settlement of the video games hadruled last August that the NCAA had violated antitrust law, and nowmust put together a fund that would give the athletes covered by the ruling $5,000 for each year they were featured in televised broadcasts of their games.

It has been estimated that the antitrust case could lead to payments totaling $300 million over a four-year period. That would be five times the size of the funds that would be provided to settle the two videogames cases against Electronic Arts. Those are cases about the right of publicity. Earlier, Electronic Arts faced an antitrust claim, like that against the NCAA, but that was settled earlier, and the antitrust case moves aheadin the Ninth Circuit only against the NCAA.

Meanwhile, at the National Labor Relations Board, the NCAA is fighting against a lower-ranking board officials ruling that collegiate athletes are legally entitled to be treated as employees of their institutions, and thus are entitled to form and join labor unions to bargain over pay and working conditions. That dispute focuses on the meaning of federal labor law.

The two cases that were filed at the Supreme Court a year ago by Electronic Arts have been idling away for months on the Courts docket, with the former athletes getting repeated extensions of time to respond. The issue in both cases one from the Ninth Circuit, and one from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit raised the same constitutional question: does the First Amendment right to free speech give video-game developers a right to create visual and sound games, and does that right provide a defense to a lawsuit claiming a violation of the right of publicity? Both circuitsrejected that defense.

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Firefox could be adding built-in Tor support for improved private browsing

In future releases of Firefox, you may have access to a private browsing mode thats a whole lot more private. Theres a chance that Mozilla could be working to integrate support for Tors anonymous surfing tech into their browser. Tor integration might not be a perfect privacy solution but its definitely an upgrade over the private browsing modes our browsers currently offer.

Patrick Howell ONeill of The Daily Dot recently spoke with Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Tor Project. During their exchange, Lewman mentioned that several major tech firms have ongoing discussions about adding Tor functionality to their products. One of those companies, Lewman said, has a 10% to 20% share of 2.8 billion internet users.

He didnt specifically name Mozilla, but those numbers line up pretty nicely with estimates of Firefox market share from trackers like NetMarketShare and StatCounter. And theres every reason to think that Mozilla would at least consider adding Tor support to Firefox.

Mozilla is one of the most trusted companies on the internet, particularly when it comes to user privacy. They spearheaded the push for Do Not Track (which has unfortunately failed) and they launched the Lightbeam add-on to show Firefox users how the sites they visit were sharing their browsing data with third parties. Firefox has always offered loads of configuration tweaks that allow users to lock things like cookies down, too.

Mozilla and the Tor Project also have a pretty decent working relationship already. They share many of the same values and goals and Mozilla says theyre always discussing new ways to increase trust and privacy on the web.

Youll already find Firefox in the Tor browser bundle, but Firefox integration would bring easy Tor access to hundreds of millions of additional users. Tors network will need to be scaled up to handle the additional traffic not that 100% of Firefox users will click in, but even 10% of its base would be hard on todays Tor network.

Now read:PORTAL router puts hassle-free TOR privacy in your pocket

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Firefox could be adding built-in Tor support for improved private browsing

Reddit's Cryptocurrency Could Have Many Uses

Reddit is considering creating a cryptocurrency backed by shares of the company. These shares would then be redistributed back to the community in recognition of the role it has played in the sites success.

Or that at least is the plan for some of the $50 million the company raised in funding from a group of investors that include Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.

Other investors participating in the round, according to CEO Yishan Wongs blog post on the subject, include Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Jared Leto, Jessica Livingston, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Mariam Naficy, Josh Kushner, Snoop Dogg, and Yishan Wong.

The capital will be applied to a number of projects, Wong wrotethe company plans to hire more staff for product development, expand the community management team, build better moderation and community tools, work more closely with third party developers to expand its mobile offerings, improve the self-serve ad product, build out Redditgifts marketplace and invest in the infrastructure.

The investors also pledged to give back 10 percent of their shares to the community. In the comments section, Wong went into more detail about how that could occur.

We are thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it exchangeable (backed) by those shares of reddit, and then distributing the currency to the community. The investors have explicitly agreed to this in their investment terms.

Nothing like this has ever been done before. Basically we have to nail down how to do each step correctly (it is technically, legally, and financially complex), though in our brief consultation with an ex-SEC lawyer, he stated he could find nothing illegal about this plan. Nevertheless, there are something like 30 different things we have to pull off to make this work, so were going to try.

Wong freely acknowledges the plan could fail and if it does, its back to the drawing board for a plan to reward the community.

But it is unlikely Reddit would junk the entire project without salvaging something from it.

Last month Daily Dot noted that Reddit was seeking a cryptocurrency engineersomeone with a background in math or computer science to explore new technology applications and infrastructure involving the blockchain and cryptocurrency.

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Reddit's Cryptocurrency Could Have Many Uses

Reddit gets $50m funding, plans new cryptocurrency to share the wealth

Self-styled front page of the Internet site Reddit.com is flush with case all of a sudden, after confirimg a new $50 million funding round. Its a bucket-load of cash to be sure, but whats more interesting is that the site is promising as much as 10 percent of the amount will be shared with community members through the creation of a new cryptocurrency.

Reddit users do deserve a share of the spoils, for theyve helped make the site the huge success it is today. One thing its particularly good at is spotting Internet trends and news long before the mainstream media does, and of course its a great place to find things like stolen nude celebrity photos or hunt for terrorists.

Reddit CEO Yishan Wong wrote in a blog post that the investors have agreed to hand over 10 percent of their shares to community members, as part of the terms of the deal. However, it seems Reddit doesnt know exactly how its proposed cryptocurrency will work just yet. It could be that the cryptocurrency is used as a kind of ownership token of shares in the site a concept thats been proposed by several crypto 2.0 projects in the past.

Nor is Reddit the only company to announce a plan like this Overstock.com made a similar announcement last July.

Wong attempted to clarify things on the r/blog subreddit, saying that the idea is to create a special-purpose cryptocurrency backed by the values of shared created by this funding round. We are thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it exchangeable (backed) by those shares of reddit, and then distributing the currency to the community, wrote Wong. The investors have explicitly agreed to this in their investment terms.

Given the potential benefits for site users, Wong feels the idea is worth trying, although he warns that Reddit is currently just exploring the idea. CAVEAT: KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS PLAN COULD TOTALLY FAIL, he added in a later post.

As for the rest of the money, Reddit plans on using it to bolster its production development staff and community management teams, and to increase its mobile presence. Just this month, Reddit launched an official mobile app for its popular Ask Me Anything sessions, so we can expect to see more developments in this area.

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Reddit gets $50m funding, plans new cryptocurrency to share the wealth

Reddit is planning its own cryptocurrency to give users part ownership of the site

It seems like theres a cryptocurrency for everything these days, so why not Reddit? The social news site, which calls itself the front page of the internet, has just raised $50 million in venture capital based on a total valuation of $500 million. Reddit CEO Yishan Wong says that 10% of that money is earmarked for the Reddit community itself. As for how to distribute the shares, Reddit is looking at creating its own cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin, but hopefully more long-lived than Coinye.

With existing cryptocurrencies, users can mine more units of the currency by running increasingly difficult computations on computer hardware. This proof of work entitles them to a certain share of new coins when they are created. In some cases, this computation also works to keep the transaction records in sync so coins cant be spent more than once. Reddits cryptocurrency, however, will be backed by the allocated shares of Reddit.

If this plan is actually put into action, each share would presumably be sliced up into smaller pieces represented by a snippet of code handed out to members of the community. It is unclear how it would be distributed the Reddit user base is vast and many people have multiple accounts. Whoever is granted their own sliver of Reddit could use that Redditcoin however they like sell it, trade it, give it away, or hide it and watch as it appreciates in value.

There are still plenty of legal and logistical challenges standing in the way of making Redditcoins a reality. Its possible the idea will fall apart, but investors did agree to the plan in theory when handing their money over to Reddit. If this doesnt work, Reddit will find another way to give shares of Reddit to the community.If it works, they would be crazy not to call it Reddit Gold, which is the optional premium version of Reddit.

Now read:The best porn and gore of Reddit

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Reddit is planning its own cryptocurrency to give users part ownership of the site

Coin Brief Podcast #17: Secret Goldman Tapes, MIT Bitcoin Subpoena, Butterfly Labs Shutdown, & More – Video


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Feds: BFL Mined with your miners — PayPal Spinoff — Bitcoin Photography — Bitcoin Watch – Video


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ACT Comets fast bowler Michael Delaney tips Ireland to be dark horse at next year's World Cup

Michael Delaney makes his return to the representative arena in the second match after recovering from consecutive shoulder reconstructions. Photo: Graham Tidy

Having played a season in Ireland, ACT Comets fast bowler Michael Delaney expects the men from the Emerald Isle to be the surprise packets at next year's World Cup.

Ireland will continue its preparations for the one-day tournament when it takes on the Comets in two 50-over matches at Manuka Oval next Tuesday and Thursday.

Delaney makes his return to the representative arena in the second match after recovering from consecutive shoulder reconstructions.

Having previously been contracted by South Australia, the 26-year-old suffered his most recent shoulder injury while playing in Belfast last year.

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He believes Ireland will challenge the second-tier teams at the World Cup, and has the potential to spring an upset on the higher-ranked sides.

"I think they'll be a little bit of a dark horse," Delaney said.

"They'll be the team to beat out of the minor countries and they might cause an upset here and there.

"Their top cricketers can play first-grade cricketers anywhere, the thing they struggle with is a little bit of depth, but they're definitely improving."

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ACT Comets fast bowler Michael Delaney tips Ireland to be dark horse at next year's World Cup

Settling in: West Liberty's Bridenstine finds her way, role for unbeaten Comets

WEST LIBERTY, Iowa Ruben Galvan says that this seasons West Liberty High School volleyball team is off to the best start of any team hes coached in his 13 seasons at West Liberty.

The Comets have a 19-0 record one of just four unbeaten teams left in the state regardless of classification and Galvan is quick to point out that such an achievement was only possible through the sum of the teams parts, not just through one person.

Galvan illustrated that point by recalling the effect that was felt by the Class 3A No. 7 Comets when Audra Bridenstine, an experienced junior outside hitter, had a bit of a slump two weeks ago when West Liberty played Iowa City Regina and Tipton.

She had a rough week of practice and games, and we didnt look as sharp as we have because of her not being as sharp as she can be, Galvan said.

While the Comets got through that week with straight-set victories over the Regals and the Tigers, Bridenstine worked through her issues, scoring 16 kills for the Comets at last weekends Mid-Prairie tournament, including a team-leading six kills in the championship match with the Golden Hawks.

Im not even sure if I figured out how to get back in the groove, but I just cleared my mind and just let whatever happens happens, Bridenstine said. Even when Im not hitting my best, my teams always picking me up and it seems that me and [setter] Cassedi [Simon] connect.

Bridenstine has remained a consistent threat at outside hitter along with Kayla Kaalberg, flanking middle hitter and leading attacker Hailey Daufeldt. Shes on pace to match her kill numbers from last season, with 85 kills in 44 sets thus far.

More notably, shes emerged as the teams most efficient server after not offering up one serve throughout her sophomore season. Bridenstine has converted 101 of 105 serves and has 14 service aces.

This seasons team is nearly identical to last seasons group with the exception of one senior, Merideth Nichols, graduating after the Comets bowed out in the opening round of the regional tournament in 2013.

But last season's team was wrestling with improving upon the success of teams in the previous two seasons, including the 2011 squad that went to the state tournament.

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Settling in: West Liberty's Bridenstine finds her way, role for unbeaten Comets