...Marcel decides to stop fighting and give in to the dark side, setting up a Windows machine and plugging his nose. All is not lost however, as Marcel tries to make his Windows system look and behave more like a Linux system.
A while back I modularized my shell configs and recently someone suggested trying out the same thing with my vim and neovim configs and you what, it was actually a pretty good idea. While there's nothing wrong with having a massive vimrc there are some nice benefits you do get from splitting up you configs like this.
Yesterday Lisa Su from AMD announced that big Navi is going to be announced next month (and there have been far too many announcements about announcements). But meanwhile, in Asia, there's always a guy that has something to show. And as it turns out, that would be a photo of big Navi.
The photo shows the backside' of the allegedly a Big Navi prototype PCB. You can see that Big Navi indeed is big as well as eight memory SMT traces with paper labels "Typical XT ASIC" references for a "16 Gb Samsung GDDR6 memory."
But you don't use Present directly, usually, usually Present is the mechanism for GLX and Vulkan to put bits on the screen. So, today I merged some code to Mesa to enable the corresponding features in those APIs, namely GLX_EXT_swap_control_tear and VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_RELAXED_KHR. If all goes well these should be included in Mesa 21.0, with a backport to 20.2.x not out of the question. As the GLX extension name suggests, this can introduce some visual tearing when the buffer swap does come in late, but for fullscreen games or VR displays that can be an acceptable tradeoff in exchange for reduced stuttering.
While there aren't too many Windows games out there still popular and supporting AMD's Mantle graphics API that was the precursor to Vulkan, open-source developer Clément Guérin continues work on his "GRVK" initiative for mapping Mantle on top of Vulkan as a learning exercise and for allowing those still relevant Mantle-supported games to in turn run on Vulkan.
This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.7.0 and Istio 1.7.1
Users accustomed to lengthy waits between releases will be surprised to find open-source vector graphic outfit, Inkscape, has squeezed out version 1.0.1 of its editor mere months after the version 1.0 milestone was achieved.
It took 16 years for Inkscape to hit 1.0 last May and we came away impressed by the polish of the cross-platform vector graphic editor.
While ostensibly a patch release for the inevitable bugs, the Inkscape team has popped in a number of features, some of which had been lurking beneath the covers of the previous release. The Selectors and CSS dialog which had been flagged as experimental in v1 has turned up in the Object menu and makes it possible to tinker with CSS properties saved in an element's style attribute.
The ongoing saga of Civilization VI seeing online cross-play broken between updates continues, with it now once again back online as of the update today, September 10.
A repeating issue: the game updates like most recently with the August 2020 release, cross-play has issues and gets disabled, then eventually it's sorted again. Hopefully at some point they will find the real cause of the constant breakage and actually sort it. Firaxis Games, the original developer, sent word yesterday that Aspyr Media were on it and today it's back online.
[...]
Sid Meier's Civilization VI is for Linux PC is available on the Humble Store and Steam.
X-Plane has long been Linux-friendly and one of the most realistic flight simulators available while today it's taking a big step forward with its 11.50 release and the much anticipated introduction of its new rendering engine with Vulkan support.
After being in public beta for months, X-Plane 11.50 is now official as the latest stable version of this high quality flight simulator.
GNU/Linux gaming has come a long way over the past decade. We are lucky to live in an age where there are a number of native linux games including AAA titles to choose from on the platform. Steam has also vastly increased the number of games available on Linux. Despite the vast availability of GUI based games, sometimes it can be more relaxing and entertaining to play terminal based ones. This is not so surprising considering the fact that most Linux users spend a lot of time on the command line and feel at home there. Luckily, there are a number of great terminal based games available on the platform as well.
Last month NVIDIA announced that its GeForce Now game streaming service was adding support for Chromebooks, allowing you to stream PC games through a web app, even if you’re using low-end hardware. Now NVIDIA is making it easier to access games you already own, by allowing Chromebook users to sync their Steam game libraries.
Linux typically does not get all that much love when it comes to games. Now, the penguin-people out there are getting an update to a free kart racer called Super Tux Kart with Tux the penguin as the main character.
First off, what is Super Tux Kart? According to the project’s webpage, it is an “3D open-source arcade racer with a variety characters, tracks, and modes to play.” In the early 2000s, a project called TuxKart floated around for Linux (if you want to see this lovely Word-webpage, you can do so here). Once the project tapered off around 2004, it was picked up again in 2006 by Joerg Henrichs, now with the moniker of “Super Tux Kart.” Over time, updates continued to be added as the team for Super Tux Kart grew. New maps, stories, and a whole game engine got added to this once small project. The game now features a whole host of open-source project mascots, such as the mascots for Linux, Blender, and GIMP. In 2019, online multiplayer was added, which brings us up to speed for Super Tux Kart's latest update.
Thursday continued the Akademy 2020 BoFs, meetings, group sessions and hacking. There is a wrap-up session at the end of the day so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present.
As discussed in the Season of KDE/Google Summer of Code BoF that we had yesterday in Akademy 2020, our plan is to start the next edition of Season of KDE soon. But first we need to start thinking about some project ideas and, most importantly, we need mentors! So if you are a KDE contributor and want to participate as a mentor in the next SoK, please join us and fill the ideas page.
The backend plumbing required to support notification grouping is being tackled by GNOME developer Mariana Pícolo. She recently shared a blog post on the progress she made in this area as part of this year’s Google Summer of Code.
Pictures paint a thousand words so here’s .gif of the new behaviour in action (keep in mind nothing you see here is finalised or finished)...
But let’s back up a bit: what is notification grouping, and why is it useful?
Notification grouping is a simple concept: multiple notifications from a single app are grouped together in one (expandable) notification. This approach keeps the message tray uncluttered and parseable as no one app able to “dominate” the alerts list with its notifications.
I'm very pleased to announce the new NuTyX 11.6 release.
The 64-bit version contains more than 1000 packages upgraded.
The 32-bit version of NuTyX, still actively supported.
In the newest release, base NuTyX comes with the Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel 4.19.143 and the latest stable 5.8.7.
Changelogs for the kernels are available here:
kernel 4.19.143 changlog
kernel 5.8.7 changelog
The gnu c library, glibc, is now glibc 2.31
The graphical server is xorg-server 1.20.9.
The mesa lib is 20.1.7, gtk3 is 3.24.22, and qt has been updated to 5.15.0.
Python interpreters 3.8.3 and 2.7.18 have been included in this release.
The MATE Desktop Environment comes in 1.24.1, the latest version.
The XFCE Desktop Environment comes in 4.14.1, the latest version.
The KDE Plasma Desktop is now 5.19.5, the Framework is now 5.73.0 and applications are now 20.08.1
Available browsers are: firefox 80.0.1, falkon 3.1.0, epiphany 3.36.4, etc
Many desktop applications have been updated as well like thunderbird 78.2.1, Scribus 1.5.5, libreoffice 7.0.1.2, gimp 2.10.20, etc.
The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on a set of local patches. I set a goal to reduce the local patches to bare minimum, ideally reaching no local modifications at all.
Thunderbird is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize – and it’s loaded with great features!
Our packages.gentoo.org site has recently received major feature upgrades thanks to the continued efforts of Gentoo developer Max Magorsch (arzano).
Six openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots have arrived in the rolling release since the last Tumblweed update.
KDE’s Plasma 5.19.5, php and Ceph were among more of the known updates.
The display-oriented email client Alpine updated to version 2.23 in the 20200908 snapshot and provided support for the Simple Authentication and Security Layer-IR IMAP extension. The open-source disk encryption package cryptsetup 2.3.4 added support options for the 5.9 kernel and fixed a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure affecting the memory write. A couple of RubyGem packages were updated in the snapshot and the 2.43 libcap package added some more release time checks for non-git tracked files. The snapshot is trending stable at a rating of 99, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Also trending at a 99 rating, snapshot 20200907 brought two package updates with fetchmail 6.4.12 and perl-Cpanel-JSON-XS 4.23. Fetchmail provided some regression fixes that were introduced in the versions between the 6.4.12 update and the previous 6.4.8 version in Tumbleweed.
Just four packages were updated in the 20200906 snapshot. The Heaptrack fast heap memory profiler updated to version 1.2.0; the package that allows you to track all heap memory allocations at run-time removed a fix-compile patch for 32bit. New features were added in the libvirt 6.7.0 version; added support for device model command-line passthrough for xen was one of the changes and there was also a change to the spec file that enables the same hypervisor drivers for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. The update of php 7.4.10 fixed a memory leak and python-libvirt-python 6.7.0 add all new APIs and constants in libvirt 6.7.0.
Rocket Software has introduced Rocket BlueZone Web for Zowe, which provides terminal emulation for IBM Z servers from any browser-enabled device.
Zowe is an open source initiative within the Open Mainframe Project (OMP), which delivers a modern browser-based GUI and services architecture to the IBM Z platform.
According to the announcement, Rocket BlueZone Web provides “a secure, browser-based terminal emulator that lives within the Zowe desktop environment. It includes superior configuration options for macros and settings, enabling a familiar emulation environment.”
What does the future hold for hybrid cloud? Watch Stefanie Chiras, Vice President and General Manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business Unit, and Brian Hopkins, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, in an open conversation on the future of cloud and Red Hat’s recommended strategy.
Built in collaboration with Red Hat and IBM, Red Hat Marketplace is an open cloud exchange for enterprise customers.
Zorin OS is one of those distributions that users love, because it offers tons of options. Users can work with a typical Linux desktop, one that resembles Windows, or a desktop that is decidedly very macOS-like. No matter which interface you use, it’s still very much Linux underneath.
With the latest release of Zorin OS, you’ll find new versions of software, as well as Zorin Connect, which allows you to easily connect your Android phone to the desktop. The latest version of Zorin Connect improves the auto search for devices on trusted Wi-Fi networks, adds quick buttons to send files and clipboard contents, supports the latest Android release, and includes performance and stability enhancements. Zorin OS 15. 3 also includes the latest security patches for every piece of included software.
I’ve lived in Austin, Texas for a little over 5 years and recently turned 25. I’m currently a Marketing Manager here at Canonical. When I started at Canonical in sales, I worked closely with the LATAM team, focusing primarily on the larger Latin America countries with significant enterprise IT markets. When I’m not working I like to jump on my XBOX and play competitive games, or watch my favorite drag queens lip sync “FOR THEIR LIVES” on RuPaul’s Drag Race.
My major in college was Communication, and one of my focuses was in intercultural and interpersonal studies. Towards the end of my college career, I got into artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and I ended up writing a “thesis” on the ethics of AI/ML and data collecting.
[...]
I speak both English and Spanish, and working at Canonical enables me to practice my Spanish everyday! I regularly use Spanish to communicate with IT professionals in Latin America, figuring out what they’re doing at an enterprise level and what Ubuntu-based solutions they might be interested in. I’ve also been translating some of our written content. All the practice has definitely helped me improve my Spanish, and I quickly learned a lot of tech and business terminology. In PR and communications, I hope to continue using my spanish-language skills for social media.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we interact with people, things, and the world around us. A few months ago, we launched the Touch Less, Do More Challenge, calling on our community to build solutions based on Arduino Nano or MKR boards to enforce social distancing or enable touch-free technologies.
More than 1,000 participants submitted solutions to the contest in hopes of winning tens of thousands of dollars in prizes, including hardware from Newark, Dragon Innovation product assessment, and Hackster marketing support.
The judging panel — composed by Massimo Banzi (Arduino Co-Founder), Nishant Nishant (Avnet VP & Global Head of Digital), Benedetta Piantella (Design Researcher and Professor at NYU), Alessandro Ranellucci (Arduino Chief of Open Source Community) and Alex Glow (IoT Media at Hackster) — selected the best projects. Without further ado, here are your winners…
[...]
15-year-old Dhruv Sheth has impressively designed an intelligent system comprised of six solutions that automate commonly used devices throughout homes and in public to prevent COVID-19 transmission. These solutions — which are built upon the MKR WiFi 1010 and Nano 33 BLE Sense — include a smart intercom, a temperature monitor, a voice-controlled elevator, a mask detector, a queue management system, and a sanitization system.
Google has loosed Android 11 on a waiting world.
The company is again delivering the update to owners of its Pixel phones on the day of release, and to some phones from OnePlus, Xiaomi, OPPO and realme. Those of you using other mobe-makers’ tin get to wait until those vendors get their act together.
Among the updates are plenty of changes to Android’s enterprise incarnation that Google says “better support company-owned devices” with “controls like asset management tools and personal usage policies that give IT the ability to keep devices compliant with corporate policy without compromising employee privacy.” IT can’t turn on location services on a company-owned phone without users being made aware of the change.
Huawei has announced plans to pre-install its own Harmony operating system on its smartphones from next year.
The Chinese company said it would also offer the software to other manufacturers to use as an alternative to Android.
Huawei is currently the world's second bestselling handset-maker, after a brief time in the top spot.
In addition, Huawei revealed its OpenHarmony project which is an open-source take on HarmonyOS similar to AOSP (Android Open Source Project). It will be open for developers soon and will support devices with as low as 128KB (yes, kilobytes) of RAM.
HarmonyOS is all about multi-screen functionality with seamless continuity and adaptive UX elements meant to work on a broad range of devices. Huawei is also touting improved security, smart voice recognition and fast cross-device data transfers.
Google's rules for when its Chrome browser allows and blocks the automatic playback of web audio and video have come under fire following a company developer's decision not to address objections to the removal of autoplay blocking controls from Chrome for Android.
Earlier this year, a user of the mobile version of Chrome on Android complained on the Google support forum that videos started playing upon visiting a web page and there appeared to be no way to prevent this.
Other forum participants chimed in, noting that the controls for preventing videos from autoplaying had disappeared. It's a concern that has been raised before.
The issue applies specifically to muted videos since unmuted videos aren't supposed to autoplay, even if they do sometimes. It was raised in March as a bug in the Chromium bug tracking system.
We need your help here at The Document Foundation. LibreOffice needs your support. In this article, I am going to ask you for help. I am going to ask you for a commitment to a monthly donation to The Document Foundation.
The increased use of Free Software is a central component for more digital sovereignty. Together with a strong alliance of administrations, politics, business and civil society, we call for the development of a code repository with Free Software for the public sector.
The increased use of Free Software by public institutions is a central building block for more digital sovereignty. Free Software, also known as Open Source Software, can be reviewed by everyone and can thus be independently checked for security aspects. Applications can be operated by the user and adapted to their needs. In this way, a high degree of independence from single vendors can be achieved. In addition, administrations have the opportunity to cooperate with each other more easily across organisational boundaries.
Together with the Open Source Business Alliance, the federal working group of municipal IT service providers Vitako and other experts, FSFE has developed a first concept for a code repository for the public sector and has found numerous supporters from administrations, politics, economy and civil society. Under the slogan "A place for public code", the interest group now wants to pave the way for a portal through which the public administration in Germany can exchange and jointly develop Free Software, also known as Open Source Software, in an adequate and legally compliant manner.
Now in a bid to comply with the requirements of GPL v2 and help aftermarket developers get the ball rolling on building ROMs and kernels, Microsoft has released the kernel source code for the Surface Duo.
OpenWrt — building on their sixteen years of success as the most popular Free and Open Source (FOSS) wireless router project — today joins Conservancy as a member project. FOSS wireless routers assure software freedom for all Internet users. Conservancy will help OpenWrt continue to thrive and grow as its new fiscal sponsor.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days (September 13, 2020). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
This series of posts comes directly from my book Clean Architectures in Python. As I am reviewing the book to prepare a second edition, I realised that Harry percival was right when he said that the initial part on TDD shouldn't be in the book. That's a prerequisite to follow the chapters on the clean architecture, but it is something many programmers already know and they might be surprised to find it in a book that discusses architectures.
So, I decided to move it here before I start working on a new version of the book. I also followed the advice of valorien, who pointed out that the main example has some bad naming choices, and so I reworked the code.
Python provides a built-in @property decorator which makes usage of getter and setters much easier in Object-Oriented Programming.
Properties are useful because they allow us to handle both setting and getting values in a programmatic way but still allow attributes to be accessed as attributes.
The permissions of a file in a Linux system are split into three sets of three permissions: read, write, and execute for the owner, group, and others. Each of the three values can be expressed as an octal number summing each permission, with 4 correspondings to read, 2 to write, and 1 to execute. Or it can be written with a string using the letters r, w, and x or - when the permission is not granted.
For example, 640 is read/write for the owner, read for the group, and no permissions for the others; converted to a string, it would be: "rw-r-----"
In this episode, I worked to add breaks to the display of the week schedule. We had to update context to include the break information into the schedules. I refactored a method out of the calendar display code to make some reusable logic for handling breaks.
The app needs to display breaks on the schedule and adjust what is displayed based on when the breaks are. I started with changing the background color of the break days. The break days were added to the context of the view. Once in the context, I adjusted the colors to show the breaks.
Wing 7.2.5 enhances the accuracy of some types of code warnings, improves Debug I/O process management, streamlines new virtualenv creation, implements vi mode :[range]y, and makes a number of usability improvements.
If you worked with Python 2 or an early version of Python 3, you probably remember that in the past, dictionaries were not ordered. If you wanted to have a dictionary that preserved the insertion order, the go-to solution was to use OrderedDict from the collections module.
In Python 3.6, dictionaries were redesigned to improve their performance (their memory usage was decreased by around 20-25%). This change had an interesting side-effect - dictionaries became ordered (although this order was not officially guaranteed). “Not officially guaranteed” means that it was just an implementation detail that could be removed in the future Python releases.
But starting from Python 3.7, the insertion-order preservation has been guaranteed in the language specification. If you started your journey with Python 3.7 or a newer version, you probably don’t know the world where you need a separate data structure to preserve the insertion order in a dictionary.
It's that time again! Time for us to take a look at how the Rust project is doing, and what we should plan for the future. The Rust Community Team is pleased to announce our 2020 State of Rust Survey! Whether or not you use Rust today, we want to know your opinions. Your responses will help the project understand its strengths and weaknesses and establish development priorities for the future. (If you'd like to give longer form feedback on the Rust roadmap, we're also collecting blog posts!)
Completing this survey should take about 10–15 minutes and is anonymous unless you choose to give us your contact information. We will be accepting submissions for the next two weeks (until September 24th), and we will write up our findings afterwards to blog.rust-lang.org. You can also check out last year’s results.
For years now, we've covered various milestones the esports industry has hit as it has exploded in popularity. Once relegated primarily to a few overseas markets, the past decade has seen an acceleration of the industry hitting the mainstream, from features in sports media on participants, college scholarships for esports, IRL leagues getting in the game, and even the betting markets opening up to esports gambling. While this trend began long before the world's current predicament, it's also true that the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered live sports for months, acted as a supercharger for all of this.
Boulder, Colo.—The call to action my generation received, during our first moment of inflection, was to get back to business. I was in my last year of high school on September 11, 2001, when an airliner slammed into the Pentagon a few miles away. Later that month, while visiting O’Hare International Airport, President George W. Bush implored the American people to “do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida.”
As schools cautiously reopen for the fall semester, several have discovered potentially harmful bacteria in their water systems. Parents are likely concerned about what this means for their children, and other districts may be checking their own water’s safety.
President Trump was well aware of how dangerous COVID-19 was in the early days of the pandemic. He even admitted to journalist Bob Woodward in February that he understood the disease was deadlier than the flu, contradicting his public statements and attitudes toward the disease during that time and in the months following.
The staffer for North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis compared obtaining healthcare in the U.S. to purchasing new clothes, telling a three-time cancer survivor, "If I can't afford that dress shirt, I don't get to get it."
A frightening report that appeared on CNBC “Key coronavirus forecast predicts over 410,000 total U.S. deaths by Jan. 1 ‘The worst is yet to come’” (September 4, 2020), is worse news than the fact that other signs of death will be on the ballot in November. The Newspaper of Record takes a somewhat similar tack in “America’s summer failure,” (September 4, 2020).
If President Trump and Senate Republicans were willing to work with Democrats on just one issue, a bill ending federal marijuana prohibition could finally become law.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a wave of drug use swept over Russia. Opioids, which were easily accessible not just on the black market but in regular drug stores as well, were especially popular. This led to a spike in deaths from overdoses and the increased spread of HIV. Previously, information about the consequences of drug use and access to antiretroviral therapy was practically nonexistent (therapy only became available to all Russians in 2006). At the time, a few, but notable, drug activists focused on education and harm reduction. Russia’s conservative turn in drug policy, however, later squeezed them out of the country altogether. At Meduza’s request, journalist Evgeniya Ofitserova retells the history of this drug activism.
I work in what I'll call algorithmic molecular similarity, where people use an algorithm to characterize if two molecules are similar. There is almost no overlap between those methods and legal molecular similarity. Two essays ago I covered patent law, where patentability depends on the expectations of a "person having ordinary skill in the art". In my previous essay I covered drug control law, which in the US seems based on the ability of laypeople to judge chemical similarity based on 2-D structure.
If you are extra cautious about securing your online accounts with the best possible authentication method, you probably know about Yubico. They make hardware authentication security keys to replace two-factor authentication and get rid of the password authentication system for your online accounts.
Basically, you just plug the security key on your computer or use the NFC on your smartphone to unlock access to accounts. In this way, your authentication method stays completely offline.
KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).
KeePass is really free, and more than that: it is open source (OSI certified). You can have a look at its full source and check whether the encryption algorithms are implemented correctly.
Billions of people around the world have come to rely on the services Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google provide to exercise their basic human rights. But for many people, both within and outside the U.S., the concentration of power in these companies has meant considerable harm.
We've noted a few times how the TikTok ban is largely performative, xenophobic nonsense that operates in a bizarre, facts-optional vacuum.
A heavily-redacted opinion has been released by the FISA Court. Even with the redactions, it's clear the NSA and FBI have continued to abuse their Section 702 privileges. But rather than reject the government's arguments or lay down more restrictions on the use of these collections, the court has decided to amend the rules to make some of these abuses no longer abuses, but rather the new normal. This means there are now fewer protections shielding Americans from being swept up by the NSA collections or targeted using this data by the FBI.
Let’s be honest about America’s wars and the men (overwhelmingly) and women who have fought them.
On the days when he is not celebrating his friendship and trade deals with China’s president Xi Jinping, Donald Trump has sought to hype China as the United States’ major enemy in the world. This has meant not only absurd allegations about the pandemic (top Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro has claimed that China€ deliberately sent€ infected people to the U.S. to spread the virus and damage the U.S. economy), but also sanctions, tariffs, and hints of military confrontations. While much of this silliness will go away if Donald Trump is defeated, the idea that the United States is involved in an intense global rivalry with China has gained serious credence among elite types. This is both wrong and dangerous.
The year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe’s lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one left — alone, utterly alone and triumphant atop the world.
The year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe’s lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one left—alone, utterly alone and triumphant atop the world.
“I’m not saying the military’s in love with me,” Donald Trump said on Monday. “The soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
What does NATO have to do with the election? What—as we talk about the coronovirus crisis and systemic racism, unemployment and health care and Trump’s alleged coddling of Putin—does NATO have to do with anything?
The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned Germany’s Ambassador to Russia, Géza Andreas von Geyr, to its office on Wednesday, September 9, to “convey strong protests” in connection with the situation surrounding opposition figure Alexey Navalny, who is in intensive care in Berlin.
Senators Ron Wyden and Jerry Moran have published an op-ed at Just Security detailing the government's overuse of classification (and distaste for declassification) -- a practice that uses our tax dollars to keep secrets from us. Overclassification is a problem. It has been a problem for decades, but it keeps getting worse. Multiple government agencies spend billions every year marking things "classified" and then forgetting the documents they've classified still exist.
Carbon dioxide gas (CO2) has been accumulating in the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (~1750), because increasingly voluminous fluxes of that gas have been exhausted from the lands and the oceans, and are beyond the capacity of natural CO2 sinks to absorb completely.
I have lived in Claremont, California for 12 years, and never have felt so much heat as I did Saturday, September 5, 2020. That was a very hot day. The temperature hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Today, the world is at a crucial juncture and we must choose the right path to a green recovery for a better future," says U.N. Secretary-General€ António€ Guterres.€
Two new Physical Oceanographic Real-Time Systems, also known as PORTS€®, are improving maritime safety near Kings Bay, Georgia, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, near two U.S. Navy installations. NOAA and the U.S. Navy partnered to install the first new PORTS in two years, the 34th and 35th in the nationwide network.
PORTS is a partnership program with local port authorities, pilot associations, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Navy, academia, and other stakeholders across the nation. In addition to other noted benefits, these systems also improve hazardous spill response and enhance recreational activities.
This story is part of a collaboration between The Nation and InsideClimate News as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. The piece below focuses on cities; to read how green recovery spending can impact rural areas, click here.
"Hard to say what's worse—destroying the nation's largest wildlife refuge, or further inflaming the climate crisis with new oil and gas drilling so a few fossil fuel companies can profit at the people's expense."
While excluding any funding for direct cash payments to Americans struggling to afford basic necessities amid the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis, the purportedly “targeted” relief legislation put forth by Senate Republicans Tuesday calls for a $161 million handout to the coal industry — a proposal Sen. Bernie Sanders condemned as “pathetic.”
"While Senate Republicans tell us we can't afford to give $2,000 a month to the working class during the economic crisis, the Covid-19 'relief' bill they just released provides $161 million in corporate welfare to the coal industry during a climate emergency."
Seventy wildfires raged across California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states on Wednesday.€
"Over the next 30 years lack of access to food and water will only increase without urgent global cooperation," says head of the Institute for Economics & Peace.
Today, working people in the United States are faced with a cruel paradox: Productivity is off the charts, and yet they work more hours than their parents’ generation did at the same age, and their real wages haven’t budged in decades. Many can’t make enough money at their jobs to dig themselves out of debt. Jamie K. McCallum argues in his new book, Worked Over, that these coinciding trends all began in the early 1970s and were partly initiated by a concern that well-paid union factory workers couldn’t stand their jobs.
There has been plenty of debate about what the Fed should do differently to ease the economic crisis. But again, it is Congress—hamstrung by Senate Republicans’ refusal to act—which has all the power to end this crisis
Richard Reeves and Christopher Pulliam had a New York Times column complaining that Democrats want to restore the full deductibility for state and local income taxes, which was ended with the 2017 tax cut bill. They claim, rightly, that the vast majority of this deduction goes to rich people.
Insofar as Donald Trump is campaigning in, as opposed to subverting, the 2020 presidential election, his main selling point is Law and Order.
Pundits across the political spectrum are pushing similar advice on Joe Biden: In the words of Washington Post columnist George Will, “He needs a Sister Souljah moment.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board, Bret Stephens in The New York Times, conservative Amanda Carpenter, liberal George Packer, and more urge the same tactic. Packer warned that the upheaval in Kenosha could be fatal to Biden’s chances in November. “In the crude terms of a presidential campaign, voters know that the Democrat means it when he denounces police brutality, but less so when he denounces riots. To reach the public…Biden has to go beyond boilerplate and make it personal, memorable.”
In the “old” days prior to the institution of legislative term limits in Montana, veteran Butte legislators loved to play a trick on their newly elected colleagues. They’d come up to them and quietly ask: “Did you get your envelope yet?” The clueless rookies would say “what envelope” and they’d be told “the envelope with the money from The Company.” “The Company” was the Anaconda Company, the offspring of the notorious Copper Kings that rode roughshod over the law and routinely bought or threatened legislators, sheriffs and judges as they made untold millions pulling copper from The Richest Hill on Earth.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) took the unprecedented step on Tuesday evening of seeking to defend President Trump against a private lawsuit by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll who has accused Trump of sexual assault. Carroll sued Trump for defamation after he denied ever having met her and accused her of lying.
Yesterday, on his last day to appeal a New York state court ruling ordering him to produce documents and a DNA sample as a defendant in an ongoing defamation suit, Donald Trump did the unthinkable: He fired his private attorneys, replaced them with Department of Justice lackeys, and argued that the statements and smears he made against the woman who sued him were done in his official capacity as president of the United States.
"By putting the DOJ to work defending him over conduct that has nothing to do with his official capacity, Trump has taken another giant step toward full-blown authoritarianism."
The Trump campaign faces a cash crunch, having spent about $800 million of the roughly $1.1 billion it raised since January 2019. At the same time, it appears to be hiding payments to top officials charged with cracking down on profligacy.
On September 8, Minsk witnessed another solidarity rally in support of those arrested during opposition protests. The demonstration was predominantly attended by women, some of whom brought their children. Belarusian law enforcement typically only arrests men during protests, but this time it was different. A photo taken by Minsk photographer Yevgeny Yerchak began circulating widely online and in the media: it showed a group of women with their arms linked, backed against a wall, looking at a security officer in an unmarked uniform. “Meduza” asked Yevgeny Yerchak to tell the story behind this photograph and explain what happened to its subjects.
Vladimir Putin won’t host a marathon call-in show on television this year. The Russian president’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told the news agency TASS on Wednesday that a “direct line” in 2020 would be “excessive,” given Putin’s multiple national addresses already this year.
Today the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered that absentee ballots should not be mailed until it decides whether to place Green Party candidates Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker on the ballot. The Court will review the actions taken by the Democrats on the Wisconsin Election Commission in keeping the Green candidates off the ballot. The Court is seeking additional facts to make a decision in this critically important case involving voter choice.
“The courts are right to be skeptical of this manufactured delay caused by the Democrats,” said campaign manager Andrea Mérida, “Had the Democrats on the Elections Commission avoided violating basic due process at the hearing, we would not be in this position. Instead, the hyper-partisan Democrats on the commission denied our campaign the right to present evidence and should have dismissed the challenge from the beginning because our campaign followed the commission staff’s instructions to the letter regarding Angela Walker’s address change.”
What should platforms like Facebook or YouTube do when users post speech that is technically legal, but widely abhorred? In the U.S. that has included things like the horrific video of the 2019 massacre in Christchurch. What about harder calls – like posts that some people see as anti-immigrant hate speech, and others see as important political discourse?
Honestly, you'd think that the Senate might have a few more important things to be working on right now than introducing what has to be the... what... 8th bill to try to rewrite Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act this year? Either way, three Senators on the Commerce Committee have released yet another truly ridiculous attempt at reforming Section 230. Senators Roger Wicker, Lindsey Graham, and Marsha Blackburn are the three clueless Senators behind the ridiculously named "Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act."
French government entities continue to clamp down on speech. Following a terrorist attack on a French satirical newspaper, government leaders vowed to double down on protecting controversial speech. The govenment then fast-tracked several prosecutions under its anti-terrorism laws, which included arresting a comedian for posting some anti-semitic content. It further celebrated its embrace of free speech by arresting a man for mocking the death of three police officers.
Kevin Zeese was a major constant reliable presence in the movement for peace and justice. He used writing, editing, online and all other forms of communication. He organized events, protests, occupations. He risked arrest. He ran for office. He was an attorney and used the courts and shared his expertise. He thought independently. He acted collaboratively. He maintained good relations with those he disagreed with — even those he disagreed with over that most disagreeable of topics in a collapsing oligarchy: elections.
Taking the census ensures your community gets its fair share of funding—and representation—during the pandemic and beyond.
We've noted more than once that the Donald Trump, Ajit Pai FCC isn't much for this whole accurate data thing. This FCC can routinely be found parroting inaccurate lobbyist claims on a wide variety of subjects, whether that's the rate of recent broadband investment, or the number of people just out of reach of affordable broadband. As such, it's not uncommon to find the FCC basing policy decisions on junk data; most recently exemplified by its rubber stamping of the job and competition eroding Sprint/T-Mobile merger (which was approved before FCC staff had seen ANY data).
On August 11, 2020, the Ninth Circuit handed down its opinion in Federal Trade Commission v. Qualcomm Inc., reversing the district court’s judgment in favor of the FTC. This essay argues that the Court of Appeals made two significant errors in its analysis. The first relates to the court’s failure to understand how Qualcomm’s conduct in the market for patent licenses affects competition in the complementary market for smartphone chips. The second concerns the court’s statement, at odds with the D.C. Circuit’s landmark decision in Microsoft, that if conduct “is not anticompetitive under €§ 1, the court need not separately analyze conduct under €§ 2.”
The dispute is over whether the USPTO should cancel Al Johnson’s registered trademark for goats on a green roof. To be clear – the mark is not the image of goats on a roof, but instead is an actual building with live goats walking around on the roof.
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The TTAB dismissed the opposition for lack of standing. That decision was then affirmed on appeal since Bank provided neither a real interest nor a reasonable basis for his belief of damage. The court noted that the “offense” injury was substantially undermined by Tam.
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Following the court’s decision, there was some debate on attorney fees. In particular, Swedish Restaurant requested that the court clerk enter the attorney fee award. Banks protested — arguing that attorney fee awards must be calculated and awarded by the court, not the clerk. The Federal Circuit agreed on that point and today awarded all of Swedish Restaurant’s requested fees of $28,523.00. (The Clerk separately taxed the costs at $241.54.)
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