Leftovers

• Mexico News Daily ☛ Trekking, Mexico style

  Mexico has no national trekking trails, but two long-distance hikers in Jalisco decided to create their own.

• Tom MacWright ☛ Recently

  Something I’ve been encountering time and time again is the difficulty of getting both “good vibes” and “good ideas” in the same movement.

  For example, fighting greedy housing developers has great vibes, a clear-cut enemy, lots of likeable compatriots, potential for good visuals. Sometimes it’s correct – developers are no saints, and they’re sometimes the bad guys – but a lot of the time it’s wrong. Fighting new development no matter what is the essence of NIMBYism.

  YIMBYism often has bad vibes: we have to deal with loud, often-wrong twitter personas like Matt Yglesias speaking for the movement. There’s a lot of “well-actually” corrections and gesturing toward charts and numbers. But, most of the time it’s right. Every time you look at recent history, building housing has led to more housing, and not building housing has led to more homelessness.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ A Tiny Particle Accelerator Just Achieved a Major Energy Milestone

    10 GeV in a 4-inch chamber.

  • Science Alert ☛ This Adorable Penguin Sleeps More Than 10,000 Times Each Day

    Wait, what?

  • Hackaday ☛ Print Your Own Brain Lamp From MRI Data

    MRIs generally fall somewhere on the scale from boring to stressful depending on why you’re having one and how claustrophobic you get. Regardless, they’re a wonderful diagnostic tool and they’ve saved thousands if not millions of lives over the years. In a fun use of the technology, [mandalaFractals] has shown us how to make a 3D-printed brain lamp using an MRI scan of the head.

• Hardware

  • Science Alert ☛ China's Building an Epic Underwater Data Center With The Power of 6 Million PCs

    The first of its kind.

  • Hackaday ☛ Radio Emissions Over Sunspots Challenge Models Of Stellar Magnetism

    Sustained radio emissions originating from high over a sunspot are getting researchers thinking in new directions. Unlike solar radio bursts — which typically last only minutes or hours — these have persisted for over a week. They resemble auroral radio emissions observed in planetary magnetospheres and some stars, but seeing them from about 40,000 km above a sunspot is something new. They don’t seem tied to solar flare activity, either.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Sunspots Are Coming (Again)

    There are a bunch of ways to estimate the age of a radio amateur, by the letters in their callsign, by their preferred choice of homebrewing technology, or sometimes by their operating style. One that perhaps doesn’t immediately come to mind is to count how many solar cycles they remember, and since the current cycle 25 is my fourth I guess I’ve seen a few. Cycle 25 is so far shaping up to be quite an active one especially of late, which popular media are describing as bombarding us with flares from a “sunspot archipelago” and the more measured tones of spaceweather.com giving us warning of X-class flares heading in our direction, today!

  • Hackaday ☛ Cat-o-Matic 3000 Serves Your Feline Masters

    When you have three cats and three humans, you have one problem: feeding them on a schedule without over or under feeding them. Even if there was only one human in the equation, the Cat-o-Matic 3000 would still be a useful tool.

  • Hackaday ☛ LED Tester Also Calculates Resistor For Target Voltage

    [mircemk] built a slick-looking LED tester with a couple handy functions built in. Not only can one select a target current to put through an LED, but by providing a target voltage, the system will automatically calculate the necessary series resistor. If for example the LED is destined for 14 V, this device will not only show how the LED looks at the chosen current, but will calculate the required resistor to get the same results on a 14 V system.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Off Guardian ☛ WATCH: Decoding the WHO’s New Pandemic ‘Agreement’ & New World Dis-Order

    James Corbett and Dr. Meryl Nass return to “Good Morning CHD” to chronicle the latest Oct. 30 draft of the WHO Pandemic Treaty — now pegged the pandemic ‘agreement’.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Five senators ask Biden to impose China travel ban after respiratory illness cases

    China is experiencing a spike in respiratory illness cases among children.

  • The Straits Times ☛ No new infectious diseases found in investigations, China's National Health Commission says

    No new infectious diseases have been found so far in investigations of respitory illness, Mi Feng, an official with China's National Health Commission said in a press conference on Saturday.

  • RFA ☛ In China, 1 in 5 could face severe drought, UN data says

    Globally, hundreds of millions will suffer extreme drought conditions if temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius.

  • Science Alert ☛ For The First Time Since The Pandemic, Life Expectancy in The US Is Rising

    But it's not all good news.

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ October remittances highest ever recorded in a single month

    Remittances to Mexico have been on a record-breaking trend since the start of the pandemic, but the peso's strength has affected purchasing power.

  • Press Gazette ☛ News diary 4 – 10 December: Train drivers strike, Johnson at Covid inquiry

    A look ahead at the key events leading the news agenda next week, from the team at Foresight News.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ ‘We can never go back to normal’: A year on from China’s ‘white placard’ zero-Covid protests

    A year after historic protests broke out on Shanghai’s bustling Wulumuqi Road, only a subtly increased police presence on main junctions betrays anything out of the ordinary.

  • Reason ☛ The DeSantis-Newsom Debate Was Really a Debate About COVID

    Too bad that was only a small part of the 90-minute affair.

  • Latvia ☛ Man gets severe burns at self-proclaimed 'medical' facility

    A retail company that sells electrical goods calls itself a medical center and offers free health improvement procedures. Latvian Television's broadcast 4. studija was approached by a viewer who suffered severe burns at this establishment, LTV reported in its November 30 show.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ U.S. Senator: What Do Our Cars Know? And Who Do They Share that Information With?

      “As cars increasingly become high-tech computers on wheels, they produce vast amounts of data on drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and other motorists, creating the potential for severe privacy violations. This data could reveal sensitive personal information, including location history and driving behavior, and can help data brokers develop detailed data profiles on users.”

      Not only does the letter articulate the privacy harms imposed by vehicles (and trust us, cars are some of the least privacy-oriented devices on the market), it also asks probing questions of companies regarding what data is collected, who has access, particulars about how and for how long data is stored, whether data is sold, and how consumers and the public can go about requesting the deletion of that data.

      Also essential are the questions concerning the relationship between car companies and law enforcement. We know, for instance, that self-driving car companies have also built relationships with police and have given footage, on a number of occasions, to law enforcement to aid in investigations. Likewise both Tesla employees and law enforcement had been given or gained access to footage from the electric vehicles.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Scoop News Group ☛ U.S. government sanctions prolific North Korean cyber espionage unit

    The veteran hacking crew has been at the heart of Pyongyang's efforts to gather intelligence by breaching computer systems.

  • Security Week ☛ US Sanctions North Korean Cyberespionage Group Kimsuky

    The US has announced sanctions against North Korean cyberespionage group Kimsuky over its intelligence gathering activities. 

  • Security Week ☛ In Other News: Utilities Targeted by Hackers, Aerospace Attacks, Killnet Leader Unmasked

    Noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: Utilities in US and Europe targeted in attacks, aerospace hacks, and Killnet leader unmasked.

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea launches first spy satellite with SpaceX

    December 02, 2023 4:14 AM
    
    

    A SpaceX rocket on Dec 1 launched South Korea’s first military spy satellite, intensifying a space race on the peninsula after Pyongyang launched its own first military eye in the sky last week.

  • The Straits Times ☛ North Korea says interference in satellite operations would be considered declaration of war

    North Korea said it would respond to any US interference in space by eliminating viability of US spy satellites.

  • RFA ☛ US, allies impose sanctions on N Korea following satellite launch

    The move comes after Pyongyang last week successfully launched its first reconnaissance satellite.

  • NYPost ☛ North Korea says interference in its satellites would be declaration of war

    North Korea said it would mobilize its war deterrence if any attack against its strategic assets were imminent.

  • RFA ☛ Kazakh jailed on spy charge in China seeks transfer to Kazakhstan

    Chinese judicial authorities sentenced him to 20 years in prison in 2018.

  • RFA ☛ Congress hears of Beijing’s ‘discourse power’

    Even US companies, scared of being frozen out of China’s huge market, are toeing its political line, experts say.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen says China invasion unlikely for now, as Beijing overwhelmed by ‘internal challenges’

    China is not likely to consider a major invasion of Taiwan for now due to domestic challenges, the island’s president Tsai Ing-wen said Wednesday, although Beijing is trying to sway its upcoming election.

  • RFA ☛ North Korean ‘stormtroopers’ are ill-equipped for harsh winter weather

    The soldiers were sent north to build houses in the fall, but will have to stay through winter without warm clothes.

  • Stanford University ☛ Protests mark South Korean president and Japanese prime minister’s Stanford visit

    The two world leaders’ discussion centered around cooperation between the nations and the future of science and technology. Outside the auditorium, anti-APEC protesters voiced opposition to the summit and expressed disapproval of the two leaders.

  • Techdirt ☛ Judge Says Montana’s TikTok Ban Is Obviously Unconstitutional

    This wasn’t hard to predict. When Montana passed its TikTok ban in April we called it “laughably unconstitutional.” Montana’s very silly Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, who claimed to have been the driving force behind the bill, had insisted that the state would be vindicated in court. As we noted when the bill passed, his public defense of the bill was to admit that the point of the bill was to shut down content he didn’t like online, damning his own case.

  • Reason ☛ Judge Halts Montana's First Amendment-Violating Fentanylware (TikTok) Ban

    The ban, scheduled to take effect on January 1, is likely unconstitutional in multiple ways, the judge held.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Rebel attack against Myanmar’s military escalates. Is China involved?

    A major offensive launched by ethnic militias has forced Myanmar’s military dictatorship to fall back on almost every front. It is a critical moment for the army, which ousted democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021.

  • YLE ☛ Turku court reduces Burger King knife wielder's sentence

    The offence was the 25-year-old man's first criminal conviction in Finland.

  • YLE ☛ Interior Ministry places movement restrictions on Inkoo port area

    The port area is currently home to a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal ship.

  • New York Times ☛ A protester self-immolates outside the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta.

    A security guard tried to intervene but was unsuccessful, officials said.

  • France24 ☛ Guinea-Bissau army says holding leader of rebel security unit after clashes

    Guinea-Bissau's army said Friday it was in control after a gun battle in the capital between units of the security forces, underscoring the political divisions in the small West African nation with a history of instability.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Fake’ label appears on anti-mobilization Telegram channel run by draftees’ wives — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Pro Publica ☛ Texas Judge Orders Release of Uvalde Shooting Records

    A state district judge in Travis County has ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety to release law enforcement records related to the May 2022 Uvalde school shooting, more than a year after a consortium of news organizations sued for access.

    The ruling by 261st Civil District Court Judge Daniella DeSeta Lyttle calls on DPS to fulfill 28 records requests filed by the news organizations, which include ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, subject to redactions such as personal information of police officers and blurring the faces of minor victims in crime scene photographs.

  • Stanford University ☛ Strawser | The Faculty Senate and VPSA are keeping secrets at students’ expense

    The Faculty Senate and VPSA's lack of transparency around nominations to the Academic Integrity Working Group harms student interests, Strawser writes.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Still a lot of work to do to gain the trust of VA whistleblowers

    The VA’s Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection (OAWP) – set up in the aftermath of the department’s secret wait-list scandal – got off to a very rocky start. It had scandals of its own. According to the government watchdog Project on Government Oversight (POGO), VA has reformed OAWP in ways that have made real progress toward building whistleblower confidence. But there is still a whole lot of work to do. Joe Spielberger is policy counsel at POGO. A few weeks ago, he testified before the House Veterans Affairs Committee about what is needed at OAWP. He speaks here with Federal News Network Deputy Editor Jared Serbu.

• Environment

  • European Commission ☛ Opening speech by Executive Vice-President Sefcovic at the High-Level Plenary of the Local Climate Action Summit

    I was very pleased...

  • Energy/Transportation

    • DeSmog ☛ Mapped: Big Ag’s Routes to Influence at COP28

      As this year’s climate summit gets underway in Dubai, powerful food and farming companies are well positioned to ensure their interests are protected. They will use their connections to network, lobby – and even raise investment.

      These agri-giants will be rubbing shoulders with over 80,000 participants – the highest attendance of any climate conference – which these days comes with increased media fanfare and activity, including protests, side events, drinks and dinners happening in and around the main event.

    • DeSmog ☛ Corporate Promotion of Carbon Capture and Storage Contradicts Science, Study Finds

      The vast majority of corporate advocacy promoting carbon capture and storage is misaligned with climate science, new research shows. 

      According to an analysis released today by InfluenceMap, over 80 percent of corporate policy engagement on CCS between 2021 and 2023 does not meet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s science-based policy guidance, which includes recommended methods for limiting warming to 1.5°Celsius or well-below 2°C – the targets established by the Paris Agreement. The study shows that IPCC recognizes a role exists for carbon capture technologies. However, the UN’s climate science body has stated that global fossil fuel production and use must decline substantially, and that CCS is not a feasible justification to deepen reliance on these dirty fuels that are driving climate breakdown. 

    • Pro Publica ☛ West Virginians Could Get Stuck Cleaning Up the Coal Industry’s Messes

      West Virginia’s fund to clean up abandoned coal mines is in such dire shape that it threatens to stick taxpayers with hundreds of millions — perhaps even billions — of dollars in cleanup costs. And yet, little is being done to turn things around.

      The bankruptcy of just one significant mining company could wipe out the fund, according to the state’s top regulatory official. And auditors for the Republican-controlled Legislature said at least five major companies were “at risk” of dumping cleanup costs on the state.

    • Defence Web ☛ Scrap metal ban is not working and should not be extended – SEIFSA

      The Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of Southern Africa (SEIFSA) has noted with concern submissions to the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (the dtic) calling for the extension to the scrap metal export ban, designed to curb infrastructure theft, which is scheduled to come to an end this December.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Straits Times ☛ Proposed dog meat ban in South Korea reignites heated debate over centuries-old practice

      Some question if the ban is necessary for a sunset industry

• Finance

  • LRT ☛ Lithuania’s banks pay €102m in second windfall tax instalment

    Eight Lithuanian commercial banks and credit unions have paid 101.6 million euros in the so-called solidarity tax, a temporary levy on excess profits, the State Tax Inspectorate told BNS on Thursday.

  • Black Friday is over. Here’s what we learnt.

    We hope our posts about making your products last struck a chord with you this November. At Fairphone, we’re all about supporting you to hang on to your tech for as long as possible. It’s our way of tackling the whole electronic waste issue!

  • Meduza ☛ Redeveloping Dushanbe Construction is booming in Tajikistan’s capital — but at what cost? — Meduza

  • The Sunday Times UK ☛ Octavius Black steps down as MindGym boss in ‘challenging’ market

    Octavius Black is preparing to step aside as chief executive of MindGym, the workplace training company he created more than 20 years ago.

    The author and entrepreneur, 55, a contemporary of David Cameron at Eton, will leave the role to become executive chairman after the company’s annual meeting in July next year.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Broadcom to let go 1,800+ VMware employees amid push for increased profitability

    Broadcom Inc. is letting go more than 1,800 VMware employees amid an effort to boost the virtualization giant’s earnings significantly. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the job cuts on Thursday, citing regulatory filings.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Cloudbrink’s co-founder takes his company to court over allegations of financial fraud

    A simmering dispute between the co-founder of Silicon Valley startup Cloudbrink Inc. and the executive brought in to run the company became public knowledge on Wednesday with the filing of a lawsuit.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ DC Circuit Rules that a President’s Speech as Candidate Is Not Official

    The DC Circuit just held that when a President campaigns for re-election, he acts as an office seeker, not an office holder entitled to absolute immunity.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • RFA ☛ Media Watch: Chinese firms running fake S Korean news sites

      South Korea’s spy agency warns it could be part of Beijing’s online influence operations.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ A high school’s deepfake porn scandal is pushing US lawmakers into action

      On October 20, Francesca Mani was called to the counselor’s office at her New Jersey high school. A 14-year-old sophomore and a competitive fencer, Francesca wasn’t one for getting in trouble.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ St. Petersburg artist Sasha Skochilenko, who replaced store price tags with antiwar messages, appeals seven-year prison sentence — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ TV channel fined by St. Petersburg court for showing music video with ‘LGBT propaganda’ — Meduza

  • Techdirt ☛ Yes, The First Amendment Protects Displaying The ‘Thin Blue Line’ Flag Even In Publicly Owned Buildings

    Most people seem to understand the First Amendment protects their right to say stupid or offensive things, especially when they’re the ones saying them. These same people often forget the First Amendment does not protect them from counter-speech, during which they may be publicly decried as stupid or offensive.

  • Techdirt ☛ Elon Musk Says Only Those Who Pay Him Deserve Free Speech

    Okay, okay, I think this is the last of my posts about Elon Musk’s unhinged appearance at the DealBook Summit with ill-prepared interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. We already covered his cursing out advertisers, while predicting that “earth will judge” them, as well as his statement that AI copyright lawsuits don’t matter because “Digital God” will be here before it’s over, but I also wanted to cover one more exchange, in which Musk effectively says that only those who give him money deserve “free speech” (his definition of free speech).

  • Press Gazette ☛ Mirror strikes victory for honest opinion as Dyson loses £1m libel bid

    High Court judge says Brian Reade comment piece did not cause 'serious harm'.

  • RFA ☛ Hong Kong journalist incommunicado, feared detained in Beijing

    South China Morning Post reporter Minnie Chan is unreachable after an assignment in October.

  • Reason ☛ Maintaining Online Copy of Court Opinion Isn't Libelous, Even When It's Reversed

    A district court refuses to enter default judgment against caselaw publisher Leagle, concluding that the plaintiff's claims against Leagle were legally insufficient.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Hunter Biden Gets a Step Closer to Vindicating Twitter’s Takedown Decision

    On the same day that, in sworn testimony before Congress, Michael Shellenberger claimed "there's no evidence" that the hard drive Rudy Giuliani shared with the NY Post was manipulated, Vish Burra asserted (laughing) that he would hack Hunter Biden again.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Press group concerned over report of South China Morning Post journalist missing after China trip

    South China Morning Post (SCMP) reporter Minnie Chan has gone missing after a work trip to China, Japan’s Kyodo News reported on Thursday citing unnamed people close to the matter. A local press group has expressed concern over the apparent disappearance.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ South China Morning Post says ‘missing’ reporter is safe after press group raises alarm; threatens legal action

    South China Morning Post (SCMP) journalist Minnie Chan is on personal leave concerning a private matter, the newspaper has said, after a local press group raised concerns about her reported disappearance following a work trip in China.

  • RFERL ☛ Popular Uzbek Blogger Gets Eight Years In Prison On Charges He Rejects

    A court in Uzbekistan's eastern region of Ferghana sentenced blogger Olimjon Haidarov on December 1 to eight years in prison on charges of extortion, defamation, and libel.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ Retiree Arrested For Criticizing Local Officials Will Have Her Case Heard By The Supreme Court

    We’ve long known the Fifth Circuit is the worst circuit to hear your case involving rights violations by law enforcement. Despite one particularly blistering dissent from Judge Don Willett calling qualified immunity a “rigged game” litigants almost always lose, the Fifth Circuit continues to coddle cops and overreaching government officials to give them what they want at the expense of rights of the governed.

  • Techdirt ☛ Investigation Exposes Yet Another Small Town That Is Little More Than A Law Enforcement Honeypot

    Law enforcement for profit is an ugly proposition. Most of us immediately think of civil asset forfeiture, which is generally just cops going shopping for stuff they want or cash to buy the stuff they want that isn’t subject to outside oversight.

  • Meduza ☛ Uzbekistani journalist wins country’s first-ever gender discrimination case — Meduza

  • RFERL ☛ Director Of Kyrgyz Opera And Ballet Theater Arrested For Alleged Abuse Of Office

    The Kyrgyz State Committee of National Security (UKMK) said on December 1 it arrested the director of the Kyrgyz Opera and Ballet Theater, Almazbek Istambaev, on a charge of abuse of office.

  • RFERL ☛ Former Kazakh Security Chief's Cousin's Appeal Against 10-Year Prison Term Rejected

    A court in Kazakhstan has rejected an appeal filed by a cousin of the jailed former head of Kazakhstan's Committee of National Security (KNB) against his conviction and 10-year prison term on charges of bribery and embezzlement.

  • The Kent Stater ☛ Nepal registers its first same-sex marriage

    Same-sex couple Surendra Pandey, second left, and Maya Gurung pose for a photograph with their marriage registration certificate at Dordi village council office on Wednesday, November 29, 2023. Sunil Babu Pant/AP Reuters —  Local authorities in a village in Nepal registered the Himalayan nation’s first same-sex marriage on Wednesday, officials and activists said, five months after the Supreme Court issued...

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ FCC To Vote On New Rules Cracking Down On Shitty Cable TV Fees

    For decades, cable TV giants have nickel-and-dimed customers with a rotating assortment of bullshit cable TV fees, whether it’s “regulatory recovery” fee (a misleadingly named fee designed to have you blaming government for industry greed), regional sports fees (charged whether or not you watch sports), or the completely meaningless “broadcast TV fee” (which has ballooned at several times the rate of inflation).

  • BIA Net ☛ Criminal complaint filed against man sharing child abuse images on Ekşi Sözlük

    First Women and Children Association, filed a complaint with the Ankara Public Prosecutor's Office, demanding the identification and prosecution of the user who shared photos and videos of child abuse on the online platform Ekşi Sözlük. The platform issued a statement indicating that the mentioned content has been removed and criminal complaint made for the identification of the individual.

• Monopolies

  • Patents

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ The first CRISPR cure might kickstart the next big patent monopoly battle

      That’s a real nice CRISPR cure you have there. It would be a pity if anything happened to it.  Okay. Drop the tough-guy accent and toss the black fedora aside. But I do believe that similar conversations could be occurring now that a historic gene-editing cure is coming to market, as soon as this year.…

    • JUVE ☛ Bayer and Weickmann successfully defend Nexavar patent monopoly in the second instance

      The dispute concerns Bayer’s patent monopoly EP 23 05 255, which expired in December 2022.

    • Unified Patents ☛ $6,000 for InfoGation navigation patents prior art

      Unified Patents added three new PATROLL contests, each with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 6,292,743, U.S. Patent 8,898,003, and U.S. Patent 10,107,628, all owned by InfoGation Corporation, an NPE. The patents generally relate to navigation systems.

    • Unified Patents ☛ Atlantic IP entity, Foras Technologies, parallel processor patent monopoly reexam granted

      On November 29, 2023, less than three months after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding a substantial new question of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,502,958, owned and asserted by Foras Technologies, Ltd., an NPE and entity of Atlantic IP Services Limited. The ‘958 patent monopoly relates to lockstep processor technology where two processors are paired together, and the two processors perform exactly the same-operations and the results-are compared.(e.g., with an XOR gate).

  • Trademarks

    • TTAB Blog ☛ TTABlog Test: Are these Two Design Marks Confusable (for Rice)?

      Global Commodities petitioned for cancellation of a registration for the mark shown below left, claiming likely confusion with its registered mark shown below right, both for "rice." Since the goods are identical, a lesser degree of similarity between the marks is needed to support the Section 2(d) claim, but are the marks close enough to cause source confusion? Global Commodities, Inc. v. Capital Distributors, LLC and Capital Imports, LLC., Cancellation No. 92078857 (November 29, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Mark A. Thurmon).

  • Copyrights

    • Tedium ☛ In Search Of New Lows

      Why did seven-string guitars become a nu-metal staple in the late 1990s? It turns out they nearly went forgotten—but a guitar nut in Bakersfield decided he wanted to follow a specific sound.

      Today in Tedium: I’m going to reveal two things about myself in today’s Tedium that may change your opinion of me. First off, in the year 2000, I stood in line on one of the hottest days of the year in the streets of downtown Detroit to get a free ticket to a Limp Bizkit show on a tour infamously sponsored by Napster. (And I mainly did it because I was a Napster fan, and we did a lot of things we regretted in the name of nu metal.) And second, many years later, I played a key role in maintaining Fred Durst’s Wikipedia page. I don’t know why I did it—my thinking was that, because this guy was a joke at the time, as a journalist, if I could be objective about the work of Mr. Durst, I could be objective about anything. Anyway, I thought about these things this week when I was presented a strangely compelling 45-minute video of Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland selling off his gear, and I wondered: “Where are all the seven-string guitars?” Now, I have to answer that question. Today’s Tedium ponders why seven-string guitars came to shape nu-metal.

    • JURIST ☛ Canada and Surveillance Giant Google strike deal to compensate news publishers under Online News Act

      The Canadian federal government on Wednesday announced an agreement with Surveillance Giant Google that will see the tech company compensate news Canadian news publishers. This marked a shift from Google’s initial stance of potentially blocking all Canadian news content following the introduction of the new Online News Act.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: GLNWSUO Wordo: MOIST

  • Hexcrawling the dungeon

    Next time I see or make a dungeon map I wanna overlay a grid of 60′ hexes on top of whatever 10′ or 5′ square grid there is, if any.

    To me that’ll be a lot more useful for the exploration turns, or “ticks” as we call them (a tick is ten minutes, a round is six seconds), so I’m gonna call it “tick hexes”.

    I don’t need to worry about distance that way, since my rule is that in one turn, you can do searching & interacting in one 10×10×10 cube as long as that is within this or an adjacent tick hex, in accordance with how dungeon speed works in our game.

  • Moon observing Fairbanks, AK, USA 2023-12-01 (publ. 2023-12-02)

• Politics and World Events

  • President Xi, Send The Nukes! — What Is To Be Done Now?

    On a private forum today, one of my oldest friends, who is, regrettably, a centrist Democrat, posted a note asking those of us who are critical of Joe Biden to put up or shut up – to tell him what we would have progressives do next, or get the fuck off the forum. The rest of this post is my reply, written in one draft over the course of which I drank several glasses of box wine.

    It's being written before I've seen any election returns, though polls have closed in the Eastern and Central time zones.

    This is probably the last installment of ``President Xi, Send the Nukes'', though never say never again.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello, World!

      Denizens of Gemini, is this thing on?

      I'd just like to thank Sandra San for pointing me in the right direction and so now I've found my way here.

    • Status Report: Building the HTTP/2 Client for Drogon

      I left my last job by the start on November, 2023 and have a week of free time before I join the new one. With time on hand, I decided to finish a feature request I made years ago in Drogon. A HTTP/2 client - And server, but that'll happen later. I never expected to get it almost finished in like 5 days. The protocol looks duanting at first. It requires you to implement your own flow control and multiplexing. But it's actually not that bad. The protocol is designed in a way to be very diffifult to desync. And the flow control is in fact, very simple. Totally not like the complicated TCP states and backup algorithms.

    • Ja la vivo progresas

      I hope everything's going well for you! Things are good here. I've decided to dust off SeaMonkey for my school stuff. All the computer systems they use here are ever-so-slightly out of date in a wonderfully comfy way, that is, it's easier to use SeaMonkey Mail than some terrible webmail via Internet Explorer (chrome).

    • Saying hello to imaginary friends

      I an honestly see reverting back to pre-internet times, including buying only with cash, only locally, and paying bills only via paper through the mail. And this isn't just a philosophic point. I'm truly tired of what's become the online/paperless lie. Maintaining logins/passwords, and repeatedly enduring various two-factor dances is seemingly like way more work than I'm recalling paper billing being.