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The silver lining is due to cesium contamination.Today’s News:
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/good-news
On 3rd of April 2024, Tom Lane committed patch: Invent SERIALIZE option for EXPLAIN. EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, SERIALIZE) allows collection of statistics about the volume of data emitted by a query, as well as the time taken to convert the data to the on-the-wire format. Previously there was no way to investigate this without actually … Continue reading “Waiting for PostgreSQL 17 – Invent SERIALIZE option for EXPLAIN.”
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/6sY
I had understood in principle that printf is Turing complete, but I am still aghast at this interactive game of tic-tac-toe implemented with a single printf statement.
Computing the NOT of a single value is also easy:
printf("%1$255d%1$s%hhn", a, b)will compute
*b = (strlen(a)+255)%256 = strlen(a)-1and again, because strlen(x) is either 1 or 0 we have
*c = !bFrom here we can compute any binary circuit.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/04/the-turing-police-say-x-wins/
North Carolina has never had an independent candidate for U.S. House on a government-printed ballot. But in 2024, Shelane Etchison appears to have qualified in the Ninth District. Here is her website. She needed 7,460 valid signatures and the county election boards have verified 7,532.
The Ninth District is in central North Carolina, just west of Raleigh. It has a first-term Republican incumbent, Richard Hudson. He is running for re-election. In 2022 he won the general election in a two-person race with 56.5%.
Flock Safety — a relatively recent entrant to the surveillance tech arena — is branching out. It’s courting cops with cheap ALPR cameras, unproven claims about crime reduction, and a little lawbreaking of its own.
But it hasn’t abandoned its roots. It first hit the scene with plate readers it pitched to the Fun Police: homeowners associations and the even deeper pockets overseeing our nation’s many gated communities.
Flock tells HOAs and the heads of carefully curated communities things like “Flock Safety is the only security camera that stops property crime.” It’s a laughable claim. For one, Flock’s cameras are cameras and pretty much any security camera will have some effect on crime. Second, cameras don’t prevent crime….
The US cannot assure Britain that that the First Amendment will apply to Julian Assange outside
the US, because an old Supreme Court decision says it does not. This probably means that
Assange’s last appeal will proceed, and go on for a long time during the US election campaign.The article contends that Biden’s interest, as well as justice, argues for
dropping the charges
against Assange.To ask (even rhetorically) whether Assange has been “punished enough” is to normalize
horrible abuse. The conditions that Assange has suffered in Belmarsh prison are too cruel even
for the worst criminals. No one should be
kept alone in a cell
for 23 hours a day.
Giving Assange a plea bargain would be better than trying him as
a spy,…
Facial recognition tech is probably improving as time goes on. Given enough providers, controversy, and individuals who definitely want this tech to stop being so terrible at correctly identifying women and minorities, anything is possible.
Rather than wait for the tech to catch up to the promises made by promotional materials, cops are apparently moving ahead with efforts that will cause even more problems for future tech adoption.
We’re already afflicted by at least one tech company that believes it’s perfectly OK to stock its database of billions of photos with any content not locked down on the internet. Beyond that, there’s the problems inherent to the systems themselves, which aggravate biased policing by doing their most…
Update: On Thursday, Special Superior Court Judge Matthew Houston ruled that there is no “compelling public interest” to release body-camera footage of the botch raid. More below. On Tuesday, the Raleigh Police Department asked a judge to block the release of body-camera footage from the botched raid of Amir and Mirian Ibrahim Abboud’s home in April 2021. On Thursday, the judge obliged. According to court records, an RPD SWAT team “suddenly and without warning, broke and busted open the Abbouds’ front door with a battering ram, pointing their long, AR-styled firearms at Mr. Abboud, Mrs. Abboud, and their 11-month-old son.” Though the search warrant was ultimately based on mistaken identity—State Bureau of Investigation agents confused…
Can you play chess against your printer? The answer will soon be yes, and it’s thanks to [Nicolas Seriot]’s PSChess. It’s a chess engine implemented in PostScript, of all things. It’s entirely working except for one last hurdle, but more on that in a moment.
What’s it like to play PSChess? Currently, one uses a PostScript interpreter (such as GhostScript) to run it, much like one would use the Python interpreter to run Python code. The user inputs moves by typing in commands like d2d4 (representing a piece’s source coordinate and a destination coordinate on the 2D board). Then the program makes a move, and outputs an updated board state to both the console and a PDF…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/03/30/playing-chess-against-your-printer-with-postscript/
On Tuesday, the Raleigh Police Department asked a judge to block the release of body-camera footage from the botched raid of Amir and Mirian Ibrahim Abboud’s home in April 2021. According to court records, an RPD SWAT team “suddenly and without warning, broke and busted open the Abbouds’ front door with a battering ram, pointing their long, AR-styled firearms at Mr. Abboud, Mrs. Abboud, and their 11-month-old son.” Though the search warrant was ultimately based on mistaken identity—State Bureau of Investigation agents confused Abboud with a neighbor who is also of Arab descent—the police refused to pay for the damage, court records show. In February 2023, the Abbouds filed a complaint against the SBI with the…
Back in 2021, the Chicago Office of the Inspector General released a report on the PD’s ShotSpotter tech. The acoustic detection system was apparently mostly useless, no matter what ShotSpotter may have commented in response.
Residents of Chicago are paying nearly $11 million a year for this system. But it’s obvious they’re not getting much bang for their buck, so to speak. ShotSpotter (which has since rebranded to SoundThinking) claims its detection system is worth every penny blown on it, stating that it is “highly accurate” and “benefits communities battling gun violence.”
Plenty of cities that have spent money on this product say otherwise. So do lawsuit plaintiffs and other victims of civil rights abuses, who…
Rapidly rising insurance premiums are forcing affordable housing developers to cut back on programming, lay off staff, and even sell. To add insult to injury, some insurers also seem to be adding penalties or withdrawing coverage for housing voucher holders.
The post Soaring Property Insurance Rates Threaten Affordable Housing Development appeared first on Shelterforce.
Lakeland, Florida is not known as a particularly violent city. It does not appear on lists of America’s most crime-ridden towns. But it is home to one of the first installations of real-time public facial recognition in the U.S. The first among the cameras have been installed by the Lakeland Downtown Development Authority (LDDA), according to local NBC affiliate WFLA. The Ledger counts 14 cameras in the project, and says they are running Verkada software. The installation is expected to be complete at the end of April. The cameras cost $115,000. Three individuals, specifically, are concerning enough to be placed on a biometric watchlist so they can be identified in real-time. They have histories of…
CompSci and math professor by trade, he envisaged a galactic Usenet, and was utterly brilliant
Obituary Science fiction author and academic Vernor Vinge has departed this life, aged 79.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/22/vernor_vinge_obituary/
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the Democratic Party has assembled a “new team of lawyers” tasked with blocking third-party candidates from appearing on the ballot.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/22/nzvc-m22.html
Calling all extension developers! With Manifest V3 picking up steam again, we wanted to provide some visibility into our current plans as a lot has happened since we published our last update.
Back in 2022 we released our initial implementation of MV3, the latest version of the extensions platform, in Firefox. Since then, we have been hard at work collaborating with other browser vendors and community members in the W3C WebExtensions Community Group (WECG). Our shared goals were to improve extension APIs while addressing cross browser compatibility. That collaboration has yielded some great results to date and we’re proud to say our participation has been instrumental in shaping and designing those APIs to ensure broader applicability across…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/
The leader in gunshot detection tech rebranded recently. Following several months of sustained negative press, ShotSpotter decided it wanted to be called something else: SoundThinking.
But a raffelesia by any other name smells the same. ShotSpotter had experienced a bit of quick uptake by law enforcement agencies, but in recent years, it was more well-known for having contracts terminated by major cities, allegedly altering data to better fit police report narratives, and suing reporters for covering nothing more than allegations made against the company in court.
No one’s going to stop calling ShotSpotter by its original Christian name. SoundThinking may be the new brand, but if anyone wants readers to instantly understand the tech being discussed, ShotSpotter…
Enlarge / A car’s hazard warning lights will need a physical control to get a five-star EuroNCAP score in 2026.
Some progress in the automotive industry is laudable. Cars are safer than ever and more efficient, too. But there are other changes we’d happily leave by the side of the road. That glossy “piano black” trim that’s been overused the last few years, for starters. And the industry’s overreliance on touchscreens for functions that used to be discrete controls. Well, the automotive safety organization European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) feels the same way about that last one, and it says the controls ought to change in 2026.
“The overuse of touchscreens…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2007776
San Francisco’s ballot initiative Proposition E is a dangerous and deceptive measure that threatens our privacy, safety, and democratic ideals. It would give the police more power to surveil, chase, and harm. It would allow the police to secretly acquire and use unproven surveillance technologies for a year or more without oversight, eliminating the hard-won protections backed by a majority of San Franciscans that are currently in place. Prop E is not a solution to the city’s challenges, but rather a threat to our rights and freedoms.
Don’t be fooled by the misleading arguments of Prop E’s supporters. A group of tech billionaires have contributed a small fortune to convince San Francisco voters that they would be safer…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/voting-no-prop-e-easy-and-important-san-francisco
Continuing the relentless assault on civilians in Gaza, Israeli troops killed more than 100 starving Palestinians waiting for flour from aid trucks yesterday. Emboldened by US complicity, Israel persists in acting with impunity in Gaza.
Palestinians mourn following an early morning incident when residents rushed toward aid trucks in Gaza City and were met with Israeli gunfire on February 29, 2024. (AFP via Getty Images) On Thursday at dawn, Israeli troops unleashed a barrage of gunfire on a crowd of starving Palestinians waiting for aid trucks in Gaza City, killing over one hundred people and wounding more than one thousand others. The death toll is expected to rise as most hospitals…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2024/03/israel-flour-massacre-war-crime-gaza/
