On January 19, the North Carolina legislature passed HB 605, which moves the 2022 primary from May 17 to June 7. If the bill becomes law, that would also give independent candidates more time to petition. Independent candidate petitions in … Continue reading →
This Sunday, January 23rd, is RCV Day (Get it? It’s 1/23)! In states all over the country, people will be mobilizing to spread the word about ranked choice voting. FairVote and Rank The Vote – a national grassroots organizing group – are collaborating to coordinate these efforts nationwide. Check out the events detailed below to learn more about some of the creative ways organizations are spreading the word about RCV and ways to get involved in your state!
“Beer Elections” are a fun way to introduce ranked choice voting to people who are unfamiliar, and allow them to experience RCV in action. Rank the Vote Delaware is hosting beer elections at local breweries where participants will be…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/rcv_day_events_planned_across_america
I’ve been writing about Genode OS for over a decade as one of the interesting original, open-source operating system frameworks that has taken novel approaches to many design elements and continues persevering with their efforts. For 2022 the project has yet more ambitious goals ahead…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Genode-2022-Plans
When you spend a lot of time on the computer doing certain more specialised tasks (no, we’re not talking about browsing cat memes on twitter) you start to think that your basic trackpad or mouse is, let’s say, lacking a certain something. We think that something may be called ‘usability’ or maybe ease-of-use? Any which way, lots of heavy CAD users gush over their favourite mouse stand-ins, and one particularly interesting class of input devices is the Space Mouse, which is essentially patented up-to-the-hilt and available only from 3DConnexion. But what about open source alternatives you can build yourselves? Enter stage left, the Orbion created by [FaqT0tum.] This simple little build combines an analog joystick with…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/a-diy-cad-mouse-you-can-actually-build/
“[Historical knowledge] gives understanding of how the present world came to be, and maybe more importantly, an appreciation that everything that is, never necessarily had to be” -from “History as Freedom” —Joe Costello, longtime political organizer, writer
On the 10th anniversary of the groundbreaking SOPA Blackout, a question seems to surface above all else: can any one of us really go on to change history? And how, exactly, does that happen?
For the 24 million people who participated in the largest online protest in history against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the millions more who witnessed the protest in real time, the course of history was changed. Had it succeeded, SOPA would have given anyone the power…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220118/11134648307/how-sopa-blackout-happened.shtml
On 17th of January 2022, Michael Paquier committed patch: Introduce log_destination=jsonlog “jsonlog” is a new value that can be added to log_destination to provide logs in the JSON format, with its output written to a file, making it the third type of destination of this kind, after “stderr” and “csvlog”. The format is convenient … Continue reading “Waiting for PostgreSQL 15 – Introduce log_destination=jsonlog”
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5eU
Congressional Democrats are joining Republicans in a last-ditch effort to undermine the newly implemented No Surprises Act, which bans surprise medical bills. A key provision in the law could become a first step toward allowing the federal government to standardize rates for medical procedures covered under private insurance plans, an objective the private health care industry has fought for decades. Late last year, in the months leading up to the bill’s enactment, opponents filed a flurry of lawsuits claiming that by enforcing the rule in a manner widely viewed as consistent with the text of the legislation, the Biden administration had overstepped Congress’s intentions.
The leading opponents of the provision, which mandates that insurers and health care…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/17/surprise-medical-billing-lawsuit/
The pulse-dial telephone and its associated mechanical exchange represents the pinnacle of late-19th and early-20th century electromechanical technology, but its vestiges have disappeared from view with astonishing rapidity. [Matthew Harrold] is a telecoms enthusiast who’s been kind enough to share with us the teardown and refurbishment of that most signature of pulse-dial components, a telephone dial. In this case it’s on a rather unusual instrument, a British GPO outdoor phone that would have been seen in all kinds of industrial and safety installations back in the day and can probably still be found in the wild today if you know where to look.
The teardown soon identifies a dial that runs very slowly and is sorely in…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/01/16/a-dodgy-dial-gets-a-teardown-and-some-oil/
At Akademy in Milan – I’m pretty sure it was
then – I gave a talk about “Managing meeting in Matrix”. The Blue Systems crew
has a kind of weekly stand-up over text chat to coordinate things and to keep
everyone in the loop. That meeting is managed by a Bot, which I call QuatBot.
Only two years after my talk about it, I’ve gotten around to doing an
actual release.
No Screenshots
QuatBot is a Bot for use in text-chat. So there are no pretty screenshots
of it in action, or what the UI looks like: pick your favorite
Matrix client (I switch between nheko
and neochat depending on which
has a more recent release fixing bugs that annoy me).
Getting the Source
QuatBot isn’t a KDE project,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://euroquis.nl//blabla/2022/01/17/quatbot
We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what’s at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
Ten years ago, a diverse coalition of internet users, non-profit groups, and internet companies defeated the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), bills that would have forced internet companies to blacklist and block websites accused of hosting copyright-infringing content. These were bills that would have made censorship very easy, all in the name of copyright enforcement. This…
Increasing numbers of young men are having vasectomies because they
recognize that it’s not good to have children in a world headed into
climate disaster.It’s not good for the children, and it’s not good for the rest of the
world.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives//2021-nov-feb.html#17_January_2022_(Vasectomies)
Enlarge / A Starlink track running across the Andromeda galaxy. (credit: Caltech Optical Observatories/IPAC)
SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service will require a dense constellation of satellites to provide consistent, low-latency connectivity. The system already has over 1,500 satellites in orbit and has received approval to operate 12,000 of them. And that has astronomers worried. Although SpaceX has taken steps to reduce the impact of its hardware, there’s no way to completely eliminate the tracks the satellites leave across ground-based observations.
How bad is the problem? A team of astronomers has used archival images from a survey telescope to look for Starlink tracks over the past two years. Over that time, the number of images affected…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1826316
Moleskine, manufacturer of popular notebooks, calendars, and sketchbooks, seems to think Taiwain sank to the bottom of the ocean or something. In 2019 its notebooks indicated Taiwan’s public holidays along with those of 43 other countries. In 2020 it started referring to the country as “Taiwan (Prov. — Read the rest
In October 2020, the RIAA caused outrage by taking down YouTube-ripping tool youtube-dl from GitHub.
The RIAA cited the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, claiming that the tool could be used to download their artists’ musical works from YouTube, in breach of copyright.
With little supporting case law in the United States, the RIAA referenced a decision from the Hamburg Regional Court in a similar case, which found that YouTube’s “rolling cipher” should be considered an effective technological protection measure under EU law. Any attempt to circumvent it, therefore, would amount to infringement.
Nevertheless, GitHub later restored the software and placed $1m in a takedown defense fund.
Threats Were Also Sent to Others
While the RIAA’s effort to take down…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/major-record-labels-sue-youtube-dl-hosting-provider-220114/
Time to back up those PDFs you’ve been hoarding
Worrying changes are afoot for e-comics vendor ComiXology as Amazon finally gets round to asserting copy control – meaning no more downloads of unprotected comics, even if you’ve paid for them.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/01/14/comixology_kindle/
I previously wrote about the issue of swap potentially breaking SSD [1]. My conclusion was that swap wouldn’t be a problem as no normally operating systems that I run had swap using any significant fraction of total disk writes. In that post the most writes I could see was 128GB written per day on a 120G Intel SSD (writing the entire device once a day).
My post about swap and SSD was based on the assumption that you could get many thousands of writes to the entire device which was incorrect. Here’s a background on the terminology from WD [2]. So in the case of the 120G Intel SSD I was doing over 1 DWPD (Drive Writes…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/01/16/ssd-endurance/
Web3 is being called the future of the internet. But what is Web3, exactly? The Onion explains.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-guide-to-web3-1848356077
Washington D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a federal appeals court to block enforcement of onerous copyright rules that violate the First Amendment and criminalize certain speech about technology, preventing researchers, tech innovators, filmmakers, educators, and others from creating and sharing their work.EFF, with co-counsel Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia yesterday to reverse a district court decision in Green v. DOJ, a lawsuit we filed in 2016 challenging the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on behalf of security researcher Matt Green and technologist Andrew “bunnie” Huang. Both are pursuing projects highly beneficial to the public and perfectly lawful except…
