It has happened in other regions before and it's happening again in China: the government has ordered the dumping of Windows in favor of Linux, among other things. This time, though, the reasoning is a bit different. According to Bloomberg, Beijing has ordered government offices and state-backed firms to replace foreign-branded PCs and their associated operating systems with alternatives that can be domestically maintained.
As such, China is set to replace almost 50 million PCs in central government agencies alone. It is important to note that this process will obviously not be completed in one fell swoop but is intended to be carried out in a staggered manner over a period of two years, according to unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
 In fact, it is also one of the best media server software for Linux.
Yes, the media server was already available for Linux, and we also had a tutorial covering the installation steps.
It has been an awesome day on your Linux system, and suddenly a process starts to slow down the whole computer. It is not that important, and you want to stop its execution.
Pamac is the default graphical package manager on Manjaro Linux. Learning how to manage packages using Pamac is essential for every Manjaro user.
Manjaro Linux has become well-known as a version of Arch Linux that's easier to install and use. Part of this reputation stems from your ability to use Manjaro with a complete lack of command-line knowledge. There are graphical apps to install Manjaro itself and to install software. That's where Pamac comes in.
Pamac is the default graphical app for installing software in various versions of Manjaro. While it's not hard to use, not every component is intuitive to a newcomer, so let's dive in.
Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Rust on CentOS 9 Stream. This is one of the most popular programming languages in the world.
Rust is an Open-Source and multipurpose programming language that was initially created by Mozilla, but has gradually gained much popularity worldwide.
Fans of this language say that it is possible that in time it could be a very solid alternative to C or C++ if it is not already.
How to Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 22.04. FFmpeg is an open-source collection of great tools for audio and video processing to record, convert and stream.
This tutorial covers the steps required to install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 22.04. You will also learn how to use the ffmpeg command line tool to convert audio, add text to video and many more.
This tutorial is tested on Google Cloud for automatic image and video processing.
Apache Solr is an open-source search platform written on Java. Solr provides full-text search, spell suggestions, custom document ordering and ranking, Snippet generation, and highlighting.
This tutorial will help you to install Apache Solr 9.0 on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish systems.
Want to complete your Cities: Skylines collection or get started with pretty much everything you need? Check out the new Cities: Skylines - Colossal Collection Bundle. Looks to be a pretty great deal overall for a game you can easily spend absolutely thousands of hours in.
The Battle of Polytopia, a very highly rated turn-based strategy game that hopped over from mobile to PC back in 2020 is still expanding with a whole new diplomacy mechanic. Now you don't have to just expand and wage war, you can actually do a little more in the game and€ strategize with others.
There's a Battle Royale for everything now of course and Super Animal Royale puts 64 furry things in an arena and makes them fight until the end. Oh, it also now has Steam Deck support.
Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo is a thoroughly wonderful looking 3D adventure about a dead snake that wakes up in Limbo. Their first Kickstarter back in 2021 didn't do well but they've relaunched with a new demo.
It's like The Sims but pixel-art and comes from an indie developer, what's not to love about this? Tiny Life has you take care of a family, build up their home and try not to kill them. First mentioned here back in January, the developer has been steadily working away on it.
A review of the Arch Linux based Garuda Linux, which brings a collection of desktop environments, window managers, and tools for general users and gamers.
I Have an Ampere Altra-Max/INGRASYS Yushan Server System running Centos 8 stream.
 The Raspberry Pi is the king of single-board computers because it offers decent performance packed into a convenient form factor for an attractive price. But its competition hasn’t been asleep while it’s been sitting on the throne. In 2022, there are several cheap Raspberry Pi alternatives that you should consider for your projects, each offering a unique set of features and capabilities. So, without further ado, here’s our list of the best cheap Raspberry Pi alternatives in 2022.
Update notice: The first version of this article was published in 2020. Since then, several compelling Raspberry Pi alternatives have been released, and the best ones are included in this updated version.
 DM&P Vortex86DX3 is an x86 embedded processor launched in 2015 that we’ve previously found in single board computers and mini PCs, but I’ve just noticed ICOP was offering the SOM304D3 system-on-module based on the single and dual-core versions of the Vortex86DX3 SoC.
The SOM304D3 is available with 1 or 2GB DDR3 RAM, works in a wide temperature range (up to -40€°C to +85€°C), and is designed for space-constrained industrial applications, especially those requiring legacy interfaces like ISA, IDE, and/or a parallel port (aka printer port).
Frequently in Gemini, I see mentions of GIT, dislike of github, and alternatives such as Gitea, GitLab and others. At work I use git and we use github for hosting the companies repositories. I have even taught introduction to git classes at a previous employer to encourage the switchover from SVN to Git. I even managed a company hosted instance of GitLab.
So glad I stopped using Scheme and moved to Common Lisp. Looks like the R7RS-large committee has fragmented, and now they are rewriting the R7RS-small spec that THEY ALREADY STANDARDIZED, only this time they're adding in features that will be impossible to implement for almost all current Scheme implementations, so it's looking more and more likely that there will only ever be one or two conformant R7RS-large implementations. Still no hint of anything useful for actual programming like… well anything that has to do with interfacing with the outside world.
I'm a big enemy of Github monoculture, but I feel like many of the alternatives for project collaboration and communication are somewhat lacking. Using services like Gitea[0] or Gitlab[1] provide a familiar Github-like experience, but inherit a lot of its downsides, including requiring account creation to submit patches and being enormously complex pieces of software that are challenging to self-host. Git-send-email[2] requires somewhat arduous IMAP setup and can be fiddly to get right the first few times. It often requires a custom email client to set up a proper workflow.v
 A web framework offers the developer a choice about how to solve a specific problem. By using a framework, a developer lets the framework control portions of their application. While it’s perfectly possible to code a web application without using a framework, it’s more practical to use one.
D is a general-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax that compiles to native code. It is statically typed and supports both automatic (garbage collected) and manual memory management. D programs are structured as modules that can be compiled separately and linked with external libraries to create native libraries or executables.
Here’s our recommendations. We only feature open source software.
I’ll confess. Although printf-style debugging has a bad rep, I find myself turning to it on occasion. Sure, printf is expensive and brings in a lot of code, but if you have the space and time to use it while debugging you can always remove it before you are finished. However, what if you don’t have an output device or you are using it for something else? If you are using most modern ARM chips, you have another option — a dedicated output channel that is used for several things, including debugging output. I decided I wanted to try that on the Blackpill running mbed, and found out it isn’t as easy as you might think. But it is possible, and when you are done reading, you’ll be able to do it, too.
With Perl 5.36.0 just around the corner, we thought that this is a good time to clarify plans for the future of the Perl programming language. We realised that the future was hammered out in a number of steps, across several months. This meant that there hasn't been a single statement we could refer people to. This post is to fill that gap.
Two years ago Perl 7 was announced. A key idea for Perl 7 was to significantly reduce the boilerplate needed at the top of your code, by enabling a lot of widely used modules / pragmas, but this would have come at the price of breaking some backwards compatibility. This would have meant that some existing code wouldn't have worked without modification.
This prompted a lot of heated discussions: some thought this was a great idea, and some thought it a terrible idea to throw away one of Perl's key strengths. Ultimately this led to a discussion about who had the right to make this decision, now that Larry is no longer involved in Perl (and hasn't been for about 20 years). The end result of all those discussions was a new governance structure.
Golf is a sport that has always enjoyed a good gadget or eight. Whether it’s something to measure the wind, or the latest putter guaranteed to save your game, golf enthusiasts have always flocked to such toys. [Nick O’Hara] has something that might just be a little€ too exciting for the golf set, though, in the form of his golf club launcher.
Living and working in a remote rain forest may sound idyllic to those currently stuck in bland suburbia, and to be sure it does have plenty of perks. One of the downsides, though, is getting new materials and equipment to that remote location. For that reason, [Digital Naturalism Laboratories], also known as [Dinalab], has to reuse or recycle as much as they can, including their scraps of acrylic leftover from their laser cutter.
Gin, bourbon, valium, weed, horse racing, nine-ball, poker, pills, petroleum, chess, sex, television, losing, winning—the novels of Walter Tevis are queasy with addictions big and little. Most are hazardous. Some are deadly. A few seem nice enough, but nice is usually booby-trapped somehow, so that a character can’t enjoy, say, a game of pool without going on a bender a page later. These are novels without rising or falling action; they move to the jerkier rhythms of recovery and relapse. When an addiction is fed, life levitates along; when starved, nothing can ease the pain except feeding some other addiction. Often there’s no escape, since Tevis makes even non-addictions seem addictive. Depression is addiction to misery. Civilization is addiction to resources. Genius is addiction to whatever you’re a genius at. Life is addiction to food, water, and pleasure that eventually comes to a cold-turkey close. You wonder what he would have said about OxyContin or the iPhone—or, for that matter, The Queen’s Gambit, the Netflix miniseries adapted from his 1983 novel.
The moment when everything changes is just like every other moment, more or less, in the world of Free Love, Tessa Hadley’s latest novel. Phyllis Fischer and her husband, Roger, a civil servant in the Foreign Office, are getting ready to go to a party across the street from their house in their placid London suburb. Before they leave, she asks her husband’s opinion about which earrings she should wear while she puts his cuff links into his dress shirt. “There was a lot to be said for these companionable married exchanges: low-voiced and sensible, friendly, worn into their groove, each partner attuned through long familiarity to the needs of the other,” Phyllis thinks. When they arrive, they make the usual small talk with the usual people. But suddenly Phyllis walks out, putting on her coat and walking across the road as if she had forgotten something at home. She tears a page out of her diary and writes a brief note, which says she needs to get away for a few days, and tells Roger not to look for her. Her daughter will find it later that night. Meanwhile, she goes toward the train to London, toward Nicky Knight, the young lover whom she has seen a handful of times. “She really had no idea then, that she wasn’t coming back,” our narrator tells us.
Being color blind is pretty weird. Everyday, typical, “normal” people see colors I can’t imagine. When co-workers or friends find out, it’s often an exercise in personal boundaries with plenty of pointing to various colors and asking what I see. But being colorblind is kind of useful. It’s helped me appreciate the colors I can accurately experience. And I often find myself wondering how the colors that exist in our daily lives came to be. How do you invent a color you can’t see? Today’s Tedium is looking at the Switzer brothers, how they manufactured fluorescents, and the outsized influence of DayGlo.
The troparion is woven throughout the season before Pentecost. We replace the usual beginning of our prayers with the Paschal troparion even. It's the cornerstone of the season, and maybe even a short explanation of we believe as Christians.
Making PCBs isn’t always just about getting nice copper traces on a lovely fiberglass board. There’s often lots of drilling to be done! This PCB drill press from [w_k_fay] should help you do just that with the finesse and accuracy of a pro.
Some guys get all the breaks. [Guy Dupont] had the honor of building a working, interactive wall-mount landline phone for the red carpet premiere of a certain TV show. The phone was to be an Easter egg inside an 80s-style pizzeria set. About every two minutes the phone would ring, and anyone brave enough to answer would be greeted with either a fake pizza order, an old answering machine message, or a clip from The Show That Cannot Be Mentioned.
But amid a sharp increase in fatalities and serious injuries among cyclists hit by cars and trucks, some cycling advocates say there's often a disconnect between efforts to encourage more biking and ensuring the safety of bicyclists who are using streets that are primarily designed to move cars and trucks through city neighborhoods and urban centers quickly.
Our roads have not always been built to prioritize cars, because the first vehicles to use the nation's streets weren't automobiles; they were carriages and bikes. In fact, the League of American Bicyclists has been around since 1880, long before cars.
"We lobbied Congress at the end of that century to get the first paved roads in the United States," says Bill Nesper, the League's executive director, who adds that it wasn't until after World War II that our streets became so car centric.
WBEZ recently asked Chicagoans to tell us what they wanted to know about biking in the city and what unanswered questions they had for City Hall transportation officials. Questions from nearly 200 cyclists poured in.
When will there be more protected lanes? Why don’t the police enforce the law when it comes to cars parking in bike lanes? How can I encourage cars to stay a safe distance away without pi**ing them off?
We didn’t just field questions — we posed them to the official at City Hall who is responsible for the city’s bike network. Read his responses here.
If you hadn’t noticed, the U.S. doesn’t give much of a shit about this whole privacy thing. Our privacy regulators are comically and intentionally understaffed and underfunded, we still have no meaningful privacy law for the Internet era, and when regulators do act, it’s generally months after the fact with penalties that are easily laughed off by companies rich from data over-collection.
DuckDuckGo’s “agreement with Microsoft” allows trackers to bypass privacy settings of DuckDuckGo “Privacy Browser”.
Why would they block them?
They’re hosted on Microsoft Azure and get their search results from Microsoft Bing.
DuckDuckGo is just a thrall of Microsoft, and it lets them sell their products while hiding who they really are, from people who know that the Microsoft brand is toxic.
Most deep neural networks are trained by stochastic gradient descent. Now “stochastic” is a fancy Greek word for “random”; it means that the training data are fed into the model in random order.
So what happens if the bad guys can cause the order to be not random? You guessed it—all bets are off. Suppose for example a company or a country wanted to have a v, but still be able to pretend that its training was actually fair. Well, they could assemble a set of financial data that was representative of the whole population, but start the model’s training on ten rich men and ten poor women drawn from that set € then let initialisation bias do the rest of the work.
If people want to travel incognito to an abortion clinic, according to well-meaning advice, they need to plan their trip the way a CIA operative might – and get a burner phone. As a cybersecurity and privacy researcher, I know that wouldn’t be good enough to guarantee privacy.
Using a maps app to plan a route, sending terms to a search engine and chatting online are ways that people actively share their personal data. But mobile devices share far more data than just what their users say or type. They share information with the network about whom people contacted, when they did so, how long the communication lasted and what type of device was used. The devices must do so in order to connect a phone call or send an email.
But with a few clicks of a mouse, PimEyes brought back a real-life nightmare that occurred nearly two decades ago. She has since tried and failed to get all of the explicit photos removed from PimEyes' search results, despite the site saying it would scrub images of Scarlett from results. As of this week, sexually explicit images of Scarlett could still be found via PimEyes.
Dmytro Kozatsky is a soldier from Ukraine's Azov regiment and the photographer behind a now-famous collection of photos showing the defenders of the besieged Azovstal steel plant. On May 16, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces ordered the commanders of the units in Azovstal to “save the lives of the personnel” there. Four days later, on May 20, Kozatsky reported that he had surrendered. Meduza spoke to his sister, Darya Yurchenko, about why Kozatsky originally decided to join Azov, his life during the siege, and his family’s main concerns at the moment.
On May 20, Azov regiment member and Mariupol defender Dmytro Kozatsky posted two farewell photos on social media as he left the Azovstal steel plant, where he had been living under siege for over two months.
But nonetheless, conducting a war crimes trial during active hostilities, and by a civilian court, is not normal. Nor may it be wise.
As an expert on the law of war – that is, the set of international legal protocols and conventions that set out the rules of what is allowed during conflicts – I am concerned that trying a prisoner of war in such circumstances is problematic for several reasons. Further, it could set a disturbing precedent. While the Ukrainian trial may well have been conducted under due process of law, the same may not be true if Russia decides to follow suit.
Now on May 19, “THE EDITORIAL BOARD,” the full Magisterium of the Times, has moved from hints to a clarion call for a change in direction in an editorial uninformatively titled, “The War Is Getting Complicated, and America Isn’t Ready.”€ From atop the Opinion page the Editorial Board has declared that “total victory” over Russia is not possible and that Ukraine will have to negotiate a peace in a way that reflects a “realistic assessment” and the “limits” of U.S. commitment. € The Times serves as one the main shapers of public opinion for the Elite and so its pronouncements are not to be taken lightly.
Ukrainians will have to adjust to US “limits” and make sacrifices for newfound U.S. realism
Any major war will, of course, inflict immense harm on the environment and Ukraine’s no exception. Although far from over, the fighting there has already resulted in widespread habitat and farmland destruction, while attacks on fuel-storage facilities (crucial targets for both sides) and the wartime consumption of fossil fuels have already released colossal amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. But however detrimental they may be, those should be thought of as relatively minor injuries when compared to the long-term catastrophic damage sure to be caused by the collapse of global efforts to slow the pace of global warming.
Mind you, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, the possibility of preventing the world’s temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above its pre-industrial average seemed to be slipping away. After all, as a recent study by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made clear, without a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions, global temperatures are likely to exceed that target long before this century ends — with terrifying consequences. “In concrete terms,” as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out when releasing the report, “this means major cities under water, unprecedented heat waves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages, and the extinction of one million species of plants and animals.”
When guards first brought Daniel Taylor into a room at the Stateville Correctional Center outside Chicago, we were strangers. It was 2001. I was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He was an inmate serving a life sentence.
He had written to me earlier. His was one of the dozen or so letters I’d get from inmates each month — each in an envelope red-stamped with a note saying they were from an inmate at the Illinois Department of Corrections, as if to warn me about their contents. But his letter stood out. He had been convicted of a 1992 double murder, he wrote, but he had records that showed he was in a police station holding cell when the murders were committed.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an executive order facilitating a simplified process by which residents of Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions will be given Russian citizenship. The document was published on the Russian government’s official legal information portal.
Since the start of the war, the Russian government has repeatedly violated even the most basic rights of Russian soldiers. Those who don’t want to join the war have been forced to sign contracts and sent into battle against their will. Meanwhile, families have been given little to no information about the fates of their missing husbands and sons —€ nor, often, have they been given their dead loved ones’ bodies. With the official system either overwhelmed by the sheer number of victims or invested in remaining opaque, the task of helping relatives get answers has fallen to human rights lawyers. Meduza spoke to Soldiers' Mothers Committee Executive Secretary Valentina Melnikova about the new role the organization has taken on since February 24.
Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant was under continuous siege by Russian troops from early March until May 17. The last place unoccupied by Russian troops in the city, the plant was completely cut off from the outside world. Ukrainians managed to defend it up until May 16, when the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces ordered the commanders of the units in Azovstal to “save the lives of the personnel.” The soldiers (the majority of whom belong to the Azov regiment, which was using the plant as a base) laid down their weapons and surrendered. Meduza spoke to the wives of two of the Azov soldiers who were taken prisoner, and to the mother of one who died, about what it was like to follow the siege from afar as their loved ones were under siege inside the plant.
Ms. Mattson’s passport was seized and she was forced to wait in the terminal overnight before being placed on a plane the morning of Monday, May 23. In the deportation documents, Colombian migration authorities mistakenly identified her as a citizen of Argentina, despite her U.S. passport. The U.S. Embassy in Bogota was unable or unwilling to help Ms. Mattson with this ordeal, although a U.S. official characterized the retention of her passport as irregular.
Ms. Mattson visited Colombia in the Spring of 2021 as part of a human rights delegation to investigate state violence against peaceful protestors. On this recent occasion, she was invited by Colombia’s Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CPDH), the country’s most prestigious human rights organization, to be an electoral observer.
Although Mattson resides in Mexico and first flown there, her tribulations did not end there. She was then held in Mexico without passport or phone while immigration waited for the first available flight to the US, because she is a US citizen. Only when Mattson exited the plane in the US were her phone and passport returned to her.
Colombian authorities falsely claimed that Mattson “represents a risk to the security of the State.” When contacted, the US embassy refused to aid her on the bogus grounds that they do not get involved when someone is accused of being a security risk.
According to the Kremlin-controlled media, the overwhelming majority of Russians support the war against Ukraine. There is no mass movement against the invasion, the state’s propagandists argue, and yet the authorities tirelessly track down and prosecute ordinary people for criticizing the “special operation” on social media and at small protests with banners that read, “No to the war!” But can these statements against the invasion change anything? Are they worth the risks? What’s the point of such actions if the war continues regardless? Maria Sereda at the Greenhouse of Social Technologies (Teplitsa) discussed these questions with Croatian-Bosnian human rights activist Igor Blazhevich, who’s assisted with deliveries of humanitarian aid to conflict zones and helped found the charity group People in Need. With Teplitsa’s€ kind permission, Meduza republishes Blazhevich’s remarks in full.
These are good times to be an arms maker. Not only are tens of billions of dollars in new military spending headed for the coffers of this country’s largest weapons contractors, but they’re being praised as defenders of freedom and democracy, thanks to their role in arming Ukraine to fight the Russians. The last time the industry gained such a sterling reputation was during World War II when it was lauded as the “arsenal of democracy” for fueling the fight against fascism.
Our largest weapons-making corporations are on a run for our money that on a planet that hardly needed one more war.
Katrina vanden Heuvel explores what it would take to bring the war in Ukraine to an end.
While Russia dropped missiles on Kyiv and laid siege to the port of Mariupol in late February, the oil and gas industry took advantage of the war in Ukraine to spread misinformation about the causes of the energy crisis in order to apply political pressure and pursue a longstanding wish list of policy changes, according to new research.€
Energy prices soared in the aftermath of the Russian invasion. In response, the oil and gas industry waged a concerted influence campaign that blamed the Biden administration’s climate policies for undermining American energy independence and for causing a spike in prices, according to a report from InfluenceMap, a corporate watchdog group. Across an array of platforms, the industry and its allies framed more drilling and looser regulation as a solution to these problems, and advocated for policies that had tenuous connections to the global energy crisis but were nonetheless favorable to the fossil fuel industry.
Ukraine must negotiate based on a “realistic assessment” and “limits” to U.S./NATO commitment, says NYT.
Under the clause, politicians who have engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States or “given aid or comfort” to insurrectionists are barred from running for Congress. Cawthorn argued that the Amnesty Act of 1872 repealed the clause and protects him. At the trial court level, a federal judge agreed and dismissed the challenge to Cawthorn.
However, Judge Toby Heytens wrote for the Fourth Circuit that “the 1872 Amnesty Act removed the Fourteenth Amendment’s eligibility bar only for those whose constitutionally wrongful acts occurred before its enactment… the 1872 Amnesty Act does not categorically exempt all future rebels and insurrectionists.”
Jessica Corbett reports on how progressive Democrats responded to Tuesday's massacre in Uvalde, Texas.
The rote responses of most congressional Republicans to the murder Tuesday of 19 Texas schoolchildren and two of their teachers were so wrenchingly vapid, so grotesquely lacking in any sense of urgency, that Representative Ruben Gallego could not take it any longer. The Arizona Democrat read a statement from Republican Senator Ted Cruz in which the Texan claimed those who demanded action to avert future school shootings were “politicizing” the tragedy. And he responded appropriately.
We speak with Manuel Oliver, co-founder of the gun reform group Change the Ref, about Tuesday’s mass shooting at an elementary school that left 19 children and two adults dead in Uvalde, Texas. Oliver is the father of Joaquin, one of the 17 students killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. He encourages those closely affected by Tuesday’s shooting to channel their grief into action on gun control, and calls on celebrities to commit to the fight.
Hours after Tuesday’s mass shooting that killed at least 19 students and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy passionately addressed Republicans on the Senate floor in a call for action on gun control. “I’m here on this floor to beg, to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues: Find a path forward here,” said Murphy. “Work with us to find a way to pass laws that make this less likely.”
The National Rifle Association still plans to host its annual meeting Friday in Houston, Texas, despite Tuesday’s mass shooting at an elementary school that left 19 children and two adults dead in the state. More than 55,000 people are set to attend and hear speeches by former President Trump and Republican Texas lawmakers including Governor Greg Abbott and Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn. Michael Spies, senior staff writer at The Trace, says the NRA convention will serve as a “Republican pep rally” to uphold “an absolutist vision of the Second Amendment,” and argues the Republican Party’s devotion to unrestricted gun access goes beyond the NRA, whose power he says is slowly weakening. “The machine works on autopilot now,” says Spies, who also discusses a pending Supreme Court case which could do away with a New York law requiring gun owners to hold a permit to carry concealed guns.
Nineteen children and two teachers were shot dead at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday by an 18-year-old who had earlier shot and critically wounded his grandmother. The gunman was shot and killed by law enforcement. The attack was the deadliest school shooting since the massacre in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012 and comes just 10 days after an 18-year-old self-described white supremacist attacked a grocery store in the heart of Buffalo’s African American community. We go to Austin to speak with Nicole Golden, executive director of Texas Gun Sense, who says Texas lawmakers have widely opposed gun violence prevention legislation supported by the majority of Texas voters. She also denounces Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s recommendation to arm teachers.
At the present time, over a million tonnes of tritium-contaminated water are being held in about a thousand tanks at the site of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power station in Japan. This is being added to at the rate of ~300 tonnes a day from the water being pumped to keep cool the melted nuclear fuels from the three destroyed reactors at Fukushima. Therefore new tanks are having to be built each week to cope with the influx.
These problems constitute a sharp reminder to the world’s media that the nuclear disaster at Fukushima did not end in 2011 and is continuing with no end in sight.
What do you get when Pacific Northwest National Laboratories takes over what was once the largest and deepest gold mine in North America? The answer might be enough energy to power 10,000,000 homes. The enhanced geothermal systems project includes the lab and several partners from academia and industry and aims to test sending fluids down boreholes so the Earth can heat them up. Hot fluids, of course, can easily create electricity.
Oregon gas utility NW Natural offered free activity booklets in English and Spanish to schools in its service territory last year. The booklets target kids as young as kindergarten with games and puzzles that position fossil gas as a clean source of energy. The utility claims the materials relate to safety, and as a result, the company is trying to get ratepayers to cover the costs of the campaign. But a coalition of environmental groups opposing the move argue that the school booklet initiative was instead a propaganda campaign aimed at influencing children.€
Last year, NW Natural, Oregon’s largest gas utility, sent emails and print mailers to schools in its service territory, offering free gas-related activity booklets for children, according to testimony filed with the state Public Utility Commission (PUC) in April by environmental groups, including the Coalition of Communities of Color and Climate Solutions. The groups are represented by lawyers from Earthjustice and the Green Energy Institute at Lewis & Clark Law School.€
Community members gathered at Burns Park Sunday evening to attend a public power festival hosted by Ann Arbor for Public Power (A2P2), a non-profit organization advocating for the city to municipalize its energy utility and replace DTE Energy, the private utility company currently serving Ann Arbor, with a publicly owned energy utility. The Sunday festival featured live music, educational booths and speeches from guest speakers.
How much more unpredictability must the American people endure as a result of our reliance on fossil fuels before we finally cut ties with Big Oil and build a stable, affordable clean-energy economy? It seems like President Biden is out of options, given the intransigence of the fossil fuel–friendly Congress. But he has one: use his authority as president to invoke the Defense Production Act to dramatically scale up production of clean energy, while simultaneously protecting national security.
The report revealed that 32 percent of our native trillium species or varieties are threatened with extinction, thanks to human development, predation by white-tailed deer and feral hogs, competition from invasive plants and more.
Trillium erectum, also known as the wake robin, red trillium or stinking Benjamin, holds its flowers above its green leaves on short stalks called pedicels. Credit...Margaret Roach
The plight of any native species is cause for concern, but with trillium there is another layer — almost an emotional factor. Their distinctive, early flowers charm us, making them a kind of poster plant for other species in trouble, ambassadors for an interest in growing and conserving natives. Botanists often refer to them as “charismatic” flora.
Campaigners who have stopped illegal gold mining in Ecuador, shut down a toxic oil drilling site in Los Angeles, pushed Australia's largest banks to stop funding coal projects, and held a powerful fossil fuel company to account for disastrous oil spills in Nigeria are among the recipients of the Goldman Environmental Prize for 2022, which is being awarded Wednesday.
The award ceremony is being held virtually in light of the pandemic and will honor seven grassroots campaigners representing each of the world's six inhabited continents, with each winner awarded $200,000.
Also relating to the Buffalo shooting, the Sunbury, Pennsylvania€ Daily Item reports that it “prompted GOP legislative leaders to call Monday for the reinstatement of New York’s death penalty law for murders fueled by racism and hatred.”
I read a lot of news stories each and every day, and I’m always surprised at how often I see various events characterized as “prompting” calls for action — the same calls, for the same actions, from the same people who were making exactly the same calls for exactly the same actions long before the events in question.
The witness: Robby Mook, who managed Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign.
The revelation: According to Mook, Clinton personally approved the initial disinformation campaign that eventually became “Russiagate,” an attempt to explain/excuse Clinton’s poor performance and ultimate loss, and Donald Trump’s victory, as a function of Russian “meddling” in the election.
Yossi Cohen's mistress was a married flight attendant, to whom he exposed Israeli national security secrets.
The rise of streaming services on the Internet was a revolutionary shift when it came to the world of media. No more would content be pumped in to homes in a one-way fashion, broadcast by major conglomerates and government-run organizations. Instead, individuals would be free to hunt for content suiting their own desires on an all-you-can-watch basis.
The web of global intermediary liability laws has grown increasingly vast and complex as policymakers around the world move to adopt stricter legal frameworks for platform regulation. To help detangle things, we offer an overview of different approaches to intermediary liability. We also present a version of Daphne Keller’s intermediary liability toolbox, which contains the typical components of an intermediary liability law as well as the various regulatory dials and knobs that enable lawmakers to calibrate its effect.
Liability itself can be distinguished on the basis of remedy: monetary and non-monetary liability. Monetary liability results in awards of compensatory damages to the claimant, while non-monetary liability results in orders that require the intermediary to take steps against wrongful activities undertaken through the use of their services (usually in the form of injunctions to do or refrain from doing something).€
Monetary remedies are obtained after establishing an intermediary’s liability—which ranges from strict, fault-based, knowledge-based, and court adjudicated-liability to total immunity. Various configurations along this spectrum continue to emerge, as regulators experiment with regulatory dials and knobs to craft legislation tailored toward specific contexts.
Two political figures determined to play to the base no matter what it costs them have filed lawsuits against book retailer Barnes & Noble, claiming (one specific Virginia Beach store, along with a Virginia Beach school) the company is marketing “obscene” books to kids.
It’s truly amazing how focused people are, in discussions on content moderation, on the claims that “content moderation is censorship” and that it’s primarily “suppressing” political speech. That’s not how it works at all. Honestly, the origins of most content moderation efforts were around two major things: (1) spam prevention and (2) copyright infringement. Over time, that’s expanded, but the major categories of content moderation have little to nothing to do with “viewpoint” discrimination, no matter what Texas seems to think.
The full video is also available to watch here.
Western newsrooms generally love martyrs—men or women whom they can market to their readers as perfect victims. Shireen Abu Akleh, though not one to turn the other cheek, certainly fit that profile: a 51-year-old Palestinian Christian woman with an American passport who was killed while wearing a clearly marked press vest. Even so, because of who killed her, Abu Akleh’s very public death and “perfect victimhood” was up for debate.
Silao, Guanajuato, Mexico—Since the massive General Motors plant opened here in 1996, the workers have been represented by the 86-year-old Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). On February 1 and 2 of this year, all that changed when a majority of GM’s 6400 workers voted to be represented by the Independent Union of Auto Industry Workers (SINTTIA). Before then, union elections at the plant were essentially a farce.
Following the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the streets of the city erupted in protest. Police responded accordingly. Which is to say indifferently. Rather than rein in the violence that had triggered the protests, many officers felt they needed to make protesters pay for their ungrateful response to racial bias and police violence.
Hertz has dug its own hole. And it insists it hasn’t hit the bottom yet. The shovels will continue to be deployed until the litigation ends. This isn’t going to work out well for Hertz, but the company seems to have retreated deep into denial following lawsuits over its bogus theft allegations.
I've fallen into a rabbit hole of URI (Uniform Resource Indentifier) encoding and decoding, and why not publish my results here so I at least have a place I know where I can look it up again. And who knows? Maybe someone else will find this useful.
A recent DMCA notice sent by Blizzard to Github demands the takedown of an avatar depicting the gaming company's character 'Chef Nomi'. While legally sound up to this point, Blizzard's notice goes on to inform the coding platform that its failure to deploy piracy filtering technologies is "evidence of intentional facilitation of copyright infringement." In Github's case? Not even close.
This week, France's national anti-piracy agency Arcom spoke at the Cannes film festival. The public heard that France is serious about fighting online piracy and that new blocking powers will help to crack down on infringing services. What wasn't mentioned, is that French law prohibits streaming services from showing recent movies, which arguably keeps piracy relevant at the same time.
There’s a story in the Daily Mail that underlines why it is important for people to make copies. It concerns the re-surfacing of€ rare recordings of the Beatles: