The laptops were all installed with Linux, a much lighter weight OS. "This worked really well," says Miller. "The team turned the refresh around in a matter of a few days and were able to get the devices issued by the end of the week. It was an example of local government working at the speed of light."
In parallel, the team worked to set up colleagues with remote working tools, while constantly monitoring the system to make sure that it was holding up under the burden of 4,000 employees suddenly logging in remotely. HackIT started figuring out how to bring key services online, such as support forms for residents with COVID-19 or emergency phone lines.
Linux Drivers Tutorial Let's go over all the ways Linux drivers get installed in Linux. I will be talking about both the DKMS package and linux-firmware in this tutorial.
Brent sits down with Aleix Pol, president of KDE e.V., KDE software developer, co-founder of Linux App Summit and Barcelona Free Software. We discuss his longstanding collaborations within the KDE community, developer sponsorships in open source business models, and more.
The details that make a great distro, things that make us wince, smug people online, great photos, imposter syndrome, and more.
When it comes to the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors we have looked at the various higher-end SKUs since their launch last August up to and including the EPYC 7742 with its 64 cores / 128 threads per socket. But for those wondering about the EPYC 7002 series performance at the bottom end of the spectrum, here are some fun benchmarks of the EPYC 7232P and EPYC 7262 on the near-final Ubuntu 20.04 LTS state compared to various vintages of Intel Xeon CPUs -- most notably, a curiosity driven look at the 8 core / 16 thread Intel Haswell Xeon performance.
The EPYC 7232P comes in at the bottom end of the EPYC spectrum at around $500~509 USD for the retail price as an 8 core / 16 thread Zen 2 server processor. The EPYC 7232P has a 3.1GHz base clock and 3.2GHz boost clock while having a 32MB L3 cache and a 120 Watt TDP. Common EPYC Rome features like the eight channels of DDR4-3200 remain supported with this low-priced EPYC processor.
What do you do when you're running low on storage space? I run disk cleanup to clear the updates and system files, purge the browser data, and if that doesn't help I use a program like SpaceSniffer or WizTree.
That's on Windows of course. For a cross-platform solution, you can use something like Filelight; this is a KDE application that was officially ported to Windows. The start screen of Filelight displays a circle for each hard drive and partition. The colored part of the ring shows the used space and the white areas indicates the free space on the drive. Mouse over the colors to view the storage information in Gigabytes.
One of our favorite adages is “A picture is worth a thousand words”. It refers to the notion that a still image can convey a complex idea. Images can portray a lot of information quickly and more efficiently than text. They capture memories, and never let you forget something you want to remember, and refresh it in your memory.
Images are part of every day internet usage, and are particularly important for social media engagement. A good image viewer is an essential part of any operating system.
Linux offers a vast collection of open source small utilities that perform functions ranging from the obvious to the bizarre. It is the quality and selection of these tools that help Linux stand out as a productive environment. This is particularly true when it comes to image viewers. There are so many image viewers that are available for Linux that it can make selection difficult.
From our detailed investigations, we strongly recommend feh if you’re looking for a command-line based viewer. If you insist on a graphical user interface, plump for gThumb and/or QuickViewer. There’s other good free and open source image viewers which we’ve also compared.
Some people change wallpapers on their desktops, phones or other devices more frequently than they change clothes. Finding new wallpapers on the internet is not that difficult. However, you do start to see the same images over and over the more you look. And then it starts to get a little difficult. That’s when many people flock over to Unsplash. Unsplash is a royalty-free photography site, not remotely aimed at providing wallpapers. However, it is a very popular source of wallpapers for many users. Fondo wallpaper app is a new app for Linux that makes it much easier to find and apply wallpapers from Unsplash.
To be fair, browsing images on Unsplash is by no means a remotely difficult task or a hassle. Similarly, setting an image from your browser as your wallpaper is not that difficult either. But having an app just makes it all so much more fun and cohesive. It’s one of the reasons why wallpaper apps are so popular on smartphones. While on a desktop, browsing the internet and finding wallpapers is not as difficult as on a small phone, an app still provides a much better experience. In case you also use a Windows PC, you should also try these best wallpaper apps for Windows 10.
How an operating system accesses and manages these files is determinant on the file system used. For example, a USB drive formatted using the basic Linux file system (ext4) is inaccessible on a Windows computer. Let's show you ways to find out your Linux file system type. Most of them are commands that are executed on the Linux Terminal.
Any Operating system in the market whether its Windows, Linux, Unix, macOS, and any other, must be able to access and manage files and data on storage devices.
Valve continue to polish the Steam Client with a bunch of recent changes that have been in Beta for a little while now pushed out for everyone. Here's what's new.
On the Linux side, it's had a lot of cleaning up done. Valve disabled CEF keyring integration by default, which was annoying plenty of people. An issue that caused some Proton enabled games to redownload was solved, Big Picture Mode's on-screen keyboard should now actually pop up when clicking on text fields with Touch Screen Mode enabled, Steam Overlay should now work for titles that use XInput2 and a client crash was solved while iterating directories.
We had a few little updates too for the Linux Steam Runtime as it now includes the latest version of libvulkan, Valve has added exports for more WSI functions for Proton and they improved the runtime diagnostic tools.
Arcen Games are continuing to improve and update their massive grand-scale real-time strategy game, AI War 2, with a huge expansion name The Spire Rises out now.
In addition to some new things to capture, turrets, and other ships that are available in any game once this expansion is installed, there are two major new factions. The Scourge is your greatest foe, the smartest and most dangerous sub-group of the AI. The Fallen Spire is your greatest ally, providing you with unprecedented firepower. You get to mix and match too, having both or neither or even make the Scourge your ally with new customization options.
Empires of the Undergrowth is a game that makes me freak out, it makes me feel like my skin is crawling with little bugs and all sorts and yet I can't tear myself away from it whenever I load it up. A game all about managing a colony of ants, in a real-time strategy type of setting with some great visuals.
It's been quite a long time since the last major update but Slug Disco Studios have been crazy-busy. They've actually been pushing out Beta updates for months with it all coming together in the 0.21 update out now for everyone. One of the biggest behind-the-scenes changes is the movement code, which they said will increase performance a lot allowing more and bigger creatures and the same for maps.
Vagrus - The Riven Realms is one of the most promising game in-development right now, a dark narrative RPG with a supreme style and fantastic writing that continues expanding.
Currently doing the hybrid Early Access/Crowdfunding 'Open Access' model on Fig, so you pledge funds on their campaign and get access right away. I've written about it a few times, mainly out of excitement after playing plenty of it and being massively impressed by it.
With fast beats and quick finger work needed to hit all the notes, the community-driven rhythm game 'Project Heartbeat' is now available with Linux support in Early Access.
It's Friday, things are terrible everywhere so how about a nice casual and relaxing free game? Sono is what you need. Released earlier in March, the developer added a Linux build recently too.
Quite a relaxing and almost meditative experience, and one that requires very little effort. You control a tiny little organism that you guide through an abstract microcosm collecting lost fragments of sound.
Unbeatable from developer D-Cell Games is an upcoming rhythm-adventure where music summons dangerous monsters and it looks really quite sweet.
According to the developer it's a "rhythm-adventure about siblings, creative blocks, and rocking out in a world where music summons dangerous monsters". You talk your way out of trouble as you explore and fight through arcade-styled rhythm-game action with an original soundtrack by Peak Divide.
Soldat 2 was announced recently, as a return to the classic side-scrolling multiplayer shooter currently in development by Transhuman Design and a demo is out now.
Valve continue to push Linux gaming forward and today they have a new Beta installer available to try for the Steam Client. Currently, it's aimed at Debian and derivatives (Ubuntu and so on).
What's new? It includes "improved distribution compatibility, updated first start dependency checks, updated udev rules.." as mentioned to us on Twitter (original tweet was removed due to wrong link) by Valve contractor Timothee Besset. All of that is quite important of course, especially things like the udev rules to ensure various hardware works with Steam like the Steam Controller, DualShock 4, VR headsets and so on.
The Kubuntu team is delighted to announce an ‘Ubuntu Testing Week’ from April 2nd to April 8th with other flavors in the Ubuntu family. April 2nd is the beta release of what will become Kubuntu 20.04 and during this week, there will be a freeze on changes to features, the user interface and documentation. Between April 2nd and final release on April 23rd, the Kubuntu team and community will focus on ISO testing, bug reporting, and fixing bugs. Please join the community by downloading the daily ISO image and trying it out, even beginning today.
Plasma Bigscreen is a new KDE project aiming to provide a user interface for television screens
Besides having an UI adapted for TV use, Plasma Bigscreen also incorporates the Mycroft AI voice assistant in aiming to be a robust Smart TV platform. KDE Plasma Bigscreen aims to be innovative, support full voice control, and easy to expand with new "skills" capabilities.
KDE has just announced Plasma Bigscreen, a new project that brings its very own user interface to smart TVs with all the typical bells and whistles that such a device requires, including media-rich apps.
KDE Plasma is a desktop environment initially developed for Linux Desktop PC or SBCs, but that’s also available on Linux phones with Plasma Mobile (previously known as Plasma Active).
The developers have now decided to work on a version for the big screens with Plasma Bigscreen suitable for TVs and TV boxes and offering an open-source, Linux-based alternative o Android TV.
So one of the toughest Krita releases is up today. Tough not in the sense there were a lot of regressions to solve but the mountain of build issues faced by the team. The credit of course goes to the new Python release and just like every other hurdle we face, Apple.
The beta was released a couple of weeks ago and as artists reported it was rock solid. David was upset cause he was unable to crash it even after 20 hours of usage. It brings a ton of bug fixes and a bunch of new stuff, to pick some of them...
Well, My full name is Regina Nkemchor Adejo, I am a Nigerian. I am a technology enthusiast who transitioned into sciences from an arts background. I currently work as a database and application specialist in a tax organization. I am a YouTube content creator, I create technical videos related to database and Linux administration.
Most importantly, I love computers! I spend most of my time on them.
The approach taken by Cartesi, is to bring all the tools and capabilities available in a modern operating system (Linux) to the decentralised web. The Cartesi solution provides a legitimate and fully-fledged Linux OS that:
Enhances the capabilities of decentralised applications avoids compromising on the security guarantees of blockchain.
This is a very subjective review of the MintBox 3. I say “very subjective” because not only do we get 5% of each sale (that in itself wouldn’t matter all that much), but we absolutely love this unit, the very long partnership we’ve had with Compulab and the fact that this amazing computer is running our software and wears our name.
No computer is perfect though, we’ll make some criticism, but as an introduction I’d rather warn you. This is by far the best computer we’ve ever played with, it runs Mint and it has our logo on it. It’s hard not to feel any bias.
During this week, we have released 6 snapshots to the public (0318, 0319, 0320, 0322, 0324, 0325). The changes were more under the hood than spectacular, but here they are:
Thursday 2020-04-02 through Monday 2020-04-06, is the Fedora 32 Upgrade Test Day(s)! As part of the preparation for Fedora 32, we need your help to test if everything runs smoothly!
There are many new changes and additions that have happened to the pull functionality in the podman build command. As of Podman version 1.7.0, which was released in January 2020, the ways that you can pull and how you pull container images during podman build have been changed and added to. Let's dive in.
From its inception, Call for Code has tackled society’s most pressing issues. More than a month ago, IBM participated in a health hackathon, and the ideas generated there addressed many of the most pressing needs we face today – from testing kits to drug discovery and supply chain. We were inspired to see what developers could create in just one weekend to help respond to COVID-19. We realized we can and should do more through the amazing ecosystem and infrastructure we’ve created through Call for Code.
Just last week we announced that the Call for Code Global Challenge would expand to address both climate change and COVID-19, and we’re already receiving overwhelming support and some exciting early ideas. In a single day, we received over 1,000 registrations from developers. First responders, at-risk individuals, and coders are reaching out to us to share their experiences and brainstorm solutions. Together with Creator David Clark Cause and in partnership with United Nations Human Rights and the Linux Foundation, we’re asking developers, data scientists, and problem solvers to answer the Call.
[...]
We’ve also published the 2020 Call for Code Challenge climate change starter kits (see here). To help define the specific situations caused by climate change where your innovations could be most helpful, a few weeks ago IBM partnered with the world’s leading humanitarian experts for our kickoff event in Geneva at the historic Palais Wilson, Headquarters of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Together with UN humanitarian experts, and eminent technologists from Red Hat, JP Morgan Chase, Persistent Systems, Unity Technologies, NearForm, and Johnson & Johnson, we collaborated to create our three climate change starter kits.
Each kit focuses on a key topic — water sustainability, energy sustainability, and disaster resiliency — essential to halting and reversing climate change, and grounded in real-world needs defined by the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. These are the areas where you can have the greatest impact:
A new era has begun for Red Hat’s XML language server, which was migrated to the Eclipse Foundation under a new project name: Eclipse LemMinX (a reference to the Lemmings video game). The Eclipse LemMinX project is arguably the most feature-rich XML language server available. Its migration opens more doors for future development and utilization. In addition, shortly after its migration, the Eclipse LemMinX project and Red Hat also released updates: Eclipse LemMinX version 0.11.1 and the Red Hat VS Code XML extension.
Nearly everyone who is working on an open source project likely has motives beyond helping others. It can be as straightforward as a personal "I need something to help me do X, and I am willing to work with others to help me achieve that goal." Or perhaps a company is heavily using the project’s software and the contributor needs to be active as part of their job.
Regardless of how a person comes to the open source table, it’s very possible that they will find themselves wanting to do more. Again, this could be to help their company make a bigger impact in the project, or something desired out of a sense of personal gain. As community organizers, it’s very important to recognize these needs and foster them, lest you lose a potentially fantastic contributor to your project.
One path projects can provide to those who want to do more is enabling contributor/commiter permissions, ultimately with an eye towards giving that person more say into the direction of the project through the contributions of others as a maintainer. Setting up a path to maintainership can be very important as a community onboarding best practice, because it says to contributors, this is a goal you can achieve in our community, should you wish to go in this direction.
A clear maintainer path is a mutual benefit to the other maintainers of the project as well, since a broader distribution of maintainer tasks can help balance workload, reduce the chance of burnout, and introduce greater diversity into the decision-making process. It's also important to the health of a project long-term. A project that isn't growing new contributors, committers and maintainers is in danger when its existing maintainers and committers find themselves too busy, changing jobs, or otherwise unable to drive the project with the same commitment they have today.
More organizations are said to be using Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for building artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) data science workflows and AI-powered intelligent applications.
The popular Linux distribution Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu but the developers are maintaining a side-project that bases the Linux distribution on Debian instead.
There are several reasons for that: first, because it provides them with an option if Ubuntu would no longer be maintained, disappear, or be turned into a commercial application. Second, because it provides Linux Mint developers with an opportunity to test Linux Mint software designed specifically for the distribution using another Linux distribution that is not based on Ubuntu.
The developers of Linux Mint have released LMDE 4, Linux Mint Debian Edition 4, last week.
It shouldn't come as a big surprise but PHP 7.4 has now landed in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to replace the existing PHP 7.3 support within the "Focal Fossa" package archive.
PHP 7.4 released back in November with support for accessing C functions / structs / variables using FFI, Opcache preload functionality, and a variety of other improvements as the annual big update to PHP7.
Over the past few months, we published a number of articles showing how to snap desktop applications written in different languages – Rust, Java, C/C++, and others. In each one of these zero-to-hero guides, we went through a representative snapcraft.yaml file and highlighted the specific bits and pieces developers need to successfully build a snap.
Today, we want to diverge from this journey and focus on the server side of things. We will give you an overview of a snapcraft.yaml with two interesting components: a) it will have more than one application; typically, snaps come with one application inside b) it will have a simple background service, to which other applications can connect. Let’s have a look.
This month: * Command & Conquer * How-To : Python, Ubuntu & Security, and Rawtherapee [NEW!] * Graphics : Inkscape * Graphics : Krita for Old Photos * Linux Loopback: nomadBSD * Everyday Ubuntu * Review : QNAP NAS * Ubuntu Games : Asciiker plus: News, My Opinion, The Daily Waddle, Q&A, and more.
Microchip has launched a 600MHz ARM9-based “SAM9X60” processor with a 2D GPU and -40 to 105€°C tolerance along with a Linux-driven, $260 “SAM9X60-EK Evaluation Kit” with MikroBus and Raspberry Pi expansion.
Microchip has revised the ARM9-based AT91SAM9260 SoC that was introduced in 2006 by its subsidiary Atmel. The new SAM9X60 model has boosted the clock rate from 180MHz to 600MHz and has quadrupled the cache to dual 32KB cache. It has also lowered the voltage rate, among other improvements.
The internet offers plenty of free messaging services. Applications like WhatsApp and Viber are part of our daily life and are the most common way we communicate with relatives and friends. But security awareness is increasing the demand for a truly private chat solution. Furthermore, messaging apps take up a lot of space in our devices, so an alternative chat channel could be useful to share media, info, and contacts with our friends.
Today we are going to see how to install a private chat and messaging server with a Raspberry Pi and Rocket.Chat.
That’s not a bad starter pack at all, especially if you plan to use the Raspberry Pi 4 for some hardware hacking. If your plan is to use this as a regular PC, you might also want a Raspberry Pi 4 case. Either way, be sure to check out the aforementioned Humble Bundle if you’re looking for ideas on how to use it, along with our guide to 10 surprisingly practical Raspbery Pi projects anybody can do.
With this, we had a workable lighting and power setup for overnight sailing. But next obvious step will be to increase the range of our boat.
For that, we’re adding a solar panel. We already have most parts for the setup, but are still waiting for the customized NOA mounting hardware to arrive. And of course the current COVID-19 curfews need to lift before we can install it.
Until we have actual data from our Victron MPPT charge controller, I’ve run some simulations using NASA’s insolation data for Berlin on how much the panel ought to increase our cruising range.
Work is hard right now. COVID-19 makes it a challenge to stay focused and motivated. But it was cathartic for me to do some research into how the open source community is responding to the global pandemic.
Since the end of January, the community has contributed to thousands of open source repositories that mention coronavirus or COVID-19. These repositories consist of datasets, models, visualizations, web and mobile applications, and more, and the majority are written in JavaScript and Python.
Infineon engineers developed a 3D printed lung ventilator to help address the shortage of ventilators due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The German federal government held a hackathon called #WirvsVirus (“We against the virus”) where 42,000 people met to find solutions to challenges from the coronavirus. Infineon engineers, led by Mahmoud Ismail who has a doctorate in lung mechanics, submitted a 3D print design and a design for the electronics and algorithms to develop and open-source lung ventilator.
Starting April 1st, the Decentralized AI Alliance and partners SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol plan to host an online, not-for-profit hackathon called COVIDathon.
The goal is to bring together the decentralized artificial intelligence community in an effort to help find solutions to combat the COVID-19 outbreak.
Nowadays at the time of the outbreak, many companies adapt to working from home in several countries as a measure to reduce the rate of infection."Working from home" is the new trend here, Companies like Amazon initiated this strategy for their employees which turned out to be effective.
Video conferences are essential solutions for companies, especially, with remote employees and companies which taken "Work-from-home" measures.
Video conferencing is used in several sectors like software development, consultation, digital media, healthcare, logistics and more.
For any number of reasons, open source software is embraced by data analytics researchers and professionals. This might be because many top researchers work in the education sector, and the emphasis is on cutting costs – hence the attractiveness of an open source free download. Or might be because the same mindset required for the deep exploration of data is similar to the love of software development common among many open source developers. Whatever the case, the data tools on this list are open source leaders as data analytics becomes ever more important.
Inventory Management Software is a computerized system to manage and keep track of the number of stored goods, serial numbers, barcodes, costs, location...etc
Inventory management solutions keep track of the goods while moving through the process or stored in the warehouses. This can help in decreasing costs and enhance customer support service.
In the following list, we take a look at the top free and open source solutions which are suitable for small and medium-sized companies.
Ever wanted to analyze text documents for documents or articles? There are several tools, web services that provide such services but what about desktop programs?
So here in this article, we have collected several tools to help you achieve that, and even more, they are free and open-source as well. We will try to list the specific and unique features per item to make it easy for our readers to pick what they need.
Among all the serious diseases and deaths it causes, the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its accompanying COVID-19 disease also keep the FSFE and the whole Free Software community in suspense. For our community and other charitable organisations we would share our experiences and lessons learnt from the Corona crisis.
First of all, we are glad that we can fall back on years of experience with remote collaboration crossing borders and continents. Since its foundation, the FSFE has had its roots in all over Europe, working together with people and organisations in various time zones. Luckily, we are trained to use asynchronous communication tools. But the FSFE as an organisation and community still has to deal with new challenges and serious drawbacks that make our work for Free Software much harder. Your help is needed to balance these!
We are pleased to announce GNU Guile 3.0.2, the second bug-fix release of the new 3.0 stable series! This release represents 22 commits by 8 people since version 3.0.1.
Among other things, this release fixes a heap corruption bug that could lead to random crashes and a rare garbage collection issue in multi-threaded programs.
One of many new features in the GCC 10 code compiler releasing in about one month's time is finally having a built-in static analyzer. This static analyzer can be enabled with the -fanalyzer switch and has been maturing nicely for its initial capabilities in the GNU Compiler Collection 10.
The static analyzer was added to GCC 10 just back in January with an initial focus on C code. This static analyzer for GCC was spearheaded by GCC's David Malcolm and was available in patch form a few months prior. This static analyzer isn't as mature or robust as what's been built into the likes of LLVM Clang for a while now, but it's getting there.
The summary is that, many well-known databases that were previously Open Source have either moved to an Open-Core Model and/or changed to Source Available licensing. There are various reasons behind this including refinement of business models and protecting investment in intellectual property. I won't debate the motivations or merits of such approaches in this article, there are already many other articles out there which do! Instead I will look briefly at one such Source Available license, the Business Source License, and whom has adopted it and how.
Nuts, an open source, decentralised data exchange solution offering a large-scale trusted chain of custody, is inviting healthcare organisations to join. The project is being tested by hospitals, general practitioners and companies involved in healthcare, and hopes to launch the first version this summer.
Once more, I wanted to push a small change to a Git repository to which the owner gave me write access. This repo is currently the only one for me, for which I need to use https as transport protocol and therefore have to enter username and password for each and every push.
On the other hand, I keep all my valuable credentials in Pass: The Standard Unix Password Manager for a couple of years now. It stores them with strong GPG encryption on my disk, is nicely integrated into Firefox by a plugin and there is also a KDE plasma widget available, created by my fellow KDE developer Daniel Vrátil. So why can’t Git read (I was about to use pull here, but that might be confusing in the context of Git) the credentials from my password store? There must be a way!
Next, I started reading the documentation about git-credentials which seems to provide all that is needed. Just that pass was not on the list of helpers. Reading the specs, I expected it to be pretty easy to write a small wrapper that solves the issue. But: this sounds like a problem too obvious and to be solved already. So the search began.
Using all kinds of combinations of git-credentials, pass, password-store and some more I don’t remember, I always ended up on some general Git documentation, but no sign of what I was looking for. So maybe, it really does not exist (oh, I have not consulted the yellow pages) and I have to develop and provide it to the internet community myself.
While big changes are on their way for Qt 6.0, QML got some new language features already in 5.15. Read on to to learn about required properties, inline components and nullish coalescing.
When you start working from home, one of the first things you might have noticed is that there almost no outside influences on your schedule.
You probably have meetings—some over team chat and others over video— that you have to attend, but otherwise, there's nothing requiring you to do anything at any specific time. What you find out pretty quickly, though, is that there's an invisible influence that sneaks up on you: deadlines.
This lack of structure fosters procrastination, sometimes willful and other times aimless, followed by frantic sprints to get something done. Learning to mitigate that, along with all the distractions working from home might offer, is often the hardest part of your home-based work.
Here are a few ways to build in that structure for yourself do you don't end up feeling like you are falling behind.
Developer Otto Moerbeek (otto@) has been working on support to boot from FFS2. He writes in with the below article, to give us a little insight into the challenges he faced while working on this.
Type annotations are a formalized way to add some extra information about types to your project. Once you get through adding mypy to your project and annotate your code (remember you can do it automatically, at least to some extent) you will find yourself at the ocean of possibilities.
Interested in good code and even better tests? Check out my upcoming book on the architecture - Implementing the Clean Architecture. This post will show the most impressive libraries that leverage type hints that I know.
Beginners seem to ask this question when they are feeling daunted by the challenge before them. Maybe they are hoping for a helpful answer, but it seems like most answers will just be a jumping off point for feeling bad about their own progress.
Everyone learns differently. They learn from different sources, at different paces. Suppose you ask this question and someone answers “one month”? Will you feel bad about yourself because you’ve been at it for six weeks? Suppose they say, “ten years”? Now what do you think?
The question doesn’t even make sense in a way. What do we mean by “learn”? If you can write a number guessing game in Python, have you learned Python? Are we talking about basic familiarity, or deep memorization? Does something have to be second nature, or is it OK if you are still looking through the docs for details? “Learned” is not a binary state. There isn’t a moment where you don’t know Python, and then suddenly you do.
Hypothesis is the Python tool used for property based testing. Hypothesis claims to combine "human understanding of your problem domain with machine intelligence to improve the quality of your testing process while spending less time writing tests."
In this episode Alexander Hultnér introduces us to property based testing in Python with Hypothesis.
The Internet is full of good articles that explain the theory behind the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) well (e.g. 1, 2, 3 and 4) . However, many of these works contain a fair amount of rather advanced mathematical equations. While equations are necessary if one wants to explain the theory, we decided to take it to the next level and create a gentle step by step practical implementation to complement the good work of others.
In this short series of two articles, we will focus on translating all of the complicated mathematics into code. Our starting point is the document written by Mark Stamp. We will use this paper to define our code (this article) and then use a somewhat peculiar example of “Morning Insanity” to demonstrate its performance in practice.
Neal played in more than 6,000 games in 97 countries for the barnstorming Globetrotters from 1963 to 1985, when the team appeared in numerous televised specials, talk shows, television shows and even cartoons that included the team's own animated series.
With a virus of this scale having social and economic implications to nearly every country in the world, chances are that mis-information flies thick and fast.
The plan, long backed by second-place contender Bernie Sanders and other members of Congress, also would boost enrolment at US public colleges and universities by more than 15 per cent, experts are calculating.
The Russian Orthodox Church says it will not close cathedrals and churches next week in Moscow, during the national holiday called yesterday by President Putin to curb the spread of coronavirus. The church issued this statement in defiance of Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, who has asked Muscovites to refrain from visiting religious sites next week.
Fear the immigrant, Muslims, foreignness, black people protesting, black athletes kneeling during the Anthem, germs, foreign travel to non-Western countries, terrorism, etc., etc. Before 9/11, as a teen in the late 1990s, it was fear of marijuana, public welfare abuse and, as always, inclement weather.
There is a clear economic driver to sensationalizing fear in the mass media: viewership and advertisement revenue will increase as more of the public watch to ‘learn’ what to fear and how to keep ‘safe’. In this sense, the American public are like people anywhere, albeit, with a different system conditioning them.
From an evolutionary perspective, reflexive fear may help an animal survive. But acting like a prey animal, with eyes on either side of head to detect approaching predators, is no way to live. For a cornered, frightened rat will do anything their master says to not be crushed underfoot.
It is in times of crisis, like the growing coronavirus pandemic, that deep structural inequities and the U.S. government’s mismanagement of funds are starkly revealed. Half of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Half a million Americans sleep out on the streets. Thirty million Americans don’t have health insurance. Forty-five million are burdened with $1.6 trillion of student loan debt. I could go on, but the point of these stats is to highlight the fragility of our society and its uncertain ability to weather the human health and economic impacts of crises like the coronavirus.
In January 1976, flu broke out among Army recruits training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Most of the flu, tests revealed, was of a common strain, A-Victoria, but four cases (one of them fatal) proved to be swine flu, similar to the strain that caused the 1918 pandemic that killed half a million people in this country and 50 million worldwide. Swine flu had, in 1976, not been seen in humans for more than a half century, so immunity was almost nonexistent. Further testing at Fort Dix turned up some alarming results — an additional nine cases with as many as 500 recruits who had been exposed to the virus but were asymptomatic. While a vaccine had been developed for A-Victoria and many other flu strains, none existed for swine flu. Public health authorities, led by the Centers for Disease Control, quickly became alarmed.
The CDC recommended in March that a swine flu vaccine be developed on a crash basis and that every American be vaccinated by fall. President Gerald Ford concurred, and implementation of the plan moved into high gear, with Congress appropriating money for the vaccine and later effectively indemnifying vaccine manufacturers.
Self-protection means doing what we can to protect—and understand—everyone.
On March 19th, the gutless depravity of failed leadership found a new poster-boy. Republican Senator Richard Burr was found to have sold off his stock in what he knew would be losing value (hotels, travel industry) before the stock market started crashing from the pandemic COVID-19 while simultaneously toeing Donald Trump’s line that everything was fine. He provided warning to his rich constituents, but set the rest of the public up.
Gunshot victims with massive blood loss and failing lungs packed the emergency room of Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas late on the night of Oct. 1, 2017. A man had opened fire on a music festival from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, spraying more than a thousand rounds of ammunition into the crowd, wounding hundreds.
The hospital soon ran out of ventilators, machines that breathe for patients who can’t. Dr. Kevin Menes, a critical care physician, had several patients in respiratory failure. Menes remembered that a colleague from his medical residency had studied how to connect multiple people to a single ventilator. When a respiratory therapist said to Menes, “‘We don’t have any more ventilators,’ I said, ‘It’s fine,’” he later recalled. He asked for tubing and began splitting one machine’s oxygen flow into two patients, saving their lives.
The global animal vaccine market is now worth an estimated $7.2 billion, which reflects a rise of $1.7 billion since 2010. One of its leaders is Merck, which currently advertises forty-nine vaccines for poultry—to prevent everything from fowl pox and turkey coryza to salmonella and E. coli—and twenty-five vaccines for cattle. Although vaccines to prevent salmonella, for example, may seem like a positive development, as Rosenberg noted, many vaccines are produced from GMO spores, which a 2018 study in Veterinary Research flagged as cause for “environmental concerns” because the spores have “the potential to survive indefinitely in the environment,” posing “biological containment” problems that the study described as “crucial.”
In the past day, Russia recorded 182 new coronavirus infections. Health officials have now diagnosed 840 cases across 56 regions of the country. The lion’s share of the new cases (136 patients) was reported in Moscow, bringing the city’s total number of infections to 546. A federal task force has acknowledged two deaths caused by the illness. Both of these patients were senior citizens.€
"We must add a 90-day grace period for those impacted by COVID-19 for rent payments before April 1."
K.K. Shailaja is the health minister in the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala, the state in the southwest of India that has a population of 35 million people. On January 25, 2020, she convened a high-level meeting to discuss the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. What had particularly worried her is that there were many students from Kerala studying in that province of China. Shailaja had won widespread praise for the swift and efficient way she had steered her department through the Nipah virus that hit Kerala in 2018. She recognized that there was no time to be lost if the virus spread from Wuhan; the government had to set up mechanisms for identifying possibly infected persons, and then for testing, mitigation, and treatment. On January 26, 2020, her department set up a control room to coordinate the work.
With little government support and corporate accountability, humanitarian aid workers are scrambling to address the refugee crisis in the wake of the global pandemic, COVID-19 (coronavirus).
I’m sitting here self-quarantined with my family in our 1738 stone farmhouse just north of Philadelphia. It’s an ancient building that I’m sure has known its share of epidemics over the centuries, including typhus and the deadly 1918 Spanish Flu.
The Morning Consult/Politico poll comes as a top Trump administration health official says of the outbreak, "You don't make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline."
On Feb. 13, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent out an email with what the author described as an “URGENT” call for help.
The agency was struggling with one of its most important duties: keeping track of Americans suspected of having the novel coronavirus. It had “an ongoing issue” with organizing — and sometimes flat-out losing — forms sent by local agencies about people thought to be infected. The email listed job postings for people who could track or retrieve this paperwork.
As Trump's coronavirus lies and boasts and potentially deadly fictions mount, so does the urge to shut him up. As of Thursday evening, the U.S. had 82,404 cases, the most in the world - a number representing a 22% jump in what his foul administration insists should be called the "Wuhan" virus but which in all historical accuracy should be renamed the Trump Virus, given that, at this rate, there will be 250,000 cases by Easter, when he wants to see all those beautiful, packed, virulently toxic churches. Right now, our mortality rate is 1.4%, but there is virtual consensus among health experts it will get much worse. Still, the lies keep flowing: "The mortality rate, in my opinion, is way down," "America continues to gain ground," "nobody knew there'd be a pandemic," chloroquine will be “available almost immediately” and it won't kill you, the "LameStream media wants to keep our country closed" to mess with "my election success" but "the real people want to get back to work ASAP," except for the 75% who say that's insane, "We have done one hell of a job," and, "No one has done the job that we have done." (Well, that one might be true.)
The COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the world, and in many cases shutting it down, has become so pervasive so as to even dominate the headlines here at Techdirt. To say the outbreak has altered our way of life would be a massive understatement. Social distancing, shutdown states, stuck in our homes, jobs reduced and gone; this whole thing has become a nightmare.
Each morning when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo briefs the media and the public about the status of the coronavirus pandemic in his state, he pays particular attention to two numbers: How many patients with COVID-19 are in the hospital and how many require intensive care.
“That is the number we watch because that’s the number that are flowing into the health care system,” Cuomo said on March 18, adding that 549 patients were in the hospital as of that morning.
A conservative business group founded by a prolific Republican political donor is pressuring the White House to greenlight an unproven COVID-19 treatment, saying in an online petition that the country has plants in the U.S. ready to produce a drug but can’t because of “red tape, regulation, and a dysfunctional healthcare supply chain.”
In recent days, Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus’ Job Creators Network has placed Facebook ads and texted supporters to sign a petition urging President Donald Trump to “CUT RED TAPE” and make an anti-malarial drug called hydroxychloroquine available for treating those sickened with the virus, one such message obtained by ProPublica reads.
"3.3 million people just lost their 'if you like your employer benefits you can keep them' benefits. Healthcare can never again be tied to employment."
National and local leaders are responding in dramatically different ways to the current global pandemic, which, if left uncontrolled, could reach a severity not seen since the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919.
As calls ramp up for the nation’s leaders to deal with the coronavirus pandemic as if we were at war, it’s worth remembering the advice Aeschylus, the Greek tragedy playwright, gave nearly 2,500 years ago: “In war, truth is the first casualty.”
Bryan White leaned in to greet his wife with a kiss on the forehead when she arrived home from a 12-hour shift at Salem Health, an Oregon hospital that’s had 19 confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
“Nope, you don’t want that,” his wife told him as she rebuffed his kiss.
Three Liberty University students, a young man and two women, sat eating lunch on Wednesday afternoon at a small table in the common dining area of the student union on the sprawling campus perched high above Lynchburg, Virginia. They compared notes on the suntans and burns they’d gotten on beaches during spring break last week. They joked about what it would be like to take the college’s gun-range classes remotely. A fourth student with a backpack strolled up to the table to chat with them for a few minutes.
The young man seated at the table mentioned that he was thinking of going to a Starbucks off campus but wasn’t sure it was safe to do so given the coronavirus raging across the country, which has sickened at least 65,000 people nationwide, more than 400 of them in Virginia and a few of them in Lynchburg.
"I think what we're seeing in New York City and New York state right now is a real warning to other areas about what may happen or what may already be starting to happen."
The coronavirus and the real threats to American safety and freedom.
On March 13, the Government of India announced that it would cancel all visas until April 15 in an attempt to restrict international travel. The federal government did, however, make exceptions for those with diplomatic passports, work visas, and emergency visas.
As the viral blitzkrieg rolls across one European border after another, it seems to have a particular enmity for Italy. The country’s death toll has passed China’s, and scenes from its hospitals look like something out of Dante’s imagination.
President Donald Trump prides himself on being optimistic no matter how dire the situation. That is not necessarily a bad trait; it helps to get by in hard times. But deniability of past or repeated behavior when it results in harm to yourself or others, is not a positive trait. In fact, as president of the USA, it endangers everyone. Trump’s State of Denial has led us to the current horrendous situation of not being as prepared as we could have been for the coronavirus, i.e. COVID-19.
Americans don’t expect much from their government. But even by the standards of a nation with one of the flimsiest social safety nets in the Western world, the inability and unwillingness of both major political parties to manage and solve the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic is shocking.
Germany’s Aachen Cathedral has dug out the relics of little-known Saint Corona, patron saint of resisting epidemics, from its treasure chamber and is polishing up her elaborate shrine to go on show once the coronavirus pandemic has passed.
The pandemic, confirmed to have infected nearly half a million people worldwide, including more than 30,000 in Germany, has boosted public interest in the Christian martyr, believed to have been killed by the Romans around 1,800 years ago.
An 84-year-old man has become the first British prisoner to die after contracting coronavirus.
Edwin Hillier, an inmate at HMP Littlehey - a category C male sex offenders' prison in Cambridgeshire, died in hospital on Sunday.
Hillier, a convicted paedophile, reportedly had health issues.
A second serving UK prisoner, a 66-year-old male inmate at HMP Manchester, died in hospital on Thursday after contracting coronavirus.
Former school caretaker Hillier, from Hemel Hempstead, was jailed at St Albans Crown Court in 2016 for sexually abusing two girls in the 1970s.
Nineteen inmates across 10 UK prisons have tested positive for coronavirus, the Ministry of Justice has confirmed.
It comes after it was announced yesterday that prisons across England and Wales would be shutting down jail visits in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19.
A number of prisons have already confirmed cases of COVID-19 as cases soar across the UK and Boris Johnson orders Britons to stay inside.
However anxiety inside jails over coronavirus continues to grow due to the close proximity of prisoners and fears staff will go off sick with the disease.
Yesterday the Ministry of Justice confirmed that visitors would no longer be allowed to enter the establishments in an effort to keep staff, inmates and families safe and protect the NHS's ability to cope with the surge in coronavirus cases.
Six months after ex-Chancellor Sajid Javid announced an end to austerity, many families still rely on food banks to survive. The BBC's Chris Vallance has been spending time at a food bank in Oxford, hearing the stories of those who come seeking help. She sits in a red plastic chair, at a table covered in a blue and white cloth and she cries. There are freshly cut daffodils in the window, fresh groceries in rows beside her and she is distraught. For 20 minutes, a volunteer at the Community Emergency Foodbank in Oxford listens to her story, takes some of the weight of it from her shoulders, and brings heavy sacks of groceries to carry home to her family. In the food bank's little kitchen I speak to Mary, the volunteer who helped her. "It's a different story from every person but it's a similar sort of thing," she says. "Parents struggling to feed their families, teenagers that are always hungry, looking for food that isn't there. Sometimes you hear stories that they've been living on bread for a few days. They say, 'I feel a failure, a failure that I can't feed my children.'" Short presentational grey line Every Tuesday and Friday between noon and 2pm the food bank sign is wheeled out, outside St Francis church in east Oxford, and people who cannot afford food walk in. Sometimes they wait by the door, at other times they walk back and forth while they summon up the courage to enter. They are entitled to three visits a year but the food bank rarely turns people away. Sometimes it's the job centre or social services that gives them the necessary little blue referral form. Sometimes they are referred by a doctor who can tell they are not eating. I have been visiting the food bank since mid-January, on and off, listening to people's stories.
Health minister Matt Hancock said on Twitter on Friday he has tested positive for coronavirus and is self-isolating at home with mild symptoms.
Less than two hours earlier, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that he too had tested positive for the virus.
Has no one explained to Donald Trump how the Streisand Effect works yet? His campaign has apparently been sending laughably ridiculous threat letters to various TV stations that have been airing an advertisement put together by a group called Priorities USA, criticizing the President's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The ad highlights Trump's repeated statements playing down the virus and insisting that he had things under control, even as the numbers of infected started to rise exponentially. It's a pretty effective ad. You can see it here.
You can almost smell the fear-laden sweat oozing from the pores of television broadcasts and social media posts as it finally dawns on our political and media establishments what the coronavirus actually means. And I am not talking about the threat posed to our health.
Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open source platform for connected car technologies, announces three new members: MERA, Mocana, and Osaka NDS.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bluez and php5), Fedora (chromium, kernel, and PyYAML), Gentoo (adobe-flash, libvpx, php, qtcore, and unzip), openSUSE (chromium, kernel, and mcpp), Oracle (ipmitool and libvncserver), Red Hat (ipmitool and rh-postgresql10-postgresql), Slackware (kernel), and SUSE (ldns and tomcat6).
An ongoing security vulnerability in iPhones and iPads is keeping VPN applications from doing their job. For iOS versions 13.3.1 and later, this bug remains unpatched and has been rated with a 5.3 CVSS v3.1 base score. When a VPN connection is initiated on iOS, all existing internet connections by the operating system and other applications are supposed to be terminated and then restarted inside the VPN app’s encrypted tunnel as a proxy so no third parties are able to see your IP address. The VPN bypass bug in iOS 13.3.1 and later causes some internet connections to continue with their original, unencrypted connection – which is a security and privacy concern. This means that people on the same network could snoop on the unencrypted data stream and the endpoint of the unprotected connections are still able to see your device’s IP address.
Picked up by the always-excellent Bleeping Computer and Windows Latest, Microsoft has announced that both its big March 2020 update and a new patch issued to fix buggy antivirus scans within Windows 10 have severe side-effects which users need to know about.
It remains to be seen if it will make it for the upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel merge window, but the FSCRYPT inline encryption functionality has now made it up to its ninth revision for offering better file-system encryption performance on modern mobile SoCs.
FSCRYPT inline encryption came out at the end of last summer and compared to the existing FSCRYPT file-system encryption/decryption where the work is left to the file-system and Linux's crypto API, this inline encryption/description shifts the work off to the block layer as part of the bio.
For obvious and justified reasons, the coronavirus pandemic dominates the news currently. One of the latest developments is that India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has put his entire country on lockdown. Ordering 1.35 billion people to stay indoors is a pretty dramatic move. A side-effect of that lockdown is that one of the most important pieces of privacy legislation, the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019, has been delayed in its passage through the Indian parliament.
One of the hard lessons that I have learned over my years of practice is that, although some lawyers believe that they can increase the in terrorem effect of a complaint or a demand letter by piling on claims, the net effect of adding silly assertions can be to make things worse for your own client and not better. That may be true as well of the demand letter recently sent by David Vance Lucas of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings on behalf of their client, ProctorU.
No matter what you call it, a backdoor is a backdoor. Any method that gives a third-party access to encrypted data creates a major vulnerability that weakens the security of law-abiding citizens and the Internet at large.
Encryption is essential to security online.
Never discount the importance of venality in international relations.€ While pandemics should provide the glue for a unified front in response – we keep being told of fighting this horrendous “invisible enemy” – it’s business as usual in other respects.€ The United States, with a disparate, confused medical system that risks being overwhelmed, remains committed against that other country floundering in efforts to combat COVID-19: Iran.€ Instead of binding the nations, the virus, as with everything else, has served as a political obstacle.
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, so have confrontations between detainees and guards at Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities across the country, the latest in Louisiana and Texas.
The battles come as four people — two correctional officers and two detainees — tested positive for COVID-19 at New Jersey detention facilities.
"An absurd demonstration of Washington's gangsterism."
Federal judges continue to trip over themselves in their hurry to extend qualified immunity to law enforcement officers. No matter how egregious the violation -- and how simply wrong it appears to reasonable human beings -- cops can usually escape judgment by violating rights in new ways, ensuring there's no precedent that would make them aware they shouldn't do things like destroy someone's house after they've been given permission (and a key!) to enter.
Norway announced Thursday that it had extradited a fundamentalist Islamic preacher to Italy, despite the ongoing coronavirus epidemic, where he has been sentenced to jail for leading a jihadist network.
The news comes at a time when counterterrorism experts have warned neo-Nazi extremists adhering to ‘accelerationism’—a hyper violent doctrine among the far-right seeking to hasten the collapse of society through terrorist acts—have discussed using the global coronavirus pandemic to spur the disintegration of vulnerable governments dealing with the crisis.
Last week, Belton’s mayor issued a stay-at-home order for its residents. Authorities said Mr. Wilson said he felt compelled to act because of the mayor’s order and intended to use a car bomb to cause mass casualties at the hospital.
The F.B.I. is reviewing the shooting, as is standard anytime agents are involved in shootings.
KUOW weighs each decision about preempting regular programming individually, based on perceived news value in the moment and whether a preemption is of the highest value to our local audience.
After airing the White House briefings live for two weeks, a pattern of false information and exaggeration increasingly had many at KUOW questioning whether these briefings were in the best service of our mission—to create and serve a more informed public. Of even greater concern was the potential impact of false information on the health and safety of our community.
Societies worldwide are changing overnight to meet the coronavirus threat. The climate crisis should match the rapid pandemic response.
With the need for social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to be discussing how we will handle displaced peoples and limited resources should a climate disaster occur. It is not a matter of if this will occur, but when.
I watched a beautiful video this morning showing the murmuration of a flock of starlings with Pachelbels Canon in D Major in the background. It got me thinking about the ability of creatures to act as a living unit without verbal, visual or any other obvious form of communication. Birds fly in murmurations, fish swim in schools, bison graze in herds and so on, doing all through some form of telepathic communication that we humans, with all of our science and education seem to hardly understand at all. This in turn brought me to thinking about mass consent of large numbers of people in times of crises. One of the pressing questions and difficulties of this particular crisis, the pandemic, is the fear of over-reaching government and what appears to be the very real need for human cooperation, and so back to the birds, fish and bison.
The other morning, walking at the edge of a local park, I caught sight of a beautiful red cardinal, the first bird I ever saw some 63 years ago.
"I feel like an art lover wandering through the Louvre... as it burns to the ground," says one observer of the coral damage.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has requested the assistance of over 1,500 US military personnel for border enforcement, citing immigrants’ “potential to spread infectious disease,” according to an internal Department of Homeland Security memo obtained exclusively by The Nation.
President Donald Trump's plan to lift coronavirus restrictions by Easter against the advice of medical experts would result in hundreds of thousands of additional deaths from the new coronavirus, according to a model epidemiologists built for The New York Times.
Though individual states will make their own calls, Trump says that he wants to ease restrictions intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus and see "packed churches all over our country" on Easter Sunday. But the scientific modeling shows that waiting and continuing closures and restrictions just two additional weeks would save hundreds of thousands of lives. Likewise, keeping restrictions in place for two months could prevent 1 million deaths.
The economic and political structure of capitalism requires “an ideology, a consciousness, a way in which the citizenry can be taught to accept the system as it is. This ideology has many branches but one root, the maintenance and enhancement of the capitalist economic system. The elements of the dominant political ideology include: privileging individualism over community; conceptualizing society as a brutal state of nature controlled only by countervailing force; acceptance of the idea that humans are at base greedy; and, finally, the belief that the avariciousness of human nature requires police force and laws at home and armies overseas.”
Manufacturers frequently use specially colored packaging or scents to market personal care products to female customers, but the “pink tax” is not limited to those products; it also is evident in the costs of clothing, children’s toys, and even dry cleaning and car repairs. In 2013, researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research found that when male and female participants call mechanics, the female callers who seemed uninformed were quoted about $23 more on average than the male callers. Overall, gender specific pricing can cost a woman an estimated $1351 more per year in 1994, according to the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs study (p.6, 15).
"Meanwhile, these very same folks had no problem a couple years ago voting for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for billionaires and large profitable corporations. Not a problem."
In his national address on Wednesday, Vladimir Putin announced plans to impose a new 13-percent tax on bank accounts and securities worth more than 1 million rubles ($12,670). The tax will apply not to these sums of money but to the income earned on these funds — to the dividends from securities and interest on deposits. Currently, the average interest rate on bank deposits in rubles is about 5 percent. After the new tax is introduced, confiscating 13 percent of this money, the average interest rate will fall to 4.35 percent (5 x 0.13 = 0.65). In other words, Russians with bank accounts worth 1 million rubles earning an interest rate of 5 percent will need to pay the government roughly 6,500 rubles ($83), leaving account holders with 43,000 rubles ($550) in earned interest.
The coronavirus pandemic is just a symptom of systemic problems the industries cannot resolve.
"They're going to give nearly unchecked power to dole out trillions of dollars to a guy who just called over 3 million new unemployment claims 'not relevant.'"
"How wonderful is this. A beautiful silver lining."
The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated glaring structural and racial inequities in American society. What the Senate has put forth is not nearly good enough.
Just before midnight on Wednesday, the Senate passed the long-negotiated $2 trillion stimulus package. The theme of the stimulus overall seems to be that every win for ordinary people is paired with far more wins for companies. And while the package is imaginative when it comes to enormous loan funds for big businesses with few conditions, for the 43 million federal student loan borrowers in the United States, the relief is severely inadequate. There is cash in the bill for colleges and universities, but no federal student loan cancellation for borrowers who attended those schools in the past. In other words, colleges got bailed out, but alumni got sold out.
The Senate unanimously approved a historic $2.2 trillion emergency relief package late Wednesday night to battle the unprecedented economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic. The House will consider the bill Friday before it goes to President Trump’s desk to be signed into law. The bill would massively expand unemployment benefits, providing laid-off workers up to 100% of their salary and health insurance benefits for four months. Vermont senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders successfully fought to strengthen the bill’s assistance to laid-off workers, and voted “yes” even as he warned about the bill’s corporate bailout fund. “We do not need, at this moment in history, to provide a massive amount of corporate welfare to large profitable corporations,” Sanders said in a video explaining his vote.
Right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck told viewers of his eponymous BlazeTV program that older Americans should get back to work in order to “keep this economy going and working,” even if that means risking death by complications of the new coronavirus.
I have been a labor economist for a very long time and this is simply unprecedented.
"The only way to escape this trap is to avoid stepping into it in the first place. That's why the House must remove the cut to Social Security's dedicated funding before this bill passes."
"A transfer of wealth and power to the super rich from the rest of us, with the support of both political parties—a damning statement about the condition of American democracy."
An embroidery work illustrating the early course of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United€ States—more images of which are posted here at the Sidewalk Museum of Congress—follows the exponential growth in number of confirmed cases. The cumulative number rose very slowly through February, reached 100 on March 2, then leaped to 1,000 by March 11 and blew past 10,000 a week later, on March 18. It took just six more days more to surpass 50,000.
By a vote of 96-0, the United States Senate Wednesday night passed an enormous coronavirus stimulus package that would provide some desperately needed economic relief to struggling workers and the unemployed while establishing a $4.5 trillion fund to bail out large corporations — with little to no enforceable restrictions.
As the global pandemic sees business shed hundreds of thousands of jobs, Alison Pennington outlines an urgent case for government to provide wage subsidies, guaranteed incomes, and an expansion of public jobs.
The inadequate preparation for and callous response to the unfolding health and economic crises puts brutal inequalities and distorted priorities on full display.
"Instead of forcing American taxpayers to spend $500 billion subsidizing a fund for Secretary Mnuchin, that money would be far better spent going directly back to the people."
"We are about to experience something we cannot really imagine."
There have been a number of pieces in major news outlets telling us what the recovery will look like from this recession. Most have been pretty negative. The important thing to know about these forecasts is that the people making these forecasts don’t have a clue what they are talking about.
Although the joint statement acknowledged that “no evidence of a compromise or disruption to election infrastructure” existed at the time, politicians, pundits, and news outlets have been quick and consistent in pointing fingers towards a broad list of typical foreign threats, as Whitney Webb reported for MintPress News.
Kalen Keegan, a college student at the University of Nebraska Omaha, immediately noticed when her Twitter account unleashed a torrent of posts in Chinese. “My other account got hackedðŸâÂðŸÂ½,” the soccer player posted on a replacement account. The new author tweeting as @Kalenkayyy had strong views on geopolitics — all aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. It was obsessed with the protests in Hong Kong, offered uncritical praise of the Hong Kong police and accused demonstrators of fomenting a “color revolution” backed by an “anti-Chinese American conspiracy.”
As the coronavirus outbreak led to a lockdown of Wuhan and its surrounding cities in late January, the Hong Kong posts were suddenly deleted. The account continued to post relentlessly in Chinese, but it now focused on the burgeoning epidemic. About a month later, her Twitter profile began to change in other ways. The reference to her college disappeared and her headshot was replaced by a generic photo of two people kissing. By the end of the week, her Twitter transformation was complete. @Kalenkayyy was now a Chinese propaganda-posting zombie account belonging to someone purportedly named Kalun Tang.
Does anyone here seriously believe we’d be hearing a loud call for party unity if it were Bernie Sanders leading in the delegate count?
The time is now for the G20 to help save millions of lives and kick-start the future that humanity needs to hope again. Only a compassionate and collective global response will do.
"Only the most radical reset, akin to a post-world war overhaul of the international economy, will allow us to rebuild the international economy in a way which means we can tackle future pandemics."
The social media company and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg have been criticized for Facebook’s corporate structure, in which Zuckerberg has a controlling stake in the company thanks to a special class of super-voting shares. His dominance has been a point of contention for investors who believe Facebook has been irresponsible in the handling users’ personal data, and that Zuckerberg has not been held accountable.
The board’s lead independent director is supposed to provide oversight of Facebook and Zuckerberg for shareholders.
Despite the decrease in cases, German authorities nevertheless decided to have not just one, but two action days this year. The first took place on June 6, when German authorities launched coordinated police raids in 13 federal states against suspects who had allegedly posted hate speech online. In a total of 38 cases, homes were searched and suspects interrogated, the Federal Criminal Police Office reported.
A staff member in Russia’s government cabinet has reportedly tested positive for COVID-19, a source close to the government told Meduza. Another source in the cabinet also confirmed that someone working for the government’s staff is suspected of having contracted coronavirus.€
The spectacle of a “people’s approval” is likely to stretch over several days, requires no minimum turnout or independent verification and will include home and electronic voting. “Putin was too scared to hold a proper referendum so he came up with this fake procedure,” says Mr Navalny. “The Kremlin is desperate to draw us into it, count us up and then declare victory,” he adds. He has refused to participate in it. On March 15th a group of 350 lawyers, intellectuals and journalists signed an open letter warning of a constitutional coup that threatens to plunge the country into a national conflict. Three days later the number of signatures had swelled to 30,000.
On March 18, as is the case with many of its other quasi charitable acts, Chinese state-run mouthpieces used the verbs "supplied" and "delivered" to give the impression that the communist regime was donating 150,000 portable, rapid COVID-19 test kits to the Czech Republic. In fact, the central European nation's Health Ministry paid some 14 million crowns (US$546,000) for 100,000 test kits, while the country's Interior Ministry footed the bill for another 50,000, reported Expats.cz.
However, Czech news site iROZHLAS on Monday revealed that local healthcare workers have discovered that up to 80 percent of the Chinese kits give false results. During a crisis staff meeting held for the Moravian-Silesian Region by regional hygienist Pavla Svrcinova, the error rate for the test kits was found to be 80 percent, prompting officials to suggest they only be used for those persons who are nearing the end of their quarantine and never previously tested positive.
A crisis on this scale can reorder society in dramatic ways, for better or worse. Here are 34 big thinkers’ predictions for what’s to come.
Although there was no official confirmation, several porn websites were opening. Two leading adult sites pornhub.com and xvideos.com were not accessible but pornhub.org, along with several others were opening. Pornhub even launched its new "StayHomeHub" campaign and was offering a free premium subscription to "help flatten the curve".
In February, Haidar spoke out about not having heard from her husband for a month’s time. At the time, Haidar said she had her last update had been Jan. 14. the last time she had heard of Badawi’s wellbeing was on Jan. 14.
Despite attempts to contact the jail, Haidar was unable to reach Badawi.
The history of restrictions on reporters trying to cover the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, the CDC, the EPA and other federal health agencies has not been researched thoroughly enough, and thus, it’s a story not told often enough or well enough. That’s the opinion of a longtime Washington observer and journalist.
[...]
Foxhall is not only critical of restrictive federal policies, but also of journalists and news organizations that are often silent about what’s happening.”I don’t think anything can be more dangerous than something the press will not talk about or does not understand as a danger,” she says. “It’s not ethical journalism to take information in a controlled setting and publish it without telling the public that this information control is going on. You are at high risk of being harmful to public welfare.”
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been denied bail after arguing that his release from a UK prison would mitigate his "high risk" of catching coronavirus.
The Australian made the application in the Westminster Magistrates Court on Wednesday, with less than 15 people in attendance due to the coronavirus lockdown.
District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange had absconded before and said that Belmarsh prison is following government guidelines to protect detainees with no confirmed virus cases there yet.
Judge Vanessa Baraitser brushed aside the advice about coronavirus from both of the Prison Officers Association and the Prison Advisory Service and told Julian Assange he would not be bailed on fears that he would contract the virus.
Assange’s lawyers argued that the virus can spread rapidly in Britain’s overcrowded prisons and that there are already 100 staff off sick with coronavirus symptoms at HMP Belmarsh, the high security prison where Assange is held.
Yet despite Assange’s already weakened medical condition, including a previously reported lung complaint, the Judge refused to accept that there were fresh grounds for granting bail, even though the Justice Minister is currently reviewing whether remand prisoners like Julian Assange should be released.
Citing Assange’s previous asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy as a reason for not granting bail the Judge refused to accept the offer of house arrest and electronic tagging made by the Assange’s QC, Edward Fitzgerald.
HMP Belmarsh could not even arrange for Assange to be connected by video link for the whole hearing. He was removed to his cell while the proceedings went on without him.
‘This is a dangerous and cruel decision’, said WikiLeaks Ambassador Joseph Farrell. ‘Coronavirus will spread in Belmarsh. With 100 Belmarsh staff off ill Julian is already at risk. Visits have been cancelled. He will have no access to friends and family and his time with his legal team will be reduced further. How is anyone supposed to prepare a defence in such conditions’
Assange had argued that his release from a UK prison while on remand would mitigate the risk of him catching coronavirus.
Ahead of today’s application by Julian Assange's lawyers calling for bail on the grounds that he is in imminent danger from COVID-19 spreading through the prison population, Massimo Moratti, Amnesty International’s Europe Deputy Director of Research, said
“In light of the COVID-19 crisis, UK authorities should urgently consider releasing some people who are currently in detention or prison, especially those who are more at risk from the virus. Julian’s Assange’s claim of being vulnerable to COVID-19 must be rigorously examined.
The Russian government has drafted legislation that would empower Prime Minister Mikhail Misustin’s cabinet to put the nation on high alert and declare a national emergency in the event of an epidemic. The document is now published on the State Duma’s website.
The economy's turned upside down, people are dying, and we're all cooped up because the people who are supposed to keep us safe didn’t.
The real divide is between democracy and oligarchy.
This peril is immediate and pressing. There are 2.2 million Americans locked up at any one time, but over 11 million go through prison or jail gates in any one year.
Breathing hurts. The mound of tissues next to the groove you hollow into the couch grows faster than seems possible. Sound and light crash against your skull like hammers, so even binge-watching and reading become painful.
Now more than ever, we need to make our digital campaigns meaningful.
Officials from anti-abortion organizations asked the Trump administration on Tuesday to take steps to halt abortion access as part of the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Predictive policing efforts continue to expand around the world. Fortunately, so has the criticism. The data witchcraft that expects a bunch of crap data created by biased policing to coalesce into actionable info continues to be touted by those least likely to be negatively affected by it: namely, law enforcement agencies and the government officials that love them.
The NLRB—which consists of unelected political appointees—have the power to postpone such hearings any time they find “good cause.” After a two-week waiting period for a hearing, the scope of the bargaining unit and the eligibility of individual employees to vote in a certification election is subject to litigation. The impact of these new changes puts unions at a major disadvantage since employers now have more time to inundate workers with anti-union propaganda in the lead up to an election.
The state police thrashed the man in West Bengal's Banipur Rajgung area of Howrah district after he went out to buy milk during the 21-day lockdown. He later passed away after the beating. His family has alleged he died of the injuries.
A spokesman for police in the holy region of Mecca, Brig Mohammad Al Ghamdi, said authorities had identified those involved in “this criminal act”.
Make no mistake: These conditions do not affect only those who are incarcerated. The correctional officers and many others who work inside jails and prisons, from medical personnel to maintenance workers, are also at immediate risk. Every night, they go home to their families and communities, where they can transfer the virus. What's more, many of the over 10.5 million people who enter U.S. jails each year spend only a few days behind bars—before re-entering society.
The deprivation of basic health and hygiene to anyone who is in the custody of the government is a disturbing violation of human dignity any time. But in a pandemic, violating the practices that are pivotal to "flattening the curve" creates a massive and unjustified burden to the public at large.
Earlier this month, the biggest U.S. broadband providers announced they'd be dropping usage caps and overage fees during the pandemic in order to provide a little financial relief to home-bound Americans trying to slow the virus' spread. That's good, since telecom CEOs, engineers, and leaked documents have all made it clear caps and overage fees on fixed-line networks are little more than the price gouging of captive customers in uncompetitive U.S. broadband markets, and do absolutely nothing to help manage congestion in the age of intelligent networks that can prioritize or deprioritize entire traffic types on the fly.
But don’t panic yet: Operators can sidestep major jams and outages by upgrading equipment and adding components at these bottlenecks, according to the company, which likened it to a supermarket hiring more cashiers for busy times.
“They can add more capacity, which is easily done,” Nokia said. “Networks are handling traffic well -- so far.”
Nokia’s analytics service, dubbed Deepfield, also found a 300% surge in remote-conferencing programs like Zoom and Skype in the U.S. compared with the previous week. Video games, meanwhile, soared 400%.
Generics companies say innovators abuse divisional filing systems to prolong patent life and frustrate their competitors’ freedom to launch
It seems worth noting a historical milestone today. 67 years ago today, March 26, 1953, Dr. Jonas Salk announced the vaccine for polio, and saved millions of lives. And this is notable given the current COVID-19 pandemic we're all living with. However, at a time when we're having to be vigilant for giant pharmaceutical companies sneakily trying to game the system to get extra exclusivity, and patent maximalists pushing for extended patent terms as an "incentive" to come up with a vaccine, it's worth noting the simple fact that he did not patent the vaccine. Indeed, in a TV interview with Edward Murrow, Salk famously said "could you patent the sun?"
"There's no doubt that the prospect of an enormous public backlash is what made the difference."
During my recent attendance at the MIP – Managing Intellectual Property, International Patent Forum 2020 in London early this month, which Daniel Law sponsored, I had the privilege of attending to a session in which the Hon. Mr. Justice Birss, judge of the High Court of Justice for England and Wales, spoke about “Comparison of international IP enforcement”.
Scientists in the city at the center of China’s virus outbreak have applied to patent a drug made by U.S. company Gilead Science Inc. to treat the disease, possibly fueling conflict over technology policy that helped trigger Washington’s tariff war with Beijing.
The government-run Wuhan Institute of Virology said this week it applied for the patent in January along with a military laboratory. An institute statement acknowledged there are “intellectual property barriers” but said it acted to “protect national interests.”
Granting its own scientists a patent might give the Chinese government leverage in negotiations over paying for the drug. But it also might fuel complaints Beijing abuses its regulatory system to pressure foreign companies to hand over valuable technology.
China has applied for a new patent on an experimental Gilead Sciences Inc. drug that its scientists believe might fight the coronavirus.
It has applied for a patent for the use of the drug, know as remdesivir, to treat the novel coronavirus. The move is a sign that China views Gilead’s therapy as one of the most promising candidates to fight the outbreak that has now claimed almost 500 lives. A patent battle may affect Gilead’s control over the drug in China.
Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter by clicking on this link, and please send any tips, leads, and stories to virus@time.com.
While Gilead’s experimental drug isn’t licensed or approved anywhere in the world, it is being rushed into human trials in China on coronavirus patients after showing early signs of being highly effective.
However, development of any market-leading advantage should be done with an awareness of how to protect that investment and retain the advantage. So, can you get a monopoly on your AI's lucrative invention? This article considers potential hurdles to patent protection and some suggested solutions.
The IP frameworks are already being tested with respect to AI inventions. At the intergovernmental level, WIPO, on December 13 2019, published an issues paper in calling for submissions on the interaction between AI and IP. At the industry and academic level, the application to the EPO in August 2019 (rejected on December 20) for patents in the name of DABUS, an AI tool relying on a system of deep neural networks.
Much of the industry and academic (and now patent office) focus has been on whether the patent framework is capable of allowing for an inventor which is not a legal person. Currently, the answer from the EPO, the USPTO, the UKIPO and others is no, but it seems that at some stage, inventorship, or a path to ownership at least, could potentially be solved by granting of limited legal personhood to AI if the policy arguments in favour of AI inventions win out.
Managing IP asks in-house and private practice counsel why an increasing number of patent litigators are filing in Alan Albright’s court rather than in the Eastern District of Texas
In-house and private practice counsel say the Western District of Texas’s promises of efficiency are alluring, but that the breadth of case law in the Eastern District makes it more predictable
On March 23, 2020, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi regarding a provision in the current draft of the Senate version of the coronavirus funding bill (H.R. 748) that would eliminate accountability in government research and development (R&D) agreements. The draft bill proposes to expand the authority of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to use “Other Transaction Authority” (OTA) for R&D funding agreements. Agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services have asserted that OTA agreements are not subject to the Bayh-Dole Act, and expanding OTA would take away safeguards that are critical to protecting to the public’s investments in biomedical R&D.
As expected , the FDA designates Gilead Sciences' (NASDAQ:GILD) remdesivir an Orphan Drug for the treatment of COVID-19. Among the benefits of Orphan Drug status in the U.S. is a seven-year period of market exclusivity for the indication, if approved.
ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, the Food and Drug Administration granted Gilead Sciences “orphan” drug status for its antiviral drug, remdesivir. The designation allows the pharmaceutical company to profit exclusively for seven years from the product, which is one of dozens being tested as a possible treatment for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
Experts warn that the designation, reserved for treating “rare diseases,” could block supplies of the antiviral medication from generic drug manufacturers and provide a lucrative windfall for Gilead Sciences, which maintains close ties with President Donald Trump’s task force for controlling the coronavirus crisis. Joe Grogan, who serves on the White House coronavirus task force, lobbied for Gilead from 2011 to 2017 on issues including the pricing of pharmaceuticals.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected three appeals calling for more clarification on what is and isn’t eligible for patents under the high court’s Alice ruling, despite warnings that refusing to resolve the uncertainty will lead to “staggering consequences.”
A few months after denying numerous cases that sought to provide more clarity concerning patent eligibility standards, the justices turned down a new batch of appeals on the same issue.
Here is a look at some of the cases the high court turned down.
Reese v. Sprint
The makers of the movie 'Hellboy' recently asked for $270,000 in piracy damages against the operator of the now-defunct torrent site MKVCage. While the accused man didn't put up a defense, U.S. Magistrate Judge Kenneth Mansfield recommended denying the request, as it's unclear how the movie company ended up at this figure. As a result, Hellboy must go back to the drawing board.
An anti-piracy memorandum aimed at removing allegedly-infringing content from search engines is beginning to have an effect in Russia. That's according to the chief of the Internet Video Association, an anti-piracy group representing the interests of numerous licensed online video distribution platforms.
It's been a year since the RIAA sued Charter Communications, using the same strategy it had used against smaller ISPs Cox and Grande Communications -- that the DMCA actually requires internet access providers to completely kick users off upon the receipt of multiple (unproven) claims of copyright infringement. The RIAA has been plotting out this strategy for the better part of a decade.
