A dramatic, multi-level, and increasingly dark scandal has been engulfing the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro for the last month. It began just weeks after his stunning November victory but before he was inaugurated on January 1, and has completely paralyzed his presidency ever since. Just this week in Davos, which Brazil planned to unveil its new face to foreign capital, Bolsonaro and his top ministers left a long-scheduled press conference empty to avoid answering questions…
While I generally like PostgreSQL’s documentation quite a bit, there are some areas where it is not nearly specific enough for users to understand what they need to do. The documentation for maintenance_work_mem is one of those places. It says, and I quote, “Larger settings might improve performance for vacuuming and for restoring database dumps,” but that isn’t really very much help, because if it might improve performance, it also might not improve performance, and…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4kx
Peak indifference is the moment at which a far-off problem becomes so obvious that the number of people alarmed about it begins to grow of its own accord; a new Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication survey finds that 46% of Americans believe that they are living through adverse effects from climate change right now (up 9% in a year) and 72% of Americans say…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/24/self-radicalizing.html
A New Abnormal To: Leaders and citizens of the world Re: A new abnormal: It is still two minutes to midnight Date: January 24, 2019 Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention. These major threats—nuclear weapons and climate change—were exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://thebulletin.org/2019/01/it-is-still-2-minutes-to-midnight/
A dramatic, multi-level and increasingly dark scandal has been engulfing the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro for the last month. It began just weeks after his stunning November victory but before he was inaugurated on January 1, and has completely paralyzed his presidency ever since. Just this week in Davos, which Brazil planned to unveil its new face to foreign capital, Bolsonaro and his top ministers left a long-scheduled press conference empty to avoid answering questions…
Here is an extensive look at handling software dependencies from Russ Cox. “Dependency managers have scaled this open-source code reuse model down: now, developers can share code at the granularity of individual functions of tens of lines. This is a major technical accomplishment. There are myriad available packages, and writing code can involve such a large number of them, but the commercial, legal, and reputational support mechanisms for trusting the code have not carried over.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/777407/rss
I trust you’ve heard by now that HTTP/3 is coming. It is the next destined HTTP version, targeted to get published as an RFC in July 2019. Not very far off. HTTP/3 will not be done over TCP. It will only be performed over QUIC, which is a transport protocol replacement for TCP that always is done encrypted. There’s no clear-text version of QUIC. TLS 1.3 The encryption in QUIC is based on TLS 1.3…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/01/21/quic-and-missing-apis/
Much of the U.S. political system was flummoxed two weeks ago when a brand new 29-year-old congressperson made a seemingly radical proposal on “60 Minutes.” Here’s what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said that wound everyone up: The U.S. should tax income over $10 million per year at a top rate of 60 or 70 percent. Republicans responded by shamelessly lying about what this meant, pretending that Ocasio-Cortez was advocating a tax rate of 70 percent on all income. Some older Democrats, such as…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/21/ocasio-cortez-marginal-tax-rate/
This Monday, the final “trilogue” (a meeting between the European Parliament, the European Presidency, and the EU member-states) was supposed to convene to wrap up the negotiations on the first update to the Copyright Directive since 2001, including the controversial Article 13 (mandatory copyright filters for online services) and Article 11 (letting news sites decide who can link to them and charging for the privilege). But that meeting has been cancelled and now the whole…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/19/axel-voss-hostage-freed.html
Over 20% of writers surveyed by PEN reported that they avoided writing about certain topics because they knew about surveillance. That survey was in Scotland. Here are some reports: One participant who had covered the conflict in Northern Ireland in 70s and 80s stated that they would not cover the conflict in the same manner if it took place now; another stopped writing about child abuse when they thought about what their search history may…
Both the Right and the center have every reason to fear the Women’s March — it’s advancing a radical vision of feminism for the 99 percent. Thousands hold signs and rally while attending the Women’s March on January 20, 2018 in New York. Spencer Platt / Getty It’s the kind of necessary conversation that takes place all the time within activist groups: someone calls out a bigoted statement or points to a pattern of bias…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/womens-march-agenda-2019-feminism/
Back in 1979, Bernard Greenberg wrote a long document about Emacs on Multics. If you’re interested in the history of Emacs and how it evolved, you’ll probably enjoy reading through the document. It’s fairly long and detailed but all that detail is revealing. It’s hard today to appreciate how difficult it was to implement Emacs—or any video editor—on a large mainframe like the H6000 system that Multics ran on. The problem was that the hardware…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://irreal.org/blog/?p=7767
In the first week of January, we closed the Free Software Foundation’s end of the year fundraiser and associate membership drive, and we’d like to thank you for your generosity and support. Because of you, we’ve raised $441,802 and had 488 new associate members join — surpassing our goal of 400 new members. Thank you for donating, joining, and spreading the word. Your support is just what we need to push the free software movement…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/the-fsf-is-5-000-members-strong-thanks-to-you
In the first week of January, we closed the Free Software Foundation’s end of the year fundraiser and associate membership drive, and we’d like to thank you for your generosity and support. Because of you, we’ve raised $441,802 and had 488 new associate members join — surpassing our goal of 400 new members. Thank you for donating, joining, and spreading the word. Your support is just what we need to push the free software movement…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/the-fsf-is-5-000-members-strong-thanks-to-you
With only days to go before the planned conclusion of the new EU Directive on Copyright in the Single Digital Market, Europe’s largest and most powerful rightsholder groups — from the Premier League to the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Association of Commercial Television in Europe — have published an open letter calling for a halt to negotiations, repeating their message from late last year: namely, that the Directive will give the whip hand…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/15/breaking-ranks.html
Enlarge / An employee demonstrates fingerprint security software on a smartphone at the MasterCard Inc. stand at the Mobile World Congress in this arranged photograph in Barcelona, Spain, on Wednesday, February 24, 2016. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images News) According to a new ruling issued last week by a federal magistrate in Oakland, California, the government can’t get a warrant granting permission to turn up at a local house allegedly connected to a criminal suspect,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1441071
Professionalization isn’t perfect: historically, professional societies “were structured around hierarchies of gender and race and laypeople were expected to obey expert judgment without even asking questions.” But professionals were also organized around ethics of service and morals, with professional standards that required practitioners to use their expertise to further the public good. Decades of neoliberal marketization has flattened out these service-based ethics, turning every kind of professional into just another kind of business with customers…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/13/purdue-poisoned-the-well.html
Gail Atwater and her two young children were driving home from soccer practice in March 1997 when they realized that a rubber bat that was usually affixed to the window of their pickup truck was missing. It was a favorite toy of Atwater’s 3-year-old, Mac, so the trio turned around, retracing their route to see if they could find it. Atwater slowed to a speed of roughly 15 miles per hour as she cruised through…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/13/misdemeanor-justice-system-alexandra-natapoff/
Law Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos here analyzes the part of H.R. 1 that requires all states to use nonpartisan methods to draw U.S. House boundaries. H.R. 1 is the bill introduced in the U.S. House and supported generally by Democrats in the House. The text of the bill is still not on the web page for Congress, but it should be shortly. Stephanopoulos supports the part of the bill concerning gerrymandering, but he has some suggestions…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2019/01/09/law-professor-analyzes-anti-gerrymandering-provision-of-hr-1/
What is the role of PgBouncer in a Postgres High Availability stack? What even is PgBouncer at the end of the day? Is it a glorified traffic cop, or an integral component critical to the long-term survival of a Postgres deployment? When we talk about Postgres High Availability, a lot of terms might spring to mind. Replicas, streaming, disaster recovery, fail-over, automation; it’s a ceaseless litany of architectural concepts and methodologies. The real question is:…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4k9