After the early years of the industry were dominated by Silicon Graphics, Linux became the natural successor to SGI’s IRIX. Over 20 years later, Linux is the primary operating system used on artist workstations at many studios. Two of the goals of the VFX Reference Platform specifically relate to Linux:
- Reduce complexity and effort required to support Linux in VFX and Animation.
- Lower the barrier to adopting Linux as a supported platform both for software providers and end-user studios.
This page contains information about activities and initiatives in support of these goals.
In this video, we are looking at Deepin 23 Preview.
Today we are looking at Deepin 23 Preview. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.18 or 5.15, and uses about 1.5GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
It sounds crazy but what if Arch Linux was given an official GUI installer, but it might not be as crazy as you first think as it has been proposed on the Arch Linux Gitlab and had a little bit of discussion
A new version of the super-fast file finding Linux app FSearch is now available to download.
I’ve written about FSearch a few times in the past. I love its robust feature set and heroic ability to help me find just about anything I ask of it, regardless of the ancient, forgotten directory I left it in! Heck, it the closest thing to a ‘Everything Search Engine’ app for Linux there is in my opinion.
Anyway, I’m not here to introduce you to the app — it’s a GUI search utility, it does what it says — rather relay word that an updated version is available to download/upgrade to.
And it’s a pretty big one.
[...]
At the heart of FSearch is its search engine, and for FSearch 0.2 this component is “greatly improved”.
In our previous guide, we demonstrated how to install and configure HAProxy as a load balancer on Ubuntu 22.04. This guide is a continuation of that guide and, we will go a step further and demonstrate how to setup HAPrpxy SSL termination on Ubuntu 22.04 step by step.
HA Proxy is a widely used and opensource HTTP load balancer and proxying solution for Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD environments. It’s used to enhance the performance and reliability of web servers by distributing the workload across multiple servers. By so doing, it provides high availability of services and applications.
If you want to display a custom message to your visitors when they try to navigate to an url path that doesn't exist on your website, you need to create a custom error page that will be displayed only when the result is not found.
In this tutorial you will learn how to create a custom error page on Nginx, we are creating a custom error page for 404 errors.
If you use a Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may want to install the official Nvidia drivers. While most modern Linux Desktop systems come with the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards, this driver is not as fully featured as the official Nvidia driver. The official Nvidia driver provides better performance and more features, making it the better choice for demanding applications. Installing the driver is not difficult, but it does require a few steps. First, you will need to identify your graphic card model and find the appropriate driver on the Nvidia website. Once you have downloaded the driver, you must uncompress it and run the installer. After following these steps, you should be able to enjoy better performance from your Nvidia card.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install NVIDIA Graphic Drivers on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series using two methods that should suit most user requirements.
Today we are looking at how to install Tesla Motors Simulator Beta on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
I’ve been a happy user of Virtual Box for most of my desktop needs over the past years. But now and then I like trying other options, like VMware Workstation.
Because I’ve been trying to run some VMware VM image not so long ago, I must have downloaded and installed VMware Player.
Today I was reminded how easy it is to get fixed in your thinking.
The short lessons learned: if the Hostname fails (due to SSL) try the IP address.
Longer story:
I have to reprovision a system. It was currently running Ubuntu 22.04, but the software we needed to run on it only worked with Ubuntu 20.04. While this should not have been the case, it was not my problem to solve…My problem was to figure out how to run our development stack.
And I got stuck. Why…because sometimes you miss the obvious things, and sometimes you miss the less than obvious things.
Valve has today released Proton 7.0-4 after a short period in public testing, this brings further compatibility of Windows games on Linux desktop and Steam Deck.
You don't have to do anything special for the update, as it will be available in your Downloads on Steam as long as Proton 7.0 is installed. Just update it like any other game or application you have in your Steam Library, it's the same on Linux desktop as it is on Steam Deck.
Valve’s Steam Deck handheld gaming PC ships with a Linux-based operating system called SteamOS, which is part of the reason Valve can set starting prices as low as $299. But if the Steam Deck could only play native Linux games, it wouldn’t be much use as a gaming PC. So Valve developed Proton, a tool that builds upon the WINE compatibility layer and adds support for many additional PC games. The latest version adds support for even more games, as well as bug fixes, performance enhancements, and other new features.
Across the Obelisk is a fantastic deck-builder that just left Early Access, as the first game under Paradox Interactive's new publishing label Paradox Arc. You might want to clear your schedule for this one, as it can easily suck away over 100 hours as you constantly want to jump back in for another attempt.
Titan Shell is an in-development twin-stick shooter from Meatbag Studio that blends in features from roguelikes / rogue-lites to offer a pretty interesting experience not many such shooters give you.
Love your cute and colourful little adventures? Dreamed Away from Nicolas Petton / Pineapple Works looks like it's worth keeping an eye on.
Axiom Verge 2 from Thomas Happ Games has jumped over from the Epic Store to Steam and it comes with Native Linux support and it is also Steam Deck Verified! This was made with Ethan Lee's FNA, so it's another quality port too and uses the Vulkan API.
Backpack Hero is a dungeon crawling roguelike where you need to constantly sort out your small backpack and it's absolutely sucked me in. A new Native Linux release from Jaspel and IndieArk, I have no doubt this will be something of a hit on Steam.
Running unofficial code on a Nintendo Game Boy has long been a solved problem. However, you still need a way to get that code onto the handheld console. The Squareboi cartridge promises to do just that, as created by [ALXCO-Hardware].
ChimeraOS continues to improve the couch-gaming experience for Linux with ChimeraOS 34 out now and there's quite a number of improvements and fixes. Before you had the likes of HoloISO and winesapOS there was ChimeraOS, giving you a tailored experience more like SteamOS when Valve wasn't updating it.
It seems Valve has made it easier to claim free stuff on the Steam store, so you no longer need to quickly try to install something free and back out of it to claim it. Seems this happened somewhat silently but it's obvious enough that no one is going to miss it.
Valve has put out a small upgrade for the Steam Deck in the Beta and Preview channels that seeks to improve the offline mode. This is a much needed fix.
Created and maintained by Chinese developers, deepin has long been considered one of the prettiest Linux-based operating systems. Understandably, due to its development happening in China, many people do not trust the distribution -- especially with biometrics being added. Not to mention the recent dustup over Taiwan and apparent ongoing genocide.
If you are someone that trusts deepin despite its country of origin, however, I have some really exciting news. Today, an official public preview of the upcoming deepin 23 becomes available for download. The developers highlight the inclusion of the new "Linglong" package format, atomic updates, and new repositories.
There are a bunch of new Arch-based distributions emerging lately. All feature graphical installers—something that Arch Linux does not—and each has its own custom desktop modifications. But that's about it. In fact, the landscape is starting to look a lot like the Ubuntu-derivative scene, with different wallpapers, icons, and default apps.
The natural comparison to these distros is Manjaro. But there is no comparison. Not only is Manjaro the best Arch-based distribution, but it's also in the running for the best Linux distro.
Let's go over some of Manjaro's differentiating strengths, milestones, and accolades.
[...]
To paraphrase the most interesting man in the world: I don't always use an Arch-based distro, but when I do, I prefer Manjaro.
IBM has settled the age-discrimination case brought against it by the widow of a sales executives who took his own life after being laid off.
Denise Lohnn and Big Blue reached a tentative agreement on March 31, and US District Judge Lewis Liman stayed the case pending a decision on whether sensitive documents at the heart of the legal battle would be made public. On Monday, the court dismissed the case as settled.
That settlement was, funnily enough, brokered about a month after the unsealing of partially redacted internal IBM communications disparaging older Big Blue employees as "Dinobabies" and calling for their extinction at the company [PDF].
Another document [PDF] discussed IBM's "dated maternal workforce" and called for that to change. It also called for IBM to "shift headcount mix towards greater percent of early professional hires."
The emergence of those court filings in February prompted IBM's chief human resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux to deny that IBM has systematically made an effort to oust older employees, as numerous lawsuits have claimed.
.NET 6 is now included in Ubuntu 22.04 repositories, so let’s see what the collaboration between Canonical and Microsoft brings us.
Microsoft and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, have announced native .NET availability in Ubuntu 22.04. While open-source .NET has long been available in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions, this collaboration by Microsoft and Canonical will better secure the .NET software supply chain with enterprise-grade support.
Last summer I bought a 2021 Hyundai Ioniq SEL. It is a nice fuel-efficient hybrid with a decent amount of features like wireless Android Auto/Apple CarPlay, wireless phone charging, heated seats, & a sunroof.
One thing I particularly liked about this vehicle was the In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system. As I mentioned before it had wireless Android Auto which seemed to be uncommon in this price range, and it had pretty nice, smooth animations in its menus which told me the CPU/GPU in it wasn’t completely underpowered, or at least the software it was running wasn’t super bloated.
As with many new gadgets I get, I wanted to play around with it and ultimately see what I could do with it.
Yes, you can go onto a multi week trip with a smartphone running free software. I wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to Prizren/Kosovo to attend Debconf 22 using a€ Librem 5. It’s a mix of things that happened and bits that got improved to hopefully make things more fun to use. And, yes, there won’t be any big surprises like being stranded without the ability to do phone calls in this read because there weren’t and there shouldn’t be.
After two online versions€ Debconf 22€ (the annual Debian Conference) took place in Prizren/Kosovo this year and I sure wanted to go. Looking for options I settled for a train trip to Vienna, to meet there with friends and continue the trip via bus to Zagreb, then switching to a final 11h direct bus to Prizren.
When preparing for the trip and making sure my Librem 5 phone has all the needed documents I noticed that there will be quite some PDFs to show until I arrive in Kosovo: train ticket, bus ticket, hotel reservation, and so on. While that works by tapping unlocking the phone, opening the file browser, navigating to the folder with the PDFs and showing it via evince this looked like a lot of steps to repeat. Can’t we have that information on the€ Phone Shell‘s lockscreen?
Already, previous versions of the Rubber Ducky could carry out attacks like creating a fake Windows pop-up box to harvest a user’s login credentials or causing Chrome to send all saved passwords to an attacker’s webserver. But these attacks had to be carefully crafted for specific operating systems and software versions and lacked the flexibility to work across platforms.
The newest Rubber Ducky aims to overcome these limitations. It ships with a major upgrade to the DuckyScript programming language, which is used to create the commands that the Rubber Ducky will enter into a target machine. While previous versions were mostly limited to writing keystroke sequences, DuckyScript 3.0 is a feature-rich language, letting users write functions, store variables, and use logic flow controls (i.e., if this... then that).
A magnet for open source supporters, the very first edition of Open Source Summit Latin America is opening its virtual doors to a plethora of speakers and attendees alike. Collabora is proudly sponsoring this wide offering of events that will captivate a diverse audience from developers to community leaders. This new annual conference strives to further hold a space for development and growth for all things open source in Latin America.
This jam-packed two day event takes place entirely online from August 23 to 24 and boasts a heavy contribution from the Collabora crew. Participants will have the opportunity to catch 5 different talks from one of our teammates that range from Meson build system applications to remote team connection. Four of the talks will be in English and one talk given by Daniel Almeida will be in Portuguese. This multilingual gathering is sure to capture the accessible nature of open source.
"Escape to Freedom" is a new animated video from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), giving an introduction to the concepts behind software freedom: both what we gain by having it, and what rights are at stake. We now have the video available in Mandarin and Spanish language tracks.
Free software advocacy is a worldwide endeavor. We therefore ask free software supporters for their help in translating our videos. The more languages we make our resources available in, the further we spread the philosophy of software freedom. Our newest video Escape to Freedom was announced last month and -- thanks to our awesome translator volunteers -- has already been translated into Spanish (multiple dialects), Chinese, and French. As of this writing, subtitles are available in those languages and first versions for four other languages are awaiting review by a native speaker in their respective languages: Persian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Italian.
Clockwise’s data is gathered from 1.5 million meetings tracked by its platform over the course of 12 months up to May 2022, providing an overview of work practices by 80,000 developers at 5,000 companies. It shows that the average software engineer spends 10.9 hours per week in meetings, with 19.6 hours of “focus” time – defined as two or more hours free to concentrate on work.
The remaining six hours are classed as “fragmented”, which refers to the schedule gaps between meetings that provide little opportunity to settle back into completing a task. Separate research has shown that it can take around 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption, and meetings can often be the cause of context switching that distracts workers from more productive work.
When they failed to produce ID or insurance documents, the police just let them go, and took their word for it that I ran the light.
I ended up having to hire a lawyer for $400 and fight the ticket to avoid having my car insurance rates go up. Meanwhile, the police showed up but couldn’t honestly testify to anything because they would have had to admit they weren’t even on the scene for more than half an hour.
I went to check the court computer for something today and my browser suggested to auto-fill the name of the other driver for last year. When I was deciding on whether or not to go to court, I decided to scope out the other guys and see what their record was looking like. It turned out that they were just a couple of assholes who didn’t even go to court when they were in trouble with the court. So I demanded a bench trial and they had to dismiss the ticket because, surprise surprise, neither showed up.
Chris Hedges writes that the archeological remains of past civilizations, including those of the prehistoric Cahokia temple mound complex in Illinois, are sobering reminders of our fate.
Traveling through mainland Europe on a British passport leads you to several predictable conversations. There’s Marmite of course, then all the fun of the Brexit fair, and finally on a more serious note, beer. You see, I didn’t know this, but after decades of quaffing fine ales, I’m told we do it wrong because we drink our beer warm. “Warm?”, I say, thinking of a cooling glass of my local Old Hooky which is anything but warm when served in an Oxfordshire village pub, to receive the reply that they drink their beers cold. A bit of international deciphering later it emerges that “warm” is what I’d refer to as “cold”, or in fact “room temperature”, while “cold” in their parlance means “refrigerated”, or as I’d say it: “Too cold to taste anything”. Mild humour aside there’s clearly something afoot, so it’s time to get to the bottom of all this.
Pulling a trailer behind your bike has an aspect of freedom and exploration to it. However, the reality is that pulling a large, heavy box behind your bike is incredibly draining physically. So [Drew] returned to the drawing board for his bike camper and added a motor, making some tweaks along the way.
Jump scares are controversial in the horror world, whether you’re talking about movies or video games. You can bring that same irritating thrill into real life, too, with this Halloween mirror from [jasonwinfieldnz].
American Airlines has agreed to buy up to 20 supersonic jets and put down a non-refundable deposit on the planes that are still on the drawing board and years away from flying.
Neither American nor the manufacturer Boom Supersonic would provide financial details Tuesday, including the size of American's deposit.
American, which also took options for 40 more Boom Overture planes, becomes the second U.S. customer for Boom after a similar announcement last year from United Airlines for 15 jets.
Accordingly, there has been growing interest in democratizing LLMs and making them available to a broader audience. However, while there have been impressive initiatives in open-sourcing models, the hardware barriers of large language models have gone mostly unaddressed.
The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) made history in late 2020 when it successfully recovered asteroid samples from the Hayabusa2 mission. Now, research carried out on the precious bits of rock is being published. Researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science Technology confirm that the bits of asteroid Ryugu collected by the probe represent “undoubtedly among the most uncontaminated Solar System materials available for laboratory study.”
Hayabusa2 made history during its mission, and not just at the end. It arrived in orbit of Ryugu in 2018, and soon after deployed a number of small tumbling and stationary robots on the surface. This returned some incredible images and preliminary data on the nature of the asteroid’s surface. It also picked up a few bits of regolith from the surface with the aid of dense tantalum slugs fired at the surface. Later, it deployed the Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI), which launched a shaped HMX explosive charge to create a small crater on the surface, revealing material unaltered by solar radiation.
While it would have been considered science-fiction just a few decades ago, the ability to watch virtually any movie or TV show on a little slab that fits in your pocket is today no big deal. But for an electronics beginner, being able to put together a pocketable video player like this one would be quite exciting, and might even serve as a gateway into the larger world of electronics design.
For this isn’t just my story, and if it were just my story, then it wouldn’t be very important. It’s a story of misplaced institutional priorities. And beyond that, it’s a story of a profession that is eating its young. You see, I could have done everything I did, and not done everything I didn’t, and managed to survive, if not for a reality that far transcended my individual choices. I could have spent too much time on my teaching and writing, I could have published academic work that refused to clothe itself in jargon or to pay obeisance to the latest trends, I could have even had a white penis (which put two strikes against me on the job market), and still have found another position, were it not for this: there were fewer and fewer positions to find. Institutions were shifting their teaching to adjuncts on a monumental scale. They were destroying with one hand the professoriate they were creating with the other. And, of course, it’s only gotten worse since then: worse and worse and worse. Which means that while the particulars of my story may be unique to me, the outcome is not. Thousands of people are driven out of the profession each year (and thousands more agree to settle for the adjunct life). And the ones who get screwed, at a time when the general level of undergraduate instruction has become truly abysmal, tend to be the dedicated teachers, the ones who made the same mistake that I did, of caring about their students. Ultimately, the reason I left academia (since you’re wondering) is the same that many others have. My story is a personal disappointment; the larger story is a tragedy.
If there is anything that hyperscalers and cloud builders value more than anything else, it is regularity and predictability. They have enough uncertainties to manage when it comes to customer demand that they like for their systems to behave as deterministically as possible and they like a steady drumbeat of innovation from their silicon partners.
In a way, the hyperscalers and cloud builders created the merchant switch and router chip market, and did so by encouraging upstarts like Broadcom, Marvell, Mellanox, Barefoot Networks, and Innovium to create chips that could run their own custom network operating systems and network telemetry and management tools. These same massive datacenter operators encouraged upstart switch makers such as Arista Networks, Accton, Delta, H3C, Inventec, Wistron, and Quanta to adopt the merchant silicon in their switches, which put pressure on the networking incumbents such as Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks on several fronts.
[...]
This single chip Tomahawk 5 can drive 51.2 TB/sec of aggregate bandwidth, double that of the Tomahawk 4 that was unveiled two years ago – right on the two year cadence that Broadcom likes to keep its switch ASICs moving on. With the Tomahawk 4, Broadcom had one version that had 512 SerDes running at 50 Gb/sec using PAM-4 modulation to drive a total of 25.6 Tb/sec of bandwidth, another one that had 256 SerDes that ran at 100 Gb/sec, and a bunch of variations that had a smaller 12.8 Tb/sec of aggregate bandwidth for more modest use cases. With the Tomahawk 5, the 512 SerDes that wrap around the packet processing engines and buffers are running at 100 Gb/sec speeds, yielding that 51.2 Tb/sec of bandwidth. We can expect a bunch of different variations of the Tomahawk 5 family of ASICs – these have not been revealed as yet. What we do know is that the Serdes design for the Tomahawk 5 is brand new, and for good reason.
“This generation of SerDes was designed from the get-go to be very flexible,” Del Vecchio says. “This 100 Gb/sec SerDes can push copper up to 4 meters, and we can handle front panel optical pluggable modules, of course, and we can also drive our co-packaged optics.”
Researchers are looking into drone delivery as a method to efficiently deliver testing kits while limiting contact between individuals.
The assailants also shot at two of the health workers present at the spot, they escaped unhurt, but the police officers deployed as security for the team were killed in the attack.
Picketing began early Monday morning in Fresno, Sacramento and San Jose – temperatures there were predicted to reach triple digits by the afternoon. There are also pickets in San Francisco.
The union explained why: “For the past decade, Kaiser psychologists, therapists and social workers have done everything in their power to make Kaiser fix its broken mental health care system. They’ve gone on short- term strikes, filed whistle-blower complaints that resulted in record fines€ and€ helped pass new laws€ aimed at improving access to care. But Kaiser patients are now waiting months just to start therapy and clinicians are leaving in droves because they can’t provide the care their patients need to get better.”
The Food and Drug Administration finalized a rule Tuesday to allow U.S. consumers to purchase hearing aids over the counter beginning as early as October, a years-in-the-making change that could benefit millions of people who have forgone assistance due to onerous regulatory and cost barriers.
"We need to go further by expanding Medicare to cover hearing (and visual and dental)."
Republican U.S. Senate hopeful and ultra-millionaire Mehmet Oz attempted Monday to cast his Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, as "the most radical candidate in the country" by citing his support for "free healthcare," a line of attack that was met with widespread derision on social media.
Dr. Oz, a former television personality who is trailing the key Senate contest by double digits, delivered the attack through a crudely animated ad showing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) emerging from Fetterman's skull holding a sign that reads, "Free healthcare for everyone!"
According to some reports, there has been an alarming rise in ransomware breaches globally, including India. The continued explosion of connected devices and widespread digitisation in multiple sectors has increased the likelihood of cyberattacks, especially ransomware.
Earlier this month, the administrator of the cybercrime forum Breached received a cease-and-desist letter from a cybersecurity firm. The missive alleged that an auction on the site for data stolen from 10 million customers of Mexico’s second-largest bank was fake news and harming the bank’s reputation. The administrator responded to this empty threat by purchasing the stolen banking data and leaking it on the forum for everyone to download.
SafeGraph is not alone among location data brokers in trying to “research wash” its privacy-invasive business model and data through academic work. Other shady actors like Veraset, Cuebiq, Spectus, and X-Mode also operate so-called “data for good” programs with academics, and have seized on the pandemic to expand them. These data brokers provide location data to academic researchers across disciplines, with resulting publications appearing in peer-reviewed venues as prestigious as Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These companies’ data is so widely used in human mobility research—from epidemic forecasting and emergency response to urban planning and business development—that the literature has progressed to meta-studies comparing, for example, Spectus, X-Mode, and Veraset datasets.€
Data brokers variously claim to be bringing “transparency” to tech or “democratizing access to data.” But these data sharing programs are nothing more than data brokers’ attempts to control the narrative around their unpopular and non-consensual business practices. Critical academic research must not become reliant on profit-driven data pipelines that endanger the safety, privacy, and economic opportunities of millions of people without any meaningful consent.€
Location data brokers do not come close to meeting human subject research standards. This starts with the fact that meaningful opt-in consent is consistently missing from their business practices. In fact, Google concluded that SafeGraph’s practices were so out of line that it banned any apps using the company’s code from its Play Store, and both Apple and Google banned X-Mode from their respective app stores.€
The winners fit a pattern: Across the battleground states that decided the 2020 vote, candidates who deny the legitimacy of that election have claimed nearly two-thirds of GOP nominations for state and federal offices with authority over elections, according to a Washington Post analysis.
The Lyon prosecutor’s office confirmed to the newspaper Le Progrès that the initial findings “point to a murder by decapitation”. The investigation, entrusted to the Sûreté départementale du Rhône, “must determine the exact circumstances of this tragedy, as well as the motive, and examine the personality of the perpetrator”, the prosecutor’s office said. Le Progrès
The Florida federal judge who signed the warrant for the FBI to raid former President Donald Trump’s property is Jewish, and the far-right is terrorizing him and his community as a result.
The federal court-authorized search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate has brought renewed attention to the obscure but infamous law known as the Espionage Act of 1917. A section of the law was listed as one of three potential violations under Justice Department investigation.
If you're looking for a figure from history to compare Donald Trump to in the wake of the FBI's search of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, I have a suggestion that may surprise you: Al Capone.€
Sally Denton wrote in the€ Guardian€ about a€ 1930s Coup Attempt Against FDR; there had been a former such attempt. The€ retired US Marine Corps Maj Gen Smedley Butler testified before Congress that a group of Wall Street financiers recruited him to lead a fascist coup€ against FDR. None of the financiers appeared before Congress, and the Roosevelt Administration took no action on the General’s claim. It has slipped into a footnote in history.
The€ mob of a thousand trying to stop Congress from functioning on January 6th could squeeze into a definition of a coup. Still, it was not a military takeover of a democratic government which is a classic definition of one. Those coups happen regularly across the globe, as in Spain (1936), Chile (1973), Burma (1988), and Egypt (2013).
Britain has played a key role in NATO forward troop deployments and training exercises on Russia’s borders. With war underway, the UK sends billions in arms, special forces, and volunteers to ensure escalation.
February marked the 10th anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death. Since the killing of the 17-year-old, the raw outpouring of public grief and rage in Black communities has created new—and at times discordant—social movements targeting racial discrimination. But there has also been a backlash in the struggle over how the US public should learn and remember its violent history.
A series of explosions occurred at an ammunition depot near the village of Maiske, Dzhankoy district, in the north of Crimea. The explosions began around 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday, August 16, and lasted for several hours.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Tuesday that “Ukrainian sabotage groups” blew up six electric transmission towers in the Kurchatovsky District of Russia’s Kursk region. The attacks reportedly caused disruptions to power supplies from the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant.
Russian language courses have been removed from Ukraine’s school curriculum, along with works by Russian and Belarusian writers, the Ukrainian Education Ministry announced on Tuesday, August 16.€
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a celebrated leftist who lifted millions out of poverty during his tenure as Brazil's president, continues to hold a substantial lead over far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, whose preemptive assault on the integrity of the nation's electronic voting system and refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power has led to heightened fears of political violence as the October election quickly approaches.
"There is good reason to fear a possible Brazilian January 6 kind of situation."
There are very few things that are more dangerous for citizens and cops than no-knock warrants. These warrants allow cops to raid houses without announcing themselves, leading those on the receiving end to assume they’re being invaded by armed criminals.
But then a suspect was caught. CBS News reported Tuesday that “Muhammed Syed, 51, was identified as the ‘primary suspect in the recent murders of Muslim men,’ police said Tuesday, and charged with murdering Aftab Hussein on July 26 and Muhammad Afzaal Hussian on Aug. 1. Detectives connected the two cases using bullet casings found at the two scenes. They are still investigating Syed’s possible involvement in the murders of Naeem Hussain on Aug. 5 and Mohammed Zaher Ahmadi on Nov. 7.”
Europe is gripped by its baking temperatures and its worst drought for 500 years. Iconic rivers, such as the Rhine, the Po, and Danube, the lifeblood of countries' economies, are reduced in some places to a mere trickle.
My hope since I first ran for office 20 years ago has been that we would stave off the worst effects of climate change. That is why I worked to make Providence the first capital city in the country with a renewable energy mandate, and to expand solar and wind generation throughout Rhode Island.
It won’t be long before winter descends on Europe. Before it does, most European countries must address the question of how long and how well they will be able to handle decoupling from Russian energy.
Because of the Ukraine war, oil and natural gas are the chief currencies, which means that energy politics is central to determining the war’s future. Oil and gas finance Putin’s war, constrain Europe’s response to it, and largely determine which side the rest of the world takes.
Amidst the discussions about grid-level energy storage solutions, it is often easy to forget that energy storage can be done on the level of a single house or building as well. The advantages here are that no grid management is needed, with the storage (electrical, thermal, etc.) absorbing the energy as it becomes available, and discharging it when requested. This simplifies the scale of the problem and thus the associated costs significantly.
As interest in electric vehicles continues to grow, consumers may find they have a lot of questions that they would like answered even before stepping inside a dealership or taking out a car loan. To that end, General Motors is launching a new online platform called EV Live designed to educate curious car buyers about the brand new world of battery-powered vehicles.
Anyone with questions about EVs who owns a computer or smartphone can log into EV Live to chat in real time with one of GM’s EV experts, who can offer tutorials, vehicle walkarounds, and (perhaps unsubtly) help promote the automaker’s many EV related products.
A new type of neural network aced a virtual wine-tasting test and promises a less energy-hungry version of artificial intelligence.
[...]
A less energy-intensive approach would be to use other kinds of hardware to create AI’s neural networks, and research teams are searching for alternatives. One device that shows promise is a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ), which is good at the kinds of math a neural network uses and only needs a comparative few sips of energy. Other novel devices based on MTJs have been shown to use several times less energy than their traditional hardware counterparts. MTJs also can operate more quickly because they store data in the same place they do their computation, unlike conventional chips that store data elsewhere. Perhaps best of all, MTJs are already important commercially. They have served as the read-write heads of hard disk drives for years and are being used as novel computer memories today.
Both forestry and nature conservation experts are puzzled by the new regulation, by which the government intends to provide more winter firewood for the population. Demand is indeed increasing, but the amount harvested could be increased without encroaching on protected forests or clearcutting. If only there were enough loggers. A further problem is that it is not practical to heat with wood cut this year. What the government might want with the recent regulation change remains a mystery.
Amid extreme drought driven by the climate emergency and warnings of a possible "catastrophic collapse" of the dwindling Colorado River, the U.S. Interior Department on Tuesday announced the first-ever tier 2 shortage for the overdrawn vital waterway, triggering water use cuts in two Southwestern states and Mexico for 2023.
"Today's Colorado River projections are undoubtedly a dire warning for the American West to eliminate rampant corporate water abuse before it's too late."
Economic and climate justice groups on Tuesday applauded as U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, with advocates hailing the $740 billion investment in climate action, corporate tax reform, and healthcare as "landmark legislation" while they pledged to continue working to secure more ambitious reforms.
"It's law," Biden said as he signed the IRA, which includes a historic investment of $370 billion to expand renewable energy infrastructure, caps prescription drug costs for senior citizens, and pays for badly needed reforms by raising taxes on corporations.
An Uber Eats driver says he made 37 cents in 4 hours due to having to fill up his gas tank. Less than nothing after car wear and tear and the IRS and state.
I constantly have to explain to my spouse why it wouldn’t be worth it for me to do UberEats or something for more money.
Many people don’t understand until they’re doing it.
If this man “earned” 37 cents in 4 hours, he probably had to put miles on his car to do it.
The more you drive, the more wear and tear your car accumulates, and the faster you’re in the repair shop. It also drags down the value of your car several cents per mile.
When the thieving IRS and thieving state revenue department go after him to steal “their share” of the money at the end of the year, so that they can pay themselves with it and buy votes from people who don’t do much of anything at all, they’re going to want about ten bucks out of that day’s earnings.
(Social Security and Medicare will demand to be paid twice, because he’s “self-employed”.)
The United States has made a small but significant move toward creating a public system to allow millions of Americans to file their taxes for free.
The sweeping domestic policy bill passed by the House and Senate last week mandates that the IRS study options to provide a free tax filing option for Americans. That study represents a threat to the for-profit tax prep industry dominated by TurboTax, a product of the Silicon Valley company Intuit. President Joe Biden said he plans to sign the bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, today, following the party-line vote in the House to approve it on Friday.
Apartment hunting in New York City is a special kind of hell. Friends warned me before I moved here five years ago, sharing stories of cockroaches and sketchy real estate brokers, of paying $2,000 per month to live next to an early morning parade of garbage trucks. So when I landed my first apartment — with hardwood floors, a short commute and an in-unit washer/dryer for less than $1,850 a month — I thought I’d found a unicorn.
The unicorn turned out to be a pile of rotting meat in a trenchcoat. First my ceiling became waterlogged from my neighbor’s leaking radiator (while she was recovering from surgery). Then my radiator soaked the apartment of my downstairs neighbor (who was paying $3,000 a month even though there was no heat in her toddler’s bedroom). A feud between our landlord and the local post office ensured all of our mail was dumped onto the basement stairs, where it got stolen or buried under snow. When I could no longer use my radiator for fear of leaking water everywhere, the landlord suggested I deal with a historic cold snap by installing “extra thick curtains.” Once the weather warmed, a building down the block started hosting parties so loud they made my floorboards tremble until two in the morning.
With President Joe Biden set to sign the Inflation Reduction Act into law on Tuesday, progressive members of Congress are increasingly speaking out against a side agreement that Democratic leaders reached with Sen. Joe Manchin in order to secure final passage of the $740 billion climate, tax, and healthcare measure.
The side deal focuses primarily on permitting changes that would help fast-track fossil fuel infrastructure—including a long-delayed pipeline in Manchin's home state of West Virginia—even as scientists say that meeting key emission-reduction targets requires a swift end to all new oil and gas development.
Amid what looks like the largest labor organizing movement since the Great Depression, California lawmakers are considering legislation that would bolster protections for hundreds of thousands of the state’s frontline workers—and set a national standard for how our government advocates for the working class.
A new poll by Gallop shows that nearly the entire US populace no longer trusts mainstream media. Is this is a wonderful or a horrible thing? And what's the cause? Lee Camp digs into it.
Kelly Denton-Borhaug explores how lies and disinformation triumphed in our all-American world and what to make of it.
The campaign of Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is running to unseat U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, declared Tuesday that the Republican incumbent "is bought and paid for by Big Pharma."
That charge came in response to Johnson's Monday comments about Medicare negotiating the cost of certain prescription drugs, which is included in the Inflation Reduction Act that U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law Tuesday afternoon.
The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has refused congressional requests for documents and prevented staff from testifying about the destruction of text messages sent by Secret Service agents and senior DHS officials prior to and on the day of the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
That's according to Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.)—the respective chairs of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Committee on Homeland Security—who told DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari in a Tuesday letter that he must start cooperating with their committees' joint investigations into his potential mismanagement of the deleted texts as well as his alleged censorship of an internal report on sexual harassment, or expect a subpoena.
Congressional hearings into the January 6, 2021 raid of the US Capitol building continue, focusing on the actions of Donald Trump and members of his administration as they sought to have Trump’s loss turned into a win.
With a head-scratching endorsement in the race for New York’s 10th Congressional District, The New York Times put itself on the already crowded ballot in next week’s primary election. Out of a slate of 12 candidates, including a Congress member, a former Congress member, and state assembly and city council members, most of whom are either women or of color, the Times endorsed the only person without political experience, wealthy white Democratic attorney Daniel Goldman, known to many as a Democratic lawyer in the first Trump impeachment trial and an MSNBC legal analyst.
In the Coal Creek Coffee shop in Laramie, Wyo., a few weeks ago, a woman recognized me and struck up a conversation about what has become the most closely watched congressional race in the United States. She explained that she was a Democrat but that she would be crossing over to vote in Wyoming’s Republican primary to cast a ballot for embattled Representative Liz Cheney.
Senate Democrats are currently sitting on a bill that has the votes to pass if brought to the Senate floor, according to advocates with direct knowledge of the situation, and would provide meaningful relief to thousands of pregnant workers across the country. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require employers to offer reasonable accommodations to pregnant employees unless they pose an undue hardship—light duty assignments, more frequent bathroom breaks, unpaid leave for doctor’s appointments or recovery from childbirth, even things as small as a stool to sit on or the ability to carry a water bottle—has enough support from both Democrats and Republicans to pass the chamber, and the House passed the bill in May 2021. “The Senate could pass it today,” said Dina Bakst, co-president of A Better Balance, who has been advocating for the bill. But the bill is still awaiting a vote, and advocates say time is running out.
Recent episodes of purposeful and accidental truth-telling brought to my mind the latest verbal lapse by George W. Bush, the president who hustled this country into war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. He clearly hadn’t planned to make a public confession about his own warmongering in Iraq when he gave a speech in Texas this spring. Still, asked to decry Russian president Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine, Bush inadvertently and all too truthfully placed his own presidential war-making in exactly the same boat. The words spilled out of his mouth as he described “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified invasion of Iraq — I mean of Ukraine.”
However, they have too frequently been the allies of totalitarianism in recent years, pursuing dissidents and enforcing groupthink.
They constantly extol their devotion to diversity, but their attitude toward difference of opinion is one of contempt.
They constantly proclaim how much they value diversity, but their attitudes toward difference of opinion are only contemptuous.
Perhaps something slipped in that NXT Women’s Title match, but thanks to the delayed live broadcast, fans at home will never know for sure.
After the attack, when I told my mother I wanted to write something about Rushdie, about silencing, about the sanctity of the written word, she pleaded with me not to. “It’s too dangerous,” she said. “You don’t know what they can do.” She carries this fear from the country we fled. There, journalists are imprisoned. Writers are killed.
But the silencing of writers by the state is slowly becoming a reality in America, too. This fall, school districts across the country are pulling books with “sensitive material” out of their curriculums. Librarians are asked to remove volumes from their shelves or risk losing funding. Teachers are forbidden from teaching certain topics in their classrooms or risk being fired and are, in at least one state, facing criminal prosecution.
The reactions to Van der Bellen’s statement followed promptly on the social media platforms: Photos were immediately posted to the tweet of the Federal President, showing the Federal President in a friendly handshake with Iranian President Hassan Rohani at the Vienna Hofburg. Quote from Twitter specifically to Van der Bellen’s “deep consternation”: “This is what someone says who welcomed the president of the regime that imposed a death fatwa against Rushdie with a red carpet and military honours in Vienna.”
Rowling said that Harris, who wrote the award-winning novel Chocolat, had “consistently failed” to defend female authors who disagreed “with her personal position on gender identity ideology”, allowing the women to be intimidated into silence.
During his time behind bars, his social media accounts have been regularly updated with posts about life in prison. Just last week, Navalny announced setting up a labor union for convicts, of which he said he was the only member at the time. Navalny said the union has successfully argued for replacing backless stools with chairs in the prison's sewing shop where he works.
According to the post published on Monday, the union activity was the real reason prison officials sent him to solitary confinement: “The Kremlin wants to see its GULAG consisting of voiceless slaves. And here I am, instead of begging for pardon, uniting some people and demanding that some laws be observed.”
A spokeswoman for Scotland's police said: "We have received a report of an online threat being made and officers are carrying out enquiries."
Rushdie has dealt with more than 30 years of death threats and a $3 million bounty on his head over "The Satanic Verses." Former supreme leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death following the 1988 publication of "The Satanic Verses," which some readers found blasphemous for its depiction of Islam.
Former Congressman, now Trump lackey TruthSocial CEO, Devin Nunes hasn’t had very much success with his long list of lawsuits against critics and the media. In just the past few months he’s lost multiple such cases. Of course, that hasn’t stopped him from soldiering on. One of the bigger cases he filed was against reporter Ryan Lizza and Hearst Media over an Esquire piece that Lizza published. While a district court dismissed the lawsuit easily, a year ago, the 8th Circuit brought it back with a bizarrely confused ruling about the single publication rule. I’m not going to revisit all the problems with that ruling, you can go to the link and read it if you want. However, it did at least revive the case, if only on an exceptionally narrow basis around a single tweet by Lizza, and whether or not that tweet (and not the underlying article) were done with actual malice under the law (i.e., with Lizza knowing it was untrue).
Lawyers and journalists sued the CIA and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo Monday for spying on them while they met Julian Assange when he was living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had political asylum. The lawsuit is being filed as Britain prepares to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the United States, where he faces up to 175 years in prison for violating the Espionage Act by publishing classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. We speak with the lead attorney in the case, Richard Roth, who details how a private security company stationed at the London Embassy unknowingly sent images from Assange’s visitors’ cellphones and laptops as well as streamed video from inside meetings to American intelligence. He says the offenses breach a range of client privileges and could sway a U.S. judge to dismiss the case if Assange is successfully extradited.
More than two dozen newsrooms and press freedom groups sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, calling on the Justice Department to prevent journalists and their employers from being prosecuted for simply writing about abortion.
"Rather than risk the threat of jail time, fines or legal fees, some news organizations may not be able to publish stories about abortion and possibly even contraceptives."
Judge John Koeltl, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, was assigned to a lawsuit filed on behalf of journalists and attorneys, who claim the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo spied on them when they visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Attorney Richard Roth, who is representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit, welcomed the assignment.“Appointed to the bench in 1994, Judge Koeltl is a bright, experienced, and hard working judge in the Southern District,” Roth said. “He has presided over some of the highest profile cases in the SDNY, including the World Trade Center bombing case.” “We are fortunate to have such a seasoned jurist,” Roth added. Koeltl previously presided over a case involving Assange and WikiLeaks.On August 15, four journalists and attorneys, who met with Assange while he was living under political asylum in the Ecuador embassy in London, announced they were suing the CIA and Pompeo. They also sued the Spanish private security company UC Global and the company’s director, David Morales.Beginning in early 2017, UC Global ramped up surveillance against Assange and shared audio and video footage from the embassy with “American intelligence.” It is known, according to several former US officials, that the CIA under Pompeo had "secret war plans" for disrupting WikiLeaks and kidnapping or killing Assange.
Documents reported on by the Spanish newspaper El País previously revealed that visitors who came to the embassy to see Assange had their phones taken apart, copied, and photographed. The complaint estimates that “well over 100 American citizens who visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy” had their privacy rights violated. This includes attorneys who were there to represent Assange, journalists who traveled to interview him, and even doctors who came to the embassy to assess and treat his deteriorating health.In 2019, Koeltl ruled that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) could not hold Assange or WikiLeaks liable for publishing DNC emails or emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which Russian agents were accused of stealing.
Nearly 50 years after Sacheen Littlefeather stood on the Academy Awards stage on behalf of Marlon Brando to speak about the depiction of Native Americans in Hollywood films, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences apologized to her for the abuse she endured.
Littlefeather became the first Native American woman to step onto the Academy Awards stage when she declined Brando's best actor award for The Godfather.
Wearing a buckskin dress and moccasins, she said the actor could not accept the award because of "the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry".
"The abuse you endured because of this statement was unwarranted and unjustified," Academy President David Rubin wrote in a "statement of reconciliation" sent to Littefeather in June, and posted on the Academy's website Monday. "The emotional burden you have lived through and the cost to your own career in our industry are irreparable. For too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged. For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration."
The Academy also acknowledged the toll the experience has taken on Littlefeather in her personal and professional life.
Almost 50 years later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is formally apologizing to Littlefeather for the mistreatment she experienced during her speech and in the years to follow.
"This was a chance to show our respect and gratitude toward the Irish players and Ireland Lacrosse and the people of Ireland," said Leo Nolan, executive director of the Nationals, whose U21 roster includes five players from Seneca territories in Western New York. During the opening ceremonies, the Haudenosaunee presented Michael Kennedy, CEO of the Irish lacrosse organization, with a handmade basket, a traditional wooden lacrosse stick, and a letter of thanks and communion from Sid Hill, the Tadadaho - or spiritual leader - of the Six Nations, accompanied by a Two-Row Wampum, which symbolizes how different cultures and nations can exist side-by-side in harmony and peace.
In reality, Yaser Said wasn’t angry over the fact that his daughters were dating or over their dating American boys. WFAA actually had it right in an earlier report, from June 4, which said that “police believe Yaser Said was angry his daughters were dating boys who were non-Muslim and killed them.” That is what the Dallas Morning News reported all the way back in January 2008: the girls’ mother, Patricia, had said, regarding Amina, that “since they are Muslim that the daughter was only allowed to date other Muslims. Yaser had found out she went on a date with a non-Muslim and became very angry and threatened her with bodily harm.”
General monitoring is problematic both when it is€ directly required by law and when, though not required, it is€ effectively mandatory because the legal risks of not doing it are so great. Specifically, these indirect requirements incentivize platforms to proactively monitor user behaviors, filter and check user content, and remove or locally filter anything that is controversial, objectionable, or potentially illegal to avoid legal responsibility. This inevitably leads to over censorship of online content as platforms seek to avoid liability for failing to act “reasonably” or remove user content they “should have known” was harmful.
Whether directly mandated or strongly incentivized, general monitoring is bad for human rights and for users.€
We have previously expressed concern about governments employing more aggressive and heavy-handed approaches to intermediary regulation, with policymakers across the globe calling on platforms to remove allegedly legal but ‘undesirable’ or ‘harmful’ content from their sites, while also expecting platforms to detect and remove illegal content. In doing so, states fail to protect fundamental freedom of expression rights and fall short of their obligations to ensure a free online environment with no undue restrictions on legal content, whilst also restricting the rights of users to share and receive impartial and unfiltered information. This has a chilling effect on the individual right to free speech wherein users change their behavior and abstain from communicating freely if they know they are being actively observed—leading to a pernicious culture of self-censorship.
“Defund the FBI” is the growing call by Republicans after the FBI searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. We get response from Alex Vitale, author of “The End of Policing,” who lays out reasons to defund the FBI that have nothing to do with Trump. Vitale reviews the history of the FBI, which he says has “always been a tool of repression of left-wing movements,” and calls the FBI investigation into Trump a “shortsighted” attempt to shut down some of the most extreme parts of the right wing. He uplifts efforts to “reduce the power and scope of the FBI in ways that limit their ability to demonize and criminalize those on the left.”
Human rights defenders this week accused U.S. President Joe Biden of empowering Saudi oppression after an activist was sentenced to 34 years in prison for tweeting about the fundamentalist monarchy's repression of women.
"Without any real steps toward accountability, Biden's trip to Jeddah and the international community's embrace must feel like a green light."
Reproductive rights advocates were outraged by a Florida appellate court's Monday decision upholding a trial judge's move to block a "parentless" 16-year-old from getting an abortion.
Escambia County Circuit Judge Jennifer J. Frydrychowicz recently rejected the unidentified teen's request for permission to bypass the parental notice and consent requirements under Florida law. A three-judge panel from the state's 1st District Court of Appeal upheld that decision, which critics called "barbaric," "flabbergasting," "outrageous," and "unconscionable."
Readers of Common Dreams will appreciate that the U.S. ship of state is in perilous waters. America's interlinked economic and political systems—our political economy—is failing us across a broad front and has been doing so for a long time. Problems fester, and America finds itself at or near the bottom of the OECD countries and below many others when it comes to attainment in public health, well-being of children, democratic performance, gender equality, environment and climate, poverty reduction, personal safety, social justice and cohesion, and even equal opportunity. Meanwhile, America's political polarization and hyper-partisanship have effectively paralyzed Washington and halted national progress across this huge swath of concerns. To many, America now seems in steady decline.
On February 13, at Wende Correctional Facility in upstate New York, Robert Adams had a fight with another incarcerated man while returning from recreation. As Adams explained it, officers moved to break them up, with one pepper-spraying Adams in the face before handcuffing him. Another officer taunted him, saying, “You got your ass kicked.” Adams, still handcuffed, told him to mind his business. In response, he said, the first officer punched him several times in the face, splitting his lip. This story was published with Solitary Watch, a nonprofit watchdog group that investigates, documents, and disseminates information on the use of solitary confinement in US prisons and jails.
Law enforcement officers in Novosibirsk searched the apartment of opposition City Council deputy Helga Pirogova, as well as her parents’ dacha, and the apartment of her husband’s parents, Pirogova reported on Twitter on Tuesday, August 16.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree reviving the “Mother Heroine” award, an honorary title first established under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1944.
As Ukrainian refugees fled for safety from the recent Russian invasion, the world rallied to support and show solidarity with the people in Ukraine. Everyone's profile images on social media reflected the color of the Ukrainian flag as the United States and the globe stood in strong solidarity with the people of Ukraine. We should welcome any immigrants in need. However, this show of solidarity starkly contrasts the overwhelming silence when Haitians, Central/Latin Americans, and Afghans were forced to flee their homelands because of similar conditions. Rather than being greeted by compassion, € countless people are still blocked at the U.S. borders and forced to wait in deplorable conditions.
Dozens of civil rights groups have joined an urgent push for the compassionate release of longtime political prisoner Mutulu Shakur from prison. The 72-year-old Black liberation activist is said by prison doctors to have less than six months to live, after being diagnosed with stage 3 bone marrow cancer. Shakur was part of the Black nationalist group Republic of New Afrika that worked with the Black Panther Party and others, and is the stepfather of the late rapper icon Tupac Shakur. He was convicted in 1988 of conspiracy in several armed robberies, one of which resulted in the deaths of a guard and two police officers, and also for aiding the 1979 prison escape of Assata Shakur. We speak with Nkechi Taifa, a lawyer and longtime supporter of Shakur, as well as Brad Thomson, attorney with the People’s Law Office, which has filed urgent lawsuits to secure Shakur’s release. “He is in a desperate medical situation,” says Thomson, who calls any claims that Shakur would reoffend if released “patently false and absolutely outrageous.” “It is time for him to live out his remaining days in the comfort of his family and friends,” says Taifa.
A decade or so ago you couldn’t go even a week without a major U.S. cable company finding its technicians in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. You’d routinely see technicians that€ fall asleep on the job,€ blow up homes,€ occasionally murder people€ and€ get arrested for torturing and spray painting kittens€ (seriously).
Deere's claims have included the astounding statement that the farmers who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on tractors don't actually own those tractors, because the software that animates them is only licensed, not sold: [...
According to an article written by former U.S. Representative Bob Barr, hidden away in the recently passed infrastructure bill, the very one I warned before would negatively impact drivers across the country if it were to pass, is a measure to install vehicle kill switches into every new car, truck, and SUV sold in this country. The regulation likely won’t be enforced for five years, so maybe there’s time to do something about this.
Now, that’s not to say this language doesn’t bring up a crap-ton of issues, because it does, especially privacy issues. Privacy concerns have already been noted in detail by the ACLU, which has compiled a very cogent list of questions about the language in the law: [...]
Per the bill, the proposed safety device will “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired.”
The language of the RIDE Act bill states the following: [...]
After months of working in what they say are unsafe weather conditions for wages that leave them struggling to afford basic necessities, more than 150 workers at Amazon's air freight hub in Southern California walked out mid-shift on Monday to demand fair treatment by the trillion-dollar company.
"We are the people sustaining our nation's supply chain and we deserve safe working conditions, livable wages, and protection from retaliation."
Being the “Queen of Talk,” perhaps it’s no surprise that Oprah Winfrey has made it onto Techdirt’s pages plenty of times in the past. To be fair to her, most of the posts we’ve done concern her being on the receiving end of typically silly intellectual property disputes. That being said, Oprah and her company, Harpo Inc., have also been willing to be quite aggressive in protecting her branding and intellectual property.
Last week LaLiga and Serie A issued new warnings over the use of pirate IPTV. Then the unthinkable happened. In their respective home countries of Spain and Italy, technical problems meant that legal subscribers missed matches at the start of the new season. Fortunately, a new Serie A anti-piracy campaign advertised in stadiums was 100% successful in reaching IPTV pirates.
The Rome Court of Appeal has confirmed that American streaming platform Vimeo must pay €8.5 million in copyright infringement damages to Italian broadcast giant Mediaset. The verdict centers around roughly 2,000 infringing videos that were uploaded to the platform. The Court affirms that Vimeo plays an “active role” and can't hide behind a safe harbor defense.
Max Collins, the lead singer of the band Eve 6 has penned a great piece for Popula, noting that owning media is now an act of countercultural defiance. Specifically, he’s speaking out against basically all of the major book publishers suing the Internet Archive for making it possible to check out digital copies of books. He highlights, first, how the key gatekeepers, both in music (the record labels) and in book publishing have crafted a system that clearly screws over the actual creative folks, and how they basically want to make it so that all media you consume is on a rental model where you have to keep paying again and again and again.
I've always been an avid reader, but it's been several years since I've found a book that was unputdownable. This one, is The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson. This isn't the first of his novels that I've read, and the others were excellent as well.
There's a recurring truth in my life: "keep it simple".
I first encountered this phrase during my engineering preparatory days. My mentor, a greybeard whom I still admire and keep in touch with, shared this tidbit of wisdom when I proposed some over-complicated solution to a problem-- as young folks who are looking to prove themselves tend to do.
I don't recall much about that specific problem and its solution, but the principle has stuck with me. This principle doesn't apply to only engineering problems. I've known it to be a truth in almost all facets of my life.
A friend and I are currently going through a bit of a journey together, booted along by the expected price of energy for the coming winter. We both want the same thing - a well-insulated house with a heat pump to keep us warm, and solar panels to power the heat pump. No gas, directly or indirectly! Our starting points are a bit different, though.
He's recently bought an old Victorian end-terrace with solid brick walls and no insulation, while mine is a detached new-build with regular cavity walls and plenty of insulation. This naturally means his house loses a lot more heat than mine. That means he'd need a much bigger heat pump to stay warm - but how much bigger? And how much would adding insulation help?
What are some of the things you most regret either buying or not buying? Some of these will stay with me to my dying day.
The first thing I did was create a Dockerfile (or, in OCI parlance, a Containerfile).
I started blogging in 2003 until 2005, but that blog is no longer available. My second attempt came in 2008, and it lasted until 2011; that blog is still online (but inactive) at one of the domains I own. The third attempt started at my "professional" site three years ago this week, but I haven't posted anything in more than a year.
I wanted to write all my FORTH code for a project in uppercase. (Hey, it's my project, alright!?) However, using the CAPS LOCK key in Emacs is a bit annoying, because the minibuffer commands are case sensitive, meaning that you have to disable CAPS LOCK first before using any M-x command.
1. The laptop I'm currently using to write this post.
2. A Raspberry Pi W-0 that I, shamefully, haven't actually done anything with. It's weaker than I'd hoped it would be, so I'm not sure what to do with it.
3. An old, jailbroken Amazon Kindle.
4, 5, 6. Three mobile phones; the newest one chipped and bent but still functional, the second-newest one that I currently use as my main mobile device since it's only a little cracked, and one from 2010 that I can't bear to part with even though it's obsolete because it's small and adorable and has a very cute little slide-out keyboard.
A Dell Optiplex a buddy and I found at a thrift store for $5. It's got a Core 2 Duo and 8 GB of RAM. Right now it runs Nextcloud and Jellyfin.
Pentium 4. I also have a couple of broken P4 motherboards.
BTRFS is a Linux file system that uses a Copy On Write (COW) model. It is providing many features like on the fly compression, volumes management, snapshots and clones etc...
this is my first foray into the gemini protocol - a return to simpler times with more technological constraints and less oversight from corpos. i've seen the massive jump from html4 to html5 and (what i like to call) the javascript bigbang, the weird little anime-styled websites that offered free web layouts and graphics with other personal touches - and their unfortunate fading into oblivion, and the insane growth of internet companies that would soon consume every person's inidividuality to pump out more meaningless data for more profit.
Lunar 0.6 has just landed in github with improved UTF-8 support. The majority of characters in the multinational character are now supported alongside a smattering of other unicode code points.
I have been musing about this for a long time, but I don't think I had encountered exactly this argument before. It was always explained as "software just expands to use all available hardware", or as "Andy and Bill's law", or as "software developers are just lazy", or as "software developers are expensive, and hardware is cheap" so just use whatever computing power you need to have your product out.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.