WirePlumber, the modular session and policy manager implementation for the PipeWire multimedia server for handling audio, video streams, and hardware on Linux systems, has been updated today to version 0.4.13, a release that adds new features, improvements, and bug fixes.
WirePlumber 0.4.13 is here to add new features like Bluetooth SCO (HSP/HFP) hardware offload support, audio passthrough for encoded files like MP3, AAC, and others if both the hardware and software support it, as well as support for allowing newly plugged cameras to be immediately visible to the portal apps.
You can use media queries to style elements based on features of the browser viewport, for example, min-width, max-height, or orientation. With container queries, you can now do the same but with any parent element. Instead of the viewport, you can now listen to properties and features of a containing element.
Killing a process in Linux usually involves using the process ID with the kill command. You can also use the process name with killall command.
This becomes a problem at scale. If you have millions of users on hundreds of different shards of a database, eventually you'll get a clash of IDs. To that end, Twitter invented Snowflake IDs.
Snowflakes are pretty clever. They are a 64 bit ID. The first part of the ID is a timestamp, and the second part is some information about the server which generated the ID. This means that IDs can be sorted by time, and will globally unique.
By gaming, I’m not gonna limit gaming to Maro’s four traits (goals, restrictions, agency, and a lack of real-world relevance). Instead, I’m gonna use a definition of gaming that’s broad enough to encompass all processes meant to determine the outcome of something. I’m not just talking about player skill games like chess or baduk here, or games with a mix like Uno or Rummy. A game can be 100% stochastic like Bingo, Candy Land or Snakes & Ladders and I’m still going to argue that Fail Forward is bad. Or it can be a 100% story telling activity like Rory’s Story Cubes and I’m still gonna make the same case.
Maybe the one place I’m narrowing the definition is gonna be for the word “bad”. I mean “counterproductive”. If you’re using eighties slang and think bad is good, then this essay isn’t gonna fly with that.
I am rarely this enthusiastic about games, especially retro-styled games because so many miss the mark in numerous ways but thankfully Chained Echoes is just brilliant.
Humble Bundle have announced that throughout this week, they will be sticking up older popular bundles for a very limited time and limited amount of purchases so keep an eye for some fun hits to stock up on.
Tis the season to buy more games to keep warm and all that. The GOG Winter Sale is live, and you can get a free copy of Ghost of a Tale.
Konqueror is a file manager and web browser for the KDE Plasma Desktop. In many ways, Konqueror defined "network transparency," as it applied to a personal desktop. With Konqueror, you can browse remote network files (including the Internet itself, which really is just a collection of remote files viewed through a fancy lens) just as easily as browsing your local files. Sometimes there was some configuration and setup required, depending on what kind of file share you needed to access. But ultimately, the goal of having instant access to all the data you had permission to view was a reality with Konqueror in ways no other file manager had achieved. And at its peak, the open source web engine it developed (KHTML) was adopted by both Apple and Google, and lives on today as the core library of modern web browsing and, technically, Electron app development.
Today, the KDE Plasma Desktop lists Konqueror as a web browser. Officially, file management has shifted over to Dolphin, but Konqueror is still capable of doing the job. For the full and classic Konqueror experience, you should try the Plasma Desktop 3.x fork TDE, but in this article I use Konqueror in KDE Plasma Desktop version 5.
NixOS is a distro built with a new sort of software build tool. You can install it and it works, but oddly that isn't really the point.
This is not a conventional Linux distribution, and so this is not a conventional distro review. We know that one of the most irritating types of statement is "if you have to ask, then you won't understand." Attempting to understand Nix and NixOS, as an outsider, are a little bit like that: the virtues and benefits that its website and wiki talk about, or even early coverage, for instance here on Linux.com, are rather theoretical. There appears to be little overlap between the sort of things that the Nix community seems to consider important, and things an ordinary desktop OS user might consider important, that it is hard to bridge the gap.
Financial Institutions (FIs) need to respond with agility and business velocity to keep pace with changing economic conditions. Yet, emerging competition from fintechs and challenger banks and increasing customer expectations is making this task difficult, especially as regulatory and compliance requirements increase. Embracing the next phase of digital transformation is an imperative for financial institutions to sustain and grow in a competitive environment of rising cost pressures. To meet these challenges, many FIs are adopting open-source software.
For Raspberry Pi enthusiasts it must seem that Christmas has come a few weeks early this year. Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton announced via the official blog that a 100,000 units had been secured for single-unit sales (one unit per customer) and that by the second half of 2023 it is expected that will return to pre-pandemic levels. This is good news for those who have felt the bite of the supply shortage that has dogged the Raspberry Pi for well over a year. The bad news? Raspberry Pi Zero and Zero W see a $5 price increase, but the Raspberry Pi Zero will be available for bulk purchase in 2023.
Northwestern University’s Embedded Electronics Class delivered a bumper crop of ESP-32 projects this year. The student teams recorded their progress on hackaday.io with project descriptions, logs, BOMs, diagrams, photos, and videos to share with other makers. While all utilized the web connection that the ESP32 offers some teams chose to use ESP32 Cams to incorporate photos, video, and computer vision. We love the variety of projects the teams created, some customized versions of consumer products and others new types of smart-devices.
In the light of the continuing mayhem on Twitter under Elon Musk, lovingly chronicled by Mike in ever-longer posts, it’s no surprise that many people are looking at alternatives. One of the main options is Mastodon. Although offering similar micro-blogging functionality to Twitter, one of its chief attractions is that it nonetheless does certain things differently.
Young tech creators, get ready: Coolest Projects Global will be back in 2023 and we want to make this the year of your big idea!
This November, teachers across the UK helped 367,023 learners participate in the annual free UK Bebras Challenge of computational thinking.
This site contains the FOIA releases of the CACHE.DATs and associated software of RPMS before 2021, but not the patches. They were originally hosted in the Tech Journal of OSEHRA. When OSEHRA closed in Feb. 2020, they transferred many of their assests to WorldVistA to host. The Indian Health Service has agreed to allow us to host their most recent releases of the RPMS FOIA as did OSEHRA. However, the most recent releases have only included interval patch updates. WorldVistA has requested that they again release CACHE.DATs and they are considering the request.
In this how-to we will learn the basics of the OBS user interface with the end goal being to create our own video that mixes audio and video elements into one recording.
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Recently I introduced a high-performance write-path into rqlite and, to my great surprise, it exposed a bug in SQLite.
The SQLite team quickly addressed the issue but let’s take a look at the behavior I saw, and how I finally created a simple test which reproduced the issue.
[PLOS], the pioneering non-profit open-access publisher founded in 2000, said that its new Open Science Indicator project would measure and report three characteristics of published articles: how many appeared in a preprint format, shared their research data, and made available the computer code underlying that data.
The Meta-Object Compiler, moc, handles Qt's C++ extensions and it is required for signals and slots and properties in Qt. moc reads C++ header files and if the Q_OBJECT macro is used, it generates an extra .cpp file named moc_filename.cpp containing extra (meta-object) code. This post has a bit of background information and a shell script to automatically include moc_*.cpp files in your code whenever Q_OBJECT is used. If you use qmake, this will probably speed up your build and if you use cmake, this will probably speed up incremental builds (when CMAKE_AUTOMOC is on).
A good CI/CD system means developer productivity. What an ideal CI/CD system looks like today.
A few months ago I switched to working in Go. Before that, my main language was Python for many years. The change to Go has been very smooth, without any major surprises or stumbling blocks. This may partly be because in the past I have also worked in both C++ and Java. Even so, Go (the parts I have used so far) is quite straightforward.
Before I started in my new role, I read through The Go Programming Language, which is quite good. Otherwise I have mostly used online resources when I have needed to learn how something works. Both A Tour of Go and Go by Example are good.
Modern processors have powerful vector instructions which allow you to load several values at once, and operate (in one instruction) on all these values. Similarly, they allow you to have vector constants. Thus if you wanted to add some integer (say 10001) to all integers in a large array, you might first load a constant with 8 times the value 10001, then you would load elements from your array, 8 elements by 8 elements, add the vector constant (thus do 8 additions at once), and then store the result. Everything else being equal, this might be 8 times faster.
There's a neat trick to solve Advent of Code, day 6 in a single pass.
Looking over the solutions mega-thread, it seems like not many people discovered this trick; when I posted about it, people found it to be noteworthy.
This matter of logical versus sequential constraints is at the heart of the distinction between scenario-based techniques — use cases, user stories… — and object-oriented requirements. This article analyzes the distinction. It is largely extracted from my recent textbook, the Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis [1], which contains a more extensive discussion.
2022 twenty four merry days of Perl
Numerous professions utilize simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) to deliver emails to their end users. SMTP also retrieves messages, though that has not been its primary use case. Open source frameworks like Django, a Python-based web framework, allows more control for sending emails using functions and expressions.
This article shows how to configure an SMTP server and send emails in Django using SMTP.
When faced with what to build from the trimmings of the walnut tree in her yard, [Amy Quian] decided to build a headless travel ukulele. [via MAKE:]
When he was a child in his hometown of Rosario, Argentina, Lionel Messi was nicknamed "La Pulga" (the flea) because of his short stature. This didn't stop him from starting to play soccer since he was five years old. In 2004, when Kobe Bryant, the famous basketball player visited his friend Ronaldinho, considered one of the best soccer players in the world, he told Bryant, "Kobe, I want you to meet the player who is going to be the greatest soccer player who ever lived." He didn't know that his words would be prophetic.
The shopping mall has a great many antecedents: the opulent markets of Victorian London, the arcades of Paris, and the department stores in the United States that could swallow an entire city block. But the mall as we know it has only one daddy: the architect Victor Gruen. A Viennese socialist, Gruen had established a tidy practice designing residential projects and shops before the Nazis seized Austria in 1938. Gruen’s forte was making the quotidian a bit lovelier: A typical tweak of retail spaces might have involved relieving the tight, cloying atmosphere of a tiny perfumery by placing mirrors on the ceiling. After fleeing to the United States, Gruen dipped his toe in wage drudgery before deciding to unpack his drafting desk and return to his bread-and-butter work of transforming shops into open and welcoming spaces in a freelance capacity.
Compared with the decades that came directly before and after, the 1990s have often seemed a ho-hum era, the dull Jan caught between its more outrageous siblings. While the ’80s arrived with a burst of big hair and shoulder pads, a synthy MTV soundtrack blasting over the Gipper’s evisceration of the welfare state, and the 2000s appeared like a deranged comet, throwing whole worlds off course, the ’90s bounced and slouched their way forward, a little bit sunny, a little bit ironic, and more or less insignificant. This was the decade so boring it was supposed to be the end of history.
On this week’s episode of the Edge of Sports podcast, we interview radical educator Jesse Hagopian and how a crew of Seattle activists were able to get Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll to wear shoes with a bracing political message.
Fair warning: if you ever thought there was nothing particularly interesting with optical viewfinders, prepare to have your misconception corrected by [volzo] with this deep-dive into camera-aiming aids that leads to an interesting hybrid smartphone viewfinder.
Grant Wahl was unique in the business of sports writing. It was not because he was the most widely read and influential soccer writer in the United States. It was also not because, at age 48, he had accomplished so much, writing for 24 years at Sports Illustrated, before parting during a spate of 2020 budget cuts. It was because, first and foremost, he was kind. And secondly, because he never hesitated to speak truth to power. In the soccer world that means talking honestly about FIFA and the politics of World Cup host countries, and those are some powerful enemies to willingly choose. Wahl, of course, died suddenly at the Qatar World Cup last week, sending shock waves sent through the most widely watched sporting event on earth. He had complained about pain while breathing, writing last Monday on his website that he had visited a medical clinic in Qatar. He collapsed on Saturday while watching Argentina advance to the semifinals.
1. Fashionopolis: The Secrets Behind the Clothes We Wear by Dana Thomas€ (Dial Books, 2022). I learned much from this eyewitness story of the textile and fashion industry worldwide.
2. Who’s Raising the Kids? The Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children€ by Susan Linn (The New Press, 2022) and€ You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination and Intellect of Tweens€ by Claire Nader (Essential Books, 2022). Both books will encourage you to rescue youngsters from controlling corporate hucksters and the addictive Internet Gulag.
Cernan and Schmitt spent most of their time collecting almost 250 pounds worth of moon rocks and soil samples. But the scientific research didn't stop them from enjoying themselves: The astronauts at one point belted out a now-famous rendition of "The Fountain in the Park," a 19th-century vaudeville song, all while skipping along in the moon's low gravity.
A few days ago I spoke to some of the striking academic workers at the University of California. (You can view my remarks at their rally, below.)
Occasional pieces of furniture serve little purpose other than to fill a space and maybe display a prized ornament or two. Who hasn’t got a relative with one two many small tables or display stands overfilling the available space!
The GXMO 58U is a Mini-PC featuring the Octa-core Ryzen 7 5800U processor along with AMD Radeon Graphics. The device is equipped with 16GB DDR4/512GB SSD, Wi-Fi 6/BT 5.2 and triple 4K display support.
There’s no doubt that the 7-segment display is a gold standard for displaying lighted digits. But what about a throwback to an older system of displaying numbers — Cistercian? With thirty-one 0805 LEDs, [Josue Alejandro] made a simple module displaying a single Cistercian digit (any from 0-9999).
Reining in social media’s role in kid’s lives has been on Patterson’s agenda since at least this August, when he issued a statement condemning social media platforms role in the Robb Elementary School Shooting. Patterson specifically referred to findings from the Robb Elementary Investigative Committee Report, which claimed that users reported the shooter’s behavior to social media platforms prior to the tragedy.
“Social media is the pre-1964 cigarette,” Patterson stated. “It’s a slap in the face of all Texans that these platforms refuse to publicly answer questions from those elected to represent the people. However, as other committee members expressed, if you’re not at the table then you’re on the menu.”
The White House on Monday condemned billionaire Elon Musk's call for Anthony Fauci, the US infectious disease expert who is a hate figure for many on the right, to be prosecuted over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"These are incredibly dangerous, these personal attacks that we are seeing," said White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre, in response to the weekend tweet by Musk that subsequently went viral.
"They are disgusting and they are divorced from reality," she said.
In a victory for public health advocates, a federal judge in Montana has blocked the state from implementing a law that would make it illegal for hospitals to ask employees if they are vaccinated. The measure, which passed last year, was the country’s most extreme anti-vaccination law.
Health care providers in Montana had sued the state over the law, arguing that it violates constitutional protections for disabled Americans. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy agreed with them. His ruling permanently enjoined the state from implementing its law in any health care facility.
A group of progressive lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal is calling on Biden health officials to immediately launch a fraud probe into the organizations taking part in ACO REACH, a slightly reformed version of a Medicare privatization scheme that the Trump administration set in motion during its final months in power.
In a Thursday letter to Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), 21 members of Congress voiced alarm that the ACO REACH pilot "provides an opportunity for healthcare insurers with a history of defrauding and abusing Medicare and ripping off taxpayers to further encroach on the Medicare system."
On August 7, National Review published an article lambasting the US Department of Agriculture’s decision, announced in May, to broaden the prohibition of discrimination in federally funded nutrition programs, including the National School Lunch Program, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The writer’s argument centered on a Christian school in Tampa, Fla., that, he wrote, was being “forced by the government to choose between adherence to the laws of man and those of God.”1This article was produced in collaboration with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
Hive Ransomware Group, a FBI-identified criminal organization, has appeared to claim credit for ongoing “disruptions” to Knox College’s computer systems.
Hive Ransomware Group, a FBI-identified criminal organization, has claimed credit for ongoing "disruptions" to Knox College’s computer systems.
In an email sent to a number of Knox students on Wednesday, a group claiming to be Hive says it has encrypted “critical infrastructure and data,” compromised the college’s backup servers and mined sensitive personal information like medical records and social security numbers.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (node-tar and pngcheck), SUSE (colord, containerd, and tiff), and Ubuntu (containerd, linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-oem-5.17, and vim).
Device Authorization enables a second device to bestow access with a user's active consent. In short, the device can present a one-time passcode (OTP) to the user, and they can transcribe that into an authorization web page or app on their phone or computer. After authorizing the device, it then appears logged in and can perform its functions with the user's preferences.
One problem: transcribing device codes is phishable, and it trains users to think this is a safe activity. Device auth codes effectively bypass unphishable two-factor security
A new development release of LibreSSL is out, and should be arriving on a mirror near you shortly.
Apple has always been a market leader in user security. Things haven’t changed, no matter how much the FBI wishes/litigates. What’s most important to Apple is that users can trust it to keep their personal info and communications private and secure. What’s most important to federal law enforcement agencies — pretty much just the FBI at this point — is on-demand access to data stored in Apple devices.
The TSA has been working towards this goal for nearly a half-decade. Its parent agency, the DHS, has already deployed facial recognition tech, most of it aimed at foreigners. The CBP uses it all the time. In 2020, the CBP’s facial recognition scanners at US borders captured 50 million facial images and less than 300 “impostors,” including (according to its press release) someone using their sister’s ID because they themselves had not received a COVID vaccination. Millions spent. Millions scanned. Barely anything useful accomplished. Par for the DHS course.
Surveillance has become a ubiquitous part of modern life. Public spaces are dotted with CCTV cameras inside and out. Recent years have seen the technology spread to the suburbs with porch cameras spreading the eye of big tech and law enforcement ever further.
Chia Te Bakery, known for its pineapple pastries, said they were required to provide details such as factory specifications, which included questions like how many employees the company had in Taiwan, and the ratio of ingredients in a pineapple pastry, which asked for the amount of sugar and cream used. The company’s owner Lin Yueh-ying (æžâæÅËèâ¹Â±) added, “It feels kind of like they don’t want to let you register… I won’t say they’re picking on us, they just make it troublesome.”
Two of the world's earliest color photographers separately documented ethnic Armenian inhabitants of Ottoman Turkey just before the religious minority was largely wiped out over a century ago.
When he went to a remote desert village near Somalia’s front lines with Al Shabab, parliament member Malik Abdalla was driven to act by images of jihadist atrocities against civilians. His goal: to mobilize villagers to support the most serious effort to date to take on Al Shabab’s 15-year insurgency.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Islamic studies scholar who was detained in Iran for more than two years, is still figuring out how to move on with her life two years after returning home to Australia. Her experience offers a glimpse of what Brittney Griner and others who have been through similar ordeals could encounter in their transition to post-detention life.
The European border agency observes boats with refugees from the air and lets them be brought back to North Africa. A new report by human rights organisations criticises this as ââ¬Å¾Airborne Complicity“.
EFF this week filed an amicus brief arguing that when police officers wrongly arrest an independent journalist in violation of the First Amendment, courts must order the officers to pay damages. The brief was written by Covington, and our co-amici are the National Press Photographers Association and the Pelican Institute. The brief explains that damages are necessary both to compensate the independent journalist for their injury, and to deter these officers and others from similar misconduct in the future. The case, Villarreal v. City of Laredo, is before the federal appeals court for the Fifth Circuit. A panel of judges issued a great decision in favor of the journalist earlier this year, but the entire court has agreed to rehear the case.
The issue on appeal is whether a dangerous legal doctrine called “qualified immunity” should protect the officers from paying damages. Fortunately, Congress empowered people to sue state and local officials who violate their constitutional rights. This was during Reconstruction after the Civil War, in direct response to state-sanctioned violence against Black people. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court created a misguided exception: even if a government official violated the Constitution, they don’t have to pay damages, unless the legal right at issue was “clearly established” at the time they violated it. Worse, federal courts can grant qualified immunity without even ruling on whether the right exists, which stunts the development of constitutional law. This is especially problematic for digital rights, because there sometimes will not be clearly established law regarding cutting-edge technologies.
The amicus brief explains the importance of internet-based independent journalism to public discourse. About half of Americans get news from social media. Independent journalists have published important stories on social media about, for example, police violence against Black people. The brief also explains the importance of a damages remedy to protect independent journalists from police violations of their First Amendment rights. Professional journalists often have the backup of their employers, the traditional news media. But independent journalists often must fight alone.
In June, St. Petersburg opposition politician Sergey Troshin publicly came out as gay — a risky decision in a country that has begun vilifying LGBT+ people all the more intensely since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now, Russia's recently expanded law against LGBT "propaganda" has given Troshin's political opponents a new tool to use against him. And while Troshin told journalists he plans to keep speaking out against Moscow's discriminatory legislation, he could face thousands of dollars in fines if the Russian Attorney General's Office decides to act on the denunciations against him.
The Belarusian Defense Ministry announced plans to conduct a snap combat readiness inspection of its armed forces.
We feature excerpts from activists from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus who were honored Saturday at the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who just days earlier vowed that his war in Ukraine would be a “long process” with no clear end in sight. Jan Rachinsky accepted on behalf of the Russian civil rights group Memorial, which was shuttered by the government last year. Oleksandra Matviichuk accepted the award on behalf of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, and Natallia Pinchuk attended the ceremony in place of her husband, the jailed Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski.
And sure enough, those weapons manufacturers now have a lot to be grateful for. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal,€
The Pentagon knew that when it was forced to exit Afghanistan, where it had used a massive amount of weaponry for some twenty years to wreak death and destruction on that impoverished Third World country, its loyal army of arms manufacturers might begin to suffer. The crisis that the Pentagon has ginned up in Ukraine has clearly helped to alleviate that suffering.€
Hundreds of Oath Keepers said they are or were employed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a report published Monday found—a revelation that comes about two weeks after two leaders of the far-right militia were convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with the January 6 insurrection.
"Extremism within our government is always alarming, but even more so in a department with a law enforcement and national security nexus like DHS."
In its December 12 evening digest, the Ukrainian General Staff reported the Russian military’s attempts to advance on the Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Zaporizhzhia directions.
Notes: Phil Wilayto is cofounder of Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice and Equality, as well as the Virginia Prison Justice Network. He’s also coordinator of the Odessa Solidarity Campaign , and the author of several books, including Notes from Iran.
Late on December 11, Chechen special forces raided the republic’s Urus-Martan district, looking for eyewitnesses who had failed to intervene in a clash between two law-enforcement officers the day before.
A Russian military court considered the case of the 20-year-old Ukrainian citizen Nikita Shkryabin, imprisoned in Ukraine by the Russian military.
Original story by Andrey Krasno from Kavkaz.Realii. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.
In early February 2016, the security gate at a U.S. military base near Washington, D.C., swung open to admit a Navy doctor accompanying a pair of surprising visitors: two artificial intelligence scientists from Google.
In a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse at the Joint Pathology Center, they stood amid stacks holding the crown jewels of the center’s collection: tens of millions of pathology slides containing slivers of skin, tumor biopsies and slices of organs from armed service members and veterans.
On 15 November 2022, during the G20 summit in Bali (Indonesia), Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese€ told€ journalists that his country ‘seeks a stable relationship with China’. This is because, as Albanese pointed out, China is ‘Australia’s largest trading partner. They are worth more than Japan, the United […]
Jens Stoltenberg warns things can go 'horribly wrong.'
After launching an urgent appeal for humanitarian aid for children in war-torn Yemen, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund on Monday released a report showing that more than 11,000 young people have been killed or injured in the U.S.-backed conflict, where a Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out attacks since 2015.
The true death toll of children is likely far higher, said the agency, commonly known as UNICEF, as millions face hunger and disease.
Early Tuesday morning, explosions occurred in the town of Klintsy and the nearby village of Klimovo, both of which are in Russia’s Bryansk region.
The amount of emissions from permafrost is directly reliant on how much warmer our atmosphere gets – the higher the degree of warming, the more emissions we can expect.
"It's like adding another country," says David Olefeldt, an associate professor at the University of Alberta and co-author of the study.
Once, Mark Benfatti couldn’t imagine living anywhere but St. Bernard Parish, a close-knit, working-class community perched precariously between New Orleans and the wetlands leading to the Gulf of Mexico.
His parents had moved there in 1963, when he was a year old. It’s where he met and married his wife, Donna, and where they raised their three daughters. It’s where he ran four restaurants, serving the same familiar faces every day of the year.
Tom Engelhardt examines who is committing terracide, or the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on.
What does “intermittency” mean? It’s pretty simple: The sun doesn’t shine all the time, so solar panels can’t produce energy 24/7. Wind is even more “intermittent,” or at least less predictable. A windmill or wind turbine may or may not generate energy at any particular time, depending on whether there’s a decent breeze.
“Energy density” gets more complicated, but the simplified version looks something like this: A given volume or area of space and fuel dedicated to one kind of energy production is more efficient than another. An acre dedicated to a nuclear reactor or a fossil fuel power plant (and the nuclear material or, say, coal) produces a LOT more energy than an acre covered with solar panels or wind turbines. In fact, it’s questionable whether there are enough acres on Earth to meet humanity’s energy needs with “renewables,” at least if those acres have to be dedicated entirely to energy generation.
FTX succumbed last month to the cryptocurrency version of a bank run, where rumours of liquidity problems prompted customers to withdraw their funds from the exchange en masse, which revealed that FTX didn't have those funds stored safely in the first place. The insolvency trustees now running the company's unwinding have since called the cryptocurrency exchange's management a "complete failure of corporate controls" and said that Bankman-Fried ran the company like his "personal fiefdom."
Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Twitter that Bahamian authorities had made the arrest.
“Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. Government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the SDNY,” Williams said. “We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”
He is scheduled to appear on Tuesday in a magistrates' court in the Caribbean country's capital, Nassau.
Police said Mr Bankman-Fried, 30, was arrested for "financial offences" against laws in the US and The Bahamas.
Last month FTX filed for bankruptcy in the US, leaving many users unable to withdraw their funds.
Prime Minister Philip Davis said in a statement, "The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law."
The statement added that while U.S. authorities pursue criminal charges, the Bahamas is continuing a regulatory and criminal investigation into the company's collapse.
The attorney general for the Bahamas said in a statement Monday that the Royal Bahamas Police Force arrested Bankman-Fried after notification from the U.S. of pending criminal charges against the ex-billionaire, noting that the U.S. is “likely” to request extradition.
While there doesn’t seem to be a ceiling on the number of species that might evolve, there may be restraints on how many fundamental forms those species can evolve into. The evolution of crab-like creatures may be one of the best examples of this, since they have evolved not just once but at least five times.
Crabs belong to a group of crustaceans called decapods – literally “ten footed”, since they have five pairs of walking legs. Some decapods, like lobsters and shrimp, have a thick, muscular abdomen, which is the bulk of the animal that we eat. With a quick flick of their abdomen lobsters can shoot off backwards and escape predators.
Crabs, by contrast, have a compressed abdomen, tucked away under a flattened but widened thorax and shell. This allows them to scuttle into rock crevices for protection. Evolution repeatedly hit upon this solution because it works well under similar sets of circumstances.
On Friday, the House Oversight Committee released the final report from its year-long investigation into fossil fuel industry disinformation. The result is the most damning indictment yet of the industry’s attempts to “greenwash” its public image while continuing to expand fossil fuel production and lobby against climate action.€
According to the findings of the committee, major fossil fuel companies like Chevron, Exxon, BP, and Shell have no intention of seriously reducing their emission by moving away from oil and gas production. Instead, they’re using false “net zero” commitments and other marketing tactics to mislead and distract the public while they double down on fossil fuel production.€
With just one week left at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference for countries to reach a deal to protect Earth's ecosystems, environmental campaigners on Monday implored negotiators gathered in Montréal to ensure that the elimination of harmful government subsidies is a core component of any agreement.
"Biodiversity offsets are not a substitute for real action to stop destruction of nature, just as carbon offsets are not a substitute for real emissions reductions."
Cleanup and assessment efforts continued Monday after a Canadian fossil fuel company's pipeline spilled nearly an Olympic-sized swimming pool's worth of crude tar sands oil into a northern Kansas creek that feeds a watershed providing drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people.
"The only safe way to transport tar sands oil is not to do it at all."
After decades of experimentation and billions of dollars in public investment, U.S. government scientists have reportedly achieved a major "breakthrough" in fusion energy technology, a potential game-changer in the critical pursuit of clean, reliable, and low-cost alternatives to fossil fuels and conventional nuclear power.
Citing unnamed sources with knowledge of the results, the Financial Times reported Sunday that scientists at a federal laboratory in California successfully produced "a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time," a milestone that the Biden administration is expected to announce publicly on Tuesday.
It isn’t climate change that caused a 69 percent loss in total wildlife populations between 1970 and 2018, according to a World Wildlife Fund study published this year. The cause is too many people demanding too much from ecosystems, or human overshoot of the biophysical carrying capacity of the Earth.
This past Labor Day, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation giving more than 500,000 fast-food workers a seat at the table with their employers to set wages and working conditions throughout the industry in California. It was the culmination of a decade-long organizing effort by the workers, most of whom are women and people of color, twice as likely to live in poverty as other workers in the state.
The Fed is doubling down on what appears to be€ a failed policy, driving the economy to the€ brink of recession€ without bringing prices down appreciably. Inflation results from “too much money chasing too few goods,” and the Fed has control over only the money – the “demand” side of the equation. Energy and food are the€ key inflation drivers, and they are on the supply side. As€ noted by Bloomberg columnist Ramesh Ponnuru € in the Washington Post€ in March:
So why is the Fed forging ahead? Some pundits think Chairman Powell has something else up his sleeve.
In a last-ditch bid to revive the expanded Child Tax Credit in some form by year's end, the White House has reportedly suggested to congressional Democrats that it is willing to accept a compromise deal that adds more stringent work requirements to the anti-poverty program—a reversal of President Joe Biden's previous opposition to such restrictions and a move that some progressives condemned.
The Child Tax Credit (CTC) boost enacted in 2021 did not contain a work requirement, meaning the poorest families were eligible for the CTC for the first time. But the CTC enhancement, which brought about historic reductions in U.S. child poverty, expired at the end of last year due to the opposition of Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who refused to support a renewal of the expanded CTC unless a "firm work requirement" was added.
As 2022 comes to a close, it’s time to reflect on the year behind us, and set goals for the year ahead. As state lawmakers, there’s no shortage of dreams and aspirations we have for the communities we are honored to serve. But there is one New Year’s Resolution that all states and political parties can get behind that would benefit all our constituents: ending corporate tax giveaways.
Humanity faces a grim fate because the global ruling class refuses to depart from the capitalist status quo even as their quest to maximize profits intensifies the climate crisis and the prospects of a nuclear war. But with enough solidarity, progressives around the world can build an egalitarian, democratic, peaceful, and sustainable society.
That's the message shared Monday by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who outlined his vision for how the left can work together to end the "global empire of capital" and forge a humane future—part of a Progressive International-led effort to chart a path toward a "New International Economic Order for the 21st century."
While it is undoubtedly true that the savings rate has fallen by any measure, a large part of the decline is due to people paying taxes on capital gains. This can easily be seen in the data. If we look at the third quarter data, people paid $3,244 billion in taxes, or 14.8 percent of personal income.[1] By comparison, in the fourth quarter of 2019, the last pre-pandemic quarter, people paid $2,216 billion, 11.8 percent of their income in taxes.
Since there were no major changes in tax rates over this period, we can assume that most of this increase in tax payments was due to capital gains taxes on stocks that people sold. Capital gains do not count as income in the national income accounts. Let me repeat that for the folks worried we will run out of savings. Capital gains do not count as income in the national income accounts.
Generals appointed because of their wealth and social connections, rather than ability, produced spectacular debacles, such as the Charge of the Light Brigade. The best-known achievement of the Victorian reformers was the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 that intended to produce a Civil Service in which “none but qualified personnel will be appointed”.
The old corruption
Such a change would shift Twitter away from its microblogging format that led to the platform’s rise, allowing users to write tweets more than 14 times longer than the current limit.
Currently, users wishing to write posts longer than the limit of 280 characters must create a thread and write their comments across multiple consecutive tweets.
Alex Holmes, who had been a member of the council, tweeted that the email came after the company canceled a meeting with the council.
"The way this has unfolded and way members have been treated is unfortunate and unacceptable," said Holmes, a member of the advisory board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the deputy CEO of the nonprofit group The Diana Award.
Cook joined President Joe Biden onsite this week to celebrate its forthcoming contribution to US chip manufacturing. In an announcement first reported by CNBC, Cook shared that Apple would be shifting away from imported chips in favor of Arizona-made chips once the factory was in production. “Now, thanks to the hard work of so many people, these chips can be proudly stamped ‘Made in America,’” Cook said. “This is an incredibly significant moment.”
The Broadband Grant Tax Treatment Act, a bill that would make non-taxable broadband grants from the BEAD program and the American Rescue Plan Act, may yet become law by year’s end, spokespeople for Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Penn., told Broadband Breakfast Monday.
Meta launched its Connectivity division in 2013 and explored multiple ways to provide "free" [Internet] to people, including with the help of Facebook Aquila -- an experimental solar-powered drone developed by the company that aimed to beam the [Internet] to remote parts of the world.
The US business magazine Forbes has unveiled its annual list of European people under the age of 30 who are worth keeping an eye on in fields such as culture, science and finance.
The following is an open letter written to Senate Democrats by Bishop William J. Barber II on Monday, December 12, 2022.
With major support from organized labor, including AFL-CIO President George Meany at the signing, Medicare was signed into law in 1965. Before Medicare, only 60% of those over 65 had insurance since it was unavailable or unaffordable via private insurance (seniors were charged 3x the rate of younger people). Not only economically beneficial to the working class, the passage of Medicare was a huge civil rights victory as payments to physicians, hospitals, and health care providers were conditional on desegregation.
While a big victory, Medicare did not provide full coverage for all services, and from its inception, there has been a drive to privatize and hand it over to profiteers. In fact, 2022 marks the 50th anniversary (1972) of Medicare permitting private insurance companies (HMOs) to participate in Medicare.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will not hold the year-end press conference that took place annually in December for the past decade, reports the Interfax. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the press:
So, yeah, I wrote a big long thing debunking the first round of the “Twitter Files” but there’s no way I’m going to make myself do more of that for every stupid thread of the “Twitter Files” being tweeted out. Just know that, having read all of the released “Twitter Files” threads so far, they are all just as ridiculous as the first one. They are all written by people who appear to have (1) no idea what they’re looking at (2) no interest in talking to anyone who does understand it and (3) no concern about presenting them in an extremely misleading light in an effort to push a narrative that is not even remotely supported by what they’re sharing.
Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia asserted over the weekend that former President Donald Trump's right-wing mob would have pulled off a successful coup had she and erstwhile Trump adviser Steve Bannon organized the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol.
"I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would've been armed," Greene said Saturday night at the annual New York Young Republican Club dinner, during which the club's president instructed a throng of white nationalists and other far-right figures, including Donald Trump Jr., to prepare for "total war."
If decades have distinct personalities, they also have shadow selves: covert and latent tendencies that are only barely visible at the time but serve as harbingers of change to come.1
I came of age in the ’90s, and my first steady job in journalism was as editor of a small left-wing magazine that subsisted on atrophying subscriptions and crashing arts grants and was, in those years, perpetually on the verge of publishing its last issue. The publication, called This Magazine, was founded in the 1960s, when left ideas were a roaring cultural fire. But by the mid-’90s, the fire was down to its embers, and it felt as if all we could do was blow to keep it from turning to dust. At one of my first story meetings, I suggested we stage a public funeral procession for the left, just to mark and mourn the passing of so many of its core ideas. Instead, we screamed ourselves hoarse insisting that Francis Fukuyama was wrong and history was not over; that Margaret Thatcher had lied to us—there were and always had been alternatives; and that corporate trade deals were not “free” but came at a terrible cost to workers, ways of life, and the natural world.1Naomi Klein’s first book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, was a defining work of 1990s political analysis.
These types of analyses are now being applied to understanding official Arab attitudes towards Russia, China, global politics and conflicts.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping€ prepares€ to lead a large delegation to meet with Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia on December 9, Western media conveys a sense of dread.
attended a panel discussion at the National Press Club on Monday about the fate of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. The event happened to be at the National Press Club, but it was actually sponsored by the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at George Mason University.
Hayden, the notorious former director of both the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., who oversaw the C.I.A.’s torture program during part of the George W. Bush administration, was front and center at the event.
So this year, he went a step further by creating a website to publicly share the trending topics he had logged throughout 2022 — all 457 of them.
Many mullahs will have fled. Some will seek protection from the militias they fostered in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The better connected will head to Oman or the United Arab Emirates. The outgoing and visibly ailing Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will flee to Beijing. A council of young Iranians will draft a new constitution and replace the symbol at the heart of the flag—a stylistic rendition of “God [sic] is greatest”—with the revolution’s slogan: “Women, Life, Freedom”.
Iran has hanged a man in public who had been convicted of killing two members of security forces, the second execution linked to anti-government protests in less than a week.
The execution of Majidreza Rahnavard on December 12, reported by the judiciary's Mizan news agency, came after a revolutionary court in Mashahd convicted him of "waging war against God," a charge which punishable by death, for allegedly murdering two members of the notorious Basij paramilitary militia with a knife during protests in November.
The development underscores the speed at which Iran now carries out death sentences handed down for those detained in the demonstrations that the government hopes to put down.
Activists warn that at least a dozen people already have been sentenced to death in closed-door hearings. At least 488 people have been killed since the demonstrations began in mid-September, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that's been monitoring the protests. Another 18,200 people have been detained by authorities.
The public hanging of Majidreza Rahnavard, less than a month after he allegedly carried out the fatal stabbings — purportedly angry about security forces killing protesters — shows the speed at which Iran now carries out death sentences handed down for those detained in the demonstrations the government hopes to put down.
We live in a country where freedom of expression is being questioned on a daily basis. How easy is it to make independent films?
Iran does better than us (laughs). We find ways to express ourselves. I don’t believe in censorship in any form, except self-censorship. I could have done blame-game films and more dynamic ones in my career. But I only choose to say human stories. Even ‘Manto’, which showcased the Partition, could have portrayed violence, war or explicitly the sexual concoctions that underly them. But I am not into sensationalising or glamorizing violence. The purpose is to create empathy. I don’t want to sharpen things and make them preachy even though I come from a social-work background.
The Supreme Court found that the right to protect sources is an important guarantee of journalistic freedom that creates the premise for a relationship of trust between a journalist and their source. This allows journalists to gain information from sources for whom disclosing it is illegal or would result in other sanctions in matters of public interest.
While the Media Services Act usually prohibits journalists and publications from disclosing information that could lead to the identification of sources without the latter's consent, this ban does not apply to sources who have provided false information.
A hearing begins Monday in a case that will decide if the conviction should be overturned for a Missouri man who has spent nearly three decades in prison for a murder that two other people have since confessed to committing
Last year, lid manufacturer Tecnocap illegally slashed health benefits for workers at its Glen Dale, West Virginia plant.
We look at “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power,” a remarkable new documentary that shows how a small rural community in Alabama organized during the civil rights movement to challenge white supremacy and systematic disenfranchisement of Black residents, and would become, in some ways, the first iteration of the Black Panther Party. Lowndes County went from having no registered Black voters in 1960 — despite being 80% Black — to being the birthplace in 1965 of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a radical political party that brought together grassroots activists and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Co-directors Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir tell Democracy Now! the Lowndes County story has not gotten the attention it deserves compared to other chapters of the civil rights movement, in part because its lessons are “more threatening” to the political establishment. “It seems like it has been deliberately left out of the narrative of history,” says Gandbhir. We also speak with Reverend Wendell Paris, a former SNCC field secretary featured in the film, who says the organizing in Lowndes County reflected an understanding by residents that “they needed to band together to defend themselves.”
Prison exchanges and swaps are never entirely satisfactory affairs.€ The appropriate measure in such cases is the degree of dissatisfaction that arises from them. In the instance of the exchange of US basketballer Brittney Griner for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, the Russian negotiators may well count themselves richer in […]
The owner of one of Birmingham, Alabama’s oldest industrial plants has agreed to pay a nearly $1 million fine after releasing excessive amounts of toxic air pollution into nearby historic Black neighborhoods, according to a proposed consent decree filed Friday in a Jefferson County court.
If the consent decree is approved by a judge, the Jefferson County Board of Health’s $925,000 penalty against Bluestone Coke would be the largest fine in the agency’s history. But it represents a small fraction of the more than $60 million in fines the company could have faced for its alleged violations. The consent decree would not require Bluestone to admit to wrongdoing.
Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, is urging the State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin to prevent the discrimination of people who don’t want to share their biometric data with the state.
The Los Angeles Sheriffs Department (LASD) has been overseen by a succession of terrible elected officials. Sheriff Lee Baca presided over a department that filled its ranks with criminals, ignored the proliferation of deputy gangs, and ran a jailhouse informant program so unlawful it resulted in an FBI investigation and the conviction of Sheriff Baca on obstruction charges.
With federal telecom oversight both intentionally gridlocked and crippled courtesy of the Trump era, the closest telecom monopolies get to seeing accountability are often state attorneys general.
Not all Comcast Xfinity, Charter Spectrum and Cox subscribers have activated their accounts, given the number of monthly active accounts, which includes paid subscribers, is lower than the total number of MVPD and broadband subscribers with access.
Yet subscribers with complimentary access do make up a sizable proportion of the total users. With Peacock generating losses — estimated to be $2.4 billion for 2022 — it's important, especially given Wall Street’s sudden turn on whether streaming is a good bet for media companies, to find ways to boost that.
The FTC voted 3-1 to issue the complaint after a closed-door meeting, with the three Democratic commissioners voting in favour and the sole Republican voting against. A fifth seat on the panel is vacant after another Republican left earlier this year.
The FTC's complaint points to Microsoft's previous game acquisitions, especially of well-known developer Bethesda Softworks and its parent company ZeniMax, as an example of where Microsoft made some popular game titles exclusive despite assuring European regulators it had no intention to do so.
The fumbled presale reignited fan frustration toward Ticketmaster, particularly among those who signed up as “verified fans,” which means they are able to enter a lottery to buy tickets for certain shows. Ticketmaster has said doing so helps to “ensure that more tickets go to the fans who will actually attend the event,” by granting them access to tickets before the public sale. After they register as a “verified fan,” Ticketmaster provides them with a code and a link to the purchase site. When tickets go on sale, the link leads fans to a “Smart Queue” that “keeps ticket bots out.” Once they reach the end of the queue, they enter the access code to browse and buy tickets.
It’s beginning to get quite comical watching various rightwing folks and groups bang on constantly about how pro-free-speech they are, often talking about situations that have nothing to do with free speech, only to engage in anti-speech behavior themselves. The new owner of a mountain of debt that is called Twitter has become something of an emblem for this sort of thing, shouting into the void about free speech only to turn on his heel the moment he gets an ounce of criticism.
A federal judge dismissed the case after the two sides agreed to resolve the suit in a settlement, according to court documents filed on Monday in California federal court. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Representatives for Swift didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The filings did not include any reason for, or explanation behind, the agreement to dismiss the case. Lawyers for the defendants — which also included Swift’s co-writers Max Martin and Shellback — did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment, nor did a rep for Swift. Lawyers for the songwriters who brought the suit, Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, also did not return a request for comment.
The United States Attorney for the District of Maryland has confirmed that 55 domain names were seized for allegedly streaming FIFA World Cup games. The crackdown affects millions of visitors and a broad variety of sites. Despite the gravity of the enforcement actions, some sites simply continue doing business from new domains.
The RIAA booked a landmark victory against YouTube ripper Yout.com earlier this year. Soon after, the music group requested compensation for over $250,000 in attorney's fees. Yout has now asked the court to put this matter on hold while its appeal over the legality of youtube-dl-based software is heard at the appeals court.
Illegal streaming site PrimeWire avoided, dodged, or simply ignored Hollywood's attempts to bring it down for at least a decade. A copyright lawsuit filed by the studios in 2021 was a clear sign that patience had finally run out and a year later, it's all over. A California court has just awarded the plaintiffs $20.7m in damages plus $417,600 to cover attorneys' fees.
Experts have long imagined that blue-collar workers like truckers or factory workers would be the first to lose jobs to artificial intelligence. Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang suggested that a possible collapse of trucking industry jobs, caused by the perfecting and popularization of self-driving vehicles, even had the potential to cause civil turmoil as countless workers suddenly found themselves without a paycheck. Still, the idea never got a lot of media attention—perhaps because job loss to AI has largely been considered a working-class problem.
I turned in my badge, took my exit exam. My parents
will be here soon to watch me graduate. The first
time they get to see either of their kids graduate
from anything, mom says.
I led a thorough cleaning of the kitchen & living
room today: all furniture moved, minor repairs made
& floors scrubbed, in anticipation of the advent
of my parents and when they leave, life together
after nursing school.
First, and most importantly, before looking at your old lists, write down what’s most on your mind right now. If it’s among what you’re worrying most about right now, it needs to be front and center in your new system.
Second, from your old system, move everything to “someday/maybe”, or to a sublist in “someday/maybe”. If it’s on digital, just drag it over there without looking at what’s in there yet. If it’s a paper list, relabel it without reading it yet.
It has been ages since I posted to my gemlog, and unfortunately I also have been much distracted from working on my gemcast as well, to the point where I think that I might as well write something for people who are still reading my Gemini capsule. (Hey, someone is bound to see this.)
Granted, the eight line shell script wasn't much of an engine, nor was the 54 line Perl script to build index.gmi and the RSS, plus a few lines of Makefile to hold it all together. Oh, and git. But at least there are now previous and next links on the blog entries?
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.