CounterPunch.org – Amtraks Across America: the New Penn Station

Nov 042022
 

This is the first part in a series about Amtrak travels during summer 2022. The new Moynihan Train Hall, a waiting room built at a cost of $1.6 billion, at New York’s Pennsylvania Station, across Eighth Avenue from the existing Amtrak station, which is between Seventh and Eighth avenues under Madison Square Garden. Photo: Matthew More

The post Amtraks Across America: the New Penn Station appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/04/amtraks-across-america-the-new-penn-station/

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The Onion – Biden Warns Americans That Ability To Even Pretend U.S. A Democracy At Stake

Nov 042022
 

WASHINGTON—Delivering a stark warning regarding the nation’s future, President Joe Biden gave a speech Wednesday night in which he cautioned Americans that the ability to even pretend the United States was a democracy was now at stake. “Today, our country teeters on a grim precipice, and if we aren’t careful, it will…

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/biden-warns-americans-that-ability-to-even-pretend-u-s-1849738890

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The Register – Elon Musk reportedly outlines horrible Twitter layoff process

Nov 042022
 

Email to your personal account is bad news, email to your work account means you still work at Twitter

Twitter owner, sole director and – according to his Twitter profile, now also “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” – has reportedly informed company staff that layoffs begin tomorrow.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/11/04/twitter_layoffs_email/

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Hackaday – Bye Bye Linux On The 486. Will We Miss You?

Nov 032022
 

A footnote in the week’s technology news came from Linus Torvalds, as he floated the idea of abandoning support for the Intel 80486 architecture in a Linux kernel mailing list post. That an old and little-used architecture might be abandoned should come as no surprise, it’s a decade since the same fate was meted out to Linux’s first platform, the 80386. The 486 line may be long-dead on the desktop, but since they are not entirely gone from the embedded space and remain a favourite among the retrocomputer crowd it’s worth taking a minute to examine what consequences if any there might be from this move.
Is A 486 Even Still A Thing?
An entire 486 PC in…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/11/02/bye-bye-linux-on-the-486-will-we-miss-you/

 2022-11-03  Comments Off on Hackaday – Bye Bye Linux On The 486. Will We Miss You?

Motherboard – A Wild Video Game Move in NASCAR Is Tearing the Sport Apart

Nov 022022
 

29-year-old NASCAR driver Ross Chastain did something that defies belief during Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Playoff race in Martinsville, Virginia. The young driver kept the pedal pinned around the final corner of the last lap, geared up to rarely-used fifth, and drove directly into the racetrack barrier. As smoke flew up from the contact, the car rode the wall, picking up even more speed and slingshotting Chastain ahead of his competitors.  “I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life,” one announcer said. It was the fastest time that anyone had posted at the Martinsville track in 75 years. Chastain won a spot in the upcoming NASCAR Championship 4 with that daredevil move. Even more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/epzkba/a-wild-video-game-move-in-nascar-is-tearing-the-sport-apart

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Planet Emacsen – Andrey Listopadov: Emacs Lisp shorthands as namespacing system

Nov 012022
 

In Emacs version 28 Emacs developers introduced so-called read symbol shorthands.
If you’re interested in the rationale, feel free to search the Emacs developer mailing list for the discussion.
However, it does seem that not everyone likes the idea of shorthands as a substitution for namespaces (or packages, if you’re coming from Common Lisp).
Neither did I.
And recently, a branch was set up that implements Common Lisp-style packages for Emacs.
In the discussion Richard Stallman, however, notes:

CL packages are the wrong way to implement packages in Lisp.
As I explained in a discussion two years ago, packages implemented using obarrays (or equivalent) don’t work reliably.
We have a much better basis for Lisp packages in the shorthands mechanism.
It only needs to be…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://andreyorst.gitlab.io/posts/2022-11-01-emacs-lisp-shorthands-as-namespacing-system/

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Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Senator Seeks Antitrust Review of Apartment Price-Setting Software

Nov 012022
 

by Heather Vogell ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The chair of a U.S. Senate committee asked the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday to review whether a Texas-based property tech company’s rent-setting software violates antitrust laws. The move comes after ProPublica published an investigation Oct. 15 into RealPage’s pricing software, which suggests new rents daily to landlords for all available units in a building. Critics say the software may be helping big landlords operate as a cartel to push rents above competitive levels in some markets. “Alarmingly, recent reporting by ProPublica highlighted that RealPage’s algorithm-based price optimization software,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-senate-antitrust-apartment

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Deeplinks – Stop the Copyright Creep

Nov 012022
 

In 2020, two copyright-related proposals became law despite the uproar against them. The first was the unconstitutional CASE Act. The second was a felony streaming proposal that had never been seen or debated in public. In fact, its inclusion was in the news before its text was ever made public. The only way to find it was when the 6,000-page year-end omnibus was published. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Take Action
Tell Congress to Stop the Copyright Creep
No copyright proposal—or copyright-adjacent one—has a place in “must-pass” legislation. Must-pass legislation is a bill that is vital to the running of the country and therefore must be passed and signed into law. They are usually the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/10/stop-copyright-creep

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The Onion – It’s Ageist To Suggest A Corpse Can’t Be A Great Leader

Nov 012022
 

As the discussion rages over whether or not Joe Biden—our oldest president to date at age 79—should run for a second term in 2024, there is one glaring and pernicious aspect of the debate I demand we put a stop to at once. That is the suggestion that a corpse is not capable of being a great leader.

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/it-s-ageist-to-suggest-a-corpse-can-t-be-a-great-leader-1849701047

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The Intercept – Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation

Nov 012022
 

The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/

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Hackaday – Infinitely Scrolling E-Ink Landscape Never Repeats

Nov 012022
 

Traditional Chinese landscape scrolls can be a few dozen feet long and require the viewer to move along its length to view all the intricate detail in each section. [Dheera Venkatraman] replicated this effect with an E-Ink picture frame that displays an infinitely scrolling, Shan Shui-style landscape that never repeats.
A new landscape every time you look
The landscape never repeats and is procedurally generated using a script created by [Lingdong Huang]. It consists of a single HTML file with embedded JavaScript, so you can run it locally with minimal resources, or view the online demo. It is inspired by historical artworks such as A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains and Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.
[Dheera]’s implementation…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/10/31/infinitely-scrolling-e-ink-landscape-never-repeats/

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What’s New at GNU – Andy Wingo: ephemerons and finalizers

Oct 312022
 

Good day, hackfolk. Today we continue the series on garbage collection
with some notes on ephemerons and finalizers.conjunctions and disjunctionsFirst described in a 1997 paper by Barry
Hayes, which
attributes the invention to George Bosworth, ephemerons are a kind of
weak key-value association.Thinking about the problem abstractly, consider that the garbage
collector’s job is to keep live objects and recycle memory for dead
objects, making that memory available for future allocations. Formally
speaking, we can say:An object is live if it is in the root setAn object is live it is referenced by any live object.This circular definition uses the word any, indicating a disjunction:
a single incoming reference from a live object is sufficient to mark a
referent object as live.Ephemerons augment this definition…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://wingolog.org/archives/2022/10/31/ephemerons-and-finalizers

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What’s New at GNU – ephemerons and finalizers

Oct 312022
 

Good day, hackfolk. Today we continue the series on garbage collection
with some notes on ephemerons and finalizers.conjunctions and disjunctionsFirst described in a 1997 paper by Barry
Hayes, which
attributes the invention to George Bosworth, ephemerons are a kind of
weak key-value association.Thinking about the problem abstractly, consider that the garbage
collector’s job is to keep live objects and recycle memory for dead
objects, making that memory available for future allocations. Formally
speaking, we can say:An object is live if it is in the root setAn object is live it is referenced by any live object.This circular definition uses the word any, indicating a disjunction:
a single incoming reference from a live object is sufficient to mark a
referent object as live.Ephemerons augment this definition…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://wingolog.org/archives/2022/10/31/ephemerons-and-finalizers

 2022-10-31  Comments Off on What’s New at GNU – ephemerons and finalizers

Motherboard – ‘Humbling’ Study Shows How Cat ‘Zombie’ Parasite Hijacks Human Cells

Oct 312022
 

Scientists have discovered how Toxoplasma, one of the most common parasites in humans, hacks the immune cells of its hosts so that it can ride them around the body with alarming speed, reports a new study. The research reveals new secrets about this pernicious parasite, which reproduces in cat hosts and has infected at least one third of the global population, and sheds light on how other infectious diseases spread in humans and animals. Toxoplasma is widespread in warm-blooded animals and can be dangerous in some cases—especially for pregnant women and fetuses—though most people who carry the pathogen do not develop any harmful symptoms. The parasite is a public health concern as well as a scientific…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4ax5vd/humbling-study-shows-how-cat-zombie-parasite-hijacks-human-cells

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Jacobin – They Live Is a Timeless Anti-Capitalist Horror Classic

Oct 302022
 

It’s never a bad time to revisit John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live, a hilarious sci-fi thriller that skewers the inequality of the neoliberal era and offers an iconic depiction of capitalist ideology.
The truth behind capitalist advertising, per John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live. (Alive Films, 1988) It’s almost Halloween, the time of year when every good socialist watches They Live (1988). The cult classic about the politically revealing sunglasses that expose the monstrosity of our overlords and the brutal alien society they’ve made never fails to satisfy upon repeat viewings.
Though it didn’t do well on initial release, They Live is one of John Carpenter’s ever-more-revered films, because of its extraordinary…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2022/10/they-live-capitalism-ideology-john-carpenter-critique/

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Techdirt. – Justice Thomas Still Likes Prince On Thursdays, And What That Means For The Future Of Fair Use

Oct 272022
 

I’ll start this post with a bit of whimsy before alarming you with the sense of doom portended by the stakes involved with last week’s oral argument at the US Supreme Court in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Lynn Goldsmith.
In this case the Warhol Foundation is trying to get SCOTUS to overturn a terrible decision at the Second Circuit that found Warhol’s Prince prints to not be a fair use of a photograph earlier taken by Lynn Goldsmith. This case is not just a big deal for the Warhol Foundation, which manages Warhol’s art portfolio, but for anyone else who may ever wish to make a fair use of any copyrighted work that…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/27/justice-thomas-still-likes-prince-on-thursdays-and-what-that-means-for-the-future-of-fair-use/

 2022-10-27  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Justice Thomas Still Likes Prince On Thursdays, And What That Means For The Future Of Fair Use

Jacobin – With Progressive Congress Members Pulling Their Ukraine Letter, Diplomacy Is Now a Four-Letter Word

Oct 272022
 

War fever in Washington has reached such a pitch that even mild calls for cease-fire talks, as House progressives articulated in a now-retracted letter, are now beyond the pale. That’s dangerous at any time, let alone when nuclear tensions are high.
Representative Pramila Jayapal speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Jabin Botsford / the Washington Post via Getty Images) Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, liberal discourse about the issue had veered in a deeply unhealthy direction, with any suggestion that the US should exercise restraint in managing the antagonistic US-Russia relationship casually labeled treasonous, authoritarian — even covertly doing the work of the Kremlin. As earlier episodes of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2022/10/ukraine-war-letter-diplomacy-progressive-congress-caucus-foreign-policy/

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The Register – The GNOME Project is closing all its mailing lists

Oct 272022
 

Everyone has to join Discourse… although you can still participate via email

The GNOME Project is preparing to shut down its mailing lists due to problems maintaining the project’s GNU Mailman instance – which relies on Python 2 – and a lack of moderators.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/10/27/the_gnome_project_is_closing/

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Motherboard – Conscious Reality Is Only a Memory of Unconscious Actions, Scientists Propose In Radical New Theory

Oct 272022
 

Have you ever had that weird feeling of letting your mind wander on a car trip, then not remembering anything about your drive when you arrive at your destination? Or perhaps you’ve struggled to fall asleep as your brain cycles endlessly through intrusive thoughts? Do you ever get “in the zone” while deeply engaged in an activity, like playing music or sports? These are some of the common experiences that have inspired a team of scientists to dramatically reimagine the evolution of consciousness, which is a state of awareness that humans (and perhaps some other animals) possess about their minds and the world. Led by Andrew Budson, a professor of neurology at Boston University and Alzheimer’s…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4axbkd/our-conscious-reality-is-a-memory-scientists-propose

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