The Death of the Mind

Enlarge / An artist’s conception of DART’s electronics in the last moments before they suffer catastrophic failure. (credit: NASA)
This coming Monday, NASA will broadcast its first attempt to modify the orbit of an asteroid, a capability that will be essential if we detect an asteroid that poses a threat of colliding with Earth. The planetary defense effort is focused on a craft called DART, for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which will target a small asteroid called Dimorphos that orbits the larger 65803 Didymos, forming a binary system. If all goes according to plan, DART will direct itself to a head-on collision that slows Dimorphos, altering its orbit around Didymos. NASA has repeatedly…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1883002

On September 19, over 200 U.S. political scientists published an open letter calling for Congress to pass a bill for multi-member U.S. House districts, combined with proportional representation. The group is organized under the name “Scholars for Redistricting Reform.” See the statement here.

A bill has been pending in Congress to make that change. It is HR 3863, by Congressman Don Beyer (D-Virginia). He has introduced it for several sessions of congress now.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/09/20/over-200-political-scientists-publish-statement-in-favor-of-multi-member-u-s-house-districts/

(satire) *Apple Announces New iPhones Will No Longer Be Compatible
With Human Hand.*

They have always been incompatible with natural human society.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jul-oct.html#18_September_2022_((satire)_apple_new_iphone_human_hand)

Dear Lazyweb, how do I forward my employees’ email to their gmail accounts and have it get there?To recap, my domain hosts its own SMTP server running Postfix, and /etc/postfix/virtual contains a bunch of entries forwarding “employee_name@dnalounge.com” to whatever their actual email address is, usually gmail.This has been mostly working fine for a decade or so, but lately there have been more bounces due to “strict SPF”. For example, jksound.com’s SPF record includes “-all” (dash instead of tilde) which means that when example@jksound.com tries to mail example@dnalounge.com, we forward that along to example@gmail.com, and then Google rejects it with 550 “SPF hard fail”.So, I don’t know whether it has recently become more common for people to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/08/today-in-google-broke-email/

The pattern is pretty common: young companies innovate, older companies litigate. When you can’t keep up and you can’t succeed by beating the market, you turn to the courts to try to squeeze cash out of those more successful than you. Often this involves patent lawsuits or handing your unused patents off to patent trolls to “monetize” them for you.
Over the years there have been a bunch of “patent aggregation” firms that showed up, offering to buy up patents and then promising to bring in free money by “licensing” them. The most well known of these was probably Intellectual Ventures, which scooped up tons upon tons of unused (perhaps because they were useless) patents, many from…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/30/intel-who-coined-the-term-patent-troll-makes-deal-with-patent-troll-to-monetize-unused-patents/

The Federal Reserve plans to keep increasing interest rates until inflation goes down.

Low interest rates are not causing today’s inflation, so this tactic
is not going to achieve the goal until it creates lots of unemployment.

It strikes me that Powell’s real goal may be to undermine the wave
of unionization. His business cronies will surely appreciate that.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-may-aug.html#30_August_2022_(Federal_Reserve_plans_to_keep_increasing_interest_rates)

Debian has begun a general resolution process to solicit a vote by its stakeholders what to do with non-free firmware…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Non-Free-Firmware-GR

On August 24, the proponents of an initiative in Montana asked the Ninth Circuit for rehearing en banc in Pierce v Jacobsen, 21-35173. They only want a rehearing on the part of the August 10 decision that declined to strike down the Montana ban on paying initiative circulators on a per-signature basis. They already won the other half of the case, against the out-of-state ban.

The Ninth Circuit on August 10 had declined to rule against the per-signature ban on the grounds that the evidence wasn’t sufficient. But the initiative supporters argue that their evidence is strong enough.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/08/27/initiative-proponents-file-request-for-rehearing-en-banc-on-montana-ban-on-pay-per-signatures/