The Death of the Mind

On election night, the New Mexico Green Party appeared to have missed ongoing qualified status by 51 votes. But late-arriving ballots seem to have boosted the party’s showing, so that it is now barely meeting the .5% vote test for president. Here is a link to the Secretary of State’s vote tally. The vote is still unofficial but all counties have finished their official canvass, so when the state canvass is complete, the results should be the same.

The party needed 4,617 votes and appears to have 4,619.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/11/19/new-mexico-green-party-appears-to-meet-the-vote-test-after-all/

It took more than 20 years, but the FreeCAD computer-aided design project
has just made
its 1.0 release.

Since the very beginnings, the FreeCAD community had a clear view of what 1.0 represented for us. What we wanted in it. FreeCAD matured over the years, and that list narrowed down to just two major remaining pieces: fixing the toponaming problem, and having a built-in assembly module.

Well, I’m very proud to say those two issues are now solved.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/998807/

At the International TeX Users Group Conference 2023 (TUG23) in Bonn, Germany, I presented a talk about using Metafont (and its extension Metapost) to develop traditional orthography Malayalam fonts, on behalf of C.V. Radhakrishnan and K.H. Hussain, who were the co-developers and authors. And I forgot to post about it afterwards — as always, life gets in between. In early 2022, CVR started toying with Metafont to create a few complicated letters of Malayalam script and he showed us a wonderful demonstration that piqued many of our interest. With the same code base, by adjusting the parameters, different variations of the glyphs can be generated, as seen in a screenshot of that demonstration: 16 variations…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://rajeeshknambiar.wordpress.com/2024/11/14/metafont-metapost-and-malayalam-font/

Mastercard has set its sights on transforming the online shopping experience by 2030, envisioning a checkout process where passwords and physical card numbers are no longer required. The company aims to replace traditional authentication methods with on-device biometrics for users to authenticate purchases across devices without exposing personal data online. Mastercard plans to phase out manual card entry and static passwords by 2030, using a combination of tokenization – introduced a decade ago to safeguard sensitive payment information – and biometric authentication to enable secure checkouts. Tokenization, first rolled out a decade ago to protect sensitive payment data, now plays a key role in the company’s goal to improve security and convenience in e-commerce. The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202411/mastercard-says-biometrics-tokenization-only-for-online-checkout-by-2030

This is tentatively welcome news. I mean, it can’t result in anything worse than the original decision the Fourth Circuit handed down in the Chatrie case, which said there’s nothing constitutionally wrong with searching every Google user’s location info in hopes of finding the suspect law enforcement is actually looking for. (via FourthAmendment.com)
The Appeals Court took the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision that created a warrant requirement for obtaining cell site location info over a long period of time and took that to mean that the location info law enforcement eventually obtained in the Chatrie case wasn’t worthy of Fourth Amendment protections.

[W]e find that the government did not conduct a Fourth Amendment search when it obtained two…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/06/fourth-circuit-appeals-court-announces-its-going-to-rethink-its-geofence-warrant-decision/

You stroll into your favorite food-jobber, looking to pick up a few things on your way home from work. Lots of people are on their way home from work. There are lines at every register and someone is in the self-checkout with $600-worth of groceries, beginning what will eventually become a 30-minute stop-start process that could have been handled in a five minutes by even the most incompetent cashier.
That’s when you start considering your options. Do you take the slightly shorter line manned by yet another interchangeable teen who is only working a register because the manager scrambled help to the front — one who would otherwise just be at the back of the store milking…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/06/facial-recognition-firm-announces-way-to-punish-retail-workers-shoppers-for-forming-relationships/

This year, Georgia and Ohio ballots have presidential candidates on them, for whom votes will not be counted. This has never happened before in any state in the United States. In Georgia, after the ballots were printed, the State Supreme Court said the petitions for Claudia De la Cruz and Cornel West were invalid. In Ohio, after the ballots were printed, the Secretary of State said Jill Stein had accidentally withdrawn. So, in both states, voters will see names on the ballot but if they vote for those names, their vote won’t be counted.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/11/04/2024-is-first-presidential-election-in-history-in-which-ballot-listed-candidates-cant-have-votes-tallied/

Far from a “grassroots” operation, the “Uncommitted” trap was controlled and financed from the beginning by party operatives seeking to divert mass anger over the genocide in Gaza back into the Democratic Party.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/05/eyid-n05.html